[Oakeshott] admires those who, whether humble or exalted, poor or rich, ordinary or brilliant, in different ways achieve a sense of themselves and a style that shows their success in achieving individual humanity. There are no collective achievements in these matters. We are to each other not role models but additions to the variety of human possibilities to be enjoyed.
From Timothy Fuller’s foreword to Rationalism in politics and other essays 📚.
Back in her childhood she used to have holy feelings, knifelike flashes that laid the earth open like a blue watermelon, when the sun came down to her like an elevator she was sure she could step inside and be lifted up, up, past all bad luck, past every skipped thirteenth floor in every building human beings had ever built. She would have these holy days and walk home from school and think, After this I will be able to be nice to my mother, but she never ever was, After this I will be able to talk about only what matters, life and death and what comes after, but still she went on about the weather.
From Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This 📚
I have finished Beautiful World, Where Are You and in my dream I was wrong: the balance Rooney’s characters navigate isn’t between fragility and fun, but rather joy (and beauty, and truth). But I wasn’t off by too much! 📚
I started reading Sally Rooney’s new novel Beautiful World, Where Are You last night 📚. I made it just under half way through.
This isn’t an original thought: Rooney is exceptionally talented. She has an “easy virtuosity” and dialogue, especially, shimmers off the page. It helps that the gift of the gab is an Irish thing, and in my mind she just absolutely nails the voices she is working to create. I find, when reading Rooney, I think to myself “I should try to be a writer”. She makes it look easy.
Who am I quoting up above, you may be wondering? The answer is myself, in a dream I had last night.
I dreamt that I was sitting in a university lecture hall listening to an honourary lecture given by a professor I had several classes with when I was in undergrad, Julian Patrick. Unsurprisingly Professor Patrick’s lecture was focused on the Rooney’s novel.
He made the case that Beautiful World, Where Are You concerns and is concerned with fragility. Rooney’s characters recognize but cannot escape the pressure the world puts on them, large and small. Their fragility within this context is notable, Prof. Patrick argued, and provide an interpretive lens through which we can make one sense at least of the text.
And then, after kind of wandering over in my direction (I was sitting in the front row) Prof. Patrick leaned in towards me and whispered, “Got anything else?”
So in the dream I thought for a moment, cleared my throat, and started talking. I distinctly remember the feeling of uncertainty and surprise that the rest of the audience expressed at that moment: we were less than five minutes into the lecture, and it was unusual for an audience member to being speaking at this point without any indication that we had moved into Q&A or a more conversational mode for the session.
And here’s what I said, more or less, as far as I can remember it: It is true that there is a strong element of fragility in how Rooney constructs her characters. They think about their position within a fraught and unjust social order; they struggle under the expectations placed on them by family, friends, the market, themselves; they navigate intimacy with uncertainty, sensitive to the different ways that interpretation could change the fundamentals of how a particular interaction with another might be understood. They struggle with sadness, feelings of inadequacy, being overwhelmed, moments of hypocrisy, and constant major or minor assaults to their mental health broadly speaking.
But balanced against this fragility is something else, I said (in my dream, to an audience that was now listening carefully): fun. They have and are fun, in many respects! They have deep friendships with each other. There is lots of playful banter. They are young and enjoying themselves, at least some of the time. Certainly the sex is often good, both for the characters involved and in the way Rooney writes it. The main characters seem to be living with some degree of authenticity to their own vision of their lives (however fraught that ends up being). They express their views confidently and seem to enjoy the back and forth this creates with the people around them.
The point isn’t that fragility isn’t important; rather, that Rooney balances that fragility with indications of another way of living, a fun and lively way of interacting with the world. The novel, I argued in my dream to my dream audience, is less about either side and more about the balance or between the two. And that balancing between paired elements is reproduced throughout the text. Friendship and romance; success and failure; faith and rationality; familial bonds and gulfs. The letters (emails?) exchanged between Alice and Eileen throughout are the perfect vehicle for expressing this: at once social, written for another, audience in mind, and at the same time deeply interior, reflective and crafted with and through introspection.
Granted, I’m only half way through (I was only half way through in my dream as well). But what emerges is the sense of making do, of navigating through extremes with some level of grace, relying on those around us to the extent we are able, finding meaning as honestly as we can, being sensitive to difference and to inconsistency but also to patterns and structure in how we are with others. I’m not sure this made it into my impromptu lecture, but in my mind (or the mind of my dreaming, lecturing self, which I am struggling to separate from what I actually think about the text) Rooney rejects both a pessimistic acceptance of fragility as the defining feature of how we live now, but also isn’t staking out a position that what we need to cultivate is antifragility in Taleb’s sense. There’s some path between the two.
It was an interesting dream. I’m interested to see whether my dream take on the novel holds up as I continue reading.
For about twenty-five years I have been copying sentences into the back pages of whatever notebook I happen to be using, using mostly for other purposes…. Of course there are sentences elsewhere in these books: even the briefest, most telegraphic, verbless note is a sentence of sorts. But the end-of-notebook sentences are different, even if someone them come from books I’m reviewing and so on. Unconnected to duty or deadlines, to projects per se, they compose a parallel timeline — of what?
I suppose the word is: affinity.
From the first chapter of Brian Dillon’s Suppose a Sentence, describing a practice that I’m emulating, to some extent, here on this blog. Again, closer to the end of the chapter:
So, not a treasury, then — something closer, I hope, to a kind of commonplace book, product of haphazard notation, ad hoc noticing.
The September 6 issue of The New Yorker has re-prints of two phenomenal pieces by Zadie Smith (from 2013) and Anthony Bourdain (from 2000). Highly recommended! 📚
Remote work mostly destroys the ability to appear busy, other than having a full calendar. Being on lots of calls does not actually have an output if you’re just on them to waffle on about some bullshit, and bosses no longer have the mechanism to appear busy other than doing work.
From The Work-From-Home Future Is Destroying Bosses' Brains published on Ed Zitron’s Substack. 📚
Morning reading 📷 📚
[Mona] remembered something she’d heard a while back from her friend Vlad, a sixty-something Russian novelist she’d met at Iowa during a prestigious writers' residency in the middle of Yankee Nowhere, at a time when Mona was still a newcomer to the circuit. According to Vlad… peace reigned in Iowa “only beacause we don’t understand each other’s languages, and our ignorance protects us.” To illustrate his point, Vlad told Mona he’d participated in residencies that included composers and musicians as well as writers — and that was real hell. Peace between musicians, Vlad continued, was impossible, because they could all tell who was a real genius and who was just a mediocre poseur. Music was a transparent field in which genius and mediocrity were self-evident truths — and this only ever led to hatred, distrust, and malaise. No doubt about it: not knowing each other’s languages was the key to conviviality, because if we were able to read what everyone else was writing, if we were able to understand it and feel it like music, the Russian calmly concluded, well, then we’d be murdering each other in our beds.
From Mona by Pola Oloixarac 📚
📚The phases of remote adaptation from GitLab:
Phase 1, Skeuomorph : a remote organization will look to imitate the design, structure, norms, ebbs and flows of an office environment. The primary goal is to merely continue to operate the business, but remotely.
Phase 2, Functional: Entering Phase 2 is simple. It begins with leadership asking a fundamental question: “What if we didn’t do things the way we’ve always done them?” Companies in Phase 2 will begin to take advantage of technology to replace things which were manually done, or not done at all. For example, a company will begin to:
- Record all meetings and automatically upload them, plugging knowledge gaps created by undocumented gatherings.
- Attach a Google Doc agenda to every business meeting, writing questions, answers, and conversation down in real-time as the meeting transpires so that knowledge is archived for reference, and for viewing by attendees who are not able to attend live.
- Converse about a work topic in a public chat channel instead of a private channel, so that more input may be gained.
Phase 3, Asynchronous: marked by a company’s comfortability in completing work without mandated synchronicity. Maximally efficient remote environments will do as little work as possible synchronously, instead focusing the valuable moments where two or more people are online at the same time on informal communication and bonding.
Phase 4, Intentionality: marked by an extraordinary amount of intentionality, particularly in areas that are typically assumed to need minimal guardrails. [For example] Measuring output (results) rather than input (hours). This requires a deliberate choice to not measure hours spent working, as well as a strong commitment to outlining deliverables and expectations that can be measured. This enables team members to work towards their goals in any manner they choose.
Ben Evans, on the e500m fine France has levied on Google for “not negotiating ‘in good faith’ to pay newspapers whenever a link to their sites appears in search”:
The underlying reasoning is very simple and make perfect sense, if you’ve never used the internet or thought much about how it works: “Newspapers have to be on Google and FB, but G&FB need them as well for completeless, and G&FB’s market power means the newspapers can’t demand payment for this. So, this is a competition problem”. Sure, except that 1: no-one else pays to make a link either (I don’t, and I have no market power) and 2: why should it only be newspapers that get paid, and not the other 99% of links that show up in search results?
Even with the ancient Netscape web browser, even with data dribbling into your CPU from a telephone line, pumped in from the Bell telephone aqueduct by your dial-up modem, even with the pages taking a minute to unscroll themselves for viewing, often stopping halfway down the screen, the chemical payoff was already enough to flip your animal brain into a foraging jag. You’d focus briefly on the new thing you’d just clicked on, and then ipso facto it was no longer new. What was left was the dying remnant of the secret brain-excitement from the discovery, and the hunger for another hit of this waning thrill, which is to say, the desire to do it again. This sequence of novelty and then boredom and then hunting for more novelty - now neuroscientifically engineered in the platforms and apps that occupy our thumbs - was a basic fuel of mass engagement from the very beginning of the web browser era. The ease of access combined with the sheer number of things there were to click on, the in-effect infinite number of these experiences you could have, meant the tiniest discoveries could keep you clicking after these empty rewards. The evanescence and triviality were key to our deep involvement. Each click, being both a fulfillment and a disappointment, was its own reason to click again.
From Matt Feeney’s Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age 📚.
[The] absence of social feedback is the default experience in virtual communication, and was from the beginning. You write or post or email or text something and then… you… wait. Every communication you send onto the internet leaves you abysmally hanging. In virtual interaction you are alone in time, in a way that you aren’t in physical conversations.
Pretty much everything you do on the internet throws you into an unresolved future, where human feedback lingers in teasing deferral. For language-having animals like us, whose deep emotional tuning presupposes social nearness, this aspect of online communication means it’s perpetually filled with inner drama, and this inner drama translates into preoccupation, need, a compulsive interest in coming back.
From Matt Feeney’s Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age 📚. While core narrative/argument of the book concerns parenting, I found the discussion Feeney develops on the internet to be insightful and applicable well beyond how I think about being a parent.
r/wallstreetbets had illuminated something: everyone was now playing the same game, mediated by the same interface. COVID rendered us all crouched, behind screens, contending to steer the same pools of capital in different directions. I think institutional Wall Street is afraid for a reason that’s even more intrinsic than the idea of being liquidated or margin-called. The game that we’d spent decades perfecting and protecting for a select group of insiders was now open to anyone. A great incursion on the social network was unfolding for everyone to witness. The funhouse culmination of Metcalfe’s law.
From “Is this Public? (or…Why I’m leaving TradFi for Crypto)” by Elena Burger via Substack 📚
📚 I’m halfway through Matt Feeney’s Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age and it is excellent:
For my part, as both an anxious and pugnacious dad, the idea of that this great competition in which my wife apparently birthed our children requires us to submit the inner workings of our family to the needs of an alien, immoral, technocratic, utilitarian system of achievement kind of pisses me off. And the idea that I have to suck up to certain guardians and gatekeepers of opportunity within this system, and my parenting should be devoted to urging my kids into this sucking up as well, roils my fatherly pride. It makes me want to recommit to the idea that my family is a place apart, a vantage from which I can look upon these forges and these people and tell them, No.
This defiant retreat has a romantic appeal, I admit, and it might be a healthy move for parents to make in the short term. But as a general outlook it is counterproductive in the longer run. It takes for granted our atomized predicament as families, and thus reinforces it. Admitting this leads to some of ironic conclusions that might be hard for America’s more conservative defenders of family life to accept: that the autonomy of families is actually undermined by our system of individualized competition; that reorienting the nuclear family away from this anxious striving and toward its traditional rewards and inherent virtues might require heightened solidarity in our social outlook.
Bernita watched Victoria chase the fireflies around the yard for a few minutes. This, she thought, was what a Black kid’s life should feel like - happy and unencumbered. She told Victoria to find a Mason jar. They ran through the grass until Victoria had trapped a single glowing insect. Afterward, they sat on their stoop, researching the specimen on Victoria’s phone. They learned that the bugs belong to the family Lampyridae, and that a bioluminescent enzyme makes them glow.
As Victoria scrolled, Bernita laughed. “You do know this is homeschooling, right?” she asked.
Victoria looked up from her phone. The fireflies lit up around them. “Really?” she asked.
“Yep,” “Bernita said. “This is home schooling. This is science. We about to do this for real.”
From The Rise of Black Homeschooling in the New Yorker. 📚
[W]e must shift our thinking from treating teams as collections of interchangeable individuals that will succeed as long as they follow the “right” process and use the “right” tools, to treating people and technology as a single human/computer carbon/silicon sociotechnical ecosystem. At the same time, we need to ensure that teams are intrinsically motivated and are given a real chance of doing their best work within such a system.
Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, Team Topologies 📚
And then it is another day and another and another but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.
From Weather by Jenny Offill. I enjoyed it, and it has some lovely writing, but on the whole it felt more dated than any other fiction I’ve read recently. 📚
I’ve never worked at FAANG so I don’t know what I’m missing. But I’ve hired (and not hired) engineers from FAANGs and they don’t know what they’re doing either.
For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.
My job is easier because I have semi-technical analysts on my team. Semi-technical because they know programming but not software engineering. This is a blessing because if something doesn’t make sense to them, it means that it was probably badly designed. I love the analysts on the team; they’ve helped me grow so much more than the most brilliant engineers.
A lot of progressive companies, especially startups, talk about bringing your “authentic self”. Well what if your authentic self is all about watching porn? Yeah, it’s healthy to keep a barrier between your work and personal life.
A few of many amazing/hilarious bullets from Drunk Post: Things I’ve learned as a Sr Engineer, via Hacker Newsletter #557
Venkatesh Rao has a new subscribers only post out through his Substack, and it’s one of the most interesting things I’ve read in a while. The core idea is the importance of the studio organizational form to the post-COVID reboot, and in particular the “maker studio” where platform technology and other innovation enables a single person to get busy building and creating.
The Instapot is just a slightly fancy pressure cooker with some electronics and automation for safety. Pressure cookers are over a century old, but fell out of favor in the West because they were perceived as dangerous. They continued to be used in the developing world where consumers are both more comfortable with risk, and the upside for quicker cooking of common foods (beans and lentils) is high enough to make it worthwhile. But the small increase in safety and convenience through the integration of electronic smart controls has suddenly made pressure cooking attractive again at developed world levels of consumer risk tolerance. A clear indicator — my American-bred wife has always been too scared to use my low-tech Indian pressure cooker, and used to outsource things like cooking beans to me. But once we bought the Instapot, she was willing to do pressure cooking on her own.
The situation is the same in text media. If you do your accounting right (and this is a big, ongoing debate), a subscriber-based indie publishing activity built around Substack is about a tenth of the cost in time/money/skills acquisition/relationship management as one built around WordPress.
You can go from publication idea to functioning publication in about 20 minutes with no human contact. It’s an Instapot type effect. A small and relatively trivial expansion of the feature set creates a large increase in consumer-grade production capability, primarily via elimination of dependence on 1:1 human relationships.
Rao is the mind behind internet classics like Premium Mediocre, Domestic Cozy, and The Gervais Principle. I strongly recommend the newsletter!
Togetherness first, battle second. In love, war should be peace by other means.
S. G. Belknap in Issue 23 of The Point.
From an anonymous book review of Natasha Dow Schüll’s Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, hosted on Astral Codex Ten:
Before I read this book, I had an unsubstantiated theory for why people gambled: it’s because every gambler thought he would be the one to beat the odds. In other words, people gambled to earn money. Sure, gamblers knew that most other gamblers lose money, but that just means that gambling is a high-risk high-reward activity. Gamblers were willing to bear the risk in order to have a shot at the reward.
When it comes to machine gamblers, my theory is completely incorrect. People who spend hours and hundreds on machine games are not after big wins, but escape. They go to machines to escape from unpredictable life into the “zone.”
The primary objective that machine gambling addicts have is not to win, but to stay in the zone. The zone is a state that suspends real life, and reduces the world to the screen and the buttons of the machine. Entering the zone is easiest when gamblers can get into a rhythm. Anything that disrupts the rhythm becomes an annoyance. This is true even when the disruption is winning the game.
By letting people choose their own office adventures, employees can gain back some of what’s sorely missing in American work culture: self-determination. Need to plow through a task that will take you a full day? Stay home. Need to talk through some plans with a few co-workers? Everyone goes in. Kid got the sniffles? Expecting a delivery? Have dinner plans near the office? Do what you need to do to manage your life. Being constantly forced to ask permission to have needs outside your employer’s Q3 goals is humiliating and infantilizing. That was true before the pandemic, but it’s perhaps never been as clear as it is after a year in which many employers expected workers not to miss a beat during a global disaster unlike anything in the past century.
I don’t think I have ever learned a lesson in my life. I don’t watch somebody make a mistake and conclude, well, I’ll make sure I don’t do that, then. We pretend that we can learn lessons like this because the alternative is to face the music: to accept that most of what we do in our human lives is driven by some deep, old compulsion we can neither understand nor control, and that when it comes upon us, all we can do is hold on to the wrecked boat and pray. Or laugh, depending on our personalities.
From Savage Gods by Paul Kingsnorth. 📚
It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one’s nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ.
From The Dyer’s Hand by W.H. Auden 📚