Five Things: War, Truth, AI, Secretaries, iPod
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
I have been thinking a lot about the war in Iran lately and I guess I am turning into a pacifist hawk. While I despise Trump and Netanyahu, I think the war on the Iranian regime is fundamentally right. This regime has killed their own people for 47 years and this regime as promoted terror all around the world. This regime wants to eradicate Israel. We have see so many demonstrations and uprisings of the Iranian people, but they were brutally stopped by the Iranian regime.
Does this war violate international law? I guess so, since the proxy wars the Iranian regime has been fighting somehow do not count. It also seems not to count that the Iranian regime wants to eradicate Israel. I feel that the UN has become a toothless tiger when it comes to this kind of threat to world peace. And at the same time I do not trust Trump’s and Bibi’s motifs one bit.
I do think that the world will be better off without this Iranian regime. The former German chancellor Olaf Scholz once said “I’m liberal, but not dumb” when asked why he is so tough on crime while serving on the city government in Hamburg. Liberal democracies have to uphold international law, but at the same time they have to make sure that we fight against the aggressors that want to put an end to the way we live. We need to be liberal, but not dumb.
War should always be the last resort and after 47 years of terror both inside and outside of Iran, I think it is time for the Mullahs to be done. I value peace so much that I think this is the best outcome we can hope for.
I Don’t Know How the War Is Going
The claims that “It’s Donald Trump’s war” and (its cousin) “It’s Bibi’s war” tell us nothing. The loathing and disregard that many reasonable people have for both men can impair our ability to determine whether they are succeeding. Henry Kissinger was reputed to have asked, in a moment of perplexity, “Why are the wrong people doing the right thing?” In this case, the demonstrable incompetence of the Trump administration in presenting a consistent case for the war does not necessarily spill over into the U.S. military’s apparently effective way of waging it. Bungling and competence can exist side by side to a frightening degree.
So how should we think about the war, beyond a becoming modesty about what we actually know? The beginning of wisdom is to recognize that all wars are individual—that, as the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz put it, “Every war is rich in unique episodes. Each is an uncharted sea, full of reefs.” Wars resemble one another more than they resemble anything else, but each one has to be understood on its own terms.
I sure hope this war is over soon and that there will be a strategy in place for what happens then.
Losing the War on Truth
Trump seems lost as to which lie he wants to tell. Lies are always parasitical upon truth, in the sense that you have to have some idea of what is true in order to say what is not true. But we are now in a realm where Trump knows only his own pleasures.
If we accept that nothing is true, we find ourselves among aspiring and real dictators who have good stories and media monopolies. But even if lying works in politics, truths about the world do not cease to be: civilians slain stay dead, airplanes shot down crash, actions lead to unpredictable reactions. Post-truth fascists will wander into terrains of ignorance and find themselves trapped.
In war and Trump’s presidency, truth is the first casualty.
How AI ruined the internet… and why I’m happy about it
We keep recycling things, remaking things, cross-breeding things. Spider-Man in Legally Blonde. Lord of the Rings but everyone’s from Friends. Faces swapped. Styles copied. Meaning diluted. Over and over until the thing is technically living but spiritually… haunted. A lumbering beast pretending to be alive. It’s honestly hurting my brain and I can’t keep blaming the micro plastics. But hey, we’ve got weather now. Let’s talk about that instead. That’s bread and butter, man, instead of the hellscape we’re quietly assembling.
Meanwhile, this line I mentioned, over on one side of it, you’ve got the pro-AI guys shouting about how everyone on the other side is going to lose their house, their job and their purpose if they don’t get with the program. Those Luddites, they say, will have to live on the streets. Those losers will become irrelevant, which is the modern hell.
And on the other side, you’ve got the anti-progress faction waving legal papers and doom-prophet scrolls. They’re the ones who watch Terminator for the ‘I told you so’ vibes. Those people need to wake up and smell the freshly brewed reality. We need these machines! I’m addicted! So, yeah, everyone’s yelling. Everyone’s so certain. It’s exhausting. Pass the painkillers, my head’s hurting from all the LinkedIn posts.
The internet sure is changing and I am sure we will figure out what we want to do with it in the near future and what we choose to ignore.
The case of the disappearing secretary
Not so long ago, the work of secretaries – typing, filing, organising, administrating – was a cornerstone of the economy. By 1984, six years after the map above, there were around 18 million clerical and secretarial workers in the United States, roughly 18 percent of the entire workforce. This was totally normal. In the UK at the same time, between 17 and 18 percent of the workforce was some kind of secretary. In France it was 16 percent. Different economies with different economic policies; all ended up with one in five or six workers employed in clerical work.
Why so many? Because every stage of information processing required a human hand. In a mid-century organisation, a manager did not “write” a memo. He dictated it. A secretary took it down in shorthand, then retyped it. Then made copies. Then collated the copies by hand. Then distributed them. Then filed them. And so on and so on. Nothing moved unless someone physically moved it. There was no other way.
My mother was a secretary and I was always amazed by her skills, which I did not inherit. I still type without a real system, my filing also is without system, yet somehow I get by. She loved her job, but when the computer arrived in the office, a Wang PC, she was really intimidated.
25 years of iPod brain
It’s hard to believe that there was once a time when consumer technology solved problems we actually had. In the late 1900s, one of these problems was the portability of one’s music collection. For a long time, recorded music came in the form of physical objects so large they were inconvenient to tote around. Then the physical objects shrank—into tapes, MiniDiscs, CDs—but it was still not possible to carry your entire music collection around with you without managing some kind of large bindle of rattling plastic.
In 1999, Napster launched, and every song in the history of sound recording transformed into data. What was once a large PVC disc was now code—air, really. Songs in the wind. What would be the best way to carry them with us?
And when I want to feel really old, I tell my kids about the Walkman and how my cheap knock-off product didn’t even have a rewind button.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico