Category: Doodles

I re-read my Laborator post the other day and one paragraph tied into something else I’ve been reading lately:

Any communal project is a marathon rather than a sprint: It’s important to be able to step back and trust your collaborators to follow the plans you’ve agreed upon, but when stuff falls through you need to be there to pick up the slack – and plans always shift, since life happens – regardless if it’s you or someone else who dropped the ball.

Starting a biohacking lab in Gothenburg, looking back at Laborator

I don’t know why this sentence felt like such a revelation: Stuff getting done might actually depend on you! It’s my recurring theme of feeling replaceable, and actually seeing that as a virtue. It’s possible that my focus on automating, simplifying, and categorizing information and functions stems from my own low self-esteem, where I don’t see my own value but rather only what I contribute with.

A second reason for this way of thinking is political – If I accept that there are things that I’m better at doing, my (oh so human) fallibility and vanity will start using that as an excuse for getting my way – regardless of my motivations or if it’s a “good” idea. This ties in with my anarchist persuasion – I’m 100% unformfortable with anyone who strives to power, because power always corrupts in some way.

But I can sense that I’m changing as a person, and I’m starting to become willing to accept a certain level of corruption. It’s still corruption mind, but the progress we’ve made as a species is a result of different wills enforcing their will upon others – striving for power to make their ideas come true first, worrying about the corruption of their motives and personality second.

So I’m going to try to go out on a limb and effect the world around me a bit more. Take a bit more responsibility, but also acknowledge that not everyone will agree with me, and that I myself might think that I’m wrong down the line.

I take heart in an illustration by Jessica Hagy from one of her recent newsletters:

The book I’m reading that got me thinking about this is Jaron Laniers “You are not a gadget” (which I was certain that I’d read already, but no). I’m not finished with it yet, but what has stuck with me is his conviction that what is worth preserving and promoting is the individual humanity and the freedom to act on it. I’ll do a second post on it once I’m done (36 notes so far using the brilliant Bookfusion app), but the book has given me ideas and motivation to find other ways of collaborating and doing stuff.

My previous phone was getting long in the tooth, and there was no way to get call recording to work on it, so I bit the bullet the second I saw that Nothing 2A was supported call recording out of the box. It’s bigger than I’d like, but I just have to live with the fact that everyone is OK with carrying tablets around for now.

And because I have a whole bunch of applications and more than one email, I have now spent half a day logging in to different services, trying to get 2FA to work and requesting new passwords, migrating chats and files, cursing all the while. So many parking apps – I hate you with a burning passion!

I thought that Bank ID (Swedish national 2FA application) would be a hassle to renew, but it was as straightforward as you’d please. It’s the FAANG apps that are giving me a headache – there’s no standard way of migrating the stuff, each app has come up with it’s own authentication scheme requiring some particular set of hoops to be jumped. Some apps were so difficult to get to work that I’ve uninstalled them rather than deal with the hassle. It’s a culling criteria as good as any, I guess.

Even though some people love the Nothing 2.5 launcher, it looks like a half-finished Winamp skin so I installed Nova despite how slow it can be at times. I look forward to when I can forego a cellphone alltogether and manage all my digital interactions with a ring or something less attention-requiring, but until then I’ll go for a utalitarian approach – my phone is not my personality.

I’m occasionally surprised how utter shit the usability of both mobiles and computers still is though! I’m sure part of it is just nostalgia and selective memory on my part, but I honestly miss the days of MacOS 9 and Nokia phones. Todays UI consistency is poor, the information architecture is muddled, and some design choices are just baffling. The CoverOverflow animation on Android is nauseating and can’t be turned off? The menu for editing apps is ordered differently from one app to another (see screenshot)? Why are app names truncated?

Of course, as a budding UX:er I ought to be encouraged: Look how much there’s left to do! But on the other hand, I’m sure there are designers smarter than I – whole scores of them in fact! – who have tried to wrestle these things under control and failed. The digital world stands testament to their failed ambitions, cobbled together from tear-stained post-its and angry PM comments in a shared Figjam board.

I sleep with a notebook next to my bed, and sometimes I wake up with an idea, more often a turn of phrase or a slogan, and write it down. This particular morning I wrote “I woke up rested, full of worthless energy”.

The type of energy I was thinking of was the kind that makes your head buzz with potential to solve problems – your mind is racing to apply itself to something. A problem to solve, a task to fulfill. A purpose, any purpose.

But if you don’t find a purpose, this energy, this pressure, dissapates – much like a kettle boiling over, the energy escapes as steam, as sighs and hot breath. I only keep as much energy as needed for the mundane tasks of the day, the rest leaks out.

Oik oik fellow piglets! I’m starting this post January 9th in the year of our lord 2023. I have a slight cold, my calfs are aching after ill-advised amount of exercise yesterday, and I’m looking forwards to the school semester starting again. Just like previous years, I’m scheduling this post to go live 1st Jan 2024, and I’ll track what books (and similar) I’ve read, in chronological order. My prediction is that a lot will be stuff related to school and work, but I’ll try to squeeze some fiction in there as well – and not only re-reads… (I’ll list stuff I’ll give up on as well)

Books read

Tamsyn Muir: Gideon the Ninth. Odd science fantasy book taking place in a world where there are necromantic houses who rule whole planets in service to an emperor? We get to follow Gideon, an indentured servant to the Ninth house, when she along with her necromancer are summoned to perform a test with representatives of other houses. It’s the language which makes this stand apart – Gideon talks like a contemporary angry teenager, which clashes wonderfully with the gothic surroundings. The mood reminds me of the backdrops of the game Slay the Spire, if that makes any sense.

Alan Cooper: The inmates are running the asylum. A book often referenced in modern computer design litterature as an important contribution in bridging the divide between design and development. Well written by the “father of Visual Basic” and as pertinent today as it was thirty years ago.

Mark van Wageningen: Type and Color: How to design and use multicolored typefaces. More of a skim than a read – the author presents some experiments with typefaces made up of more than one colour. It’s not a subtle effect and using it for copy text would require a brave publisher, but some of the headers are eye-catching if they fit with the overall design.

Zach Barth: Zach-like. A chronological history of the games of Zach Barth and his companies. It’s not many persons who get a genre names after themselves (zach-like) so it’s intersting to browse the evolotion from paper sketches to finished computer games. Could have done with tighter editing of text and included materials, but I have a feeling I’m not the intended audience – a burgeoning game developer might spend days analysing the sketches I browse through.

Sjöwall Wahlöö: Den vedervärdige mannen från Säffle. The first book from the Beck series that I’ve read, and I can see how it became so genre-defining. It’s suspensful, has social pathos and a no-nonsense story – great read. (Oh, and the story is about a brutal murder of a police officer, which starts to look like the first of a string of revenge killings – and our protagonist Beck is on the list)

Seth Dickinson: The tyrant Baru Cormorant. Originally the final volume of the trilogy, but since extended to a planned forth book, we follow Baru Cormorant and her dealings in trying to exert vengenge upon the imperial Falcrest. Well written and deep characters; It’s Machiavellian economic warfare, and my only complaint is that the characters are too numerous and difficult for my poor brain to keep apart. Will preorder the forth book as soon as it’s possible though!

Frederik Pohl, The boy who would live forever. Continuing the stories in the Heechee saga, there’s a menagerie of vignettes and characters which tie together many of the storylines from the other Gateway novels. Pohl has original ideas like few others – what he uses as a throwaway tidbit or worldbuilding, lesser authors would use as their main contrivance. The books becomes somewhat disjointed because of this, but it’s always fun to visit in the universe. I particularly enjoy comparing the AI minds of Gateway to the Minds of Iain M. Banks Culture series – the Gateway minds seem much more beign and less cynical than their Culture counterparts.

Kate Swindler: Life and Death Design. Part of my UX reading, Swindler describes some considerations of designing for people under stress. The book is a good starting place with many references to original research, but it’s a bit thin on the design aspect. Knowing the physical and psychological consequences of a flight-fight-freeze respons is good, but I’d like to have seen more process specific examples. Still, it’s a good primer and I’d recomend it to others who (like I) have limited experience in thinking and working with this – if we consider stress responses as conditions similar to handicaps which we need to take into account when designing, it would be a benefit to all.

John le Carré: A murder of Quality. One of his early whodunnits featuring George Smiley, and a biting description of upper class private schools in England. A woman is found murdered and suspicion falls on her husband, Smiley investigates and Carré uses him as a foil onto which we can project the banal wickedness of seemly proper breeding and behaviour. A fun and short read.

Johann Hari: Stolen Focus. An urgent and timely book looking at what many of us feel – we’ve become more stupid and distracted with each passing year. Starting out with surveillance capitalism and attention economy – manufactured to milk our brains as much as possible – he moves on to pollutants, malnurishment and a sheltered and scripted childhood as possible culprits to your shrinking attention-span. Good read, altough some arguments are weaker than other (the Silicon Valley stuff is solid though).

Michael Luca, Max H Bazerman: The power of experiments. A great primer on how the field of experimentation and nudging has moved from academia into politics and business. The authors are hilariously naïve and reductive though – the only objections they can envision to being experimented upon is either being a luddite or fear of bad actors (which are considered an abboration rather than business as usual). Despite this it’s a worthwhile read – and their attitude is informative as well, since it explains the oblivious surprise organisations show when people object to being experimented upon.

Louise Boije af Gennäs: Blodloka. A Swedish whodunnit against a backdrop of political scandals and coverups from the last sixty years. Reasonably suspenseful, but reads like something the author has seen on tv and is retelling rather than a well written novel. But I became intrigued to read more about the real-world scandals that are referenced in clippings throughout the book, so that’s a plus.

Oliver Sacks: An anthropoligist on Mars. Seven short descriptions of people with neurodivergence – aquired colour blindness, tourettes, inability to create memories – all told in Sacks curious and frank voice. The title is a quote from autist savant Temple Grandin on how she feels when navigating human relations, but serves just as well to describe how the author approaches his subjects on their terms as far as possible, bring back stories to the rest of us.

Gina Spadafori: Dogs for dummies. I’m more or less come to terms that if I and Sara are to stay together, at some point we’ll get a dog. So I figured I’d take an interest and read up on the subject. This book was a good primer on how to approach the decision to get a dog, what to look for in a breader, house training, etc. Very practical, and she highlights the responsibility one has for not encouraging “puppy mills.” I’m still not comfortable with the idea of owning a dog, but at least I’m more informed!

Hugh C. Howey: Silo trilogy. A re-read after watching the mediocre tv-adaptation. Ten thousand people live underground in a giant silo, but noone remembers why. The only thing they know is what The Order commands them, and it commands them not to go outside. Nice dystopic scifi with some twists and turns.

Albert Camus: The Fall. Short and fantastic, a monologue seemingly adressing the reader in second person. Jean-Baptiste Clamence is judge-penitent in a bar in Amsterdam, sometime in the 1950s, and he’s telling his interlocutor of his fall from social and moral grace, and of the impossibility of being noble. Looking forwards to reading this again in a while!

Lev Manovich: AI Aesthetics. A short booklet which is part of the course AI & Design that I’m taking at Borås University fall of 23. It came out 2018 and there’s not much conceptually new here that hasn’t been covered elsewhere by now, but it’s a useful summery of cultural ontologies and where AI fits in the puzzle.

E. M. Forster: The Machine Stops. A fantastic short story from 1909 which seem so in time with our current age it’s bound to get a resurgence! “No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence.” Choc full of quotes and insights into a future world enslaved by the machine.

Malka Older: Infomocracy. A near future scifi where the world is mostly divided into administative areas comprised of a maximum of 100’000 citizens. Each such centenal can be ruled by completely different rules – be they communist, laizze faire, utalitarian – and we follow political fixers in the run-up to the coming contested election. It’s a mildly interesting setup, but poorly written and not paticularly interesting in the end. I read it on a recommendation from a co-worker at RISE, and would have abandoned it otherwise.

Hannes Råstam: Fallet Thomas Quick. A fascinating read about the formerly convicted serial killer Thomas Quick who confessed to 30-some murders, was convicted for eight of them. After twenty years in bin he was exonerated after Hannes Råstam starts digging into the cases and slowly uncovers that it’s all based on wishful thinking and willful ignorance on the part of the prosecution and lawyers, and false confessions by Quick. A riveting read and a testament to the need for research-heavy journalism.

Betty Gilpin: All the women in my brain. An autobiography by the actress written with more metaphors and allegories than I’ve seen anywhere. It tells of her struggles with imposter syndrome, angst, fear of failure and fear of success. Gilpin was great in The Hunt and the more recent Mrs Davis, and it was interesting to get a glimpse of her road there. Great read, even if you don’t usually read autobiographies. “I have spent my life lily-pad hopping from goddess to goddess, quietly plagiarizing their toe rings and credos, hoping that my mirroring would count as personhood”

Fredrik T Olsson: Slutet på kedjan. A Swedish sci-fi thriller about a world conspiracy, a battle against time and some really awkward speculation about junk DNA. Poorly written and completely unbelievable characters and worldbuilding, and a perfect schlock to read when you’re down with a cold and have little energy to spare. One blurb on the cover says “more intelligent and better written than Da Vinci Code” which is a hilariously low bar to clear, which I’m not sure that this novel actually manages. No surprise at all that it’s been optioned for a film by Warner Brothers.

Books given up on

Lauren Beriant: Cruel optimism. Gave up after 34 of 354 pages when I realised that I didn’t understand what the point of the book was.

Louise Penny: Glass Houses. It’s like turning on a show which you imagine has been going for twenty years and realising that you don’t care about the characters at all. I did read another book in the series on Saras recommendation, but it’s just not for me. Put it down after 22/330 pages.

V.E.Schwab: A darker shade of magic. Dimension-hopping between different Londons. The language just didn’t grip me, and there are better magic realism books out there. 23/345 pages.

Timothy Morton: Dark Ecology. My patience with philosophical books which claim to reinvent ontologies and discourse – preferably inventing clever words in the process – grows shorter with age. I got through 17/220 pages of this book.

Charles Stross: Halting State. In a near future someone commits a bank robbery in a virtual world, and it has real world repercussions as insurence adjusters get involved. Found the book abandoned at RISE, and I abandoned it half way through.

“My personal worry is that for a long time, we sought to diversify the voices — you know, who is telling the stories? And we tried to give agency to people from different parts of the world,“ she said. “Now we’re giving a voice to machines.”

Rest of world, Victoria Turk: How AI reduces the world to stereotypes

A fantastic comparison of how Midjourney renders five terms: a person, a woman, a house, a street, and a plate of food. It comes out as stereotyped as you can imagine, but the work they put in to do the comparison really shows it in stark light.

In that dismal moment I could feel that the systems meant to process us haven’t “gone wrong” when they embarrass us. They aren’t being refined toward some higher level of seamlessness, once the technology and the data sets improve. Rather they “improve” by relocating the frictions we inevitably feel and giving it no outlet. The indifference of these systems to us and our powerlessness in the face of them in that moment becomes the indifference of society and our powerlessness to change it. In a flash, the welling irritation conveys instantly, reflexively, that solidarity must be impossible in a world where all human relations are machine-mediated.

Rob Horning: Two riders were approaching

This sentence explains more peotically what I wrote a while back: “… it will not only be “the market” which will have decided that you can no longer afford your medicin, your education, or your vacation – it will be an AI which will have endless patience to listen to your litany, but no semblence of decency to react to it.”

Work has not disappeared from the restaurant floor, but the person doing the work has changed. Instead of an employee inputting orders dictated by the customer, customers now do it themselves for free. Fauxtomation strikes again. […] But while the gap between advertising copy and reality can be risible, fauxtomation also has a more nefarious purpose. It reinforces the perception that work has no value if it is unpaid and acclimates us to the idea that one day we won’t be needed.

Astra Taylor: The faux-bot revolution

We are so primed for a technologically advanced future that we’re bluepilling ourselves into accepting fake automation as real. There is a man behind the curtain, and it’s us?

The largest corporations on earth ripped off generations of artists without permission or compensation to produce programs meant to rip us off even more. I believe A.I. defenders know this is unethical, which is why they distract us with fan fiction about the future.

New Republic, Lincoln Michael: The year AI came for culture

A great essay that puts the AI wars into a power perspective – technology used to extract labour and gain regulatory capture. Haves against have-nots. As usual. A very down to earth summery for the year 2023.

A while back I calculated my computational power according to screen estate, offering the suggestion that the more I can see (up to a point) at the same time, the more function I can extract from my computers information systems. Before that I’d done a similar thing going through how many gigabytes of storage I had personal control over, the thought being that it described the circumfence of my binary domains. The more storage, the more video I could edit, the more photos I could save, and the more high resolution pirated movies I could keep on hand.

I came to think of this again the other day when I started my migration from many computers onto a home system built around a small M1 Macbook Air. It’s a humble machine which is more powerful than my sort-of-recent i9/1080Ti Windows abomination, and much more powerful than the 5.1 Mac Pro I’m still keeping around because of the RAID and I/O ports, and I’m consolidating all the storage onto a few external enclosures. Turns out, I have some fifteen drives of different capacity laying around, as well as a bunch of USB/Firewire enclosures, and just copying the stuff from one thing to another takes forever right now.

But anywho, my point being that the amount of storage I have no longer feels like a valuable metric of my productive capacity – rather the opposite since my data exists as conflicting versions in many places – and I’m satisfied with my screen real estate (well almost, I’d like a magic whiteboard covering 2×1 meters on the living room wall). So what qualities do I value in my personal computational space today?

I’m thinking that maybe it’s convenience. I’ve become older, crankier wiser, and neither my eyesight nor patience can take as much abuse as it was able to ten years ago. I want to be able to be productive rather than fiddle around with drivers in Windows and I’m more likely to take poor design as a personal affront than a technical challange.

There’s that William Morris quote that you should “have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” and perhaps there’s something similar going on here, with a very wide definition of “beautiful” and “useful”. Along those lines, I caved in and bought an iPad to read books on since I tried one out and realised how much slicker the experience is than on any Android tablet I’ve tried.

It’s not that I want a frictionless life. Friction is important, it smooths out rough surfaces, gives us things to hang on to, and provides heat and sparks. But I’d like to choose my objects of friction with more consideration.

There are so many things worth doing in the world, small and grand, and there’s just so little value in putting up with stuff that doesn’t matter. Just write that stuff off and learn to live with the fomo; Smooth out all friction that doesn’t improve your grip on reality, and enjoy a better handle on life.

When I started studying UX Design in the long ago time-before-time (fall of 2022) I promised myself that I’d abandon all other projects and cut back on distracting reading – giving myself time and energy to focus on the studies. This worked well for a week or so.

Turns out there are whole books written on ethnography, design and usability, and they are rather interesting – who knew! Anyway, I quickly got bogged down with extra courses and books and podcasts and so on and so forth. I took to walking an hour and a half to school just to have time to speed-listen to at least some of the stuff that’s out there.

One of the podcasts that I stuck to was “What is wrong with UX,” hosted by Laura Klein and Kate Rutter. It’s now defunct, but the archive is still up at usersknow.com/podcast. Since I’ve listened to all 130 or so episodes I figured that I’d put together a selection most interesting to me as a beginner in the field. The show doesn’t rely much on callbacks, so skipping episodes isn’t that big of a deal.

An assumption about you: The selected episodes were useful as a complement to my full time UX Design studies – they gave a deeper understanding of the practicalities of what I was learning in school and reading about on the side. I’m assuming that this podcast isn’t your first exposure to the field of UX Design.

A note for us non-USA people: Americans love to talk and this podcast is no exception, but after an episode or two you’ll be able to look past the dad-jokes and forced geniality, and appreciate the content. Klein and Rutter are knowledgeble and passionate about their skills, and it’s worth sticking with the show to hear what they have to say. As a side note, I can recommend Laura Kleins book UX for lean startups as well as her course in Agile methods for UX Design over at IxDF [affiliate link].

The shows listed are in order of publication, and the descriptions are their own.

• C-FWOTS: Kate and Laura talk about C-FWOTs or Colossal Fucking Wastes of Time. What makes a design project a C-FWOT, and how can we avoid them?
• Don’t be a UX Designer: In this episode, Kate and Laura bitch about some of the most annoying things about being a UX Designer and do everything in our power to keep you from becoming one. You’ll thank us later.
• The Worst Clients: In this episode, Kate and Laura talk about terrible clients (no, not by name. we’re not committing career suicide just yet.) and how we can deal with them better as UX Designers. If you work with other people as a UX Designer, this one might be helpful. If you have worked directly with clients, consider this a possible trigger warning.
• 6 Things We Wish We Had Known: Kate and Laura talk about the things we wish we’d learned earlier in our careers as UX Designers.
• Stop Arguing with Feedback: In this episode, Kate and Laura discuss how to take the feedback you asked for a little more graciously and maybe even benefit from it. Do not, in any way, think that this is a request for you to give feedback to Kate and/or Laura. Yes, we understand the irony, and no, we’re not having any of it.
• Why You Should Care about the Business Model: In this episode, Kate and Laura give five reasons why everybody, even designers and researchers, need to understand how their products and companies make money.
• Collaborative Design: In this episode, Kate and Laura fight about what it means to design things collaboratively and the ways in which everybody seems to screw it up. Hint: collaborative design does not mean everybody makes every single decision together! This is not a democracy, people.
• Old Research Stories: In this week’s episode, Kate and Laura reminisce about old research stories and how much better things were before. Ok, mostly they talk about what’s still true of the things they learned in old research and what’s changed.
• Starting Your Own Thing: In this episode, Kate and Laura give sketchy advice about starting your own freelancing or consulting business. Reminder: you should probably not take legal advice from drunk people on the internet.
• Designing Beyond the Screen: In this episode, Kate and Laura complain about screen-based designers again. They also talk about designing for multi-modal interfaces in a failed attempt to sound modern and like they haven’t been doing this since the Paleolithic Era.
• Choosing the Right Deliverables: In this episode, Kate and Laura talk about not wasting time making the wrong stuff. You’ll be completely unsurprised that what sorts of deliverables you should make for your team depends entirely on who you’re making stuff for and what you want out of it.
• Whiteboard Challenges: In this episode, Kate and Laura talk about how to be better at whiteboard challenges if you can’t avoid them entirely, which you can’t, so just deal.
• Protect Your Users froom Each Other: In this episode, Kate and Laura talk about how and why to protect your users from each other while they slowly lose what little faith they still had in humanity. Happy New Year.
• Craft: In this episode, Kate and Laura argue about The Craft, which relates to neither witchcraft nor macrame owls, so honestly why do they even bother? Seriously though, tune in for 30 minutes of blathering about what words mean.
• Should Designers Lead: In this episode, Kate and Laura discuss something (semi) topical. They argue about whether designers should lead and then of course somehow veer into what design even is anyway and it’s pretty much a typical mess.
• Tips for New UX Designers: In this episode, Kate and Laura attempt to give advice to new UXers (something neither of them has been since dinosaurs roamed the earth). Laura advocates violence, surprising nobody who has ever met her.
• Design Principles: In this episode, Kate and Laura take a decidedly unprincipled look at design principles. Kate proves that drinking does, in fact, affect your memory, when she completely forgets Laura’s entire work history.
• Designing in Triples: Kate explains why she likes to make everything three times as hard as it needs to be. If you’re playing the What is Wrong with UX drinking game and drinking every time they mention Task Flows, then maybe don’t make any plans for after the podcast.
• High Level UX Jobs: In this episode, Kate and Laura really go off the rails talking about the similarities, differences, and issues with various different higher level UX jobs, many of which they haven’t actually held in well over a decade, if at all.

If you’ve listened to the podcast and would like to suggest another episode to add to the list – or one to take away – feel free to comment below of get in touch over at Linkedin or email. And if you know of other curated lists of podcast episodes, let me know! The amount of info that’s available online is massive, and with all search engines being choked with listicles written by drunk potato AI:s and content farms, finding the good stuff is time-consuming.

The title phrase and sentiment is taken from plagiarist & internet commentator Ryan Brodericks newsletter Garbage Day, but it might as well be one of the conclusions of an Adam Curtis documentary.

My childhood friend Matilda visited us in Gothenburg over the weekend, chaperoning her son who had a ticket to the three-day festival Way out West, and we binged most of Curtis series “Can’t get you out of my mind.” I still have the last hour of the last episode to go (“brevity” isn’t a word in his vocabulary I think), but the overarching theme of the disappearance of progressive ideologies is depressing and on point. What we’re left with after the fall of the democratic middle class & militant romantics, are fandoms jockying for position and angry people longing for a past that never were.

This is a recurring theme in stuff I’m reading as well as in conversations. It’s not so much despair as resignation. Despair would imply that you have a goal but have failed to attain it. Resignation is when you realise that your goal doesn’t matter. And resignation seems to colour the zeitgeist quite thoroughly right now – the only remaining optimists are the religious fundamentalists and accelerationist of different stripes.

One of the ideas I floated to my friends after the last election (which saw a right-nationalist government take over from the previous centrists) was that we ought to start a political party which only focuses on one issue. This in itself isn’t new – there are populist parties and movements all the time – but I’m interested in what issue might give the biggest progressive leverage regardless of the political colour one has to collaborate with.

Worst case scenario: What single-issue would make such a disproportional progressive impact that it would be worth to collaborate even with the most toxic idiots of the far right? You’re sitting at the negotiating table with a bunch of wannabe nationalist socialist romatics from SD, and if they give in on one issue you’ll lend them your support. What would that issue be?

Depending on if we’re doing this locally, regionally or nationally, the issues will differ. Right now I only have two suggestions: A complete ban on private car use in the inner city of Gothenburg (a local issue) or a hard limit on the salary for public employees (with countermeasures in place for attempts to subvert this via bonuses, etc.). Both would have huge knock-on effects, which on the face of it would be progressive (citation needed).

Do you have any other suggestions for one law, policy, activity or ordinance that would have a disproportionally progressive effect regardless of which political coalition is in power? I’m all ears, let’s do this! There’s only three years left and we probably need to make some research and print some leaflets!

My thoughts feel dated even before typing them up, but it’s spring of 2023 and the world has its panties in a bunch over ChatGPT and other Natural Language Processing AI:s, and I just want to put my scratch in the goal post for future reference. There are new AI products being churned out faster than even the press-release press technology media outlets can keep up with. (Subsequently, some have started publishing AI-generated content)

The economic downturn – combined with the class war waged by the tech sector on its workforce – has investment money salivating at the prospect of a new boom. Subsequently, there’s much said about the coming nerd rupture and ascendance of the machine.

Noam Chomsky et.al have some objections:

It is at once comic and tragic, as Borges might have noted, that so much money and attention should be concentrated on so little a thing — something so trivial when contrasted with the human mind, which by dint of language, in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt, can make “infinite use of finite means,” creating ideas and theories with universal reach.

Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull: The false promise of ChatGPT [Archive.org mirror of NYT op-ed]

It’s not that I don’t enjoy playing around with the tools – I pay both for Midjourney and ChatGPT API – but it feels like intelligence pareidoila (seeing patterns in random data). You can have a really interesting discussion with ChatGPT, and you can be surprised by what seems like creative insights and suggestions. But I’ve had really interesting discussions with the birds on the poster over my bed, as well as with my drunk reflection in the mirror. I provided the meaning and the interpretation – and I did so because I played the game of “let’s pretend.”

I’m in school right now, retooling myself into a UX design & research person, and AI crops up in more and more omnious tones. I talked with a couple Javascript students who felt vaguely threatened by AI and uncertain of what their value proposition was. And to my ears they were basing their fear not on anything specific, but rather a general sense of the AI is coming for us all! Which is being fuelled by writers on Medium with fiften susbscribers who need to write hyperbolic articles in order to – oh irony! – impress the AI of Google Search.

We had a guest lecturer the other week who talked about AI tools as something which we’ll have to learn to use within UX, in particular graphic / UI generators. That’s definitely a use I can see and which doesn’t cause me much consternation – I’ve been using generative software the past thirty years in different capacities, this latest breed just happen to be easier to talk to – but when people start writing about using ChatGPT as personas for user research, that’s just difficult to take seriously. That’s really giving into pareidoila, and you’re better of doing astrology or divining from entrails.

I’m not sure where I’m going with all of this. Of course I’d like to have my cake and eat it – by which I mean I’d like to seem clever and reasonable without missing an opportunity to piss on the AI parade – but in the end I think I come down on the side that the current iteration of AI will lead society down a shitty path where the first line of contact with other humans will be through our mutual AI:s, and as usual those with more resources will be able to have better tailored tools (as usual) to make the most of the world (as usual) and ensconce themselves in bubbles where they can have plausible deniability even more than today.

Because it will not only be “the market” which will have decided that you can no longer afford your medicin, your education, or your vacation – it will be an AI which will have endless patience to listen to your litany, but no semblence of decency to react to it.

— update 15 March —
ChatGPT 4 has just been released, and the discussion on Hacker news is full of hot-takes on what it means and you don’t know what it means and ooh, shiny.