☎ Landlines, MichFest, and the cult of AI
"All my trouble stays at home, leave your drama at the tone."
Hello, hello! This week I learned that a single performance of a John Cage organ piece has been ongoing since 2001 and is scheduled to continue until the year 2640.
A recommendation
Daniel and I had the privilege last weekend of seeing The Zone of Interest (at Roanoke’s historic Grandin Theatre), and I really can’t recommend it highly enough. I know, I know: A Best Picture nominee is a good film? Kinda dog-bites-man, doncha think? But there’s “a good film” and there’s “a heart-stopping film that will stay with you forever,” and The Zone of Interest is the latter. Plotwise, the movie follows the family of the Nazi in charge of Auschwitz as they create their dream home next to the camp. What is happening in the camp is never directly shown, but it’s never absent — the din is constant (and extremely unsettling) and the film demonstrates the many ways the characters’ lives are built on and entwined with the mass murder happening on their doorstep. The film is beautifully done and incredibly disturbing.
Faith alone
“The Cult of AI” | Robert Evans, Rolling Stone
Is AI a cult? Well … it’s not not a cult.
[Venture capitalist Marc] Andreessen has no time for doubters. In fact, doubting the benefits of artificial general intelligence (AGI), the industry term for a truly sentient AI, is the only sin of his religion.
“We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives,” his manifesto states. “Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.”
And murder is a sin. The more you dig into Andreessen’s theology, the more it starts to seem like a form of technocapitalist Christianity. AI is the savior, and in the case of devices like the Rabbit, it might literally become our own, personal Jesus. And who, you might ask, is God?
“We believe the market economy is a discovery machine, a form of intelligence — an exploratory, evolutionary, adaptive system,” Andreessen writes.
This is the prism through which these capitalists see artificial intelligence. This is why they are choosing to bring AGI into being. All of the jobs lost, all of the incoherent flotsam choking our internet, all of the Amazon drop shippers using ChatGPT to write product descriptions, these are but the market expressing its will. Artists must be plagiarized and children presented with hours of procedurally generated slop and lies on YouTube so that we can, one day, reach the promised land: code that can outthink a human being.
Dial it back
“ ‘I love to twirl the cord’: the young people pushing for a landline renaissance” | Alaina Demopoulos, The Guardian
This is a cute little piece about Gen Zers who have found joy in landline phones. It’s definitely a novelty — landlines are not making a comeback at any real scale — but you know what? It’s adorable.
Nicole Randone, a 24-year-old from Westchester, New York, takes calls from her bedroom using a purple Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen-branded landline first sold in 2003, when she was three years old. “One of my first memories is the tan landline that my parents had mounted to the kitchen wall,” Randone said. “I always fantasized about the day I’d have one in my own room.”
All of Randone’s style takes influence from what she calls “2000s nostalgia” – on Instagram, she posts to her audience of 118,000 followers showing off a bedroom decorated with a bright pink boombox, Von Dutch accessories and Chad Michael Murray wall posters. “Having a landline really bridges that gap between reality and my childhood fantasy,” Randone said. “I feel like the main character in my favorite TV shows – One Tree Hill, The OC, Gilmore Girls – when I use it.”
Warning: earworm incoming.
Facing the music
“On The Land: MichFest and Camp Trans, Part 1” | Julia Golda Harris, Dyke Domesticity
This is very interesting look at the history of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which is known for a) being incredibly important to a lot of women and b) excluding trans women. I’m looking forward to the promised Part 2, as well!
Writing about MichFest pretty much always foregrounds some controversy or another, and that was true in 1980 as well. On the last day of the festival, a Fat Liberation group marched with signs encouraging women to boycott the festival’s tee shirts, as shirts in extra large sizes were not available. That evening, a group of fifty white women, many of whom [writer Tacie] Dejanikus identifies as working-class Jewish women, read a statement demanding that the festival’s racism and classism be addressed. Their specific demands included increased numbers of woman of color performers and merchants, creation of a tent specifically for political material, translation of all announcements into Spanish and French, and establishing a closer campground for male children. The festival had struggled since its establishment with what to do about the sons of festival-goers and had arrived at a solution of providing a summer camp for boys over the age of five, but it was fourteen miles away; the group of protesters pointed out that this was particularly dangerous for boys of color.
What I hope is coming through here is that there was no version of MichFest that existed prior to conflict over MichFest, and that the white hot center of that conflict always laid in questions over who should be there and who should not be there. Furthermore, these questions were nearly always centered on axes of sex/gender, race/ethnicity, and ability/disability. This aspect of MichFest did not make it remarkable: it actually made it much like other lesbian feminist institutions, where identity-based conflict over inclusion and exclusion were also endemic. At Michigan, these conflicts found escalated pitches because of the festival’s scale and reach, and because, quite quickly, the festival took on nearly mythical significance in the eyes of many of its attendees.
Preacher’s kid
“My father, my faith, and Donald Trump” | Tim Alberta, The Atlantic
This is an excerpt from a book I’m unlikely to read. I don’t think I’d find the author’s political analysis very helpful — anyone this invested in emphasizing the difference between Trumpers and “normal” conservatives is not really reckoning with the human suffering caused by “normal” conservativism. But this piece is interesting as a personal essay about the author trying (with varying levels of success) to grapple with his father’s death and legacy. There’s no such thing as objectivity, generally, but there’s definitely no such thing as objectivity when it comes to our parents.
It was the high point of my career. The book was getting lots of buzz; already I was being urged to write a sequel. Dad was proud—very proud, he assured me—but he was also uneasy. For months, as the book launch drew closer, he had been urging me to reconsider the focus of my reporting career. Politics, he kept saying, was a “sordid, nasty business,” a waste of my time and God-given talents. Now, in the middle of the book party, he was taking me by the shoulder, asking a congressman to excuse us for just a moment. Dad put his arm around me and leaned in.
“You see all these people?” he asked.
“Yeah.” I nodded, grinning at the validation.
“Most of them won’t care about you in a week,” he said.
The record scratched. My moment of rapture was interrupted. I cocked my head and smirked at him. Neither of us said anything. I was bothered. The longer we stood there in silence, the more bothered I became. Not because he was wrong. But because he was right.
“Remember,” Dad said, smiling. “On this Earth, all glory is fleeting.”
Until next week, here’s Arthur.