Measure for Measure

“Hobbies Too Relaxing? Try ‘Leisure Crafting’,” New York Times reporter Lora Kelly suggested in a piece published on Saturday morning, just in time for you to feel pressured to measure and monitor the productivity of your weekend.

“Setting goals in off hours — what some call ‘leisure crafting’ — looks a bit like another example of letting work-brain logic worm its way into personal lives,” Kelly writes. “But done right, it can help you feel a sense of purpose, confidence and accomplishment that’s unrelated to work, said Alex Hamrick, a management professor at the University of Richmond who has written about the topic.” This can be particularly useful, according to Hamrick, “to those whose jobs do not fill them with a sense of meaning and purpose, who may even feel they have ‘a missed calling.’”

"Meaning and purpose" is a measurement, apparently.

Despite the article’s insistence that "leisure crafting" isn’t simply about making you more productive at work, it does cite a study that says, sure enough, it just might. And no surprise, the whole framework comes from organizational psychology and has roots in “‘job crafting,’ an approach that puts the onus on employees to figure out ways to focus their workdays on fulfilling tasks.”

That is to say, change is individual, individualized, framed in terms of productivity gains not personal growth. (And growth – “fulfillment” as the article puts it – gets redefined, bent to serve the machinery of capitalism.)

This push for optimization -- the ways in which the “productivity tools” of the workplace are now used to manage everyday life -- is incredibly insidious, both a remnant of some sort of “Protestant work ethic” and a marker of a present (and a future) of economic precarity and the dire prospects for either financial or psychological comfort.

Just a few days prior to Kelly’s article, Julie Beck had cautioned in The Atlantic that “The Logic of the ‘9 to 5’ Is Creeping Into the Rest of the Day,” chronicling the TikTok videos in which influencers chronicle the ways in which they organize their mornings or their evenings. “These routines are highly edited, almost hypnotic, with quick cuts, each mini-scene overlaid with a time stamp. Hours pass in just a couple of minutes, and the compressed time highlights a sense of efficiency. The videos have big to-do-list energy; the satisfaction they offer is that of vicariously checking boxes.”

The "spreadsheet way of knowledge" strikes again...

NYC Marathon Training, Week 7: Monday: Deadlifts and a 5 mile recovery run. Tuesday: rest. Wednesday: speed workout – 1 mile warm up, 2 miles at marathon pace, 4 x 400 meters at interval pace, 2 miles at marathon pace, and a cooldown. A short swim. Thursday: 8 mile easy run, ending with 5 strides. Friday: 6 miles easy, with 5 strides. Squats and bench press. Saturday: 3.5 mile run to the NYRR 12 mile training run (two laps of Central Park). Sunday: 4 mile easy run, with 5 strides.

All tracked and timed with my Garmin. All posted to Strava. The data uploaded to the app that my running coach uses. The distance of my runs entered in a Google spreadsheet. The amount of weight on the barbell and number of reps handwritten in a little notebook I keep in my gym locker. Thoughts written down in my journal – how I felt, what I ate, the shoes I wore.

Kin was sick this past week, which threw "the routine" out of whack. Well, his routine – his and Poppy's routine – mostly, as I managed to keep up with my side of things... except for reading, it seems, as we spent out evenings watching TV (a rarity) instead of listening to audiobooks.

We finished Little Bosses Everywhere, and I plan to write about the LLM as MLM for Wednesday's Second Breakfast missive – something about how we live in a culture of "cons" (one that we might simply call "capitalism"). And a culture of cons that we might see as a sort of sanctioned organized crime. The TV we binged this week, incidentally, was The Sopranos. We've started rewatching the series several times, but never made it all the way through all six seasons. Nevertheless, we started with Season 1 Episode 1 again, if only to hear Anthony Junior say "so what, no fucking ziti" and Carmela snap "What's different between you and me is you're going to hell when you die."

At some point, we also watched Freaky Tales, which was a strange and marvelous film -- one part "period piece" set in Oakland in the 1980s and one part alternative history. And we watched the new Superman, which was pretty terrible I'm sorry (not sorry) -- its only saving grace, Krypton the CGI dog.

These two films, I think, underscore some of the problems with the cultural imaginary right now: what we expect the hero (and the villain) to look like, what we expect them to do. It's too simplistic to say that the superhero movie has been drained of all its emotional resonance now that we've been numbed by Marvel movie after Marvel movie after DC movie after DC movie after Marvel movie for decades now. (That said, when I first saw the trailer for Superman, it was the John Williams theme song not the "man of steel" in peril or in triumph, that moved me.) And in some ways, Freaky Tales is a superhero movie too: the Warriors star Sleepy Floyd, armed with supernatural martial arts skills. But the Oakland community finds its own strength to fight evil (that is, to fight the cops and Nazis) as well -- the heroism is not simply individualistic; and it is not simply alien or otherworldly.

I guess I did get some reading done, finishing a re-read of Ursula Franklin's excellent The Real World of Technology, which I referenced in Friday's Second Breakfast.

I also started listening to the audiobook The Carpool Detectives, which I guess I must've seen recommended somewhere on some "best of" list – "true crime" isn't really a genre I ordinarily gravitate towards. That said, I am fascinated by the rise of these Internet detectives, the "do your own research" crowd that turn their attention to unsolved crimes and mysteries, and then – in Only Murders in the Building fashion -- turn the sleuthing into podcasts.

Things I Read but Didn’t Put in Friday’s Newsletter:

• "What If A.I. Doesn't Get Much Better Than This?" by Cal Newport in The New Yorker
• "Who is Elara Voss?" by Max Read
• Via Wired: "It Looks Like a School Bathroom Smoke Detector. A Teen Hacker Showed It Could Be an Audio Bug"
• Also in Wired: "What Does Palantir Actually Do?"
• "Eliza-pilled" – Rob Horning reads Leif Weatherby's new book Language Machines so I don't have to but I still have to

One way we can be certain that this whole "AI" thing is neither politically or pedagogically progressive is that it is being pushed so hard by the Trump Administration and its deeply anti-science, anti- "woke" agenda. I mean, these guys don't believe in vaccines or alternative energy, but they wholeheartedly support this particular technological breakthrough? Hmmm. Oh, it's one that's supposed to streamline policing and demolish labor unions? I see...

The tech industry, of course, is just fine with all of this, as long as it can continue to make money. Folks are feeling pretty emboldened too, and I imagine the industry will continue to undermine the regulatory state as long as possible.

Case in point: "Whoop Refuses to Pull Blood Pressure Tool After FDA Warning," Bloomberg reports. "We believe it is not within the FDA’s authority to regulate the product," the fitness device maker said.

Look for more of your leisure time, more of the tools that purport to show you how to understand yourself, to be dominated by bullshit metrics.

"The CDC shooting was public health’s Jan. 6," write Colin Carlson and Sean Kennedy. "In RFK Jr.’s America, it will never be safe to practice public health or medicine."

"America's best trial lawyer" Gerry Spence died this week. Spence was born in Laramie, Wyoming, and he often dressed like a caricature some folks have of Wyoming-ites: big cowboy hat, snakeskin boots, buckskin fringed jacket. My dad owned one of his books – Gunning for Justice maybe? – and, if I recall correctly, spoke of Spence with some reverence, fairly interesting considering the highest profile case from my childhood was the one filed on behalf of Karen Silkwood's family. But even in the 1980s, Spence was renowned as someone who never ever lost.

I learned about Spence's death from the Facebook page of someone I went to junior high with – a full-throated supporter of Trump who I use (that word is operative here, I confess – we're not friends on the app) to gauge what people my age in Wyoming think about "things." So I was surprised to see her wax on and on about how important Spence's legacy had been. Here I thought MAGA was very Henry VI, Part 2 when it comes to trial lawyers.

Then I read Spence's Wikipedia page and saw he'd defended Randy Weaver. So I guess that all makes sense. Spence presented himself as always defending the underdog. And almost everyone seems to believe that that's them, that "justice" entails the defeat of their enemies.

Adam Bumas wrote in Garbage Day this week about what he called “LOLgislation” -- that is government by memes: “What makes the second Trump administration different, however, is that the pandemic shifted the cultural center of gravity online. So we all have to deal with LOLgislation to some degree. If any random shitpost can suddenly become US political doctrine, and tech giants have largely given up on content moderation, we have to take every random shitpost that seriously.”

I started writing something several months ago -- on the heels of the ChatGPT memes in the style of Studio Ghibli -- about memes and agency. But I didn’t finish it; I figured I should actually read some Richard Dawkins (namely, The Selfish Gene), but that hasn’t happened. So incomplete thoughts are what this Monday newsletter is (partially) all about, so here you go...

Memes Are Part of the Problem

Without consent. What we see in AI culturally -- and we have to talk about AI as a set of cultural beliefs and practices, not just a technology -- is a blend of toxic masculinity, white supremacy, imperialism, and fascism.

The bombardment of social media with ChatGPT-generated memes expropriating the style of Studio Ghibli exemplify all of this.

To train an AI model to mimic the "look" of this beloved animation company, known for its beautiful, hand-drawn films (Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle, for example), is only part of the affront. Its founder, Hiyako Miyazaki, has worked tirelessly to protect his craft, famously responding to a demo of AI-generated animation by saying, "I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself. I am utterly disgusted."

What are the politics of AI "art," asks Max Read. "That the Trump White House tweeted out an image of a 'Ghiblified' deportation helps us answer the question," as does the closing section of Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (some of which gets invoked by digital enthusiasts to talk about the loss of "aura" in digital copies, but rarely the essay's epilogue, where Benjamin turns to the the social and political implications of this technology). "It was hard not to think of the final section of Benjamin’s essay when reading enthusiasts talking about how A.I. makes art 'become accessible,'" Read writes, "or 'enables so much creativity.'"

Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relations which they strive to abolish. It sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses -- but on no account granting them rights. The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life.

[... ]"Fiat ars -- pereat mundus [let there be art, though the world perish]," says fascism, expecting from war, as Marinetti admits, the artistic gratification of a sense perception altered by technology. This is evidently the consummation of l’art pour l'art. Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism.

I do wonder not only about fascism's connection to the creation of AI-generated memes – itself indicative of a larger social problem with the consumption and reproduction of "news" and information – but about fascism and the creation of AI-generated essays and fiction.

The latter are not so clearly an issue of aesthetics and politics, necessarily. But there is something about this hollow gesture, this facilitation of effortless participation in expression that is still really quite troubling. Intellectually. Politically. Morally.

I should offer some brilliant closing remarks here that tie all these ideas together. But I got nuthin.