Near the end of his novel, The End of Eternity, Isaac Asimov has a few things to tell us about the use of automation and robots that bears interestingly on our use of AI today. Asimov wrote the book in the 1950s, during an earlier wave of automation. He had no specific knowledge of LLMs, of course. But in reading it, I felt as though the Good Doctor reached into our future.
Category: Culture (Page 1 of 22)
These are posts on culture from the blog Base and Superstructure. Mostly the focus is on American culture. But there might be a few posts on broader, international issues.
A local guy named Mason (note: not his real name) goes to lots of local events – political events, activist meetings, festivals, and so on. He’s somewhat older, friendly but rather awkward, and overall a good natured person.
He also still wears a mask in 2025.
Sort of.
To put it more accurately, sometimes he wears a mask and other times he doesn’t. And there’s little discernible pattern to it. Whether or not he wears a mask doesn’t seem to follow any risk assessment related to Covid-19. It’s not just that he’s not at elevated risk – though he almost certainly isn’t – but at times I even see him wearing a mask while he’s outdoors and not in a crowd and then taking the mask off or wearing it on his chin when he joins an indoor meeting.
I’m not trying to pick on Mason here. He’s a good guy. My point is that his behavior tracks a lot of what I see. I’ve seen a few dozen or so local characters who fit a similar profile during the pandemic. Most of them gradually reduced or cut out their mask usage by last year.
A few remain holdouts.
Every generation criticizes the generation after it. We all know it. We have evidence of it dating back to antiquity. To boot, the criticism follows the same rough outline: the kids these days don’t respect their elders, tradition, or society, etc.
But the world has changed in historically unique ways over the past few generations. The rise of the Internet – and later social media – ushered in changes that surely stretch beyond those of the radio or television. The neoliberal era brought finance capital to power in a way never before seen.
In other words, our everyday experience of the world is changing. And it feels like it’s changing faster than it used to.
Anyway, that’s the thought behind much of the generational critique. But we should get to the bottom of it.
In a short Current Affairs article titled “Don’t Expect Art to Save Us,” RS Benedict argues that artistic or cultural expression cannot meaningfully substitute for concrete political action.
It’s not a new claim. Nor, in my view, is it a very controversial claim, though, as with even most accurate claims, it draws its detractors.
However, I think we can learn a few lessons from the very first reason Benedict gives in favor of the claim.
After the first season of Severance, I blogged a couple of times about the issues it raises for having children and organizing in the white-collar world.
As I watched the second season, I had in mind that I might revisit these topics. Does the second season tell us anything new about organizing, for instance?
In some sense, perhaps it does. It provides more detail in how companies divide workers from one another and from their work. In addition, it gets into details about how workers can overcome these things. The four core workers throw off a ton of corporate bullshit and learn how to trust each other.
But I wanted to hit one new topic.
