Month: April 2024

Wrestling With The Gray Lady

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The other day my wife and I heard a report on our local public radio station that mentioned the Biden Administration’s American Climate Corps (ACC) initiative, a new program seeking to recruit 20,000 young people into jobs on the front line of the climate crisis. Modeled on Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-Era Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the program is a signature element of Biden’s response to what anyone with a pulse knows is the most pressing issue of our day: we’re destroying the planet through misguided economic incentives.

But despite the fact that the ACC was launched with much fanfare last Fall, my wife and I had never heard of it. We have three young adult children whose future feels in doubt because of climate change, and they’d never heard of it either – not a good sign for a program that hopes to recruit tens of thousands of people just like them. All five of us feel like we’re reasonably well informed. I mean, we read The New York Times, don’t we?

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Will GenAI Kill The Web?

The Atlantic is out with a delicious piece of doomerism: It’s The End of the Web As We Know It. Were it not for the authors, Judith Donath and Bruce Schneier, I’d have passed right on by, because well-respected publications have been proclaiming the death of the Web for more than a decade. By and large they’ve been proven directionally right, but it’s taking a lot longer than most predicted. Much like the Earth’s coral reefs, the Web has been dying off in waves. In their piece, Donath and Schneier argue that generative AI augurs the Web’s final stage of life. The coup de GPT, if you will.

Donath and Schneier are more thoughtful than your average trend-spotting feature writers. Donath, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, is the kind of digital polymath I’ve admired for years, but who’s been relatively quiet of late. No longer. And Schneier, a security expert, writes smart stuff about nearly everything I care about as it relates to the Internet. It’s fair to say I’ll read just about anything he writes.

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Mine, Mine, All Mine

The original MusicPlasma interface. Author’s musical preferences not included…
  1. No Longer Mine 

When I write, I like to listen to music. Most of my first book was written to a series of CDs I purchased from Amazon and ripped to my Mac – early turn of the century electronica, for the most part – Prodigy, Moby, Fat Boy Slim and the like. But as I write these words, I’m listening to an unfamiliar playlist on Spotify called “Brain Food” – and while the general vibe is close to what I want, something is missing.  

This got me thinking about my music collection – or, more accurately, the fact that I no longer have a music collection. I once considered myself pretty connected to a certain part of the scene – I’d buy 10 or 15 albums a month, and I’d spend hours each day consuming and considering new music, usually while working or writing. Digital technologies were actually pretty useful in this pursuit – when Spotify launched in 2008, I used it to curate playlists of the music I had purchased – it’s hard to believe, but back then, you could organize Spotify around your collection, tracks that lived on your computer, tracks that, for all intents and purposes, you owned. Spotify was like having a magic digital assistant that made my ownership that much more powerful. 

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Do We Even Have The Spine To Sacrifice, Just A Little Bit?

Thanks President Bush.

Old people are always complaining about how things were harder when they were young. Walking to school in the snow, uphill both ways, that whole thing. So forgive me as I embark on what initially might feel like that old man trope, but stay with me. I’m trying to make a larger point, and I have to start with a few stories of how things were in the Before Times.

So. Back when I was a kid, Big Things That Were Not Entirely In Our Control would happen. Presidents and Governors would get on the (usually black-and-white) TV, imploring us – all of us, mind you, every single citizen of these United States – to do something that would help alleviate the situation. The actions we were asked to take weren’t particularly terrifying – it’s not like we were getting called up to war (though the last-ever draft, for Vietnam, was still fresh in everyone’s mind.)

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