And having any readers is better than having none. So far (2:30 pm), this blog post has had three visitors. (Update at 11pm: eleven visitors.) And I’m not even sure those visitors have read any of this. Meanwhile, Online Sports Betting is For Losers is now up to 3,252 visits, second all-time behind Death is a Feature (6,643 visits).
But those are exceptions. Typically, a post here gets between a handful and a few dozen visits. But ya never know what might catch fire. Over at the ProjectVRM blog, A simple plan to de-enshittify CVS, which I posted in February, clocked several hundred visits a couple days ago, thanks to leverage from this post in Ted Gioia’s newsletter. So I keep it up.
And, while you’re at it, count the stars. If you ever cared at all about Brian Wilson and his music, try to keep your eyes dry when you watch this BBC Music celebration of “God only knows.”
Bonus link: Ted Gioia’s Brian Wilson is My Brick. The one in question is from a demolished building at Hawthorne High, of which both Brian and Ted are alumni. There’s much more. Read the whole thing.
Good AI-free content. I’m closing a bunch of tabs I opened during an exploration of Lee Miller‘s work as a photographer, especially while she witnessed the liberation of concentration camps and the fall of the Third Reich. She would have been 118 years old this year, but this essay in The New Yorker, published when she would have been 100 (she died 30 years earlier), is especially worth reading if you can get behind the paywall.
But it’s still faked. Is there anything more human than intent? I wasn’t addressing that question when I wrote The Intention Economy (now only $13.93 in hardcover). But I was thinking about paths toward fulfilling the promise of the subtitle: When Customers Take Charge. Now AI is with us, and it looks like personal AI is one of those paths (and maybe the main one). Now I find myself reading Barry Petchesky‘s Whatever AI Looks Like, It’s Not, in which I am knocked over by this line from Ted Chiang’s Why AI Isn’t Going to Make Art, in The New Yorker: “it reduces the amount of intention in the world.”
The suggestion by both Barry and Ted is that by hoovering up as much as possible of all the world’s published human expression, and making it easy to re-express fuck-all—from essays to correspondence to scholarship to works of art—the intent we might have to make those things is reduced. Rather than write, or teach, or learn, or draw, we prompt an AI to do it for us. The metaphor that comes to my mind is one from broadcasting. Rather than pushing a signal out to the world through an antenna, the energy is “shunted to ground—or what engineers call a “dummy load.”
Of course, AI can be hugely useful. Try fingering personal AI again. The image atop that post was created by an AI, but all the words are mine. We did it together, because the AI can draw better than I, but I can write better than it. And it can’t write what I mean because it has no idea what meaning is, or even an idea at all. Sometimes it can fake it, and that’s plenty enough—and better at it all the time.
One of them is tweetlike posts on a blog. Jeremy Felt has a notes-oriented blog where he just pointed here with this: “… I think I can point to Doc Searls as the one who pushed me the last bit. His recent streak of daily notes with short, interesting, bits and bobs is a great format! I also saw Chuck mention format staleness and that probably helped with some ‘hey, it’s a good time for change’ thinking.” Which makes me think stinkiest stale format is the branded silo: a category that contains all the branded social media: Facebook, Linkedin, Xitter, Threads, Bluesky, and even Mastodon (which, even though it’s a federated alternative, is still a branded kind of social medium, emulating a silo without quite being one). What’s not stale is the blog. Jeremy has one. Chuck has one. I have one here. That I’m writing this with Wordland on a site produced in WordPress does not make either a silo or a platform. They are just tools for individuals to write their own stuff their own ways.
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