Blackstar
David Bowie died on this day ten years ago, so I watched my favorite music ‘documentary’ once again. It is Moonage Daydream by Brett Morgen, and it is brilliant. Such a dense piece of visual art and storytelling, extremely multifaceted and complex, like Bowie. It took five years to make in total and two years to edit, and it is easy to see why. I also watched the new documentary ‘Bowie: The Final Act,’ and it was good. (If you are in Denmark, watch it here). Also, check out Bowie Bible, what a website (yes, those are still around). And ‘David Bowie – The Last Five Years’ is free to watch on YouTube, recommended.
“At the turn of the 20th century, Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed that God is dead and that man had killed him. This created an arrogance with man that he himself was God. But as God, all he could seem to produce was disaster. That led to a terrifying confusion: for if we could not take the place of God, how could we fill the space we had created within ourselves?”
David Bowie, 2002
Moonage Daydream starts with this quote which leads into this monologue about the nature of time.
There were many things to like about David Bowie besides the music; he loved art and knew a lot about it, was an okay painter himself, read a lot of books, and last but not least, he had a great sense of humor. Some saw him as somewhat distanced and cold person, but he was often very funny in interviews and seemed to enjoy a good laugh at the absurdity of fame, life, and death.
Joy in Repetition
I enjoy taking long walks in novel locations, but what I enjoy even more is my daily walk, which is pretty much the same every day. Or rather always as never before. You cannot step in the same river twice, and the daily walk will always be slightly different even if the route is the same; weather, mood, light, and seasons will change. A good time for thinking, a meditation. So much of life is waves, repetition, routines. It’s all good, as long as joy is part of it. Like a child who laughs 20 times in a row when playing peek-a-boo, or as Prince sang, ‘The song’s a year long and had been playing for months when he walked into the place,’ and where the singer in the song only repeats ‘Love me’ infinitely.
The world outside my window
Yeah, this a color photo.
Where AI is going
AI has become a Rorschach test of sorts; you can tell a lot about a person from their general thoughts and stance on the topic. As with, e.g., social media, it is a complex and complicated thing to grasp, developing and changing constantly, impossible to pin down as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Both AI and SoMe are multidimensional issues, and both can accelerate, distort, and enhance all things that were already in the world, good and bad. But it is clear that the outer extremes for AI are much more radical compared to the effects of SoMe, from ‘existential threat’ on one side to ‘work-free abundant nirvana’ on the other. Some people use AI to become dumber at an alarming rate; other people that were already smart seem to use AI almost as a newfound superpower (although we are still waiting for the first one-person billion-dollar company to arrive, I think?). And the smartest people I know have very different takes on where AI is going. No one knows. But I would warmly recommend listening to ‘The Last Invention podcast’ for nuanced and insightful takes on AI and where we are headed; I have been through all the episodes; it’s really good. (Find it on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts).
Liv Boeree acts it out..
Also, check out ‘The Thinking Game,’ an award-winning documentary about the rapid rise of AI and the possible road towards AGI, featuring DeepMind and the company’s co-founder Demis Hassabis, who I think is fair to call a genius. His first computer was a ZX Spectrum (Yay!), and he grew up with games and gaming (he worked as a game designer at a young age; this article tells that story and more). The movie documents the journey from early attempts to play simple Atari video games on to AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and beyond. One interesting point from the movie: Hassabis insisted that the company should stay in London as he saw a lot of untapped European AI talent. The obvious thing to do would be to relocate to Silicon Valley, but no. The movie presents a somewhat one-sided and probably too positive outlook (no mention of Geoffrey Hinton, OpenAI, and all that took place in parallel to DeepMind’s work). But well worth a watch, and can do that right here: (or see more posts on AI here)
Sundown
LHF: Ask better follow-up questions
The easiest way to have better conversations is simply to ask more questions. Be a little more curious and present, try to listen a bit more (two ears, one mouth and all that). Perhaps we are seeing a side effect of online communication where everything is about the next thing. And of course, it is tempting to quickly follow up on a point by relating it to something you have experienced yourself. Nothing wrong with that, it’s how we connect the dots. But try to acknowledge what the other person is saying by asking a follow-up question or two. Otherwise, the conversation can easily turn into a tedious back-and-forth of “Enough about you, let’s talk about me” affair. When you feel seen, heard and perhaps even understood, you are also much more likely to share more, and the conversation becomes deeper. I am trying to become better at this myself; it is mostly about being aware and just being a little bit curious. That’s it, really.
Oh, and LHF is ‘Low Hanging Fruits,” just super simple little things you can try.
The moon
John Davies Cale / Jack L Kerouac
The moon her magic be, big sad face
Of infinity
An illuminated clay ball
Manifesting many gentlemanly remarks
She kicks a star, clouds forgather
In Scimitar shape, to round her cradle out
Upside down any old time
You can also let the moon fool you
With imaginary orange-balls
Of blazing imaginary light in fright
As eyeballs, hurt and forgathered
Wink to the wince of the seeing
Of a little sprightly otay
Which projects spikes of light
Out the round smooth blue balloon ball
Full of mountains and moons
Deep as the ocean, high as the moon
Low as the lowliest river lagoon
Fish in the tar and pull in the Spar
Billy the Bud and Hanshan Emperor
And all wall moon gazers since Daniel Machree
Yeats see
Gaze at the moon ocean marking the face
In some cases, the moon is you
In any case, the moon
Listen to it here
Stranger Things
I have been know to use Apple Keynote for things it’s not supposed to do. Strange things. And because of Season 5 of the Netflix series, here’s an old attempt at doing the intro in four keynote slides. It was simple enough to get 90% of the way, but (as so often before) the last 10% of a thing often takes 90% the effort (the timing being the main challenge here).
My TRON Moment
The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? Motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see.
And then, one day.. I got in..
Recently I watched the old Tron and the newer TRON: Legacy back-to-back. There are plenty of ridiculous elements in the first film, but at the same time it carried this extraordinary idea: a virtual world with geography and spatial depth inside the computer. Back then it hit something deep in the emerging hacker- and computer culture and became a kind of beacon. For many of us. For me too.
Shortly after seeing the original Tron in the cinema, I had my own personal Tron-moment. In the eighties, if you wanted anything creative to happen on a computer, you had to code it yourself. I had written a Pac-Man clone in a version of BASIC that could be compiled, so it ran absurdly fast. The ghosts were programmed to turn around when they hit a wall, but at the top of the screen I had a score counter, and I had forgotten to tell the ghosts that they also needed to turn if they entered that area. While testing the game, one of the four ghosts suddenly disappeared from the maze—it simply escaped through the hole in my code.
I stopped the program and typed “LIST” to inspect the source. But what had happened was that the ghost had carved its way straight down through the program lines and destroyed them. On a ZX81 the screen memory lived dangerously close to the area used for code, and I just caught a glimpse of how the ghost, like Flynn on his light cycle, had left the arena and driven into the “forbidden” zone. For a couple of seconds the shredded program flickered on the screen. And then the computer crashed.
It was a wild moment. People are welcome to chuckle here, but for me it was a strangely defining moment. The idea that something inside the computer could feel that physical, that concrete, never left me. Later Gibson and the rest came along and filled cyberspace with language and imagery, but for me it was the Tron-mythology that stuck. Today we live with fifteen–twenty layers of abstraction between the CPU and the interface we touch, but back then there were only a couple of thin membranes between the user and the hardware’s heart. Oh, and here’s a similar story, even more TRON than mine. (Thanks, Michael Knudsen)
Digging too deep into the datamine
Many years ago, I took on a somewhat ‘special’ freelance job. It was for Jubii, the big Danish portal I also wrote newsletters for. They were planning to launch a new section called “Jubii Lir’kassen” – a large collection of all that ‘humorous’ stuff office workers forward to each other via Outlook. The raw material was a big, unfiltered lump of content pulled from Lycos, which owned Jubii at the time (2003). Lycos already had an “Absolute Viral Golden Collection” in several countries, and my task was to censor, categorize, and describe the content prior to the Danish launch. Looking back, it was very much the shape of things to come, and not in a good way..
At first glance, it seemed like a fun way to spend a couple of days. I can’t recall how many items there were in total – but we’re talking a lower-end four-digit number. The pay was five-digit, and I figured that if I could finish it in no more than three days, I’d walk away with a decent hourly wage. So, early that first morning, I cheerfully launched into the task, actually looking forward to a few unpretentious days as a metadata slave. Because of the content management system, the work had to be done on a PC – and even though such a Windows XP contraption had never set foot inside Tveskov HQ before, I managed to get hold of one thanks to my brother Thomas. So I settled in with my big coffee mug within arm’s reach, in front of the humming, buzzing machine with its big thick CRT screen, and began working through the pile of ‘content.
Very quickly, I discovered that a high number of people from corporate environments have a close relationship with their Office suite. A huge amount of funny cat pictures, death videos, and gag cartoons were buried deep inside Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and even Excel spreadsheets. People use the tools they know, and instead of simply forwarding a funny JPEG, many of those with a “PC driver’s license” embedded the images where they felt more in control. Good for them, bad for me – the constant switching between Office programs and the CMS system felt like wading through thick, sticky syrup, not a pleasant sensation with that much work ahead.
And of course, it’s never great to sit at a computer you don’t know well. The mouse feels off, the keys are arranged just differently enough to be annoying. Around lunchtime on day one, I began to realize the project would take significantly longer than I had expected.
But what really started to gnaw at me wasn’t the time. It was the stuff upon my screen.
I have never, in such a short span, seen so many people get hit by trains, buses, cars, bicycles, dogs, and other moving objects. There was also an overwhelming number of amazing soccer goals, kids falling in “funny” ways, vomit, broken limbs, and racy jokes, of course styled in Comic Sans and garnished with an absurd number of smileys. It was as if the entire decline of Western civilization passed through me, via small bite-sized nuggets of digital garbage.
Julia Allison (remember her?) once said that there are three things that bring success online: funny, boobs, and kittens. Oh Allison, if only you knew how right you were.
Gradually I realized it’s a rough life being a day laborer in the data mines deep down in the belly of the big portals. After day one, I was completely empty and numb, but still in fairly good spirits. When I shut down the PC on day two, I wasn’t so sure anymore. Especially after going through all the videos that didn’t get approved because they were too bizarre, too violent, or otherwise inappropriate for the general public. All that death and dismemberment. The whole thing started to feel like a deranged Word-based RPG where the gameplay couldn’t get sleazy or extreme enough.
Remember poor Alex at the end of A Clockwork Orange? It was like that.
That night I had evil, evil dreams – cats and puppies being brutally kicked into clip-art soccer goals over and over again by hyperactive Page 3 girls, while I flew off a motorcycle ramp surrounded by drooling, manically grinning babies with enormous eyes staring at me from all sides. And the next morning, it was back down into the data mine again. Fortunately, I’ve repressed most of what I saw back then. I do, however, still remember this little MTV gem I titled “Use the Force, Lorenzo.” Thankfully, there was some harmless and funny material in the pile – it just got harder and harder to spot as time went on.
Like a desperate jet pilot slamming “Eject, Eject” on the escape seat, I was clicking “Reject, Reject” in the CMS system just to make the images disappear. Eventually, it became really difficult to tell which videos crossed the line – a line that got fuzzier and fuzzier as my ability to think clearly faded, while the PC just kept buzzing away as if it couldn’t care less about what was passing through it.
That final day was like a simulated car crash in extreme slow motion. Visual distortions, nausea, and self-pity in equal measure. I was confused and numb. Synapses burned out. Too many inputs. Too much metadata to fill out. Overload. Wish I could forget what I saw. But I got through and got paid.
Game over, man. Insert coin.
... 