Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

I think, first of all, we have a crisis of thinking or imagining when it comes to the future. Everyone talks about it. Everyone says that we need to start thinking about the future, and so on. But it never happens in the context of desire. The future is a necessity – something you’re being pushed into. Who wants that? 

— Maria Stepanova / “Eros replaced with Thanatos” / Equator

I start pulling my guts out,
those red silk cords
spiraling skyward,
and I’m climbing them
past the moon and the sun,
past darkness
into white.

— Ai / “Nothing But Color”

You wake up and brace yourself for the barrage of toxic gibberish that constitutes the modern public sphere. Your e-mail is overrun with spam, scams, and smut. There are voice mails from no one about nothing. A glance at the news reveals that the President is continuing to spew lies and obscenities; that a trillionaire is peddling white-supremacist propaganda on a social-media platform he owns; that a chart-topping musical artist is praising Hitler, or apologizing for praising Hitler, or praising Hitler once again. Publications from the Times on down employ clickbait headlines that treat you like a starving rat in a Pavlovian experiment. A.I. systems simulate the experience of talking to an arrogant ten-year-old boy who knows far less than he thinks he does. When pressed, the chatbots admit that they cannot “naturally understand human morality, dignity, culture, or meaning.” It all adds up to a continuous discursive tinnitus—a buzz of random, fake, stupid, sinister chatter that nobody wants and nobody can stop.

— Alex Ross / “Jürgen Habermas Defended Reason in a Darkening Age” / The New Yorker

We
came with photos and adrenaline, taped up boxes and giant
suitcases. America, to me, in 1979 was a pyrotechnic album
of bursting events, and relatives known only by nicknames
opened their mouths the way cats do to sense kin.

— José Felipe Alvergue / “trust”

“If artificial intelligence and automation begin to replace human labour at scale, the key economic question won’t be the speed at which jobs vanish — it will be who pays the bill,” argues complexity scientist Ljubica Nedelkoska. She suggests that governments must start looking beyond income tax and levy a surcharge on tech-driven windfalls instead. Or people could hold a direct stake in AI-generated profits through a sovereign wealth fund, rather than those gains accruing entirely to private shareholders.

— Flora Graham / “Tax robots, not people” / Nature Brief

A long time ago
I went on a journey,
Right to the corner
Of the Eastern Ocean.
The road there
Was long and winding,
And stormy waves
Barred my path.

— Tao Yuanming / “[A long time ago]”

You can only kill disappointment with a new try. 

— Kim Stanley Robinson / Shaman

What I’m Listening To:

But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is, brother, you have to wait

— The Beatles / “Revolution”