There Is Only Emptiness Against Us

Here in January 2026, it seems indulgent and a little selfish to spend time listening to and writing about music, but we're going to do it anyway. At worst, it's a distraction, but at best it might make us think, or bring us closer to the divine and/or to each other. Hopefully it will also help get us off our asses.

Top Ten Albums of 2025

 

10. Wednesday — Bleeds

One can almost smell the Carolina summer night, with the lake and the car and the weed and the moonlight. Fuzz bass and heavy dynamic shifts add to the wooziness. I'm not sure what Karly Hartzman has against Phish, but I’ll give her a pass this one time.

9. Juan Wauters — MVD LUV

Maybe Montevideo is the only civilized place left on this earth, where people like Juan Wauters – by far the most likable character on the list this year – will greet you and ask you what’s bothering you and promise to listen to you and invite you for coffee, like a Roke wizard, gently weaving spells to protect the last sane, good place on Earthsea from the warring kings from the other islands. (Someone has been reading a lot of LeGuin lately).

8. Great Grandpa — Patience, Moonbeam

Identifiable as folk-rock, or alt-country, and I think there may be some lyrical references to farms in there somewhere, but this is more than a genre exercise. The band appear to be nice, down-to-earth folks in the “Ladybug” video, in which the bass player also appears to be 8 months pregnant.

 

7. Telethon — Suburban Electric

Fun and lively dudes from Wisconsin, who are knd of like The Hold Steady, kind of like Weezer, kind of like Nirvana, kind of like Schoolhouse Rock, and not at all afraid to break into a polka. 

 

6. Neko Case — Neon Grey Midnight Green

Everyone’s here to see the singer, but I'm fixated on John Convertino, barely visible behind the drum kit, brushes teasing and tapping and swishing and stuttering on the snare, evoking the rising snowdrifts outside the bar off I-94 and inviting you to order another round and wait out the blizzard in here, while listening more closely to what the grey-streaked redhead on the microphone has to say. 

 

5. Haley Heynderickx & Max García Conover — What Of Our Nature

Acoustic guitar way down in the mix, like a cat skulking through the tall grass. There’s disapproval and some anger and generous serving of cleverness here, but over an undercurrent of hope and belief in eventual justice. Go ahead and draw comparisons to Dylan and Baez. Which reminds me: where the fuck are the protest singers in America right now? 

 

4. Richard Dawson — End Of The Middle

In which, like Odysseus, our hero returns from the epic, millennia-spanning journey of his last three albums. I heard him say in an interview that he was going for “domestic” with this album, and there are plenty of northern English homey signifiers: community gardens and under-21 matches on the telly, and many stiff yet heartfelt (i.e. northern English) human exchanges which Dawson always captures so masterfully. Yet, by the time we reach the terrifying(ly gorgeous) middle 3:4-over-4:4 bit of “The Question," in which we learn the gruesome backstory behind the decapitated apparition haunting the track’s young female protagonist, you are reminded that this is Richard Dawson, and shit is going to get crazy in an awesome and delightful way. My wife cannot stand his voice, and I can understand why, but I can’t get enough of this guy.

 

3. Car Seat Headrest — The Scholars

A few years ago, I saw CSH at a small venue in Amsterdam, and I bumped into the guitar player on the stairwell and told him I was sorry they didn’t play “Cosmic Hero,” and he said (looking mildly annoyed as he turned from the young woman he was hitting on to answer me) that yeah, they don’t really like playing the, like, longer songs live. With that exchange in mind, I’m not sure how they’re planning on touring this release, which finds Will Toledo giving broad license to his more operatic tendencies, and which includes several tracks longer than 10 minutes. I find this more inscrutable and frankly less likable than when he used to sing about drugs being better with friends and vice versa, but I can't fault his ambition, and I could spend all day listening to him harmonize with himself.  

 

2. Min Taka — I Think We Should Just Move In Together (EP) 

The best act to come out of the Netherlands since… Golden Earring? Like Olivia Rodrigo without the performative anxiety, like Lily Allen without the defensive sarcasm, like (dare I say) Tay-Tay without the baggage of being Tay-Tay. Clocks in at 19 minutes and change, including a track which is a reprise of the opener, leaving me very hungry for more. 

 

1. Black Country, New Road — Forever Howlong

A couple of years ago, Isaac Wood packed his rags and went down the hill, and the band was left a-lying still without a frontman and an essential part of their sound. Rather than calling it a day or going their separate ways, the rest of BCNR responded by turning toward one another, divvying up the vocal responsibilities among the three women, hitting the road, playing a ton of music, and releasing a live album. Nowadays what they might lack in drama and urgency they make up for with patient song evolution, voices like Sirens, and (always earning points from this listener) a surprisingly inventive and musical drummer.  

 

 

P.S. (* = recommended):

 

*Lily Allen — West End Girl

Adds to the canon of post-breakup albums with merciless autobiographical detail, while showing off her prodigious acting chops (the album title is not incidental). One wonders if fiction would have been more interesting, but I won’t deny her her catharsis. As an aside, if you’re looking for a thrilling couple of hours, pick up a copy of “2:22,” the play she was in. No spoilers here.

 

Allo Darlin’ — Bright Nights

Friendly and folksy, like a warm quilt. Nature metaphors abound.

 

Basia Bulat — Basia’s Palace

Benign pop/folk, and refreshing to hear a female vocalist eschew the typical pyrotechnics one hears on contemporary radio, because Basia Bulat sings as though she has moderate to severe asthma. 

 

*BC Camplight — A Sober Conversation

Piano, musical-ish, but smarter and less campy. Merits a few more listens.

 

*The Beths — Straight Line Was A Lie

I love this band, and I won’t deny Elizabeth Stokes her blue period, but this release made me long for some of their former energy and joy. I admit that in early 2026 I also long for some of my own former energy and joy.

 

Big Thief — Double Infinity

I should probably like this band more than I do. Sometimes the timbre of the lead singer’s voice makes all the difference.

 

*Rodney Crowell — Airline Highway

A first-ballot songwriting hall-of-famer shows us what aging gracefully looks like. The fact that I’m less familiar with his songbook than I am with, say, Steven Malkmus’s, is my fault, not his. 

 

De La Soul — Cabin In The Sky

Always nice when old friends drop by. As I get older, I talk healthier too. RIP Trugoy the Dove.

 

Drake & Partynextdoor — Some Sexy Songs 4U

Another year, another quality Drake release, but at this point we should concede that he hasn’t really progressed from high-school-level relationship psychology. “Pussy so good I should stay inside, but I had to step out with the guys” is not a line I need to hear from a soon-to-be-40-year-old.

 

Earl Sweatshirt — Live Laugh Love

Confusing and sometimes enjoyable, like middle age. 

 

*Robert Forster — Strawberries

Sometimes you don’t need to be so clever, sometimes you don’t need to smother your vocals in layers of reverb and echo, sometimes simple rhymes (floor/door, stay/day, ten/men, town/town!) and basic instrumentation work just fine. See also Rodney Crowell.

 

*Foxwarren — 2

I thought the singer’s marble-mouthed diction sounded familiar, and sure enough it’s Andy Shauf, who had an appearance on my top ten list a few years ago. Andy is not looking for any trouble, just some gentle cooing over a top-notch rhythm section and samples from old movies. There may be a theme in there worth unpacking. 

 

Ezra Furman — Goodbye Small Head

I held my breath as I pressed play, hoping this would not be a concept album about bottom surgery. I think it wasn’t? 

 

Geese — Getting Killed

Top-notch drummer and grooves tastier than a sloppy joe, undermined by a frontman who channels a caterwauling Thom Yorke. I don’t understand what the fuss is all about.

 

Gloomy June — Gloomy June

If a management consultant were to plot Gloomy June on one of those 2x2 grids that management consultants are fond of, where the y-axis represented “energy” and the x-axis represented “engaging,” this would go in the upper left quadrant. 

 

Cory Hanson — I Love People

The dude from Wand does a credible imitation of Dewey Bunnell from America. 

 

Home Is Where — Hunting Season

Just as this band is missing a relative clause in its name, so it is also missing a competent vocalist to complement the nifty guitar playing. 

 

Hot Mulligan — The Sound A Body Makes When It’s Still

Generically likable emo. I realize that I say pretty much the same thing about every emo act on this list. 

 

Jane Remover — Revengeseekerz

Yikes. Makes Danny Brown seem laid-back by comparison.

 

Jeanines — How Long Can It Last

As if Jane Wickline from SNL started a Guided By Voices tribute band. That’s too harsh: there’s nothing wrong with some jangle and some harmonies, and I imagine this crushes on the east side of the East River.

 

*Sophia Kennedy — Squeeze Me

Wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome. I had no idea who this artist was, and for some reason my first listen through what kept coming to mind was The Berlin Stories. Androgynous, affirmative, club-friendly. And what do you know: this woman grew up in Germany. I would make a wry reference to Weimar here, but my wife (also German, with a keen sense of history) reminds me that we’ve already reached 1933.

 

Kerosene Heights — Blame It On The Weather

Serviceable emo. I would have loved this when I was 19-22.

 

Lady Gaga — Mayhem

At her best, she reminds us that no one does gay club anthems better. At her worst, she’s almost embarassingly derivative: a Wham! Guitar part here, a Depeche Mode synth there, and a Taylor Swift knock-off that’s so convincing you reach for the liner notes to see who wrote it. 

 

Maddie Jay — I Can Change Your Mind

Pretty. Chill.

 

Mamalarky — Hex Key

Starts encouragingly, with late-Blur woozy guitar, before pivoting to synth-heavy mushrock. May also be an anagram for the current FDA commissioner. 

 

*McKinley Dixon — Magic, Alive!

Euphoric, mile-a-minute rapping integrates well the Mahavishnu Orchestra-style backing band. We’re outside, rejoice, indeed. 

 

*McLusky — The World Is Still Here And So Are We

Welsh kings of the dynamic shift make an emphatic return

 

Jensen McRae — I Don’t Know How But They Found Me

Kind of the whole package here: great set of pipes, well-written songs with bridges as sturdy and elegant as the Zakim, flawless backing band. I wish she wouldn’t affect one of those à la mode speech impediments, but the fact that I don’t want to listen to it is my fault, not hers. 

 

Melody’s Echo Chamber — Unclouded

I listened to this at the gym one morning in Orlando, and I don’t recall much other than the super-dry drums. Still waiting for her to show up in a Louis Vuitton ad campaign.

 

Parcels — Loved

As if Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons came back as a Praise act. 

 

Hayden Pedigo — I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away

Pretty, skillful acoustic (meaning no singing) modern folk. I will have to keep this in mind if I ever start a YouTube channel about hiking.

 

Rosalía — Lux

Cool strings and synths and hints of percussion, Spanish vocals that channel something divine and terrifying. Inscrutable guest performances. Not something I’ll put on when I’m setting out a plate of cookies for company, but it’s impressive.

 

Ruby Haunt — Blinking In The Wind

Fleet Foxy, with a lead vocalist so laid back, you fear the entire operation may grind to a halt any second.

 

Saint Etienne — International

Bouncy and happy and sounding like they’re misreading the geopolitical room here in 2026. Possibly angling for a retirement gig on a cruise ship.

 

Samia — Bloodless

Sheryl Crow-esque, relatively inconsequential.

 

Saturdays At Your Place — These Things Happen

Likable emo act, not so bound to the genre that they will miss an opportunity for a shuffle beat or a handclap break.

 

Serengeti — Universe

“This is Mr. Floyd calling for Mrs. Floyd, are we reaching?…He keeps hanging up…There must be somebody else there besides your wife, sir.”

 

*Skrillex — Fuck U Skrillex You Think Ur Andy Warhol But Yr Not!!

The musical equivalent of scrolling TikTok, perhaps while taking amphetamines. The listener is encouraged to play the album in its entirety, which feels appropriate, as each “song” hurtles into the next with frantic, ADHD-like speed. The music itself approximates the sounds of those chariot-things in Star Wars Episode 1, and guest artists appear, evidently for the primary purpose of saying their own names into the microphone. Despite all that, there’s a self-mockery, from the album title on down, that makes this oddly likable and super-fun. 

 

Sombr — I Barely Know Her

Boy chases girl, boy loses girl, boy misses girl. All the right moves are here - vox are distorted just so, middle 8’s are sturdy – yet I can’t help but get the impression that we’re dealing with a narcissistic jerk here. Maybe it’s that line about not wanting the kid of another man to have his ex’s eyes, a line I can’t imagine, say, Juan Wauters delivering.

 

Smerz — Big City Life

Like a dance party on tranquilizers on a cruise ship on rolling seas. Girl seeks boy, but stakes are low and ambivalence reigns. “Talk to me if you want to.” Perhaps this is what the dating scene is Copenhagen is like, and why the Danes are so happy.

 

Stereolab — Instant Holograms On Metal Film 

Madame Sadier’s vox are a little too high in the mix, which makes this effort feel more like a PoliSci lecture than a night out at the club, but then again Stereolab has always been a pretty didactic project. Pairs well with the Zesinger Fitness Center at MIT.

 

*Tame Impala — Deadbeat

Has there ever been a situation where an artist leaning into parenthood has made their art better? This is nice to have on in the background, but is that where Kevin Parker really wants to be?

 

Taylor Swift — The Life Of A Showgirl

I can’t add anything useful to the conversation here. 

 

Tops — Bury The Key

Breathy lead singer, 80s pop sounds. May induce mild to moderate head bobbing.

 

Tyler, The Creator — Don’t Tap The Glass

Apart from the opening track, on which Pharrell reminds us of his chromatic mastery, nothing to see here. Liked him in Marty Supreme. 

 

Weatherday — Hornet Disaster

The band you are looking for, and I believe they are looking for, is The Hives. 

 

The Weather Station — Humanhood

Tasteful and adept, evoking Tori Amos. Unlike Tori, nothing here to grab you by the loins.

 

Wet Leg — Moisturizer

Something about this band creeps me out. The band name and the word “moist” in the album title is not helping matters.

 

*Steven Wilson — The Overview

This is ground control to Stanley Kubrick, backed by his usual band of studio wizards. RIYL: Greg Egan

 

The World Is A Beautiful Place And I Am No Longer Afraid To Die — Dreams Of Being Dust

This year’s model is lighter on the tension and heavier on the release. The screamy stuff isn’t my cup of tea, and the nihilism is turned up to 11, but they have a point that we humans are royally fucking things up, and they do what they do very very well.  

No Static At All

In business school I took a course called “Marketing High-Tech Products.” We studied Empire of the Air, the Ken Burns film, which documented how American culture was shaped by radio, and how a few extraordinary, ambitious, often troubled men were the force behind its emergence. Highly intelligent misfits like Edwin Howard Armstrong, who discovered that audio signals could be represented by modulating the frequency of a carrier wave, thus inventing FM radio. Alongside his scientific prowess, Armstrong had an odd fascination with climbing to the top of antennae towers – a hobby made more poignant when, one winter’s night in 1954, he exited a window in his apartment on East 52^nd Street and dropped 13 floors to his death.

 

One of the lessons of that class was that the better technology – in this case FM, far superior to AM as far as sound quality and broadcast range – sometimes isn’t the one that wins in the market.  Technical, commercial, and most of all human factors often conspire to promote inferior platforms.  Armstrong’s long-standing feud with David Sarnoff, the President of RCA and a key figure behind the dominance of AM radio at the time, was believed to have contributed to his suicide.

 

The other lesson was how radio transformed electrified human communication from one-to-one (e.g., a telephone or telegram) to one-to-all.  “For the first time in history,” said Jason Robards in the film’s voice-over, “one person with a microphone could speak to many, influence them, perhaps change their lives.”  Television would take this even further, introducing visuals into the equation. 

 

I took this class in 2005, as “Web 2.0” was just getting off the ground and people were gushing about “user-generated content.”  “The Facebook” had launched the year before, but “social media” as a term and a concept hadn’t yet taken hold of American culture.  The first iPhone wouldn’t come out for a couple more years.  Still, in class that day, there was excitement around how this evolution was about to reach its pinnacle: an age in which technology would enable all-to-all communication. Thanks to these platforms, everyone would be able to engage with everyone.  Mass communication would be democratized.  Information would be fully transparent and accessible.  Human relationships would strengthen.  The world would be a better place.

 

Not so much, it turns out.  By pretty much any measure, social media – turbocharged by ubiquitous smart phones, capital markets, and another small cohort of highly intelligent yet flawed young men – has generated far more harm than good. It has increased depression, anxiety, body-dissatisfaction, and insomnia, especially among young people. It has enabled the rise of surveillance capitalism, which has moved swiftly beyond advertising efficiencies into the realm of social control and economic oppression. It has played an active role in real-world violence. It has encouraged humans to communicate in ways that are performative, impersonal, knee-jerk reactive, and hostile. It has eroded human relationships and the essential societal foundation of common truths.

 

I figure you know all this already. The question is what are we supposed to do now? 

 

A few years ago, my father was cleaning out his basement, and he asked me to come pick up some of my old boxes. Inside one of them, I stumbled across a pile of letters I had received when I was in college.  Sifting through them, I was amazed to find more than 200 letters and cards: from my closest friends, but also from people I wasn’t that close to; from my parents and grandparents and aunts; from former coaches; from old flames and would-be lovers; from people I hadn’t thought about for 35 years, but to whom at some point I had gone through the trouble of writing. 

 

Many of these letters were mundane, but a surprising number were interesting and thoughtful and real.  They were asynchronous, they were thought through and mulled over, sometimes they were agonizingly waited for and torn open with anticipation.  At the time, this was one of the primary ways we formed, maintained, strengthened (and in some cases severed) human relationships. For a while, email took up this mantle, and group chats still help keep a lot of people connected in a positive way. But I can’t remember the last time I sent someone a truly thoughtful or important email. 

 

Is it silly to think we could start writing letters again?  Does it take too much time and effort?  Is it too much of a hassle to find a stamp and schlep to the post office?  

 

I would like to find out at least.  I’ve made a list of 52 people, and I will write at least one letter per week for the next year. If you wouldn’t mind getting a letter from me, please send me your mailing address. (If I already have your address, and/or if your last name is “Snow,” you’re already on the hook.)  Of course you’re welcome to write me back, but please don’t feel obligated to. If this inspires you to write to someone else, even better.

 

This may seem no more than a quaint exercise in nostalgia, and I’m not naïve enough to believe that mailing a few letters will inspire a magical awakening of goodwill and kinship and The Soul of America Will Be Saved.  But consider for a moment the fact that the United States Postal Service is in real danger of being dismantled by profiteers who would like to arrange things so that your interactions with other humans are mediated only by them. Imagine for a moment that x.com were the only means of communicating with faraway family members, or accessing your medical records, or filing your taxes, or voting.  While I still can, I will write some letters, because I suspect it beats doomscrolling. And I’m sure it beats doing nothing.

 

If Everybody Had an Ocean

 

With the Euros in Germany last month, and now the Olympics in Paris, this summer has meant a lot of sports on TV.  So much screen time does not benefit one’s mental or physical health — especially near the end of a long soccer tournament, I start to feel all strung-out and irritable — but it’s hard to resist the Olympics.  And this year the organizers made the inspired decision to make Paris itself the star of the show, eschewing the typical stadium extravaganza for an opening ceremony along the riverbanks, putting beach volleyball at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, plotting the road events to pass the Musee d’Orsay, etc. Their only notable misstep has been to insist on forcing the triathletes into the disgusting Seine, rather than using one of the many non-toxic and highly telegenic bodies of water (e.g., Lac d’Annecy) across the hexagon.

Watching this much TV has also given me the chance to catch up on my advertising.  I’m digging Salesforce’s spots with Matthew McConaughey as a Wild West sheriff heaving “information bandits” through swinging saloon doors.  The fact that the bandits all wear some version of the Silicon Valley tech bro “puffer vest” always makes me chuckle, and might make you forget that Salesforce is run by Silicon Valley tech bros.  There’s also the usual spate of pharma ads, which are mostly unremarkable, save the prelude to the Opzelura (ruxolitinib) spot from Incyte, where various family members run frantically into the living room after the mother exclaims from the couch, “QUICK! THERE’S A PHARMACEUTICAL COMMERCIAL COMING ON!”  Ironic self-mockery may or may not move more units, but it at least signals to the viewer that we’re all in on the joke.

More rote and uninspiring has been the lineup of overtly Olympics-themed ads, every single one of which is an execution of the same concept: i.e., a representative child sees the Olympics on TV and is inspired to put in years of hard work, to see every setback as an opportunity to grow stronger, to be grateful for all the sacrifice and support from their parents and coaches, all in the service of following their dream of becoming a member of Team USA who will one day be on TV and inspire the next generation of young athletes, and so on. Of course, the likelihood of any of these “children” actually making it to the podium is roughly equivalent to their winning the Powerball, but we Americans do love worshipping a certain mythology around work ethic and achievement.

Peacock has made the most of streaming video’s capabilities through their “Olympics hub,” which lets the viewer watch multiple live events at the same time, with the option to zoom into a specific event if things get interesting.  It also lets you search by individual sport, so you can spend all day watching judo if you want (I do not, as I don’t understand the rules and it always appears as if at least one competitor’s uniform is getting pulled off).

Early in the games, I clicked on the “surfing” icon, mainly out of curiosity because I knew it was taking place in Tahiti and I wanted to see what it looked like. Even though I grew up <5 miles from the ocean and spent most of my summers at the beach, I was never a surfer.  My formative years were generally spent rule-following, and the surfing scene seemed to me as a more menacing, criminal-adjacent realm, of cars and fins and skipping school and precocious body hair and danger. 

It’s hard to overstate how unlike surfing is to other televised Olympic competitions.  The coverage opens on a bobbing, half-in-sea-level shot of Teahupo’o.  The competitors – one in blue, one in red – dive into the water and paddle out to the break line, where they sit on their boards looking out to sea, hoping a rideable wave will come their way.  Minutes pass.  Only the steady white noise of the surf, softly amplified every now and then by the roll of a breaking wave – sits above the silence. More minutes pass.

The TV commentators are also of a different species.  Joe Turpel, raised in Hawaii, covers play-by-play with a mellow Pacific burr.  Color commentary, such as it is, is handled by Mike Parsons, a famous big wave surfer with a more bookish timbre in his voice, but the same half-baked lack of urgency.  Together they escort the viewer into a totally awesome semantic universe, of gnarly tubes and tagging the lip and staying behind the curtain and getting gobbled up by the foam ball. A universe in which “goofy” is a term of art. “Get too close to that reef, and it can really stop your energy,” says Turpel, describing the literally death-defying nature of this event with characteristic insouciance.  Some more minutes pass.  

I would like to watch an Olympics in which all the events are covered by Joe Turpel and Mike Parsons.

There are moments of action, when the right wave comes and the surfer with priority spins the nose of their board around and paddles along with the rising wall.  What these humans do on surfboards is miraculous, and you’ve probably seen that great photo of Gabriel Medina, with his finger raised and his board hovering above the surf, looking like some kind of Brazilian god/warrior.  But, as breathtaking as they are, these moments are somehow not over-dramatized. A surfer gets rewarded for constructing a ride in which the turns are seamlessly connected together.  In the same way, it seems like riding the wave, and paddling back out, and (especially) sitting there bobbing and waiting, are all part of one, larger, connected practice that seems awfully spiritual.  There is a reason why the surfers’ meditation routines come up in the commentary so often.

Each heat lasts 30-35 minutes (minutes can sometimes be added on if there were no rideable waves for a long stretch).  As the clock winds down, which in other sports would be a crescendo of frantic activity, we find the surfers, still, sitting there, maybe taking a few speculative paddles up the reef, but for the most part still bobbing and waiting.  The winning wave may come, but very often it doesn’t, and there’s nothing they can do about it, and they don’t seem terribly concerned about this.  They, like us, are subject to forces much, much more powerful than our own desires and dreams.  No matter how many hours of work have been put in, the right wave at the right time simply might not come and the horn will sound it will be time to paddle back to shore.

Zen and the Art of Airline Marketing

A couple of weekends ago, I flew to Michigan to visit my daughter at school.  When I arrived, we went straight to the Crisler Arena to watch a basketball game, where I dazzled her with my explanation of the finer points of the pick and roll.  I grumbled at the fact that none of the players seemed to know the proper way to roll after setting a pick – dropping the top leg so as to “seal off” the defender -- which creates a much better scoring opportunity.  Kids today.

Air travel for something that isn’t work has a certain allure.  Packing a bag with no dress shirts. Reading for pleasure. Paying attention to things, without the overhang of meetings or presentations.  

While boarding my flight to Detroit, I noticed that Delta’s ads lining the jetway mostly featured photos of people sitting in airplane seats and gazing at screens. Eyes vacant, faces softly illuminated by their phone or the in-flight entertainment system or an iPad shared with a significant other. 

It used to be that airlines would promote travel by showing attractive destinations (beaches, foreign cities, exotic dining). Now they promote travel by showing people looking at their phones.  You could say that Delta is, in a dime-store-Buddha kind of way, highlighting the journey, not the destination.  But of course it’s not really the journey: it’s the escape from the journey, enabled by screens and noise-cancelling headphones. “The ‘me time’ you deserve,” promises one ad. 

What does this say about Delta’s customer experience?  I suppose at one level you can commend them for their honesty. "We know that the experience of our product is so unpleasant," they imply, "we’re going to promote it by showing how you can remove yourself from that unpleasant experience thanks to technology.  Which by the way we will gladly enable by providing in-flight wifi, USB outlets at your seat, and unignorable video screens approximately 6 inches from your face."

Meanwhile, Apple recently launched their Vision Pro headset, the latest salvo in Silicon Valley’s war against human experience that is unmediated or non-monetizable.  Interestingly, their marketing for the Vision Pro also has a veneer of Zen.  A video shows a man standing at his uncluttered workspace, app windows floating gently in space around him. “Be in the moment. All over again,” Apple promises.

In a perverse way, marketing the Vision Pro in terms of a philosophy that extols the virtue of “non-self” is spot on.  When you use this product, you remove all direct connection with the outside world. What you perceive is completely captured, filtered, and presented by Apple, Inc.  With the headset on, your eyes as perceived by others are not your eyes at all, but an avatar, created and projected by the device. Your visual connection with reality has been severed, and a representation of that reality, one that is completely administered and controlled by a commercial interest, has been grafted in place. You, vis à vis the “real world,” cease to exist. 

Some of the reviews of the Vision Pro speak in similar terms of dislocation. “It's easy to lose track of where I am when I'm wearing the Vision Pro,” begins Scott Stein in CNet, who writes from “inside” the device, as if it were a whale that has swallowed him whole.

As I’ve mentioned before, the idea of self-annihilation shows up often in mystical traditions. The only way we can approach direct contact with the divine is to relinquish our egos.  If we do this right, we simultaneously embrace/submit to an essence (call it God if you’d like) that is surpremely powerful and loving and good. Delta and Apple also invite us to lose our selves, but in the service of late capitalism and the glory of spatial computing.

People are not buying this, figuratively and (especially given the $3,499 price point) literally.  Many of critiques of the Vision Pro have highlighted the horror of what this product is and represents.  And yet: a lot of reviews suggest that, once the technological bugs are sorted out, the miracle of augmented reality will usher in a new era of awesomeness.  All we need, they suggest, is Apple to get the hand-eye interface to work more smoothly, and we’ll finally be able to get lost.

 

The Content Generation

Why you should embrace generative AI, and why you should resist it.

The boardroom soap opera of the past week seemed an appropriate punctuation to a year in which generative artificial intelligence went from esoteric CompSci topic to something we all needed to be concerned about.  Like a handful of pebbles thrown into a pond, the launch of ChatGPT, barely a year ago, created ripples which continue to expand and overlap. “Knowledge workers,” who for years looked on complacently as digital automation put checkout clerks and assembly line workers and travel agents out of a job, suddenly confronted a future in which they too could be replaced by machines. CFOs salivated over OPEX savings that would come from swapping out messy, inefficient humans with computers. Luddites and other contrarians split semantic hairs, chortling over ChatGPT’s mistakes, and arguing that these models were no closer to “general intelligence” than your smartphone’s auto-fill function. Money poured in. The rest of us kept ourselves entertained asking ChatGPT to write poems and break up with our boyfriends.

I come neither to bury GenAI nor to praise it.  Like any technology, GenAI is neither inherently evil nor inherently good. Scoffing at it or ignoring it won't make it go away. Deifying it, despite OpenAI’s lofty mission statement, will not bring about the betterment of humanity.

Granted, there is a lot to worry about.  I won’t even touch the hypothesis that a paperclip-maximizing AI will wind up annihilating humanity. The doomers may be right in the end, but humans seem to be perfectly capable of coming up with ways to annihilate themselves without the aid of a large language model. I do worry about the stuff that GenAI models make up as they respond to a prompt. The term “hallucinations” -- evoking dreams and psychedelia -- is deceptively benign; “lies” is more appropriate. In 2024, citizens of many countries including the US will elect their next leaders amidst a swamp of artificial words and images indistinguishable from real ones, and I think we’re in for some seriously ugly scenes. 

And yet, retreating to our pencil-and-paper sanctuaries and refusing to engage isn't a good answer. Your job will (or already does) involve interacting with AI at some level. GenAI models will make your life easier, especially by automating certain repetitive tasks. Working alongside a GenAI, if you do so skillfully, will liberate you from a whole lot of drudgery – think writing meeting minutes, summarizing long documents, cleaning out emails, etc. Rather than doing your job for you, GenAI can actually enhance the work that you’re doing. To paraphrase medical futurist Bertalan Meskó: professionals will not be replaced by GenAI, but professionals who know how to use GenAI will replace those who don’t.

Amid all the chatter, I think it’s beneficial to consider a question that I don’t hear very often when generative AI is discussed: What do humans lose when they stop writing? What happens to them when they no longer devote time and energy to the practice of composition, when they delegate that activity to a machine? 

Content generation is among the lowest-hanging fruit for companies looking to improve their P&Ls using GenAI. Without a doubt, ChatGPT can churn out, adapt, and optimize mountains of text a lot more efficiently than you or I can. The marginal cost of producing another unit of content approaches zero. And a funny thing starts to happen. Words, and the ideas they signify, become reduced to units of economic output: manufactured, ingested, excreted. The relationship between the source of the content and its consumer becomes purely transactional. More than that: the “reader” becomes nothing more than a vessel through which content passes as supply and demand curves seek equilibrium. 

I get a similar feeling sometimes when I think about money. My salary, direct-deposited into my bank account while I sleep, effortlessly sluices through me on its way to my creditors, thanks to the “auto pay” function I’ve set up. I have forfeited my agency, like we’ve forfeited many things, for the sake of convenience. We get out of bed each morning to keep feeding the machine.  

Yet I still see glimmers of hope. A few months ago, I was asked to write a one-page memo summarizing a strategy presentation my team and I had put together. This could have been accomplished in a few seconds by uploading our 50-or-so slides into a GenAI model. However, the presentation was confidential, so a public model like ChatGPT wasn’t an option, and we hadn’t yet stood up an in-house model. So I spent two or three hours drafting the memo myself. And in the act of writing it – putting one sentence after another, searching for the right words and flow, crafting a few paragraphs to convey a set of ideas – something interesting happened. I became able to articulate our strategy more clearly. I found that I actually understood the story we were trying to tell much more deeply than I had beforehand.

If you've ever kept a journal, perhaps this sounds familiar. Our appreciation for experiences, situations, people, ourselves, you name it, becomes much stronger, fuller, realer, when we try to write about them. Writing helps us make sense of our world, which seems even more important at a time when the world is full of a lot of stuff that seems senseless. As Flannery O’Connor said, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

Writing prose, as opposed to just consuming it, also forces us to reflect at least fleetingly on the human being who’s eventually going to read it. We consider our words, not only for their accuracy, but for the impression we wish them to leave on another person. Writing is a solitary and often lonely activity, but, perhaps paradoxically, it fosters empathy. Will this speak to my audience?  What is their state of mind when they sit down to read it?  How will it “land?” All part of a delicate but critical maneuver which requires that the writer place herself inside the head of her reader.

When humans stop writing, I would argue, they become less human. Or at least they become lesser humans. They get mentally and spiritually flabby. They become Matrix-like vessels for forces that do not have their best interests in mind. They think about other people less. They succumb to powers of this world that rebel against God.

So, yeah: understand what GenAI is and what it isn’t. Get comfortable with ChatGPT. Learn to work with GenAI tools, just like you’ve learned to use a word processor.  But at the same time make sure you don’t surrender the opportunity to create prose of your own. Take the time and make the effort to work with language, to put words together, to create meaning. At the very least, it’s good for your health. At best, as George Saunders puts it, “purifying one’s prose style is a form of spiritual dedication; working with language is a beautiful and noble way to spend one’s life.”