Today’s Best Band Ever™ is Kali Malone.
…almost two hours of concentrated, creeping organ pieces governed by a strict acoustic and compositional code with ultimately profound emotional resonance.
In other words, drones, minimalism, and everything that makes great music.
Difficulty: Hey, not too rough (if you don’t mind an occasional single note, sustained for a minute)
Other way around this time. The Cloud and technology are kind of boring these days. Everybody’s jumping on the GenAI these days. Even Amazon’s re:Invent was dominated by the Q. Google now has Gemini. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just a shift from cloud bringing innovation like serverless, to being a stable platform. And then this stability allows for developments like these. Really fascinating stuff.
And, of course, greed and selfishness being as prominent as ever. For the record, I support Jewish people, but I don’t support Israel’s settlement policy or how it’s dealing with Palestine.
Boredom
This paper is, in my opinion, amazing. Ironically, I don’t remember much of it by now, but the concept that (I’m rephrasing here)
The feeling of boredom is a protest against being prevented from achieving something that matters.
This is just crazy. I’m not even talking about the bore-out. Simple scrolling to kill time is explicitly counterproductive against boredom because it too blocks us from doing something meaningful.
Unless you are one of those scientists, who try to reverse engineer tiktok’s algorithm (or any other content platform), that scrolling is making you less happy.
From SMBC comics.
But finally, let’s talk about the assholes
For the last two years, I was thinking a lot about what, in my opinion, can be defined as “human scalability”.
We’re told that a team should be no more than seven people. Or actually three.
That humans cap at a maximum of 250 social connections.
In 1455, Gutenberg completed his 42-line Bible.
Apart from the obvious democratisation of the reading that happened, another big change took place. Before Gutenberg, it was theoretically possible to read every important book in the known universe.
Not anymore. The world of knowledge got too big.
I call it “The Gutenberg threshold”.
Of course, it’s not only about books. Many companies start as a group of people, small enough for every employee to know any other. But after some success and growth, it’s almost inevitable that the CEO will be one day making a decision based on the number of people, not their qualities. Human resources.
I guess it’s the cost of progress, and the only thing one can do is to adapt to the new times.
Change the approach.
My argument is not exactly about theoretical epistemology.
If you prefer, it’s about an applied epistemology, human scalability and a choice of being an asshole.
I’ve used the “asshole” several times already, let’s define it for the sake of this piece. Just like the boredom paper above, it’s crucial to shift the term from the dead-end “I’m bored” into a practical “I’m subconsciously fighting stagnation”.
With this in mind, I’d propose defining “to asshole” (verb, action) as a choice of staying ignorant, when presented information. With this, “an asshole” (state) is someone who consistently assholes to maintain their comfort of being ignorant. Being an asshole is about pretending the world is small.
I grew up first in the Soviet Union, then, after it collapsed, in Ukraine.
Looking back, I can summarise my political awareness as two-fold: on one hand, it was common knowledge that individual people have no influence on the events whatsoever — we’re just screws in The Grand Machine. On the other, all events were interpreted via soviet propaganda. Good us versus bad them.
So cultivated political apathy, wrapped in a thick layer of propaganda.
Until 2004, I didn't care about politics. The Orange revolution made it personal for me.
Until 2014, I didn't question much the past. I knew about the Holodomor, but it was far away and “I guess it was bad times for all”. I didn't know about the great displacement of Tatars from Crimea. Or many others, including Ukrainians from the Eastern Ukraine.
Or what we did in the 1968.
I heard about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, but it wasn’t until recently, when I realised the World War Two started in 1939 by the Soviet Union together with the Nazi Germany invading Poland. In retrospective now I understand why it was never called World War Two in the Soviet Union. Because they started it as aggressors and were losing it.
Or the fact that I grew up with Russian as my mother tongue had only to do with the 400 years of the “empire of brothers” systematically working to erase the Ukrainian language and culture. It took me 30 years of being outside the ruzzian propaganda bubble to start realising it existed at all.
I’m ashamed of that ignorance and terrified of how much I’m still ignoring.
It was the full-scale invasion, and reports from my brother of him hiding his family in the cellar during ruzzian bombings, that shifted this war across the Gutenberg threshold for me. From abstract to the very personal.
And what made me to start to rethink my position about the Syrian war, the Israeli-Hamas one, the still ongoing (sic!) Rohingya genocide, the climate change and many others.
The fact that it’s not personal to me, that it’s beyond my personal Gutenberg threshold, doesn’t make it less important.
Yes, I cannot seem to scale beyond that. I cannot know everything, but ignoring makes me an asshole.
Let’s hope 2024 and beyond will be about the decline of the assholes, even or especially if the times are tough.
A happy new year (no matter their calendar) to all who don’t think they should be invading, killing and stealing from their neighbours.
Take care and stop aggressors.
PS. This post is still stubbornly 100% GPT-free.