I feel a bit scatterbrained these days. I am hyperaware of the sentences bemoaning how technology and screens have reduced our ability to concentrate to 40 seconds. I was left unable to finish a recent piece in The New York Times about the happiness enjoyed by those who detach themselves from the universe of smartphones and migrate to flip phones. It was a journey I had told myself I would make a number of years ago when my own smartphone broke, but was too weak to actually undertake. “Make me chaste, oh Lord, but not yet.” Reading the NYT story reminded me of a Ted Chiang piece (in Exhalation?) about a device that lets us communicate with not-quite parallel universes where slightly different choices were made in the recent-enough past that we can still effectively communicate with one another about what is or might have been. The specter of flip phone me was blurry in the extreme but I feared that reading to the end would induce some sort of clear vision that would haunt me forever – a me that is content in a way I am not, and perhaps cannot (can never?) be with the smartphone. A me whose resulting centeredness led to clearer thinking and reasoning, which led to worldly success as well as, if not spiritual enlightenment, then at least less unenlightenment. Buddhahood is beyond my attainment, but flip phone me is a bodhisattva, at least, as opposed to whatever I am now. C, who consistently (and correctly) needles me for my lack of adherence to ‘no phone Friday’ is herself making plans to push more of her friends and family to call us on our landline (in reality VoIP, I have no idea how to even find out if the copper landline still exists). She took herself off of social media a number of weeks ago and feels much the better for it. This is a victory, but it does take away one of my soapboxes and level the playing field – always a dangerous change in a marriage! I don’t know if I truly believe in a coming wave of ‘desmartphonification’. If I do, I suspect that – sadly – it will take place among the meritocratic masses who actually staff the companies that push this technology onto us. AI refuses to leave the headlines, and I still have yet to see a really exciting use for it that doesn’t come with some kind of equivalent downside. At the very least generative AI will worsen, not improve, what LeFevre terms a ‘non-information overload’ (am I attributing the right person?). It’s not that the world seems smaller, it’s that you have to sift through some much more extra shit to be able to see it. And once you do see it, what then? Are you meant to report back to someone? To better delve into your own inner space that maps, somehow, onto this real world outside?
Alexei Navalny is dead. I feel as though I’ve been reading about him for two decades, perpetually locked up or about to be so. Doubtless there will be lengthy, informative obituaries in the coming days and weeks, mourning the symbolic death of Russia’s democratic urges. The strange part for me was how quickly I moved past the headline. Navalny was ‘important’ in the global sphere of public affairs, a serious subject amid lighter coverage of ‘prominent’ people about whom we have endless filler (filler being the main course for some). He was also always potentially portentous, like Aung San Suu Kyi was for so many years, as opposed to the many movers and shakers who cycle and recycle back into view having accomplished what appears to be nothing. Now a martyr to democracy, I suppose he is at least beyond a place where he could have a Suu Kyi-like fall from grace. The story of his death (no details to read other than the press release from Russia) got about 30 seconds of my time and then it was on to the next one. A few minutes later I felt obscurely ashamed laughing at some meaningless video, the contents of which I have already forgotten. The ugly old truth rearing its head again, life moves on unending. There is no pause. Maybe not so much an ugly truth as a bracing one, but sometimes that cold, bracing shock burns a raw nerve. Navalny’s name goes into the history books, but part of me is
Disinflation and deflation. I have seen a frankly concerning number of articles in reputable sources with headlines essentially reading “Why haven’t prices gone back down?”. Outlets whose readers are supposed to be among the discerning elite have to explain that deflation is bad, and that most corporations are not going to simply cut prices back to an arbitrary, pre-pandemic level. How was this even a question? I would be curious, however, to do a line-by-line review of all the CPI components and see if any of the categories the BEA tracks have in fact experienced (unusual) deflation rather than disinflation. An item for the ‘to-do’ list.
Cost-of-living crises are in vogue right now, speaking of disinflation. Endless headlines about housing affordability. Poking and prodding a variety of statistics (focused mostly on per capita measures) led me to some of the recent population projections from the UN. The 21st century will be peak humanity, their central tendency predicts – hitting about 10 billion humans in the late 2080s before declining. Given my mild pessimism I am more interested in the deterministic lower bound, which moves the birth rate down by 0.5 and so peaks in the 2050s just shy of 9 billion humans. The former scenario is just possibly in my lifetime, the latter is – I hope – almost certainly in it. Fewer people sounds really good.
smq.world 