💬 Quotes & Concepts
- Job market optimism increased for workers who worked on-site, without the option of remote. Job market optimism decreased among remote workers, hybrid workers, and even workers who worked on-site but have a remote option.
- Higher levels of leadership report higher levels of overall wellbeing. At the same time, they are substantially more likely to report much worse individual days.
- Large U.S. employers are more likely to reduce their workforce after implementing AI; smaller employers are more likely to expand their workforce.
- 18% of U.S. employees said it was “very” or “somewhat” likely their job would be eliminated in the next five years due to technological innovations. In organizations where AI has been implemented, that figure rises to 23%. In some industries, such as finance (32%), insurance (32%) and technology (31%), it is much higher.
💬 A great tidbit from the current read, Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde:
One of Picasso‘s favorite assignments for a young artist was to have him or her try to draw a perfect circle. It can’t be done; everyone draws a circle with some particular distortion, and that distorted circle is your circle, an insight into your style. “Try to make the circle as best you can. And since nobody before you has made a perfect circle, you can be sure that your circle will be completely your own. Only then will you have a chance to be original.” The deviations from the ideal give an insight into the style, and thus, Picasso says, “from errors one gets to know the personality.”
💾 This blog post from Discourse.org on why they are staying open source in the age of AI is really good:
Biological immune systems work because they’re exposed to threats. They encounter pathogens and build memory. An immune system that’s never been challenged will collapse at the first real infection. Open-source codebases work the same way - vulnerabilities that get found and patched make the software harder to attack. Security researchers who read the code add layers of defense, and public audits build institutional knowledge about where the weak points are and how to shore them up.
💬 Viriginia Woolf in her classic essay on How Should One Read A Book?:
If the moralists ask us how we can justify our love of reading, we can make use of some such excuse as this. But if we are honest, we know that no such excuse is needed. It is true that we get nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading; it is true that the wisest of us is unable to say what that pleasure may be. But that pleasure—mysterious, unknown, useless as it is—is enough. That pleasure is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilizing to the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects, that it would not be in the least surprising to discover, on the day of judgment when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain, that the reason why we have grown from pigs to men and women, and come out from our caves, and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat round the fire and talked and drunk and made merry and given to the poor and helped the sick and made pavements and houses and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.
💬 From Ezra Pound:
“You can spot the bad critic when he starts by discussing the poet and not the poem.”
🚀 I learned today that a small art piece called Moon Museum was smuggled onto the moon by multiple artists including Andy Warhol, Forrest Myers, and John Chamberlain during the original Apollo 12 mission. The fact that it was unauthorized is so amusing to me, and feels appropriate.
💬 A good quote from the newsletter of my young buddy Julian The Businessman aka the Youngest Entrepreneur in NYC:
“Even though hard work produces good results, keep trying until you find something easier that will also produce good results”
👔 Gallup’s annual State of the Global Workplace report is one of my favorites. Here are some findings I will be pondering:
🎨 Been fascinated with Jeremiah Goodman’s gorgeous paintings, especially the “garden in hell"— which was the living room of former Vogue Editor-in-Chief, Diana Vreeland. Her eclectic home has inspired an abundance of beautiful derivative works. See attached photos for examples.
💬 David Shurman Wallace on the poetry (and witness) of John Ashberry:
Increasingly, consumers are offered the image of art-making as a subgenre of celebrity, and the works of art themselves are allowed to remain laudable but forgettable byproducts. For the serious reader or writer, perhaps celebrity is beside the point, but most find the social orbit difficult to escape; the result is thousands of voices clamoring against the algorithm, riffing on the same jokes. Poetry — good or bad, distinct or homogenous — is somewhere else… In a time when “the right to be forgotten” — the ability to have one’s internet trail removed from search — feels increasingly difficult to secure, there is something prescient in Ashbery’s inwardness. So much of the beauty of the New York School relied on its essentially non-public interiority — the sense that there was a secret between friends you weren’t quite in on, but might glimpse for a moment. That we are moving away from Ashbery’s aesthetics makes it all the more important to remember the link between the creation of small, informal communities and a curiosity about new language.
💬 Spring has officially arrived and I can’t help but think of one of my favorite love poems, Everyday You Play, by Pablo Neruda. The final stanza especially:
💬 Greg Lukianoff hitting the nail on the head in regards to Afroman’s hilarious victory in court:
This case cut through that: Somebody with power pushes you around. You refuse to grovel. You answer back. You make them look ridiculous. You win. That still has enormous emotional force. It also points to something bigger, which I have thought for years: The story of music in America is, in large part, the story of free speech in America. Free people are not required to speak to authority in the tone of a worried assistant dean. They are allowed to tell power to go to hell.
💬 Have been doing a deep dive into the Fluxus art movement of the 1960’s and am more than a little inspired by the anti-retail shop opened by Robert Filliou and George Brecht, which they named “La Cédille qui Sourit,” or “The cedilla that smiles.”
The thoughtfulness and spirit of the work speaks for itself, but I do adore this tidbit about Filliou, as quoted in JSTOR:
Filliou’s text suggests a fully relational model of subjectivity that, while individual, desires to be fulfilled or made able by connecting to others. It was a model lived by the artist himself, who depended for his survival upon the kindness and generosity of friends, who simply reflected the kindness and generosity of their friend Robert back to him. Well aware that this had become his habitual approach to working and living, he once remarked: The real talent I have is for friendship. Ninety-nine percent of my work is not visible."
This is a vital part of creating what they called a “poetic economy;” a concept that is not going to be leaving me anytime soon. They struggled with the same challenge of being purists versus needing money that many artists struggle with today. What is more important, is that they considered the act of non-creation, failure, and mere ideation, a virtue. They worked hard to not be famous.
When the anti-retail shop inevitably closed, since it was hardly ever open and never really had “inventory”, the artist’s sent out a letter to their friends with the following:
“There is always someone making a fortune, someone going…broke (us in particular)
💬 RE: My last post about Kimiyo Mishima. A quote too good and near to the themes of my heart not to publish explicitly. When asked about her artistic process:
“I just keep playing. I never think of how to sell my works. I have never had ideas like “I should make a piece for sale.” I just make what I want to make, do whatever I want to, and keep making trouble for people around. I just keep playing all the time.”
💬 Duchamp’s short essay on The Creative Act (1957) is a good read for people who like to think about art, but also inadvertently gives one of the best arguments for why utilizing AI generation is so detrimental to an artist’s development:
In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. His struggle toward the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfaction, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the esthetic plane. The result of this struggle is a difference between the intention and its realization, a difference which the artist is not aware of. Consequently, in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act, a link is missing. This gap, representing the inability of the artist to express fully his intention, this difference between what he intended to realize and did realize, is the personal ‘art coefficient’ contained in the work. In other words, the personal ‘art coefficient’ is like an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.
✍️ Back in October, I wrote a dark fiction fable that included a brief rant from an unhinged tech CEO about the connection between war and business. Yesterday morning, Alex Karp of Palantir was on CNBC making the exact same arguments:
On the battlefield, on the commercial battlefield, too, at large companies… our ability to target and take out adversaries and enemies in a way no one else can. I mean, from a not moral perspective, they’re exactly the same; what makes you lethal on the battlefield, and what makes you commercially viable?”
I’m not prescient—this is just how these guys think. They are terribly misguided, even if commercially successful.
💬 From the saintly Simone Weil, in Gravity and Grace:
We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will. Attention is bound up with desire. Not with the will but with desire—or more exactly, consent. We liberate energy in ourselves, but it constantly reattaches itself. How are we to liberate it entirely? We have to desire that it should be done in us—to desire it truly—simply to desire it, not to try to accomplish it. Love is the teacher of gods and men, for no one learns without desiring to learn. Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good.
💬 Nice to come across this very optimistic and well-researched essay on the importance playfulness today:
The most successful communities will embrace play-based gatherings in unexpected ways. In a society so desperately craving permission to connect, play is the forgotten art with the potential to lead to transformative experiences.
But, as someone who has been on the PLAY schtick for a long time, it’s vital that it does not get pigeon-holed into a mere trend or movement. Play is as universal a virtue as patience, justice, or even (as I argued in last week’s blog) love.
Play is the way!