10 Jul 23 Monday Briefing

🎶 You don't gotta go to work, work, work, work, work… 🎶

“Eating Bitter”

Fifth Harmony sang about that four years before it became fashionable to do so – Work From Home. Paul Graham waxes lyrical about how to do it greatly, and thankfully, it doesn’t involve AI… yet. The ongoing theme of AI looms large, and the shadow it casts on this newsletter is no exception. Graham cautions that “People who are smart and ambitious but don't achieve much tend to become bitter”, and I think he’s on to something here. If you’re blessed with genetics and favourable starting conditions, if by whatever arbitrary measure you fail to make something of yourself, it’s hard to see where to cast blame.

The link between that thought and this past week’s AI theme is that I’ve always held that if what people fear about AI is that it will kill or replace us, then we (but really, those suckers) probably deserve that self-fulfilling prophecy. The need to produce rage-clickbait titles is doing this entire discourse a huge disfavour. This week’s best long-ish read for me was Ben Evans’s very thoughtful AI and the automation of work, and there are overlaps to what Evans and Graham are saying, chiefly that meaningful work still lies within the individual human being, who is constrained only by their ambition and imagination. Evans sums it up the best by saying that we really don’t know enough to say anything with too much certainty. Anyone who makes claims to the contrary is bullshitting.

What a tangled web we weave…

Are you on Threads yet? I’m a compulsive new-app joiner, so of course I am. The onboarding onto yet another app on the Metaverse was alarmingly easy and seamless with Insta follower list auto-follows and cross-posting. The UI is also iOS optimised, seems native-built almost, but somehow slightly less sticky than Twitter, for now. I suspect it will take a while for me to serendipitously discover quirky accounts with hot takes or hilarious shitposting. Threads is also a new avenue for people I know to reveal how awesome or how terrible they are with text. More anon.

Nails and Hammers

Almost everything in Western mainstream media is seen or reported through coloured lens these days. What I can tell you from a less Eurocentric worldview is that the colour of a man’s skin or any oppression he might have suffered has little impact on his behaviour as a predatory shit. I’ve only casually followed David Adjaye’s career, and thought Sugar Hill looked weird and not very liveable for a public housing complex. He might be a famous black architect, but he’s also just a man who, like millions of men all over the world, (allegedly) harassed and abused women. Is it disappointing for a historically marginalised community who’ve gone all in on their golden boy? Yes. Is it surprising that he could have behaved terribly? No.

Pancake Graveyard

What does IHOP, upstate New York, and the Revolutionary War have in common? The Battle of Fishkill, apparently. A bonus long read – I’m still trying to wrap my head around the lengths to which people will go to defend what they believe in, whether conservation or capitalism.