Musings of the Obsessive Kind

What I finished:

+ Listened to More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker.

WHAT A BANGER! I anticipated that this would be about how fucked up our tech overlords' worldviews are from a moral and public policy perspective, and that certainly played a large part in it. But it ended up being more about why they're wrong about the very tech they're hyping--why the claims they make are not actually possible given, like, physics and the nature of the universe. Which is not an angle I'd seen explored before, and I would have expected it to all be over my head. But Becker is absolutely fantastic at explaining complicated tech and science-y things in a way that I could understand--at least enough to know that these Silicon Valley guys are full of shit.

The moral arguments are woven into all of this; Becker has a lovely humanist approach to the world and a deep appreciation for the humanities. He's clearly repulsed by the perspectives and priorities of the people who are running our digital world (and, increasingly, our physical one as well), so I felt safe in his hands. I often feel alienated from STEM subjects both because math doesn't come easily to me and because the current discourse around it seems so anti-human to me. But Becker reminded me that there's really no boundary between the humanities and STEM and that if you appreciate both, you better serve whichever one you're focused on. Life, nature, the universe is one interwoven textile and needs to be understood as such.

The more I learn about the decision-making class in Silicon Valley, the more I believe that they hate all the things that make us human--art, care, struggle, nature, bodies, again, death, humility, the mutuality of relationships. All of these people are absolutely terrified of death and yet, if they did succeed in their (futile) endeavors to live forever, what would they do with all that time? They're certainly not investing in learning about the world as it is or getting to know other people or creating beautiful things or just enjoying nature. So what would be the point of living forever? They have no answer to this and if they weren't doing such terrible, terrible things to our society and nature, I would feel profound pity for them. As it is, I'm just angry. It's baffling to me that we allow the most morally vacuous people in the world to make consequential decisions about the fate of humanity.

My one complaint is that I wish Becker had read the book himself. Judging by his new podcast Dreaming Against the Machine, he's got the voice for it, and I always, always prefer to have the writer read the book if it's possible. The guy who read it did fine, but there's just no replacing the personality of a writer.

+ Read The House of the Patriarch, the 18th Benjamin January series. You may ask yourself, "Is 18 simply too many books in this series?" And the answer is "NO!!!!" There can never be too many books in this series!

For those of you who are new to my favorite currently-being-written series of books: these historical mysteries follow Benjamin January, a free man of color, in 1830s-40s New Orleans and beyond. The mysteries are good, but they're really an excuse to explore Ben's world: the complicated and colorful people he knows and loves and fears and hates, the vivid and singular and meticulously-researched world of antebellum New Orleans. These are books about power and oppression, about resisting it and not being able to resist it, about building relationships with people who are very different than you are, about how those relationships are really the only thing worth anything in a world of darkness and cruelty. I love them with all my heart.

This is one of the not-in-New Orleans books; Ben is searching for a young white woman who disappeared in upstate New York's "burnt over district" in a time of weird religious groups. A favorite topic of mine! My first thought was, "We're going to get a Joseph Smith cameo!" but no, we're a few years after he left for Illinois, so while he's mentioned a time or two he does not show up. The historical cameo we do get is much more unexpected and made me laugh. The cameos are always such a fun part of the not-in-New-Orleans books, and Hambly's writing is grounded enough that Ben never quite turns into the Forrest Gump of the antebellum US (and Mexico and Cuba and France and wherever else he goes!).

The mystery itself is engaging--I was very invested in Eve Russell, who became one of my favorite one-off characters--and, as usual, Hambly makes fantastic use of a period of American history that doesn't get a lot of fictional attention. I especially appreciated that palpable danger that the non-white characters were in even in ostensibly "free" New York--there are traffickers everywhere just waiting to capture free black people and sell them into slavery down south. No one can breathe easy because everyone is in danger all the time. Of all the fictional media I've encountered, this series as a body of work is one of the best at communicating the totality of the chattel slavery system--how it affected every single thing about life for black people, every moment of every day. How no one was ever, ever safe and how hard people had to fight for even the relative safety that a few were able to find. How it tainted the whole society, how it curdled souls. I always come away with an understanding of just why the Civil War had to happen, why the abolitionist movement probably never would have succeeded without violence. Slavery had to be ripped out at the roots.

Anyway, since we weren't in New Orleans, I missed Rose and Hannibal and Livia and Dominique and Shaw and Olympe and everybody back home, but we did get some excellent Chloe scenes, which are always a bonus! (Chloe!!!) As usual, I spent the whole book going, "When will Ben get to go home? When will he get to have a bath and a good meal and a full night's sleep and see his wife and children???" because nobody whumps their main character the way Hambly does.

But somehow no matter how dark the subject matter of these books are, they never make me feel hopeless. Heavy with the reminder of all the things that people do to each other, yes, but also fiercely grateful for all the ways we find to take care of each other. Gah, I love these books!

+ Listened to Culture Creep by Alice Bolin, a collection of essays at the intersection of feminism and pop culture. Your degree of enjoyment will depend largely on how willing you are to read personal essays that dive deep into things that most people would say "it's not that deep" about (Animal Crossing, wellness tracking, teen magazines, the Playboy Mansion). Most people's eyes would probably glaze over, and honestly I'm not sure if I would have kept up with this if I was reading it, but listening to it while working was enjoyable enough. I don't care for memoir as a genre unless the writer is really freaking fantastic, so when things are too person, I tend to check out, but this managed to be rooted enough in the texts themselves for me to never do that, and Bolin has some really sharp insights throughout. All in all a fine audiobook experience.


What I'm currently reading:

+ Listening to God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O'Gieblyn. Well this is a unique book! It's philosophy and technology all tangled up together, at once personal and universal, about the past and the future, meaning and consciousness and nature. O'Gieblyn is incredibly smart and the book is very challenging in a way I appreciate. I also appreciate that she grew up fundamentalist and went to a Bible college before becoming an atheist; there's this one moment where she talks about how a process that took society centuries of bloody struggle (moving from Christian to secular societies) is something that those of us who were raised in rightwing Christianity have to do on our own in the course of a few years, and I have never heard anyone talk about it that way. But yeah, it's really hard to go from "the world is 6,000 years old" to "the universe is billions of years old" and all that those things imply in a short period of time! It's a lot for an individual human being, and she does an incredible job of evoking the disruption of that and also how things linger even when you don't want them to.

+ Reading Hunting Shadows by Charles Todd, 16th in the Inspector Ian Rutledge series of historical mysteries. This series is set in the UK just after WWI and has a shell-shocked Scotland Yard inspector as its protagonist. These are suitably engaging and twisty mysteries for when that's what I want. They kind of all blur together in my head, but that's fine--I don't need everything to be Benjamin January. I don't like cozy mysteries, and these are not, but they also don't lean too far into the gritty darkness either. It's a good balance, well written, and I continue to enjoy this series as I dip in and out of it.