Upstream #200
clickbait 🧑💻, heirlooms 🎁, short cuts ✂️, agents 🧑💼, richter 🎻.
Hey. How you doin? Been Halloween-ing? Yeah. Same. Also got to see Max Richter in the NCH, which was truly magnificent. Momentous one this week. It’s the 200th edition. Nearly 8 years of this habit. Wow. Thanks for reading. Right. Let’s go.
"Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning."
John O'Donohue, poet and philosopher
culture // clickbait 🧑💻
The US presidential election will be decided on Tuesday. It’s been odd. But we’re used to odd. Porn stars. Sexual assault. Facism. Racism. Eating dogs and cats. The overton window's been drop kicked into a new dimension. We talk about TikTok politicians, but it’s worse. It’s a clickbait election. And as this piece on confessions of a clickbait writer confirms, clickbait works. Stories are written with scroll depth. Information buried 3 scrolls deep. But it’s empty, hollow. Historian and author Rutger Bregman said that the job of journalism is to “make the things that are important interesting, instead of making the interesting things important” But populism means pandering. It also highlights, as Alan Moore wrote, the darker side of fandom, where "elections that decide the fate of millions are conducted in an atmosphere more suited to evictions on I’m a Celebrity … in which contestants who are insufficiently amusing are removed from office. Saleability, not substance, is the issue”. The issue with fandom is that it sits right alongside fanatics. And when you believe in nothing, you fall for anything.
brands // heirlooms
Heirlooms are interesting, aren’t they? A piece of wood, a coffee grinder, or a clock, become vessels for stories, memories and emotions. They help us understand who the hell we are. This lovely short about heirlooms, is a great reminder about the value of meaning. Keepsakes are mostly worthless to others, but priceless to their owners, because meaning adds value to things. But it’s not always obvious how. If all we cared about was speed and price, there wouldn't be any coffee shops; we’d just use vending machines. But we value, and pay for, experience and meaning. Like the economist David Friedman's Doorman Fallacy theory. If you define the role of a doorman as opening a door, then you’d quickly automate it. But the job brings loads more benefits and meaning, like empathy, feeling secure and adding character. In our efficiency and automation bubble, we’d do well to remember the value of meaning.
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creativity // short cuts ✂️
We live in a world of short cuts. Technology shortens things. Even walking. Students can write an essay with AI in seconds. But of course it was never about the essays. It was about the process, the journey. Freya India wrote how we live in imaginary online worlds and how “kids today have their imaginary worlds generated for them. Instead of writing their own stories, they can put prompts into ChatGPT. Instead of creating their own fantasy worlds, they can generate them with a few clicks.” Ian Leslie wrote about the dangers of abandoning the humanities. How they teach us not what to do, but how to be. How they make life, and us, more interesting and less robotic. In contrast, the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat grew up in a house full of jazz music. His father said “There was always, always music at home. I’ve always been a lover of jazz and classical music...As a child he used to draw on the coffee table, or on the floor while I played my jazz and read.” Basquiat himself said “I wanted to be a jazz musician, but I couldn't play anything. So I became an artist, and my paintings became my music.” That took a slow childhood of influence. A journey. But he did it. In his own mind. With his own imagination. In 1920 Joyce wrote in Ulysses 'Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home'. Feels pretty relevant right now.
technology // agents 🧑💼
One of the promises of AI was the promise of removing drudgery. We’d be cutting out the low value, time sapping crap. It hasn’t really happened yet, but it looks like it might be on the way. Anthropic just announced Claude 3.5 Haiku, which can among other things can take control of your computer to do tasks. It looks impressive and helpful. The future is emerging. AI started with co-pilots, but “computer use” as they describe, feels giving the tech a lot more agency, to do a lot more things. It also includes improvements in writing code, and Sundar Pichai says 25%+ of new Google’s code is already now AI generated. Microsoft and Salesforce have new agents too. And like everything to do with AI, this is as bad as it will ever be. More to come.
Five random (ish) things:
watching // richter 🎻.
Max Richter is amazing. His new (ish) album is great. A record about reconciling polarities, bringing together the electronic and the acoustic, the human and the natural world, the big questions of life and the quiet pleasures of living. Stand out track here. Enjoy!