3/10/2025
The wind lately.
It knows something is up. It knows we fell asleep and it knows that the artificially intelligent are running code against us. And for our part we are self-documenting. We're giving it up all day and letting it fly - language and thought and the simple exhaust of life here in this time are blown across the street like the neighbor's recycling. Empty cans and energy drinks. The leadership has braced itself against every decent thought the last half century has had and the violence in the wind is enough to make you think. How many times do I need to chase down a garbage can to know that the only thing it really wants is to roll away, spreading its forgotten garbage across a neighborhood that is desperately trying to make sense of the wind. It never used to be like this. There are no question marks on sentences because the answers are either unknowable or unnecessary. There is no questioning anymore. There is only resistance or acceptance. The days of just letting the wind blow are behind us. At some point the wind demands to be reckoned with and a choice will have to be made. There seems to be danger in every act. Spending time in the street among a drift of empty beer cans is kinetic and the simple act of stomping them into the ground so they can't roll away seems like the only thing of value left to do.
3/6/2025
Productivity is limited. I suppose that in some sense, some very narrow sense where capital sees a return, we can push for productivity with harsh methods that extract some sort of measurable output from labor. Yet the economics of it is so cold. If capitalism, or the capitalistic approach to creation, has a true flaw it would be this unrelenting drive to numbers. Hours worked, lines of code, lead time, defect rate. The software we make, the technology we use, has suffered from this frame. In selecting productivity as capital sees it as the core metric by which we measure the value of any given output we provide the set and setting for the creation of ugly, sinister, inhumane technological systems that pervade our discourse and sideline our critical reasoning. Perhaps if we opt for a humane perspective on productivity will we have some chance at creating technology that echo the oldest sense of tool-use as the extension of human capability. Perhaps if we situate the whole person as something to be supported rather than something to be mined we can reclaim the development of technology from the blind drive of capital.
3/5/2025
Today is gray. The rain is lobbing down on the driveway where my car - my 16 year old VW Jetta with a scant 30k miles - used to sit. It had been sitting there unused and silent for just about a year. Somedays I feel sadness when I look at that car. Like I should have given it more time. I should have given it more love. It's a machine I know. And it is a dumb machine when compared to the 'other' car that occupies the space next to it. The ostensibly 'smart' car. The software driven, trickle charging, surveillance car that sits there half aware of it's surroundings. That car, the one I have been driving on occasion, is a problematic car. A politically charged car that is perhaps unaware if the symbolism it carries. I'm going to give that car back, but unfortunately I'm not wealthy enough to do it with the sort of haste I would like to. I'd like to drive it up to the gates of the man who owns it and just let it go. But that isn't an option. Since I don't own the surveillance car I am contractually obligated to pay a monthly fee to host this symbol of toxic male fragility in my driveway for another 7 months. And I will. And when my Jetta returns from it's well deserved spa treatment I will enjoy driving it. I will embrace it's complete lack of technology. I will use it as some sort of penance for the lapse of judgement sitting right next to it in the driveway.
1/31/2025
I want to write again. I'm not sure why and I'm not sure what, but it's been a while and I've decided to try to get some words out. I'm fairly certain this will be a sort of stream-of-consciousness format - raw, lightly edited, partially informed thought. And this - what you're reading now - is the first pass. A paragraph of meandering and undirected prose. It has no real purpose other than starting. It is here for me the writer rather than you the reader. It is an attempt to divine some meaning in a world where meaning seems to be up for grabs. It may get poetic. It may get technical. It may get political. It may get frustrated. It may get deleted.