Twee stukken over vertelkunst: de manier waarop we verhalen vertellen. Kort, want het ligt al lang op de plank.
Discworld (nog niet gelezen) is anders dan andere fantasy, omdat het meer ‘regels’ schendt dan meestal. De analyse vergelijkt het met In de Ban van de Ring van Tolkien, wat een heldenverhaal is (jammer dat Tom Bombadil buiten de analyse is gehouden overigens), voedsel voor authoriteitsdenken zoals helaas weer trending is. Discworld is meer gefocust op de wereld, hoe deze in feite werkt, en hoe je daarbinnen zelf doelen kun stellen en nastreven. Ik moet die boeken lezen.
De letterlijkheid rukt op, over hoe met name in film de kijker van het zelf denken en fantaseren wordt ontheven. Ik mis hier wel het feit dat streamers die letterlijkheid en redundantie expres inbouwen om met het moderne ‘achtergrondkijken’ te dealen. Wat niet wil zeggen dat het een bedenkelijke trend is.
Somebody writes about how expertise cannot be fully codified, and thus never fully taught through passive learning (books). One must have some (or a lot) of experience to become “street smart”, instead of merely “book smart”.
Most interesting is the corollary, especially for organisations: if you train personell to be book smart, they’ll only be able to cope with the scenario’s codified therein, and be generally lost when it comes to creative problem solving. Brain-on-rails. This is basically the point Bert Hubert made: it takes expertise to be able to know what expertise is, and by outsourcing all expertise the expertise to succesfully outsource is lost. A problem often encountered in government. Moreover, these process-heavy environments actively repel skill and epxertise, so it is a kind of downward spiral. Arre Zuurmond’s solution is simple: liberate experts from this kind of process-bureaucracy.
At Jacobin an interesting exploration of how different methods can produce different GDP numbers, and how we (official statistics) might require methodological updating. The article explores a Dutch-developed method in particular: the Penn World Table. If I understand correctly, it does not use official exchanges rates to produce GDP number in a single currency (almost always, or always, USD), but purchasing power parity tables, which track real costs over time of baskets of products, which generates a price index which can be compared to different countries.
Gives you a good idea of what goes on in official statistics, and what the impact is on key figures you’ve heard about and your government uses to determine policy.
Apart from all the other terrible things happening, Minneapolis is showing us what descendance into fascism looks like. The Minneapolis major was on the Daily Show with a very clear story and message, which should raise those gun-totin’ Americans in an uproar, one would think. I listen to the Heavyweight podcast, whose main lead lives in this city, and who’d be telling exactly the kind of stories you’d expect are now plentiful there. The latest episode is about the events, and the way his wife tells here experience, just one word popped into my mind: razzia.
In Dutch, this sort of “raid” would be (but isn’t much) translated as “razzia”, which means a very specific kind of raid, namely the sort of raids ICE are conducting. Looking to find people with a certain status and ethnicity, people who’ve almost always settled here ages, generations ago, are part of their communities but can be distinguished if you insist by having some customs or skin color that never was a problem in their communities but can be made into a problem if you have an army of brownshirts looking for something to do, something to hate.
The ascendance of Trump and the extreme-right in the US have made it hard to avoid Godwin’s like the word “razzia”, so let’s try the following. Imagine we are living in Germany late thirties, and let’s take stock of how the government, public discourse and the national conversation have changed in recent years. Fascists, or if that’s too strong a word for you, fascist-admirers have taken control over the government. Not quite through elections, which then were cancelled because why would they now me necessary? A clear vision on who is desirable (white Aryans) and who isn’t (the rest, with a certain hierarchy) and who can be freely blamed instead of solving problems is established. Most aren’t part of the undesirables, but many are, and certainly in more urban areas do people know, interact, live with, marry with the undesirables. A new quasi police force is not really there to dispense justice but to harrass, bully and even “accidentally” murder the out-group. They sometimes do that by way of raids, or razzias: a group will attempt to discover and “arrest” all out-group people present in a certain area, street or block. First, things happen far away, then, they happen in your street.
How can you possibly ignore the huge commonalities?
One of the first studies on the relationship between AI and work shows an interesting and solid result: AI intensifies work, it does not reduce it. Even without that conclusion, it’s an interesting article because we all want to understand how our work is going to change.
I have to think of who’s been pocketing advances in productivity ever since Keynes speculated about the 15 hour work week: not workers! And a lot of workers undestandibly don’t mind this, because productivity can give you an advantage that doesn’t save time, but earn you more money. And guess what people, business owners and employees alike, overwhelmingly prefer?
I also have to think about addiction, obesity, mental issues due to social media overuse; we as a biological species are not programmed for surplus, we don’t know how to set our own goals and boundaries. Plus, we measure against peers, so we don’t want the same house but a 15 hour work week, we want a 40 hour work week and a bigger house, just like the neighbour. Or at least, many people can’t make that decision.
As scarcity decreasingly is an issue, I wonder when, or if, our species will ever adapt and simply choose a level and state we are comfortable in without feeling pressure or need to stay in the rat race.