How Not To Be the New York Times

From Federico Thoman in the America-Cina Newsletter from today’s Corriere della Sera:

Ma anche dagli Stati Uniti abbiamo parecchi spunti: un’analisi su come Trump ha cambiato la retorica di un presidente americano e di come l’amministrazione abbia imposto una «censura» a termini come «cambiamento climatico» ed «emissioni» al dipartimento dell’Energia. Se, come diceva il filosofo tedesco Heidegger, «il linguaggio è la casa dell’essere», non siamo messi benissimo.

But we also have plenty of insights from the United States: an analysis of how Trump has changed the rhetoric of an American president and how the administration has imposed a “censorship” on terms like “climate change” and “emissions” at the Department of Energy. If, as the German philosopher Heidegger said, “language is the home of being,” we’re not in a good place.

There are some fine things still to read in the world, especially if you’re lucky enough not to be trapped in the prison currently being fashioned by MAGA zealots out of American English.

Gertrude!

Gertrude Stein was a steward of the English language as well as its first modern sorcerer. To this day, fifty years after I first read her Lectures in America, I’m still amazed by how skillfully she managed to dissolve the accepted frameworks of literacy without simultaneously depriving literacy itself of either its traditional subtlety or its depth. In the twenty-first century, as we’re beginning to believe that the written word lacks the ease of use that terminal stage capitalism and its media torrents demand, we look to computers to do the work of creating, disseminating, sorting and interpreting the flood of content for us. That’s a mistake, possibly a catastrophic one. If you want to know why, read Gertrude Stein, the only effective antidote I know of to the Newspeak now being forced on us by the shiny barbarisms of our new century.

A Humanist Doxology

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.

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….

Quoted Without Comment

Rationality, in the sense of an appeal to a universal and impersonal standard of truth, is of supreme importance …, not only in ages in which it easily prevails, but also, even more, in those less fortunate times in which it is despised and rejected as the vain dream of men who lack the virility to kill where they cannot agree.

—Bertrand Russell, as quoted in Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, Chapter 23: The Sociology of Knowledge

Here again is that key insight we saw in The German Ideology: in totally changing a society, people must inevitably radically change their own ideas, and the nature of being human itself. Under communal ownership and democratic control, it would be socially impossible to be someone whose selfhood is predicated on the exploitation of others. A subjectivity that would desire such power would be meaningless, and have no social traction. Marx and Engels repeatedly stress that revolution is the transformation of people and ideas as well as social structures.”

— China Miéville, A Spectre, Haunting (analysis of The Manifesto of the Communist Party)

What We May Hope To Live Up To

<< 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

From 1995: Ziggurats

Post-modern architecture comes to the campus—from a previous incarnation on the Web

Anywhere you look in the Nineties, you’ll find the whimsies of Post-Modernism grinning back at you. Every mall seems to evoke the Forum Romanum, every apartment block the baths of Caracalla.

It’s a clever sort of classicism, but not a rich one. With little money available in modern times for marble, let alone for craftsmen willing to spend their lives chipping away at acanthus leaves, the glory of imperial Rome is only hinted at.

Which, I gather, is exactly the intent. Post-Modern architects claim no allegiance to a particular style; their stated passion is to reintroduce the decorative element into architectural design, to abandon the idea of the city as a “machine for living” in favor of something that won’t give us all nightmares.

Ironic quotations from the past would nevertheless seem to be an essential element of their designs; without them the architect would be vulnerable to the charge of bad decoration, or worse still, of dishonesty. (Stone is stone. Prestressed concrete isn’t. “Form follows function,” etc.) By impudently placing a column where no column could possibly be, Philip Johnson can justifiably claim to be as candid as Van der Rohe about the distinction between the structural and the “merely” decorative.

In any event, the products of more than ten years of Post-Modern construction are now all around us, and the surprising thing is that many of them actually seem to work pretty well.

On the University of California campus where I earn my living, most of the recent buildings are Post-Modern. With their porticos and exterior staircases, their friezes of semi-engaged columns or sunken windows set into beveled architraves, they resemble — at least from a distance — the modest public buildings of a state capital in the Midwest.

On closer inspection, the classical illusion is tempered by the realization that the columns are shells over steel beams, the architraves stucco over styrofoam; that the rooftops above the tiled eaves are burdened with roaring machinery and impossibly large exhaust funnels.

Nevertheless, with their exterior walls painted in shades of pink, sienna, and pale gray-green to match the eucalyptus trees which surround them, their staircases faced in polychrome Mediterranean tile, these pseudo-Roman exercises seem much more restful, more human, than the angular modernist monstrosities from the Sixties which stand beside them.

We’re told that imperial Rome was also painted, that brick and tile were as much a feature of its public facades as marble. Crossing the grass quadrangle between “Physical Sciences North” and “Physical Sciences South,” I’d like to think so. It would help explain why I can imagine men in togas standing under these porticos, or coming down these staircases, something which I could never imagine on the steps of the grand white palaces of Washington.

The illusion of less complicated times lingers for a moment, then I realize that if this were truly Rome, there’d be a long row of monuments to Republican senators along the edge of quadrangle, or perhaps an equally long row of crucified Christians. That, I suspect, would constitute more irony than the architect intended, or the public relations office on our campus would be willing to endure.