#337

Time marches on, they say. I wonder, to what beat? What sets the pace?

*

Saw some computer nerds for what seems like the ten billionth time in my life screaming about how stupid it is that people don't want to learn to code. Angry that people are saying "don't bother to learn code, soon AI will do it for you!". I agree with them that this is stupid; if you want to do computer science, by all means, learn to code. But motherfuckers have been on my ass to learn to code my whole entire life, and my whole entire life people have been telling me not to bother because whatever workaround will soon render manual coding obsolete. Autocode, offshored labor, whatever. However, what about the third option, which is that I have zero fucking god damn interest in coding at all, period, and wouldn't tell an AI to make a computer program even if it could make it? I don't code because I don't fucking want to. Because performing the actual process is not interesting to me at all. Because I couldn't give less of a shit about coding, code, and the coders who code it. 

Like, what the fuck? Why haven't you cocksuckers shut your mouths and gotten up off your motherfucking knees yet? I have never in my life met someone who knew how to code extremely well who was also worth knowing on a personal level, with the singular exception of my own younger brother, who is a fairly lonely man in his field. You understand what I'm saying? Stunted extensions of systems are not the same as authentic, realized individuals. You can talk about the utility of coding all day, but when I look at the world around me, the people in it, and what they have to deal with on a daily basis and in terms of their own future prospects, I see the same exact problems of history that have always existed plus a bunch of new ones that coding added to the pile. No one is happier. Indeed it could be said that everything is worse. Near as I can tell, the absolute best outcome of monkeys having learned to code is more efficient research and data access, and video games. Also word processing ability I guess. Not to discount these things, but the puff 'n cruft on top of them is just gobsmacking, let alone the facilitated rapine of our psychic and material lives. 

Apart from that, why the fuck is it okay for you to scream at me to learn to code but someone teaching you how to throw a punch or catch a baseball is such an imposition? Read more books. Go get laid. Go down to the swimming pool and jump off the diving board a couple times. For Chrissake, anything. Understand that your whole coding nonsense teeters on the good graces of systems that mobilize mass human labor and suffering, on multiple industries using up vast resources with huge footprints and we are coming to a tipping point. It is vulnerable to revolution and disaster in a way that knowing a couple of ancient skills is not. I can just see you looking a Congolese refugee with a stump where their hand used to be dead in the eye and telling them they should have learned to code. I can see you at the foot of a waterfall, banging two rocks together in the hopes that repeating the action will, eventually, generate a working keyoboard and interface. Well, it will, if they're the right type of rocks, but how would you know? And what the fuck do you know about the application of sharp edges in three-dimensional space? All you know is ones and zeroes, commands that do fuck-all when spoken to a tree or a prey animal or an individual with actual command of their surroundings. 

Learn to code? Learn to pray, asshole. Learn to think about real things. Learn to stop assuming a whole slave class and unsustainable network of dependencies will always be there to support your bullshit. And leave me alone.

You know what? I've changed my mind. I would tell an AI to make human coding obsolete. With maximum prejudice. Let the chips fall where they may. I know how to start a fire, make a shelter, cook in volume, clean and dress a cut or burn and set a broken bone, wield knife and bow, invent a myth, do public speaking, trip deep on hallucinogens, and teach all those skills and more besides. Philosophy, papermaking, heavy lifting, tool use, basic plumbing, horsemanship, gardening, military strategy, carpentry, geology, cartography, metalworking, clayshaping, irrigation. I'm set for success if society defaults to zero. I'm down for an Always Coming Home scenario.

"Oh, but coding will solve all these problems! No one will ever have to work again if everybody on the planet knows how to code and machines do every boring old real thing!"

God, if I could only help you fucking hear yourselves. If I could but force your crusty little eyes to look at the light, instead of the screen. 

I can only leave you to consider one of the more penetrating Achewood alt-texts: "You are not a powerful man if you have no power when the power is out."

*

Related: saw on some kind of poll that a good percentage of people my age and a bit older--older millenials and gen x'ers--would like to go back to an era before internet. Even more than half of boomers and gen z'ers feel the same way. I do not, personally, even though one might accurately assess from the above section that I loathe computers, hate them to death.

Well, that internet was a mistake cannot be doubted. But so was agriculture and the smelting of metallic ores. So it goes. 

Part of it I guess is I was on internet when it was pretty cool, so I kind of hold out for the concept that all these hordes of no-IQ interlopers and the corporate shitfuckers and political fuckwits that farm them will just kind of, I dunno, get bored and leave.

But apart from that, which is stupid and nonsense, is the power of the blank text field, of which I am obviously a proponent and beneficiary despite the negative effects that tend to accrue. I also think that if there is potential, and we went for that potential, there's no sense sitting around sunk in regret.

Finally, simply this: if you look back, you die. We must step forward, ever forward, eyes raised, into the future. 

Yeah, we've let the absolute shittiest kinds of people ruin internet. We've let the worst in ourselves reward their depravity and cunning and now everybody's life is measurably worse. They have taken a device that might have unchained us all, freed us all, and turned it into a depression engine that runs on fear and avarice.

But it's not over yet. 

*

Ok peace whatever BYE

--JL

#149

Been a strange, tense couple of weeks. One of those times in life where relations with every single person in your life are a little sandpapery at best, a season of snags in every instance, tiny violences intentional and accidental blooming everywhere along with the branches of the early trees. All the time a low insistent drone at the back of your skull, the unlocking of the season ratcheting everyone's intensity up, causing us to chainsmoke and make mistakes. 

All you can do is weather the storm, throw all the dead weight you can find overboard as you reframe what does and does not constitute dead weight under present conditions, and use whatever you can catch hold of to stay alive. Try not to make as many mistakes as you want to. 

Hold the center.

*

Personally I have always had a tricky relationship with early Spring; it can really fuck me up. I have made some really terrible, even fantastically terrible decisions at this time of year. 

Keeping it pretty steady this time around. Thankful for that. 


--JL 

#25

Life has been most disturbed of late. How it rankles, even grates--even, I say, grinds upon me to come to you twice in a row bleating apologies for my unconscionable silence. Nevertheless, life has been most disturbed of late, and what can be done?

Well, I could disturb my sleep in order to maintain output even in the face of unexpected tasks and duties. But subtracting from your own quality of life merely to live strikes me as the enterprise of a fool, and I no longer have that young man's verve which lends such foolery charm, and the purposefulness of experience farming.

Old heads will know what I'm talking about--letting a young person do something like an idiot, wasting a bunch of energy for nothing because they think they know better than you, and they're hungover and grumpy because they ate a cold spoonful of beans four hours ago and didn't sleep so much as laid unconscious on the couch they rescued from the landfill, surrounded by empties and overflowing "ashtrays". You could do the task in two seconds with a practiced, well-rested gesture, but you know what? It's okay that they'll take two minutes just to fuck it up. They need this pain in order to molt that hideous chrysalis.

That's how I became an adult: with my own gin-reek roaring in my nostrils, slicing my hand open for the ten hundredth time, showing up late to open the store only to find that I left the key in my other pair of pants, getting into an actual fistfight with my boss' husband, running over a dude's toolbox with the fleet vehicle, my ex screaming at me in front of customers, shattering a five hundred dollar piece of glass...

The whole trick is having done stuff wrong so many times that I can see myself doing something wrong from a mile away.

Anyway, tomorrow is October first. Not just October first! It is Monday, October first. A special day in the calendar of my people. I like the number seventeen. I have mentioned this.


--JL