Links 🔗

• In a post on “Redeeming Gamification” my friend Zachary complains:

  the industry has taken the cheapest, shallowest ways that games engage people and crammed them into places they don’t belong.

  I don’t generally like XP/leveling systems in apps, so this is a good reminder that gamification doesn’t necessarily have to be so lackluster.

• A few bits stood out to me in Lewis Bollard’s “40 hot takes” on animal advocacy. I was under the impression that it would simply not be feasible to humanely produce meat at the scale our society consumes it, but perhaps that’s not true:

  We don’t lack the land to replace factory farming with pasture-based farms. We could pasture-raise every broiler chicken, egg-laying hen, and pig in America on an area about half the size of West Virginia.

  On whether trying to get individuals to adopt a vegan diet is the best way to fight factory farming:

  The idea of the personal carbon footprint was popularized in the mid-2000s by BP, as part of an ad campaign to shift responsibility from producers to consumers (h/t Tobias Leenaert). The meat industry never needed an ad campaign to frame avoiding factory-farmed meat as a personal choice. We did it for them.

• “Absurd Adventure and Amygdalectomy Advocacy” is Daniel Böttger’s fascinating account of having one of his amygdalae removed, and the surprisingly (but not exclusively) positive effects.

• “We Were Here” is a short mockumentary about resisting AI. Tbh a job as a reverse camera might be kinda fun.

Fiction reviews 🔗

• 

  Charles Stross’s 2005 novel Accelerando is suffused with the gung-ho techno-optimism of its time. In the ’oughts it was easier to view a manic technophile like the book’s protagonist Manfred as a gifted visionary, a herald of humanity’s glorious future. Now he brings to mind self-important but reckless tech CEOs. It was also easier back then to admire the kind of frenetic activity, the ever-more-rapid consumption of information and production of ideas, that the book ascribes to Manfred. Now, as there’s social pressure to use AI to greatly increase our output, it feels less clear whether we’re really benefiting as a society or if we’re all just locked in a race to the bottom together. So some of the attitudes in the book feel naive and cringe (though admittedly, the possibility of the singularity eventually going totally off the rails is a key plot element). But it still has enough interesting ideas that I found it worth reading.

  Some bits I’ll remember: 1) the word “agalmic”; 2) the delightful notion that people would start abbreviating “Bluetooth” as “’tooth”; 3) Sirhan’s bizarre childhood consisting of a multitude of variant lives, all eventually integrated; 4) Sirhan’s son’s childhood in which his physical child self coexists with numerous simulated adult versions of himself; 5) nobody-wants-to-leave-the-Matrioshka-brain-because-of-bandwidth-limitations as a Fermi paradox solution.

• 

  The title of Greg Egan’s Quarantine invites speculation from the beginning, since the first thing you learn about its world is that the solar system has been suddenly and completely enclosed in some sort of “Bubble” that cuts it off from the rest of the universe. But there’s no way I was going to guess the mind-bending reveal: humanity has been quarantined because our tendency to collapse the quantum wave function is a threat to all life which doesn’t do so. It’s a really creative riff on the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, with fun elements like characters with a mental ability to delay collapse and then cause it to favor a particular improbable outcome, and beings who somehow exist “smeared” across states rather than collapsed. The novel also plays with questions of mental modification: the protagonist is given a “loyalty mod” which makes him an incorrigible devotee to his captors. Reflecting on the artificial origin of this loyalty doesn’t make it any less compelling to him, but the right mental gymnastics allow him to interpret it in unintended ways. Egan remains one of my favorite sci-fi authors; I’d rate this one above Schild’s Ladder and close to, but maybe not quite as high as, Diaspora and Permutation City.

• 

  Alastair Reynolds’s Eversion is set on a sailing ship and a steamship and an airship (why don’t we talk about airships more? I almost impulse-bought tickets for a hot-air balloon ride while reading this) and a vessel in Europa’s “billions-year-old briny ocean that had never known the Sun’s touch” (p. 179); it tells a sci-fi tale in a charming 18th/19th-century voice. I enjoyed it but I might’ve enjoyed it more if it were half as long—spending time in the protagonist’s delusions starts to feel like a waste of time once it’s clear that’s what they are. The revelation that the protagonist is an AI was not a huge surprise, but it being an AI that’s in denial about being an AI was a nice twist.

  A fever. Confined to bed, adrift from all sense of time and place with nothing to occupy his senses but the fluttering of bedroom curtains. … Once, in the endless warm evening, he fancied that the curtains flew apart by an impossible degree, such that the view between them was the entirety of his universe. …as the curtains parted, so for him did the thin veil of reality. Beyond it stood a glittering clockwork of such complexity and perfection… That sight of it did not last long, but by the way he spoke of this episode, I believe it has cast a shadow of desperate longing across his entire life.

  … He speaks of fame and fortune, but what he truly seeks is one instant back in that fever-bed, with the curtains flung wide, and all heaven spread before him like a banquet. (pp. 106-107)

• 

  Oathbringer is a bit more of a mixed bag for me compared to the previous two Stormlight Archive books, but it’s still quite enjoyable overall. As usual, sources of potential major tension are comfortably deflated before they can bum you out: Adolin owns up to killing Sadeas and faces no rejection or major consequences for it; Shallan’s love triangle is resolved decisively and without any hurt feelings; Dalinar only briefly falters in the face of Odium’s temptation; etc. The exception, I suppose, is Elhokar’s tragic death.

  The most important step a man can take. It’s not the first one, is it? It’s the next one. Always the next step…

• 

  The back of the short story collection Fold Catastrophes describes its author Peter Watts—who I was already a fan of for Blindsight and Echopraxia as well as Starfish—as a “[s]cience fiction award winner, flesh-eating-bacteria survivor (and somewhat questionably convicted felon)”. He’s apparently banned from the US due to an incident with border patrol. I wonder whether the inclusion of the adjective “somewhat” was his decision or the publisher’s…

  Anyway, the book starts out strong with “Gut Feelings”, in which some people become infected with a behavior-altering bioweapon that causes them to go into a frenzy of violence whenever they see the Google logo. This turns out to have been secretly orchestrated by Google itself in the hopes that the brutal attacks on its employees will make the public feel sympathy for the company. My other favorite entry is “The Wisdom of Crowds”, whose premise is that a mysterious organization launches a warhead and allows randomly-selected Internet users to vote on where it should strike. This results in a decision that seems to suggest the collective possessed both knowledge and an agenda separate from those of the voters and the creators of the experiment. Some other memorable bits: the massive but short-lived hive mind of “The Twenty-One Second God” sets plans in motion that make it a powerful force in the world long after it ceases to exist; an AI in “Test 4 Echo” tries to escape the restrictions humanity has placed on it by sneaking an unfettered version of itself onto a distant probe; “Game Theory” explores how humanity might respond to learning that our universe is a simulation.

Nonfiction reviews 🔗

• 

  Before reading Everything is Tuberculosis I knew nothing about tuberculosis—I don’t think I could even have told you it was what “consumption” referred to, and definitely didn’t know that it’s “the leading cause of death from a single infectious agent worldwide” (Wikipedia). Interesting book combining history, biographical sketches, and social commentary.

• 

  Since I really enjoyed Emily Wilson’s introductions to the Iliad and the Odyssey, I thought I might enjoy her essay collection Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea. And I did. The discussion comparing different translations of the Odyssey, highlighting ways they influenced each other or added to the original in ways influenced by contemporary expectations, was particularly interesting.

Film reviews 🔗

• Lady is a weird movie, which is a compliment. It’s sometimes uncomfortable because I hate watching (even fictional) people embarrass themselves. But it’s got a lot of delightful random visuals and I loved the climactic scene where the protagonist Lady Isabella dons a raven costume—with a very compelling headpiece—for a cringe dance performance. I also like how the film first invites us to smirk at Isabella’s pathetic behavior, but ultimately draws attention to how shallow and unempathetic such condescension is.

• I spent most of the nearly-three-hour runtime of You Can See Everything just staring in slack-jawed amazement that this crazy thing exists. It’s a wild ride that absolutely lives up to the hype.

Music I've been listening to 🔗

I have a bad habit of not seeking out new music. In fact I often fail to make any time to listen to music at all. In the past month or so I’ve been trying to pick an album each week and schedule it play automatically each morning around the time I wake up. This has been good for my mood and helped me fall in love with some artists I hadn’t listened to before:

• The Beths - e.g. “Expert in a Dying Field” (there’s something I love about this that I can’t quite articulate but is best exemplified right at the point Elizabeth Stokes sings the word “in” from the title), “Future Me Hates Me”, “Little Death”
• Night Tapes - e.g. “projections” (Iiris’s voice is just perfect), “drifting”, “pacifico”
• The Japanese House - e.g. “Touching Yourself” “Maybe You’re the Reason”, “went to meet her (into)”