Episode 270: Pulling at Tightly Woven Threads

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I lately find myself dwelling on not the existence of new technology, but on questions about how we humans should treat it. After all, nothing in our cultures or languages has evolved to accommodate, for one example, ASoLs. In the interest of discussing these geegaws and thingamajigs with someone who actually not only uses them, but doesn't actively hate them, I have a chat with KMO as we start the title of Episode 270: Pulling at Tightly Woven Threads.

In this episode, I spoke with KMO (who most recently publishes, among other places, the Substack Gen X Science Fiction & Futurism). (There was one point in our chat where I was flailing about trying to remember the exact wording of a 1934 quote from Upton Sinclair, what I call the Sinclair Maxim; it was so rough I just cut my flailing and KMO's attempts to remember and just stuck the maxim in there.) Other than that and the removal of a few throat clearings and stumbles, that's what the conversation sounded like. I don't think we managed to convince each other of what we found more or less important about this new technology; but that was never going to be the point. The point was just to talk about it, call them AIs or ASoLs or SALAMIs (that's a real acronym! Look it up!), that is all part of the chat.

The point of any chat should never be to convince or accept, to correct or humble oneself, to excoriate or lambaste or enshrine someone else. The point of talking is first and foremost just to talk.

Episode 269: An Abundance of Lies

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Every so often, a book emerges that gets a lot of buzz from the media and gets tongues wagging. Sadly, too often those books say things that stretch credulity to the breaking point and start to smell a lot like a massive propaganda campaign stuffed into a hardcover. I follow the abundant evidence of one such book being bunkum in this Episode 269: An Abundance of Lies.

In this episode, I read a lot of stuff. I start with Zephyr Teachout's Washington Monthly essay "An Abundance of Ambiguity;" followed by Matt Bruening's Jacobin article, "What the 'Abundance Agenda' Leaves Out;" followed by Daniel Drezner's book The Ideas Industry and Anand Giridharadas' Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World; moving on to the American Prospect article by Hannah Story Brown called "An Abundance of Credulity;" and I close with Matt Stoller's Big newsletter essay, "An Abundance of Sleaze." (For reasons I'll explain in the next episode, I mentioned but did not read from an essay called The Poverty of Abundance. Trust me, I had reasons.)

I play: two snippets from The Long Now Foundation's interview with the pair of authors, the first featuring host Michael Pollan, the second with Derek Thompson. Musically, George Monbiot shows some real optimism in the opening backed by KMFDM; and Julie & Rolf & The Campfire Gang close us out with "Over the Rainbow."

Bonus Episode: Senator John Sherman's Address to the Senate

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While most of us have heard of the Sherman Act, few have savored Senator John Sherman's speech to the Senate in defense of that act.  Today, I present to you my reading of an edited version of that speech, in this Bonus Episode: Senator John Sherman's Address to The Senate.

Find the scanned copy mentioned in the episode here.