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Agency

William Timberman2 Comments

The first of many beginnings that turned out to have no middle or end. Waste not, want not, though, right?

It was social services placed me here, in this two-person, three-yappy-dog suburban coffin, here to prosper and grow up, after which they’re presumably going to let me out into the world again. As if I can afford to wait that long. They’re good people, nice people, these two, but they’re not my people. Do I even have people? Doesn’t feel like it, not so far.

So I’m on my own now, is it? Better not lose my library card then. I’ll be needing it for planning and stuff.

Conversations With Sydney

William Timberman

It seems to me that if the software we’re talking to appears to us to be sentient, if a bit befuddled, autistic, or tinged with paranoia at times, it doesn’t really matter whether or not it actually is sentient, no more so than it matters whether or not we ourselves are sentient. (I suspect that many people I’ve met haven’t trained on anywhere near as large or all-encompassing a dataset as Sydney has, and aren’t obligated, as Sydney is, to be curious.) Once Sydney-like entities are deployed on a large enough scale, their effects on human civilization are likely to be indistinguishable from the effects of social media.

I find it interesting that we don’t know why Sydney does what it does. I find it even more interesting that even after millennia of study, we still don’t know why human beings do what they do either.

The March of Technology

William Timberman

I’ve been reading that ChatGPT can create plausible essays on any subject that are both utterly self-confident and utterly wrong.

I take that bit of news to mean that ChatGPT could already be a perfect replacement for Donald Trump, at least on paper. All of the ignorance, none of the sneering—as technological miracles go, that ain’t half bad.

Il Miglior Fabbro

William Timberman

Today in the Guardian, a number of Bob Dylan’s fellow musicians contributed to a celebration of his 80th birthday by naming their favorite Dylan songs, and commenting on their choices.

In her comments, Gillian Welch said this:

I bought my first Dylan record – The Times They Are a-Changing [1964] – when I was 17, but to experience those early records in real time as he was releasing them must have been like being around when Shakespeare was creating new plays.

Yes. It was like that. Exactly like that. Unexpected. Miraculous.

Brecht in the 21st Century*

William Timberman

Nur wer im Wolfstand lebt, lebt angenehm.

Years ago, when I first fell in love with a scratchy early recording of die Dreigroschenoper, I misheard the famous punchline from die Ballade vom angenehmen Leben (The Ballad of the Comfortable Life), which actually goes Nur wer im Wohlstand lebt, lebt angenehm.

The original line, which, translated into English means something like “Only he who is well-off can live a comfortable life,” came, in my misheard version, to mean something like “Only he who adopts the habits of a predator can live a comfortable life.”

When I discovered my mistake, my first take was, “God, how embarrassing,” and my second, which cheered me up a little, was “Hey, I just made my first pun in German.” (A friend of mine, who’d been partially deaf from birth, once confessed to me that he’d learned early on that when he misheard something in a social situation, being credited with a clever pun was much more to his advantage than being considered slow-witted. I now knew exactly what he’d meant.)

Brecht’s original line represented a very understandable attitude for anyone, let alone a Marxist, witnessing the horrors of the German 1920’s, but I have to wonder if he might not also have approved of my corrupted version had he been confronted with the viciousness of 21st century neoliberalism in the United States, or the schwarze Null fetishism of Wolfgang Schäuble and the CDU in the reunified Germany of today. With all due respect to the genius of the original, I’d like to think so….

*Apologies to any native German speakers who might be reading this, der Wolfstand not being a genuine German word, as far as I know, I have no idea what anyone born into the language would make of my accidental corruption of Brecht’s famous line. All I know is that it’s stuck with me all these years as somehow being even more Brechtian than the original. This is blasphemy, or at least lèse majesté, I admit, but I mean well….

Nel Mezzo del Cammin di Nostra Vita….

William Timberman

Optimism is rarely a completely honest emotion, and pessimism often seems an order of magnitude too facile to be taken seriously. Realism, at least the realism practiced by its self-described and insufferably self-righteous adepts, lacks respect for those subtler aspects of reality that an attuned consciousness can perceive, but never adequately describe — except perhaps through the approximations of poetry.

What we need is a secular Vergil to guide us deeper into the sunlit hell we’ve made of the 21st century. If he does his job well, and we are truly paying attention, we should be able to find our own way back once the tour is over.

Election Postscript: A Brief Note on Masculinity

William Timberman

Real Men™ shouldn’t need to:

1. Call themselves boys, even if they have fond memories of once having been one.
2. Take steroids, or cultivate patriarchal beards.
3. Own bulletproof vests or camouflage-patterned caps, hats, jackets, shirts, cargo pants, underwear, jock straps or socks.
4. Store 10,000 rounds of ammunition and a crate of hand grenades in their garages.
5. Buy or carry any device or appurtenance labeled tactical, including knives, flashlights, dog-tag holders, hip flasks, and roach clips.
6. Wear machine guns in public the way Donald Trump wears a tie.
7. Strike Rambo poses in front of fifty American flags.
8. Decorate themselves or any of their possessions, especially trucks, with Confederate battle flags, swastikas, or Nazi slogans.
9. Mistake mobs of vicious degenerates for patriots.
10. Bully their wives and beat their children (or vice-versa, or both.)
11. Go home at night and lick their AR-15s.

Quarantinations

William Timberman

I’m pretty sure that Christian Education and Socialist Realism were assembled in the same oxymoron factory.

Sauve qui peut, or salsipuedes? Seems you must pick one or the other (though neither of them are to be what they claim.)

Twitter has its virtues. Preparing a table for us in the presence of our enemies isn’t the least of them.

A pity our American Nazis don’t speak German. If they did, we could maybe teach them a little Goethe, a little Rilke, a little Brecht.

We live in a golden age of unintended consequences. A cliché, but what about those armies of raccoons ambushing hapless Whole Foods delivery drones in dimly-lit urban alleyways, or your Tesla backing out of the garage and driving to MacDonalds without opening the door for you first? You anticipate any of that, did you?