isn't this what you want?
Feb. 6th, 2024 17:09![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ursamajorBay Area friends! We've got another concert coming up with Oakland Symphony Chorus a week from Friday (February 16, 8 pm at the Paramount; The Artist As Activist), and we'd love to see you there. The Symphony will be performing Joan Tower's Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, No 6 and Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No 5, and we'll be joining them for the world premiere of Carlos Simon's Here I Stand: Paul Robeson.
And then in April, OSC will be collaborating with Pacific Edge Voices for their The Sound Garden of Love concert at St. Mark's in SF. On the program: Elgar's Lux Aeterna, luminous and crystalline; it's new to me, but I'm looking forward to floating up there, supported by close harmonies. And to my utterly ecstatic joy, a piece with which I am quite familiar: Vienna Teng's The Hymn of Acxiom. Yes, when I found this out, my squeals could be heard clear across the bay. :D (I know! I still need to write about her Freight concerts in December, but suffice it to say for now that I am glad those shows have become part of my end of year rituals, grateful for every year she's managed to find a way to come back since my first time in 2019, or done an online concert the years she couldn't.)
There is something very now-ish about taking a song created with electronic voices based on one person's voice, and extracting it back out to a group of human voices to perform with all of our quirks and foibles, and the power of community enabling a group performance where we as individuals will need to take breaths unplanned, will make mistakes, but will make art, beauty, together. It feels zeitgeist-ish, similar to how I've written 100,000 words' worth of stories in the last six months, as if I'm rebelling against the mainstream embrace of large language models as authors, algorithms as intellects, corporations as people. Now-ish, even on the accelerated schedule of technology changes, because the forces Teng described in the early 2010s have had more than a decade to entrench themselves into our lives.
*
Sometimes, the advertising algorithms get stuck in a rut. Like Lily Diamond, I, too, have been inundated with lingerie ads in my social media in the runup to Valentine's Day, now barely a week hence, and I'm mildly curious if it's the usual spray and pray targeting feel of most ad campaigns, or if any signals I threw out being a person online have contributed to so intensely refocusing the ads that I'm being shown.
(someone is gathering every crumb you drop)
Unlike Diamond, I have a long-term partner, so at least the algorithmic ad targeting isn't inadvertently taunting me as cruelly as it is her. But it's still a ridiculously narrow focus. Why have I not gotten ads for, say, Valentine's chocolate, to remotely the same degree, when I literally follow multiple chocolatiers on Instagram and zero lingerie makers, when chocolate is something I consistently express a desire for? Or Valentine's flowers when I buy flowers semi-regularly, follow florists and gardeners on Instagram? The algorithm is screeching (crap, there I go anthropomorphizing it when I spend so much time trying to explain to people that it's not human, it's not actually learning the way we think of that, even if it is manufactured by human biases), "You're not a whole person, you're a wallet we can raid to sell you scraps of nylon for outrageously inflated pricing, if we only wear you down enough!" Hooray, late capitalism.
(reach in your pocket)
But what's being advertised even more avidly to me at the moment than even the seasonally predictable lacy red and pink and black trousseaux? These Friends of the Boundary Waters x Hippy Feet Merino Wool Hiking Socks.
I have literally seen the same ad for them 13 times in the last 72 hours across all Meta properties. They're crew-height wool socks with a design evoking the views along said Boundary Waters: pine trees and rushing rivers, the sun at the horizon, a canoe shimmering in the alpenglow. A place I'd love to kayak someday, even if probably not in the winter, ha (🔒).
I know I could tell Meta to stop showing said ad to me, as it's repetitive, but I'm also amused and wondering how many more times they will show said ad to me. Even after I acknowledge that yes, I am going to buy these particular socks for reasons practical, aesthetic, and sentimental; the algorithm made a direct hit after 99,999 other failures ranging from ignorable to irritating. (I've been a wool socks stan for 20+ years now, since my first "hold on, REI carries hiking socks now that are both warm *and* cute?".) Even though I feel guilty for rewarding said algorithm, I can't deny that I'm still glad the existence of these socks was brought to my attention, tiny dopamine hit of success, tiny sigh of relief that once they arrive, I will be back up to a week's worth of crew socks without holes in the heels?
(o how glorious, glorious, a new need is born)
*
Later in that piece, Diamond confesses:
(someone is learning the colors of all your moods, to (say just the right thing and) show that you're understood)
In a conversation I've been having with a friend this week, they used a turn of phrase that struck me. Struck me because, of the people I know, they would be *the* person who would phrase it that way. My instant reaction to that was, "That is such a ~you~ way to phrase things!" And in the context of the broader conversation we've been having around modern technology and how it mediates communication and relationships, in the moment, declaring "that is so you!" felt like pushback. Pushback for individuality, relatability, personality, humanity. But I know that with enough aggregated data of a given person, the deepfakes are out there; ChatGPT can dish out words "in the style of" many prominent individuals' writings. I am both curious what such a model would do with my writing, given over 25 years of such being available in digital form, and horrified at how easily it could put words in my mouth, say I wrote or said things that I never did.
From a professional context? That's already happened. We were on the front lines of that battle in late 2022, maybe early 2023. One day, we received an email from somebody wanting to read a paper one of my coworkers had supposedly written. They had never written the paper the reader was requesting - but it was titled with a topic that was something which someone at our company would be likely to write about or would have been planning to write about. Apparently, they had asked ChatGPT about that topic, and ChatGPT looked at the writing available on our website and used it to wholesale invent papers "by us" to cite.
(leave your life open, you don't have to hide)
And yet I'm posting this publicly, anyway - rolling the dice, seeing who will read, engage. (Hoping for who, rather than what. Betting that silence means what.) Going on four years of having our social life circumscribed by circumstance, our social media interactions bound by ever tighter limits.
Posting this here, while knowing that everyone is tired of creating Yet Another Account To Keep Track Of, and burned by the corporate mainstream options that are tolerated enough, if limited in other ways. And, too often, too worn down by the demands of twenty-first century life to conjure up the activation energy to engage, either. (Who has time for 2000 words of my rambling observations?) Yet I'll still link to this on the mainstream social networks where I know people, because. (I guess with Bluesky opening up this week, I ought to look again and see who's made digital homes there, on Threads, on Mastodon. I gave up last year because, again, Yet Another Account To Keep Track Of.)
*
I've also been reading Rebecca Solnit this weekend. Her latest for the London Review of Books, In the Shadow of Silicon Valley, weaves together a lot of loose threads. It's long, but worth the read. What caught my attention most was how she talked about the social pandemic both predating and coexisting with the current medical pandemic, a crisis of extractive technology impeding human connection, exacerbated since the first stay home orders. The loneliness Diamond expressed above, too.
(let our formulas find your soul)
No wonder the doom loop narrative persists, when our neighborhood shops (what ones are allowed to exist when most of us live in places subjugated to Euclidean zoning) have been replaced with Amazon lockers and CloudKitchens ghost kitchens, and there are fewer and fewer in-person third places to bother leaving the house for, to build and maintain local community, especially if you don't have the finances and health to participate in what ones exist. The convenience of two-day delivery shifting towards on-demand delivery no matter the detriment to society and climate.
I haven't started writing a Substack For Reasons, though I follow a number of people on it because that's where they're writing these days, and it seems to be where to go to get your voice heard. But I can't deny the convenience of the Substack app, the convenience that makes it attractive to the mainstream who have capitulated to an Amazon-dependent lifestyle, are getting most things delivered rather than adding in-person shopping to an already overloaded life. This, of course, comes with societal costs that require systemic fixes, but.
Also, honestly, how infrequently I actually see the newsletters of anybody I've subscribed to via more ethical newsletter platforms contributes to this seduction. Because my email inbox is a black hole. (And yet, longtime friends and readers will laugh their asses off when I report that I got TWO emails for Whatcom Kim (🔒) today!) It's embarrassing to admit that the easiest way for people to reach me right now is via Instagram and/or Facebook rather than GMail, especially when trying to shoehorn complex, nuanced thoughts into a platform designed for superficial quick-hit engagement. My communication outputs and inputs, mediated by billionaires with priorities that are a mismatch for mine. Even my physical existence is unavoidably affected by forces larger than me, backed by financial chicanery at levels far beyond my reach.
The piece ends with even Solnit sounding weary, she of changing the story from despair to possibility.
Valentine's Day will mark 4.5 years sincehyounpark and I arrived (back) in the Bay Area. It is a markedly different Bay from the one I left for college; I am a markedly different person in my 40s now from who I was in my teens. But even with the 13-month interruption of staying home curtailing our plans to establish our Bay-based social life, see old friends more regularly, make new friends? The best parts of being here have been the relationships we're forging and reviving, the community we're finding our way into. And among our community, among the people we know, we're all trying to make things better for all of us.
We're all a chorus here, doing the work, needing to breathe at points when the sound must go on. Staggering our breathing as individual singers so we can sustain the sound as a whole. If you're feeling like Solnit here? Breathe. To end by quoting Vienna Teng again: "We've got you."
And then in April, OSC will be collaborating with Pacific Edge Voices for their The Sound Garden of Love concert at St. Mark's in SF. On the program: Elgar's Lux Aeterna, luminous and crystalline; it's new to me, but I'm looking forward to floating up there, supported by close harmonies. And to my utterly ecstatic joy, a piece with which I am quite familiar: Vienna Teng's The Hymn of Acxiom. Yes, when I found this out, my squeals could be heard clear across the bay. :D (I know! I still need to write about her Freight concerts in December, but suffice it to say for now that I am glad those shows have become part of my end of year rituals, grateful for every year she's managed to find a way to come back since my first time in 2019, or done an online concert the years she couldn't.)
There is something very now-ish about taking a song created with electronic voices based on one person's voice, and extracting it back out to a group of human voices to perform with all of our quirks and foibles, and the power of community enabling a group performance where we as individuals will need to take breaths unplanned, will make mistakes, but will make art, beauty, together. It feels zeitgeist-ish, similar to how I've written 100,000 words' worth of stories in the last six months, as if I'm rebelling against the mainstream embrace of large language models as authors, algorithms as intellects, corporations as people. Now-ish, even on the accelerated schedule of technology changes, because the forces Teng described in the early 2010s have had more than a decade to entrench themselves into our lives.
*
Sometimes, the advertising algorithms get stuck in a rut. Like Lily Diamond, I, too, have been inundated with lingerie ads in my social media in the runup to Valentine's Day, now barely a week hence, and I'm mildly curious if it's the usual spray and pray targeting feel of most ad campaigns, or if any signals I threw out being a person online have contributed to so intensely refocusing the ads that I'm being shown.
(someone is gathering every crumb you drop)
Unlike Diamond, I have a long-term partner, so at least the algorithmic ad targeting isn't inadvertently taunting me as cruelly as it is her. But it's still a ridiculously narrow focus. Why have I not gotten ads for, say, Valentine's chocolate, to remotely the same degree, when I literally follow multiple chocolatiers on Instagram and zero lingerie makers, when chocolate is something I consistently express a desire for? Or Valentine's flowers when I buy flowers semi-regularly, follow florists and gardeners on Instagram? The algorithm is screeching (crap, there I go anthropomorphizing it when I spend so much time trying to explain to people that it's not human, it's not actually learning the way we think of that, even if it is manufactured by human biases), "You're not a whole person, you're a wallet we can raid to sell you scraps of nylon for outrageously inflated pricing, if we only wear you down enough!" Hooray, late capitalism.
(reach in your pocket)
But what's being advertised even more avidly to me at the moment than even the seasonally predictable lacy red and pink and black trousseaux? These Friends of the Boundary Waters x Hippy Feet Merino Wool Hiking Socks.
I have literally seen the same ad for them 13 times in the last 72 hours across all Meta properties. They're crew-height wool socks with a design evoking the views along said Boundary Waters: pine trees and rushing rivers, the sun at the horizon, a canoe shimmering in the alpenglow. A place I'd love to kayak someday, even if probably not in the winter, ha (🔒).
I know I could tell Meta to stop showing said ad to me, as it's repetitive, but I'm also amused and wondering how many more times they will show said ad to me. Even after I acknowledge that yes, I am going to buy these particular socks for reasons practical, aesthetic, and sentimental; the algorithm made a direct hit after 99,999 other failures ranging from ignorable to irritating. (I've been a wool socks stan for 20+ years now, since my first "hold on, REI carries hiking socks now that are both warm *and* cute?".) Even though I feel guilty for rewarding said algorithm, I can't deny that I'm still glad the existence of these socks was brought to my attention, tiny dopamine hit of success, tiny sigh of relief that once they arrive, I will be back up to a week's worth of crew socks without holes in the heels?
(o how glorious, glorious, a new need is born)
*
Later in that piece, Diamond confesses:
Aside from feeling bullied by an ostensibly omniscient algorithm that's supposed to know me and anticipate my needs better than I do myself, I feel a bit let down. It feels good to be known. I've made many a joke about my phone being a pseudo-surrogate boyfriend, but it's the algorithm we rely on to feel understood psychologically, spiritually, capitalistically.
(someone is learning the colors of all your moods, to (say just the right thing and) show that you're understood)
In a conversation I've been having with a friend this week, they used a turn of phrase that struck me. Struck me because, of the people I know, they would be *the* person who would phrase it that way. My instant reaction to that was, "That is such a ~you~ way to phrase things!" And in the context of the broader conversation we've been having around modern technology and how it mediates communication and relationships, in the moment, declaring "that is so you!" felt like pushback. Pushback for individuality, relatability, personality, humanity. But I know that with enough aggregated data of a given person, the deepfakes are out there; ChatGPT can dish out words "in the style of" many prominent individuals' writings. I am both curious what such a model would do with my writing, given over 25 years of such being available in digital form, and horrified at how easily it could put words in my mouth, say I wrote or said things that I never did.
From a professional context? That's already happened. We were on the front lines of that battle in late 2022, maybe early 2023. One day, we received an email from somebody wanting to read a paper one of my coworkers had supposedly written. They had never written the paper the reader was requesting - but it was titled with a topic that was something which someone at our company would be likely to write about or would have been planning to write about. Apparently, they had asked ChatGPT about that topic, and ChatGPT looked at the writing available on our website and used it to wholesale invent papers "by us" to cite.
(leave your life open, you don't have to hide)
And yet I'm posting this publicly, anyway - rolling the dice, seeing who will read, engage. (Hoping for who, rather than what. Betting that silence means what.) Going on four years of having our social life circumscribed by circumstance, our social media interactions bound by ever tighter limits.
Posting this here, while knowing that everyone is tired of creating Yet Another Account To Keep Track Of, and burned by the corporate mainstream options that are tolerated enough, if limited in other ways. And, too often, too worn down by the demands of twenty-first century life to conjure up the activation energy to engage, either. (Who has time for 2000 words of my rambling observations?) Yet I'll still link to this on the mainstream social networks where I know people, because. (I guess with Bluesky opening up this week, I ought to look again and see who's made digital homes there, on Threads, on Mastodon. I gave up last year because, again, Yet Another Account To Keep Track Of.)
*
I've also been reading Rebecca Solnit this weekend. Her latest for the London Review of Books, In the Shadow of Silicon Valley, weaves together a lot of loose threads. It's long, but worth the read. What caught my attention most was how she talked about the social pandemic both predating and coexisting with the current medical pandemic, a crisis of extractive technology impeding human connection, exacerbated since the first stay home orders. The loneliness Diamond expressed above, too.
(let our formulas find your soul)
Americans face a social pandemic of loneliness and isolation. The US surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, has declared it a crisis. His reports identify causes including the internet, smartphones and social media. None of these was created with this agenda, but all of them have advanced it. Some of the ‘examples of harm’ listed by Murthy include ‘technology that displaces in-person engagement, monopolises our attention, reduces the quality of our interactions and even diminishes our self-esteem’.
The Covid-19 pandemic worsened isolation, but tech had already made redundant many of the ways we used to congregate and mingle, while often portraying those ventures into the world as dangerous, unpleasant, inefficient and inconvenient.
No wonder the doom loop narrative persists, when our neighborhood shops (what ones are allowed to exist when most of us live in places subjugated to Euclidean zoning) have been replaced with Amazon lockers and CloudKitchens ghost kitchens, and there are fewer and fewer in-person third places to bother leaving the house for, to build and maintain local community, especially if you don't have the finances and health to participate in what ones exist. The convenience of two-day delivery shifting towards on-demand delivery no matter the detriment to society and climate.
I haven't started writing a Substack For Reasons, though I follow a number of people on it because that's where they're writing these days, and it seems to be where to go to get your voice heard. But I can't deny the convenience of the Substack app, the convenience that makes it attractive to the mainstream who have capitulated to an Amazon-dependent lifestyle, are getting most things delivered rather than adding in-person shopping to an already overloaded life. This, of course, comes with societal costs that require systemic fixes, but.
Also, honestly, how infrequently I actually see the newsletters of anybody I've subscribed to via more ethical newsletter platforms contributes to this seduction. Because my email inbox is a black hole. (And yet, longtime friends and readers will laugh their asses off when I report that I got TWO emails for Whatcom Kim (🔒) today!) It's embarrassing to admit that the easiest way for people to reach me right now is via Instagram and/or Facebook rather than GMail, especially when trying to shoehorn complex, nuanced thoughts into a platform designed for superficial quick-hit engagement. My communication outputs and inputs, mediated by billionaires with priorities that are a mismatch for mine. Even my physical existence is unavoidably affected by forces larger than me, backed by financial chicanery at levels far beyond my reach.
The piece ends with even Solnit sounding weary, she of changing the story from despair to possibility.
"I don’t know whether these billionaires know what a city is, but I do know that they have laid their hands on the city that’s been my home since 1980 and used their wealth to undermine its diversity and affordability, demonise its poor, turn its politicians into puppets and push its politics to the right. They have produced many kinds of dystopia without ever deviating from the line that they are bringing us all to a glorious utopia for which they deserve our admiration.
I used to be proud of being from the San Francisco Bay Area."
Valentine's Day will mark 4.5 years since
hyounpark and I arrived (back) in the Bay Area. It is a markedly different Bay from the one I left for college; I am a markedly different person in my 40s now from who I was in my teens. But even with the 13-month interruption of staying home curtailing our plans to establish our Bay-based social life, see old friends more regularly, make new friends? The best parts of being here have been the relationships we're forging and reviving, the community we're finding our way into. And among our community, among the people we know, we're all trying to make things better for all of us.We're all a chorus here, doing the work, needing to breathe at points when the sound must go on. Staggering our breathing as individual singers so we can sustain the sound as a whole. If you're feeling like Solnit here? Breathe. To end by quoting Vienna Teng again: "We've got you."
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no subject
Date: 2024-02-07 01:33 (UTC)ROFL
Date: 2024-02-07 01:39 (UTC)(I'm still kind of mad that she signed me up for a Jingle Run like 15 years ago, doing the Hot Chocolate 5k earlier this year kind of felt like I got sucked into her trap. That one of the emails today was FROM A BIKE SHOP just felt like extra betrayal!)
no subject
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00 (UTC)Oh my GOODNESS have fun with the singing!!!
no subject
Date: 2024-02-08 19:42 (UTC)(Plus, it's like we each got a special surprise with that program announcement - Edward Elgar is one of Hyoun's favorite composers, like Vienna Teng is one of mine, so *hearteyes*)