After a career as a middling but devoted high school cross-country runner, running was one of the (many) things I dropped immediately upon arriving at college. (Also: writing poems, playing violin, playing saxophone, writing for the school newspaper, exploring my queerness.) I knew on some level that I didn’t want to stop running, though, so from freshman year through the rest of my twenties I tried at least annually to get back into it. With each attempt I would tell myself why I should pick the habit up again: I wanted to be fit, I wanted to look hot, I wanted to smoke my brother at basketball. But each time, after a day or a week or a fortnight, I fell off it. These motivations weren’t nearly enough. When push came to shove, I didn’t actually care about looking a certain way or being a good athlete.
Now I’m 33, though, and I’ve been on a running kick for a year-and-a-half. I lace them up a few times a week and go out for 2- to 5-mile runs. I’m not very fast, but I run hard enough to feel it in whatever corner of the body is weakest today: lungs, calves, shins, glutes. Once again, I love running.
The thing is, these runs aren’t about looking hot. They’re not even about being strong. No way. My runs are pure, uncut mental health treatment. It turns out that that is the one thing that will get me out the door, rain or shine: the sure knowledge that my mopey ass will feel so, so, so much better afterwards.
Here’s another, more subtle, point about the grace of email and newsletters: Creation and consumption don’t happen in the same space. When I go to send a missive in Campaign Monitor the world of my laptop screen is as silent as a midnight Tokyo suburb. I think we’ve inured ourselves to the (false) truth that in order to post something, in order to contribute something to the stream, we must look at the stream itself, “Bird Box”-esque, and woe be the person in a productive creative jag, wanting to publish, who can resist those hot political tweets.
I’m not even sure this point is that subtle—or maybe I’m an outlier—but when I open up a social network to post there, it is the rarest of times that I don’t find myself scrolling, indefinitely, before saying to myself, “Wait, why did I open this app?” By the time I remember what I wanted to post, the spark of creation has often winked back into the brisk morning air.
Email newsletters are a great way to circumvent this pattern, but I especially appreciate Mod’s insight because it also explains why my current arrangement for posting tweet-length things works well for my can’t-resist-the-scroll brain. That arrangement being:
Draft tweet-length and longer blog posts in MarsEdit, which contains no feed at all and only enables creation.
Hit publish and MarsEdit sends them directly to my Micro.blog-hosted personal blog, jasper.land, where they exist indefinitely on a website I own and can directly link to.
Micro.blog automatically reposts to RSS, a weekly roundup newsletter, and Mastodon, so I am hypothetically having the same social media experience as someone who posted directly to Mastodon. (Before the Musk takeover and attendant API ruining, Micro.blog could repost on Twitter, too.)
The part of this that I have previously noted is the joy of having my own blog that isn’t affiliated with any VC-funded corporation. But now I’m think that an equal or perhaps even more important factor in my enjoyment of all this is the way these low-fi tools elegantly separate creation and consumption.
There’s this throwaway scene in I Love You Now Die—the documentary about the trial of Michelle Carter, the teen who supposedly hectored her boyfriend into killing himself—where the filmmakers stand in a parking lot near the crime scene and interview random passerby about what happened. Nothing much comes of their gambit until a woman rolls down her window and gives a brief monologue in a thick Massachusetts accent.
“Why does evil exist?” she asks dramatically, before answering her own question. “I don’t know.”
There’s something iconic and unfiltered about her, and about this thing she says. The quote immediately became a catchphrase in our household, always recited with the same melodramatic, singsong intonation of the original.
The chance to see something like this, something true and raw, is for me one of the chief pleasures of watching documentaries. If you share this pleasure, then I highly recommend Telemarketers, a three-parter about predatory spam calls, 2000’s call center culture, poverty, fraternal orders of police, capitalism, and an extremely iconic man named Patrick J. Pespas. It is truly stuffed with the strangeness and playful genius of people you never otherwise see on TV. (Except sometimes in reality stuff like Catfish.) And it centers on an unlikely bromance between two life-affirming weirdos.
Plus, it answers a question I’ve had for years: what the hell is up with those deep-voiced robots who call you and pretend to be cops and ask for money?
Just finished the Acquired episode about Costco, and hearing a detailed breakdown of the business model has convinced me: I’m going to get a membership. (They cap their markup at 14%! For everything!)
As I was listening I slowly realized something strange: Costco basically runs a controlled economy. They only stock one or two items in each category, in part because that’s the only way that the larger business model can work, but also because they assume customers don’t want endless choices as long as the limited choice they do have is high quality and very cheap.
This is basically how Lenin drew it up! State communism and a command economy! The state determines what the best things are, ensures their availability, and the populace happily accepts them, spared of the need to make a decision.
Another thing I learned is that the demographics of Costco members skew wealthy. Rich people want that sweet luxury communism most of all.
Finding things on the internet has always been one of the main problems and promises of the worldwide web. For the last two decades, though, a single search engine, Google, has so dominated this space that its name is now the verb for “look something up online.” But history hasn’t ended, and Google has become markedly worse. For some of us, it’s time for a new search engine, and I think I may have found the one.
But first, let me back up.
Do you remember the internet of the late ’90s? That was when I first got online, and back then the main way I found stuff online were the search engines Lycos and Altavista. Those were what my dad used, so I followed his lead. My research needs were pretty simple: pictures and diagrams of castles. Generally, the search engines succeeded in turning them up for me.
In the early 2000’s, as a preteen, I started finding the limitations of these search engines. But just around that time, Google came on the scene, and I moved over with everyone else. This new search engine provided an amazing experience: finding precisely what I was looking for. Even when I just had a hunch that something specific should exist, Google would often find it for me within a few queries. It permitted a truly awesome level of granularity.
If anything, Google was too good at finding things. No longer was I randomly encountering the bizarro cruft of the internet, which had always been part of the fun of wandering around online. Even as I had this new superpower, I could feel something being lost. So I seized on the Stumbleupon browser extension (RIP) as soon as I heard about it, and as a high schooler I spent countless hours after school parachuting into random corners of the web.
But always, for search, Google.
Twenty years later, though, and Google has become absolutely choked with ads. I’ve learned to pause before clicking on the first hit. No longer can I feel confident that Google has surfaced what I want. Instead, I pause and take a moment to steer around all the crap that advertisers have paid to place between me and what I’m looking for. I carefully squint to see the tiny “Sponsored” label, which seems designed to be so small and unassuming that it’ll trick me into thinking it’s a “real” search result. And it surely is designed for that exact purpose—after all, search ads are set up so that if I do click on the ad, the advertiser will pays Google $.67 (the average) or $5 or even sometimes $50 or more.
What to do about this? A few years back I tried out a search engine called Neeva for a while. (The journalist James Fallows was a big fan.) But Neeva never did the trick for me, and well before the search engine bit the dust this May, I myself abandoned it and went back to Google.
In the raft of post-mortems following Neeva’s closure, though, I heard about another pay-to-use search engine. (Via John Gruber.) This one shares with Neeva the dubious distinction of having a clumsy name—it’s called Kagi—but in every other way I think it’s better.
I’ve been using Kagi for a few months now. And I have gradually, grudgingly, come to feel that it’s a worthwhile way to spend $5 month.
The main thing that makes Kagi leagues better than Google (2023 version) is its total lack of ads. It can’t be overstated how much of a difference it makes to use a search engine that has a business model centering your search experience rather than one premised on selling ads against your eyeballs.
At the same time, I appreciate that Kagi is not trying to be a precise but ad-free clone of Google. Instead, the team behind it seems to be working in their own way to try to make the best search engine. They provide different search filters you can customize. Results get automatically broken out into “Discussions” and “Listicles” and other useful categories. Image search becomes a gallery. There is an AI-generated summary that’s a click away for any search. And so on. There are many features I haven’t had the time or need to try yet. But basically: the Kagi team really does seem to be taking their best shot at making a great search engine.
Is it better than Google across the board? I think it’s up and down. Usually, it just works for me. Sometimes when trying to find something very specific, I do find myself having to turn back to Google. But other times I come away feeling like I wouldn’t have found the thing I ended up using, or have found it as quickly, without Kagi.
My main criticism is its pricing model, which is needlessly confusing:
The Standard plan offers 300 searches for USD $5 per month. This plan is suited for users who are new to paid search engines and are looking to own their search experience.
The Professional plan offers 1,000 searches for USD $10 per month. This plan is suited for internet professionals and developers who are prolific and advanced search users.
…
Pay Per Use Enhancement
The Standard and Professional plans both feature Pay Per Use options within the Billing Settings. Searches beyond the monthly included searches, are priced at 1.5 cents per search. There are two limits that you can set to control your cost:
• The soft limit triggers a notification regarding pay-per-use cost
• The hard limit prevents further searches so you do not incur additional costs.
That is so confusing and arcane. And worse, pay-per-search makes it seem like you should be miserly with actually using Kagi. Do they really want to incentivize users to not use their tool?
Happily, I can report that even if you think you use search all the time, you should just select the $5/month version and continue on your merry way. I have yet to hit their limits, and even if I do, they’ll just charge me a few bucks extra that month. Whatever.
The biggest, best thing about Kagi has been feeling my muscle memory shift back to an earlier, less defensive way of being. I have slowly shed my instinctive distrust of the first result. I don’t find myself looking for those little “sponsored” tags. And consequently, search has become less of a chore, less of a hassle, and more of a pleasure.
Sophomore year of college, I figured out that the university library’s card catalogs had been shoved into an old hallway and were still accessible, despite having been replaced years before by a digital catalog. I would sometimes go and browse the contents of these handsome old walnut cabinets for twenty minutes or an hour, looking up my current interests and seeing what titles I might find adjacent, and what further notes I might find on the cards. It was curiously satisfying. A few times, I did find a book that I’d go chase down in the stacks, but more often I just enjoyed surveying the titles and keywords and generally getting the intellectual lay of the land.
Kagi isn’t as inefficient as that old card catalog. It’s a fully functional search engine of the ’20s. But using it does have some of the same feeling of engaging with information in an older, less adversarial way. You pay $5, and in return you aren’t subjected to Google’s intrusive surveillance ad-tech and in-your-face ads. Google, by contrast, pockets $21/month/user, mostly from ads.
The big takeaway? Kagi is a search engine that doesn’t make you feel like you are the ore in an elaborate mining operation. Instead, a bit surprisingly, it feels like a small gift to yourself.
When I first moved to LA, the ubiquitous billboards advertising a figure known as Sweet James intrigued me. Who was this Sweet James? Driving back from Highland Park in the late afternoon, we passed a billboard, then a bus, then a bus stop ad, all for Sweet James, all promising he would fix your situation, set things to rights. We decided that Sweet James must be a supernatural force that could be summoned by Angelenos whenever we found ourselves in a jam. Wish you hadn’t broken up with your girlfriend? Call Sweet James, and she’ll be outside your door in ten minutes, begging you back. Outgunned at the rumble with the opposing gang? Call Sweet James and watch the bodies fall. Piled up a whole bunch of dirty dishes and now feeling overwhelmed? Call Sweet James!
For years we would laugh when we saw the billboards. We’d put on our deep movie announcer voices and say, “When all hope seems lost, what do they do? Call Sweet James.” Pity the city whose superheroes are all personal injury lawyers.
It tipped from absurdity into offensiveness when the Sweet James ads began popping up in the dashboard of our car. We drive a Rav4 from 2018 with a funky infotainment system. It’s not advanced enough to actually include the album art of the song you’re playing over bluetooth, but instead it will pull a random picture of Johnny Cash from Toyota HQ and show that beside the track listings. (Most often, it defaults to hilarious stock images representing “Alt Rock” or “Indie” or whatever.) When the radio is on and picking up a digital signal, that same real estate displays an image provided by the radio station. For KCRW, our local NPR affiliate, it shows, you know, the KCRW logo. But for all the pop and rock stations, they just immediately sell that space for advertisements—from, you guessed it, Sweet James.
The ad budget for this law firm! To try to get you to call them after your personal tragedy, they spend tens of millions of dollars every year. They have literally taken over the dashboard of my car. The bastards.
Yesterday, I finally realized who is paying for these enormous ad budgets. It’s me! I pay it through outrageous car insurance costs, through high taxes for a government that pays out enormous settlements left and right, and through a higher cost of goods across the board, because part of the cost of doing business is getting sued. Being part of U.S. society in 2023 means absorbing the costs of this system, where injured parties sometimes get enormous payouts (and the law firms representing them get rich along the way).
I hate it, but to be clear, I don’t really blame Sweet James or the other personal injury outfits. (Like Pirnia Law, with its derpy motto, “We didn’t meet by accident.”) In fact, I think that, in the context of a society with limited safety nets for the chronically injured, the chance of getting a big payout is a lifeline to so many people. For some people, I’m sure that Sweet James really is a sort of superhero.
Instead, I blame a society that does so little to reduce harms, that seems uninterested in stopping accidents from happening (witness the plague of swollen, pedestrian-crushing vehicles clogging our streets and parking lots), and that doesn’t take care of people after the worst happens. We should be working to build a world where personal injury lawyers are a rare breed, infrequently called upon, and with limited ad budgets. We’re not, of course. In one of the absurdities of capitalism, working to reduce the frequency of injury is actually against the interests of the lawyers who represent injured people. They don’t mind in the least that I pay exorbitant auto premiums and higher taxes and higher costs across the board, to subsidize their industry. On some level, they’d be happy if I got injured, as long as I called them. Unsafe streets and workplaces and neighbors might be a tragedy, but to them they’re also a profit center.
And so it falls to the rest of us to try to fix up our society enough to get our superhero out of the lawyering business entirely—so he can focus on what he’s truly meant to do. Because when L.A. finds itself with a dinner party in 45 minutes but still not having started cooking, who does it call? Sweet James!
I’ve been feeling reflective this week—so here are a few reflections on the experience of blogging in 2023, and on using Micro.blog as my main microblogging platform, which I’ve been doing since October. (This follows my thoughts on resuming sending out my email newsletter, Lightplay].)
As a writer, I find it to be a great gift to have a gradient of formality in the places that I publish. At the high end of formality would be the book project I’m working on, or the 6,000-word history of Antioch University’s “Great Expansion," which I published as the cover story for this year’s Antioch Alumni Magazine (print circulation ~40,000). For these kinds of writing projects, the standard of writing has to be quite high, going through many drafts, multiple editors, proofreaders, etc. A bit less high-stakes might be a news story I write for my job, that gets posted online. But still, I’ve got to get it right—this kind of writing is my livelihood.
Lower down the formality gradient is something like Lightplay, which I’ve found works best if the register is that of a friendly letter from a caring friend. I try to keep it easy, so I can write an edition over the course of a few hours in the evening, edit the next day, and get it out. And it’s great to write like this, not stressing too much, and putting it in front of readers just a few days later. It keeps one from getting too precious.
But I can get psyched out by even something as low-stakes as a newsletter sent to a few hundred people. So: the blog. And even better: the microblog! (“Microblog” generally refers to a place where you post things under ~280 characters; the most notable platforms for this are Twitter and Mastodon.) Here’s the sort of thing I might think up and post here, all within a minute or two:
My microblogging began last September. It was before the Muskrat finished buying Twitter, and I found myself off work on parental leave and with significant little chunks of free time as the baby slept. So I decided to set myself the goal of posting something—anything—on Twitter every day for three weeks. (For the deranged completist, here’s the archive of all my tweets.) At the end of my experiment I realized that I enjoyed posting, but I hated the “like” counter at the bottom of every tweet, which revealed that only three Twitter users liked me (wife, dad, friend in Maine). I’m pitiably susceptible to feeling like a loser, and the little popularity ticker is one of my biggest triggers. Despite my enjoyment of posting, Twitter made me feel bad.
Around that time, I found out about Micro.blog, which is a service adjacent to Twitter but all its own thing. For $10/month, Micro.blog lets me:
host my blog on my own custom domain (jasper.land)
post via their app (which I use on iPhone) or via the excellent MarsEdit (which I use on my computer)
cross-post everything to Mastodon (I used to have it cross-post to Twitter; in the future I may have it cross-post to Bluesky)
I can’t over-state how much better it feels to have my own little blog feed on Jasperland, versus having all my tweet-size posts hosted on an ad-funded platform that is liable to hostile takeover by a white nationalist billionaire. But even if Twitter had remained a public company, I still much prefer to own my own feed.
It makes me much more likely to post. Partly this is just because of what it lacks: the like counter. But I also think I am drawn to the feeling that I’m building my own little cache of words and images and ideas, my own little edifice, here on Jasperland. Tweeting always felt like it was chasing engagement and likes and retweets. A post on jasper.land, even though relatively few people might end up seeing it, feels self-justifying, like writing in a journal.
You can tell it’s been a hit, because I’ve posted here 112 times in the last 8 months. And I’m excited to keep posting, moving forward. Maybe in five years I’ll have a thousand posts on here—a little archive of what I was reading and thinking about.
One tweak that I made this week is to adjust the newsletter settings within Micro.blog. Previously I set it up in the configuration where it would send subscribers the full text of all posts longer than 280 words. I thought that would be great—if I wrote a full-length blog post, a few people would actually read it. (I have three subscribers.)
What ended up happening is: for the four months since I set it up that way, I don’t think I have posted a single blog post longer than 280 characters. Something about the knowledge that it would trigger an email getting sent out made posting a longer blog post feel strangely high-stakes. I don’t know exactly what I was worried about, but if I had to boil it down it would be: fear of wasting someone’s time. The whole point of the blog is to have a low-stakes place to post my writing, but the newsletter feature raised the stakes ever so slightly. It’s a weird part of my psychology as a writer: a small fear can block me, sometimes indefinitely.
Recognition and acceptance are among the first steps to healing, so this week I changed the newsletter feature. Now it’s going to send an email to subscribers every Saturday, no matter what. That email will have all my microblogs along with links and previews to longer pieces. Søren Kierkegaard once said, “Do it or do not do it, you will regret both.” For me the freeing corollary is: post a longer blog post or do not post a longer blog post, your subscribers will receive an email on Saturday either way.
We’ll see how that goes long-term. And of course, I don’t know how I’ll feel about Jasperland in six months or a few years. Maybe I’ll go back to microblogging directly on a platform. Maybe I’ll give up microblogging entirely. But I suspect I’ll remain here, posting in my own little realm, finally having found the right low-formality medium, happy as a clam.
Should you possess as your first name a goldilocks name, not ubiquitous yet not entirely obscure, not dated-sounding yet not so new-sounding as to clearly be an emerging trend, you are almost guaranteed sooner or later to learn that your name has been impressed into service as the brand name of some tech service or other. Cora is now a tampon company. Casper, a mattress company. Marcus? Some project of Goldman Sachs. And please spare a thought for the Alexas and Siris of the earth, whose lovely names have been commandeered by two of the biggest and most powerful corporations ever to exist, to stand in for their automated voice assistants. Hey Siri, we say now, rudely addressing our devices. Hey Alexa.
I guess I’m lucky that Jasper—after decades of service mainly as a high-volume dog name but also as my own—has only now been pressed into service as a tech product name, and it’s not for a voice assistant! That’s the good news. The bad? Jasper, the company, sells an AI copywriting tool that aims to put incarnated writers, like yours truly, out of business.
This, I will admit, has piqued my curiosity. Is an “AI writer” really going to take my job? Or will it at the least change how I carry it out, exponentially upping my productive capacity? To put it the way an AI might, it’s made me curious how 10x my content production.
That’s a screenshot from an actual email this company, Jasper, sent me after I tried to use their tool. (Upon me creating an account, they demanded a credit card; the fine print said that after a 5-day trial they would charge me $480; I declined.) I think that this email captures rather perfectly the riciculousness of what today passes for AI—and why I feel basically sanguine about attempts to use computers to replace me and other writers.
Here’s the thing: AI writing tools promise to help us create more written output faster—to “10x your content production.” But that’s a solution in search of a problem. The problem with writing isn’t that there isn’t enough of it. Hahahaha, no, that is not the problem. The problem with writing, obviously, is that we only live on this earth for a limited number of days, we only get to read so much, and we don’t want to feel our time has been wasted. Unfortunately for the AI automators, so far all but a thin sliver of AI writing—and that largely limited to explicitly AI art projects like this beautiful essay by Vauhini Vara—is just not worth your or anyone else’s time.
The thing is, AI writing lacks care. I mean this in all senses of the word. On the small scale, the AI isn’t careful, and its writing is often full of falsehoods and other errors. But in the bigger sense, too—the AI doesn’t care about what it’s writing. It’s not invested, emotionally or intellectually. It’s just riffing. As Robin Sloan writes in a recent newsletter:
The thing to know about the AI language models, OpenAI’s GPT-3 and its cousins, is that they are fundamentally bullshitters. The bullshit has gotten better and better, but at the core … well, there’s nothing at the core.
The AI, lacking a soul, is profoundly disinterested, it just doesn’t care, so it just generates what it’s been programmed to think you’ll want to hear. There is no insight. There is no curiosity. At least not on the part of the machine.
More than anything, raw AI prose reminds me of the way that in the NBA 2k video games you can play against the computer—but you can also set up the computer to play against itself. Back and the forth, the computer will slowly simulate an entire game on its own. And in many ways it might be similar to watching an actual, live basketball game. For myself, I’m a big basketball fan—I’m literally writing this essay after watching an entire basketball game on TV—but, man, you couldn’t pay me enough to more than glance at a simulated basketball game. It turns out, a big part of why I’m watching these games is to experience things that cannot be simulated: competition, creativity, human fallibility, and the possibility of the unexpected.
I would throw out that many, even most people who read books for pleasure do so not just for plot but also for similar human elements to why we watch basketball. Certainly these are among the primary driving forces behind highbrow fiction, essays, and poetry.
The writers who do seem to have use for tools like jasper.ai are, no coincidence, the same ones who are incentivized to value quantity over quality. Josh Dzieza’s fantastic piece in The Verge,“The Great Fiction of AI” is about just this question: how will increasingly powerful AI tools be used by writers. Understandably, he focuses on a genre novelist, Jennifer Lepp, who writes cozy paranormal mystery novels published directly to Amazon’s Kindle marketplace. She ends up turning to AI because of the insanse pace she must keep in order to make enough money to survive: 6 novels per year to start with, and then, as Amazon’s service becomes ever more crammed with other pulpy novels, 10 per year. (This seems like a particularly degraded version of a “dream job.”) The AI does help the central figure somewhat in her unceasing toil cranking out these novels—but only because, readers in this genre and on this platform have a seemingly bottomless appetite for fairly repetitive plots and stories.
Eventually, though, even Lepp finds that the AI is writing stories without soul. She takes back the reins and just uses the AI program (in her case Sudowrite) for parts of her books she doesn’t care about. Here’s a quote describing that:
“Like I know we’re going into the lobby, and I know that this lobby is a secret paranormal fish hospital for nyads, but I don’t particularly care what that looks like other than that there’s two big fish tanks with tons of fish and it’s high-end,” she explained. So she tells it that, and it gives her 150 words about crystal chandeliers, gold etching, and marble. “My time is better spent on the important aspects of the mystery and the story than sitting there for 10 minutes trying to come up with the description of the lobby.”
For myself, I struggle to imagine simply not caring about a description. If I don’t care about it enough to actually write it, then why would it be in the novel at all? Isn’t it the height of rudeness to expect a reader to care enough to read something that I literally didn’t care enough to write?
All this is not to say I’m not interested, at least a little bit, in these tools. I do think that AI writing is kind of interesting. But I just can’t bring myself to believe that it will ever fundamentally change the way that I write. Nor do I believe that it will crowd the market for good writing, the way that many of its boosters seem to think it will. At best, it may flood the market with half-baked, soulless crap that doesn’t respect readers’ time. Perhaps I’m simply not cynical enough, but I think such a future would have the central effect of raising, not lowering, the premium on truly great, thoughtful, writing.
Last night I was reading Mary Gaitskill’s review of Blonde, the novelization of the life of Marilyn Monroe that Joyce Carol Oates published in 2000. (I found it because Gaitskill sent out a PDF in her newsletter panning the film adaptation.) In the review, Gaitskill ultimately ends up advocating for the book as a powerful exploration of psyche, sex, and the entrancing figure of Marilyn. But she takes a winding road to get there. And she's not afraid to be crass. (Heads up: the passage discusses sexual violence.) Here are her first two paragraphs of the review:
Get back to me when an AI writes something as sharp, funny, and full of idiosyncratic but ultimately moral insight as that. Till then, I think we writers will still have jobs.
Here’s the real trouble: how in the hell do we get to be writing on the level of Mary Gaitskill? That’s something neither Jasper has yet achieved.
Our society’s got problems, and they’re all the same problem: people who already have things are resistant to giving them up.
Got a mortgage? You might be threatened by people planning to knock down the single family homes down the street and put up high-density apartment blocks.
Got a small fortune, or a high income? You might be threatened by people trying to raise taxes to fix social problems.
Got a car and routes you enjoy driving? You might be threatened by proposals to invest in mass transit over roads.
Got white supremacy? You might be threatened by people chanting “Black Lives Matter.”
Got a profitable oil company? You might be threatened by climate activists.
Et cetera.
This isn’t to say all change is good change. And especially not when it comes to urban development, which is what I want to talk about here. Obviously, cities like Los Angeles (where I live) have long histories of using development to harm, profiteer upon, and destroy communities with less power.
One of the essays that has most influenced my thinking on this is "Racism is Killing the Planet" by Hop Hopkins. (I first read it when I profiled Hop in the Antioch Alumni Magazine from two years back.) Among many key points, Hop says that “You can’t have climate change without sacrifice zones, and you can’t have sacrifice zones without disposable people, and you can't have disposable people without racism.” So many of the disasters of urban development, from the community-bisecting freeways championed by Robert Moses to redlining to the racist “predictive policing” policies championed by fasc-tech companies like Palantir can be explained if you see the people they target as “disposable people” and the communities they live in as “sacrifice zones.”
That said, I’m not so sure that I myself live in a sacrifice zone—and yet my neighborhood seems to be in the middle of a big fight around development. Here’s a political mailer I received a few days ago:
This group, Beverly Fairfax Community Alliance (unclear who’s behind it), is rallying support to oppose the forthcoming redevelopment of the CBS studio lots down on Beverly, about ten blocks from me. According to the other side of the mailer, this expanded facility will “create traffic gridlock on our already congested streets” and “foreseeably push community rents even higher than they are today and lead to the displacement of existing renters.” The second part in particular would be a real harm, especially as many of my neighbors are Jewish emigrés from the former Soviet Union, gay men who have made their lives in West Hollywood, retirees, renters, and most often an intersection of these identities and more. (This is the same coalition that came together to create West Hollywood in the ‘80s, explicitly to pass rent control laws.) I don’t know where many of my neighbors will go if forced out of the apartments where we make our lives.
But I’m also skeptical of the motives of these folks opposing development. The last bullet point, “DENSITY,” seems to give up the game: a chief concern is that the new studio will be designated as a “Regional Center” which will lead to “future intensification of development for our entire community.”
While that sounds scary—it also seems obviously necessary! Beverly-Fairfax and West Hollywood may be relatively high-density in Los Angeles, but for us to house everyone at affordable rents and reasonable home prices, we affirmatively need intensification of development. That should be something we’re pushing for!
So I find myself skeptical of this mailer. I need to do more research. And in a larger sense, I’m finding it harder and harder to make sense of what development we should oppose (beyond obvious things like freeway widening and oil pipelines), and what we need to throw our whole weight behind. More and more, I’m pro-development until convinced otherwise.
We’ve been watching The Rings of Power, the new, half-billion-dollar Lord of the Rings spinoff that Jeff Bezos bought for Amazon Prime, hoping to replicate the success of Game of Thrones. I’m afraid to say, it’s bad. But... good-bad?
The storyline is ridiculous, reliant on the non-existence of a postal system, an absence of news-relaying networks, and some ridiculous failures of operational intelligence. The elves have short hair. The camera always feels like it’s zooming in on people’s faces when they say fancy place-name words like, “Numinor.” The acting is often wooden (not the actors’ faults necessarily; the characters are impossibly broadly written). There are no hobbits, but instead an insufferable proto-hobbit species called Har-Foots, who are always putting shit in their hair. And to top it off, the world-building, the one thing that a fantasy show can’t live without, is atrocious.
Nonetheless, each episode is packed with little pleasures. Some of these are due to the insane budget, which means that the CGI is often excellent. But often it’s due to the ridiculousness of the directorial decisions. For instance, I can’t get enough of this orc:
He’s garbed in ridiculous couture: a white alligator-skin shawl, an eggshell helment, and a battle axe that he’s apparently using to excavate the trench wall. (Why he’s helping the elf-slaves is left unexplained.) But within a moment of appearing on-screen, the sun comes out, and he recoils in pain, the light burning his skin. He holds his shawl up against the sky and does a prissy, shuffling scamper back to the part of the trench covered in awnings.
There’s something alive to this character, some irrepressible messiness and humanity. We never see the specific orc again, but for the four seconds he’s onscreen—what a king! Look at him as he goes by:
Watching the episode, we had to rewind the tape to make sure we’d seen it right. And then we rewound the tape again and again, laughing until we were crying.
At some point I want to write a longer essay about what I call “Fucked Up Taste”—the idea that part of developing an aesthetic sensibility is coming to love things that are un-beautiful and “bad” and even ridiculous. It’s not the newest of ideas, but it’s one that I enjoy contemplating. There’s nothing quite like running into something as wild and precious and lovably ridiculous as this orc, in an otherwise self-serious mess of a show. I love this guy. Give him his own spin-off!
For no good reason beyond proclivity, I can’t help myself but try out new software all the time. I’m on waiting lists for software (Arc Browser; Dall-E). I’m currently on 30-day and 10-day free trials (Qobuz; Tidal; micro.blog). I’ve got a handful of apps that I use daily that two years ago I’d never even heard of (iA Writer; Otter.ai; Fantastical). There’s always that dream, that the next thing you try will become a tool you can’t live without.
It’s sort of like bringing new tools into the kitchen. You’re never going to replace the knife, cutting board, cast iron pan. And sure, most things are either flimsy gadgets or far too specialized. But I started using an electric water kettle here in my kitchen about three months ago, and I feel like it’s been more than a marginal upgrade. I drink more coffee because of it. And I also cook pasta faster, because it’s easier to boil water.
I’m saying all this, because this is my first post to micro.blog, drafted inside iA Writer and posted directly from there (I guess; will find out shortly). And it’s also my first time using micro.blog’s “repost” functionality to automatically add it to Twitter and Tumblr, too. Will anything come of it? Likely not. But if it did, that would be sweet! I always want a new tool, if it’s useful—and especially if it helps me write more, and connect with more people through my writing.
