Mark Coatney, long-suffering digital media pioneer (Time! Newsweek! Tumblr! Al Jazeera!), gets me to finally read a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin and I loved it. Topics include our changing world, what the world is for, preindustrial longing, why we should maybe recognize that media companies are ephemeral things, the pitfalls of power, lame AI, floating orbs of light, humans imitating machines, why humans like things, leaky boats as a metaphor for a lot of software, and the fact that any human power can be changed by human beings – including, possibly, the power contained within ourselves.

Many thanks to Mark for coming out to record with me at Yale. Huge treat to get some time with him in real life.

Tons of shownotes!

• The passage from Analogia by George Dyson that I refer to: “The Apache was a hard foe to subdue,” according to John Gregory Bourke, “not because he was full of wiles and tricks and experienced in all that pertains to the art of war, but because he had so few artificial wants and depended almost absolutely on what his great mother – Nature – stood ready to supply. Our government had never been able to starve any of them until it had them placed on a reservation.”
• Tales of the Tyrant, the story about Saddam Hussein mentioned by Mark.
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
• Social media and the Arab Spring
• Facebook’s Oversight Board
• Biz Stone’s tweet revealing the weight of having to deal with Twitter accidentally becoming a non-state actor
• Planetary Boundaries
• Le Guin’s acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation Medal, which includes this phenomenal passage: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
• Simon Willison on NotebookLM’s AI podcast generator
• Mark’s (is it really Mark’s?) NotebookLM-generated podcast about Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence”
• “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art” by Ted Chiang
• Literally Unbelievable
• Domi & JD Beck covering “Flim” by Aphex Twin
• “Girl/Boy Song” by Aphex Twin
• How Russell Holzman teaches himself how to play breakbeats live
• Day Million
• Tracking bird populations with radar data
• The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling