This email has been a tough one to write, not because there’s a dearth of content to discuss, nor because the content itself is necessarily particularly difficult, but because of the feeling of convergence of many threads of content I’d like to talk about. Each subject I’ve put together notes on seems to bleed into some other zeitgeisty issue, which bleeds into yet another significant event, and so on until I’m desperately uncertain whether some of these topics are in fact hierarchically linked, and in which case I fear that I’ll fail to position each in its correct order.
A list of things I’ve started writing about (and then stumbled): misperceptions of consumer demand for the documentary function of AI-manipulated photography; AI is boring / how tired we are of reading and talking about AI; my Anytype workflow for writing and notes and mind-mapping ideas; Casey fucking Newton’s wanton destruction of his own journalistic credibility; the recession of ‘AI’ from headline-grabbing technology to an invisible actor in a complex system; a recap of 2024 (boring); predictions for 2025 (urgh); the carrot-on-a-stick process of trying to define intelligence; a walkthrough of a workshop on creative misuse of technology; tech giants creating their own liabilities by forcing shut open ecosystems; the misinformation apocalypse was DOA, why are we (as a society) sooooo bad at realistic forecasting?
Since the only reason I really write these emails is to get my thoughts in order, and since it’s appropriately January, I’m 🌟resolving🌟 to try to wilfully ignore any grand unifying theories and write discretely, quickly, and carelessly, with hardly any respect for order or hierarchy.
If this is to overcome writer’s block, I’d relate it to a kind of lightly obsessive-compulsive reader’s block which I used to face: occasionally at the end of a page or a paragraph or even sometimes just a sentence, I’d fear that I’d not really been listening to the text, that my mind had wandered or there was something I’d failed to truly comprehend. I’d go back and re-read the section, often only to face the same dilemma once again, and then I’d repeat this process over and over before allowing myself to move on. I’d have spent hours reading what ought to have taken minutes had I ever possessed the mental fortitude not to give up, deeply exasperated at how difficult reading seemed to be.
I overcame this and learned how to reliably read a fucking book only by acknowledging that the text is not temporally linked to my moment of reading it. Any time I question my true comprehension of the information I just remind myself that I’m able to return here later on: the text I just read will be right where I left it, and if I finish the rest of the book and still feel like I missed something then I can always come back and read it again, probably armed with more contextual knowledge than the first time around. Anything you read now, you can also read better later; anything you write now you can write better later.
It’s not that I am afraid of making mistakes per se, in the sense of factual errors or poor predictions, but I do fear missing things: letting an interesting connection between two ideas fly past, or failing to apply a useful critical tool from one discipline when approaching another. I only fear these because it feels like wasting time. Like the reading compulsion, I find myself trying this idiotic attempt at comprehension-maxxing and ignoring the false economics of trying to succeed in the short-term rather than letting these immediate failures evolve into long-term understanding. I can always come back and write it again!
I’d planned to bundle all this with some more focused text about an actual topic, but with the above in mind I think it would be hypocritical to do anything other than wrap it up here and hit send. I’ll come back soon with some neatly-packaged, discrete and manageable nuggets of half-baked theoretical bullshit, exactly as promised.