Category: ideas

The US has had a long history of mistrust in highly educated professionals, but we seem to have shifted to a situation in which expertise has become both a disqualification and a reason for attack.

It is only now, a decade after the financial crisis, that the American public seems to appreciate that what we thought was disruption worked more like extraction—of our data, our attention, our time, our creativity, our content, our DNA, our homes, our cities, our relationships. The tech visionaries’ predictions did not usher us into the future, but rather a future where they are kings.

The idea is simple. Within these algorithms, notes are treated like the DNA of music. It all starts with an initial population of ‘songs’– each a random jumble of notes stitched together. Over many generations, the algorithm breeds from the songs, finding and rewarding ‘beautiful’ features within the music to breed ‘better’ and ‘better’ compositions as time goes on. I say ‘beautiful’ and ‘better’, but – of course – as we already know, there’s no way to decide what either of those words mean definitively. The algorithm can create poems and paintings as well as music, but – still – all it has to go on is a measure of similarity to whatever has gone before.

What makes something offensive is that it presents an unwelcome viewpoint that creates discomfort, bruises egos, and hurts feelings. When people take offence, they are trying to silence those who offend them. Call this concept of offence offence-as-hurt. The main theoretical counter to this view is to argue that offence is not about ‘hurt feelings’, but about real harm.

Over the past few decades, labor force participation has sharply dropped for men ages 20-34. Theories about the root cause range from indolence, to a lack of skills and training, to offshoring, to (perhaps most interestingly) the increasing attractiveness and availability of leisure and media entertainment. In this essay, we propose that the drop in labor participation rate of young men is a result of a combination of factors: (i) a decrease in cost of access to media entertainment leisure, (ii) increases in both the availability and (iii) quality media entertainment leisure, and (iv) a decrease in the marginal signalling utility of (conspicuous) consumption goods for all but the highest earners.

We’re rapidly approaching a point where actors will have a new source of revenue. Sooner than later, instead of offering Robert Downey, Jr. $50 million to play Iron Man, the movie studio will offer him a nominal licensing fee to use his likeness applied to an anonymous actor. Sound crazy? As technology improves (and it is improving at an exponential pace), it will become harder for us to discern what is real and what is fake.

Hysterical surrealism. Heck, there’s a whole subgenre of foreclosure art. And then there are movies like Sorry to Bother You. “The register is manic horror-comedy rather than depressively dystopian. I’ve noticed the same tone in other works, including contemporary poetry about inequality and market ruin.”

Alicia Jo Rabins, on pulling together discussions among writer/musicians about serving two different disciplines: “It’s not that unusual to work in multiple disciplines, but sometimes I feel a bit lonely about it. For so many of us, there’s no single word to describe our practice, no easy answer to the question ‘what do you do?'”

The author of Belles echoes the author of An Ember in the Ashes in her appreciation for the protagonist of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series (and they say we need a little more Katniss right now): “I needed to read girls like her; girls who weren’t so nice; girls so angry that their rage could topple anything in their path; girls that could face the dark; girls who could never be contained.”