Today’s word of the day is “retrospective.” The only happy thing to say about really anything at this point is I’m glad Sabrina had the best year of her life. Even though Taylor literally got her catalog back and had major commercial success, she’s still watching Sabrina get all the attention. And funny enough she seems fine with it!

I’m having caffeine just so I don’t go back to sleep. Emily told me everyone she knows is either getting drunk or working both today and tomorrow. Some of them both. That’s all we’re missing. I actually admitted that hanging out with me might be preferable to watching people get piss ass drunk. 

This is really good. https://rushkoff.substack.com/p/the-joy-of-becoming-worthlessexcept

Indeed we are witnessing disaster capitalism at its finest. And when the dust settles we will likely all be better for it. But oh my things are gonna suck really bad first. 

I love Rushkoff’s use of the term “the kleptocratic elite.” He says a lot of things I’ve been thinking about the past few years. He’s a lot more optimistic than I am, but I think he’s got the right idea. It’s one I’m going to save and come back to in the future. 

One happy thing. Someone from Casela noticed our dumpster was overflowing. So they stopped in and got it. I’m sure this is the first day they could make it out. Turns out Emily was just as stressed about it. Now we can finally finish cleaning out next week and move on with our lives.

Apparently there’s another Emily Slatin who’s an EMT who has an intersex sister who’s also an EMT. The video Emily found was from 2013 though so who knows what happened, but that’s nuts.

… since I’m just laying here anyway I got to thinking more about retrospectives. Specifically how there’s this massive gap between the information we had at the time, the developments since then, and how we view the past with our current lenses. We talk of “humble beginnings” and this is always a funny term for me when corporate money is involved. 

My only plans this coming year are to keep breathing (mostly for Emily’s benefit) and maybe write some stuff. I’m done with trying to remix and “fix” past works. Even my fiction stuff I think is better off left in the past. It doesn’t mean we won’t see those characters again… we will but I just don’t know in what form. As I’ve said previously I’m just building a database of neat shit and whenever there’s a particularly great article like the one I read with Emily this morning, I save it as a pdf. I expect a lot of these great writers to be clamming up behind paywalls sooner or later, completely understandable but immensely frustrating to refer back to later requiring throwing money at shit (it makes me very annoyed). I balk at committing to any one creator. 

As it stands now, [when it comes to baseball,] I’m more interested in how the sabermetric crowd continues to evolve, how people use data and their own guts in tandem to make bold predictions. It’s even more interesting to see how they come true, but more instructive to see how they don’t. And I’m getting away from retrospective thinking and leaning more into forward thinking that’s constructive and applicable right away to whatever I’m on about. Which is preserving voices and ideas that need to be.

I’m aiming to have a no buy year outside of some books but even those will likely be few and far between. It’s going to be a bit of a “down” year where I’m setting up systems going forward. 

I went to sleep around 830 while Emily stayed up a while longer. But when I woke up around 11 with constipation issues her light was out. Neither of us had the energy to see this year out. But being forced to sit here in frustration, I went on Sublime and saw something I didn’t expect, a short essay by Isaac Asimov called whatever you wish. He saw this future coming, where machines could replace much of what we think of as work. And he saw it as a good thing. He wrote of “teaching machines” and the great expansion of the liberal arts. 

AI, then, isn’t the issue, as I’ve said before. It’s that most people see the nature of work changing and they see only a void… but this isn’t really true as long as society still finds a way to function and those who aren’t doing the high tech work will find plenty to occupy them if they are willing to look for it. And the crazy thing, we are pretty much already there! These next few years are going to be a breakdown of systems that we’re not that humane to begin with. Yes there will be a lot of suffering, but these may just be necessary growing pains. Once AI takes over so much of the repetitive labor, it will free up humanity to do what we do best, really cool and spontaneous shit. I just worry that it’s going to take a while for most people to figure that out. 

But I suppose that’s not my issue. It is however my issue what to do with myself. When I’m faced with the idea of “whatever you wish” it’s simply for people to be civil so that I have someone to share my ideas with outside my own house. Perhaps that day is not far off. But it certainly isn’t today and won’t be tomorrow. So it seems that the next couple years will indeed be preparation for that better time I must hope will come. The one Asimov hoped for, and may still become a reality. 

We must then, all aspire to be better, cooperative, collaborative, and seek ways to create an outsized value for fellow humanity. We have the tools, but rather than let them be generative, we must use them to be iterative, constructive, and as vehicles for our aspirations, not to spill our guts into the toxic emptiness of “productivity.” And right now, I’m not feeling particularly aspirational. I need to change that in a hurry. 

I find myself pondering my own complacency in language and my lack of seeking cadence and musicality in my words, something I was finding before generative AI came and upset my creative process by attempting to compete with it for some reason. Several of my projects reek of my early experiments with large language models and while the quantitative output is impressive, the qualitative results I’m not proud of at all. 

So this will be a year or two of stripping back the excess. This will be a year of austerity of content. I’m not looking to create or consume as much as curate, refine, and reframe. My aim is no longer to instruct or guide as much as make my words more of a conduit. I have a bad habit of coming off obtuse when I don’t intend to be. I must inject some of the lost poet in me back into my continued work. I must push forward but to do so involves collecting the final stragglers of my past missteps into my new collective imagination going forward. What may be my quietest year in over a decade online may ultimately be my most soul searching. I can’t let anyone or anything distract me now. Not even the siren song of the dreamiest dream came true.