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Steve Jobs’s Last Stand

William TimbermanLeave a comment

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….

The End Of the Beginning….*

William Timberman7 Comments

The Supreme Court has finally finished booby-trapping every legal exit from our national fascist nightmare. For the moment at least, Trump’s Gleichschaltung appears complete. In a country of 340 million people, though, that’s almost certainly an illusion. Only the profoundly ignorant can rejoice in what comes next. Does Tommy Tuberville, for example, realize what his bodyguard bill is likely to look like from now on? Does he imagine that the Republican Party or the Trump administration is going to pay it for him?

*A previous version of this text appeared in the comments section of the Crooked Timber post The end of US democracy, by John Q

Is It Genocide?

William Timberman2 Comments

Yes.

To call it anything else is to deny the painfully, devastatingly obvious.

Have I, as a citizen of the United States, been complicit in this genocide?

Yes.

To deny it is to pretend that the obligations of citizenship do not apply to me.

Were there provocations? Were they inhumane?

Yes. As true in October, 2023 as in May, 1948.

Do we need to talk about European colonialism, Muslim atavism and xenophobia?

If we’re being honest, yes.

How can a child of the Enlightenment, a citizen of the United States, countenance even the idea of an ethnic state?

Intellectually, not at all. Diplomatically, the wisdom of the principle of live and let live is unavoidable. We should accommodate any religion or ideology which doesn’t demand that we bend the knee to its claims of supremacy. (This absolutely includes Christianity, which has a long history of lethal meddling in other people’s legitimate affairs.)

Can we understand why, 80 years after the Shoah, Israelis feel embattled, feel justified in committing any atrocity which they believe will keep their enemies at bay?

Yes, absolutely.

Can we understand why, 77 years after the Nakba, Palestinians feel abandoned by the rest of the world—as alone as the Jew who once wrote on a Matthausen concentration camp wall, “Wenn es einen Gott gibt, dann soll er mich um Verzeihung bitten!” (“If there is a God, then he ought to beg me for forgiveness!”)?

Yes, absolutely.

Is there any hope of forbearance, of reconciliation here?

None that I can see.

Is this because I’ve become morally and spiritually numb?

Probably. Does this speak well of me?

No.

Can I, will I do better?

Time will tell….

Egg Freckles

William Timberman3 Comments

Siri is from Apple and is here to help us. We’re assured that it doesn’t spy on us like its relatives from Amazon and Alphabet do, so why do we hate it? Maybe being talked to like we were five years old by a machine the size of a grapefruit has something to do with it. Maybe being given answers that are either irrelevant or insane when we ask it a question does also. Artificial intelligence sounds like a fine idea. Being given artificial stupidity instead tends to confirm the contempt that we suspect the management of large corporations have for us. The tech bros fear the singularity. What they should fear is the Butlerian Jihad.

What We May Hope To Live Up To

William Timberman

<< Ainsi, dans l’ombre et dans le sang, la plus forte des Républiques s’est constituée. Chacun de ses citoyens savait qu’il se devait à tous et qu’il ne pouvait compter que sur lui-même ; chacun d’eux réalisait, dans le délaissement le plus total son rôle historique. Chacun d’eux, contre les oppresseurs, entreprenait d’être lui-même, irrémédiablement et en se choisissant lui-même dans sa liberté, choisissait la liberté de tous. Cette république sans institutions, sans armée, sans police, il fallait que chaque Français la conquière et l’affirme à chaque instant contre le nazisme. Nous voici à présent au bord d’une autre République : ne peut-on souhaiter qu’elle conserve au grand jour les austères vertus de la République du Silence et de la Nuit.>>

“Thus, in darkness and in blood, a Republic was established, the strongest of Republics. Each of its citizens knew that he owed himself to all and that he could count only on himself alone. Each of them, in complete isolation, fulfilled his responsibility and his role in history. Each of them, standing against the oppressors, undertook to be himself, freely and irrevocably. And by choosing for himself in liberty, he chose the liberty of all. This Republic without institutions, without an army, without police, was something that at each instant every Frenchman had to win and to affirm against Nazism. No one failed in this duty, and now we are on the threshold of another Republic. May this Republic to be set up in broad daylight preserve the austere virtue of that other Republic of Silence and of Night.”

—From Jean-Paul Sartre’s La République du Silence, published on September 9, 1944, in the first non-clandestine issue of Lettres françaises, republished in 1949 in Situations III

Unbidden Bits—April 16, 2025

William Timberman

Political posts on social media often seem little more than rehearsals for what we’d like to see engraved on the tombstones of our friends and allies, if not on our own. Fair enough. No matter what form we choose to embody our resistance, la lutte continue:

Unbidden Bits—April 1, 2025

William Timberman9 Comments

If you aspire to rule as a latter-day Caligula, you should probably pay a lot more attention to your latter-day Praetorian Guard. Did you see the video of that very large bodyguard watching Elon do his drunken frat-boy fork and spoon trick at a recent Trumpfest? If the country finally tires of our ruling monsters, it won’t matter how many of us leftie riff-raff they’ve deported or disappeared. The sound of gladii being sharpened in the White House basement must be deafening these days—if, of course, you have the ears to hear it.

Prolegomenon For a Future De-Nazification

William Timberman2 Comments

Against the day we know will come, when genuine justice can once again be served, let us make sure we remember the names of every one of Musk’s script kiddies, every recipient of Trump’s January 6 pardons, every member of every Texas or Florida governor’s rat squad, every fake elector put up by Republicans for the 2020 election, every member of every right-wing militia or lawless county sheriff’s posse comitatus, and every member of the U.S. Supreme Court who voted with the majority in Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. If we are ever to restore what the Constitution once promised us—to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity—we will need them to answer publicly and completely for what they’ve attempted to do to our country.