Last year I produced a series of conversations on thinking through technology and society, including with L.M. Sacasas, David Cayley, and Elke Schwarz. Some of the most productive were with my friend and colleague, Pete Chambers, a scholar based at RMIT University in Melbourne, whose work engages with traditions of critical and social theory.

W. H. Auden, ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’. For more: ‘A Poem (and a Painting) About the Suffering That Hides in Plain Sight’.

When a dam breaks, we can be confident bad things will follow. To what extent we can accurately forecast where exactly the water will rush to, what the precise damage will be, that is much more difficult to predict, as Falconer explains. War is much the same. Wars are a distinctive mixture of highly contingent, historically distinctive features and relatively constant dynamics that tend to reappear.

Josef Adalian and Lane Brown have written a thought provoking article about the state of the television industry, ‘The Binge Purge’. What is remarkable is how much of what is being described could be applied more broadly to describe many industries and institutions today.

I find myself in a disposable hotel, a place that could not have existed 10-15 years, and most likely will not exist again at some point in the near to medium term future when we are forced to consider more what we choose to build and consume.

I recently returned from a 5 day trip to Shanghai, my first visit to the city and the country since late 2019. It was interesting and instructive being back. While it was a short and incomplete visit, I thought it might be worthwhile sharing some observations, especially given that the vast majority of content on China is being produced at distance and with little direct engagement.

Substack has been constantly reminding me of my failure to publish new notes. This is not exactly surprising. It is a model that encourages a ‘pump and dump’ approach to writing, the content monster is always hungry.

In a prior note, I reflected on ‘time, for what purpose?’. One prompt for it was the Japanese term, ‘time performance’, used to evaluate the supposed value of time spent on an activity. As with so much of the present moment, it is both logically consistent and absurd.

In Japan, the sakura are falling. Perhaps elsewhere, too.

My aim in this series is to think through the likely trajectory of current AI-technologies, and what some of the potential ramifications might be (notes one and two). In doing so, I’m not attempting to assess how powerful these current models are or could become, but assuming that they have reached a stage of development consequential enough to be impactful.

In the first note thinking through the arrival of ChatGPT and the incipient AI arms race, I suggested Shoshana Zuboff’s work on surveillance capitalism as an important reference point. The behaviour of big tech over the last 15 years offers a clear track record of what we might expect, and it does not look promising.