Didn’t some Yeats dude write a poem about the center not holding and the best losing all conviction and shit?
Doh! Too far back in the stream, no retrieval.
The quality of an information stream is inversely proportional to its velocity.
I was thoroughly engaged on a site called The Big View back in the 20-aughts, and watched it totally subsumed by one-liner trolls over an agonizing period of years. The owner finally turned it off in disgust.
No denominator, no matter how low, no matter how common, dares now to call itself Least.
Imo, what we truly observe in operation here is a profit motive severed from the ethical considerations that give human effort meaning.
Henry Ford wanted to make automobiles affordable. The usual quote goes something like, “the best car possible, at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.” And the last clause was not due to idealism, but to having some glimmer of sense about how to accomplish the first two. When he got rich building affordable vehicles, that was the affirmation of his efforts and the validation of his method, not at all the point of them.
There’s a child of thirty I follow, whose substack has so far been rather an anti-masculine screed than a thoughtfully feminist perspective examined, but she’s smart, and sometimes exposes blind spots in my thinking that need the light. I have sensed an increasing desperation for wider reach from her lately, and started reading an entry this morning only to find it solidly, woodenly, AI-chundered “output” with a smidge of human garnish here and there. So it goes.
Didn’t some Yeats dude write a poem about the center not holding and the best losing all conviction and shit?
Doh! Too far back in the stream, no retrieval.
The quality of an information stream is inversely proportional to its velocity.
I was thoroughly engaged on a site called The Big View back in the 20-aughts, and watched it totally subsumed by one-liner trolls over an agonizing period of years. The owner finally turned it off in disgust.
No denominator, no matter how low, no matter how common, dares now to call itself Least.
Imo, what we truly observe in operation here is a profit motive severed from the ethical considerations that give human effort meaning.
Henry Ford wanted to make automobiles affordable. The usual quote goes something like, “the best car possible, at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.” And the last clause was not due to idealism, but to having some glimmer of sense about how to accomplish the first two. When he got rich building affordable vehicles, that was the affirmation of his efforts and the validation of his method, not at all the point of them.
There’s a child of thirty I follow, whose substack has so far been rather an anti-masculine screed than a thoughtfully feminist perspective examined, but she’s smart, and sometimes exposes blind spots in my thinking that need the light. I have sensed an increasing desperation for wider reach from her lately, and started reading an entry this morning only to find it solidly, woodenly, AI-chundered “output” with a smidge of human garnish here and there. So it goes.
Great post, thanks
A very helpful analogy for how shorts become addictive.
Give us just enough sugar to get us to want ‘one more’ and we can’t stop until we find ourselves in a reclining chair trying to get our smile back.