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Life In Code: CONCLUSION (Patreon)

Published:
2024-09-27 18:35:20
Edited:
2024-10-28 23:36:08
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

BOOM TWO: A FAREWELL~!

Feeling very miserable today for not much reason. I wish it was cold and grey outside instead of sunny and beautiful.

I like that new Weeknd song with Playboi Carti

ok let me complete book club on schedule and then. perhaps lurch into everything else. including redoing that stuff i lost from last night. fuck.

.

..

...

Tender Love For Making A Living:

"He makes what was once the modest objective of one's labor, formerly known as "a living." (278)

The affection and prioritization that Ullman places on local commerce and the working class is v touching. "Affordable capitalism."

Venture Capitalist Start-Up Culture:

--------

What happens in the startup world does not rise from the ground up but descends from the VCs on down. (289)

--------

What assures venture capitalists is the promise of disruption. What makes money is smashing existing structures to replace them with new ones that can be owned by private investors. Wages earned across a wide spectrum of the existing order—small retailers, booksellers, taxi drivers, reporters, editors, schoolteachers, and more—are swept up like chips on a roulette table, everything going into the hands of the winner: the wealth of the many concentrated into the riches of the few. (293)

-------

I was struck again by the avoidance of any "partnership" with government, as if such a relationship would tarnish the brilliance of the Wi-Fi umbrella by joining forces with the underfunded, overworked, understaffed agencies. He, like so many true believers, envisions a clean technical solution to human problems, conceived of in co-working spaces, clear glass boxes, and conference rooms, whereas the government is anathema, a pit, the much in which dreams of changing the world forever sink. (295)

TRUMP AND DISINTERMEDIATION

Ullman's assessment of Trump's interaction with disintermediated technology is! exactly! how! i feel! about! that!

And Finally:

I cried for the third time in this book reading that last paragraph.

I must hope that those who barely remember life before the internet, or never knew it at all, will find their way through the dazzle and disappointments of technology, the seductions and the traps. I have to trust that, as they await future wonders, they will also look back to see the world as it was before this moment of the internet, and find guidance there on how to live now. (303)

Look thats me. thats us!

00000[///"""++===]--------

_____________________

OK! I don't know about you but I think this may have been the best thing we've covered in Book Club. I felt emotional seeing someones comment last week that they were sad we only had one more week with it. Yeah. I will have to read more Ullman for pleasure, and will need to select the next book quite carefully.

What did you think of this conclusion and the whole collection? Very much looking forward to reading and responding over the next few days. Feeling that thing where I sometimes open up the Reddit discussion thread for a movie after seeing it because I jsut want to keep experiencing the movie.

Chat here and chat on the livestream on Sept 30! 4:30pm EST ! Here!

NOWWW IM OFF TO REFILM ThIS THING AND HATE THE SUN!!!!!! TURNIGN 27 TOMORROW IM NOT READY BUT I AM A CHILD OF GOD ANd THE WORLD KEEPPS SPINNING!GGGGGNG

Files

Comments

Teageen

Relevant to the content of this book and also KTi in general: https://youtu.be/4EmstuO0Em8?si=ml-6fBvbg8fsoRnu One of my friends (the cyber security friend) sent this to my friendgroup chat. It's about the enshittification of the Internet. I think a talk this guy did last year at DEFCON was posted here. I can't think how else I would have watched it.

SkateLouis

The park section really resonates with my experience in my city. Years ago they changed the main park to be all so very modern and all so very white. Progress they say! It's been 10 years since and all we got was less shade, unfinished botched construction, and a bunch of skatists because the concrete is great for skating (good for them tbh, too bad every one hates them for "destroying the park" now) There was nothing wrong with the old park. This change served no one, only the satisfaction of engaging in new trendy trends in architecture. That feels like the startup logic. Innovate for the sake of innovating. Not actually solving a problem, not thinking how that will actually affect people. Dreams and projects without purpose, things nobody asked for. "Useless" can be a descriptor for plenty of technology, specially apps and social media. They sure make us feel great for a while and fluctuate tons of money, but at the end, serve no true value.

ijbol

Happy birthday in advance 🫶🏿

Silver

[failing to comprehend me getting even older; as CJ has a 27, I have a 19 looming over my head that will force itself into my life in a couple of days. On a different note ZMM is also waiting for me (im coming Lucas).] Now while i didn’t cry, this was the perfect ending to this book, leaving me as an emotional wreck (for my standards). I read it on the train and while calming down after the fact i noticed my best friend, peacefully watching his favourite show, instantly stopping everything responding to a push-up notification that lit up his newly bought, treasured and subconsciously placed as to be constantly in ones view phone. This really almost broke me. Ullman hopes for the next generation but i am increasingly unsure about them and me. I can try to be conscious, to engage critically, to do this bookclub, but… Idk its tough Some things from the book The crows replacing the other birds is horrifying to read aaah “Stacks of boxes with that Amazon arrow trying to be friendly by mimicking a smile” (283) That logo has been a pet-peeve of mine for ever. Proud to say that i don’t have an amazon account and have never bought anything from their service. We’ll see how long ill be able to resist. “What happens in the startup world does not rise from the ground up but descends from the VCs down.” How is she so good at this The last 10 pages are perfect.

Josh Foreman

Yeah this was a fantastic choice. I prolly never would have read it otherwise. Glad I did. There's a lot to take away from this. One thing that especially sticks with me (I finished it last month, sorry, but I have a million books to get through!) is the sting of being described so well from her perspective. Being in tech in the mid 90's was very much like being in a frat house. (From what I understand through media, I've never actually been in one) Our monoculture of shared perspective, media (MONTY PYTHON FOR LYFE) and habits created a very dense thicket for anyone outside to penetrate, and I had no idea at the time, and this book shamed me about that. I was also in various online communities at the time, and they were also part of this monoculture. And I think of what's going on in current online communities like this one, and just sort of agape at the delta between my experience of being online in my twenties, and all yall's experience. The difference in level of discourse is staggering. I like to think if I was exposed to the ideas you all have, I might have been a different twenty-something. But dunno.

sepha

tomorrow is also my birthday lol (lost my shit when I found out) and I think my friends are taking me raspberry picking ^^ So glad Ullman mentioned how no one knows their delivery people anymore. That's overwhelmingly what I think about whenever I receive a package nowadays. I have back pain and it always flares up when I carry heavy things, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone else... In the previous essay Ullman was incredibly optimistic...or maybe passionate is the right word? And in this one it's definitely not as optimistic. It's a stark reminder of all the work that still needs to be done. To be honest this book was a sort of wake-up call for me, because I share a lot of the same sentiments and I dooooon't want to spend my life wasting away at the software factory where I currently work (I guess Ullman had that era too though, lol). It actually is making me think about going back to school. To get a PhD perhaps, and so people will call me Doctor lmao, but mostly to see if I would be a good teacher (gsi)?!?!? Mother and Father had me chasing the dream of financial stability, but idk. I care about teaching a lot, I have been told anecdotally that I'd be good at it...and like...that's a job I'd be proud to do. Right. Anyway that was such a fire way to start doing book club and I'm looking forward to the next one <3 This community has introduced me to a lot of new things and it's so refreshing. Otherwise I'd be wasting away trying to crack BG3's Honor Mode, which is a dumb way to spend time while my art languishes. I slayed tactician though. (2 life cleric 10 lore bard, saved everyone in the Iron Throne without Haste. Period.)

benedict.m

so this book has already become a Part of Me. as much as I deeply loved Braiding Sweetgrass and How to Do Nothing and have kept a lot of things from those books with me, they didn't grab me by the neck the way Ellen Ullman did in these essays. they didn't help me feel the recent death of my cat. they didn't help me understand what was happening while i sat with my grandma through her last hours of life. they didn't change me in the way I think Life in Code has. this book is going to live in the "mysterious background processes" of my mind for a long time <273>. obviously I'm being a lil dramatic, it's a book and I'm the same person I was two months ago. just also different. "Goodbye to uneven beauty, I thought. Goodbye to rawness, aging, wildness. Farewell to the messy place where random thoughts can ramble and collide and maybe cohere in the tumultuous background regions of the mind." <275> so here we are. I don't think I knew how badly I needed someone to tell the truth of this story, of how the internet lived and died and lived and died again. in this chapter she places the degradation of the online world where she's spent so much of her life in context with the very similar degradation that's been happening for a long time in the physical world: destruction and monopolization masquerading as "streamlining," as "cleaning things up." "the beautified, sterilized park" <276> "the terrible cheerfulness amid a neighborhood where reality is two cops drawing guns on four guys" <295> "Too clean, I thought...a true extinction of the fortunate messiness of what had been there before." <300> "the desire to banish the horrid middle of all this 'thinking about it'" <145> "disdain for the body...suspicion of the flesh" <147> Ullman is not at all anti-technology or anti-change. one of the most beautiful traits she demonstrates in this book is her deep love of machines, of plunging into uncertainty and figuring out what a tool can do. "I sat back with a pleasure that reminded me of the time I'd fixed a carburetor: It works" <241>. but she knows too well who is developing the Internet. she KNOWS the early programmer culture and how it mutated into startup culture and then into whatever you'd call what we have in the year of our lord 2024. most importantly she knows *why* they change the things they change, and she knows that the main reason is very rarely for the public good. "Yet all vital cities must change. A city that does not extend its boundaries into underused areas is a dead city. The question is, into which boundaries and what sort of change?" <279> "He listened patiently. 'Well, all that may be true,' he replied. 'But I'm not working for society. I'm working for the company.'" <291> ~ Change the World ~ "Without that introspection, the motto of change devolves into an egoistic motive, a willful blindness to the contributions of the past, not realizing that with every advance there also comes some aspect of life that is diminished, or will vanish, for good or ill." "'Change the world!' is but an advertisement...a slogan to rally the youth, tell them it's fine, you are not here just to make money: You are noble." <293> I think I used to feel this way, a little bit. not in the context of programming or startups but in my artistic ambition. but I don't feel that way anymore. I don't want to be a famous writer. I don't want my words to mean everything to everyone. I don't want to be rich. I don't want to Change the World. I just want to live. I want to change. I want to engage in every way I can in "the true work of creating a more egalitarian world, the slow, hard job of organizing, the hours of contentious community meetings: the clash of need against need" <296>. how the fuck has "JUST making a living" become a thing to pity? I didn't cry reading this chapter. but the final page held me. Ullman's disappointment is powerful, and her hope is real. I wish there were easier answers, that massive power structures and absolutely fucked incentives didn't stand in the way of our reclaiming and reassessing the technology embedded into us. but we're not alone.

azalea water

i feel like my soul’s been washed ---------------------------------------- I don’t have much to say in the final essay other than that I’m in love with how Ullman talks about San Francisco. She knows the city like the back of her hand, has seen it change over decades with new waves of immigration and architecture. She’s a part of the city, like some unmovable monolith. “Gay male S&M leather bars had taken over the southern end of Folsom Street; a few have survived. The collision repair shops are still here, as are the gas stations, social-service agencies, and soup kitchens where SOMA extends down toward the Mission District.” - (page 279) I love talking to older folks who’ve seen a city change over time. In London, you can chat with old Jamaican ladies who’ve been sitting in Brixton since Windrush, or cockney grandparents with a dialect specific to the exact street they grew up on. London’s changed a lot in the last sixty years, especially. And the culture coming from it reflects that change so beautifully – music, language, TV, film – everything is drenched in the specific cultural ties that come from Polish, or Nigerian, or Bangladeshi families blending with the history of the city. And even if San Francisco has turned into a desolate, concrete wasteland of failed start-ups, that won’t be forever. New York has shifted so much since its founding, someone could write a 1,000 page book on what happened in NY during the 50s alone. Fingers crossed, we might just see San Fran become an escape again. ---------------------------------------- Forgive the naval gazing, but my stomach dropped a little when I reached the last page. Not because I knew I’d miss the book's themes or content, but because I’ve fallen in love with Ullman’s styleof writing. In much the same way “Braiding Sweetgrass” grew on me like a tumour, this book has too. “Life in Code” is such a rare thing: A non-fiction book about heavy, academic subjects that manages to be both human and informative at the same time. And that's all in Ullman's prose. You don’t miss a book because of its prose – that’s not something that happens. With fiction, you fall in love with the characters and themes. With non-fiction, you’re gripped by the subject or the stories that the author writes. You don’t walk away from 100 Years of Solitude going “Damn, that sentence structure went hard.” Prose is meant to be something invisible to the reader, but Ullman has taken that rule and snapped it. Before reading this book, I didn’t really care for coding, or San Francisco, or the early internet. Now I’m learning Javascript. Ullman was able to craft something incredibly special. She managed to blend her own life experience with technical aspects of coding and political messages that didn't come off as forced or preachy. And somehow this book hasn't become a bestseller. Somehow it only has 1,000 ratings on Good Reads. I'm just glad this book club got people to experience this book in a dialogue. If nothing else comes from anyone here reading this book, that is enough in and of itself.

phil e the theyby

I also had the thought “hey, that’s us!” in response to the last paragraph. She might as well have written “Everyone, the Kill the Internet book club REALLY needs to exist.” The emotional power in this chapter is staggering. Ullman paints such a vivid picture of the dehumanization and contradictions of our current Internet age. People have already pointed out several of them, but this one punched me in the face: “But I could find no mention on the project’s website of what Google X will give to the people below: reliable electricity, clean water, security from the ravages of ethnic wars, not to mention computers and cell phones and software. Even Bill Gates was skeptical. ‘When you’re dying of malaria, I suppose you’ll look up and see that balloon, and I’m not sure how it’ll help you.’” (289) I love that she quoted Gates here, because to me, there’s this very subtle message on how much this is a systemic problem rather than an individual one. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has received a lot of (justified) criticism for being a huge tax write-off and having a massive negative impact on the market and distribution of pharmaceuticals. And yet, I do believe that Bill Gates is still a human who believes he is doing good. This isn’t because he’s stupid; it’s because he has been playing the role society demands of him: the innovative tech CEO under capitalism HAS to constantly be expanding and acquiring. Their ideology HAS to believe that a single man’s ideology is all that’s needed to change the world for the better, and as long as the “right” people come to power and do the “right things,” the world will change for the better. And above all, capitalism itself CAN’T be the problem. If it were, it would mean that his life’s work has been actively destroying the world. Who could actually hold that? Who could confront that reality and not immediately kill themselves? The way I see it, most of us are just actresses and actors playing our parts to keep this massive system running the way that it is. This applies if you’re a CEO, unemployed, a software engineer, or an Uber delivery driver. Our humanity and our psychology gets compressed to fit into the roles we find ourselves in. It happens automatically and unconsciously. I think the way we start feeling like actual humans is by connecting with others as full humans, and by getting to know the parts of ourselves that don’t fit into our “role” and learning what those parts of ourselves have to teach us. Happy birthday, CJ! I have an upcoming birthday (October 5) and I generally hate the fuck out of my birthday (not the aging part though, being old is great), so I feel a little weird wishing someone a happy birthday. But I do hope you can reflect on and honor the many ways you’ve channeled Quality, and how the discussion that exists in this book club is the way it is because the folks here respect the way you engage with the world. Your willingness to engage with your full humanity encourages me to do the same, and then we all start doing that, and then it becomes this beautiful and gay circle of uplifting each other’s embodied human experience.

alex

ok i’m back. ok. so. took a break for life reasons but also because i loved this book so much that i just read the rest of it and i couldn’t stop crying lol. like every time i tried to pick it up and either write a review or even respond to KTI i literally would have the chin wobbles. boom two fucked me UP and i’m emotionally raw asf so let’s do this - Boom Two: A Farewell - Just to preface: I am the kind of person that gets upset when trees are removed. I cried when we had to have trees removed at my old house, and I literally hid behind my monitors so I couldn’t see while we were having two trees removed from the front yard just a week ago. Something about it fucks me up. “Something was wrong. The space to my left was bare. Sun blared where there should have been shade.” (273) hit me like a punch to the gut. That entire paragraph spanning to 274 is enough imagery to turn my stomach. My notes on the top of that page are “Why does this always make me feel sick? Why am I crying?” And then, below descriptions of concrete rails around trees that had likely already been cut down and grinded up, “that makes me want to throw up.” “[N]othing meandering here. Goodbye to uneven beauty, I thought. Goodbye to rawness, aging, wildness.” (275) Hello to a “beautified, sterilized park… an opportunity for the social cleansing of a neighborhood.” (278). A page later, my notes around the steady roar of trucks bringing in gravel and sand and the cranes scratching the sky: “It’s like I can feel the city suffocating… And like a construction-induced Silent Spring.” When my mom bought her house, it was the end of that phase of the neighborhood. The road came to a dead-end, though there was an up-and-coming neighborhood nearby. For the hip and with-it millennials, right? Our house backs up to the golf course. Not great for the dog, who’s easily stimulated. Or for us, who don’t super like drunk men. But it was good for the view: we had great sunsets. The sun framed the cows and this tall windmill on a hill a fair distance away - maybe about a third of a mile back. The land was bought a few years ago. The ranch was replaced with shrieking and pounding and beeping, and eventually a school managed to emerge. They connected the road between our two neighborhoods, making the main outlet somewhat dangerous. But honestly, the most egregious part of it are the new houses. Of course, the wildlife problem started beforehand. We’d noticed fewer birds, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that we started hearing the coyotes most nights. Displaced by construction, and meandering around to find food. In any case, I figure the one bedroom “luxury” rentals aren’t super helpful for that, either. Instead of “dry cleaners, shoemakers, convenience stores, all that goes into making something that is not just a building but part of a neighborhood” (277), they’re putting in one bedroom houses. Houses that turn and fit together like Tetris. A yard - if you can call it that - with about the square footage of a parking space (which, just looking, you can tell there are too few). There’s that, and then the next house over. The next person paying rent starting at just $1,999 for the luxury of a house outside of an apartment (don’t think of how a much better use of the land would have been an apartment building and a shopping center.) A park. A fucking pond would be a better use of the land, frankly. When my mom and I walk, sometimes we dip over there to see how it’s going. We don’t usually last more than five minutes. “What makes money is smashing existing structures to replace them with new ones that can be owned by private investors.” (292) So they destroyed a ranch, and around the school they carefully constructed, they placed a tight, anti-human maze of 400 square foot homes. On the plans I can see space allocated for foliage, but I can already feel the heat on the iron fence and roofs just radiating away and bouncing off the white walls of these sterile houses. “The new trees will not offer shade for decades” (300) made me cry again. I sound melodramatic being so emotional over a small construction project like this, but I guess it’s my own privilege to have not seen such anti-human structures so close to my home. I’m marveling and reeling at the same time. There were rolling hills and cows before - tall grass and windmills. Green that your brain engineered itself around - green that you instinctively seek. It puts your mind at ease, it helps you breathe. We replaced it - in our unending obsession with productivity and efficiency, even if it’s decidedly inefficient to use the land as we did - with black and white homes. We know humans to own houses. We know they can’t afford houses. So we gave them tiny houses to rent, the premise of luxury. The illusion of upward mobility. It feels gross, man. I look up at the trees still in my yard and think about the gross straight lines and metal seating that’ll give you a third degree burn and hope we can move towards building things with actual humans in mind someday. That’d be swell.

capybyara

The part about how the phrase "change the world!" is not as inspiring and noble as it is presented had me thinking about it for days. Especially the paragraph: "What assures venture capitalists is the promise of disruption. What makes money is smashing existing structures to replace them with new ones that can be owned by private investors. Wages earned across a wide spectrum of the existing order—small retailers, booksellers, taxi drivers, reporters, editors, schoolteachers, and more—are swept up like chips on a roulette table, everything going into the hands of the winner: the wealth of the many concentrated into the riches of the few." This is something I subconsciously knew all along, but I had not seen it described in such a tangible, straight-forward manner. Since, it has helped me discuss these topics in a much more productive way. This book was such a breath of fresh air. I frequently talk about technology and the internet with friends and family, and though a few of them either share my stance on them or are slowly having some realizations, with others I often feel like I'm talking to a wall. It's so frustrating; my intensity about it gets brushed off as a joke or another hyperfixation of mine or something. Before I can fully explain what my point is, people lose interest because I sound like a crazy person and it's "not that deep". It was cathartic to read about Ullman's deep investment in this cultural shift. How it got to her so personally. How it's not just changing society, but also the individual experience. None of this is at arms length! It is right here! Also (late) happy birthday CJ!

Chandler Sterling

"Goodbye to uneven beauty, I thought. Goodbye to rawness, aging, wildness. Farewell to the messy place where random thoughts can ramble and collide and maybe cohere in the tumultuous background regions of the mind." (pg. 275) Two months ago, at the start of this book, I said that I had been dedicating my life to the machine for too long. I have been dedicating my life to new things lately. I have read and written and filmed and edited and basked in so many things that keep me an arm's length from the machine. Human things. It seems strange but fitting that as Ullman has to say goodbye to so much of the uneven beauty in her life, I stumble upon so much in mine. It's as if she was passing the torch throughout this book. I worried for a bit that I don't know what to do with the torch, but the further into the book I got, the more I am reminded that the last person didn't know what to do either. You're wielding fire. For all the use it's light may give, it emanates from something inherently dangerous. The worry is what keeps people from getting burned. I was disappointed in this final chapter at first. It felt like such a deflation from the passion and hope that filled just one chapter before it. Then I read the section about Trump. It's hard to remember even now just how much that election affected attitudes for so many people. When I reread the chapter as a direct fallout of the election, I wasn't as bothered by the shift in mood. I can understand why Ullman feels so shell-shocked throughout this time. The world around her is being torn up by the roots. Dust flies from recklessly uncovered trucks, and their bad decisions get us all dirty. Goodbye to uneven beauty. "...compared to the early hopes for the web, the internet is a god that failed." (pg. 303) We are the inheritors of a failed religion. I think often of how current tech culture can resemble the Catholic church in the Middle Ages. I see corruption driven by greed. They take something that most people aren't given the chance to understand, and they weaponize that unawareness to sell you something. The idea of security. Before, they used the illiteracy of the masses to sell pardons. Learning to read and translating the Bible were definitely steps in the right direction. That is what Ullman was advocating for in the previous chapter. The other huge movement was, of course, the Protestant Reformation. People on the inside who didn't just disagree with the rotten practices, but hammered their arguments on the front door. I hope that will be us. I continue to struggle with how to Kill the Internet outside of these weekly book club moments. When I hear coworkers talk about how awesome and smart AI is getting, I try to remind them that people are smarter. When I go to recruiting events, I try to demystify the machine for all the students still under the spell of these myths. I try to tell a new, more honest, story wherever I find the machine's call is strongest. I hope I am doing some good outside of this community. In these two months, I thought a lot about what makes Ullman so different from the other authors we've read. She compares to Pirsig in my mind. Her ability to interweave autobiographical events with her current philosophical thoughts makes for a similar type of Quality writing. It provides her with an inarguable validity that everything else naturally grows from. So many book club posts for YANAG were caught in the tangle of Lanier's lofty claims, but there is no need to debate whether or not we as a community think Sadie was a trick. Ullman writes essays like poetry. There is an attempt to get across not just an idea, but the emotional state tied to it. Structure and diction and syntax are all weaponized to create a very particular space for you to interact with the ideas. Ullman isn't trying to convince you of anything, she's just rebuilding a moment in her life around you and asking what you see. Poetry. Two months ago, I said that I have always thought of myself as a writer. This book showed me I'm ready to start being one.

reva

WHAT A GOOD ENDING!!!! i remember the endings of you are not a gadget and how to do nothing left people with mixed feelings and feeling not completely satisfied, but this one really really worked. there is a kind of sinking dread to spaces that are precious to you being changed into something that feels dead. this happened to a childhood beloved playground quite recently. it was this beautiful sprawling structure made entirely of wood, with towers and tunnels and walkways and a train. it was a maze to wander through and endlessly fun. i'm not even sure why they got rid of it, but it'll be replaced by a completely normal playground. really sad stuff. it also makes me sad to hear about ullman's community meeting that only she was at. public meetings with government entities always seem to go like that, and it makes sense but it's also so frustrating. it feels so tantalizingly close, this medium in which the public could genuinely impact what happens to the places they live in, but it also feels so far away. there's always the feeling that you will be the only one to show up, and that you can't possibly hold conversation with people who actually have knowledge about the subject, and that your concerns will be dismissed and you will feel like a fool. community engagement is really hard, and it's very easy to decide not to try it. i think life in code provides one of the most compelling arguments for diversity i've ever seen. ullman starts the book by thoroughly breaking down the typical programmer's mindset and how their bias affects their code and how their code affects us all. she talks about all of the perspectives that are never considered by a typical programmer, from something as simple as nerd pop culture references not being ubiquitous to something as important as "having internet access does NOT help you survive wars and disease." and then she stresses that these perspectives can be centered only when EVERYBODY learns to code. really good stuff. when she mentioned donald trump it was like a punch to the gut. again what a GREAT way to end the book i was on the edge of my seat. mirroring what cj pointed out in an earlier post, i really like her references to all of her previous essays. it has this extremely satisfying sense of finality, like we've reached a time when she looked back at all of her essays and decided "yes, these will be a book. let's write the conclusion." i think i really adore this structure of a series of essays written across 20 years. i feel like i've gone on a whole journey, and gotten a really wide range of fully developed insights that you can't get from a book written in a couple of years. i sat for a while, reading and rereading the last sentences of the book and imagining that new generation of young dreamers, before suddenly realizing *I* am that new generation. ullman is passing the torch to me. it's up to me now to understand the past and look towards the future carefully. reading this book, and being in this book club, has kickstarted me on that journey. thank you all for making this a place that i want to be. <3

Sol

I had fallen behind but just finished reading the last 40% of the book in about 1 sitting to be here. It's an excellent book, one that feels addressed to me as a millennial who's taken Coursera classes and getting certified to break into tech from an origin in the humanities. It puts plainly many of my anxieties about this world and STEM even broadly, so it was heartening to have that call for people like me to join the fray. Much of it is undigested yet, since I just put it down. Rudolf Steiner's prophecy of Lucifer and Ahriman came to mind in the story of the bulk tank. In a 1919 lecture he describes two seemingly at-odds forces: Lucifer, a figure of going up and further up out of materiality into an abstract enlightenment, and Ahriman, a figure of materialism, nationalism, a modernistic suspicion and rejection of the transcendental. Yet he says these figures will make a deal: Lucifer will draw out the soul and Ahriman will fritter it away into a device, a jar for example. The ultimate cybernetic movement, a transhumanist movement: extract and reinvest. Control them softly. Like the bulk tank, international databases house extensive records on individuals, and now datasets are being leveraged to recreate these individuals on different orders: image, voice, creative capabilities, and coming more. This is, in some way, nothing new. When a colonizer can't have something they want, they make a replica.

Megan S.

(I am typing this while on desk at work. It’s getting darker sooner, and I notice it most when closing. I can’t see the streets outside, just the reflection of all our fluorescent lights against shimmering black glass. I’m reading on the internet archive since my e-book expired, and I’m copying any passages I find compelling as I go. I am greedy. I find all her passages compelling. It is difficult to leave any where they are. Beautiful beautiful prose) (Sometimes I wonder how many of these little interstitial prologues to write. I think they reveal just how scattered my writing process can be, how much of it is a bunch of stitched together moments in time. I think I’d prefer to write in long sessions, I think it might even produce better Quality, but also there is something tender to the broken trains of thoughts. Something over nothing:I’m back to tub typing.) (Final update: I am feeling the consequences of my greed as I do indeed have way too many quotes and they are all So Good, and this makes it very hard to choose) Goodbye to uneven beauty, I thought. Goodbye to rawness, aging, wildness. Farewell to the messy place where random thoughts can ramble and collide and maybe cohere in the tumultuous background regions of the mind. 274 -what are we supposed to do with a grief like this. Lanes everywhere are closed for construction vehicles. Cars clank over trench plates. Drivers hang like dead men on their horns (Ullman 278). I want to take a moment to just appreciate the prose of this sentence. Like all great writing, It needs to be read out loud. Feel how the sentence “cars clank over trench plates” moves in your mouth. It feels like cars on a freeway. Harsh mono-sylamic words that go clunk when you speak them. Follow up by the absolute banger: drivers hang like dead men on their horns. I love the use of the word ‘hang’ as both a verb and an extension of the metaphor. Fuck. She’s so good. “Until a few months ago, the park was still surrounded by tall, rangy trees. The grass was still the rough-bladed crabgrass. The picnic tables were weathering. The dirt paths turned to mud when the winter rains came on. The park retained a certain wildness, untrimmed, left alone for the trees to grow and dandelions to bloom on the grass” (Ullman 278). I recently finished reading Braiding Sweetgrass, and the way Kimmerer described nature rewrote my brain chemistry. Still, I’m a city dweller and I don’t get to see much of the type of nature Kimmerer describes. I love how Ullman uplifts the sacred mundanity of a city park. Yes, nature is here too. No, we haven’t managed to destroy it. Yes, you need to walk on winding paths and sit under aging trees. Goodbye to uneven beauty, I thought. Goodbye to rawness, aging, wildness. Farewell to the messy place where random thoughts can ramble and collide and maybe cohere in the tumultuous background regions of the mind. 274 -What am I supposed to do with this grief? How do we mourn the messy rambling places when everyone is telling us they are outdated, inefficient, obsolescent, done and dead and dying. “The assumption is change for the better. But rarely have I met would-be founders who consider how the “better” world they envision may be entwined with one that is worse. Without that introspection, the motto of change devolves into an egoistic motive, a willful blindness to the contributions of the past, not realizing that with every advance there also comes some aspect of life that is diminished, or will vanish, for good or ill; and we are at least obliged to look back and recognize what was before and what may never be again.292 How do we live with a grief like this? What do we do with the diminished life, the vanished nature, that which may never be again? It feels like too much. It feels like asking tech bros to think of Quality and Ethics is laughably naive. What is the benefit of AI? It’s new. It’s changing the world. It’s the way of future (I don’t usually use tone indicators, but just to be clear this sentence should be read with the most scathing sarcasm you can muster). What are the costs? We don’t know. We’re still figuring that out. Maybe it puts writers and artists out of a job. Maybe it makes it a little bit harder to do research on fashion aesthetics. Maybe it’s soul crushing to build, worse to maintain, and impossibly immeasurably greedy. Whatever it is, it isn’t blind to the contributions of the past. How could it be when it needs them so desperately? . I have to trust that, as they await future wonders, they will also look back to see the world as it was before this moment of the internet, and find guidance there on how to live now. It is up to a new generation to turn a sharp eye on what is happening all around them. It’s their turn. I wish their future well 302 So the first time I read this sentence I fell into a small pit of despair (small because it could be managed with a bath and holding my cats). I thought “there’s no way in hell we’re going to figure this out”, which is sort of funny because this community is doing exactly what Ullman called us to do. We are turning a sharp eye to what is happening around us, we are finding guidance in the past, we are trying to do better. The despair is still there (I might just be prone to it tbh), I’m still worried that We (as in humanity) aren’t going to figure It (how to live in this absurd new world) in time (before climate change or fascism takes me out). Still, I don’t think despair is a productive response. Moreover, I don’t think it’s true (okay it’s a little true). This community is special and vibrant and lovely and so so valuable, but I don’t think we are fundamentally Built Different. I don’t think we are alone in our search to live better, to better, be better. If nothing else, I believe in the kind of hope that obligates me to act, that calls me to be in community, that requires more of me than ironic derision. What else is there? Final review: 10/10. Rewrote my brain chemistry. Got spoiled with my first full bookclub. Every other piece of art I consume from here on out will taste of inadequacy.

D.S Films

I have finally caught up and finished Life in Code, Uni life has been chaotic if that's an excuse. The new video on Jordan Peterson suits and Derek Guy is incredible and I love how much this fantastic book is featured. The section about sitting around the same campfire was powerful and emotional, especially because we have all read this together and now it is part of this incredible project. The ending of this book feels perfect, with it's discussion of Donald Trump, Twitter and the future. I had a sad song playing as I read and I was upset that this final chapter was still relevant as Trump is somehow still allowed to run for President again. I was brought out of this pit of despair for the very end, which gave me hope, that if enough people could look back at what we had without the internet, we could work to gain that lost beauty again in the future.

Lou Corben

**crawls, knees and palms bleeding, over the finish line, staggers to feet, panting** “...Hey guys..!” I was cc’ed into an email at work the other day where the Marketing Manager was talking to someone about setting up a Meta Tag and I asked her what that was. She said it’s a bit of code you can embed in your website that tracks what someone does on your website so you can see what someone does when they’ve followed a link from Facebook or Instagram so you can work out customer behaviour and your return on investment from social media ads. I don’t think that’s particularly insidious to be honest but we’re a small company with minimal resources and it just made me think “wow, we’re being surveilled in so many ways we don’t even know about” I definitely enjoyed this book but it didn’t get under my skin in the way it seems to have for other people, but I enjoyed reading about how much it meant to other people :) <3 🍓 Frances Ha time, finally

Maggie Moffat

I paid a bunch of money to get this book in New Zealand. I moved to Australia a few days ago and it was the only book I brought with me. I love it. It moved me multiple times. So sincerely written. I love it when people care deeply. A joy to read. And her humanistic perspective on a culture that makes me feel super depersonalized has been a great comfort in a transitory part of my life. Idk, stoked on it

halley

ahoy! jumping in late to say I loved this book along with all the comments and contributions of this community. I think I've been changed for the better by reading it and I have a lot of respect and admiration for Ullman. it's stirred up a lot of thoughts and feelings that I think I've mostly summarized in previous threads, and while I wanted to respond specifically to this last chapter, to be honest it's been a while since I read it and now I'm completely engrossed in a new book (love and will) so I've mentally moved on. I'm reading and writing in my hammock as much as possible these days, enjoying this gorgeous fall weather with the sun shining through the walnut tree. looking forward to the time war and catching up on monthlies recs. (frances ha was amazing! I'm still processing)