Ten years forward to the singularity? Sure, why not? Or maybe back to those halcyon days of…of….
Yeah, okay then—sturdy shoes, earplugs, and a Gandalf stick. Onward we plod. As the lady with the starched hair once said: “There is no alternative.”
Apocalypsos
Lest We Forget
The Congress of Ratfuckers
Is It Safe?
No, it’s definitely not safe—not for everyone, and certainly not for the most technologically vulnerable among us.
A couple of days ago a neighbor and friend of mine, a retired nurse in her early eighties, dropped by with a frustrating problem she was having with her iPhone. She handed it to me and said “I can’t get into it. My face doesn’t unlock it any more. It says I need a password.”
When I activated the screen, a message appeared that the phone could not be unlocked for another 15 minutes. This was bad news, really bad news. It meant that she’d already entered the wrong password at least eight times.
(When security settings on iPhones are properly configured, they will lock permanently after ten failed attempts to unlock them with a password. The warning that this is about to happen is the increasing delay that the phone requires between each failed attempt after the fifth to unlock it.)
As gently, and as non-technically as I could, I explained the peril that she could be in. She could be facing not only data loss, but even a permanently locked phone as well. I asked her if she was sure what her password was. She said no, she hadn’t thought she’d needed one, just her face, but she believed it could be her brother’s birthday. “That’s unlikely to be right,” I told her, “Your brother’s birthday can be entered as either six digits or eight digits. This wants seven.” I showed her the screen with the seven dots showing where the password was to be entered.
I then explained to her that according to an Apple support document, which I printed out and handed to her, we might be able to use her Apple Account password to erase the phone, unlock it and restore her data from a backup. I asked her if she had a backup. She said she didn’t think so. I asked her if she knew her Apple Account password. She said she didn’t have an Apple Account, not that she was aware of anyway.
At this point she was both confused and frustrated, and I was fresh out of expertise. I told her that at that point her best bet was to call Apple suppport. I asked her if the locked phone was her only phone. “Yes,” she replied. Did she want to use my phone to call Apple? No, she had other things she needed to do, and she didn’t have the time, so we said our good-byes and she left.
I haven’t heard from her since. I’m going to try texting her and calling her later today, but it may well be that I’ll have to go knock on her door to see if she’s got the problem sorted. I’m worried, of course, but since I’ve apparently gone from helpful techie neighbor to the prophet of technological doom, I’ll be lucky if she doesn’t slam the door in my face.
My question to the prophets of the digital revolution is this: How many times a day around the world does a dance like this take place? Will adoption of these new technologies only proceed, as the witticism about scientific progress has it, one funeral at a time? Maybe in the grand scheme of things, these agonies can’t be entirely eliminated, but it would certainly be helpful if the ones steering us along the road to the future would pull over just for a moment and devote a little more effort to harm reduction among the more vulnerable of our citizens.
Not Technically Treason
Despite the understandable hysteria on the center left, Donald Trump’s geopolitical betrayals are not treason. The U.S. isn’t actually at war with any of the greasy dictators that he’s put us all at risk to curry favor with, so technically they aren’t enemies. Even though he’s giving aid and comfort to them, and definitely deserves to be put somewhere where he can’t contribute to the torture of innocents, he doesn’t actually seem to be at risk of being marched out of the White House at gunpoint by the forces of an irate U.S. general staff. (After Hegseth’s purges of any general officer with more than two neurons, a military coup has never seemed all that likely anyway, no matter what Trump and his dumbfuckery end up costing us.) This is a mixed blessing even for those of us who, in our allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, have always held the principle of civilian control of the military to be sacred.
I, for one, will hold to my principles, but I’ll also say that for the first time in my life, the shame of being a citizen of the United States of America, a country that elected Donald Trump twice, is overwhelming. Redemption is still possible, I suppose, but at this point I’d rate the possibility of it coming in my lifetime as slim to none.
Progress on Donald Trump’s Bucket List
√ War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity:
Ordered a February 28, 2026 airstrike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, Iran, killing at least 156 people. The victims included 120 children, 26 female teachers, and several parents who had come to the school. The fatalities also included a pregnant teacher and a six-month-old fetus.
Ordered aerial attacks on a number of unnamed Venezuelan fishing boats, killing their crews. Pilots of attacking aircraft were reportedly ordered by the Secretary of Defense to fire on any survivors of the initial bombing runs on their vessels as they struggled to stay afloat in the water, insuring that no one survived the US assault.
√ Murder:
Alex Pretti, Renee Nicole Good, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Silverio Villegas González, Keith Porter Jr., Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Joan Sebastian Guerrero, Mario Bass—all murdered at the hands of ICE, or while they were being held in its custody.
√ Sexual Assault/Rape:
E. Jean Carroll. (Also, whatever is in the Epstein files, if the Republican Party ever allows them to be seen in their entirety by ordinary mortals.)
√ Kidnapping and False Imprisonment:
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Andry José Hernández Romero, Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, Jefferson José Laya Freites, Arturo Suárez Trejo, Anyelo José Sarabia González, Jerce Reyes Barrios, Frengel Reyes Mota, José Manuel Ramos Bastidas, Albert Jesús Rodríguez Parra, Maikol Gabriel López Lizano. All were placed in restraints without due process and transported by air to El Salvador, where they were handed over to the tender mercies of the wardens of CECOT (El Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo).
√ Theft:
SSSI and Derco Settlement. Gen Digital Inc. False Claims Settlement. AECOM Hurricane Katrina Relief Settlement. Magnolia Diagnostics False Claims Act Settlement. Broadway Electric Inc. Settlement.
√Fraud:
Judged culpable, civil case of falsifying business records (34 counts) May, 2024. Judged culpable, civil business fraud, New York, February, 2024.
√ Bribery, Extortion, and Violations of the Emoluments Clause:
Smirking misappropriation of María Corina Machado’s Nobel Peace prize medal after he’d ordered a US armed invasion of her country to kidnap its head of state.
A Boeing 747 passenger aircraft given by Dubai, for unspecified reasons, not to the United States, but to Donald Trump personally.
Promising a $5,000 Trump Dividend to every adult American provided the Republicans preserved their congressional majorities in the 2026 midterm elections.
Demanding that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy investigate Hunter Biden while withholding nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine. Shortly after Ukraine announced publicly that an investigation would take place, the US government released the $400 million that was being withheld. A post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, or genuine extortion? We report, you decide.
√ Perjury:
In December 2020, he filed a federal lawsuit in Georgia to overturn the presidential election results, personally signing a verification swearing under oath that the voter fraud figures in the complaint were true and correct to the best of his knowledge. A federal judge later concluded that the records demonstrated an effort to press false claims in court, and emails from Trump’s lawyers acknowledged that some of the allegations were inaccurate. Legal analysts have argued that this sworn verification meets the elements of perjury because Trump had been briefed by Department of Justice officials that the claims were false.
√ Vandalism:
White House demolitions, uprootings, tacky remodeling jobs, and fake gold embellishments,
A fatally incompetent renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool,
The defacing, defunding, and closing of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
A gaudy and hideously expensive gold leafing of the Arts of War and Peace equestrian statues.
The impending construction of an obscenely large and gaudy marble eyesore, to be named the United States Triumphal Arch.
Conversations with the New Siri
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 him 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 many customer’s homes now 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
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
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…?
End Times Euphemisms
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
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.)