Posts by author:
Chris Bertram
Crooked Timber is twenty years old today, which is an awfully long time for a website, never mind a blog, never mind one that is strictly non-commercial and run on volunteer labour. So here’s to us, and here’s to all those who have been on board at various times during our journey. To quote the Grateful Dead: what a long, strange trip it’s been.
We started the blog shortly after the Iraq war started and in a world that was still shaped by the immediate aftermath of 9/11. A bunch of people who had blogs of their own came together to form our collective after a period of email back-and-forth. It might have been quite a different blog: Norman Geras a strong supporter of the war, had been involved in the emailing, but it became clear that we couldn’t have both him and Dan Davies, so we settled for Dan, and what a good choice that was. Matt Yglesias was invited, but never replied, and has gone on to a rather successful online career.
The initial crew was Chris Bertram, Harry Brighouse, Daniel Davies, Henry Farrell, Maria Farrell, Kieran Healy, Jon Mandle and Brian Weatherson. Four out of nine survivors isn’t bad, but I miss the contributions of those who have moved on, who wrote some of the great posts of the early years. Within a few months we had added Ted Barlow, Eszter Hargittai, John Holbo, John Quiggin, Tom Runnacles, Micah Schwartzman and Belle Waring, and then Ingrid Robeyns and Scott McLemee joined us a couple of years later, followed soon after by Michael Bérubé. By 2008, the Guardian was listing us in its top 50 most powerful blogs, but I think we missed the moment to cash in and become tech zillionaires. Niamh Hardiman became a member around 2011, followed later by Tedra Osell, Eric Rauchway and Corey Robin, then Rich Yeselson. In 2018 we were joined by Serene Khader, Miriam Ronzoni, Gina Schouten and Astra Taylor and then this past year by Chris Armstrong, Elizabeth Anderson, Eric Schliesser, Kevin Munger, Macarena Marey, Paul Segal and Speranta Dumitru. Throughout we tried to keep a mix of people of different experiences, backgrounds, genders and locations, though I’m sure we could have done better. One person, who sadly has left us, deserves special thanks: Kieran Healy was not only an intellectual force behind Crooked Timber, but also, long after he ceased posting, kept us on the road with his technical expertise. The site would have long since fallen over without him.
I’m just back from France, where my direct experience of riots and looting was non-existent, although I had walked past a Montpellier branch of Swarkowski the day before it ceased to be. My indirect experience was quite extensive though, since I watched the talking heads on French TV project their instant analysis onto the unfolding anarchy. Naturally, they discovered that all their existing prejudices were entirely confirmed by events. The act that caused the wave of protests and then wider disorder was the police killing of Nahel Merzouk, 17, one of a succession of such acts of police violence against minorites. Another Arab kid from a poor area. French police kill about three times as many people as the British ones do, though Americans can look away now.
One of the things that makes it difficult for me to write blogs these days is the my growing disgust at the professional opinion-writers who churn out thought about topics they barely understand, coupled with the knowledge that the democratization of that practice, about twenty years ago, merely meant there were more people doing the same. And so it is with opinion writers and micro-bloggers about France, a ritual performance of pre-formed clichés and positions, informed by some half-remembered French history and its literary and filmic representations (Les Misérables, La Haine), and, depending on the flavour you want, some some Huntingtonian clashing or some revolting against structural injustice. Francophone and Anglophone commentators alike, trapped in Herderian fantasies about the nation, see these events as a manifestation of essential Frenchness that tells us something about that Frenchness and where it is heading to next. Rarely, we’ll get a take that makes some comparison to BLM and George Floyd.
[click to continue…]
Crooked Timber was inaccessible yesterday, due to a dns issue, but here’s another picture of Alexanderplatz:
Malbork Castle, from which the Teutonic knights dominated a swathe of central Europe in the middle ages, is a vast and impressive fortress. It also has some rather stunning interiors.
This is why food in the US and Britain will never be quite good enough.
It is reported that Geoffrey Hinton “the godfather of AI” is leaving Google and has voiced some serious worries about the future of humanity as AI continues to develop. I don’t have anything interesting to say about grey gloop or paperclips or AI robots waging wars, but I have been thinking a bit about the impact of AI on creative work, not limited to the production of student essays. Already we are seeing voice actors replaced by clones of their own voices and professional translators reduced to editing the output of machine translation (almost as much work, but for less money, I’m told). So what happens if AI can produce artworks (or should that be “artworks”?) such as plays, paintings, pseudo-photographs, movie scripts, novels, songs, symphonies that are indistinguishable from human productions and that people consume and enjoy? Well, one effect might be that it becomes even harder for people to earn a living producing artworks for the market than it is now. But that doesn’t mean that human production will disappear. And the reason that it won’t is because our interest in creative work isn’t just about the object of production but about its process and the exercise of our human powers (“life’s prime want”, as somebody once said.)
The invention of photography in or around 1839 may have made possible a more accurate representation of reality and in doing so may have displaced some forms of drawing whose purpose was the utilitarian representation of reality, but it hardly stopped people from painting and drawing and, indeed, gave them a new medium in which to express themselves. AI may be, even is, able to produce something that looks like a good drawing of an object, but it cannot replace the human activity of looking hard at that object and co-ordinating hand and eye to produce my (however pathetic and inadequate) represention of it. AI may be able to produce a song, but it cannot substitute for the experience of writing a song and singing it. So I suspect that even if AI gets very good and produces work indistinguishable from human work, it will not and cannot fully replace human work. It will, perhaps, somewhat devalue the artwork as the object of contemplation and consumption, except insofar as we continue to admire works as the product of specifically human intention and execution (just as we would continue to admire the moves of a talented human footballer even in a world where AI-driven robo-footballers were available). But the artwork as the product of a human process, with a renewed focus on that process as the real activity of doing and making will not cease to exist. The Milton who produced Paradise Lost “as a silkworm produces silk” will continues to write; the Leipzig literary proletarian will not. Indeed there may be more of creative labour, since if AI provides for our basic needs, we’ll have the time available to hunt in the morning and criticize after dinner, as well as drawing, painting, cooking, and writing short stories and songs, just as we have a mind. (That is, unless we are enserfed to spend our time catering to the whims of Jeff and Elon instead.)
Endless steps in what was, until 1492, the Jewish quarter of Girona and where there is now a wonderful museum dedicated to the city’s long Jewish history.
