I’m teaching my “Mass Media & Society” course this summer at UCW. More than my other courses, this one needs to be updated from term to term, which happily requires I come up with some new activities and topic modules. Here’s hoping they’re all engaging and edifying!
In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.
A *reverse* centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.
For example, an Amazon delivery driver, who sits in a cabin surrounded by AI cameras that monitor the driver’s eyes and take points off if the driver looks in a proscribed direction, and monitors the driver’s mouth because singing is not allowed on the job, and rats the driver out to the boss if they do not make quota.
The driver is in that van because the van cannot drive itself and cannot get a parcel from the curb to your porch. The driver is a peripheral for a van, and the van drives the driver, at superhuman speed, demanding superhuman endurance.
Obviously, it’s nice to be a centaur, and it’s horrible to be a reverse centaur. There are lots of AI tools that are potentially very centaurlike, but my thesis is that these tools are created and funded for the express purpose of creating reverse centaurs, which none of us want to be.
“What gets installed in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” My friend photographer Marilyn Suriani is preparing a huge installation there – the largest piece is 54-feet wide. It’s beautiful, a continuation of this remarkable phase in her career, which sees Suriani creating nature- and waterscapes in shimmering, rhapsodic colours. This work feels both abstract and earthly.
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I learned a couple of weeks ago that Marilyn had passed away, in Atlanta, where she had lived and worked for decades. Marilyn was a Sicilian live-wire originally from Philly whom I truly really loved. I had acquired her photo-book Dancing Naked in the Material World in 1991 or so, in my Buffalo, New York publishing days. We got to know each other over the phone; listening to her voice made the sun shine; and she taught me a ton. At my desk right now, I face seven photographs by Marilyn on the wall.
Rick Beato’s recent interview with Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA focused as much on AI technology as on the creation of ABBA’s songs and records. The co-writer of “Waterloo,” “SOS,” and “Dancing Queen” was mostly sanguine – indeed, enthusiastic – about artificial intelligence’s likely effect on human creativity generally and on musical composition specifically. (Ulvaeus – who is president of the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers – has some intelligent prescriptions for handing copyright and royalty protections in this new era, too.) It’s an edifying interview.
And it inspired me. I have been figuring out ways to adapt to ChatGPT’s presence in my students’ academic lives – and in my own writerly life. There is certainly no way around it.
Regarding students, I have been reading Ethan Mollick’s Substack blog, “One Useful Thing,” closely. Mollick is a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who is “trying to understand what our new AI-haunted era means for work and education.” A recent piece called “Now is the time for grimoires” explains how “large language models” like ChatGPT can be used by students as mentors, tutors, and coaches via “spells” or “grimoires” – remember Harry Potter! – that is, via precisely constructed “prompts” that spur truly useful interactions between AI and students. (I was turned out to Mollick, by the way, by a marvellously inventive third-year student of mine this summer.)
Regarding my own stuff, this week I have been experimenting with ChatGPT by prompting the platform to rewrite some formerly published work of mine in the style of other writers whose books line my shelves. The results were immensely illuminating and fun to read.
I chose my 2002 piece “Pigeon Park Sentences.” Here you can see the piece with glosses and paraphrases by AI versions of Henry James, Louis Zukofsky, and Andrea Dworkin.
My friend John Glionna has been spending the summer in his ancestors’ home town in Italy, working on a book about the people there. One of the joys of this writer is the way he lets us see rough drafts of the book’s chapters emerge on his terrific blog. His “Pomarica Journal” is dazzling, vivid with the voices of others and with Glionna’s profound friendliness (and a customary goof or two). His photographs are really terrific, too.
(I’ve asked John to create a dedicated photo-gallery on his website. We’ll see what happens!)
I’ve never had writer’s block, but I find it difficult *to write well* on a topic that makes me angry. Attacks on transgendered people make me angry to a staggering degree.
I set up my Mastodon account: @thebasil@securitycafe.ca. Before I start posting, I’ll be looking around the place to see how the online culture there operates (back in the Usenet days we called that “lurking”). Staying on Twitter until the last of my friends and faves shut the door behind themselves on the way out. [Revised with new account info. – Dec. 16]
This morning the registrar Internic.ca invited me to purchase the URL basil.sucks at a “discount.”
This seems like a lot. Here’s the pitch:
Whether you want to safeguard your brand, provide your audience with a savvy way to share feedback, or execute creative marketing campaigns, .SUCKS stands out from the rest as a bold and brave domain.
I used to gobble up domain names but decided to pass on this one. I passed on this one as well:
I did get basil.photo and basil.help, though. Not too expensive! My ideas are already percolating.
(If I decide to write that memoir, no doubt I will very much regret not having basil.sucks!)
When I moved to Vancouver in 1996, I became a communications specialist for public and private companies mostly headquartered in this city. I wrote management discussions for annual and quarterly reports, literally hundreds of news releases, and lots of material for online audiences in chatrooms on Usenet and elsewhere. With a couple of partners, I also created two or three dozen websites for clients; these were among the first in their industries.
Part of the fun of these latter projects was registering not just appropriate domain names for these companies, but other URLs that *might* be appropriate for them one day. On top of that, we made sure to register domain names that could possibly be confused for those our clients used, so that their competitors couldn’t get ahold of them for the purpose of confounding investors and regulators.
I thus spent a fair amount of capital collecting URLs, mostly for clients and potential clients but also for many for my own endeavours. This week I learned that I almost lost one – PigeonPark.net (used for various literary projects) – that I have had for 15 or so years. (Its expiration notice landed in my spam folder – yikes!) With the help of my friends at Uniserve Communications (which hosts most of my websites), I saved it in the nick of time – whew!
Here’s a blast from the past, from when I first announced the site on basil.CA:
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16 August 03: In You Don’t Look 35, Charlie Brown! the late Charles M. Schultz writes, “There must be different kinds of loneliness, or at least different degrees of loneliness. … The most terrifying loneliness is not experienced by everyone and can be understood only by a few. I compare the panic in this kind of loneliness to the dog we see running frantically down the road pursuing the family car. He is not really being left behind, for the family knows it is to return, but for that moment in his limited understanding, he is being left alone forever, and he has to run and run to survive. It is no wonder that we make terrible choices in our lives to avoid loneliness.”
Comix artist Seth illustrates these words in a remarkable series of panels called “Good Grief!” published in Drawn and Quarterly (Volume 2, Number 4). I came across these panels many years ago and have been looking for them ever since, locating them in my disorganized files only this morning. I now realize that my Pigeon Park Sentences were variations on Schultz’s theme, that I could not have even started without its echo in my imagination.
“It is no wonder that we make terrible choices in our lives to avoid loneliness.”
Oliver Sacks was unsurpassed as an author of extended medical case-studies; he was also a marvellous memoirist. His range of erudition was impossibly wide and deep, and the tone of his prose was tender, profoundly courteous, and delightful even when melancholy.
In his last published piece, called “The Machine Stops” – published posthumously this week in the New Yorker – his tone is entirely different. It’s crabby and pessimistic. It is like nothing else in his entire oeuvre.
I cannot get used to seeing myriads of people in the street peering into little boxes or holding them in front of their faces, walking blithely in the path of moving traffic, totally out of touch with their surroundings. I am most alarmed by such distraction and inattention when I see young parents staring at their cell phones and ignoring their own babies as they walk or wheel them along. Such children, unable to attract their parents’ attention, must feel neglected, and they will surely show the effects of this in the years to come. …
I am confronted every day with the complete disappearance of the old civilities. Social life, street life, and attention to people and things around one have largely disappeared, at least in big cities, where a majority of the population is now glued almost without pause to phones or other devices—jabbering, texting, playing games, turning more and more to virtual reality of every sort. …
As one’s death draws near, one may take comfort in the feeling that life will go on—if not for oneself then for one’s children, or for what one has created. Here, at least, one can invest hope, though there may be no hope for oneself physically and (for those of us who are not believers) no sense of any “spiritual” survival after bodily death.
But it may not be enough to create, to contribute, to have influenced others if one feels, as I do now, that the very culture in which one was nourished, and to which one has given one’s best in return, is itself threatened. …
When I was eighteen, I read Hume for the first time, and I was horrified by the vision he expressed in his eighteenth-century work “A Treatise of Human Nature,” in which he wrote that mankind is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” As a neurologist, I have seen many patients rendered amnesic by destruction of the memory systems in their brains, and I cannot help feeling that these people, having lost any sense of a past or a future and being caught in a flutter of ephemeral, ever-changing sensations, have in some way been reduced from human beings to Humean ones.
I have only to venture into the streets of my own neighborhood, the West Village, to see such Humean casualties by the thousand: younger people, for the most part, who have grown up in our social-media era, have no personal memory of how things were before, and no immunity to the seductions of digital life. What we are seeing—and bringing on ourselves—resembles a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale.
The hope presented in the essay’s last words seems not truly felt:
Between us, we can surely pull the world through its present crises and lead the way to a happier time ahead.
(That is such a depressing sentence.)
As I face my own impending departure from the world, I have to believe in this—that mankind and our planet will survive, that life will continue, and that this will not be our final hour.
Many years ago I capped off a story to my son Miles with the phrase “all’s well that ends well.” The story’s context made the meaning of this bit of Shakespeare come to life for him for the first time, Miles said. It was a pleasing moment for both of us.
That nearing his own end Oliver Sacks saw catastrophe not just coming but already here, barely rallying to convey even the flimsiest expression of hope – this stunned me (though it shouldn’t have) (we haven’t been taking care of our minds).
A close friend of mine noted that Facebook has held us all “hostage.” If we don’t acquiesce to its pernicious commerce, we lose easy contact with our dear friends and fun acquaintances. Facebook used to be utterly delicious. *sighs*
Twitter was a great way to stay up to date and share information. It still is, actually. It also enlivens trolls, bots, racists, people who hate women, and the American president. It makes me feel like an accomplice.
I am a communications professor. I would not take lightly absenting myself from these platforms.
[Update, 31 Dec. –> I am vacillating!]
[Update the Sequel, 27 Jan. –> I have retreated fully!]
I’m pretty much an open book to my building manager (thank you, B.!). If I ever have to move into another rental, though, the services provided by a British data-mining company might unnerve me. Writes Stanley Q. Woodvine in Vancouver, BC’s Georgia Straight,
Tenant Assured is a web-based service first made available two weeks ago to landlords around the world. The service essentially forces people to open up their social media accounts to the prying eyes of landlords as part of the process of applying to rent an apartment. …
This is how Tenant Assured works:
A landlord who’s signed-up with Tenant Assured sends all of their rental applicants to a special link on the Tenant Assured website. They are then asked to provide full access to up to four of their social media profiles—on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. These are then thoroughly crawled, scraped, and analyzed by Score Assured. The scrutiny includes conversation threads, private messages, and contact lists. …
Concerns that the service is a gross violation of personal privacy were brushed off by the company, which trotted out the oldest authoritarian assurance about surveillance in the book, namely, “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear“. Or, as [the company’s] cofounder Steve Thornhill put it … “If you’re living a normal life then, frankly, you have nothing to worry about.”
Thornhill further pointed out that people had to give their consent to the Tenant Assured process and that it was really not much different from a background check or credit rating.
Of course it’s very different … . There are long-standing laws governing credit and background checks and there are processes in place to allow people to see their credit reports and correct inaccuracies.
Although landlords anywhere in the world can sign up for the service—including right here in Vancouver—it’s is not clear what laws in any given jurisdiction could hold such an online service to account.
As a professional communicator, I take great pains not to post anything at all controversial online: very little politics or religion … or anger. (I always ask myself, “What would my students think? My future clients? My Mom?”)
The persona I therefore project is a good deal sunnier and more welcoming than the real thing. Indeed: Last year a girlfriend from high school wrote me, “Bob, I like you so much better online.” Good to know.
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