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Good morning. Today's issue is being written from the reading chair because the writing desk is covered with hundreds of puzzle pieces. Because I took the better part of a week off work at the beginning of the month, I find myself uncharacteristically prepared for the necessary rituals of the holiday season. I have decided to spend the time I've saved by breaking out a new 1000-piece Magic Jigsaw Puzzle pre-Xmas to happily spend useless hours listening to music and podcasts while my hands are kept busy and my eyes are off-screen.
Labyrinth Locator
Tomorrow is the Winter Solstice (for folks in the Northern Hemisphere) and my family doesn't have a tradition around this event. In years past, generous friends have invited us over to gather and to share the warmth of their backyard fire-pit. Some of these friends write down their intentions for the new year and what they want to leave behind on a piece of paper that they then burn on the first day of Winter.
This year, I'm going to try to convince my family to do a labyrinth walk to mark the change of seasons. When I floated the idea yesterday, they were open to it although my kiddos didn't really understand the significance of walking a labyrinth path. The last labyrinth I walked was the High Park Labyrinth. A walking meditation, its circles are a reminder of natural cycles, of the seasons and of nature, making the park a perfect home for the labyrinth symbol. It has graced the contemplative thoughts of thousands of people who have known about it’s presence or happened upon it. The High Park Labyrinth is open to seasonal celebrations for many different groups, is used by schools, teachers, camp leaders, people recovering from illness, grief or other problems, and also by those who are just enjoying a walk through the park.
You can find nearby labyrinths using the Labyrinth Locator but I would also suggest using your favourite online mapping service as well, as there are well-established non-traditional labyrinths (like the Stockade Labyrinth) that don't seem to be included in the Locator. You might still be able to find Labyrinths in the London Underground. Years ago, I stumbled upon a couple of them while I was in the city, and as artist Mark Wallinger has noted, it is an apt symbol of a complicated set of passages that millions of people pass through from home to work and then to home again. The Grandmother Hypothesis
You are reading the newsletter of a middle-aged woman and so it should not be too surprising that I would be low-key obsessed by the idea that one's life journey can be seen as a labyrinth. This concept felt like a clever literary device to me when I read Larry's Party when I was young and in university so many years ago, but now it feels like an obvious truth.
Once you orientate yourself to this idea, aging doesn't feel like moving towards an end, but to a return. You can do the same things that you first learned as a young person, but you have to scale back the scope of the work. Menopause is reversed adolescence. I was introduced to the idea that 'menopause is reversed adolescence' from Dr. Jen Gunter. I also believe that she was the person who introduced me to the idea that "the evolutionary advantage of menopause is grandmothers." This is what is known as the Grandmother Hypothesis. (Please note that while the name of this hypothesis is gendered, the theory, from my understanding, does include alloparents who provide non-family care). When I was preparing for my talk about artificial intelligence earlier this month, I did some more reading up on the work of child development scholar Alison Gopnik. I found this lecture that she gave at the Johns Hopkins Natural Philosophy Forum on "The Evolution of Human Intelligences: Exploit, Explore, Empower" as both accessible and enlightening. I've linked to my favourite passage in the talk: when she states that there are multiple intelligences that come into play as we progress through our lives. And she is so mean to 35 year olds! Too much has been written about the fever dreams of company founders of Ai who position large language models as a tool for tactical advantage in whatever struggle comes with a market opportunity. And yet, there are theories that humans developed language specifically so we could better care for children. Gramsci’s Nightmare
Meanwhile, Sam Altman cannot imagine how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT.
What a nightmare. Large language models – the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT – work by ingesting a civilization’s worth of texts and calculating the relationships between these words. Within these relationships is a great deal of knowledge about the world, which allows LLMs to generate text that is frequently accurate, helpful and useful. Also embedded in those word relationships are countless biases and presumptions associated with the civilization that produced them. In the case of LLMs, the producers of these texts are disproportionately contributors to the early 21st century open internet, particularly Wikipedians, bloggers and other online writers, whose values and worldviews are now deeply embedded in opaque piles of linear algebra.
This is the first part of the abstract of Ethan Zukerman's November talk entitled, Gramsci’s Nightmare: AI, Platform Power and the Automation of Cultural Hegemony. I'm sharing it here not because I agree with its conclusion (which I don't think I do), but because this essay is an accessible introduction to the work of political philosopher Antonio Gramsci. One reason why it feels like we are in a perpetual culture war is because the right have embraced some of Gramsci's ideas and now believe that "politics is downstream of culture." Political philosopher Antonio Gramsci believed that overcoming unfair economic and political systems required not just physical struggle (war of maneuver) but the longer work of transforming culture and the institutions that shape it (war of position.) But the rising power of LLMs and the platform companies behind them present a serious challenge for neo-Gramscians (and, frankly, for anyone seeking social transformation). LLMs are inherently conservative technologies, instantiating the historic bloc that created LLMs into code that is difficult to modify, even for ideologically motivated tech billionaires.
The Allusionist reads A Christmas Carol
I'm adding a bonus recommendation because I cannot bear ending today's newsletter on a bummer, especially as we are entering a season of being restive and festive. Let me share what I'm going to listen to as I do my puzzle later today:
Streamed live on Dec 19, 2024 The Allusionist reads A Christmas Carol Join the Allusionist for the first of four livestreams of the "redistribute the wealth! You can't take it with you!" fable for our times: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Helen Zaltzman reads (aloud - you won't just have to watch her quietly turning pages) with music and visuals by Martin Austwick.
If you want to read along with your own book, do! This first stream will be Stave 1 of the book, wherein Scrooge is going about his daytime business of work, more work, and making other people's lives worse, then that night he is visited by the ghost of his late business partner Jacob Marley.
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