gratitudes, the boo radley's, analog social media, ai, capitalism, capitalism alternatives, presidents who cry traitor, my photographs
yesterday i was grateful for beacon wellness and my flu shot...
today i am looking forward to the farmer's market and a quiet day at home...
trying out some new-old music... music of the 90's that passed me by but being reviewed by pitchfork as a notable album of the past...
The Boo Radleys: Giant Steps Album Review | Pitchfork
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the 1993 masterpiece from a group of shoegazing Beatles fanatics who went up against Oasis in the battle for the soul of British rock—and lost.
two songs in and i certainly like it... question is... should i buy it?... i will have to live with it a bit... see if it seeps into my being...
i have been thinking about my desire to withdraw from current technology as much as possible... for the past couple of days i have been thinking about social media as it exists on line, and social media, as it existed before facebook and instagram and whatever else was an option... i have soured quite a bit on all of that... i have tried even some of the off the beaten track options... tumbler... micro.blog... none of them have been very satisfying... what has been satisfying is the analog social media technology... my local coffee shops, restaurants, performance venues, pot luck suppers, movie theater... etc...
i get to know the people who serve me in these various venues... it is similar to the kind of relationships i have been able to have on line with people i don't know well or haven't met in person... except it is in person... the baristas at kitchen and coffee... the patrons of kitchen and coffee... these are not deep relationships for the most part... but they are face to face relationships and some of them go deeper... not unlike on fb, ig, etc... they are ever so much more satisfying... why did we ever think trying to create online community was a good idea...
i am down on ai too... years ago i did a talk on it... i researched and talked about what the possibilities were... back then i was ambivalent... i could see the possibilities and the inevitabilities of it... i didn't know if it would be good for humanity... i wasn't sure it wouldn't make the bulk of humanity irrelevant... i tried to be optimistic... i am not optimistic now...
yesterday ted gioia published a piece on what ai was doing to the creative arts space...
https://open.substack.com/pub/tedgioia/p/paul-mccartney-invents-a-new-kind?selection=162cedfd-51f4-494c-ac43-fa1cda6442be&r=3lmw0&utm_medium=ios
AI represents the exact opposite of creativity, Gilligan warns. It steals the work of others. So any attempt to legitimize it as a creative tool is built on lies. A bank robber might just as well pretend to be a financier. Or an art forger claim to be Picasso.
the biggest problem i have with ai is that the elite tech bros own it... ai requires huge investment to scale up... mostly in the form of massive, energy consuming, server farms... it is expected that ai demand for energy will push up the cost of electricity for everyone... and what the elites want to do with ai is get rid of much of the human workforce... what does an economy that heretofore has relied on the purchase power of masses of people look like when you make it difficult to impossible to make money to pay for things?...
i have been reading a lot about alternatives to capitalism... or ways to moderate capitalism so it doesn't destroy the planet and people with it... there are alternatives... locally focused economies... gift economies... expiring money economies (which prevents capital accumulation)... they have been tried and have sometimes been quite successful on a local basis, until those in power deemed them a threat to the system they benefited from and shut them down...
i will continue to withdraw myself from the technology where and when i can... i will report back as i do...
one of the things that gives me some hope in the face of the politics of the current moment is that we have been here before... multiple times... it was never easy to get past moments like these and return to the promise of the declaration of independence... it is often bloody... but we have always done it... nothing guarantees we will turn back the current authoritarian bid, but it helps me to know we have done it before... this morning, heather cox richardson posted about a previous president that accused oppositional law makers of treason and suggested they should be hanged... andrew johnson did it in the mid 1800's after the civil war...
For the president of the United States of America to call elected lawmakers traitors and demand they be arrested, tried, and sentenced to death for making statements he perceives as threats to his policies is bizarre, outrageous, and anti-American. But it is not unprecedented.
back then, johnson and his followers extremism was too much for the general public...
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/november-22-2025?selection=88b046af-71d1-4654-8fb1-c8204f1b01c8&r=3lmw0&utm_medium=ios
Johnson’s extremism and his supporters’ violence created a backlash. Northerners were not willing to hand control of the country to the former Confederates rioting in the South and a president who called for the hanging of congressmen. Rather than rebuking the Republicans in the midterm elections as Johnson had predicted, voters repudiated Johnson. They stood behind the principles in the Fourteenth Amendment and gave Republicans a two-thirds majority of Congress.
there are signs that a similar backlash is in the works... a lot will depend on being able to hold free and fair elections and to turn back the attempt to delegitimize them or outright steal them...
a few photographs from this morning...
