Tag: History

Who Controls History If AI Is In The Mix

Time in a bottle of bits

One of the scariest things about this insane period we’re living through is the attempt by those in power to rewrite, alter, or just get rid of history they don’t like. Whether it’s banning books, changing curriculums, forcing the closures of libraries, or what museums can display, I find it a cowardly, yet effective way to hide heads in the sand, bury the sins of the past, and admit we’re actually ashamed of ourselves.

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I know this because I have lived this. My early education certainly tilted the American narrative towards the mythology of the Old South. It wasn’t until I left home, and got involved in the theatre that I discovered just how much I hadn’t learned, how much more I needed to, and how the future depends on the past, no matter how complicated it was.

Fortunately the information was there. It was up to me to do the work.

What happens when it’s not there? Or it’s wrong?

I find It hard to imagine that large chunks of the world’s history can be erased, growing up in an era when my access to it seemed to expand exponentially. But it’s been tried before. It’s succeeded with entire generations of populations. Now we’re facing the very real possibility of it happening again in this digital age with the aid of Artifical Intelligence.

There’s an interesting piece by Benji Edwards in Ars Technica about a college student who trained a small AI model that he called TimeCapsuleLLM on Victorian texts. During his experiments his time capsule spit out some actual history he didn’t know about real protests during the era. He checked into the info and the LLM was indeed accurate.

At first glance, that feels like a very positive AI story. Discovering lost history is a good thing. However, with the way I understand AI training it all depends on what data it’s trained on. That leaves things up to who controls the training data. Leave out, change or bias the historical record and…

Well, you can see the problem.

Elon Musk has already hinted at this kind of manipulation. I’m sure there are others thinking the same. They say history repeats itself. Actually history doesn’t. Humans do. History is just the record of the repetition. Humans just use newer and different tools to mold the past into something more comfortable. I may be mistaken, but I think history, in the long run, also proves that never really works out.

Correcting and rewriting history is not for the faint of heart. But when there is no heart, there’s a problem.

Time machines and time travel have always been fraught with danger in the history of science fiction. So has Artificial Intelligence. I’m reasonably sure we’re not smart enough to walk whatever fine lines might exist in a future when the past can be more easily manipulated. We haven’t been in the past when the erasing was harder. But I am dead certain we’re going to be facing this unreal reality.

Again.

Just with newer methods.

Without anything resembling Artficial Intelligence, we’ve managed to forget, alter, or set aside many of the horrible lessons of human history. Why should any new tool we create be any different? I’m sure these AI geeks think they can strip ego and emotion out of these robots they are building.

I doubt they will ever remove hubris.

(Image from Peter Herrman on Unsplash.)

You can also 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. 

The Reason Trump Won’t Declare Martial Law

Follow the money

Drip, drip, drip. The daily dilly dallying on the margins that the Trump administration keeps doling out continues. Horror after horror is revealed on this fascist march into demolishing the world’s oldest democracy. But the money keeps rolling in.

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The ongoing debate as to whether or not these despicable actions are distractions is in and of itself a meaningless distraction. We’re essentially living under a dictatorship already, and yet the putzes with power can’t really go there. Doing so would cut their mother’s milk off at the teat.

There’s a reason for the pace of things. There’s a reason why Trump hasn’t just declared a full national emergency and implemented martial law and shut the place down. That reason is political fundraising. That’s where the money is. That’s where the suckers are.

Without elections the con men and women can’t shake down the public, corporations, and foreign countries for political donations. Cut off that cash flow and you cut the power, quicker than flipping a switch. It’s not just money for candidates and causes. It’s money for consultants, think tanks, and the advertising dependent media. Declare martial law and the spinning wheel stops.

In order to keep the money flowing there needs to be an opposition. Without one it would be all about selling meme coins, fake gold phones, and silly shoes. The shake downs would still continue, just on a different levels. Gifts, grifts and gunpoint.

Of course the silver lining is all of those fundraising emails would stop.

(Image from Freddie Colins on Unsplash)

You can also 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. 

Lightning and Thunder and Memories

Haunted by storms from my past

We’re all always watching the weather, especially as the dire promises of climate change become reality. Hurricane season in the Atlantic is swinging into the its most dangerous months after some guy who wants to build gigantic energy sucking and polluting server farms got let loose in the U.S. government and did his best to dismantle departments and the science that help us know more about what’s to come.

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I grew up in the hills of central Virginia and survived a few dangerous storms during my childhood. One of those was Hurricane Camille in 1969. I wrote a piece about the night that the storm many had thought already dissipated dumped 25 or so inches of water on our county creating massive flooding and mudslides, and taking lives. That night haunts me to this day.

You can check out the piece on the Medium publication Ellemeno called The Thunder Never Stopped. I hope you go and check it out.

Thanks to David Todd McCarty and NatashaMH for letting me publish the piece on Ellemeno.

You can also 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. 

Everywhere Else is the South

Political geography knows no borders

I laughed out loud. As we watch some states sending National Guard troops into Washington DC bowing subserviently to the convicted felon’s desire to stop everyone but him and his followers from committing crime, a friend in frustration said “the South is sending all of these troops.” Well, not exactly.

Mason and Dixon Line.

But then again, maybe so.

Yes, South Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana and Mississippi are sending troops and they are indeed Southern States geographically, socially, and historically in the context of the American Civil War. South Carolina makes perfect sense as it was the first state to secede from the Union. Some of the others with their secessionist histories do as well. But at first glance, Ohio certainly doesn’t, nor does West Virginia.

The American Civil War has been studied and written about so much, it’s amazing how much so many just don’t know. It’s actually a bit stupefying how many accept the mythologies about the sentiments and ideologies that underpinned that conflict. The maps in the history books make it easy with their North/South divide. But it was never easy. In an ironic twist in this latest reactionary resurgence of racist rewriting history, West Virginia actually split off from Virginia to join the Union after Virginia seceded from the Union.

Like I said, it’s enough to make me laugh at the ignorance of it all.

But then I remember a line from Lanford Wilson’s play Talley’s Folly. A lovely two-hander that features Jewish New Yorker Matt Friedman wooing Sally Talley in Missouri.  As she demurs with objections about their different backgrounds and ways of life, in frustration he tells her:

…there is New York City, isolated neighborhoods in Boston, and believe me, the rest is all the South.

I’ve found Wilson and Matt’s observation to be extremely accurate in my travels through life, and certainly it resonates the same in today’s insanity as well.

Put it this way, in this Civil War we’re inching into there won’t be anything like a Mason and Dixon Line dividing the opposing sides. Actually there never was.

You can also 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. 

Mainstream Media Continues to Dismantle Itself

MSBNC to become MS Now

It’s been an accepted part of conventional wisdom for quite some time that what we consider mainstream media is gradually fading away in the face of newer generations turning to other sources available on the Internet for news and entertainment. Heck, even some older generations are turning what used to be the dial.

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The business models have suffered for a while now whether it’s print, broadcast or cable. The fading away has gained new and seemingly panicked momentum thanks to the depredations of the Trump administration, aided by the greedy cowardice of the corporations worried more about avoiding the wrath of the beast they helped create, than the standards they all proudly trumpeted for years. Those trumpets have largely fallen silent or just ring hollow.

The end of late night comedy shows captured a lot of attention recently, but eventually most broadcast scripted news and entertainment will also give way. Which is ironic given that the convicted felon largely responsible for this quickening pace came to prominence via Reality TV, which let me tell you is anything but reality and is very scripted.

Now NBC Universal, owned by Comcast, is making a move away from MSNBC, attempting to distance the Peacock from controversy by rebranding as MS Now. That little branding acronym stands for  My Source | News | Opinion | World.

Yeesh. I guess the marketing department was the first place they made changes. As a social media friend Judgment Dave says, “it sounds like a translation of something in Japanese that doesn’t translate well into English.”

It’s weird, yet it isn’t to hang onto the ‘MS’, given that MSNBC was birthed as partnership with Microsoft and NBC, long since dissolved. Somewhere Bill Gates is laughing because it also sounds like a software program delivered on a CD-ROM.

Whatever sturm and drang comes from this news of the moment, (news of the Now?) the bigger picture is that these troubled corporations, in what feels like desperate efforts to try and save themselves, are essentially hastening their eventual final curtains in the wake of current trends already overtaking them.

Some may lay blame on the rise of the Internet and mobile devices in every hand, but the fact of the matter is the smart folks at the top of these corporations missed the moment. Some eventually tried to make changes. Remember CNN Plus? But in my opinion their failures were less about the delivery mechanisms and more about the decline of the news and entertainment products that they delivered as the cost cutters held sway.

NBCUniversal isn’t done trimming the sails yet. Plans are in place to spinoff other properties as well (CNBC, USA, Oxygen, and E!).

Some will blame it on advertisers seeking the best way to reach customers. That’s mostly true, but ask podcasters how that’s going for them these days. Chasing advertising revenue is always a cyclical game for just about everything except sports.

It’s no wonder then that it feels like we see our politics more and more resembling blood sports. Of course the irony is audiences claim they want less, not more in that realm. What will be interesting to see in the next decade or so is how political advertising, which fills so many corporate media coffers sorts itself out, once the usual outlets fade away as they continue to play to ever diminishing audiences that keep spreading themselves wider and wider, attempting to flee the same old, same old.

Certainly ads will continue to be designed to run on social media and circulate that way. But the only folks making real money off of that trend are the political consultants and ad-makers.

I hope I’m around to see how my grandkids eventually consume what we once revered and respected as the news. I’ll regale them with what I imagine they will view as fairy tales and myths.

You can also 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. 

Sunday Morning Reading

The lazy days of Summer

We’re technically out of the Dog Days of Summer, but it doesn’t feel much like it. It’s the kind of hot Summer I remember as a kid when the dogs would spend the hot part of the day lazing under the porch. I’m spending mine traveling (too much traveling) and sharing what I can here and there. Find some shade and check out this week’s Sunday Morning Reading.

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Peter Wehner thinks the only way out of the wreckage we’re in is to rewrite the cultural script. Tall task. He spells it out in The Virtue of Integrity.

Knowing is half the battle. What you do with knowledge is an altogether different story as knowing and knowledge are two different things. Check out Jim Stewartson’s piece The War on Knowing. 

Somehow in all of the wreckage we’re sorting through, empathy became a bad thing for those doing the wrecking. NatashaMH thinks this crazy Artificial Intelligence race we’re in is taking the human out of being human. If you ask me it’s all a bit too human as we look to foist off responsibility for the choices we make. The Risks of Synthetic Empathy is a great piece. Give it a read.

Then take a look at Mathew Ingram’s piece, People Fall In Love With All Kinds of Things Including AI Chatbots. When chatbots start filing for divorce I think we might have created Artificial Generative Intelligence.

Kyle Chayka is exploring The Revenge of Millennial Cringe. Home may be where the heart is, but it was a terrible song.

Stephen Marche is talking about Profound and Abiding Rage: Canada’s Answer to America’s Abandonment.  Abandonment is a good way to describe what we’re all feeling these days.

Apple’s about to unleash new operating systems for its devices in a few weeks and the one that has my interest is for iPads. From what I’ve seen (I don’t run the betas) the changes to the multi-tasking capabilities will be a positive step forward. Craig Grannell takes a look at how long it took for Apple to finally make these changes in Apple Finally Destroyed Steve Jobs’ Vision of the iPad. Good.

Chicago’s Uptown Theatre celebrated 100 years this week. Robert Loerzel takes a look in Uptown Theatre: 100 Years of Glory and Decay. 

When you think you’re the center of the universe it can rock your world when you find out you’re not. Kids learn this. Republicans in the current administration have not. Eric Berger writes about NASA’s Acting Chief Calls For the End of Earth Science at the Space Agency.

(Image from Machekhin Evgenii on Shutterstock.)

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. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

Chicago’s Uptown Theatre Hits 100 and is Still On The Skids

Decaying majesty

They certainly don’t make movie theatres like they used to. That’s not surprising or new, and long ago signaled a passing of a time when building special places for people to gather became less of a priority than so many other concerns. Chicago’s Uptown Theatre was one of those special places back in the day. It’s been decaying and shuttered since 1981 and every now and then efforts surface to try and bring it back to life.

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The Uptown celebrates its 100th birthday on August 18. Built as a grand show palace by Balaban & Katz and the architectural firm Rapp & Rapp, it was hailed as spectacular, and a “splendiferous palace of a place.” The Uptown sat 4,320 in what was called “an acre of seats.”

Offering movies and live entertainment it was billed as a “shrine to democracy where there are no privileged patrons. The wealthy rub elbows with the poor — and are better for this contact.” It also had air conditioning.

Obviously a lot changed throughout the years, talkies took over from silent films, the Great Depression, and the advent of TV changed the dynamic. The Uptown part of town itself fell on hard times and saw big changes, and during much of my time in Chicago was the last section of the lakefront resisting redevelopment. The final act on the Uptown stage was a concert by the J. Geils Band in 1981.

Robert Loerzel has a terrific piece looking back at the Uptown Theatre in the Chicago Tribune that’s more than worth a read as we approach the show palace’s centennial. There’s also an excellent gallery of photos, which the photo above is from. The link should be a gift link, although I don’t know how long that lasts. Loerzel has also authored a new book, The Uptown: Chicago’s Endangered Movie Palace

When I first moved to Chicago in 1999 there were still a few of these show palaces in operation around the city, but the Uptown had long since shuttered. I got to take a tour of the place in the early 1990’s and the scale of what it once offered was impressive to see, only dwarfed by the decay and disrepair.

There are still efforts to try and find funding to restore the Uptown, but I’m sad to say I think priorities have shifted in such a way that we won’t see that happen.

You can also 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. 

Pedophiles, Pulpits, and Politics

The irony is delicious. But it’s tough to swallow.

It’s entertaining, yet frustrating watching the MAGAts fight with each other over this Epstein saga. Frustrating because nothing will really come of it. Entertaining because even stupid comedy makes you laugh now and again.

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This is one of those rare moments when the age-old rule of politics that you shouldn’t get in the way of your opponents digging a deep hole for themselves should not apply. I wish whatever the Dem party is these days would just take the gloves off and start smacking them as the Pedophile Party with every communication. But that would be fighting dirty with dirty and Dems don’t do that on that high road they trapped themselves on.

There’s not only political hay to gain in this chapter of our decline, but there’s plenty delicious irony to boot. The party that loves its churchgoers might be causing a few twitches in the pews. But then again, those congregations have their own problems with perverts in the pulpits. The party that turned a sex trafficking ring into a conspiracy theory doesn’t seem to like it when they realize their propaganda actually worked on their own followers.

Those family values folks in Congress keep voting to keep this under wraps now that their own are under threat. But that actually makes some political sense. Too many of their donors are probably on whatever list may or may not be. If not they themselves.

What’s even funnier is the guy at the center of this can’t keep his mouth shut and actually keeps admitting there’s actually a there there every time he tries to shut it down. Attempting to blame the Democrats for creating and covering up the list actually suggests there is one. I’m guessing a copy might be in his former wife’s casket along with a few other secrets.

I’d use tired and insulting metaphors like circus or clown show to describe this gang and this moment, but that just devalues even the shadiest touring attraction that might ever have existed. Those crews were at least smart enough to know when to pull up stakes and leave town.

(image from Sam Maylyn on Unsplash)

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. 

Sunday Morning Reading

Notice the good things amidst the bad.

It’s been a week. But I repeat myself. These days it seems like that’s always the case. Superman’s back. (Again.) So too are this season’s butterflies. Everything circles back. Today’s Sunday Morning Reading is a potpourri of topics of interest that stroke a number of chords, some familiar, some not so, some good, some not so. Either way, enjoy.

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In That Was Good, Merlin Mann says that smart people always find the best reasons for being very sad. I can relate. He suggests the cure for that might be noticing some good things. Even the small ones. Check it out. It’s a good thing.

This week featured the news revisiting the subject matter of several plays I’ve written or directed in the past. One of those, Inherit the Wind, the play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, is a semi-fictional retelling of the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. This year marks the 100th year anniversary of that trial. Neil Steinberg has a terrific piece, both commemorating and commiserating. Given how short a distance we’ve traveled in this circle we keep walking in. Check out 100 Years Ago, The Scopes Trial Gripped The Nation, And Here We Go Again.

Twice a week on social media I post “This is your now weekly, and continuing reminder that we’re still fighting the Civil War.” Frankly, I don’t see it any other way for reasons I shouldn’t have to explain. I don’t often post interviews in this column, but I’m making an exception this week to post Amita Sharma’s interview with political scientist Barbara Walter who has helped forecast civil wars in other countries. Take a look at San Diego Political Expert Details Steps That Could Lead To US Civil War.

I blow hot and cold on Tom Nichols’ political commentary. I very much like his piece Damn You All To Hell! Find out his thoughts on how Hollywood taught a generation to fear nuclear catastrophe. It might have worked with that horror. Funny, yet sad, how it hasn’t worked with all of the goings on currently.

History is indeed always an incomplete picture that’s always evolving and struggling to take hold. In Texas Man’s Fight To Move A Lynching Marker Sparks New Battle For Truth, Christina Carrega pinpoints one of those moments of evolution.

Mathew Ingram says We Shouldn’t Blame AI For The Stupid Things That People Do. I agree. AI is the prime example.

Chris Castle takes on a piece of the Section 230 argument, thinking that a new theory of liability is emerging, grounded not in speech, but in conduct. Give a look at The Duty Comes From The Data: Rethinking Platform Liability In The Age of Algorithmic Harm. 

And to round out the circle this week, take a look at David Sparks’ A Remarkable, Unremarkable Thing. Don’t let the small things go unnoticed.

(Image from Anya Chernik 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.

Sinners: A Review

Worth sinking your teeth into.

I saw Ryan Coogler’s Sinners in a movie theatre when it was released in April. I rarely go to movie theaters these days, but in this one instance I was certainly glad I did. Now that Sinners has reached streaming on the 4th of July, I hope anyone who didn’t have a chance to see it on the big screen will take time to view the fireworks it provides at home. I’m looking forward to a second watch. It is excellent. It’s not perfect. But it is sublime in its imperfections.

Sinners01 978x652.Ryan Coogler knows how to tell stories. He knows how to tell stories in big ways. He knows how to tell stories that entertain and unsettle. He knows how to weave the various strands of history, culture, and popular story tropes together in ways that spin out a fresh new cinematic delight that redefines the old and refreshes the tired. He may get a bit carried away here and there, but in the end he delivers as a filmmaker of note.

In Sinners he ties Southern-gothic, vampire horror, and depression era gangster styles together along with a musical storyline that literally burns down the house. Working with his familiar actor collaborator, Michael B. Jordan, playing a set of twins, Coogler creates something brand new, dangerous and in the end just damn dandy. I fully expect Sinners to be quite popular in the Best Picture categories when awards season rolls around. Even with its imperfections, it’s at the top of my list for best films of the year.

Jordan and all of the actors are superb. The music is red hot. The vampire gore is plenty gory. There’s a raw, violent, sexual tension throughout that’s heightened by the rawness of the blues music that infuses the storyline. The sequence when the fateful evening’s dancers are intermingled with ghosts of African and African-American pasts and premonitions of musical genres of a future yet to be is a highlight, even if it is a bit too precious.

Coogler also plays with some larger themes among the music, horror, and history. Questioning why Blacks cleave to Christianity (“Blues wasn’t forced on us like that religion,” and who counts as Black when everyone doesn’t have the same black skin or heritage, cut through many of the myths so easily consumed and assumed about the Black South.

As to the flaws, perhaps the biggest is also its biggest strength. Coogler stretches out a wide canvas to paint this story on.  Perhaps too wide, and even so he often paints outside the bounds of that canvas. And once the delicious and setup is accomplished, the violent confrontation we all know is coming at times feels more rushed than we want it to, certainly when it consumes characters we’ve invested in.

Even with those flaws, Sinners yields a bounty that often borders on the rapturous. It is more than worth your time.

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.