Housekeeping

The Antipersonal Assistant

William Timberman3 Comments

My flirtation with so-called smart home technology began with internet connected cameras that allowed me to see inside my house when I was away on trips, and with locks that I could unlock remotely in case my neighbors needed access in emergencies. Maybe the memory of my mom driving my dad crazy by wondering an hour or so into every Sunday drive if she’d left the iron on is what set me up for this. Whatever it was, I found that the offer of a personal panopticon to help control the things in my life that might still be controllable was genuinely seductive, even though I’d long been aware that the things one can control in life aren’t the things that actually matter.

In any event, ten years or so into this adventure, the technology had matured to the point that relying on it to help me do things I hadn’t previously been able to do seemed quite natural. Then the daemon of generative AI sprang full-grown from Sam Altman’s brow—unbidden, unannounced, largely unfathomable—and demanded to be a full partner in the pilgrim’s progress I had up till then considered to be my private life.

Would you like me to show you what movies are on that you really want to watch? Here’s all the news I compiled for you today—I left out the things I know would upset you. I saw that you were almost out of coffee, so I ordered ten pounds of your favorite whole beans from that new place you got the push notification from last Tuesday, the one you saved in your shopping list.

No, thank you. Raped by the heralds of demented late-stage capitalism was definitely not something I wanted chiseled on my tombstone, let alone tattooed on my backside. Was there any way to avoid it, though? Well, not entirely, but there was Apple.

Apple was (and still is) almost universally considered among the technorati to be hopelessly behind in AI, particularly in the generative AI that made Alphabet’s Gemini so much smarter and more responsive than Siri, so much more competent at the agentic functions that made a personal assistant genuinely useful. Fine, I thought, investigating further, I’ll stick with Apple, then. They promise they’ll let me turn the good shepherd stuff off, and retain at least the illusion of free will.

I should have known better. I don’t think anyone has yet realized just how demeaning, yet inescapable, our dance with the agents of virtual personhood is going to be. For example:

I like to read before going to sleep, but I don’t like having to get out of bed to go turn the lights off when I’m finally ready to put away the reading and get some shuteye. Most people probably just switch off their bedside lamps, but given the built-in recessed ceiling lights that came with my house, I skip the bedside lamps and instead engage in a three-part Siri conversation with a HomePod on the other side of the room:

Siri, good night. This turns off all the lights except the lights above the bed, locks all the doors, turns off the TV and speakers in the living room if they’re still on, and checks to see that the garage door is closed.

Siri, before bed. This sets the lights above the bed to the right color temperature and brightness for reading.

Siri, bedtime. This turns the lights above the bed off.

A couple of nights ago, I mistakenly began the sequence by issuing the second request, before bed, instead of the first, good night. Siri, however, responded as though I’d actually said good night. Since the two requests don’t actually sound anything alike, I’m tempted to believe that the Siri algorithm(s) have taken note not only the content of the requests I’ve been issuing almost every night for the last few years, but also their sequence, and very helpfully did what it assumed I wanted it to do instead of what I actually asked it to do. The fact that its inference was helpful in this particular situation didn’t keep it from feeling like a scenario straight out of 1984. These are precisely the sorts of judgments that no one who values their personal autonomy wants a stochastic parrot to be making, even in support of the seemingly benign act of turning lights off and on.

Get ready folks. Unlike me, you might not have to share your bed with them, but it does look like these corporate nursemaids are going to be looking over everybody’s shoulder from now until some future Sam or Elon decides there’s more profit in thermonuclear war, desertification, or Soylent Green. Last one to the singularity is a rotten egg!

A Pledge of Non Allegiance

William Timberman

With Austria now governed by Nazis, the US destined to follow at the end of the month, and Germany itself due to join both of them in the wake of its upcoming election in February, I have an announcement to make. Since there’s nowhere to go now that isn’t under threat from the Zeitgeist, it’s time to stop merely alluding to my lack of allegiances, and to publicly and formally declare myself a rootless cosmopolitan.

Yes, I know that’s what Stalin called the Jews. I can even give it to you in the original Russian: безродный космополит. (No, I don’t know any Russian I didn’t learn first from the glossary at the end of A Clockwork Orange, but we have Wikipedia now, don’t we? If nothing else, it allows us to more accurately catalog our afflictions.)

Full disclosure: I’m not a Jew, but I could easily have been one—I suspect a great grandfather of converting to Catholicism in his native Austria during the waning days of the Habsburg empire, something he seems to have done to advance his career prospects in uncertain times. Be that as it may, I’m willing to grant Stalin a bit of poetic license here, as the phrase clearly has resonances well beyond the obsessions of a single autocrat. (I doubt Donald Trump is aware of it, but Stalin was a poet laureate of brutality long before Donald stumbled into the role on idiot TV.)

So, with my apologies to the muse of history now made, I can say openly that I feel no allegiance to any current political faction, nor to any forseeable future faction, no reverence for any religion (in my view they’re all based on fear and steeped in superstition and hypocrisy), and finally, no desire to submit to hagiographies and catechisms past, present, or future. If you need help, I’m available. Whatever I can do, I will do. But if you want me to rat on my neighbor, round up people you consider undesirable and put them in camps, reeducate the children of the very poor, or otherwise kiss a vicious imbecile’s ass, look elsewhere.

Singing In The Dark Times

William Timberman

Twitter. After more than a decade of contented blogging, I tried it last year, and was almost immediately chased off the premises by a persistent sociopath who needed to be there far more desperately than I did. I’d been onboard long enough, though, to realize that what made Twitter valuable was its omnipresence. It saw everything everywhere all at once, and was both faster and less timid than any curated medium was at reporting what it saw. Despite its flaws, Twitter always knew what was up, and it was always eager to tell everybody about it.

Being able to eavesdrop on the entire world in real time, or as close to real time as human perception and internet data transmission allow, is intoxicating in both the good and bad senses of the term, which is undoubtedly why Twitter can sometimes appear to us as a fountain and sometimes as a cesspool, and sometimes as both at the same time. Despite attempts by management to police vile and unpleasant behavior, there has never been any credible gatekeeper on Twitter, no credentialing, certification, or approval process that couldn’t easily be circumvented. The reason for this was the sheer scale of the task. The universe of discourse on social media in general, and on Twitter in particular, was and is too large and too fast to control, even with the assistance of computer-driven algorithms. Unlike the editors of the New York Times, Jack Dorsey and his staff had no illusions about their ability to monitor, let alone enforce, cultural norms at scale. On Twitter, civilized discourse was an option, but it was never the only option. Caveat lector was the rule.

And so it was until Musk, full of who knows what except himself, decided to cast his bread upon the waters. Given that we’re only a few days into his reign, it’s hard to predict the outcome of his dalliance with any confidence, but at the moment it seems unlikely that he’ll ever find that bread again, at least not all 44 billion dollars worth of it. What the rest of us will find is even more uncertain, but I suspect that even after Musk has done working everything over from top to bottom with his libertarian hatchet, Twitter will remain pretty much what it always has been, the human comedy entire, in all its tawdry glory. It’s also a fair bet, I think, that Musk the reformer isn’t as smart as he thinks he is, and it won’t be all that surprising if, in the waning days of his epiphany, he turns out not be as solvent as he thought he was either.

All that aside, what I found useful about Twitter last year is still just as useful, and I know my way around the place now. I no longer need to browse except when the mood strikes me, I’ve found a place where the sociopaths can’t get to me, and if Elon ever tires of his pet project, or surrenders it to the bankruptcy courts, I’ll still have Mastodon, or something very like it, to fall back on. Caveat lector is working out just fine for me. YMMV.

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.

WordPress Boogie-Woogie

William Timberman1 Comment

After being lost in the fog like Brigadoon for more than a month, Dogtown is back. The story is an all-too common one, I’m afraid. In order to resolve some nasty response-time issues, Dogtown’s host, GoDaddy, offered to move everything to a more capable server. When they did, things broke, which gave me the opportunity to learn more about WordPress and MySQL database management than I ever wanted to know.

Thanks to some excellent advice from GoDaddy technical support, though, and the moral support of more savvy friends, it all seems to have come right in the end, and the place is functional again. Apologies to anyone who visited during the dark time — unfettered access to everyone all the time is the intended policy here. Really.

Now, then…what exactly was I doing before the lights went out? There ought to be some half-completed drafts lying around here somewhere….

A Short Housekeeping Note

William Timberman2 Comments

To all of you delightfully available young ladies of Kiev, and your clever Internet pimps:

If you’re willing to meet my price, I’ll be happy to set up a little sidebar where you can display your irresistible charms without the slightest hindrance, a kind of Dogtown Reeperbahn all your own.

Otherwise, please note that this is a small blog, without so much traffic that I can’t afford to see and delete your sneaky little contributions within minutes of their arrival. Unless I happen to be asleep, of course, in which case my readers can leaven their more pressing concerns with a modest giggle until I finish my coffee the following morning.

Fair enough?