gordonzola

Between my regular rotation of Bastards/Cool People/ICHH, I've been slowly making my way through Better Offline's coverage of CES. Technically this is work-related and I should be listening on work time (obviously I'm not) but if you want like 20 hours of coverage about what's new in tech (spoiler: not very much), AI crammed into everything, and robots that still can't fold laundry, it's worth checking out.

It's really interesting from more than just Ed Zitron's usual professional hater perspective—which, to be clear, is something I appreciate as a professional hater myself. Because with something like CES, the questions of "who is this for" and "what is the use case" are actually critical and in your face. It's the Consumer Electronics Show, after all. So while robots in manufacturing are obviously a thing, the use case for household robots is a bit more questionable. The most successful household robot, the Roomba, recently went out of business, because as it turns out, they're not useful for 1) most households, which have things like furniture and sometimes stairs, or 2) the parts of your floor that you really don't want to vacuum, like tricky corners. They are good for scaring cats or if your cat is not scared of them, transportation.

The episodes are full of even more absurd technology to solve problems that aren't real, like fridges that open for you, meant to automate the parts of your life that you actually want to enjoy. We want machines to do menial tasks, leaving creative work for us. As it turns out, they're quite good at menial tasks in a factory, where you're doing the same thing repeatedly, but not in a house, where you have to do a lot of little annoying things.

But what we (normal people) want is very different from what techbros want. Remember, these are people who have not had to experience challenges in real life, so when they think about what a person might need, they come up with things like "what if I didn't want to cook and I got my fridge to open for me and dumped a bunch of ingredients in a pot and it would make food, and also a robot read a bedtime story to my child?" The fantasy, of course, is having a slave. But that is not the fantasy that normal people have, and there's an incredible disconnect between where tech is heading and actual human needs. 

Anyway, I am working through it very slowly because, as I said, 20+ hours, but it's worth a listen. Also if anyone can find pictures of Robert Evans in an exoskeleton I would like to see that for reasons.

I remain awed by, proud of, and scared shitless for my incredible friends in Minnesota, who are fighting on the front line against literal jackbooted thugs. Even if you don't have a personal connection, I'm sure you're also gripped by the news.

Here is how you can help:

A post by naomikritzer

How to help if you are outside Minnesota.

This also has advice on how to start preparing for if and when this shit comes to your home state.

If you are in Minnesota.

I am also stealing some graphics that lydamorehouse posted that you can spread around, as long as you credit the artist. Credit where it is known:


By Rin Mix.


By Cas Fern.


Artist unknown but if you find out, let me know and I'll edit it.

Let Minnesota be the graveyard of fascism!

Just finished: Mavericks: Life Stories and Lessons of History's Most Extraordinary Misfits by Jenny Draper. I don't have a lot to add since last week. If you read my blog you will like this. It is my jam. It's a rather inspiring read for—look, I haven't written about politics in a public post in awhile but you know. You know. 

Currently reading: Choices: An Anthology of Reproductive Horror, edited by Dianna Gunn. This one I picked up because a lot of the authors in it are my kind of people, and it's a cool concept. There must be a particular subgenre of leftist, author-led anthologies, and like. I want to fix that subgenre. I want it to exist, but I want to push it like, a notch further or two.

Part of my problem here is absolutely personal, which is that I'm intensely phobic of pregnancy and childbirth, and so in order to ping as horror in my brain, a story has to somehow be worse than my own fairly intense reactions to the subject. A few of the pieces are but they're mostly "wow it would be awful to be pregnant in a dystopian regime that viewed women as chattel" well, here we are. I have the same critique of my own writing btw. You simply cannot write bad things fast enough to get your book out before those bad things are just an accepted part of reality. Plus a lot of the stories are earnest, which is one thing that horror can't be. There's one story about an anti-abortion protestor that goes straight for black comedy and it is excellent; so far it's my favourite.