It is a difficult time for me right now, so I thought something a bit easier and perhaps a more fun distraction would be to send out a newsletter of ephemera. Succession also ended last night, and while some of the discourse about it on Twitter has been annoying (the worst is the venture capital bozos incapable of dealing with a story ending so they turn to generative AI for answers), suffice it to say that it ended exactly how it had to, with each character assuring their own tragic fates.
In a less-interesting industrial register, some folks have been posting about the show’s end signifying a larger end for television, as the streaming age has calcified into endless and featureless slop to such a degree that a series like Succession can no longer exist. It is, frankly, hard to argue with this logic, at least for now — one can hope that the WGA strike, among other factors, force these companies to take stock of what they’re providing and heed the writing on the wall.
Anyway, below find a mix of things I’ve been reading, watching, listening to.
Ephemera: Reading List
For The Nation, Edward Ongweso Jr takes down venture capital once and for all: “Undermining and abolishing venture capital is necessary to stop technology from being developed and deployed for surveillance and social control and to sabotage the machine that undergirds how our society and world operate. Venture capital is a particularly vulnerable point in that system. In the public imagination, it’s increasingly connected to spectacular failures of banks, unprofitable enterprises, multibillion-dollar scams, authoritarian governments, and mewling libertarians who pine for a reactionary world where basic liberties are rolled back once and for all. Even among industry insiders, there are calls for reforms that would go a long way toward reining in investors and founders. But that’s not enough. On this and other fronts, if there’s going to be any hope of building a better world, we must vie for power over the entire system of technological development.”
On the (even) nerdier side, Elham Saeidinezhad writes for Phenomenal World about the finance system’s microstructures, or in other words, the underlying aspects of finance that keep it going. The point here is that we normally only analyze these systems once a crisis hits, and we struggle to connect the dots and make sense of how we got to the point of disaster. Instead, she argues, “analyzing changes in market microstructure thus presents a constructive avenue through which to understand and predict the fluidity and stability of financial markets.” It gets way down into the nitty-gritty from here (seriously, I only understand like half of it at best), but the basic point is a good one: we should do more to understand these systems pre-crisis, because the big finance players want the rest of us to feel overwhelmed by the complexity so that we don’t pay attention at all.
Adam Tooze can sometimes get stuck in columnist-brain these days, but he can still fire off a hell of a newsletter. His look at the Bretton Woods mythology is a fascinating history that remains basically accessible to people like me who don’t know what “restricted capital mobility” actually means.
For a clear-eyed perspective on artificial intelligence and the shifting power dynamics of the tech industry, have a look at AI Now’s annual report, “Confronting Tech Power.”
Joe Zadeh wrote a very cool piece for Noema about the history of charisma, tying together the rise of Hitler with artificial intelligence. “In an increasingly complex and divided society, in which partisanship has hindered the prospect of cooperation on everything from human rights to the climate crisis, the thirst for a charismatic leader or artificial intelligence that can move the masses in one direction is as seductive as it has ever been. But whether such a charismatic phenomenon would lead to good or bad, liberation or violence, salvation or destruction, is a conundrum that remains at the core of this two-faced phenomenon. ‘The false Messiah is as old as the hope for the true Messiah,’ wrote Franz Rosenzweig. ‘He is the changing form of this changeless hope.’”
https://twitter.com/wownicebuttdude/status/1661787804874027011
Gavin Mueller, author of Breaking Things At Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job, wrote for The Atlantic about the WGA strike from a Luddite’s perspective: “While futurists once again predict the imminent arrival of a world where robots throw us out of work, the WGA is pushing for an alternate future in which workers have a say over whether and how new technologies are adopted. Anyone working in an industry where CEOs see AI as a way to reduce labor costs should be paying close attention to how the strike plays out. That almost certainly includes you.”
Ephemera: Watchlist
In 1970, Alvin Toffler published a book called Future Shock, which essentially argued that as the twentieth century advanced, we were all experiencing too much change in too short a time. It became a surprise bestseller, seemingly tapping into a common psychological experience of fear toward rapid change, for both individuals and entire societies. In 1972, a short documentary based on the book was made and screened at the Cannes Film Festival. The doc is hosted by a cigar-chomping Orson Welles, who theatrically repeats Toffler’s core arguments, the perfectly-pitched guide into the ills of a culture consumed by itself. All 43 minutes are on YouTube.
On Conan O’Brien’s podcast, Bill Hader made reference to an interview with Don Rickles on the The Dick Cavett Show, 12 incredible minutes of all-timer Rickles insults to someone he very obviously has no respect for. It’s bliss.
If, like my cat, you enjoy 8-hour YouTube videos of birds, chipmunks, squirrels, and other little creatures, he loves this channel.
Letterboxd list by user Biscutbuu666, “Suburban Gothic and Small Town Horror” — adding everything I haven’t seen to my watchlist.
Movie Recommendation: Over the weekend, I saw the 4K restoration of Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation, which is apparently the first time in quite a while that the film has been assembled according to Araki’s vision in the version that originally screened at Sundance in 1995. It’s an incredibly 90s film in many ways, full of silly dialogue and insults that would be considered too juvenile even to Roman Roy, references to pop culture of the time and a general apocalyptic vibe that seems to permeate society, a pre-Y2K nihilism that is immediately palpable as the film opens with a disaffected Rose McGowan in a club as “Heresy” by Nine Inch Nails blares on the soundtrack. If I had seen this at 16 or 17, it really would have rocked my world — it still did now, but it is so intimately tapped into that sort of teenage intensity and cosmic comic tragedy that I may have ended up a different person if I’d seen it then. Catch it if and when you can.
Ephemera: Playlist
Another great episode of Citations Needed, on the trope of blue collar hardhat conservatives in America and the supposed exclusivity of the Left. Of course, this narrative was manufactured, and the history of its deployment is fascinating.
I had a great time listening to Marc Maron’s interview with Paul Schrader, a career overview like no other. Maron asks Schrader 2 or 3 times why he got involved in a certain project, what drew him to it, and Schrader’s answer each time is “It’s so perverted!”
Song Recommendation (New): “Dog Dreams” by Lucy Liyou
Song Recommendation (Classic): “Sentimental Journey” by Doris Day