AI and being human in 2025

Anytime you take up a tool, and consider its use, imagine it in your worst enemy's hand, with the sharpest part of it pressed against your neck.

By almost any objective measure, this is the greatest time to be alive in all of human history. Poverty is at a low level, and even what it means to be poor represents a lifestyle better than how many people lived throughout history. Even by recent standards, life is better today for most people than it was a mere 25 years ago, to say nothing of 100 years ago.

But the 21st century is not without its own challenges. Despite the objective improvements, life feels precarious these days. Many of the most notable technological developments of the last decade have been failures, scams, or both. Theranos. Wearables. Smart homes. Blockchain. Cryptocurrency. The ongoing degradation of social media and the general enshittification of many other services.

While it might be a good time to be alive, it feels like the experience of being human has been compromised. 

What does it mean to be human? 

Tools

When I was young, I was told the defining characteristics of humanity were its development and use of tools, enabled by the opposable thumb and a large and complex brain.

When you think of “technology” these days, what do you think of? Apps? Smartphones? The internet, whatever that is these days? The miracle of MRNA vaccines?

These are all iterations or updates of ideas and products that have been around for a long time. We think we are living in a wondrous present filled with futuristic innovation, but the reality is most of the 21st century so far is just updates of old ideas, perhaps enabled at new scale or with new shamelessness, or more likely just new marketing.

The beginning of the 20th century was a different story. No time in recorded history could match the euphoria and curiosity about the future that gripped the Western world around 1900.  The previous 2 decades had produced telephone, the light bulb, the automobile (including new assembly line mass production techniques), and in 1903 the airplane. Humans could fly.

In 1905 Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch developed the Haber-Bosch process for making ammonia from its elements, a milestone in industrial chemistry and helped feed the world.

These were not incremental improvements on existing ideas and technology (like a cellular phone or Compact Disc), but were an explosive expansion beyond what had previously been assumed were the limits of human possibility.

By 1915, every single one of those innovations would be transformed into an horrific weapon of war, and deployed to kill human beings on a scale that was also previously unimagined and beyond what people had assumed was possible.

The fist picks up the club, then the sword, then the gun. These are ways of applying force at a distance. We end up in 2025, where combat often means pushing a button to kill a person you cannot even see. Or all the people.

We have built tools that exceed our ability to wield them, or to even comprehend them. Aside from weapons of total destruction, we have created cheap food with little nutrition value but plenty of calories and tooled ourselves into an obesity epidemic. We built the greatest information collection and distribution system in human history, made it open to all, and then filled it with lies, manipulation, advertising, and a soupçon of sentimentality.

Technology always has consequences, and is always used in unexpected and unanticipated ways. Not all of them are good.

And now there is artificial intelligence, or AI. The dream of AI is that humans can create a computer program that is “intelligent.” But what does that even mean? 

The hilarious and sad thing is we don’t know. And I mean this in both the sense of “we don’t know what a thinking, intelligent program does, or how to make one” but also “we don’t even know how we think, or what intelligence in humans -- or any other creature -- is.”

That has not stopped over $300 billion in investment from just the United States in the last 5 years. The combination of weird optimism and desperate greed strikes me as particularly human.

AI isn’t new

There’s a Greek myth about Talos, a big bronze robot that protects Crete by flinging boulders at ships. This dates back to 700 BC or so. It is somewhat telling that even back then, AI was used for military purposes.

I think our modern conception of AI dates back 100 years to RUR -- Rossum’s Universal Robots, written in 1920 by Karel Čapek. It is where the word “robot” comes from, being derived from the Czech word “robota”, and means, more or less, slave labor. The name “Rossum” translates to “brain” or “intellectual”.

The play covers all the issues you can imagine. After wondering what it means to be human, and realizing they are vastly more capable than their human creators and masters, the robots rise up and take over the world, displacing humanity. It is The Terminator. It is Blade Runner. It is a critique of capitalism and the use of technology for war.

But this is art, this is speculation. When I say AI isn’t new, I also mean there’s already been technology that can pass the Turing Test. I am speaking of Eliza.

Eliza is a computer program created in 1964 by Joseph Weizenbaum. Weizenbaum was trying to create a program that worked like a person-centered therapist in the style of Carl Rogers. PCT, or Rogerian therapy, has the therapist reflect a client’s statements back to them. (You can try Eliza here.)

Weizenbaum thought it was somewhat silly and limited -- he had programmed Eliza, he knew how it worked, how little it actually did, and how Eliza absolutely did not and could not think. And yet, his secretary tried it, and quickly asked Weizenbaum to leave the room, because she was legitimately “connecting” with the machine. As far as the secretary was concerned, she was having an important, enlightening conversation about private matters. 

Weizenbaum had survived the early years of Nazi Germany. He endured a challenging childhood, and later, a divorce where he lost custody of his child. He got into computers and psychoanalysis. By the early 1960s, he was working for General Electric, where he built computers for the Navy that launched missiles and computers for banks that processed checks.

He was asked to join the MIT faculty not long after, where he worked with legends like Marvin Minsky, and John McCarthy -- the man who coined the term “artificial intelligence”.

Weizenbaum was no dummy, and no booster of technology. He spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to be human. By the 1970s, Weizenbaum called AI “an index of the insanity in our world.” 

He saw the so-called computer revolution as going backwards, the wrong direction. He felt it “strengthened repressive power structures instead of upending them. It constricted rather than enlarged our humanity, prompting people to think of themselves as little more than machines." 

Joseph Weizenbaum

By ceding so many decisions to computers, he thought, we had created a world that was more unequal and less rational, in which the richness of human reason had been flattened into the senseless routines of code.

Weizenbaum’s thinking had been influenced by his experiences in psychotherapy. Unlike his colleague Marvin Minsky, he did not see the human mind as a “meat machine”, he saw it as something fundamentally unknowable, opaque, deep, and strange.

Weizenbaum knew Eliza was a trick, and he could see how this trick would lead people to see computers as having actual judgment and being deserving of credibility. Weizenbaum knew they had neither.

Randomness

I have been working with computers as musical devices since the mid-1980s. Initially, one thing people loved about computers, sequencers, and drum machines was they kept perfect time. Give them a tempo, and they’ll stay locked to it forever, like a metronome, perfectly repeating what you asked them to play. 

But artists realized this didn’t feel right. It felt cold, inhuman, too perfect. Real drummers and real players were better, or at least different. New music was made that leaned into this perfection and coldness, but many people wanted something that felt more human.

Programmers responded. They added a feature called “humanize”. This feature would randomly vary the timing and loudness of the notes. The more you increased the value of “humanize”, the more frequently the variations happened, and the more extreme they became. 

This is what the programmers thought being a human was -- like the machine, but randomly sloppier, with the extreme settings producing something comical and unlistenable . “Being human” was reduced to being an inferior version of the machine.

It turns out that teaching machines to play music with “human feel” is far more difficult than people thought. Because it isn’t about variations in timing or volume, random or otherwise. It’s not just that “feel” and “swing” exist. It is how they exist and what drives them. AI cannot “feel the music”. All it can do is analyze the output of people who did feel the music, and perform a shallow interpolation.

Creativity

Alban Berg wrote strange music. He was a disciple of Arnold Schoenberg, but Berg wanted to wed Schoenberg’s new 12-tone system to German expressionist ideas, to get at the unconscious, to get at intense feelings. In order to do this, he created something genuinely new and controversial. To some, his masterpiece opera Wozzeck is bizarre garbage. To others, it is sublime. But all agree nothing like it had existed before.

One can look at all the major 20th century art movements -- impressionism, expressionism, Dada, surrealism, futurism, cubism, minimalism, and so on and see them as mere reactions or responses to what came before. To some degree, that is true, but it ignores the passion, the fury, the desire that fueled that need to create something which felt new and unprecedented. It also ignores the obsessiveness, silliness, darkness, and other feelings that drove artists to create all those things the way they did.

AI in its current state is incapable of generating anything new. AI cannot create from a place of feeling or memory, for it has none. AI did not have a traumatic childhood or a loving and supportive family or a failed first marriage or money problems or substance abuse issues. AI has never looked at a painting and felt peace or beauty or challenged or disturbed. It has never felt anything at all.

I have been writing songs for almost 40 years. I am still learning how to do it. A good chunk of my work involves interpolation, or being inspired by the work of others. But even when I am writing in the style of someone else, my own strange self seeps through. I cannot help it. I will put in my own feelings, my own twists, my own obsessions and favorite ideas.

The machine cannot do that. It has no inspiration, no favorites, no artists it loves, no artists it hates, no feelings or memories attached to anything it has ever ingested or “created”. It has as much pride, satisfaction, or frustration in producing art as a vending machine has in dropping a soda can into the pick-up slot.

It may not matter. I have written before about the sorry state of art and art literacy in our modern times. When it seems like all media is merely a way for internet celebrities and major corporations to monetize their brands, perhaps greatness doesn’t matter, and instead custom-fit pandering content is the future.

But AI is never going to make Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska”. AI is never going to make Bon Iver’s “For Emma, Forever Ago” or Low’s “Double Negative”. AI is never going to create Citizen Kane or Five Easy Pieces or Birdman. It might create something like those things after they’re out, but AI is never going to do it first. AI is never going to rebel against the status quo, it is never going to write something because it has to, because its brain is on fire with ideas and it is unable to sleep.

(Emotions &) Relationships

Some argue that our relationships are the defining characteristic of being human.  When you think about your life so far, it is possible you think about physical objects -- the house you grew up in, your favorite stuffed animal, your musical instrument. But I would bet that you think most about people, the times you had, the relationships you had, and how they made you feel.

AI is never going to be happy to see you. It will never be jealous of your success. It will not miss you when you’re gone. It won’t get misty about the old days.

I have learned the hard way that relationships require vulnerability to be truly intimate. You can never have a real relationship with AI, because AI has no vulnerability. It has nothing to lose. It has no warmth to give, no deeper layers to show, no stories to tell.

AI will never trust you more or less, and it will never respect you more or less. AI is never going to have a bad day or a bad week and need your comfort or understanding or help. 

AI is incapable of relationships in either direction, any more than a toaster is.

Death

Humans are considered to be unique among animals in that we understand and can conceptualize the idea of our own death. You are going to die. So is everyone you ever loved or knew. Reckoning with this inescapable reality is something we all must do at some point in our lives. 

In my own experience, it is significant and transformational. 6 years ago, I had cancer. I was extremely fortunate, and survived -- for now -- with some physical damage and scars. 

Last year, I had to put my father into assisted living. He is 81. He has vascular dementia and has been declining rapidly for the last 2 years. It is unlikely he will be around much longer. He is already diminished mentally and physically, fading away before my eyes.

These 2 events and the close contact with the Grim Reaper changed me. You have likely already had a few encounters with mortality, and you will have more, if you are lucky. You may have to bury your own parents some day. It will change you, and memories of them will haunt your life and your dreams.

You are still young, and yet, I am sure you think about death differently now than you did when you were a child, or 10 years ago. I was your age once. Now I am 55 and the realization that I have perhaps 20 or 30 years remaining -- and that the last third of those probably won’t be much fun -- is sobering, and gives my every remaining day a sense of urgency.

AI does not die. It has no conception of death. It knows no sadness or melancholy at the thought that everyone it has ever known is fated to oblivion. AI cannot cry because it misses its dead friends. AI will not change its life or thinking or perspective or philosophy in any profound way because of what it thinks or experiences, because it cannot think and does not experience. AI won’t rue or celebrate the wasted days and years of its youth. It has no concerns about losing its vision or ability to walk or its memory.

AI does not miss its mother. It cannot miss its friends. And it cannot translate any of that feeling or knowledge into any insights or changes in who it is, or its behavior. 

As humans, we do. We have no choice.  

Therapy

Last year, I started grad school to become a therapist. More than one of my friends has asked me if I am worried about AI therapists -- the offspring of Eliza and LLMs, the next wave of chatbots -- taking all the jobs or displacing human therapists. One of my friends is already using their own ChatGPT instance as a kind of therapist.

In this past semester, we studied Carl Rogers -- the man whose particular therapy modality was used as the basis for Eliza. Rogers himself said the only thing that mattered was the relationship between the therapist and the client. The therapist needed to do 3 things: show empathy, view the client with “unconditional positive regard”, and be “congruent” -- to live by their values. Doing that, and reflecting what the client says, is enough for the client to have a positive outcome.

Decades of research have validated Rogers, showing consistently that the best predictor of good therapeutic outcomes is not what kind of therapy is used, or how long, or anything other than the quality of the relationship between the therapist and the client.

Here’s what I know. No AI can be a Rogerian therapist. Machines cannot show empathy, for they have none. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. Empathy means being aware of another person's emotional state, seeing things from their perspective, and imagining yourself in their place. Machines are unaware. They have no imagination. All they can do is repeat what other people have said.

AI cannot view the client with “unconditional positive regard”. They can fake it and use positive words, but machines have no regard. Their gaze is as vacant as that of a corpse. And AI cannot live by any values, for AI has neither life nor values. 

Sure, you can have a therapy-like experience with a chatbot. It is not the same. There are some people who may find it better or more useful for themselves in the short term. Some people prefer artificial fruit-flavored candy to actual fruit. Some people would rather masturbate than have actual sex with an actual human. It is not the same. 

Weizenbaum said that it would be a “monstrous obscenity” to let a computer act as a therapist in a clinical setting.

Humans have an innate and strong cognitive bias towards anthropomorphism. Modern technology is exploiting that bias. Studies have shown that the level of anthropomorphism in AI products affects consumers' purchase intentions and brand evaluations, and that anthropomorphic design cues, like human-like voices or appearances, can increase trust in robots and other agents. Thus companies implement these features, so you will trust their robot agents, think favorably of their brand, and buy more stuff. It is manipulation of your cognitive bias for their ends, and that’s before we get to their actual platforms.

The Platforms

So let’s talk about those platforms for a moment, and how they affect us as humans.

Back in the pre-smartphone, pre-internet days, life was a little more difficult. But it was also yours. If you had a computer and bought a program, you owned your copy. It would run forever, bugs and all, unchanging. If you bought a calculator, it was useful forever.

Many products you buy today are integrated hardware and software, and often rely on some kind of PC to work. If the manufacturer stops supporting your thing, either because they went out of business or just decided they didn’t want to deal with it anymore, it will eventually stop working. This has happened with stereo equipment, mobile phones, home security systems, music recording and playback software, and more.

I still have books, vinyl albums, and compact discs I bought in the 80s. They are mine, and I can use them any time I want (assuming I have a turntable or CD player). But the books on my Kindle, the music I stream from Spotify, the games I buy, excuse me, license from Steam -- though I paid for them in transactions designed to look like purchases, they are not mine. If the companies who own the platforms decide to, they can deactivate individual pieces of content or the entire platform, leaving me with nothing.

Today, all of our life activities are tracked by apps and platforms, which mediate the experience, show advertising, take a cut of the action, and mine and sell our data. Your smartphone itself is a platform on a platform, with a multi-billion dollar company making and selling the hardware and operating system, which report back all sorts of data. The company can and will grant law enforcement access to your phone. The phone itself is running on a network, operated by another multi-billion dollar monopoly in all but name. That network company may be funneling data intentionally or not to governments and corporations.

You open your phone to read the news. You almost certainly aren’t looking at an actual website for a news provider anymore (if one can call Washington Post -- owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, CNN, owned by Warner Bros./Discovery, or the once-great New York Times “NEWS” these days).

You are probably looking at a social media feed. A multi-billion dollar company called Meta owns Facebook and Instagram. X, formerly Twitter, is owned by billionaire and world’s richest doofus Elon Musk, who treats it as his personal vanity website. TikTok is owned by Chinese investors and the Chinese government exerts considerable control. YouTube is owned by Alphabet, who also own Google and its suite of products, including Gmail, and the biggest advertising business in the world.

All of those companies control what you see. They are effectively unregulated and can do whatever they want. Once, social media was nothing but what you and your friends posted. Now, those are the increasingly rare oases in a vast desert of advertisements and “suggested posts” from professional influencers. You literally don’t know what you’re missing, or what you’re getting. What you’re mostly getting is content selected to promote engagement, which is often achieved by activating your negative emotions -- rage, despair, sadness. The robots are pushing our buttons, and they are good at it.

Go out to get some food, and your phone will track you. If you disable those features (which require you to disable other useful things), your credit card will do just fine. Your purchase data is aggregated by the 3 big credit ratings bureaus, all of whom have built shadow dossiers on all of us, with our social security numbers, credit ratings, purchase histories, former addresses, and more. That data is packaged and sold all the time, including back to the big tech companies, who use their own sophisticated tools to match it up with their own shadow profiles of you.

If you use Apple Pay or similar features, other companies get a cut and a chance at the data, too. And of course, you want to put in your phone number or loyalty number to save a few bucks, even as doing so shares more of you with the technosphere.

At your job, if you’re lucky enough to still have one, you are working on yet more platforms. Slack. Microsoft Office. Google Suite. Workday. The Atlassian family. Salesforce. On the plus side, corporations demand autonomy and privacy, so your data (or rather, the data belonging to your employer) isn’t shared. On the minus side, nearly all of these products are ugly, tedious, and don’t connect to each other. 

Even romance is not immune to platforms. Once an unthinkable invasion of privacy, even dating is now mediated by platforms. Tinder. Hinge. Bumble. The first two are owned by a single company, Match Group, who also own Match, PlentyOfFish, Meetic, OKCupid, OurTime, and Pairs. Not everybody looks for companionship this way, but most recent data shows that half of people under 30 have used dating apps. Your dates are monetized and data-scraped. You have no idea what kind of influence these companies are exercising. The machine, the platform, the billionaires, have become intermediaries for love and connection.

Free time? You’re watching streaming channels, where the content is ever-changing and disappearing. We have more choices and more content than ever before, but it all feels more trivial, weightless, and superficial than ever.

Our lives are mediated by these platforms now, and these platforms are owned either by faceless, soulless corporations, or worse, mercurial billionaires who think they know best.

AI is likely to be one more, pushed into everything until it is inescapable.

What about simulation?

Some may think that any of the above experiences I cite and discuss can be simulated or emulated. Let’s just program the AI to act sad or worried, or otherwise try to be human.

But the key thing here is the AI is not actually sad or worried or happy. It is executing a pantomime of those things, based on someone else’s observations of the superficial, external signs of those emotions. It is like a sociopath practicing smiling and frowning in a mirror -- the AI doesn’t feel the feelings, but it can put on a mask that might help you suspend your disbelief.

Creators of AI will absolutely add this sociopathic mask, because as we’ve said, it helps you buy what the AI is selling, in every respect. But this is deception and dishonesty. It is a used car salesman, repeating your name to you because Dale Carnegie’s 1912 book said that it made people like you. It is the phoniest of smiles pasted over the robot’s face.

Simulation is also inherently reductive. The question is “what is the least amount of work we have to do to create something good enough?”

Simulation isn’t intelligence. I can simulate being wise by reading the answers out of the back of a textbook. All it shows is that I know how to repeat what someone else figured out or said.

It’s not all bad

Only fools make predictions. AI is still in its early days, and it is possible that it will get better and find a wide range of uses that don’t just lead to impoverishment of the human experience and manipulation of our bank balances. 

There are some clear areas where AI is promising, mostly tasks where humans are required to learn and analyze a vast amount of complicated material, or where humans are required to, more or less, act like robots themselves, doing limited, repetitive tasks. You’d be surprised how many of these jobs there are.

An example of the former is medical imaging. Many medical test results depend on a highly skilled human looking at slides or other imagery and deciding whether or not something is abnormal. Humans learn how to do this by looking at a whole bunch of slides and being told which is good and which is bad. AI with computer vision can be trained on every image ever taken, and can make determinations much faster and at scale. AI can even give you a confidence score about how certain it is, and for edge cases, those highly skilled humans can step in to validate.

An example of the latter is something like being a customer support representative, where your job is to follow a script to the letter based on user information, to be professional and cheerful, and not react to rude or emotional people. AI with voice synthesis will be great at this, and it will be even more infuriating to deal with than a clueless human operator.

Another example of the latter is much lawyering. Many lawyers are paid lots of money to essentially fill out special legal Mad-Libs or forms. AI is going to be great at this, but it is unlikely the various bar associations will approve any of this. So these lazy lawyers will now have AI do all the work and sign their name to it. Things won’t get better, but they may get a lot cheaper. Don’t go into this kind of law if you’re thinking about it!

Conclusion

This is a little dark. I’m sorry about that. I do think our current moment is a bit dark, though. While it is possible to recognize that generally things are better than they have been, when we get to specifics, it feels kind of grim. 

Because the tools we build and take up aren’t inert. They amplify who we are, for better or worse. And they change us. To paraphrase Nietzsche, when you wield a tool, the tool also wields you. The things we build, particularly our technology, change us. We can see it in language, where the limitations of texting and phone keyboards combine with decimated attention spans to produce clipped, nuance-free communication ever more reliant on acronyms and symbols, and the stripping of contextual cues and robustness means people misunderstand each other more frequently.

Perhaps we are seeing it in other levels of life, too. We are practically living inside the machine now, with our robots and platforms in every corner of our lives. 

As I consider what artificial intelligence means now and tomorrow, I can’t help but wonder if the real revelation is not about the nature of the machine’s supposed intelligence, but our own. 

How willing we are to convince ourselves that we are smart and special while simultaneously demonstrating how quickly we will reduce our options and lives down to the binary choices offered by our own creations.

I believe we, you, can still make a difference and make choices in the work we do and the lives we lead that bring us to a more enlightened, more intelligent, more human place. 

--

This is an adaptation of a talk I gave for Mark Delong's graduate-level technology seminar at Duke University on 12/03/2024.

2024 In Review

2024 was a year of changes. I lack appropriate distance and time, but I believe will look back at this year as hinge, turning point, and marker, separating "before" and "after".

The year started with my exit from a job at Osso VR, and perhaps an industry and even a career.

I took advantage of the downtime to deal with home repairs and stuff related to my ailing father and his late partner's estate. Pro Tip: Do not agree to be the executor for anyone's estate. Refuse if you can. It is a huge hassle and liability. There is no upside. 

I spent time with friends, including some great walks with old friends I had not seen in quite some time. I took a couple of trips, including a peaceful vacation down to Carmel-By-The-Sea, and visiting friends back east and down in Los Angeles.

Physically, this was a year of increasing nuisances. Various nerve insults and impingements, some bone stuff, and other things nobody wants to hear about. I'm doing OK health-wise, but replacement parts are hard to come by at this point.

It was a solid year for music. The album I appreciated most was The Cure's "Songs of a Lost World".

 I finished an ambient electronic album with my friend Thomas. Given how long we have known each other, it is surprising it has taken us this long to collaborate on something. Look for a release in early 2025!

My friend Matt took me to a stunning classical guitar performance in San Francisco, which was one of the highlights of the year and one of the best things I have seen in a while.

Sid Luscious and The Pants also reformed, with new members, new songs, and our first show since the start of the pandemic. It went incredibly well, and it felt great to be back on stage playing new material for a receptive audience.

Sid Luscious and The Pants, 2024 edition, live at The Kilowatt!

Of course, there was the start of graduate school, knocking out 3 classes in my first full semester. I am enjoying it so far, and optimistic and excited about the future.

There's plenty to be concerned about in the world. The US election was a deep disappointment, and the first few weeks afterward have already depleted my patience and goodwill for the goons, plutocrats, and other bad actors who are already complaining about their victory. You won, get over it. 

Little progress was made this year on issues of substance, such as the climate. I do not feel like I have anything new to add regarding all that stuff -- I have written about it before, and not much has changed. I still think the biggest problem for all of us is the shocking income inequality and disparities between the super-rich and everyone else. It is like these doofs have never read a history book.

In the meantime, colleague after colleague got laid off or took a package, and are finding they simply cannot find another job, either because the jobs are being outsourced (to AI or cheaper humans) or eliminated. 2025 feels like it will be economically challenging, and even my moderately wealthy friends feel precarious.

If I were a billionaire, I'd be nervous, and I'd start looking at how to be a lot more generous before it is too late.

Perhaps a theme for 2024 was growth and change -- nothing stays the same forever, nothing lasts. That applies to good things and bad. I will try to stay optimistic and positive about the new year. 

See you there!

2024 Books

Martyr! - Kaveh Akbar

My choice for book of the year. Akbar's remarkable debut novel tells the story of a young man fumbling his way through life, addiction, and grief, trying to find meaning. Great writing, and includes poetry (in the voice of the protagonist). Funny, moving, and unique. Literary fiction. Highly recommended. 

“It seems very American to expect grief to change something. Like a token you cash in. A formula. Grieve x amount, receive y amount of comfort. Work a day in the grief mines and get paid in tickets to the company store.”

"It’s easy for people who have sacrificed nothing to rationalize their own ordinariness by calling me lucky. But I sacrificed my entire life; I sold it to the abyss. And the abyss gave me art." 

Fight Me - Austin Grossman

If Martyr! is my best book of 2024, Austin Grossman's Fight Me is the one I enjoyed the most. 

Fiction about former teenage superheroes dealing with now being middle-aged. All too relatable, and extremely entertaining.

Grossman is my age. He wrote for several video games (including some which are favorites of mine) and was responsible for some great innovations in game design. This is his 4th book. I enjoyed all of his previous ones. He is covering territory and references familiar and comforting. I felt like I knew these people and their experiences, and sometimes that is exactly what you want out of a good story.

Grossman is similar to Jason Pargin, in that his books are fun, fantastic(al), and easy to read, but also filled with deeper meaning just below the surface. 

Cory Doctorow's review sums it up well. Read it here.

"It’s a thing that only happens in the wild; the chance convergence of history, desire, despair, wild talents, quirks of physiognomy that ought to kill us and usually does. Then, on very rare occasions, it doesn’t and we stagger back from the catastrophe changed, life upended, clothes still smoking from our encounter with the sublime."

...

"I used to know how life would be: high school grades in order, then college, then a job. Now we’re in a future I never dreamed of, and everything’s changing so fast, I have no way to guess what’s coming."

...

"...Let the very idea become ridiculous. Soon you’ll turn thirty, thirty-five. After a while you’ll forget that the world was ever anything but work and home and bed, and new friendships that are almost as good as the old. Let that earlier time fade, let it hang in the back of your mind like a fancy outfit you’ll never wear again. Be a plain person in plain sight, one among millions."

I'm Starting to Worry About This Big Black Box of Doom - Jason Pargin

Fiction. Pargin's latest novel is set in the present day. There's no phantasmagorical elements, like his John Dies At The End trilogy, or the science fiction of his "Zoey" trilogy. Instead, Pargin writes a taut, funny road story as a pretext for presenting his essays and thoughts about the state of our current moment, society, and world. Pargin is a deep thinker who can convincingly present different perspectives. A breezy, fun read which offset both the heaviness of the world and some of the other books I struggled through this year (See: "Prophet Song").

"Real friendships, real bonds are based on being genuine and vulnerable and flawed around each other, but we’re constantly told that’s dangerous. Ask yourself, who benefits from that? Who wants a society where there are no strong bonds between individuals?"

... 

"It doesn’t matter how comfortable or well-fed somebody is; if you humiliate them in front of their peers, they’ll want to burn the system to the ground. Well, social media algorithms are a twenty-four-seven humiliation machine. That, Phil believed, is how a population is primed for authoritarian rule."

... 

"...nothing ruins your view of the world like getting your dream job."

Maybe You Should Talk To Someone - Lori Gottlieb

Memoir. Gottlieb is a therapist, who finds herself needing therapy to get through a bad break-up. This book tells the story of her own therapy interwoven with her working with several of her clients to provide an interesting "both sides of the couch" view of modern therapy practice. Gottlieb writes breezy, heartfelt prose with a sprinkling of drama. I believe this is in development for a series.

"We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same."

Becoming Myself - Irvin Yalom

Subtitled "A Psychiatrist's Memoir". Yalom is a giant in his field and has written a pile of books, a few of which are on my list for this year. Yalom tells his life story, including how he became a psychiatrist, and how he moved the field forward. He is not a flashy writer, but he is quite good. His life is interesting not so much because of what happens (mostly normal life) or what he achieves (which he understates and is exceptional), but because of his good observations and introspection.

"...many of the issues my patients struggled with—aging, loss, death, major life choices such as what profession to pursue or whom to marry—were often more cogently addressed by novelists and philosophers than by members of my own field."

Shutter (A Rita Todacheene Novel Book 1) - Ramona Emerson

Detective fiction about a native crime scene photographer who can communicate with the dead. Tightly written, solidly executed, with a few great twists and observations about human nature. I am sure this has already been optioned by someone.

"Grandma always said to me that you never do things for people to get something in return. That is the white man’s way of living. You do it because they need you. You do it because if you don’t, no one else will."

Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl

A justifiably classic and well-respected book. Half of it is Frankl's account of his life in a concentration camp in World War II. The other half is about his psychotherapy practice. Short, powerful, and worth a read whether you are interested in therapy or not.

"...everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way."

Zoey Is Too Drunk for This Dystopia (Zoey Ashe Book 3) - Jason Pargin

Science fiction, done on Pargin's humorous, fast-paced style. Also includes Pargin's incisive and thoughtful takes on a bunch of things. I really enjoyed the other books in this series, and Pargin's previous series John Dies At The End.

Pargin deserves a wider audience, and if he weren't so imaginative, clever, and smart, his books would all be turned into shows on streaming services.

"...the most common mistake we make in dealing with people is in assuming that while our own feelings are a mess of contradictions, everybody else is operating with a clear agenda and any inconsistencies must be due to some kind of ruse."

Slow Horses (Slough House Book 1) - Mick Herron

Spy fiction, in the vein of John Le Carré. This isn't James Bond, it's more the burned-out nobodies who didn't make the grade or washed out. Great pacing, good characters, and an engaging plot. It is easy to see why this book made such a splash and was picked up by Apple for adaptation. Recommended.

"When she held the compact closer to her face, she could trace damage under the skin; see the lines through which her youth had leaked."

North Woods - Daniel Mason

A set of short stories. loosely connected around a place in Massachusetts, starting in colonial times and unspooling to the present. A best seller. The prose is fine, but I think the author was more impressed with his narrative concept album and historical progress than I was. This read like a collection of  typically depressing New Yorker short stories strung together with a thin thread. A bit of magical realism comes and goes throughout, with the author reaching at the end to connect everything and "make a bigger statement." 

Ultimately it is an unexpectedly nihilistic book -- life doesn't matter, the planet persists (even through vaguely described global warming and collapse of human civilization), the afterlife is boring and inconsequential, and nobody cares.

"I was already well into my fifth decade of life and did not have much time left for error..."

The Future Won't Be Long - Jarett Kobek

I read Kobek's I Hate The Internet a few years back and found it compelling. This book is even better.  Literary fiction following the lives of two people who meet in 1980s New York in their youth as they navigate adulthood. 

"What had happened over these years? Why was I dressing like a legal assistant? Why was I so pleased to avoid a party? Perhaps, said I to meself, you should cultivate stupidity as your new hobby. Perhaps you should become one of those horrible people trapped in perpetual adolescence, delighted to bounce up and down in dingy spaces, clapping your hands, listening to atrocious music and smiling like an infant feasting on applesauce. Wouldn’t that be the bee’s knees?"

This One Is Mine - Maria Semple

I liked the other book I read by Maria Semple so much I went back to her first novel. It is an intense, funny, and poignant look at, in her words, "strong, singular women who set out to destroy themselves. Especially if the women are living in fancy houses, have lots of help, and commit adultery." Set in Los Angeles, in a world both all-too-familiar and miles away from where I am today. 

"...happy is a misguided goal,” said Sharon. “The goal shouldn’t be to raise a constantly happy child. The goal should be to raise a child who is capable of dealing with reality. Reality is boring. Reality is frustrating. Reality isn’t about getting everything you want the second you want it. Even a one year old is capable of handling these things.”

Everything/Nothing/Someone: A Memoir - Alice Carrière

Carrière's memoir, covering her unusual parents and her own harrowing mental health journey. Powerfully written, and ultimately a positive and hopeful story. If Carrière can survive and thrive, so can we all.

"Starting at seven years old I said that the only feelings I could feel were 'guilt, regret, and nervous excitement.' I didn’t know the word 'anxiety' so I called it 'nervous excitement.'"

Chain Gang All-Stars - Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

A disappointing and simplistic story that read like a violent YA novel. The author attempts to create an important and meaningful work about the impact of incarceration, complete with footnotes. I thought it missed the mark and veered into self-parody, while failing to address any of the issues it wanted. The writing is painfully on-the-nose, the characters thin, and the plot short on movement and surprises. The author clearly knows how to write -- there were some great paragraphs and sentences -- but they are drowned out by what feels like first-draft urgency and clunkiness.

"...she believed that it was no accident that people of color, and particularly people from the African diaspora, made up so many of the characters on this show. She knew that Black people and other minorities were disproportionately imprisoned."

 

The Trespasser - Tana French

Detective/Crime fiction. French has written 5 other books in the "Dublin Murder Squad" series, but by all accounts this latest one from 2016 is the best. Compelling writing, bringing a gritty setting and flawed but interesting characters to life. This isn't my preferred genre, because it tends to feel too programmatic. French is operating squarely within the genre, but her talent elevates the work.

"The truth is, if you don’t exist without someone else, you don’t exist at all. And that doesn’t just go for romance. I love my ma, I love my friends, I love the bones of them. If any of them wanted me to donate a kidney or crack a few heads, I’d do it, no questions asked. And if they all waved good-bye and walked out of my life tomorrow, I’d still be the same person I am today."

The Truth and Other Stories - Stanislaw Lem

Lem remains one of my favorite writers, if one can say that about books that are inevitably translations. Regardless of the prose, Lem has always had great ideas. This collection of short stories is mostly strong, full of those great, inventive, strange, and unique ideas. Like many short story collections, some are stronger than others, and one or two tested my patience. Still, it's Lem. If you like him, you'll enjoy it. If you have never read his books before, I'd still point you at "Solaris" or "His Master's Voice" to start. 

"...birds and insects, to a different degree admittedly, come into the world with ready knowledge, of the kind they need—cut to size, of course. They hardly have to learn a thing, but as for us, we waste half our life studying, only to discover in the second half that three-quarters of what we’ve stuffed into our heads is unnecessary ballast."

American Narcissus - Chandler Morrison

Literary Fiction. Chandler Morrison writes about contemporary life in Los Angeles. In terms of setting and tone, he's similar to Bret Easton Ellis and Bruce Wagner. If you like their work, you'll like Morrison's. Morrison distinguishes himself with a bit more light than Wagner's unrelenting, scabrous downbeat tone, and more warmth and feeling than Ellis' often chilly work. Definitely not for everyone, but I loved every page of it.

"...it’s not only my future that’s questionable—it’s everyone’s.. Society is decaying. It’s collapsing under its own weight. You know what I’m talking about. I can see it in your eyes. Can you imagine what the world—or America, for that matter—will look like in thirty years? Twenty, even? Ten? I know I can’t. Preparing for retirement would be investing in a future I don’t believe in. I try not to make bad investments.”

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World - Naomi Klein

Nonfiction. Klein writes about the experience of right now, and the years just past -- the impact of the pandemic on truth and reality. She starts discussing the (deliberate?) confusion of Naomi Wolf and Naomi Klein, and then pulls the focus wider and to different spots of society. 

Klein is a powerful and clear writer. Her work is difficult mostly because she relentlessly highlights uncomfortable and dark truths, and asks tough questions. The more personal nature or frame of this book, and perhaps its immediacy (it feels like it was written this morning), made this book more enjoyable for me than her other books.

"If the Naomi be Klein you’re doing just fine 

If the Naomi be Wolf Oh, buddy. Ooooof."

"I would say, dripping with disdain, 'I’m an author. Not a brand. The product isn’t me. I am trying to communicate ideas. The ideas are in the book. Read the book.'”

"There is something uniquely humiliating about confronting a bad replica of one’s self—and something utterly harrowing about confronting a good one."

 

James - Percival Everett

Everett writes a companion/b-side to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim. Everett fills in what happens to Jim and recontextualizes some events from Twain's book. (You don't have to remember or have recently read Twain's book to enjoy James, but you might want to afterwards.)

James is more or less critic-proof, and will top many people's best-of lists for this year. Everett is a great writer, and the narrative moves along quickly. He makes the reader experience the non-stop stress and terror of being a slave on the run. It is enjoyable, you care about the characters, and Everett's prose is immersive and intense.

But I found James to be a bit of a "Mary Sue" at times, and some of the plot struck me as a bit contrived. There are a couple of big twists which I saw coming chapters away, and some aspects of the book seemed like checking off a comprehensive list of bad things about slavery with a 2024 mindset. These are minor quibbles, and this is also sort of the point of the book in the first place.

I fully expect a big-budget filmed adaptation.

“I don’t like white folks,” he said. “And I is one.”

Creation Lake - Rachel Kushner

Literary Fiction. Kushner tells a story of a spy-for-hire infiltrating a group of French lefty hippies that may or may not be planning something big. But it's really a story about how we are all fooling ourselves, and how people often see right through us and our self-deceptions. Not as immediately gratifying as "The Mars Room", but Kushner's writing is great and I expect a re-read would prove even richer.

"In my own salt, my own core, this is what I knew: Life goes on a while. Then it ends. There is no fairness. Bad people are honored, and good ones are punished. The reverse is also true. Good people are honored, and bad people are punished, and some will call this grace, or the hand of God, instead of luck."

Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change - W. David Marx

Non-fiction. The title says it all. A book filled with observations that seem both completely obvious and absolutely revelatory. Makes me wish I was in college (oh, wait...) so I could take a class with this book at the center of it.

...sociologist Pitirim Sorokin declared, “Any organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is ‘flat,’ and in which all members are equal. Unstratified society, with a real equality of its members, is a myth which has never been realized in the history of mankind.”

"A critical point about originality, however, is that choices never need to be original on an absolute, universal scale. They must merely be surprising within the community. A shortcut for great taste is arbitrage, finding easily procured things in one location and then deploying them elsewhere where they’re rare."

55 (Part 1: The Big News)

55 today. At least halfway, and maybe 2/3 of the way through my allotted days. The last few years have been challenging for all of us: American politics, a global pandemic, the ongoing slow melting of the environment.

I have also been dealing with aging and ailing parents and some of my own health challenges.

For me, and for some of you, this has also been compounded by personal turmoil and drought in the workplace. I was lucky enough to find a job in 2020. Luckier still to get ejected from it earlier this year. The corporate world seems more brutal, unforgiving, and silly than ever.

I am making a big change. After 30 years of being a product manager, I think I am done. I worked on and shipped many things I am proud to have been a part of, and got to work with some fun, creative, smart, and interesting people. But I think it is time for something new. This is convenient, because corporate America seems to be done with me as well, finding me too old and/or idiosyncratic.

Next month I start graduate school. I will be pursuing a Master's degree in counseling psychology, with the goal of becoming a therapist. I want to help people in a direct, clear fashion, and do work that I find meaningful and interesting.

It is a 2-year program that includes a requirement of 3000 hours of practicum. I'll be training for more than 3 years in total. 

I recognize it may not work out. But I am excited for new challenges, a different kind of work, and a different pace for my life. 

I am not sure what all of this will mean for the future of this blog. Therapists typically keep a low profile online. I have a few years to figure it out.

My product management career was mostly fun, always challenging, and sometimes lucrative. I owe much of it to two people in particular. 

One is Tim Bratton, who thought I'd make a good product manager, taught me the basics of the job, and gave me incredible opportunities early in my career. I have thanked him regularly through the last few decades, but probably not enough.

The other is JP Lester, who taught me what good management looks like, how to play the corporate game with skill and with heart, and brought me in to all kinds of exciting projects.

Together, they gave me the opportunities that have defined my professional career. Thank you, both. 

Thank you to all of my other colleagues, for putting up with me when I wasn't at my best, and encouraging me when I was.

Most of all, thanks to my partner in life Iran, who has been supportive through all of these ups and downs, successes and failures, job changes, and uncertainty. I could not have done any of this without you. 

In the near term, I am still offering product management services as a consultant, contractor, or coach. Act now, supplies are limited, etc. 

Back to Reality

After 3.5 years, I am leaving Osso VR. Times are tough all over. I've been through this before, and while I am sad to be leaving, I am genuinely excited about the future.

The Osso VR team did amazing work, and I am grateful for the opportunity to assist in blazing a trail on such a necessary and revolutionary product. I believe that virtual reality surgical training is as much a foregone conclusion as streaming music was. However, like streaming music, the early days are difficult -- you have to do everything yourself, from scratch, the hard way. It will likely take a few more years to catch on and become practical. Streaming was slow going until the widespread adoption of the modern smartphone. I think VR still needs that kind of transformative change on the device side and in the public's mindset.

I started working at Osso about 6 months into the pandemic, in August of 2020. The first year there was unusual and at times felt unreal, perhaps appropriate for a company working in virtual reality. Those early pandemic days were weird for everyone. I did a series of 20th century music lectures on Wednesday mornings that first year for team-building, and watching the attendance grow week to week was satisfying.

I remember working through The Day San Francisco Went Orange, with the ash-choked air from the wildfires mixing with an unseasonable heatwave. Nothing says "work from home" like sitting inside an 82-degree house. Hey, if I'd wanted that, I'd have kept working in Tokyo in the summertime!

During my first 2 years, the company grew tenfold, and that was an experience and challenge in itself. It was exciting to be back in start-up land, seeing the rocket start to take off.

My product team -- Sanju, Cameron, Maritza, and Jakoby -- were some of the best people I ever got to manage (and I got to hire most of them, too). I will miss them and the rest of the staff. They are mission-driven, passionate, and young. This was perhaps the first time in my career that I found myself being the oldest person at the company by far. I was impressed with my colleagues at every turn. It makes me feel better about the future.

Osso VR's leader, Justin Barad, is an exceptional person. I remain grateful to him for the opportunity. We did not always see eye-to-eye, but I respect his vision and persistence. I wish him and the rest of the Osso team the very best of luck. 

I am looking for another gig, and have some other exciting plans for the end of 2024. But for now, I'm going to take care of myself for a bit, work on some music, and do some more writing. 

I hope your 2024 is going well. Drop me a note -- I'd love to hear from you!

2023 In Review

2023 was difficult. At times, I called it "The Year Everything Broke".

Towards the end of January, the podcast I have been co-hosting went on hiatus. Each of the 3 hosts has had their own issues to deal with this year, and some of those issues escalated to a point where continuing is not possible right now. I miss talking with Michael and Dee, and I hope to get something else going soon. We are all doing the best we can.

This Old Fashioned may have been the best thing about 2023. 
It was certainly the best drink of 2023.

The torrential rains in January showed me that the front of my house was leaking, and likely had been for a while. I had to spend a shockingly large sum replacing all the windows on the front of the house, rebuilding my front steps, and getting the façade refinished. It was messy, noisy work that seemed like it would never end. I still need to get the place repainted, but the crew finally wrapped up in October. I am glad I was able to write the many large checks required to cover the repairs.

I caught COVID for the first time in March. It was not serious enough that I had to be hospitalized, but it was scary and painful. It was also disappointing, particularly given how diligent I had been masking, avoiding groups, getting vaccinated, and taking care of myself. 

On July 2, my friend David Meyers passed away after a long struggle with a brain tumor. I had known David since I was a teenager. He was the very best of what humanity has to offer. If you want to understand something about him as a person, and have a good cry, listen to this podcast. 

One of my aunts died in September from metastatic breast cancer. She was in her late 70s, had lived a good life, and leaves behind a grieving daughter and two grandchildren. 

Towards the end of this year, I found I needed gum surgery. It was less painful and scary than I expected, but still unpleasant and not recommended. This also triggered a few other health scares that have all resolved positively for now. 

I had to make more minor but expensive repairs to the car, as well. 

The biggest difficulty was dealing with my aging father. For the last decade or so, he has been involved with a partner only a few years older than me. This partner was someone with a drinking problem, substance issues, and an abrasive personality. The combination put me in a state of heightened anxiety any time I was around my father and his partner, waiting for something bad to happen. 

My father consistently chose this person over his friends and family, and they moved from Nevada to Hawaii to Thailand. At least my father was happy and secure, or so I thought. About two years ago, my father had a small stroke in Thailand. He and his partner said everything was fine, but my father then had two car accidents, one serious. When I saw them in late 2021, it was clear everything was not fine. My father was stuttering when he spoke, could now no longer walk without a cane, shuffled his feet, could not navigate steps or curbs without assistance, and fatigued easily. He was also quite obviously depressed.

I encouraged them to return to the USA, and in September of 2022, they did. 

In mid-April of this year, my father called me early in the morning. He said his partner had pushed him down several times, said they weren't going to take care of him anymore, and had told my father to kill himself. I could hear the partner in the background, drunk and screaming. I told my father to call the police and go stay with a friend. 

My father can no longer reliably read, write, or operate a computer. I purchased him a plane ticket and he flew down to Los Angeles to stay with my brother. I joined them a few days later to evaluate what we needed to do. 

My father was practically catatonic from stress, cognitive impairment, and antidepressants. He mostly stared into space when he wasn't struggling to answer our questions or sobbing uncontrollably. We had him sign powers of attorney for medical and legal purposes.

We looked into his finances. My father was once a multi-millionaire, and considered a business wizard by many. He was now quite clearly broke, with his credit card debt exceeding his meager cash sums. His major assets are two properties, jointly owned with the toxic partner. Also, by this time, my father had borrowed tens of thousands of dollars from me and my brother. We canceled jointly-held credit cards and cut off the partner's access to my father's accounts.

The three of us agreed it was time for my father to go into assisted living, and he would stay with my brother until a place could be found, probably in Southern California, not too far from my brother.

During this week, his partner had been calling and texting my father, my brother, and me, leaving vile, drunken, barely coherent rants. These calls and texts were happening almost non-stop, so we all blocked the partner.

Plans in place, I flew back to San Francisco. The next morning, I was told the partner had gone on a drunken rampage, smashing up the rental home they had been sharing with my father. Doors had been ripped off hinges, holes punched in walls, artwork, vehicles, and property attacked with golf clubs. The partner was found unresponsive on the floor, covered in blood. They had attempted suicide, and were hospitalized. The partner had not been paying their health insurance bills, however, and once stable, the hospital ejected them.

My brother and I found an assisted living facility for my father in June. My father moved in. The partner eventually stabilized enough that I was able to have the occasional coherent conversation about selling property and untangling lives. In July, I was able to visit the rental house and move some of my father's belongings into storage. At that time, the partner told me they were going to Thailand to check up on the property, set up a bank account, and contemplate moving to Thailand.

On the morning of August 9, 2023. I received a phone call from Thailand. The partner had been found dead in their hotel room. The empty whiskey bottles suggested a drinking binge. It is unclear whether this was another suicide attempt or an accident. Regardless, I had to call the partner's adult children and let them know.

My father was distraught. Despite my uncovering evidence of physical and mental abuse from the partner, my father kept telling me he didn't want to live anymore. After all of the effort put in to getting him safe and taken care of, this was hard to hear. 

The partner's will ultimately named me the executor of the partner's estate and will. Throughout this year, I have been dealing with attorneys in Nevada, Hawaii, and Thailand, trying to make sense of and get control of bank accounts and other assets. It has been like having a second job navigating phone trees, listening to hold music, talking to customer service agents, and sending documents to various addresses. 

There is more to the story, much of it sordid and sad. It is hard for me not to be angry about all of it as well. 

All of these events combined with challenges at work to make this an unsatisfying year at my job. I am not sure how much longer that will go on, but I have some plans for what's next.

The year rounded out with me catching COVID a second time in December. On the plus side, it was a much milder case than March. On the minus side, it meant that I had to spend half of my precious holiday vacation locked in my office, trying not to infect my wife. 

I could go on about current events. I tried not to pay too much attention to the desperation, horror, and ongoing tragedies around the world. It helps keep my own problems in perspective at times, but reading and watching too much just made everything seem worse. American politics, the Middle East, the environment, Russia and Ukraine -- it was a daily barrage of bad news and failure. At times, it seemed the whole world was coming apart.

Despite all of the breaking, there were a few bright spots in 2023.

One is that Emily Hobson and I released an album (Cold Comfort) and a covers EP (You Got All Sad) as Snow Westerns, a slowcore/shoegaze/cowboy alternative rock band. Working on these records was fun and satisfying, and I am proud of the result.

In May of this year, my wife and I went to Spain for two weeks. Attending a friend's daughter's wedding was our pretext, but we added on plenty of extra days in Madrid and Barcelona. The food was fantastic, the weather was gorgeous. I made some good permanent memories. Most notable was that we walked everywhere, not using public transit or cars except for getting to and from our arrival and departure areas. I hope to go back some day.

I had a great birthday break up at Sea Ranch. I wish I could go there more frequently. It is truly my happy place. 

Sid Luscious and The Pants are slowly reactivating. We are training up some new members and starting to sound pretty good. I hope we will be performing in early 2024, but regardless, it feels great to be playing music with a band again.

Part of that is my voice. Post-cancer, I have struggled to sing the way I used to. The treatments left my voice and throat somewhat compromised. I had been doing online voice lessons for a few years, but in 2023, my voice coach stopped doing lessons to return to graduate school. The work we did together seems to have paid off, however, and my singing is better than it has been in a long time.

I was able to use this for some online performances, notably UCSF's Art for Recovery group. I have been a part of this crew for 3 years now, and playing for them occasionally brought me satisfaction throughout the year.

I found solace and joy in seeing friends. I was able to reconnect with several people visiting from out of town, and had many great dinners and meet-ups with my Bay Area gang. No matter how dark, frustrated, or broken I was feeling, these people and shared moments always left me feeling energized and alive. 

And the best thing about the year was my spouse Iran. She took care of me on many levels, and her love and support made everything bearable. 

Thank you all for being here, for being present, for reading and listening. Here's hoping 2024 is better for each and all of us.

2023 Books

I joined a book club this year, which has "forced" me to read at least one book a month. That has prodded me into reading more in general. Here are most of the books I have read in 2023, more or less in order, with a few notes:

I Have Some Questions For You - Rebecca Makkai. Literary fiction mystery about a death at a prep school, but also about society's treatment of women. Great writing. Furious, incendiary, nuanced, thought-provoking. Highly recommended, and one of the best books I have read in a long time. My choice for Book of the Year, 2023.

The Vixen - Francine Prose. Literary fiction about a writer in the post-WW2 era. Great writing. Recommended.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem - Joan Didion. Didion's classic collection of essays about California and America in the 60s. It's Joan Didion. That makes you say YES! or NO!

No One Left To Come Looking For You - Sam Lipsyte. A noir-ish mystery set in New York's underground music scene in the 90s. Kinda funny, scarily accurate. Breezy. Recommended. I have read a few of Lipsyte's other books (The Ask, Hark) which I also liked.

The Terraformers - Annalee Newitz. Science fiction about some terraformers. Not recommended.

The Shards - Bret Easton Ellis. Literary fiction-alized account of Ellis' eventful senior year of high school in the early 80s. Shades of Stephen King. If you have never read any of his other books, this is a good place to start, as it effectively covers all the things he does. If you don't like his work, this will not change your mind about him. I am close to his age, and I was overwhelmed with nostalgia for my own lost youth.

Liberation Day - George Saunders. A collection of sci-fi-ish short stories, many of which ran in The New Yorker. If you read The New Yorker, you know this means they are likely depressing, heavy, powerful. Also great writing. Recommended, but it may bum you out. 

The Marvel Universe - Bruce Wagner. Literary fiction. Another of Wagner's scathing, scabrous, acidic takes on Hollywood and contemporary society. I liked it, but I also liked (or at least appreciated) several of his previous books. Definitely not for everyone. I also read Wagner's Dead Stars (2012), which covered similar territory.

The Candy House - Jennifer Egan. Literary fiction about a group of individuals in the near future. A kind of sequel to Egan's breakthrough "A Visit from the Goon Squad". Not as good as "Goon Squad". It was fine. Recommended with reservations.

A Sport and a Pastime - James Salter. Literary fiction from 1967. Full of food, sex, travel, and ennui. Evocative and beautiful. It seems like someone should have made this into a movie.

The Devil’s Playground - Craig Russell. Cinematic mystery set in Golden Age Hollywood. Fun, suspenseful. The sort of book where you want a whole series featuring the protagonist. Recommended. 

Deliver Me From Nowhere - Warren Zanes. Nonfiction about the making of Bruce Springsteen's best album, "Nebraska". A little breathless at times, but if you like the album, worth a read. 

Birnam Wood - Eleanor Catton. Literary fiction about an idealistic environmental group colliding with a billionaire in New Zealand. Starts very slow, ends abruptly. Powerful but also flawed. Recommended with reservations.

Gone to the Wolves - John Wray. Literary fiction/mystery about metalheads in 90s Florida. Recommended (if that sounds good to you).

Sure, I'll Join Your Cult! - Maria Bamford. Bamford's memoir. Funny and sad. If you like her, well worth a read (though you will know much of this already). If you are unfamiliar with her, check out her one of her specials, such as "Weakness is the brand" (Amazon) or "Old Baby" (Netflix).

The Possibilities - Yael Goldstein-Love. Science fiction. A novel about a mother whose child suddenly vanishes, and her journey and discoveries about herself and the world. 

Comedy Sex God - Pete Holmes. Another memoir by another stand-up comedian. Holmes has a somewhat goofy stage persona, but reveals himself to be a deeply spiritual person who has been seeking enlightenment and understanding for much of his life. Like many personal spiritual journey stories, it is by turns inspiring, profound, silly, and sometimes cloying or unrelatable. But his writing made me think about my own life and has led me to revisit some of his favorites, notably the work of Joseph Campbell.

There Is No Antimemetics Division - qntm. Science fiction/horror, set in the SCP Foundation universe. Imaginative and strange. I have been reading some of the SCP stuff for years, and this was an excellent take on some of those ideas.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store - James McBride. An evocative landscape painting of a novel, like looking at one of those big works by Pieter Bruegel The Elder, where you see all these characters in a town with their own stories, lightly connected. Sets a mood and captures a moment rather than focusing on a main character and a story.

Lone Women - Victor LaValle. Historical fiction, set largely in early 20th century Montana. I thought this book was going to be similar to McBride's novel -- an accurate but fictionalized story of personal experience. It was that, but LaValle takes some unexpected and thrilling detours. A bit cartoony at times, but surprising and inventive.

Today Will Be Different - Maria Semple. Comedic literary fiction. Semple has a perspective, style, and attitude that suggests late 20th century New York City. She writes about what people today would call "rich white people problems" with a kind of snark and mostly self-deprecation. While the book initially felt like similar works from "New York-y" authors, Semple pulls it in some interesting and surprising directions.

Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning - Tom Vanderbilt. A non-fiction book that weaves Vanderbilt's efforts and experiences learning new things (music, surfing, jewelry-making, juggling, foreign languages, chess, etc.) with some science and research into human brains and education. Breezy, easy, and a reminder that we should all be learning new things, all the time. 

The Dog of the North - Elizabeth McKenzie. Literary fiction. This book is a story of someone stuck taking care of everyone around them (including older relatives with dementia) while neglecting themselves. Some strange turns, veering close to absurdity. I found it timely, sad, and amusing.

Monica - Daniel Clowes. A graphic novel, in Clowes' distinctive style. Haunting, dark, and disturbing.

  

The Major Labels, Major Artists, and Major Streaming Services Plan to Steal from Indie Artists

After 25 years of flailing, the record companies have finally gotten back to their core competency: screwing small artists.

Spotify (which is partially owned by the major labels) has indicated it plans to roll out a new system in which the rich and successful blatantly steal from the poor and emerging. If your music generates fewer than 1000 plays from 500 unique listeners in a given year, you will no longer accrue royalties or get paid for that time period. The same is true if Spotify decides what you are offering is "not real music".

That money will go to the major labels. To Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran and David Byrne and Thom Yorke and the estates of Michael Jackson and Marvin Gaye.

It's a kind of reverse Robin Hood, or a perverse re-imagining of Superman 3/Office Space financial trickery. The amount of money for any individual indie artist is tiny, fractions of dollars. But collectively, it adds up to an estimated additional billion dollars over five years for people who don't need it and didn't earn it.

To be clear, it is not about the cash in and of itself -- the money for each indie artist is too small to have any real financial impact. But it is very much about the principle.

I wish I could say that all the old, successful artists who have been so vocal about streaming service economics in the past were standing up to fight against this, but they are all silent on this issue so far. I wonder why.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

Spotify and other streaming services are about to start taking money from struggling independent artists and put it in their own pockets and those of their biggest and most-successful acts. This new policy is disgusting, grotesque, and exactly the kind of thing streaming services were created to fight.

The hubris and cluelessness of the major labels is again on full display, with them arguing that "someone just putting up white noise" should be worth less than "an artist that had spent a year in the studio...with all kinds of instruments and people involved."

Uh, no. That's not how art works, and it is not how copyright law for sound recordings works, either. Effort and expense don't count, or make a work more or less valid. Records have been priced more or less "the same" at record stores since time immemorial, whether it was a bloated pop creation that cost millions and took years, Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska" (recorded in a bedroom on a 4-track), Nirvana's "Bleach" ($800!), or nature sounds.

Ed Sheeran, celebrating being able to steal from
Marvin Gaye AND indie artists
[Timothy A. Clary / AFP/Getty Images]

The major labels continue: "It can't be that an Ed Sheeran stream is worth exactly the same as a stream of rain falling on the roof." Well, some might argue the rain has more value, and is more pleasant than whatever Ed Sheeran is bleating this week. 

But the bigger issue is that the label or owner of one piece of content doesn't get to decide the value of other people's content. (And Ed Sheeran is doing just fine, by the way.) 

"Obviously white noise is very different from 'Bohemian Rhapsody,' but it...is paid the same." Yes, it is. Because the listener doesn't care, and the service charges them the same. Subscription services and hosting companies will charge you the same amount of money to put your audio content up, whether it is famous, unknown, or "noise" (and I would note there are plenty of records that cover 2 or more of those categories). 

Even the idea that the major labels get to draw a line between "functional noise" and "music"...Have none of these people ever read an (art) history book? "Functional noise" is how a lot of now-popular music genres would have been described years ago. 

It is also worth noting this is a problem wholly of Spotify (and other services') making. They wring their hands about "bad actors" gaming the system. Who lets those "bad actors" upload whatever they want, without any editorial control or review? Oh yeah, it's Spotify. 

Services like Spotify could simply stop taking anything and everything they are offered. They could exercise the barest minimum of curation or editorial discretion. For years, they have largely gone the opposite direction, desperately hoovering up whatever audio files they can find, without bothering to listen to them or screen them for merit or offensiveness or anything. 

Except for that brief period when they were thinking about kicking "bad people" off the platform. Well, not kicking them off, but maybe just not promoting them. Or something. Hmm. Why not take their money and give it to indie artists?

Let's call this what it is: Major label (and big artist) greed. 

Yesterday

Prior to the 21st century, being a small, independent artist was extremely difficult. Recording studios were expensive, and making even a cheap record could cost quite a bit. CD, vinyl, and cassette duplication cost thousands of dollars and took months. Once you finally had your records, actually getting record stores to take them, sell them, and pay you was nigh-impossible.

The digital music revolution of the late 1990s and early 2000s promised to give up and comers a chance. Computer-based recording dramatically reduced costs of making a record while simultaneously making recording easier -- you no longer had to spend a year in the studio making an album with all kinds of instruments and people involved. You could do it yourself in your bedroom or garage. 

Digital distribution meant that not only was a costly investment in physical media not required, but musicians could sell globally, with transparent accounting, effortlessly.

When my colleagues and I started building what became Rhapsody, the world's first music streaming service, we had a utopian vision: all music would be treated equally. It didn't matter if you were The Beatles or Lady Gaga or Sid Luscious and The Pants. 

We did it, and that model of equality became the standard, which every other service adopted (or copied) more or less without question. Partially because they had no ideas of their own, and partially because they were too lazy to innovate and were content to catch a ride on the work we had done. 

And as we had thought, people started listening to more music and audio from a wide range of sources. The major label's "share" of people's listening began to decline.

One could also reasonably hypothesize that the major label's share of listening also declined because the labels weren't developing long-lasting, quality artists, and because there was a massive influx of independent musicians which provided many real alternatives and allowed people to hear things other than the few dozen songs the majors jammed into people's ears by methods legal and illegal.

It also turns out people want to listen to all kinds of things, not just major label albums. They wanted to hear weather sounds, white noise, and podcasts. And the music services were eager to provide this alternative content. Ironically a big driver here was the major labels' own insistence on eye-watering terms for streaming the music they control -- the major labels incentivized streaming services to look for other things for people to enjoy. And another driver was the music services responding to customer requests.

Ultimately, this is another re-statement of the content cartel's position: Only their music is real art, and the rest of us amateurs should just shut up and pay them and be grateful for their amazing artistry.

This kind of thing is another reason I left the business in the first place.

I Will Follow

Spotify can't help it -- they're beholden to the majors, and too craven to take a real stand. And given the way the industry works, I will not be surprised to see every other music service fall in line and do the same thing. Their precious major label deals will probably require it, either explicitly, or by careful legal construction that ensures the services can't survive unless they do something effectively the same. This is how the biz works.

I am not sure if I will leave my music up on these services or not. These services are still good for listeners, even if like so much else in our 21st century world, the rich get richer by stealing from the poor. And we don't have too many alternatives left. 

But I don't have to like it, even if Spotify cravenly tries to spin this as a "pro-artist" endeavor.

One reason we started these services was to build something more equitable, fair, just, and accessible for all artists. Even back in 2000, Queen and other established artists didn't need more money. The biggest artists didn't even want to be on the services. We had to bribe them all, with fat cash payments for the privilege of paying them more royalties later. And now, for the privilege of looting the pockets of the next Yo La Tengo. I guess in that respect, we won for a while, but eventually, Big Content came roaring back, and we lost.

But another reason I was motivated to do all that work was because Napster -- an illegal, unlicensed service predicated on blatant infringement and violation of the rights of artists and labels -- was decimating the music industry. I, we, all wanted to help save the music business from Napster (and from the music businesses' own cluelessness and ineptitude).  Ironically, Rhapsody bought the Napster brand some years ago and re-branded. I used to think that was a kind of loss or victory in and of itself. But now?

We should have let Napster destroy the music business.