Now’s the time, free at last

Something I found on the web:

When it comes to changing the world:

It's always too late,
always too soon,
the time's never right,
Now's the time.

I found it deep in the Wayback Machine, here. You’ll have to scan down the lefthand panel until you come to the phrase, "Now is the time"; it'll be in grey type. Click on that phrase; it's a hypelink. You'll see new text appear in the righthand panel. The text i quoted above is there. That’s from a tribute to Martin Luther King that Bill Berry put on the web in the mid-1990s in the early days of the web. If you’re at all curious about how that got there, this post tells the story: I was on the web before the New York Times was, me and Cuda Brown at Meanderings.

This post is about that little four-line ditty. It’s not attributed to anyone. I created that page so I assume that I wrote those lines. But I don’t remember having done so. It’s not a big thing. I have no trouble imagining that I’ve forgotten all about it; it was 30 years ago. That I’ve just forgotten is more plausible than that I’d gotten the lines from someone, somewhere, and just didn’t attribute them. That’s not my style.

New Savanna traffic went Zoom, Zoom, Zoom! in July

Here’s the traffic for July 31, 2025:

Notice the peak at over 1.5 million. The earlier period of peak traffic in 2017 to 2018 has been eclipsed by a considerable margin.

Here’s where things stood on June 1, 2025:

The peak is over 250 K and that earlier peak year, 2017, still looms large in the distribution.

And here’s how things looked on March 1, 2025:

Now the 2017 peak is just a bit higher than the current peak.

It appears, however, that this current run may be over. Here’s how things looked for the last 12 months:

There’s a definite dip at the end of July. The three month totals give us a clearer view:

I haven’t got the foggiest idea what accounts for these numbers.

Tracking the “Xanadu” Meme

New working paper. Title above, links, abstract, table of contents, and introduction below:

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/130470494/Tracking_the_Xanadu_Meme
SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5346920
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/393569547_Tracking_the_Xanadu_Meme

Abstract: I treat a single word, Xanadu, as a “meme” and follow it from a 17th century book to a 19th century poem (Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"), into the 20th century where it was picked up by a classic movie (Citizen Kane), an ongoing software development project (Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu), another movie and hit song, Olivia Newton-John’s Xanadu, and a few other events. The aggregate result is that many occurrences of “Xanadu” fall into clusters that resonate with one of these founding events. Thus while some occurrences are directly related to Coleridge's poem, more seem to be related these other events and thus only indirectly to Coleridge’s poem. For example, one large cluster of Xanadu sites is high tech while another cluster is about luxury and excess. Fifteen years ago I used manual methods to identify these clusters and estimate their sizes. Now I use ChatGPT o3 to update that work and to create a methodology for identifying other terms with similar distributions.

Background: Tracking Down the “Xanadu” Meme 2
“Xanadu” as Meme 2
The Origin, Growth, and Structure of the Xanadu System 3
Xanadu Meme Dynamics, 1999–2025: Methodology and Findings 8
Calibrating the Results 10
What Other Terms Would Have Traceable Lineages? 11
Meta: Man and Machine 12
Appendix 1: Donald Trump and the Xanadu Meme 13
Appendix 2: The Xanadu Mandala 14
References 16

Background: Tracking Down the “Xanadu” Meme

Sometime early in January of 2005 I did a Google search on the term “Xanadu,” which is the second work in Coleridge’s well-known poem, “Kubla Khan.” I had no particular expectations about what would turn up, but I was nonetheless surprised that I got roughly 2,000,000 “hits.” How did this one word from an early 19th century English poem, albeit a relatively well-known one, end up on approximately 2,000,000 pages of the World Wide Web in the early 21st century?

Over the course of days, if not weeks, I ran a bunch of queries on the web, analyzed on the results, and produced a post, “One Candle, a Thousand Points of Light: Moretti and the Individual Text.” I subsequently refined that work and published a working paper (Benzon 2010). The paper argued that the current distribution of “Xanadu” is the result of four key events ranging in time from Coleridge’s publication of “Kubla Khan” in 1816 to Olivia Newton-John’s 1980 movie and hit-song, “Xanadu.” Each of those events marks the origin of cluster of occurrences of “Xanadu” having a particular vibe or resonance.

From time to time I would think about updating that original work, but always decided that I just didn’t want to do the tedious work that would entail. Then, a couple weeks ago, I was doing something with ChatGPT o3 where I had cause to upload my paper. In the course of commenting on whatever it was, ChatGPT asked whether or not I wanted to redo that original work. “Not now,” I said, but I kept the possibility in mind.

Finally, in the middle of June 2025 I decided to take ChatGPT o3 up on the offer. The study ran all night and confirmed that the clusters I had identified in my original study still stood. The purpose of this paper is to present the new results. The next two sections present a highly condensed version of my original paper. Then we have ChatGPT’s report of its study, followed by a methodology for identifying terms with similar distributions.

The cost of being cancelled

Gulati, Kris and Palladini, Lorenzo, Cancel Culture (November 10, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4440242

Abstract: Public controversies over employee speech where individuals face backlash for expressing views deemed controversial, unpopular, or misaligned with prevailing norms - often labelled as “cancel culture” - are increasingly common, yet systematic evidence of their professional repercussions remains limited. Two empirical challenges have impeded research on this phenomenon. First, data that reliably pinpoints who is ‘cancelled’ in a systematic and comparable manner is scarce because these are often acts internal to an organisation. Second, the lack of comparable, reliable quantitative metrics on performance outcomes across different professional settings is difficult to obtain. We address these challenges by examining this phenomenon within the context of academia, where the freedom of speech plays a crucial role in the pursuit of knowledge. We are able to measure scholarly productivity (publications) and peer dynamics (citations), which provide quantifiable and comparable outcomes. Leveraging a novel dataset of U.S.-based academics’ ‘cancelled’ for their speech, we employ a series of difference-in-differences designs to estimate the effects on individuals’ career outcomes. We find that, following a controversy, affected scholars experience a decline in their productivity, publishing 20% fewer new papers than the counterfactual. Furthermore, affected scholars experience a 4% decline in citations to their prior body of work, reflecting a form of peer-to-peer sanctioning. This decline is disproportionately driven by scholars who are closely connected to the affected individual, consistent with a mechanism of professional distancing. These findings highlight the professional costs of speech-related incidents and contribute to the literature on workplace and employee activism as well as the career consequences of speech-related scandals.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

New Savanna traffic shot up during June

Here’s the all-time traffic as of May 30, 2025:

Notice that the peak is just above 250K. Now, here’s the all-time traffic for June 30, 2025:

The peak is now almost 800K, more than double the previous peak, which shows up down there above 200K.

Here’s the 12-month graph ending on June 30:

Most of the action has been since April. So let’s look at the three-month graph:

So, we had a little spurt in April, and then a somewhat longer one from the end of May to mid-June. Then things shot way up at the end of June. How long will that last and how high will it go? I don’t know.

More generally, I haven’t got the foggiest idea what these spurts of activity are about, not the one in 2017 nor the current one.

Melancholy, Growth, and Mindcraft: A Working Paper

I've posted a new working paper to the web. Title above, links, abstract, table of contents, and introduction below.

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/129757296/Melancholy_Growth_and_Mindcraft_A_Working_Paper
SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5282480
ResearchGate:  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/392400067_Melancholy_Growth_and_Mindcraft

Abstract: This document explores the relationship between melancholy, creativity, and mental growth through the lens of personal blogging patterns. The author, William Benzon, analyzes his 14-year blogging frequency data as a proxy for mood fluctuations, revealing periodic slumps initially attributed to Seasonal Affective Disorder. However, examining recent years shows patterns contradicting SAD, suggesting these cycles instead reflect periods of mental reorganization facilitating creativity. Drawing parallels to computational processes like code refactoring and neural network training, Benzon proposes that depressive episodes serve as adaptive "stepping back to better jump forward" phases. The author quantifies his intellectual growth by tracking blog tag proliferation (expanding at approximately 7% annually), representing cognitive differentiation. The document concludes by exploring broader implications for a society where technological acceleration necessitates continual mental retooling, advocating for new forms of "mindcraft" to navigate these transitions. This analysis connects personal experience with wider questions about depression, creativity, and adapting to an AI-driven future.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Tracking my mind across 14 years 3
More about Growth, Melancholy, and Mindcraft 3

The core argument 4
Clarifying the core 5
Where I was headed 6

Melancholy and Growth: Toward a Mindcraft for an Emerging World 7

My Posting Habits Over the Last Decade 8
Depression and Mental Growth 12
Measuring My Mental Growth 15
Some More General Observations: Mind and Brain 18
Conclusion: Crafting Minds 20
Appendix 1: Secondary features of my posting pattern 21
Appendix 2: New Savanna tags as of December 1, 2024 21
Coming out of a melancholy period [down phase] 24

Discussions with Claude 28

Neural maturation, cerebral plasticity, and the adaptive value of vacations 28
Depression and Creativity 33
From a tag collection to a digital companion and beyond 37

Introduction: Tracking my mind across 14 years

This working paper is a bit unusual. It is autobiographical in the sense that it is about events in my life as they have unfolded over time. It is, however, very abstract. The events are the posting of entries to my blog, New Savanna, and they are present in this document only as monthly totals depicted in several charts. The number of posts in a month is a clear indication of my overall mood for that month. The primary objective of this paper is thus to analyze and comment on that pattern, which seems to indicate yearly cycles of creativity and melancholy.

My secondary objective is to analyze the production of tags making blog entries and to take that production as a measure of mental growth. While both of these exercises are somewhat speculative, this is more speculative than the first.

About the sections of this working paper:

More about Growth, Melancholy, and Mindcraft: This both introduces the argument without all the analysis and commentary and clarifies the structure of the argument, separating it into two phases.

Melancholy and Growth: Toward a Mindcraft for an Emerging World: This is the main argument, presenting that basic data about posting frequency and then about annual increase in the number of tags. There is an appendix listing all of the tags as of December 1, 2024 (I’ve added more since then.)

Coming out of a melancholy period [down phase]: This documents my posting and sleeping patterns in October and November of 2024 and my sleeping patterns from November 2024 through the end of January 2025. When I’m coming out of a melancholy phase I tend to wake up during the night and do some work, whether simply cruising the web or writing and posting. During this most recent “awakening” I decided to make entries on my Facebook page to give notice that I was awake and working in the night.

Discussions with Claude: It is now my habit to consult with both Claude and ChatGPT on projects I’m working on. While some sessions are merely informational, others involve more intense working-through-ideas. This contains three such discussions: 1) neural maturation, 2) depression and creativity, and 3) the use of tag count as an index of mental growth

Grrl Power on the Web

Jessica Testa, Is This the ‘Manosphere’ for Women? NYTimes, May 7, 2025.

Men dominate the top of the podcasting charts. As listeners, they slightly outnumber women, too. “Brocasters” and the “manosphere” have even become a media obsession, and for good reason. During the election, conservatives successfully tapped into a world of dude-driven content to reach disengaged voters.

But there has been a surge of podcasts made by women, for women, too. And a company called Dear Media is at the center of much of it.

Based in Austin, Texas, Dear Media operates the largest network of podcasts for women. Its nearly 100 shows are as freewheeling and chummy as those in the “manosphere,” similarly hosted by comedians and content creators. Except here, Joe Rogan’s alpha masculinity and Logan Paul’s unabashed idiocy are swapped for girlboss confidence and therapy speak.

Gone, too, is the overt conservatism that now blankets the manosphere — but not all of its ideas. Dear Media emphasizes health and wellness in its programming, at times dipping into the same kind of contrarian thinking that powers Make America Healthy Again, the agenda of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Wellness:

If feminist news was the nucleus of “lady blogs” a decade ago, wellness takes its place today. Edison Research recently identified the two topics most interesting to female podcast listeners: self-care and mental health.

In an interview, Michael Bosstick, the chief executive of Dear Media, described his editorial sensibility as “nonjudgmental” and oriented around free speech. He has described himself as a political independent, with a “Don’t Tread on Me” tattoo, and publicly supports Mr. Kennedy, once writing on X that Covid-19 vaccines were “experimental shots that caused many harm.”

Politics:

Mr. Bosstick is firm that he has no interest in policing or censoring his hosts. On his own show, he said, whether he agrees or disagrees with a guest, “I want to listen openly, and I try to kind of culturally push that to the rest of the company.”

His thinking aligns with that of the manosphere: Cancel culture is bad, unchecked conversation is good. People are too “hypersensitive,” Mr. Bosstick said.

During the election, that attitude attracted President Trump’s campaign to new media, as he racked up appearances with podcasters including Theo Von, Lex Fridman and Andrew Schulz. In January, two prominent Trumpworld women were similarly drawn to Dear Media.

A week before the inauguration, the Bossticks released a rare interview with the first daughter Ivanka Trump, followed by one with Cheryl Hines, the actress and wife of Mr. Kennedy, three days later. (Last summer, the couple also interviewed Calley Means, a top adviser to Mr. Kennedy.)

Ms. Trump hardly talked politics, which she called a “very dark, negative business.” Over nearly two hours, she talked more about her life, burning French toast and practicing jujitsu.

Money:

While declining to provide specific figures, Mr. Bosstick said Dear Media’s revenue fell between $51 million and $100 million, largely through advertising. But he does not see podcasts as the primary business. The goal is to “help creators monetize” through various channels: events, merchandise, television, publishing. Video podcasts may be booming, but they are just “one sliver of media,” Mr. Bosstick said.

The company, which has raised about $12 million in investments, has in turn invested in about 10 consumer brands attached to its talent roster, such as Spritz Society canned cocktails and Arrae supplements.

There's more at the link.

Traffic’s Up: New Savanna Stats, May 1, 2025

Traffic is definitely up at New Savanna, May 30, 2025:

Notice that spike at the right. It’s above 250K. Compare that with what we had two months before, on March 1, 2025:

The period from Jan. 2023 through the present is definitely longer than the earlier rise during 2017 and into 2018, and, with the most recent data, it’s higher as well. We’ll see if that holds up.

In either case, however, I don’t know what’s responsible. The earlier rise was only temporary. Will this rise prove temporary as well? Who knows?

In defense of an online life

That's the title of a new post by Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution. It's derived from a piece Cowen published at The Free Press, Why I (Often) Choose My Phone Instead of Flesh and Blood. Here's part of what Cowen posted at Marginal Revolution:

The internet, in other words, has invented a new means of human connection, characterized by “the perfect people for me.” For me, it’s people who are into analytical thinking and tech and AI and music and economics, and much more. For others? It can be Survivor obsessives or vegans or knitters or Survivor obsessives who are vegan and love to knit. The point is that there is a niche for all 8 billion of us. And now we know where to find each other.

And it turns out we value that very, very highly. So highly that we are willing to obsess over our little devices known as smartphones.

Here's a comment I posted at Marginal Revolution:

Makes perfect sense to me. The online world is well-suited to intellectual life, though you have to pick and choose carefully. The fundamental point is that, to a first approximation, you can communicate with any thinker who is online without having to worry about institutional barriers.

That's what makes the online world essential to me. I am by temperament an intellectual explorer, going boldly where none have gone before. What's utterly remarkable, that's how I was trained as well, first at Johns Hopkins then later at SUNY Buffalo. Why's that remarkable? Because going boldly is NOT what the academic world is about, though that's what it thinks it's up to. I mean, how do you train someone to do that, to be a Leif Erikson, Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, or Morton Stanley? There's no training for that, no way to institutionalize.

No, the academic world starts when the territory has been explored and preliminary maps drawn up. Now, a few academic will slip through the cracks and explore new territory. But most do not. Some particularly venturesome academics will take those preliminary maps and go in there and start building infrastructure, roads, water wells, logging operations, etc. A less venturesome group will buy plots of land and start building on it. At the other end of the spectrum we have brokers who traffic in existing properties.

I see Tyler as a diversified real estate investment firm. A very few of his Emergent Venture picks will explore new territory, but he has no idea which ones and since many/most are quite young and not yet mature, they are somewhat insulated from his own preferences and mood affiliations. For the rest of it, he's invested all over the place, every continent, every type of terrain, at various levels of development.

As for me, Johns Hopkins let me undertake a structuralist analysis of "Kubla Khan" and awarded me a master's degree for the result, which is an analysis of a poem unlike any that had been done at the time (I eventually published a somewhat revised version, Articulate Vision: A Structuralist Reading of ”Kubla Khan”, 1985). Though I didn't think about it this way at the time, it's clear in retrospect that that's when I left the profession, I "lit out for the territory," to borrow a phrase from Mark Twain. Which implies, then, that I was doing postdoc work for my Ph.D. at SUNY Buffalo. I was in the English Department, but my real teacher was David Hays, a computational linguist in Linguistics. My 1978 dissertation, "Cognitive Science and Literary Theory," was as much a quasi-technical exercise in knowledge representation as it was literary theory. I used Shakespeare's Sonnet 129, "The Expense of Spirit," as an example and got two publications out of it: Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics (1976), Lust in Action: An Abstraction (1981). I took a faculty job at Rensselaer Polytechnic in 1978, failed to get tenure, and left in 1985. I spent two years looking for another academic post and failed. I've been a ronin scholar ever since.

I kept on publishing, did two books (Visualization: The Second Computer Revolution, 1987, and Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture, 2001), and a bunch of articles. By the early 2000s the web had developed to the point where I could re-engage with the larger world – actually, that got started for me in the mid-90s with various email mediated forms. There's no point in detailing all that, but if you're curious, I talk about it at some length here, Personal Observations on Entering an Age of Computing Machines.

Facebook is worse than I’d imagined

Jennifer Szalai, A Facebook Insider’s Exposé Alleges Bad Behavior at the Top, NYTimes, 3.10.25.

CARELESS PEOPLE: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, by Sarah Wynn-Williams

The publisher of “Careless People” kept the existence of this memoir a secret until a few days ago — with good reason, it turns out.

For seven years, beginning in 2011, the book’s author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, worked at Facebook (now called Meta), eventually as a director of global public policy. Now she has written an insider account of a company that she says was run by status-hungry and self-absorbed leaders, who chafed at the burdens of responsibility and became ever more feckless, even as Facebook became a vector for disinformation campaigns and cozied up to authoritarian regimes.

“Careless People” is darkly funny and genuinely shocking: an ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world. What Wynn-Williams reveals will undoubtedly trigger her former bosses’ ire. Not only does she have the storytelling chops to unspool a gripping narrative; she also delivers the goods.

During her time at Facebook, Wynn-Williams worked closely with its chief executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. They’re this book’s Tom and Daisy — the “careless people” in “The Great Gatsby” who, as Wynn-Williams quotes the novel in her epigraph, “smashed up things and creatures” and “let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

And then it gets ugly. There's much more at the link.

Cory Doctorow: Bluesky and enshittification

The lede: No one is the enshittifier of their own story.

I would like to use Bluesky. They’ve done a bunch of seriously interesting technical work on moderation and ranking that I truly admire, and I’ve got lots of friends there who really enjoy it.

But I’m not on Bluesky and I don’t have any plans to join it anytime soon. I wrote about this in 2023: I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again/

When a platform can hold the people you care about or rely upon hostage — when it can credibly threaten you with disconnection and exile — that platform can abuse you in lots of ways without losing your business. In other words, they can enshittify their service:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

I appreciate that the CEO of Bluesky, Jay Graber, has evinced her sincere intention never to enshittify Bluesky and I believe she is totally sincere:

https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-wont-enshittify-ads/

But here’s the thing: all those other platforms, the ones where I unwisely allowed myself to get locked in, where today I find myself trapped by the professional, personal and political costs of leaving them, they were all started by people who swore they’d never sell out.

I’m glad to read this. I’d like to leave Facebook, but I feel trapped the same way Doctorow does. I’d like to leave The Site Formerly Known as Twitter (aka X), but I remain there. OTOH, that’s where the AI action seems densest, and that’s important to me, and I don’t want to spend time working my way into some other site, like Bluesky. Between my blog, Facebook, X, Flickr, Brainstorms (a private, but not exclusive, online community), and Instagram (which I’ve largely abandoned), my monthly column at 3 Quarks Daily, I’ve got more than enough media to handle.

Doctorow remarks that, yes, all these sites cared about their users, in the beginning. But: “They just cared about other stuff, too, and, when push came to shove, they chose the worsening of their services as the lesser of two evils.”

Doctorow goes on to talk about federation:

On Mastodon (and other services based on Activitypub), you can easily leave one server and go to another, and everyone you follow and everyone who follows you will move over to the new server. If the person who runs your server turns out to be imperfect in a way that you can’t endure, you can find another server, spend five minutes moving your account over, and you’re back up and running on the new server:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/04/pick-all-three/#agonism

Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose owners have high switching costs and whose users have none. An owner who makes a bad call — like removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training — will lose a lot of users. Not just those users who price these downgrades highly enough that they outweigh the costs of leaving the service. If leaving the service is free, then tormenting your users in this way will visit in swift and devastating pain upon you.

That not only helps you steer clear of rationalizing your way into a bad compromise: it also stops your investors and other people with leverage over you from pressuring you into taking actions that harm your users.

There's much more at the link.

I was on the web before the New York Times was, me and Cuda Brown at Meanderings

Megan DeTrolio tells the story about how The New York Times got its domain name, and from one of its own reporters.

On Jan. 22, 1996, in an article tucked away on Page D7, The New York Times announced the public launch of its website.

“The New York Times begins publishing daily on the World Wide Web today, offering readers around the world immediate access to most of the daily newspaper’s contents,” stated the article, by Peter H. Lewis. “The electronic newspaper (address: http:/www.nytimes.com) is part of a strategy to extend the readership of The Times.”

Mr. Lewis had once owned that very URL.

In 1985, the Times editors A.M. Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb gathered a task force, which included Mr. Lewis, to work on a project called The New York Times in the Year 2000. Mr. Lewis this week shared the details of the project and his Times work in an email, from which much of this account is drawn.

Then an editor for the Science section and a personal computers columnist, Mr. Lewis recalled predicting that by the millennium, Times articles would be read on personal computer screens, in cyberspace.

“I recall Artie dismissing me with a wave,” Mr. Lewis wrote of Mr. Gelb.

Years later, the editor Bill Stockton, who Mr. Lewis said championed science and technology reporting, assigned Mr. Lewis to cover the “rise of the internet.”

At some point, “I asked permission to register a web domain for The Times, and was told no,” Mr. Lewis wrote in the email. “Several of us thought that was shortsighted.”

And so it goes. There's more at that link.

Back in 1994 I met Cuda Brown, not his real name BTW, in the African-American Forum on Compuserve. We hit it off. Cuda had been sending out an email to friends and family for several months. He called it "Meandings." He was thinking of putting it on the web. He asked me to join him. I forget just exactly when we went live, but here's Meanderings, archived in the WayBack Machine. And here I am, listed in Meanderings 1.06 for October 1994. That must have been when we live on the web. And here's Meanderings 2.05, where we partnered with Vibe Magazine to publish essays about O. J. Simpson. Those were the days!

By then we'd launched Gravity, with Meanderings as one of Gravity's offerings. Why "Gravity"? I think the idea was that we'd be a persistent Black Hole in Cyberspace. There you can see our tribute to Martin Luther King. I could go on and on about that. Maybe later.

Anyhow, we didn't last much longer than that. I forget why we folded. Probably because Cuda had to go back to working for a living. He'd taken time off work, as an investment banker in the utilities practice of Shearson Lehman (remember them?), to launch Meanderings from a server in his house. Whatever. By then Salon had come on line and I camped out in their Table Talk discussion forum, where I lingered 'till the bitter end in 2011. I forget what happened to Bill, Cuda's real name. But we kept in touch.

Those were the days.

Wiser Than Me [Media Notes 130]

A bit over a week ago I posted the conversation Julia Louis-Dryfus had with Carol Burnett (91). Now I’m posting her conversation with Jane Fonda (86):

On the premiere episode of Wiser Than Me, Julia sits down with the one and only Jane Fonda. With a career spanning over six decades, Jane – now 85 years old – hits all the highlights: staying fit at any age, fantasizing about funerals, getting heckled on set by Katharine Hepburn…and something about a fake thumb.

I’ve since watched some other podcasts in her Wiser Than Me podcast series: Diane von Furstenberg (77), Amy Tan (72), Sally Field (77), Gloria Steinem (90), and Debbie Allen (74). I list the ages because that’s one of the first questions Louis-Dreyfus asks her interlocutor, “Are you comfortable if I say you real age?” FWIW Louis-Dreyfus is currently 63. All of the conversations so far have been wonderful, some more wonderful than others, but all wonderful. But I’m not going to binge the rest. I need to dole them out sparingly to make them last.

As for wisdom, that’s tricky. It’s always held a somewhat mysterious, even mystical, quality for me, yet the dictionary definition is straight-forward: “the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment.” Do I qualify? I’ve certainly got experience and knowledge, good judgement? Not so sure. When I was much younger, too young to be in the running for wisdom, I found this well-known statement by George Bernard-Shaw in Man and Superman: “If we could learn from mere experience, the stones of London would be wiser than its wisest men.” The thing about the wisdom in these podcasts is that so much of it sounds humble and straightforward, nothing with even a whiff of “the sound of one hand clapping” mystique. And yet it all rings true, at least to this (I hate to say it) old man. They should know. They’ve lived it.

Here's a section from a recent interview Lulu Garcia-Navarro conducted with Louis-Dreyfus in The New York Times Magazine (June 8, 2024):

I recently heard an episode of “Wiser Than Me” in which you interviewed Patti Smith, and you talked about the different ways that you’ve processed the death of people in your own life. Have the conversations you’ve been having on your podcast helped you process the many ways people deal with the hard things in their life? Yeah, it’s really one of the many impetuses to making this podcast, because all of these women I’m talking to have lived very full, long lives. And that of course means they’ve experienced loss. And I’m really interested to talk to them about how they move beyond it or with it or into it. I’m just loving those conversations, to hear from these women who have experienced an enormous amount of life.

I find what’s comforting about them, and sometimes a little depressing, is how many of the same themes — sexism, prejudice, self-doubt — they have experienced themselves. What is your takeaway from hearing these women having gone through so many of the things that we’re still going through? There’s a sense with most of them, not everybody, but there’s a sense of, OK, I’m done with that [expletive]. I don’t know if we can swear.

You can swear. But anyway, I’m done with that. I’m done with self-doubt. I’m done with shame. I’m done with feeling weird about being ambitious. You know, the list is long. We all know what it is. I think for me, the takeaway is: Oh, we can be done with that sooner than we thought. We don’t have to take 60, 70 [expletive] years to come to that conclusion.

What are you done with? I’m done with [pause] — I’m working on being done with self-doubt. I’m working on being done with shame. And I’m working really hard on finding joy.

I like the way you paused and really thought about your wording, because you said, “I’m done with,” and then you said, “I’m working on being done with … ” Well, I haven’t accomplished all of this yet! Old habits die hard.

Nationalism in Online Games During War

Bilen, Eren and Doghonadze, Nino and Khubulashvili, Robizon and Smerdon, David, Nationalism in Online Games During War (May 20, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4833809 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4833809

Abstract: We investigate how international conflicts impact the behavior of hostile nationals in online games. Utilizing data from the largest online chess platform, where players can see their opponents' country flags, we observed behavioral responses based on the opponents' nationality. Specifically, there is a notable decrease in the share of games played against hostile nationals, indicating a reluctance to engage. Additionally, players show different strategic adjustments: they opt for safer opening moves and exhibit higher persistence in games, evidenced by longer game durations and fewer resignations. This study provides unique insights into the impact of geopolitical conflicts on strategic interactions in an online setting, offering contributions to further understanding human behavior during international conflicts.

How Legal Twitter (RIP) became a source of legal talent and eventually filed suit against Elon

John Leland, How a Profane Joke on Twitter Spawned a Legal Army, NYTimes, May 26, 2024.

This is a fascinating story about what was once Legal Twitter (now dispersed under the Musk dispensation) became a focused source of legal talent I've collected a few passages. It begins with Akiva Cohen, a New York trial lawyer who liked to hang out on Legal Twitter.

How it began in confluence of different cultures:

Posts about legal cases on Twitter, which is now called X, typically draw little participation from non-lawyers. Mr. Mignogna’s case was something different.

“It triggered this avalanche of people who were fans of Vic Mignogna, who came in looking to defend Vic’s honor,” Mr. Cohen said. Some waged harassment and threat campaigns against Mr. Mignogna’s accusers and other women who had criticized him.

Mr. Cohen, joined by other lawyers on the thread, started to gleefully dismantle Mr. Beard’s legal arguments, sniping alternately at him, Mr. Mignogna and Mr. Mignogna’s supporters. “And it just sort of exploded from there,” Mr. Cohen said.

Comments on the thread piled up — a thousand, two thousand, five thousand. One lawyer claimed his cellphone got so many notifications that it thawed a frozen burrito in his briefcase.

Someone decided the thread needed a name. Thus was christened the Threadnought.

“It was kind of at the intersection of different cultures,” said Ken White, a California lawyer and titan of legal Twitter who posts as PopeHat. “You’ve got the anime culture, and then you’ve got this online troll culture, and then you’ve got law Twitter culture. And they intersected with spectacular results.”

Kathryn Tewson:

One of the Threadnought’s fiercest voices belonged to Kathryn Tewson, a self-described “unemployed housewife,” with no legal training but a gift for argument. She had her own reasons for jumping on the thread.

“I don’t like bullies and I don’t like fraud,” she said from her home outside Seattle. “I saw a bunch of people harassing and bullying the women who were the target of this lawsuit. And that just did not sit well with me.”

Ms. Tewson, 49, entered the fray with undisguised relish.

“I love fighting on the internet,” she said, almost chuckling. “I have loved fighting on the internet almost since there was an internet to fight on.” [...]

Ms. Tewson started to privately question Mr. Cohen and another lawyer, Dylan Schmeyer, about defamation law, so she could make better arguments. Mr. Cohen was impressed.

“She was astoundingly quick to pick up and understand legal concepts, ferociously curious and intelligent, quick on her feet and good with words, and excellent at asking the right questions — over and over and over again,” Mr. Cohen said. On the thread he tweeted: “Kathryn, are you sure you don’t want to go to law school so I can hire you?”

One problem: She did not have a college degree. “So Akiva said, ‘Would you go to paralegal school?’” she recalled. Mr. Cohen told her that when she finished, he would either hire her or make sure someone else did.

So she went.

She became his second hire. Realizing that

amid the trash talk and snark, the Threadnought offered a rare look into how other lawyers’ minds worked, how they broke down cases or constructed arguments. It was much more revealing, he figured, than looking at a lawyer’s résumé or law school background. Plus, he saw that they cared enough to do this analysis for free, in their spare time.

His first was Dylan Schmeyer in Colorado. There was no intention to build a virtual litigation team, but in time, that's what happened. The Mignogna suit was eventually dismissed and the Threadnought lawyers turned their attention to suits stemming from the 2020 presidential election, producing what became known as the Litigation Disaster Tours.

One reader of these Disaster threads was Don McGowan, who was the general counsel for Bungie, a video game company based near Seattle.

Bungie had a problem. People were selling software that enabled players to cheat at the company’s popular game Destiny 2, which ruined the game for those who chose to play by the rules. Bungie wanted to sue. The cases would require a lawyer who could explain technical details in terms a jury could understand.

Mr. McGowan thought Mr. Cohen’s Twitter dissections did just that. “I said, ‘Wow, if he’s this able to make this nonsense comprehensible, he must be so good in front of a jury,’” Mr. McGowan said. He retained Mr. Cohen to handle the case.

Mr. Cohen’s reaction: “‘You’re joking, right?’ Like, that’s not a thing that happens.”

In the Bungie case, the lawyers applied a novel use of federal racketeering law. They won a $16 million judgment and established that sellers of cheat codes could be criminally prosecuted for copyright infringement and money laundering. It brought them attention and more business.

With the added case work, Mr. Cohen needed another lawyer. Again he turned to the people he had met through Twitter. Mike Dunford, a Threadnought regular, was finishing a Ph.D. program in copyright law and planning to enter academia. Like Mr. Schmeyer, he had virtually no legal experience — in fact, no interest in practicing law. But he knew a lot about intellectual property and copyright law, areas where Mr. Cohen was getting work. [...]

Mr. Cohen, who before the Threadnought had barely enough cases to keep himself busy, soon expanded his team to six lawyers and three support staff members — all working virtually; all but one he had met through Twitter.

It was a ridiculous way to build a litigation team. But it made a kind of sense, said David Lat, who founded the legal website Above the Law and now writes the newsletter Original Jurisdiction.

“On the one hand, a lot of people would think you’re just hiring a bunch of randos you met online,” Mr. Lat said. “On the other hand, what he has been doing is weirdly meritocratic. Instead of hiring people based on where they went to law school, which is how a lot of legal hiring is done, he’s hiring based on seeing how people think and write in real time and under pressure. I think it’s gutsy, but it seems to be working for him.”

Meanwhile, Elon Musk and purchased Twitter and dismissed many employees. Many complained that they were getting proper severance pay. Lauren Pringle, a legal journalist who edits Chancery Daily, knew some of these people and sent them to Cohen and Tewson.

Soon, Mr. Cohen and his small team, all scattered around the country — in Hawaii, Colorado, Washington State, Long Island — were representing more than 200 former Twitter employees in two lawsuits and arbitration. The cases involved mountains of work against an adversary with seemingly bottomless resources, with no money coming in unless or until they prevail.

Those cases are ongoing. And, as a result of Twitter's transformation into X, Legal Twitter is no more.

You should read the whole thing.

Stupidify This! How Matt Farley floods the web with junk music and makes a decent living doing it.

Brett Martin, Why Did This Guy Put a Song About Me on Spotify? NYTimes Magazine, March 31, 2024.

The man:

[Matt] Farley is 45 and lives with his wife, two sons and a cockapoo named Pippi in Danvers, Mass., on the North Shore. For the past 20 years, he has been releasing album after album of songs with the object of producing a result to match nearly anything anybody could think to search for. These include hundreds of songs name-checking celebrities from the very famous to the much less so. He doesn’t give out his phone number in all of them, but he does spread it around enough that he gets several calls or texts a week. Perhaps sensing my deflation, he assured me that very few came from the actual subject of a song. He told me the director Dennis Dugan (of "Dennis Dugan, I Like Your Movies Very A Lot," part of an 83-song album about movie directors) called once, but he didn’t realize who it was until too late, and the conversation was awkward.

What he's done:

Largely, though not entirely, on the strength of such songs, Farley has managed to achieve that most elusive of goals: a decent living creating music. In 2008, his search-engine optimization project took in $3,000; four years later, it had grown to $24,000. The introduction of Alexa and her voice-activated sistren opened up the theretofore underserved nontyping market, in particular the kind fond of shouting things like “Poop in my fingernails!” at the computer. "Poop in My Fingernails," by the Toilet Bowl Cleaners, currently has over 4.4 million streams on Spotify alone. To date, that “band,” and the Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke and Pee, have collectively brought in approximately $469,000 from various platforms. They are by far Farley’s biggest earners, but not the only ones: Papa Razzi and the Photogs has earned $41,000; the Best Birthday Song Band Ever, $38,000; the Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over, $80,000. Dozens of others have taken in two, three or four digits: the New Orleans Sports Band, the Chicago Sports Band, the Singing Film Critic, the Great Weather Song Person, the Paranormal Song Warrior, the Motern Media Holiday Singers, who perform 70 versions of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” substituting contemporary foods for figgy pudding. It adds up. Farley quit his day job in 2017.

“People like to criticize the whole streaming thing, but there’s really a lot of pros to it,” he said. Indeed, in 2023, his music earned him just shy of $200,000, about one halfpenny at a time.

Movies too:

And he makes movies: microbudgeted, determinedly amateur but nevertheless recognizably cinematic features starring himself and his family and friends. (They feature a spectacular array of New England accents.) In most, Farley plays some version of himself, a mild-mannered, eccentric hero projecting varying degrees of menace. Farley and his college friend Charlie Roxburgh are in the midst of a project in which they have resolved to release two full movies per year. The model, Farley said, was inspired by Hallmark Movies: “If this movie stinks, good news, we’re making another in six months!” Their most popular work remains “Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You!” (2012), a charmingly shaggy tale of a cryptid threatening a small New England town. It features Farley’s father as a big-game hunter named Ito Hootkins.

Farley’s persona is simultaneously grandiose — “I really do think I’m the greatest songwriter of the 21st Century,” he told me — and knowingly self-effacing.

On method:

The umbrella name that Farley uses for all his outputs is Motern. He made the word up; or rather, he seized on what he felt was its strange power after misspelling the word “intern” in what he had planned to be a 10,000-page novel. To Farley, creativity has always been a volume business. That, in fact, is the gist of “The Motern Method,” a 136-page manifesto on creativity that he self-published in 2021. His theory is that every idea, no matter its apparent value, must be honored and completed. An idea thwarted is an insult to the muse and is punished accordingly.

So what?

Mostly I was trying to figure out whether I thought Farley was a bad guy. Did his scheme represent the inevitable cynical end product of a culture in the grips of algorithmic platforms? Or might it be a delightful side effect? Was his work spam or a kind of outsider art? Was he just the Poop Song Guy, or was he closer to Steve Keene, the Brooklyn-based, Gen-X-hipster-approved painter of over 300,000 works who has been the subject of books and museum retrospectives?

What the future holds:

Among other topics Farley told me he planned to tackle in future albums were: colleges, household items, tools, musical instruments. I had planned to ask what categories haven’t worked, but what had become clear by then is that the idea of any one song, or even album, hitting the jackpot isn’t the point. Even after Spotify’s recent announcement that it would no longer pay royalties on songs receiving fewer than a thousand streams, Farley’s business model rests on the sheer bulk of his output. And so does his artistic model. Whatever the dubious value of any individual song in the Farley universe, it’s as part of the enormous body of the whole, the magnum opus, that it gains power. This is especially true when you consider that an artificial intelligence could conceivably produce 24,000 songs, Farley’s entire oeuvre, in about a day, a fact that gives his defiantly human, even artisanal, labor a kind of lonely Sisyphean dignity. Whatever else Farley’s work is, it is not AI — even when it barely seems to be I.

Farley's production function:

These days, he sets himself a relatively light goal of one 50-song album a month, recorded in a spare bedroom in his house. (Fifty tracks is the limit that CD Baby, which Farley uses to distribute and manage his music, allows, a regulation that may or may not have something to do with Farley, who used to put as many as 100 on an album.) Once he reaches his quota, he begins the tedious work of checking the levels of each song, entering titles and metadata (genre, writer, length, etc.), creating an album title and cover art (nearly always a selfie) and uploading the package one song at a time.

Farley showed me a worn, green spiral notebook in which he meticulously tracks his output and earnings. From Spotify, he earns roughly a third of a cent per stream; Amazon and Apple pay slightly more on average: between a third and three-quarters of a cent. TikTok, on the other hand, pays musicians by the number of videos featuring their songs and is thus immune to Farley’s strategy; when Kris and Kylie Jenner recorded a video of themselves dancing to Farley’s song about Kris, millions of people saw it, but Farley earned less than 1 cent.

There's more at the link, but do you really need more?

Keeping Score of my online action

It’s a lazy Friday afternoon, but then recently all Friday afternoons have seemed lazy. I’ve spent much the day doing this and that and taking stock, getting ready for the been weekend push on my next piece for 3 Quarks Daily. It’s currently titled, “Why We Need Philosophy, Now, More Than Ever [AI].” Perhaps it will have that title by the time I publish it. We’ll see.

Anyhow, I thought I’d report my latest states on Academic and here at the Savanna.

Academia

I’ve got 90,841 total views, which puts me in the top 0.5%. I’ve been there for months. At one point in the last year, Mar. 22, I was in the top 0.1%. That’s pretty good. I need to be in the top 0.001%.

The chart below shows my paper action over the last 60 days. The upper green line is paper views and the lower black line is downloads. Notice that all the data points except the rightmost one indicate totals for the day. I took the screenshot at 4PM; I won’t hazard a guess where thing will be at the end of the day.

Here's the most popular papers over the last 60 days (click on chart to embiggen):

Notice that the top paper, on the tech Singularity, is way behind the second paper, on Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll, in total views (to the right), but ahead of it in downloads. The singularity paper is from 2014; the Ninja Scroll paper is from 2015. The corresponding Ninja Scroll post at New Savanna is the most popular post there. I’m particularly pleased with the performance of the Heart of Darkness paper, which is hard-core literary criticism, with quite a bit of close-reading and “distant” reading as well; it’s from 2019. The Visual Thinking paper is an encyclopedia article I published in 1990.

New Savanna

Here’s the views on New Savanna over the past three months. Very spiky.

Here’s the last year; notice the overall spikiness and the heavy action in August and September.

This is how things look over the whole life of the blog:

I have no idea what caused all that action in 2017, nor what’s the source of the recent, but highly variable, increase since August, 2023.

Here’s the most popular posts for the last three months (click on chart to embiggen):

Note particularly the most popular one: GOAT Literary Critics: Part 1.1, What do you mean, literary critic? That’s from December 4, 2023, and is the first post in my ongoing series on literary criticism. That series is a response to Tyler Cowen’s recently published book, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? Cowen published a link to my post at his blog, Marginal Revolution, on December 6 and that drove a lot of traffic to New Savanna that day.

The second post on the list is my post on Ninja Scroll; as I indicated above, it’s the most popular one at New Savanna and dates from September, 2010, the first year of the blog. In third place we have one the posts in my series about Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises. That is now the third most popular post on the blog and dates from late 2015.

Who’s the GOAT of Economics? Tyler Cowen on His New AI Book & More! [Bonus: from double-entry bookkeeping to supply and demand] – that’s in fourth place and has some comments on a podcast in which Cowen discussed his GOAT economists book. During the conversation he mentioned that he couldn’t understand why 17th century thinkers had such trouble conceptualizing the phenomenon of supply-and-demand, which he could easily explain to a reasonably intelligent teenager. I did some thinking about it and made a variety of comments about it, giving special attention to a speculation that the conceptualization probably piggy-backed on the practice of double-entry book-keeping. Cowen apparently liked that and gave me another link.

More later.

Why LLMs and image engines depend on the prior existence of the web

Data Bros forget that GenAI works because general web developed organically and independently to become a sort of our collective Jungian subconscious.

Absent that, all the MSFT riches couldn't have commanded a general web into existence!

A modern LLM pre-trained on a ~1992-93… pic.twitter.com/aLTu1waFD1

— Subbarao Kambhampati (కంభంపాటి సుబ్బారావు) (@rao2z) January 11, 2024

Why I hang out at LessWrong and why you should check-in there every now and then

The first two sections are a background, first a bit on cultural change to set the general context. Then some general information about LessWrong. Now we’re reading for my personal impressions of the place, concluding with a suggestion that you take a look if you haven’t already.

Cultural change over the long haul: Christians and professors

Back in the ancient days Christianity as just another mystery cult on the periphery of the Roman Empire. Then in 380 AD Emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica and it became the state religion of the Roman Empire. In time it spread out among the many tribes of Europe and those Christian tribespeople began thinking of an entity called Christendom, and that, in time, became Europe and “the West.”

Back in the days when Europe was still Christendom the Catholic Church was the center of intellectual life. That changed during the Sixteenth Century with the advent of the Scientific Revolution and the Reformation. The Catholic remained powerful, of course, but universities supplanted it as the institutional center of intellectual life.

My point is simple and obvious: things change. Cults can become mainstream and new institutions can displace old ones. With that in mind, let’s think about LessWrong.

LessWrong

To be sure do not want to imply that LessWrong, a large and sophisticated online community, and the currents that swirl there (the rationalist movement, effective altruism (EA), dystopian fears of rogue AI) is comparable to Christianity, but it appears cultlike to outsiders, and to some insiders as well. It hosts a great deal of high-wattage intellectual activity on artificial intelligence and AI existential risk, effective altruism, and, more generally, how to live a life. I suspect that for some who post there, it is the intellectual center of their intellectual life.

It was founded in 2009 by Eliezer Yudkowsky, an autodidact with strong interests in AI and, in particular, the destructive potential of advanced AI. That is what he’s best known for and, while I suspect that Nick Bostrom is more widely known on that subject – his 2014 book, Superintelligence, was a best-seller, and he has an academic post at Oxford – Yudkowsky has likely been more influential within the tech community centered on Silicon Valley, where he lives. As an indicator of that influence, consider this pair of recent posts at X, the site formerly known as Twitter, by the president and co-founder of OpenAI, Sam Altman:

it is possible at some point he will deserve the nobel peace prize for this--I continue to think short timelines and slow takeoff is likely the safest quadrant of the short/long timelines and slow/fast takeoff matrix.

— Sam Altman (@sama) February 3, 2023

Color me skeptical about the Peace Prize. But that’s beside that point, which is that Yudkowsky has been and is very influential in Silicon Valley. People who work in those companies post and comment at LessWrong.

Why I’m there

Because it is an interesting place, if a bit strange and off-putting, and because I have so far had some interesting conversation there. Not a lot, but certainly enough to make it worthwhile.

I don’t know when I first took a look at LessWrong, but let’s say it was more than five years ago and perhaps even as long as ten years ago. But I didn’t spend much time there. That began changing, say, two or so years ago, sometime after GPT-3 began rocking the world. I made my first post in June of 2022, and have made a total of 40 posts and 137 comments there so far (now 40 posts as I've cross-posted this there). I generally check in there every day just to see what’s going on. I may take a quick look at a new post or five, look at comments on posts I’m following, and then go on about my business. On a particularly good day I’ll read some comments on one of my own posts and reply.

The thing is, I’m a ronin intellectual, and have been for years. If you’ve ever seen the anime series, Samurai Champloo, I’m the intellectual equivalent of Jin. Yes, I’ve got a PhD – there are a few of those at LessWrong – and once held a faculty post at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. But I left that a long time ago and have been without an intellectual home ever since. I’ve published a bunch of articles in the academic literature on various topics scattered over literary criticism, cognitive science, and cultural evolution, and two books in the trade press with good publishers, one on music (Beethoven’s Anvil, Basic 2001) and one on computer graphics (Visualization, Harry Abrams 1989). For what it’s worth, and it’s worth a great deal to me, the idea count is higher than the page count would seem to indicate, but my work never really caught on. So I understand what it’s like to be a mammal in a world dominated by dinosaurs.

Report from Academia.edu • I’m Back! • Mar 22, 2023

Here’s the stats from 7:30 this morning:

I’m definitely down from the peak of March 13, but I seem to be running a bit higher than things were in February. Can I keep it up? Who knows.

But here’s the big news:

I’m now in the 99.9th percentile (top 0.1%) of Academia users. I had been running at the 99.5th percentile (top 0.5%). When you consider the nature of this distribution, that’s a significant jump.

Last March is the first time I got this high in the rankings, and that was an unexplained fluke. I had 875 views on March 28. I have no idea what caused that, but I was unable to sustain it. Perhaps things will go better this time. We’ll see.