Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1057
Robert Moses' tech bros, road ecology, bigger ambition bigger unintended consequences, a toothpaste lid holder shaped like rock fingers, Poptone as Tones on Tail, Jane's song
Good morning! Tuesday, oh fun. My hardest day. I can get through it, no fear. I am in good spirits. Had to get up even earlier today, so I could walk over to the other house and get my truck because I left it there last night. Complicated automobile logistics going on over here while my mom and aunt are visiting. But no matter, I am ready, I am ready.
Thank you for all the pool reviews. Could still use a few more, so if you are interested in leaving a review for our pool company on Google, drop me a line and I’ll send you the link.
And reminder if you want a holiday card from us, fill this form out. Unless you’ve gotten one in the past, you don’t need to then.
Finally got around to picking my book back up after, oh, three weeks of passing out and getting as much sleep as possible and not reading before bed. It is a book about road ecology. It frickin rules. Every time I read a book like this, I am stunned at a whole new world of learning, of facts flooding into me. Something I should have understood but never did. A world of information that I had always idly wondered about, but never bothered to dig into. It is horizon opening, and I love that about books so much.
I’m not very far into it yet, but once again, reading a book like this lays bare our society’s absolute absurdity in spending so much time focusing on tech titans. They’re just so boring, and they do nothing. AI doesn’t mean shit. Literally the only thing it could meaningfully do for us is kill us. It is absurd how much time we spend on “time saving” devices. Think we’ve maybe done enough in that field.
By contrast there is a dude who discovered that deer migrate. Not all deer, but the western mule deer, at least. Mind you, he discovered this in the nineties and it took him well into the 21st century to get a good idea about it. When they built I-80 it was a catastrophe. Cut deer off from their migratory trails. They wouldn’t cross the road. Snow storms would come and thousands of deer would just die on the side of I-80, because they wouldn’t cross and head south. It took us thirty years to solve this problem, and it was mainly cuz of this one dude (and his team, his students, etc, no great man theory going on here but that is a topic for another time). So then they started making deer paths under the roads. This took some convincing cuz, you know, Republicans, but the hunters liked it and the oil companies liked it and it would save money — the dude said his single greatest accomplishment was performing a cost-benefit analysis to convince the Wyoming DOT to make deer crossings and that they would save money.
Now we build deer crossings everywhere and they have reduced deer deaths 90%.
Tell me why we don’t know this guy’s name. Tell me why he’s not on the cover of magazines instead of Elon Musk and Sam Altman.
Slowly coming to the realization that roads are terrible and it is a giant bummer I am not happy about this at all. They kill animals, disrupt migratory paths, they harm the environment and they facilitate the sloughing off of microplastics from tires that dumps millions of tons of pollution all over our environment.
That last one is fixable — people are working on systems that will mitgate the plastic sloughing. And we will fix that eventually. It will take a decade, probably two, at least, for the scientists to convince the Republicans and the future’s version of Joe Biden that we need to pass laws and put these things on all cars. No one will want to do it, but eventually we’ll get there, I suspect. And the people who accomplish this — the people who invent these devices, the people who fight for their implementation — will have accomplished something monumental, reducing the pollution in our environment by millions of tons.
And we will never know any of their names.
And we’ll still be arguing about AI and Crypto.
It is becoming undeniable to me that “tech” is no longer an industry and it’s certainly not the bleeding edge of science. The “tech industry” is a boring-ass capitalist enterprise of destruction and pointlessness like Union Carbide or Monsanto. It is not exciting or new, it’s just another vector for capitalism to fuck us all up. It’s self-fulfilling, because we pay attention to it. We think AI is some important thing because we pay attention to it.
Meanwhile there is a world of monumental science and activism and social progress and upheaval happening that no one talks about and VCs can’t even bother to pay attention to.
Roads, man. Highways were invented by the Tech Bros of the day. There is a line in The Power Broker about how Robert Moses could get all the best and the brightest emoloyees because it was where the action was, the most innovative technology of the day. He became a feeder for the new deal and the National Highway Administration and all those 1940’s and 50’s tech bros made the Interstate System and….
…it was a monumental environmental disaster that thousands of people are spending decades and billions cleaning up….
…while the tech bros extoll it as “America at its best” and “when America built” and go on to find some “cool” new industry to work on, fuck things up, and leave a mess for the grown-ups to clean up.
So maybe I am into Amazon’s drone delivery efforts now, so I can, you know, get toothpaste cap holders without feeling road guilt on top of the boat guilt. Except those drones will kill a bunch of birds and god knows what else if they achieve scale, so I guess not. So this whole being an island off in the wilderness and getting everything delivered to you is terrible in even more ways that I thought about before. And we should all live in cities. Except cities suck because they make you live in 200 square feet and no artist can live in 200 square feet and feel inspired, and we are a broken country so we’ll never make comfortable city living affordable and all of that is just a rationalization because *i* am weak and cannot live in 400 square feet anymore, it is my moral failing. But I would totally move back to a city if I could have space.
Roads are terrible, running away to Mars after you fucked up the planet is terrible, evil social media is terrible, Elon should sell off Twitter and Tesla and SpaceX and focus on the Boring company maybe we could make all our Interstates underground so we don’t kill the deer or the frogs (god, the poor frogs. At least the deer stop when there’s traffic. The frogs just plow forward).
I do not consider myself exempt from this. I remember back when I was doing Barbarian and working for Apple and Google and Facebook and whatnot, I told myself we were different than the legacy capitalism before me. We weren’t really polluting, we weren’t really starting wars or killing people. And it was sort of true, but at the time I was mentally drawing a blank spot on the map around carbon emissions for data centers. I knew about carbon emissions and carbon neutrality, but I just sort of… conveniently didn’t think about data centers.
Or when I started that group on Livejournal in 2001 or so about how I really really didn’t like this one band and thought the lead singer was terrible and it was funny to make an anti-fan group about them. Eventually, before too long, I realized this was hugely bad Karma and I did not feel good about myself, and I shut down that little rapidly growing community. But I did not think about the larger societal ramifications, about what it would be like if that behavior was multiplied by millions.
Not for decades.
And these days I’m left with a profound realization that scale matters. We can never know the second-order negative side effects of the things we do. But what we do know is that the bigger the scale, the bigger the size of the unforeseen side effects. It is absolute hubris and stupidity to believe otherwise. Ambition in scale is hubris, and will lead to giant problems that other grown-ups will have to clean up down the road.
The only way to win is to not play, like Joshua says.
I was so dumb choosing a smart person job I shoulda just gone to a trade school. Maybe the Webb Institute of Naval Architecture. No relation.
I got a ring holder, it is pretty cool, it works for holding my toothpaste cap. It is too big, which is a bummer. But it also has to be too big in order to not slide around. Thus I am convinced that ceramic is not the right material for this thing. According to this obviously very authoritative list of the heaviest materials on earth, I should make this thing of Osmium or Iridium or Platinum. Hrm. Tungsten. Ranks number 6. Is Tungsten cheap?
Also, my toothpaste is red, and the toothpaste cap leaves little red toothpaste marks on the ring holder. And the ring holder I purchased is shaped like a hand doing a rock-and-roll symbol, so now it looks like the hand is bleeding, and that is really punk rock, so.. bonus.
Cruel World is back and I was momentarily insanely excited because it says at the bottom that Tones on Tail are playing. But I smelled a rat from the getgo. They’re not listed with the other bands, they’re listed as special guests, but not in, like, large type like a headliner. So what gives? And Daniel Ash has said more than once that Glenn Campling, former Bauhaus roadie and Tones on Tail bassist, is done with the band. So when I saw them there, I wondered if Glenn Campling came round. He is still decently active on social media and has released a few great soundboard recordings from “back in the day” and if I recall correctly (I confess I haven’t checked in on Glenn Campling’s social in a couple years), was still making music. So maybe it was possible that Tones on Tail were getting back together.
But nope. Apparently all that’s changed is that Glenn gave Daniel permission to use the name without him, something that Daniel wouldn’t do before. So I guess good on Daniel, but really all this is is Poptone, Daniel’s previous effort at touring Tones on Tail songs. Don’t get me wrong, Poptone was fucking awesome and I am super happy to have seen them and I would go see them again in a heartbeat and I am deeply thankful they were selling Tones on Tail merch and so now I have a semi-official (recently upgraded to official?) Tones on Tail shirt.
But I don’t need to fly to California for it. Hopefully he tours it again.
My god imagine Poptone/Tones on Tail at Cat’s Cradle I would lose my mind.
This morning on the drive to school Jane sang a made up song the whole way there. I really really want to know who she is singing about. She said at one point that she has a memorable name but you can’t even remember my name and it felt kinda riot girly. It was definitely a bit confrontational, the song, but then she also sang about love. I lost my head and asked her who the song was about but then checked myself and said it was art it doesn’t have to be about anyone. Don’t want her getting that artist complex about worrying about what people think about your art like yours truly. I will endeavor to not burden her with that. Also I fucked up and told the PTA lady, in front of Jane, that she was “stubborn” because she doesn’t wear her coat in the morning (it was 38 degrees). I am proud of being stubborn, I consider it a positive trait, but Emma is clear we don’t imprint personality traits on our daughter, she lets them grow and develop on her own and I try to respect that. So. Whoops.
Man I am ready to be done with mixes. Only have about fourteen more to go until my holiday break and THE NEW SYSTEM. That’ll be exciting. But a topic for another day. Noise and metal it is. Just checked in and there is a new Cradle of Filth song this year that is kind of exciting. Very into my purchase of the Invada record club thank you Bill for that recommendation. New Godflesh is a bit.. I mean, it’s Godflesh, no complaints but I miss their dubby vibes. Sometimes I wonder if Justin Broderick should try and make an album where all his bands are mixed into one. This Boris/Uniform album is great but I just learned there’s a new Boris/Merzbow too so that is exciting.
Hey you be careful out there, okay? Drive safe.
What's the link to the spotify playlist? Clicking the image just opens the image.