Charles Homans takes a different perspective on the changes brought about by 9/11. In fact, he argues that much of the changes we attribute to the attacks we actually brought about by technology.

These artifacts span the pre- and post-9/11 years, and the lost innocence they represent has nothing to do with the attacks. Their interest comes from their evocation of a period when people hung out with friends in person and sweated alongside strangers at clubs and music festivals; teenagers goofed un-self-consciously for cameras rather than posing for them like jaded celebrities; and popular culture could be loud and dumb and not picked apart in the digital panopticon for its social politics. The shape that looms ominously over them isn’t the Twin Towers. It’s the iPhone.

It’s taken for granted that things really changed after the September 11th attacks, and it’s measurably true. But how much of that is actually due to the attacks is highly debatable.

Cal Newport believes much of the fearmongering that is done by tech executives in the A.I. space is due to their backgrounds in Rationalism and related philosophies.

This reality, that Rationalism deeply influenced many of today’s major A.I. companies, helps us calibrate the unnerving language we’ve been hearing from their leaders. When Mr. Altman declares their pending models will be “sobering” for humanity or Mr. Amodei frets that this technology “will test who we are as a species,” it doesn’t necessarily mean that they discovered frightening new evidence that something catastrophic is imminent.

I listened to Newport expand upon this theory on the Not Dead Yet podcast. He’s got a convincing argument that the Rationalist movement has so strongly influenced these executives that they are simply parroting its talking points. He points out that tech execs who don’t come from those backgrounds — such as those in China and Jensen Huang of Nvidia — speak in an entirely different way about A.I. Newport’s view seems to explain a lot about the rhetoric we’re used to hearing from certain quarters.

Bill Gates is coming out of a period of semi-seclusion to raise the alarm bells about generative A.I. Karen Weise covers the story for The NYT. One of the main concerns that Gates has is the potential for massive job losses.

He proposed a new tax on A.I. use, known as a “token tax,” to make it more expensive to replace people and provide money to help those who do lose work. A token is a basic unit of A.I. computing. The idea of taxing it has gained some traction, including on Wall Street, as a way to increase the cost of using machines instead of human labor.

Gates wrote a personal essay on his site about how dangerous the situation could be if we don’t take it seriously.

AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice.

The man is not downplaying the stakes here. He believes that the reason his peers are not coming forward is that there is too much money to be gained.

Lauren writes about the humble linklog at Flotisserie.

An outbound link points to someone else’s work, so a linklog is essentially a renewable engine for sending traffic to other people and places. That’s the precise opposite of what big platforms want from audiences; platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook quietly bury posts with outbound links to keep your attention (and dollars) on their site and with their advertising customers. A linklog further leans into that dynamic: it willingly hands your audience and attention away while crediting your forebears, comrades, mentors, and co-conspirators. It turns the rough digital filing system into a “folksonomy,” if you will.

Linklogging is still one of my favorite ways to blog.

This blog post by Tessa Brown teases apart the difference between social networking and social media.

I suppose what the story above suggests is that social media became the pretense for social networking. I’m reminded of this article I used to teach about the role menus played in restaurant interactions between servers and patrons. Basically the finding was that all of the conversations between servers and patrons were about the menu. “Is this good,” “Do you have this today,” “Can I tell you about our specials.” So the implication for literacy theory, the study of reading and writing, is that people use artifacts in conversation to structure what they talk about–the same way you and your friend from high school just Instagram DM memes back and forth to each other. People are awkward and need something to talk about. What I want to conclude is this pat thing: media is the excuse for us to talk to each other.

Social media clusters the conversation around a media artifact. Maybe a video or song. The metaphor of restaurant servers and patrons centering communication around the menu works well here.

This may be why I’m focused on the blogging service I use having solid integration with a social site. I tend to post a fair amount of media and welcome the social aspect of conversation around that media. Whether that actually happens is another matter, but it’s part of the goal, anyway.

Jay Peters reports for The Verge about the year-over-year rise in the number of CDs being purchased.

The data suggests that “the CD has been recontextualized from a functional audio format into an affordable collectible,” Luminate says. “This behavior underscores that for younger generations, the act of buying physical music is as much about aesthetic ownership and direct financial support for the artist as it is listening to the music on the product itself.”

The surprise here is that approximately half of the Gen Z and millennials buying CDs don’t even own a device on which to play them. It’s still about that connection, though. I admitted the other day that I sometimes listen to a CD even when I could just as easily (more easily even) stream the album.