Interviewer: It sounds like you’re pretty excited about self-driving cars. Weren’t you just saying that unemployment from AI is on some kind of very overlapping continuum with extinction from AI? Isn’t rooting for self-driving cars rooting for AI unemployment here, and thus extinction?

Katja: Hmm. Well first I should say, I’m actually fairly neutral on unemployment in general from technology. If technology makes it overall easier to produce what we want, but empowers some people over others, that change in power might be a downside (or not), but if so, it’s one I’m inclined to solve with direct redistribution rather than having the people who would be disempowered do unnecessary busywork to ‘earn’ their living.

Interviewer: Ok, so you think AI unemployment is different?

Katja: Yes, because it involves the disempowerment of humans in general in favor of non-people entities whose empowerment has a decent chance of spelling our ruin. Doing things the hard way to avoid that happening isn’t busywork, it’s very valuable. I don’t usually want to take sides between different humans systematically—society seems probably best served by letting the most effective production methods win out in most cases. But sometimes there are entities who produce things efficiently, and you still shouldn’t trade with them because it empowers them. It’s a lot like not trading with Nazis (broadly—I’m not saying AI entities are evil in the same way, just that their empowerment has a good chance of leading to genocide or omnicide).

Interviewer: Ok, but aren’t self-driving cars AI?

Katja: Yes, but the class of entities I don’t want to empower isn’t ‘AI’ really—it’s more like ‘AI agents’. Though also, the processes that are creating them, such as LLM companies, which complicates things. Self-driving cars are narrow and not much like entities that can be empowered. And my understanding is that we could have perfectly great self driving without using risky AI. But maybe I should be opposed—I’m not sure how to think about what class of entities I should not want empowered.

Interviewer: Are you just in love with self driving cars because they would be so personally convenient for you?

Katja: That is probably playing a role. A car with a random stranger in it is just so much less what I want most of the time than a car by myself. I like to imagine that Uber was invented like, “New startup idea: Chatroulette but you’re stuck in a moving vehicle with the person!” I would feel worse about the end of driving as a human profession if I felt like human drivers consistently did the job acceptably well. But the rate of drivers around here seeming chemically impaired or choosing to drive on the kerb of the freeway to get around other cars, etc, and also talking to me when I don’t want to talk, means there are a lot of cases where I would like to go somewhere in a car except it seems to awful so I don’t.

Interviewer: So how was the self driving car last night?

Katja: non-existent. Once I arrived at the airport, the Waymo app informed me that I wasn’t allowed to get cars there, because they are rolling it out slowly or something. I considered trying from one transit stop outside the airport, but since the available Waymo map was a very uninformative cartoon of the Bay Area and it was after midnight, that felt risky.

Interviewer: Did you give up?

Katja: Not immediately. I had also been told that people are taking ‘robotaxis’ all over, so I looked that up. I couldn’t immediately figure out what it was by Googling and looking on the Android app store, so I messaged some friends, and they directed me to an app called ‘RoboTaxi’ purportedly from Tesla but with barely readable and amateurish font and 57 reviews. As is often perplexingly the case with things of importance to a lot of people from very well known brands, I felt like I was exploring an obscure frontier that nobody had tried to use before. (You want to do what?? Get a ride in one of our cars?? And you want to do it through an app?? And you want to know where they are available??) I logged in and it told me the airport was also out of bounds. So then I gave up.

Interviewer: How did that make you feel?

Katja: ashamed

Interviewer: That makes sense. Why did you even so brazenly think you would probably be able to get a self-driving car from the airport?

Katja: well locally, because Waymo had a map indicating that the airport was within their zone, and I figured Tesla wouldn’t have such a can’t-do attitude. But more fundamentally, I guess I haven’t properly internalized how opposed airports are to efficient travel. Seeking a human-driven car after all this, I was reminded further because the location of the rideshare pickup at the airport and the signage indicating the location, both seem like they should probably be crimes.

Interviewer: Might it be an even broader problem with your level of techno-optimism? Weren’t you just the other day very disappointed by a futuristic kettle? Perhaps you need to learn that everything is shit?

Katja: maybe, but I don’t know, sometimes technology really changes things. I remember before Uber, when I just had to phone a person at a taxi company and ask them to come and collect me and then wait for an unknown period of time, and worst case give up and walk home.

Interviewer: How was your ride home last night?

Katja: Pretty good. The Lyft driver didn’t perceive my initial desire not to talk, and so we had a detailed discussion of Yemen, his life as an immigrant, his family, arranged marriage, romance in Islam, experiences running different businesses, the nature of business partnership, AI risk, and other drivers’ views on automation. We exchanged details so we could interact again.

Interviewer: Do you really think your quest to instead drive home in sterility wasn’t completely misguided?

Katja: Humans are great, but you have to be allowed to want solitude sometimes. It follows that you should probably be allowed to want solitude while also getting to another location. That said, I probably want solitude unhealthily much, and underrate the loss of human connection from these innovations. Maybe there should be a tax or something.

Image by Peter H from Pixabay

In my own life at least, their actual arrival has been gradual and underwhelming. At some point I learned that you could call Waymos to drive you around a subset of the city of San Francisco. This was wild and exciting, but not actually very useful, since getting anywhere in San Francisco seemed to require traversing a greater subset of it than that, plus I nearly always want to also drive to or from Berkeley. I took Waymos a couple of times, and one of them might have even had transport value.

In the last few days, multiple people not from the Bay Area have casually assumed that I take self-driving taxis all the time, which caused me to investigate and learn that Waymo is now all the way up and down the West Bay Area, seemingly including the airport. So tonight when my plane lands I hope to finally get half way home without a driver! It’s not clear this will improve my experience, since I will then have to catch a Lyft in downtown San Francisco, and probably explain to them that I have all this luggage because I took a self driving car as far as I possibly could before resorting to a human driver. But I am still excited.

Photo by gibblesmash asdf on Unsplash

The next day I saw Jonathan Groff perform at the start of a TIME 100 event. He did feel like another human right there in the room, but still somehow surprisingly distant. His song didn’t touch me, though my previous experience delighting in his presence on YouTube led me to have other expectations. And his song was Sondheim, which should also support other expectations. Toward the end he said something about—I think—his work being about connection with us all and being together, and that explicit thought reached me better than anything in the music.

Having enjoyed the first Broadway show of my life the day before, and still being in New York, that evening we went to see another one: Every Brilliant Thing. It was a one-man show currently starring Daniel Radcliffe, and involved a lot of Daniel running on and off the stage and borrowing objects and asking audience members to briefly represent his high school teacher or vet or crush. It was also quite poignant. So if any performance was going to feel like a real person was in the same room as me, and like that person was reaching me emotionally, this would seem to have a good shot. And Daniel did seem like a real person over there. But I recognized the movingness of the story more than actually being moved.

The play was about a long list of things in life that are ‘brilliant’, which I hear as both ‘great’ and as ‘brightening’. The list made me feel uneasy, because I recognized the things as good, but I didn’t feel it. Ice cream, sure. The smell of an old book, okay. Bed, yeah I guess I like it quite a lot more than not-bed. This was all somewhat fitting with the themes of the play, in which the brilliance of things was recognized to different degrees by different characters at different times and levels of depression. But it still made me feel improper and distant from other people: the audience was meant to understand these things as brilliant. I cried a little about that afterwards.

But it also reminded me later of an obvious-but-hard-to-enact thought: if you don’t feel the goodness of things much at some point, it’s not an indication that everything has gone wrong, or that the world is no longer good, or never was, or that there is something badly wrong with you. This is clear in writing, but if I don’t explicitly consider the issue, it is easy to interpret such experiences of nothing seeming good as some variant of ‘nothing is good’. Which is about as correct as having a numb foot and describing the situation as ‘there is no floor’. The picture in my mind is of a sailor in darkness: sometimes you can’t see the stars, and then you have to navigate by memory. And the darkness is about your current location, not the world—it’s possible to get to other non-dark places, even if you can’t see them from here.

One of the last brilliant things involved the sound of a record crackling into the start of a song, which I was surprised to learn that I did feel something about. Perhaps because it reminds me of being alone, in a nice library, with pen and paper. That kind of state quite close to the sublime! Which reminds me that things can be sublime.

These forays into group emotion left me feeling somewhat like a distant and unmoved observer, but an earlier example is also interesting. In our first hours in town, we rushed out to see a live comedy show. It was in a crowded underground bar, and we were in flip-out seats in a walkway. I was struck by how much even the emcee made us laugh—they were funny, but I bet we laughed more than watching the most celebrated comedians on a screen. And it seemed like a fuller laughing experience—laughing with group, together. I hadn’t really thought of comedy as much better live. I wonder if in-person social orchestration is a big part of making people laugh, beyond the performance-as-separable-pixels-and-sounds. For this show at least, I was easily brought along with the emotions intended, and felt closer.

Is it less vulnerable to go along with comedic emotions than be moved by serious ones? And with a crowd I feel self-conscious? I wonder if my relationship with the other people in the room matters more than the performer.

Sitting outside a restaurant later, watching people and cars pass by, I thought about how sometimes everything seems brilliant to me, and remembering that made everything seem a bit brilliant.

Image by minthu from Pixabay

Feeling dehydrated and migrainish at the end of a day of travel, I wanted to make tea. I quickly found a promising looking plug-in kettle among the minimalist counter apparatus and plugged it in. It was voluminous, smooth, emanating modern perfection, broadcasting with its textureless heft and electric glass interface, “have you lived a life of unnecessary want, guessing if water is remotely the right temperature after you pressed a single primitive button some time ago and then forgot about it? Understand now that everything is truly simple! You have been wronged, misled. The past has been corrupt, but it is over. We have reached the time of professional water heating. Every person can have buttons for every desirable temperature, effortless buttons of light, giving you the simple information you deserve on a luxurious but reasonable lit up interface”. The kettle was even clean. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that before. It should have been a warning.

I put in water and closed the lid, and was presented with eight lit-up buttons and a big ‘69°F’. I pressed the ‘boil’ button. That made the °F number change and flash, but then it returned and this did not seem to cause anything else that suggested water heating. I pressed the power button. I couldn’t tell if that turned it on or off or neither. I pressed the boil button again. I decided to microwave my water and get on with my life.

I microwaved my water, and we did something else for a bit.

Afterwards however, the kettle was still there. It looked so tantalizingly proficient. I wanted it to boil water. I wanted sleek, efficient boiled water. Water that made you feel like not having water at any well-labeled temperature you wanted whenever you wanted was some kind of thing you had almost forgotten about from your childhood in a developing country. Also, the kettle only had about three kinds of buttons, how hard could it be to find the pattern that made it boil water?

I pressed the boil button and the power button more. I pressed the ‘warm’ button and the ‘green’ button. Sometimes when I pressed a button, most of the other button lights went out. Sometimes things flashed. I tried different orders of buttons. I tried long-pressing buttons. I tried opening and closing it, taking in off and on its stand. Sometimes the water temperature moved to a promising 70, but then just meandered back to 69 again.

My boyfriend suggested that it was broken. Which was very plausible. But it was so responsive that I couldn’t really believe it: it just didn’t have a ‘broken’ vibe. It had a vibe that it was extremely effective and easy and perhaps I was broken.

I’m pretty good at paralyzing electronic devices. It’s as if iPhones have been going about their lives mindlessly doing iPhone stuff until they meet me and suddenly everything is strange and different and they feel self-conscious can’t remember how to receive text input. Once I merely opened the box of a new laptop and it died, so that one at least can’t be imputed to my poor security or tab-management lifestyle. (I hope this trait bodes well at least for contributing to an AI pause one day.) So even though I had tried pretty hard to make this kettle work, and I’m an intelligent person capable of many kinds of puzzles, I kind of believed that my boyfriend would not have this problem.

So I asked him to help, and while he did apparently share the opinion that he would be able to figure it out near-instantaneously, he was not very interested in prioritizing this. So I played at trying to goad him into it: probably he couldn’t fix it, he was bluffing, I was going to look it up online and he would lose his chance to prove himself. He apparently didn’t need to prove himself.

Somehow though he did become interested shortly after, possibly just out of compassion. He went to the kettle and started pressing buttons. I went to watch. Possibly that broke the magic: he just did the kinds of things that I could think of: press the small number of buttons in different orders and for different durations. It didn’t work. So the situation was just as bad, except now he too really wanted the kettle to work.

Even though this was a very compelling puzzle, I moved to do the reasonable thing and look up the instructions. In bed with a mostly-legible photo of the numbers and words under the kettle, I Googled. The kettle didn’t seem to exist much. Like, one of the most promising links was something that suggested the right kettle was being sold on a shoppping site in Botswana, where I was greeted with a popup asking if I wouldn’t rather have the Brazilian version of the site, before being directed to a generic message that the item I requested is not available.

I found a kettle on Amazon that looked suspiciously similar but with a different brand name. Some buyer videos failed to clarify exactly what to do with the buttons. I found a YouTube video from someone purporting to love the kettle, in which he seemed to just press the ‘boil’ button to boil the water, but where the video also cut briefly right there, so who knows? (Why did he cut it? Is there some secret?)

In further search results I found a Reddit post “Is this a good kettle for beginners”, which struck me as both an absurd question, and a question to which “no” was an absurd answer and also clearly the correct one here.

I wonder how much the reason technology often disappoints me is that I have too many hopes for it. I love efficiency and systems improvements that pay off forever, and if a kettle appears and whispers to me that it understands that everything could be better, that it too is on the side of progress, that of course things can be simple and good, then I believe it fully until the moment it betrays me, when I am SHOCKED. Perhaps the world is mostly cynics who never expected their smartphones to lay down the letters they wanted, or prevent them from being woken by spam callers throughout the night, who would have just rolled their eyes at this kettle.

We still haven’t made the kettle work. My boyfriend says he now really thinks it’s broken. He listened to it the old fashioned way, and what it is saying is ‘wee-uhh-wee-uhh-ee-ungk’.

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Image by TaWiPoP from Pixabay

Which is partly because I’m lucky enough to not be personally much harmed by the former, but also: it’s one thing to reallocate a chunk of every second person in the country’s money, and another thing to burn a chunk of each of their time. The former serves good purposes, if debatably well; the latter serves nobody and feels like such a pointless waste.

To be clear, I’m not so much upset about my own twenty minutes—if I imagine even a fraction of Americans find it as unintuitive as I do, the scale of the destruction feels breathtaking. How many other eyes have peered at these words and numbers today? Could whoever made these pages not have considered what it would be like for another person who is not at least a casual tax hobbyist to use them? Couldn’t they have tried it out a few times on other people? (Am I being unfair, and this is a hard problem somehow?)

I realize actually sending money to the government is the last tiny step in an obscenely wasteful annual cremation of time. That is of course even more awful, but the last step struck me in particular because it feels so avoidable—changing the whole tax system may be tricky, but improving the payment pages feels plausibly solvable by a single person.

Is the harm really breathtaking though? Let us calculate extremely roughly:

• How many personal tax returns are filed in the US? It looks like very roughly 160M per year lately (e.g. here, here)

• Apparently very roughly a quarter of their filers owe money, rather than getting a refund

• Let’s just compare the current system to a good payment interface, rather than to, for instance, the government just remembering your bank details from year to year and charging you the amount that they know you owe. I guess a smooth interface would take very roughly ten minutes less.

• Let’s conservatively guess that only a tenth of people find this difficult (the rest just know to ignore the first couple of pages of text and that ‘run of the mill tax return’ means ‘Apply payment to Form 1040 - Income Tax’ for the reason of ‘Balance Due or Payment Plan/Installment Agreement’ and not for instance ‘Estimated Tax’ or ‘Extension’ even if they are filing an extension)

• So we have 160 million tax returns filed * 25% having to send money * 10 minutes * 10% having trouble = ~40 million minutes

Is that a lot? Well, it’s 76 years, which is coincidentally the male life expectancy in the US. Taxation may or may not be theft, but its practical realization appears to be distributed manslaughter. Is someone held accountable for things like this?

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• I haven’t exercised lately

• I have developed a vague background sense that I’m fragile and if I were to exercise it should be by walking around the garden or something

• I’m dressed in what is too shlubby to even count as comfortable

• I am otherwise behind on some basic life things that take effort and are normally subsidized by social incentives, e.g. showering, putting tissues in the bin, eating things that aren’t power crunch bars

• I am habitually avoiding other people

• I am habitually avoiding places where other people go

• I am habitually treating myself as a contamination threat

• I’ve been lying around in bed quite a bit

I posit that a problem with this is that these things are somewhat self reinforcing, so the period of indisposition can insidiously take hold and last substantially longer than the sickness. Feeling unfit, poorly dressed, fragile, gross and contaminatory make various things less appealing, such as visiting a gym, seeing other people, going to the office, leaving one’s room at all, leaving one’s bed at all, embarking on ambitious tidying up ventures.

Worse, it is fairly ambiguous when one stops being sick, so there may not be a moment where it’s very clear you should change your behavior, especially if you continue to feel vaguely bad from these depression-flavored lifestyle factors.

Last time I was sick for a while I was in a fairly good mood during the sickness itself, but was relatively depressed for maybe a month afterwards, which I suspect is related to this kind of thing.

I was sick last week, and seemed to be better on Saturday. To avoid this kind of problem this time, I had an idea: an official end to sickness ritual, where you abruptly do all the things a non-sick person would do, and reset your expectations about yourself.

This was is my tentative ritual plan:

• exercise: run to the gym and do 15m+ intense exercise

• groom: shower, shave, apply substances to body, dress nice

• share air: go to a cafe, get a manicure

• Share more (optional): share a drink, share a kiss

These are designed to often hit multiple factors (share a drink: saliva, socializing, unhealthy behavior that can self-signal non-fragility!)

I wrote this draft up to about here, then set out to try it out. I started out in bed, with a bit of a headache, my mouth tasting like powercrunch bar and time. Going to the gym seemed like not what to do. I intended to report back.

A first obstacle with this plan was that it was actually like 6:30pm by the time I finished writing down this idea, and it turns out that gyms, cafes and nail salons near me mostly consider that past their bedtime.

I’m a member of three different gyms near me though, and one of them was still open for half an hour, so I briefly emotionally reckoned with the fact that I really had to go to the gym RIGHT NOW if I was going to make this work, then got a move on.

I put on some shoes and went out, intending to run there. It was excitingly rainy, and the cars seemed to have a shared sense that politeness to pedestrians is a kind of luxury nobody can afford in this weather. Happily the run was short. The gym is actually a climbing gym with a bit of gym equipment in the back, a tiny bit of it cardio-directed, exactly one machine of which was not taken. So I jumped on and started cycling, without sparing moments to figure out how to adjust it to my height or anything. I think I flipped between being present, thinking thoughts like “okay that’s three minutes, I only have to do that four more times…” and playing a game on my phone. It was okay. I did it, just as the gym was closing. Check.

Ok, now if I wanted to get a manicure, I needed to change the order of things, because the two purportedly still open were closing at 8, and painting fingernails takes time. The one across the road looked intensely not open. So I set off jogging toward the one five minutes away. This was a bit more ‘race against time scavenger hunt’ style than I had had in mind, but that’s a thing that works for me. I saw a friend walking parallel across the street, and we had a friendly but confusing mimed conversation in which he seemed to indicate that he would like to race me to the corner, so I ran there but then he seemed to have a restaurant to go into, so we waved goodbye. (Social interaction: check!)

The nail salon of my hopes had light and someone painting someone else’s nails inside it, but the door was locked. Was this such a dicey part of town that they just came and unlocked the door for registered guests or something? I waited a little until what looked like a convenient break in the nail-painting and knocked, but the woman painting nails indicated that I couldn’t come in. I was at a bit of a loss then. I didn’t want to give up, but I also didn’t want to go considerably further away to considerably less real looking nail salons. I considered going to the body-decoration shop right there that was open, but they seemed to sell tattoos and additional body piercings, which I didn’t seem to be any more down for than usual. It also glowed with an eerie futuristic blue light, and if this was to be the day I got a tattoo that probably wouldn’t be the vibe I’d go for.

I looked more for suitable replacements, and found a tiny inside area with shops I’d never seen. I went into a pool bar and downstairs into their giant pool basement, which had a vast number of pool tables and quite a few people, so that’s kind of surprising and good to know.

Even if I didn’t find a good replacement per se, I was feeling good about my exploration of the town around me. In a perhaps overambitious act of non-fragility I went into the McDonalds a couple of blocks from my house. I indeed found the visit slightly intense, and left after merely looking at the menu.

I got home and moved on to becoming clean and well kept. I realized I actually had a party to go to with a dress code: business casual (which I understood to be humorous fancy dress, not serious). So I got pretty professional, which is not what I generally do professionally.

My boyfriend also emerged from some friend-visiting and wished to go to the party pronto, so I made a dash to a local board game cafe that is actually open till late and got a decaf latte to complete my outfit and my tentative ritual plan, then headed over to share air and eventually a drink.

A couple of days later, evidence is consistent with this helping. I’m in a very good mood at least, and today went on a bike ride and hike, and to a cafe and a restaurant. My friend pointed out to me that I could consider including other people in my ‘celebration’ next time, so that’s an interesting idea.

I hate my current nominal method: keeping them folded on open-front shelves, because they fall out on the floor and I can’t see almost any of them without taking a bunch out. My shelves also happen to be too tall, so I throw my sweaters at the top shelf and they tumble out and impressively twist their arms around and yank down other types of clothing on their way, which on net I hate though I’m glad to have observed it once.

I hate my current actual method: keeping them in a giant mound on the floor in front of a set of open-front shelves. It stops me from being able to reach the shelves, so is self reinforcing. I do enjoy observing feedback loops, so it has that going for it. But in downsides: the only underpants I’ve been able to locate lately are those which I left in my boyfriend’s room and he washed and put in his more functional clothing system.

I hate wardrobes. It’s really annoying to hang things on coat-hangers or to take them off. But honestly I don’t think that’s my true rejection. I may not have tried wardrobes much since childhood, when I used to wait for sleep fearfully in a dark room looking at the big wooden wardrobe with the shape of a fox’s head in the wood, much like the wardrobe in the horror story we read at school in which a wardrobe contained a dead fox which was involved in some then-barely-conceivably fucked up shenanigans, which triggered a years-long departure from acceptable mental health for me. But while that may color my view, the coat-hangers are no good anyway.

I hate chests of drawers, and there my mind doesn’t even raise practical considerations before recollecting chests of drawers of my childhood. Chests of drawers are where you worry about rotting easter eggs that you had hoped to hoard as treasure among your underwear. Chests of drawers are what you stare at while you try to calculate how likely the marks on your leg are to be from a deadly snake, and whether you should be so bold as to tell a parent, and decide to just wait it out and see. And also, you have to pull the drawers out, and they are often sticky, and you can’t see lots of clothes at once, and they are always wanting to be too full to easily open. And they are just unaesthetic somehow. And generally made of fake wood, which I hate.

I hate a chair for keeping not-quite-clean clothes. Chairs are not great for this and are great for sitting on, so what is this nonsense? Most of humans need an object for this purpose, and the best we can come up with is repurposing an object designed for a totally different use that is only serviceable at all because it has two bits that things can hang on and a flattish surface? What if we didn’t have clothes racks and just always used bikes?

I changed my mind, I don’t really hate little bins on shelves, but I don’t love them. You can’t see into them without moving them, and you can’t see very well even if you do move them. So you have to dig around in them but they are too small for that and it’s like trying to mix too much cake mix in a too small bowl. I guess I could have a lot more of them and keep them emptier, but then it’s hard to know which one you should move to a poke-around-able location. Also they tend to be unaesthetic.

There are some more obscure options, which I suppose I merely expect to hate if I tried them. A thing with rotating arms for hanging things, since half the annoyance of hanging clothes is wedging them awkwardly between too-tight other clothes. Just lots and lots of hooks. Several big baskets on the floor. Just don’t wear clothes. Surreptitiously leave all of my clothes in my boyfriend’s room. Nothing good here.

This afternoon I once again set out to find the ideal or at least okay clothes storage system, since I’m moving rooms and changing everything. And I came across the idea of ‘Grab & Go No Fold Clothes Organization’, which is to say storing clothes like potato chips: in boxes with partially-but-not-fully cut out fronts. I wonder if this is the answer: see the clothes, but the clothes don’t fall on the ground. No moving things, no shoving clothes awkwardly between clothes. Underpants on tap. No risk of this reminding me of any part of the past, at least until the future.

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“...was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was…”

- Joan Didion, on being a twenty-year-old in New York City, “Goodbye to All That”

Well I am here to tell you that someone was even younger than that.

[Content warning: not a lot of content—mostly just a PSA about how young people are sometimes. Also this is a story concretified from vague memories and probably isn’t accurate in some specifics.]

I was living in Canberra, the most fantastically happening city of my experience, when I came across an advertisement for a folk festival. I was familiar with conglomerations of folk musicians from my childhood in an abandoned Tasmanian town which very occasionally hosted an Irish music festival. I had also been an enthusiastic participant in the occasional country dance while living in the country. So I felt comfortable about this prospect, among many alien and challenging elements of my new life.

The folk festival was not on campus, but its address was on the familiar main road of the city, but very far toward the periphery.

I don’t know if the internet didn’t have maps on it at that point, or if this was prior to the magical day when someone pointed out to me that a button on my laptop actually connected it to invisible internet all around us, or if city navigation was just a wonder of the internet I discovered after for instance the econoblogosphere. But in my memory I had either a paper map or a vague sense of the city and a street address, and no real idea of the scale of the route.

Happily I was also familiar with ‘trekking’ (which I had made use of in my previous life when the Irish music had gone on for too long) and I conceived of this outing as that: I packed my big rucksack with a tent and provisions, and set out on an urban hike whose length I estimated as ‘long’.

Happily it was actually a good distance for a day hike, and I set up camp by the evening (among other tents even) and had time to explore.

At midnight I climbed a narrow staircase in search of a singing event that had caught my eye earlier. I found an attic-like room, alive with a circle of singers surrounded by audience, all facing inwards.

So note: the singers were a normal conversational distance from the audience.

Regardless of this, I, as an audience member, chose to stare continually at one of the singers. He was around forty, hairy, and it seemed to me endowed with a voice that actually an angel might have.

I was probably eighteen, and entirely dressed in red, because red is a nice color. Also nice: a good twirly skirt.

The group finished singing, and the guy walked up to me. Which might have been when I realized that being in the audience is different from being in an invisible alternative realm.

He invited me to the bar downstairs. I think I may have heard this invitation as similar to “I’m on my way to pick up some pet food, want to come along?”, which seemed like a reasonable invitation, so I joined him on his alcohol errand.

Somehow I came to believe that we were going to talk about philosophy. I was very interested in philosophy, so this was good.

He asked if I’d like a drink, and I explained that I didn’t drink things other than water because it required spending money, which I considered unethical, in light of the possibility of sending that money to people starving in the developing world. (Perhaps the exciting beginning of a philosophy conversation? No, he didn’t run with it.)

He bought his alcohol, and I got some water, and we talked, but the conversation somehow didn’t seem like it was taking off. He asked me if I’d like to go for a walk. I said yes, I liked walking.

So we went outside, and walked, all the way out of the gates of the folk festival, and onto the long dark road. The buildings were thinner and it must have been 1am, so it felt more like an empty highway than city. We wandered along the side of the road, talking, but it still didn’t seem to be going that well.

Eventually he said, “I have two black belts in karate and I could kill you”.

That seemed a bit alarming. I guessed he was just saying that it was unstrategic of me to trust him, but I felt somehow uneasy at this direction of his thoughts. Like, why did he think I shouldn’t trust him? Why was that aspect of the situation so salient to him? Shouldn’t he kind of be the one taking responsibility for not killing me? I agreed we should probably go back to the festival.

As we got close, he mentioned that he would like to have sex with me. This was a bit out of left field, but not a problem: I didn’t want to have sex with him, so I told him that.

He invited me back to his tent, so I went along.

His tent was small, so I perched pertly in the corner to maintain a reasonable distance. It was at this point painfully cold outside and fairly cold inside.

He opined that I seemed uptight in some way, and could use ‘snuggling’. We discussed this a bit. I didn’t agree that that was what I needed, and it also seemed like a somewhat wild proposition—snuggling being sex-adjacent and thus the kind of thing people do in movies or if they meet a potential true love or something surreal like that, not here in a real world tent in my life right now.

I crouched there much longer than I might have if not surrounded by crippling cold, then made a painful dash back to my tent and went to sleep.

~ Feb 2021

The other day I decided to try imbibing work-relevant blog posts via AI-generated recital, while scaling the Twin Peaks—large hills near my house in San Francisco, of the sort that one lives near and doesn't get around to going to. It was pretty strange, all around.

For one thing, I was wearing sunglasses. I realize this is a thing people do all the time. Maybe it's strange for them too, or maybe theirs aren't orange. Mine were, which really changed the situation. For one thing, the glowing streetscapes felt unreal, like cheap science fiction. But also, all kinds of beauty seemed to want photographing, but couldn't be seen with my camera. It was funny to realize that I'm surrounded by potential beauty all the time, that I would see if I had different eyes, or different glasses, or different sensory organs all together. Like, the potential for beauty is as real as the beauty I do see. (This is perhaps obvious, but something being obvious doesn't mean you know it. And knowing something doesn't mean you realize it. I'd say I knew it, but hadn't realized it.)

And then my ears were cornered in by these plugs spouting electronic declarations on the nature of coherent agents and such, which added to my sense of my head just not really being in the world, and instead being in a cozy little head cockpit, from which I could look out on the glowing alien landscape.

My feet were also strange, but in the opposite direction. I recently got these new sock-shoes and I was trying them out for the first time. They are like well-fitting socks with strong but pliable rubber stuff sprayed on the bottom. Wearing them, you can feel the ground under your feet, as if you were bare-foot. Minus the sharp bits actually lacerating your feet, or the squishy bits sullying them. Walking along I imagined my freed feet were extra hands, holding the ground.

I had only been up to Twin Peaks twice before, and I guess I had missed somehow exactly how crazy the view was. It was like standing on a giant breast, with a city-sea-bridge-forest-scape panoramaed around and under you over-realistically. The bridge disappeared into mystical mists and the supertankers swam epically on the vast blue expanse. I tried to photograph it multiple times but failed, partly because my camera couldn't capture the warm orange tinge of the sea and the bridge rising from the burning mists, and partly for whatever reason that things sometimes look very different in photographs, and partly because I am always vaguely embarrassed photographing things with people looking at me, and there was a steady smattering of them.

The roads had been blocked off to traffic during the pandemic. From a car I don't realize what vast plateaus winding hillside roads are. For us pedestrians, these were like concert stages.

The people I saw on my way up were either flying down the swooping roads on bikes and skateboards, in a fashion that made me involuntarily rehearse what I would do when they fell off, or flying unrealistically up the swooping roads on bikes, in a fashion that made me appreciate how good the best electric bikes must be now. I noticed as I watched one speed above me in awe that he flew the brand of his bourgeoisie bicycle on the back of his shirt, and wondered if he was just paid by them to ride up and down here all day, in the hope that someone would be so impressed that they would jot down the t-shirt label as the only clue to the rapidly disappearing bike's identity, then google it later.

I wandered atop the peaks, and confusingly collected a mob of crows flying above, apparently interested in me specifically. This was reasonably sinister, and in Australia birds can attack you, so I investigated on my phone, while walking hesitantly below the circling birds. At last they descended and alit on the road and guardrail around me, and stood looking at me.

This picture captures the bizarreness of the situation about as badly as it captures the awesomeness of the scenery. It's rare to be so much the center of a social situation with so little notion of what is expected of you or the meaning of it.

I think things then just kind of dissipated and I made efficiently for home.

- That aesthetic is bad.

- A party is an aesthetic creation, so having all guests' first experience of the thing you are offering them be a chintzy piece of crap that matches every other chintzy piece of crap is much worse than if the thing they were selling was like low-quality toilet paper or something.

- As far as I can tell, the only way to be informed of parties using Partiful is via SMS. Perhaps this is idiosyncratic to me, but I have no desire to ever use SMS. I also don't want to receive a message in the middle of whatever I'm doing to hear about a new party happening. Fuck off. This should only happen if the party is very time sensitive and important. Like if a best friend or much sought after celebrity is having a party in the next twenty minutes, sure text me, if you don't have WhatsApp. Otherwise, ffs email me.

- As far as I can tell, the only way to message the host a question about the party is to post it to the entire group. Yet there are very few questions I want to text an entire guest list about.

- Supposing I make the error of doing that (which I do not), as far as I can tell, the guest list receives an sms saying that I have sent a message, and they have to click to follow a link to the website to see what the message is.

- Supposing I am considering posting such a message to the entire group, Partiful will instruct me to 'Write something fun!' Fuck off. I'll decide what to write, and don't need the condescending needling. Relatedly, if I debase myself and host something on Partiful, while I'm drafting the invitation, it has been known to describe me as 'the wonderful [host]'. I don't want your narrativizing. a) Maybe I'm not wonderful. You don't know shit about me. b) I actually can't tell if you are going to seriously write that when I post the event, so I need to investigate how to mitigate that possibility.

- When I'm invited to a party, things I'm not allowed to know until after I RSVP include a) who else is invited or going, and b) where it is. Like, what do you want me to decide about social events based on? Is this communism? It also feels like such officious withholding. Like, are you serious? You're inviting me to hang out with people and you aren't going to tell me which people until I say I'll come? Are you on a power trip? Who is even on the power trip? The creators of Partiful on behalf of the hosts? "No, stand your ground, you're a party creator now, don't give up your advantage—they'll give in and give in and RSVP eventually".

- So naturally I go through the busywork of RSVPing "maybe" so I can see key details of the event. Which is annoying. But also it constitutes me saying to my friend "maybe I'll come to your party", which is a slightly shitty thing to say to an actual person I'm friends with, if for instance I think it's pretty unlikely I'll come to their party and merely want to check if this is the rare party that I do want to go to. Furthermore, now I've made it clear (to an as-yet unknown set of people who RSVP'd) that I've seen the party and am explicitly and concretely probably-rejecting it. I'm in a whole public social interaction with it. Whereas I might have liked to examine the party without engaging, leaving my knowledge of it and position on it ambiguous.

- Ok, so three steps in: I have moved from a contentless text message to a website and RSVP'd maybe and can at last see key details. At that point Partiful pops another notification into my phone telling me that I RSVP'd maybe.  Why? I know I RSVP'd maybe, because I was the person who did it, and it was three seconds ago. If later I don't know and want to know, I'll actually check in the event invitation, not the interminable list of similar looking messages from Partiful. And I was actually already looking at the event invitation until you distracted me with my phone. And if occasionally I err—thinking I RSVP'd maybe but really having RSVP'd a different thing, say—then this isn't a fucking space expedition; things will be okay.

- Then probably I just forget about it and leave it as a maybe, because I have other things to do in life, and this has already gone on for way too long, and I have technically RSVP'd, and who knows if I'll go to a thing. So that's annoying for the host, if they might have liked a real RSVP.

- But if I do try to RSVP more specifically, my options are "I'm going" and "Can't go". So in the situation that arises nearly every time—I can go but I don’t want to—Partiful has decided I'm going to just tell a little white lie to the host? Or just that I should go unless I can't? It's true that declining events is a difficult issue, and for many people white lies are the way out. But that's because it's too awkward to say "I don't want to". But if there are only two messages you can send—basically 'yes' and basically 'no'—selected by a company, it's not actually awkward to choose the 'no' one, because it doesn’t distinguish not wanting to and not being able to. There's no reason for Partiful to put a lie in your mouth there. It's true that it's also not that bad to say a falsehood, given that you only have two options, and are clearly most of the time going to want to say a thing you haven't been given the option to say. But why add this note of false smarm? Like, Partiful could make the options "yes" and "no because my mother is in hospital", and I wouldn't hold it against people if they clicked the latter, but I would hold it against the maker of the options.

- If I decide to tell my friend I can't go to their party, Partiful will message me on my phone again, with a crying face, saying sorry I can't go to the party. I don't need this shit. I don't want your emotional involvement in my decisions about when to socialize, corporation. True, it's only fake emotional involvement, but I don't want to be bathed in the fake emotions of corporations either. I'm a social animal, this stuff does change how I feel, change my sense of the sea of minds I feel I'm surrounded by, the emotions of the world. At a basic level, it's hard to say no to things, and yet I have to: the alternative is to waste my life being overwhelmed and not even able to make progress on the spew of second-rate things I sleepwalk into saying yes to. And being pinged with pictures of crying when I judge that something isn’t the right thing for me to go to, and say no doesn't help me. Does it help the host? Do they want to manipulate me? Probably not. Is Partiful’s hope that I learn to go to Partiful parties a little bit more if I feel micro-guilty and micro-sad when I decline them, and then the hosts have the sense that people come to Partiful parties more, so the company benefits? I doubt it, I guess the makers just lack much vision of what a good social world could look like, and are thoughtlessly enacting trumped up emotion where possible, in the hope that trumped up emotion gets attention, and attention gets success.

What would a good children’s book be like?

When I was about sixteen, I thought one reasonable thing to have learned when I was about two would have been the concepts of ‘positive feedback loop’ and ‘negative feedback loop’, then being taught in my year 11 class. Very interesting, very bleedingly obvious once you saw it. Why not hear about this as soon as one is coherent? Evolution, if I recall, seemed similar.

Here I finally enact my teenage self’s vision, and present A to Z of things, including some very interesting things that you might want a beautiful illustrative prompt to explain to your child as soon as they show glimmerings of conceptual thought: levers, markets, experiments, Greece, computer hardware, reference classes, feedback loops, (trees).

I think so far, the initial recipient is most fond of the donkey, in fascinating support of everyone else’s theories about what children are actually into. (Don’t get me wrong, I also like donkeys—when I have a second monitor, I just use it to stream donkey cams.) But perhaps one day donkeys will be a gateway drug to monkeys, and monkeys to moths, and moths will be resting on perfecttly moth-colored trees, and BAM! Childhood improved.

Anyway, if you want a copy, it’s now available in an ‘email it to a copy shop and get it printed yourself’ format! See below. Remember to ask for card that is stronger than your child’s bite.

Abc Front

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Abc Content 1

12.6MB ∙ PDF file

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Even if we don't die, it still feels like everything is coming to an end.