Conversations with the New Siri

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Killing Google:

I asked Siri to locate the Ramparts magazine article that included a reference to sociologists from Michigan State University working with the CIA on the South Vietnamese Strategic Hamlet program. Two minutes later I’d downloaded the full article to my personal research archive, complete with a full color image of the cover of the April, 1966 issue of Ramparts which had contained the article.

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In the summer of 1989 I took my 14 year-old daughter on a weekend trip to Los Angeles. She was interested in filmmaking at the time, so I’d worked up a list of some of the locations where scenes in the movies she’d seen had been shot, and promised to show her both how they looked in real life, and why they’d been chosen for some of their movie transformations. Blade Runner’s tour de force conversion of the Bradbury was high on that list.

Although according to my sources the Bradbury was supposed to be open the morning we visited, it turned out when we got there that it was locked up tight. When I rattled the entrance door in frustration, a security guard came, opened the door, and explained that a Janet Jackson music video had just been filmed there the night before, and the lobby was still full of equipment.

I begged as only a father can to let my daughter have a short peek at the interior, so he kindly let us stand just inside the door for a couple of minutes. Sure enough, the lobby was still full of metal scaffolding, but the elevator cages, the wrought iron and glazed tilework, the critical full-width skylight were visible enough to compare it with how it had appeared in the film. With our job done, more or less, and after a brief exploration of the façade of the Million Dollar theater across the street, we left Broadway and downtown to pursue the next attraction on the list.

I’ve long suspected that the video in question was Rhythm Nation. Although online searches in the late 90s had seemed to confirm it, hardly any details were forthcoming at the time. When the question popped into my mind again a couple of day ago, though, I thought, Why not ask Siri? The answer from Siri was a detailed production history of Jackson’s album Rhythm Nation 1814, including confirmation that the title video was at least partially filmed in the Bradbury. When I asked the followup question: “On what date was the sequence in the Bradbury building filmed?” I got this answer:

“While the exact date for the Bradbury Building sequence is not publicly documented, it was filmed as part of a 20-day shoot in August 1989 for the Rhythm Nation 1814 short film. The entire project was shot simultaneously over that 20-day period.”

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Creepy Interventions:

This unsolicited encounter with the new, let’s-pretend-I’m-a-Machine-of-Loving-Grace Siri so startled me that I deleted Siri’s pop-up message before I realized I should have preserved it in a screenshot for later consideration. Since I didn’t, the report here of what it had to say is as honest a paraphrase as I can cobbble together from memory.

Full disclosure: I’m old, and I sometimes talk to myself while working, especially when I’m attempting to solve a particularly thorny problem. I know I’m doing it when I’m doing it, I know what conventional wisdom thinks of the practice, and frankly my dears, I don’t give a damn. So don’t @ me, okay?

Anyway, I was reading a social media feed of the latest Trumpian atrocities on my iPad—anti-social media would probably more accurately describe this particular feed—when I spontaneously muttered, out loud, the following rhetorical aside: “Ah, fuck, I don’t know if I can take another minute of this shit. What the hell are we going to do?” When I looked back up at the screen I found this message in a Siri-style modal dialogue box:

“It sounds like you’re having a problem. I think I can help you—I know a number of sources that offer comfort and advice to individuals in stressful situations. Would you like me to provide you with some references?”

Mind you, I hadn’t invoked Siri, hadn’t said anything which sounded remotely like “Siri,” or “Hey, Siri,” and I’d absolutely, positively never offered even the slightest indication that I had any interest in talking to my new Apple-embedded stochastic parrot as though it were a person.

Thoroughly put off my feed, both literally and figuratively, I typed: “Do NOT, under ANY circumstances, offer any unprompted advice, information, offers of aid, nor any communications whatsoever in which you act as though you were a person.”

Siri’s response: “Okay, I won’t respond unless prompted.”

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Controlling Household Gadgets:

New Siri is slow, abysmally slow, much slower than the old, stupid Siri. Doesn’t at all like doing business with very expensive devices, like speakers and hubs, with 5 year-old chips in them, however functional they may still have been before the latest Apple system software release. With a home fully-equipped with devices that can cost in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars when the whole array is addded up, do any of these pell-mell, cutting-edge tech outfits really think they’re gonna get away with obsoleting all of our pricey hardware every couple of years? If so, their bean-counters are running the risk of a very personal Armageddon as we near the end of their bosses’ industry-wide rush to digital supremacy.

Emily St. John Mandel: a Brief Appreciation

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I’ve read three of Emily St. John Mandel’s novels now, seen the masterful HBO Max adaptation of Station Eleven, and am midway through her latest effort, Exit Party. It’s been an unusual but rewarding trip so far, largely because of how unexpected, yet how plausible, even familiar, her characters are. Her focus on them, and on their strangely syncopated encounters in the spacetime that ebbs and flows around them, pulling them apart and rejoining them again, could easily seem cheap and contrived in the hands of a less sensitive and less capable writer, but in hers they become as persuasive a signature as any riff of Bach’s or Mozart’s.

This is her real distinction as a writer, I think, and the main reason why I find her stories so attractive. She doesn’t conspire against her characters, she investigates them, peels them apart layer by layer like an onion, as though they, and the pathos that they’re embedded in are to be accepted as being just as real as the author is, as we, her readers, are. It’s a commitment on her part that I find impossible not to respect, and it leads me finally to accept that her premise, that these characters are as real as any of our own performances of character in the real world are, is entirely reasonable. Like Jane Austen, she’s what I would call a forensic humanist, one fit as few are to apply her talents to her own twenty-first century, and to us, its all too human denizens.

Tears in Rain

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Show me an arrogant prick, and I’ll show you an ignorant prick, a stupid prick. And when I’m shown the MAGA menagerie in all its pulsating, glittering entirety, I can’t help but notice that they’re all arrogant, ignorant, stupid pricks, even the seemingly endless succession of press Barbies and personal assistants who don’t actually have pricks. Sadly, sackcloth and ashes aren’t working for me anymore, nor rage, nor intricately murderous fantasies, nor appeals to the divinity who, one is told, watches over every sparrow that falls. So tell me, now that we’re ass-deep in dead sparrows, who, if not us, is going to do anything about this pitiful state of affairs…?

Nazis, the AfD, and “Christian” Democrats

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Many German Christians, like their American co-religionists, seem much less Christian to an outside observer than they pretend to be….

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Excerpted from Der Spiegel’s newsletter Die Lage am Abend, September 24, 2026:

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Was Realpolitik zwischen CDU und AfD aber noch für Auswüchse haben kann, zeigt sich nun in Heidenau im Kreis Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge.

Dort fordern Stadträte von AfD und CDU in einem fraktionsübergreifenden Beschlussantrag, Stolpersteine »im öffentlichen Straßen- und Gehwegbereich« künftig abzulehnen. Viele Bürger, Angehörige und Initiativen, heißt es in dem Antrag, würden diese Form der Erinnerung an Opfer des Nationalsozialismus als »nicht angemessen« empfinden. Und, sinngemäß: Wer gedenken will, soll auf den Friedhof gehen.

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Just what excesses the realpolitik between the CDU and AfD can still produce is now being shown in Heidenau in the district of Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge.

In a bipartisan motion, city councilors from the AfD and CDU there are calling for a ban on the placement of Stolpersteine (stumbling stones, i.e., ten-centimeter concrete cubes bearing brass plates inscribed with the names and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution) “in public streets and sidewalks.” The motion states that many citizens, relatives, and public initiatives consider this form of remembrance for victims of National Socialism “inappropriate.” In essence, it argues that those who wish to commemorate (the victims of Hitler and his National Socialist Regime) should go to the cemetery.

End Times Euphemisms

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Sadly, this is by no means a comprehensive list:

Peace Is Our Profession: the motto of the Strategic Air Command, responsible from 1946-1992 for deploying the US arsenal of nuclear-armed bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Strategic Hamlet: An open-air prison compound surrounded by fortified walls/fences with controlled access manned by armed security forces. It was thought by the US govenment and its puppet regime in South Vietnam that forcing the populations of entire South Vietnamese villages to relocate to such places would prevent the Viet Cong rebels from infiltrating and controlling the rural population of the country. Unsurprisingly, the name deceived no one, not even those required by the chain of command to commit themselves to rigorous self-delusion. The plan failed, the compounds vanished, the villagers went home, and the US and its puppets lost the war.

Full Spectrum Dominance: According to the US Department of Defense, “The cumulative effect of dominance in the air, land, maritime, and space domains and information environment, which includes cyberspace, that permits the conduct of joint operations without effective opposition or prohibitive interference.” According to anyone sane, nothing less than God-mockery on stilts.

Corpus Christi: the name of a Los Angeles class nuclear-powered attack submarine. Changed to The City of Corpus Christi when Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, a Roman Catholic, pointed out to the Department of Defense that Corpus Christi was Latin for The Body of Christ, which to him seemed inappropriate for the name of a warship. Apparently naming one The Angels irritated no one who needed to be appeased.

Extraordinary Rendition: Kidnapping

Enhanced Interrogation: Torture

Machines of Unloving Gracelessness

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Donald Trump is a perfect example of the fatal solipsism that can afflict any intelligence which trains only on its own models. AI researchers are aware of the threat, but it’s not apparent—to me, at least—that at this point the economic imperatives driving their frantic gluttony will allow them to keep generative AI from swallowing everything, including its own tail. Exactly how long do they think it will be before the supply of accessible human creativity dries up, and the only data realistically available for a frontier model to train on will be that created by its own previous generations? A year? Ten years? A generation? (This is not the singularity they’re looking for, but it may be the only one they—and we—are going to get.)

Unbidden Bits—September 2, 2026

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I was privileged to see Louis Armstrong in concert in 1961, when I was seventeen years old. He kept a stack of white cloths in the grand piano on stage, and periodically pulled one out and wiped his face with it. The woman who sang with him was magnificently, radiantly black, as wide as she was tall, and her gown glittered when she moved. She danced, she sang that night as though the lightning of all that was sacred inhabited her. Mr. Armstrong’s playing was closer to revelation than anything I’d experienced in my young life until that one incredible evening. It wasn’t an experience one ever forgets, and I haven’t. People who like to think that the world can be reduced to their bloodless, misanthropic calculations really have no idea….