November 4. Why do we think hard work is virtuous? It's mainly about Max Weber's book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
What was new, Weber thought, was the moral stance: that working hard, living frugally and accumulating wealth weren't just practical skills for succeeding, but inherently virtuous forms of behaviour.... Over time, these behaviours detached from their religious roots. You didn't need to believe in predestination to feel the drive to work endlessly, or to prove your value through success. The idea of a "calling" lingered on, but hollowed out. Eventually, it looked less like a vocation than an obligation.... Weber's point was that the moral energy that once drove the Protestant ethic has drained away. What remains are mere behavioural patterns, which have become reflexes. People still work obsessively; they still chase success as if it had ultimate meaning. The difference is that now they're unsure why.
November 7. New video! I'm still having lots of fun using images that nobody respects to illustrate songs that nobody likes. This is the third video I've made from a 2014 album that I'm surely the number one fan of, Country Space Junk by an Australian band called Wireheads. The first two songs were illustrated with human-made art, but I ran out of good stuff, and I was happy to discover that AI slop contains nuggets. It's like a video game, except instead of "one more turn", it's "one more image", and there's always a chance that the machine will spit out a good one. It's like gambling, except that what I win is beauty, and what I spend are the world's last nonrenewable resources.
I must have looked at almost a thousand images, all made with the DeepAI generator. Something I mentioned in the interview is that AI is not the artist, it's the palette. It's not the woodworker, it's the wood, and with every video I'm getting better at working with it. For example, I learned that if you put the word "sonic" anywhere in the prompt, you're likely to get Sonic the Hedgehog, so I had to avoid that. In certain styles, "fly off in a spaceship" consistently gave me a house fly, so I substituted the word "zoom". DeepAI has a bunch of styles that are good at different things, and I got the Cave Painting style to make lunar landscapes, by asking for a white plain and black starry sky. You can't say the word moon, or the AI will put the moon in the sky: Wireheads - Sonic Spaces Blues
November 14. Nice link about urban transit, What If Every City Had a London Overground? It's about how much more enjoyable surface trains are than the subway. "The Overground has become more than the sum of its parts, as it prompts people to make journeys they likely wouldn't have made before the improved experience made it comfortable and easy." It's a good bet that one day every city will have an Overground, because humans are not going extinct, and we're not going to get so primitive that we forget how to do trains; but we don't have the resources to keep doing cars.
November 14. Quick update on enshittification: I decided to pay five bucks for DeepAI pro, and it's worse. It unlocks the "Genius" level which makes the images prettier but less interesting, and I'm limited to 60 a month which is nothing. Worst of all, every time I change the style, it resets to Genius to make me buy more. I was hoping it would at least make the regular images generate faster but it does not. The user experience is actually better if I'm logged out.
What I'm seeing here is that there is no comfortable level of engagement with the monetized internet, no point of balance where you can spend a little and just hang out. Whatever it is that you want, either you find a way to get it for free, or you're marked as a rube, and the system becomes predatory.
November 17. Seattle, like NYC, has just elected a young progressive mayor. Her name is Katie Wilson, and the weirdest thing about the campaign was that the incumbent made an issue of Wilson's mother paying for daycare for Wilson's daughter. It's weird because under what value system is this bad? Not conservatism. Conservatives love the family and are all about family members helping each other out, so that the government doesn't have to. Meanwhile liberals want the government to help people out so that we're not dependent on family.
What value system is opposed to both government, and the family, helping people out? Capitalism, because if we're all atomized individuals, we all have to work in the Amazon warehouse in the holy project of sucking all the money to the top of the pyramid and calling it growth.
December 1-5. From the Autistic Adults subreddit, Driving isn't a neutral task for everyone. For many autistic people, it's a high-stakes multitasking nightmare. I think autism will eventually be understood as multiple different conditions, because descriptions of what it's like to be autistic are all over the map, and often contradictory. For example, this thread, your favorite part of being autistic, includes both hyper-logic and hyper-empathy, both intellect and intuition, both sense of style and indifference to style. Even in the driving thread, there's a sub-thread about autistic people who love driving.
I haven't been diagnosed with anything, but neurotypicals have a mode I call "self-driving human". They can "zone out" or "stop thinking" and their body automatically does the right thing while their conscious mind can just sit back and watch. I've never done this. When I'm driving, I have to constantly pump out my attention: look at the white line, look at the speedometer, look at the mirror. Even in my own apartment, I need fully conscious attention to not bump into things. Even when I'm walking, I have to monitor and instruct my mechanics and posture or I get stiff and slouchy. It sometimes feels like I live life through a straw, but a better way to say it is that perception can be narrow or wide, like a laser or like a floodlight, and my attention defaults to narrow. I can get to wide focus but it takes a continuing effort of will to stay there.
I don't think there's anything wrong with me. An adequate society would have plenty of social roles for people who perform best with narrow focus and wide time. I say "role" and not "job", because in a job someone is making sure you're in a hurry so that they can make more money from your labor than they're paying you. That's what they mean by "time is money," and it's a recent invention. Medieval crafts and primitive flint knapping were done with narrow focus and no time pressure. These kinds of tasks have been replaced by mechanization. The soullessness of AI writing is not new. The same thing happened over a hundred years ago when physical items went from hand made to machine made. We live in a weird dystopia with miraculous devices and rampant "mental illness" which is what they call it when the way you are has no place in a society that's obsessed with perpetual increase.
Related Reddit thread: What does an uneducated genius actually look like? Have you ever met someone who was incredibly smart but had little or no formal education? A lot of examples are people who are really good at fixing machines, which tells me that after modernity collapses, we're not going back to the stone age, but potentially to a decentralized utopia of garage tinkerers.
December 10. A few more thoughts on autism. Greg sends this article, "Autism is a Spectrum" Doesn't Mean What You Think. It's not like being farther or less far up the spectrum. It's like what colors you pick out. "...autism isn't one condition. It is a collection of related neurological conditions that are so intertwined and so impossible to pick apart that professionals have stopped trying."
This article, Autism's Confusing Cousins, explains how a bunch of different conditions are getting lumped under "autism" by popular psychology. But you can find the deeper message in this disclaimer: "The diagnostic boundaries between conditions are scientifically unclear and often reflect clinical convention." And the Hacker News thread is full of examples of how diagnosis of autism and related conditions is a total clusterfuck.
Now I'm even more convinced that all of this stuff will be conceptualized very differently when we understand it better. More radically, I suspect that "autism" is a feature of the present age. A diagnosis always reflects a problem, a mismatch between how people are and what society needs. Late stage industrial capitalism is so far from human nature that it's generating a lot of problems that require increasingly fiddly diagnosis. In a few hundred years there will still be neurodiversity, but it will interface with a more flexible and human-scale society in such a way that many ways of being will not be problematic enough to require experts to figure out what's wrong.
But I've changed my opinion on the practical dimension of diagnosis. I think it's good that a bunch of stuff that's not technically autism is getting lumped under autism. This paragraph from the second article explains why:
Social communication disorder is rarely diagnosed in favor of autism primarily because autism provides access to critical services, insurance coverage, educational support, and legal protections that social communication disorder does not reliably offer, creating strong practical incentives for families and clinicians to prefer the autism diagnosis. Additionally, autism has an established evidence base, validated assessment tools, clear intervention protocols, and a large supportive community with a neurodiversity-affirming culture, while social communication disorder has none of these. It has no community, minimal research, no specific treatments, and little professional awareness since it was only introduced in the DSM in 2013. Service delivery, insurance, and educational systems are built entirely around autism rather than social communication disorder, and since both conditions require similar interventions for social-communication difficulties, there's little practical incentive to make the diagnostic distinction, especially when the boundary between them (whether restricted/repetitive behaviors are truly absent or just subtle) is often unclear and clinicians are often unsure the distinction really matters.
December 16-18. Narcissistic leadership in Hitler, Putin, and Trump shares common roots. "According to the research, all three leaders experienced forms of psychological trauma and frustration during their formative years, grew up with authoritarian fathers and emotionally supportive mothers, and showed signs of pathological narcissism in adulthood."
My unusual belief about narcissism is that it's a side effect of charisma. I don't think it's possible for a low-charisma person to develop narcissism, because other people just won't treat them in a way that feeds narcissism. Mainstream psychology doesn't know how to think about charisma, but this is a good Wikipedia page about Steve Jobs and his Reality distortion field:
Bill Gates talked in an interview about Steve Jobs using his reality distortion field to "cast spells" on people. Gates considered himself immune to Jobs's reality distortion field, saying, "I was like a minor wizard because he would be casting spells, and I would see people mesmerized, but because I'm a minor wizard, the spells don't work on me."
I don't think it's quite like that. Being immune to wizardry doesn't make you a wizard. More generally, charisma is not like a light that shines on everyone. It's more like a key that fits a lock, or doesn't. A reader tells a story of a manager at his workplace who had a breakdown because he was accustomed to always succeeding through charisma, and suddenly he was among a group of people who didn't fall for it.
My evidence that charisma has a metaphysical component, is that people who don't think charisma has a metaphysical component, are continually surprised and befuddled when they see it in action. If you look at the whole phenomenon around a leader like Trump, or an entertainer like Elvis, it doesn't look like sound and light waves tickling the neurons of a bunch of disconnected people. It looks like the activation of an archetypal cohort, like they were already connected on a deeper level and they were just waiting for someone to take the role as their point of focus.