Whatever their other talents, the best of us have always had one thing in common: a fierce, unyielding clarity about what it means to be a human being. Here, in this short clip of James Baldwin speaking informally, is the most succinct expression of that clarity I’ve ever encountered. There’s no cant here, no unspoken agenda, no recrimination. This is as naked, as vulnerable, and yet as implacable an expression of our true responsibilities to one another as it’s possible for a single voice to utter. James Baldwin honors us all, while reminding us all what little comfort we can demand for doing the right thing. There’s far more on display here than a single talented person’s eloquence. We’d do well to heed it.
Month: August 2025
Steve Jobs’s Last Stand
An earlier version of this post appeared as a comment on Cory Doctorow’s Medium article “AI software assistants make the hardest kinds of bugs to spot.”
Will someone please, please tell Tim Cook and Craig Federighi to stand firm on the barricades? Their ambivalence toward the current trends in AI reflects what’s always distinguished Apple from other companies in the tech industry. Apple under Steve Jobs built beautiful tools for independent thinkers and artists, and Steve became notorious for being diligent, even implacable, in his defense of individual creators. Maybe that was because he was Stewart Brand with electricity—and a blackjack in his hip pocket for dissenters—but it was precisely his “bicycles for the mind” attitude that offered salvation to many of us who couldn’t face spending our lives as corporate drones.
Microsoft under Bill Gates, on the other hand, seemed to exist for the sole purpose of supplying the operators of Moloch inc. with productivity tools, tools that were explicitly designed to accommodate their corporate customers’ desire to surveil and control their hapless workers.
I suppose you could say, at least early on, that of the two, Jobs and Gates, Gates was the more pragmatic. Would anyone say that today of Elon Musk and Sam Altman, his direct descendants in the evolution of thinking about technology? More to the point, with social media and the tech press now awash with reports of a newly-beleaguered Apple, will Tim Cook et al. feel compelled to incorporate LLM slop into Apple’s software on a hitherto unprecedented scale, or will they stick to their muzzleloaders and form an impenetrable cordon sanitaire around their real customers, those stubborn individuals who still believe in the human use of human beings?
Stay tuned….