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Sunday Morning Reading
Back from a brief hiatus, there’s plenty to read and share. It feels like it’s becoming increasingly important, and perhaps more urgent to do both. I promise there’s some happiness amidst all of the Strum and Drang down the page.
First up, Canadian Stephen Marche is singing the Red, White and Blues. It’s easy to look from the outside in, or even from within and be dismayed at what’s going on in this country. Because it’s so damn easy to see. Unless of course you’re still in shock, or choosing to ignore it. Marche’s tune doesn’t hit a false note as he says America was a “country of bubbles.”
David Todd McCarty is back Poking The Bear. It’s good seeing him write about politics again.
Drik de Klein of History of Sorts wrote Evil, I Think, Is The Absence of Empathy back in 2019, using Captain G.M. Gilbert’s quote from the Nuremberg trials as the headline. I remember reading it a while ago and it resurfaced this week, proving, as always, just how short our attention spans are. Or perhaps our comprehension and retention capabilities.
NatashaMH says, “I can’t stand people being ignorant bastards” in her excellent piece Our Modern Discontents. Again, a viewpoint from outside the red, white, and blue bubble that feels like it’s ready to pop.
Jacob Silverman’s Welcome To The Slop World: How The Hostile Internet Is Driving Us Crazy is an invitation to a party that turned into something nobody was expecting.
Speaking of bubbles, big tech is in hot water of its own boiling these days. Google is facing anti-trust charges and a possible breakup that probably won’t happen. Wendy Grossman takes a look at Three Times A Monopolist.
Who’d a thunk it? Bot Farms Invade Social Media To Hijack Popular Sentiment. Eric Schwartzman does some digging in those all too fertile fields.
This past week we celebrated William Shakespeare’s birthday. As usual lots of words were written about the writer who used them better than anyone else to describe the human condition. One of the accepted parts of the Bard’s legacy is that he was an absent husband that left his family behind to pursue his calling. But a discovery of a letter might just change that. Check out what Ephrat Livini has to say about the possibility in an Overlooked Letter Rewrites History of Shakespeare’s Bad Marriage.
And for that happiness I promised, I’ll stick with Shakespeare and Cora Fox with ‘I Were Happy But Little Happy, If I Could Say How Much’; Shakespeare’s Insights On Happiness Have Held Up For More Than 400 Years. We often focus on his tragedies, but he reveled in the joys of life as well. Keep those happy bubbles afloat as long as you can. Pop the bad ones.
(Image from Rey Seven on Unsplash)
If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.
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Néle Azevedo’s Melting Men Reminds Us That Life Is Short
Life is indeed short and it makes sense to pay attention when things that remind us of that come back into focus when someone new discovers them. Néle Azevedo’s famous ice sculptures, known as “Minimum Moment”, seem to be making the rounds again recently and I thought I’d highlight them here. I’ve never seen them in person yet I’ve always been taken by every photograph I’ve seen of them.
The installation features small ice figures sitting on public steps around parts of the world begin melting almost as soon as they are set in place, reminding us our our short time here on this planet and the ephemeral nature of our place.
The photo above is from the 2005 installation “Minimum Moment” in São Paulo and photographed by Marcos Gorgatti. You can read more about it here.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Time For The Shibboleth of Targeted Ads To Die
We all fell for it. We all thought it would be beneficial to us as users. I don’t want to say we were all suckers, so I’ll just say we were naive. But in the end we were all suckers. Targeted advertising was supposed to cater to our needs, desires, and wishes. Surfacing what we were interested in out of the clutter was a hope and a promise that died in colliding avalanches of greed and gluttony.
To be fair some ad targeting actually works. To also be fair, even a broken clock is right twice a day. But the money came rolling in and the temptation to grab it all became far too much and made it far too easy to let slip those early promises.
Now the brains behind Artificial Intelligence are doing what many suspected from the get go and edging their way into the browser wars. TechCrunch has an interesting post talking about Perplexity’s plans to get to know us better by building a better browser.
Here’s the money quote:
“That’s kind of one of the other reasons we wanted to build a browser, is we want to get data even outside the app to better understand you,” Srinivas said. “Because some of the prompts that people do in these AIs is purely work-related. It’s not like that’s personal.”
Focus on the “personal” part.
Both Perplexity and OpenAI have made statements they would be interested in buying Google’s Chrome browser should Google be forced into a breakup for anti-trust reasons. But that’s years away. So why wait? Better to get in the game now before the regulators catch up. Or before all the data that’s good to grab gets grabbed and starts feeding on itself.
There’s irony in all of this that underlies and underlines the dissembling behind it that might just be seeping into the open. One of the promises of this new technology is that it will free us from drudgery, giving us all more time for creative pursuits and more balanced lifestyles. But the underlying goal is the same. Grab as much data as possible, especially “personal” data. That’s the currency. That will always be the currency.
Here’s the second money quote from Perplexity’s Aarvind Srinivasa:
“On the other hand, what are the things you’re buying; which hotels are you going [to]; which restaurants are you going to; what are you spending time browsing, tells us so much more about you.”
AI might continue its move into the enterprise, but that’s not enough. And if the corporate mindset of using AI to replace workers continues, that equation points to diminishing returns eventually, even if the advertisers never catch on.
We all know how this story plays out. Because it’s a rerun. And too often a plagiarized one as well.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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All The World’s His Stage. Happy Birthday (We Think) to William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare is the playwright and poet that described us all. He did so with intelligence and wit. Today, April 23, is the day most mark as his birthday. The record of his baptism is April 26th, so it’s a decent bet the date is close enough.
There really is nothing new in human behavior under the sun. In his plays and poems I don’t think he missed much in describing every thing good, bad, noble, and foolish about how we operate with each other and within the world. In my view, it’s a shame more of us don’t pay enough attention to his cataloging of humanity. But then he predicted that as well.
Here’s an intriguing side note on this very intelligent man’s celebrated birth date. I asked several AI engines on what day was he born. Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and DeepSeek returned April 23rd as the likely date with the typical (and mostly accepted) disclaimers that we celebrate that day, but there’s no definitive proof it was the actual date. I asked Siri and Alexa, both returned April 23 as the definitive date. Intriguing that Siri didn’t try to pass that off to ChatGPT. I’m sure Amazon will now offer me all kind of suggestions to purchase anything Shakespeare.
So, I’ll amend slightly my statement about the Bard describing us all and there being nothing new under the sun. He’s correct in that we’re both smart and too often not smart enough to understand what we do and do not know, but he might have missed the mark when it comes to artificial intelligence. Or did he did he?
I’m reasonably certain his works have been fed into AI engines and Chatbot training given that they are long in the public domain. I’m also reasonably certain they ignore his nothing new under the sun descriptions of human interactions in the same way those of us still walking around do.
“Lord, what fools we mortals be!”
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Carole Cadwalladr’s Final Column for The Observer
A couple of weeks ago I linked to Carol Cadwalladr’s recent return to the TED conference to deliver a speech entitled This Is What A Digital Coup Looks Like. It’s worth a watch if you care about such things. Heck, it should be required reading if you care at all about what’s happening in our digital and non-digital lives.
This post is linking to her farewell column in The Observer, the Sunday sister paper to The Guardian and The Guardian Weekly papers in Britain. Like all media outlets it’s been through some things in recent years. The Observer was purchased late in 2024 and like all such transactions that prompted staff layoffs and terminations, including Carole Cadwalladr and a number of her colleagues. You can read all about that on in her post Fuckty bye in How To Survive The Broligarchy. I suggest you do that as well as read her final Observer column It’s Not Too Late To Stop Trump and The Tech Broligarchy From Controlling Our Lives, But We Must Act Now.
I happen to believe she’s fighting the good fight. That last column provides some excellent behind the scenes during her preparation and anxiety leading up to that recent TED speech, as well as some reactions she received while at the conference, including an interchange between her and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, in addition to making the important case she continues to make.
She’s paying attention and raising alarm bells. We should too. She’s standing in the way. We should too.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Distrust-By-Default
In a typically thorough article on Ars Technica about Microsoft preparing to reintroduce the Recall feature to Windows 11, Andrew Cunningham sums up his, and I think many of our, queasy feelings about these kind of feature and marketing failures we’ve recently seen from the likes of Microsoft, Apple and others, using the phrase distrust-by-default.
Here’s the quote in context:
This was a problem that Microsoft made exponentially worse by screwing up the Recall rollout so badly in the first place. Recall made the kind of ugly first impression that it’s hard to dig out from under, no matter how thoroughly you fix the underlying problems. It’s Windows Vista. It’s Apple Maps. It’s the Android tablet.
And in doing that kind of damage to Recall (and possibly also to the broader Copilot+ branding project), Microsoft has practically guaranteed that many users will refuse to turn it on or uninstall it entirely, no matter how it actually works or how well the initial problems have been addressed.
Unfortunately, those people probably have it right. I can see no signs that Recall data is as easily accessed or compromised as before or that Microsoft is sending any Recall data from my PC to anywhere else. But today’s Microsoft has earned itself distrust-by-default from many users, thanks not just to the sloppy Recall rollout but also to the endless ads and aggressive cross-promotion of its own products that dominate modern Windows versions. That’s the kind of problem you can’t patch your way out of.
Briefly, Recall is the Windows 11 feature that was built to capture and recall almost all of what you do on your PC via snapshots, making it available for recall later. After substantial promotion, Microsoft pulled and delayed the rollout last year after security concerns were raised. Skepticism was high even before the security issues were raised that caused the delay. Cunningham’s article provides an excellent rundown on that and I encourage you to read the full thing.
I think Andrew is spot on calling the uneasy feeling many of us have distrust-by-default. Certainly when it comes to this specific Microsoft moment and other tech companies. Zooming out, I think it also describes well the armor we’re all adopting on any number of issues in these moments of mistrust we seem to be facing on so many fronts in our lives.
(Image from Atmospher1 on Shutterstock)
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Sunday Morning Reading
Sunday Morning Reading is on hiatus this week for family time. For those who celebrate Easter, and for those who don’t, may you find warmth, joy, and laughter in the company of family and good friends. A little peace would be nice also.
If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.
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iHostage Review: Not A Good Trip To The Apple Store
I’m guessing iHostage is a flick you’ll never see on Apple TV+ even though it features the Amsterdam Apple Store as a prominent character in the story. iHostage, directed by Bobby Boerman is currently streaming on Netflix and is based on an actual hostage situation that took place at the Apple Store in Leidseplein in 2022.
As far as hostage films go it isn’t bad nor is it great. These things typically only end one way, and of course if you have any familiarity (I did not) with the actual events you already know how things turn out in this case. But as to the entertainment value there’s good fun to be had as the director and his cameras look for every conceivable angle to shoot within and without the Apple Store. AirPods play an important role early on. Also interesting is watching some of the hostages use an Apple Watch to check whether or not another was having a heart attack. (For the record, an Apple Watch can’t detect underlying causes of a heart attack, but it can detect irregular rhythms.)
The acting, visuals, and direction are generally good, keeping the tension going as we cut back and forth between the hostage taker and his primary hostage, and those on the police side trying to bring about an end to the event. But again, these stories have a formula about them that to some extent just requires a plug-and-play approach with all the necessary elements of filmmaking. I’d say everyone pulls their job off well with the sort of cleanliness you’d expect in an Apple Store. In the end it’s all a bit too clean.
You can read about the true story behind the movie here and watch the trailer below. I’d say it’s a fun watch if this kind of story is your kind of thing, or you just want to tour an Apple Store in Amsterdam.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Maybe “We’re All Afraid.” We Need To Stop Saying So.
It’s often a risky thing to be candid. Even more so about your fears. I get that. Been there myself in some moments that I felt the stakes were high. Thankfully those stakes didn’t involve the fate of the United States and perhaps the free world.
Senator Lisa Murkowski’s statement as quoted in the screenshot above is indeed admirable for its candor. Yet I would call it cowardly, given her office. If you’re one of 100 people elected to the senate of the United States, you’re chosen to overcome your fears in the face of danger.
I don’t doubt that there are threats of retaliation. Yes, that’s scary and as she says “that’s not right.” But admitting you are susceptible to succumbing to fear only feeds the fever that breeds more of what you fear. And we’re already tossing too much chum into these turbulent waters.
I’m reasonably sure when the signatories of the Declaration of Independence put their names to that document there was fear in their minds and hearts. History is replete with leaders who have taken courageous stands and I’m also reasonably sure most did so while facing fears. We need to see and hear more that. Strongly worded letters and sound bites just aren’t strong enough this time around the history cycle.
I’ll give the Senator credit for saying she’s going to continue to use her voice which she says might appear confrontational at times. She used it well in an early decision point in this administration by voting against the nomination of Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense. Others weren’t so brave. My issue with her candid language here is once you admit you’re on the defensive, the other side knows it has the advantage and feels free to press harder. The only thing that’s going to turn the tide and pop the buffoon’s balloon are those who don’t cower and candidly concede he’s made you afraid, no matter how fearful you are.
You can watch more of the Senator’s remarks in the video below for a fuller context.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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There’s a Corner and Trump Has Backed Us Into It. Again.
The headline of this post came to me first. Sometimes that happens. Then I had a memory flashback suggesting that I had used that headline before. I have. That was in early August of 2023. That’s why I added the “Again.”
The first time was right after the orange menace was indicted for the third time. As excited as some were for the legal victory in that moment, I felt then that we were still in great peril. That feeling proved accurate. It chills me to read what I wrote then:
There’s no back to find our way to, regardless of the legal outcomes. Frankly there’s no back to find our way to even if somehow this monster suddenly disappeared from the planet. The damage has been done. And I don’t think we collectively have what it takes to bridge the gaping wounds, much less comprehend them. Our political systems are incapable of stopping the slaughter of children with guns. Our spiritual institutions keep remaking foundational tenets into something unreconcilable with their founding. And we’re going to fix this?
The wounds are fresh. The pain is real. There’s a monster in our midst and it’s going to take extraordinary measures to defeat it. Nothing will be the same if we do. Nothing should be the same as we try. And if there’s any healing to come it’s not going to happen without amputations that alter the way we navigate the world.
We keep repeating this cycle. We’re still in that same corner as we sit watching, hoping, perhaps praying for some legal or moral victory to change any of the actions the Trump administration is tossing about. I know there are many, like me in that previous post, who wish he would somehow disappear from the planet. But neither legal victories nor acts of God are going to change the course of destruction we’re on and have been. The damage has been done and more keeps happening daily. Some bizarre force is keeping us in trapped in a corner. It’s also keeping Trump there too. He seems to enjoy it. Most, not all, of the rest of us do not.
Let’s take this Abrego Garcia deportation case. The Trumpsters have already tossed aside (for the moment) a Supreme Court ruling against them, redefining it as one in their favor, turning no into yes, day into night, and reality into fantasy. By doing so these fluffed up maniacs have dug a hole so deep that they can’t climb out without damaging their own machismo, dragging all of us deep into it as well.
It’s a serious moment that requires serious people to actually act seriously. A rare combination that’s tough to find these days. Whether it’s this issue, an unexplainable tariff/trade war, threatening law firms and universities, or whatever this administration is tossing into the bottomless blender of bluster, behind the scenes they are still ardently working towards success in an issue that might just render moot all of the moments of new horrors they unveil daily.
The subtext beneath all of this is a plot line that threatens to make any and all of these horrid actions seem like distractions. I’ve said all along that this administration is acting as if they don’t care about the outcome of future elections. They would not be acting this way if they were. Yet that’s the frame we seem incapable of breaking when discussing each of new eruption.
If we’ve learned anything (there’s no proof we have) it is that this dictator and his henchmen mean what they say and it’s no mistake that they keep hinting of a third term, or president for life scenario. Yes, there will most likely be elections. There are elections in Russia, Hungary, and pick your favorite autocracy. This will be the battle that decides all, and we need to face each new challenge within that context.
There’s a straight line that can be drawn between the moment this Abrego Garcia case finally winds its way back to the Supreme Court for a decision and the fate of future elections. The chess moves are simple to see.
If the Supreme Court defers in any way that subjugates the due process clause of the 5th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, then all bets are off. Game over. If the Supreme Court, or rather the conservative members of that court, put the administration in check by ruling against it, the next move is either surrender or tossing the pieces from the board, scrambling it all and declaring the game invalid.
I’m frankly not sure which outcome is worse. The Supreme Court abdicating ends all but the waiting game for the next shoe to drop, continuing the charade of hoping for some moment of truth that will set us all free. Upsetting the game board acknowledges where we actually are, but are afraid to admit. Both sides are cowering in that corner, afraid to face that moment of truth.
Dark times.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
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Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3
Musings on life, the theatre, technology, culture and the occasional emu sighting
