Another Mother’s Day treat: a 40-minute video essay about “The Giving Tree”. Before watching, “The Giving Tree” was one of my least favorite children’s books — hate may not be too strong of a word to describe how I felt about it — but it is in fact nuanced, intentionally sad, and perfect starting material for some serious conversations.

The author, Shel Silverstein, seems to have been quite the character and I would now very much like to get his book of children’s poetry which has some fascinating illustrations. He also wrote the words for “A Boy Named Sue” and was an accomplished musician himself, though from the brief soundbite I heard his voice is an acquired taste.

All I can think of while reading Nilay Patel’s software brain essay, quoted and linked to all over the web, is the slight but dense Metaphors We Live By. Software databases — metaphoric file cabinets and manila folders — now themselves becoming metaphors for physical objects is truly Escherian.

📚 Finished reading: Dark Gods by T. E. D. Klein, a short story collection you’d get if you transported H.P. Lovecraft from 1920s New England to 1980s New York City, then asked him to water down the weirdness and narrow the horror from Cosmic to Upper East Side. Which is to say, I wasn’t impressed.

A mere 50 pages in and I can already tell that Inventing the Renaissance will be a banger of a book. Three concepts in particular stood out for there relevance far outside that particular period in history:

• Legitimacy, why it is important to have it and how to obtain it. Marrying into a noble family, graduating from a well-known program, surviving a few years in big pharma/big tech, getting linked to by a major website, etc.
• Zombie ideas as wrong theories that lead to more research that leads to correct theories but then refuse to die — cruthes that outlive their usefulness. See also: zombie medicine.
• Conflicting projections, as in the Medicis playing to role of “merchant scum” in Florence, a city which tends to banish people with ambitions towards nobility, while at the same time playing up your high status to the outsiders who view symbols of nobility as a sign of legitimacy (see above). It is a tough game to play which is why the AI companies are failing at it so spectacularly (to investors and eneterprise clients: we will eliminate the need for XX% of the work force; to the plebs: let us build data centers, it will create jobs; to themselves: why do they hate us?)

No surprise that it has been nominated for a Best Related Work Hugo Award, and kudos to Palmer for compelling me to write the first “currently reading” post in almost two years (the last one was also for a book she wrote).

• Monopolized by David Dayen, which Cory Doctorow recommended in response to my account from last week of the medical billing/phone scam rabbit-duck. Doctorow wrote about the book in more detail back in 2021 and yes it is now on the pile as is everything else below.
• The Credibility Crisis in Science ⊕ [Note: ↬ Joel Hamill ] by Thomas Plümper and Eric Neumayer, and if the subtitle “Tweakers, Fraudsters, and the Manipulation of Empirical Results” whets your appetite there is an excerpt available in Nautilus.
• The Art of Manliness by Brett and Kate McKay, who have had a blog of the same name for more than a decade, so it is a true mystery why an article in The Dispatch about the “gentlemanosphere” ⊕ [Note: ↬ Reader John ] chose to highlight overtestosteroned almost-douchebags such as Scott Galloway as the anti-manosphere crusaders rather than McKay. Haha, I’m joking, of course it’s not a mystery: Galloway gets more clicks, taps, swipes or rather the preferred method of interaction is nowadays. He also has a new book out, to which I shall not link.
• The Oxford Book of English Verse edited by Christopher Ricks, which someone recommended on The Honest Broker Podcast, a show that combines some of my least favorite things about this decade: Substack and using the word “podcast” to describe a video of two men talking. Still, the transcript makes for good reading and the book seems something worth keeping at the bedside, at least aspirationally.

📚 Finished reading: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, so I now have no choice but to watch Blade Runner for the fourth or fifth time. I suspect that — much like with the novel — quite a few parts will “hit different” this time around.

Just shy of 100 small-format pages, On Skibidi was a pamphlet more than a book, and a worthwhile read for this geriatric millennial who somehow managed to raise a handful of generation alpha children without once resorting to Skibidi Toilet.

Walker built his meme-explainer career on Skibidi so of course he would read all sorts of things into it: any time he mentioned dialectics or some other high-falutin’ sociology term my eyes rolled so far back into my head I would catch a glimpse of my own retinas. But there is an undeniable attraction to the screen-within-a-screen format; I remember being confounded, as a six-year-old, by the movie theater scene from Annie. How on Earth did they film actors watching other actors, and was anybody filming us watching those actors who watch the actors… which I guess was my first introduction to mise en abyme even though I only found out about the term from Walker. Coupled with quick cuts and catchy music, it seemed infinitely more appealing than the umpteenth ASMR unboxing video.

But of course now it is me overexplaining things. As with Joe Rogan, and Taylor Swift, and any other winner in the winner-takes-all extremistan world of content creation and consumption, the most likely reason why Skibidi Toilet became so popular was simply because it was popular. And to learn more about that, Fooled by Randomness would be a better bet than On Skibidi.

📚 Finished reading: Tools and Weapons by Brad Smith. An important topic — how do new technologies impact society and what can we do about it — covered in style so bland it makes corporate jargon stunning by comparison. That is what you get by being Microsoft’s General Counsel: a long list of people you would rather not offend, and an imperative to make your employer look good.

Unlike most of PKD’s work, this was my first time reading The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. I wonder what my thoughts would have been a few decades ago had I gotten to it at the same time as the rest of his novels, but now I cannot help but admire what Dick achieved and how prescient he was, yet again.

The first achievement was to do with words what Satoshi Kon did with images in all of his works, Paprika most of all. Perspectives change and timelines shift mid-sentence, delirious hallucinations become matter-of-fact reality, all without losing the reader. This is only ocassionaly done for comedy; more often, the result is horror of the Lovecraftian kind — Eldritch is right there in the title. One can only imagine what Kon would have done with this book, or with Dick’s similarly reality-bending Ubik. I am, of course, not the first person to have made this observation.

The second was to see what the religion of conumerism will bring, decades before it become obvious to everyone else: alienation, blurred reality, despair. Their physical manifestations — (a metal hand, artifical eyes, deformed jaw — are the titular three stigmata. The Man in the High Castle had religious undertones; fitting for a book of its title, The Three Stigmata… brandishes a religious foghorn.

The third, unintentional achievement, was to bring into focus what I find particularly pernicious about LLMs: I get a visceral reaction, revulsion, to its common turns of phrase. Is this not a good thing, you ask? After all, it kept me off Xitter and most of Substack, which are now inundated with computer-generated text. But no, the revulsion is there even in texts written years ago: this has to be AI, I say to myself, only to see that the article was from 2018. Much like Dick’s protagonists who keep questioning their reality and see the Eldritch stigmata in everyone and everyhing, even themselves, long after exposure to the transcendental drug which is the book’s McGuffin, I have overcalibratted my bullshit detector to find fault in the most innocuous turns of phrase.

Worst of all: am I myself now writing things that someone will mistake for AI — instead of human — slop?

📚 Finished reading: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, a masterpiece that has only become more relevant with time. Not having seen much of the Amazon Prime show I can’t comment on its faithfullness or quality, but I have a hard time imagining it could match the complexity of the original.