Mandy Brown with a reminder about how fuzzy language can be. It’s relative to the speaker and the listener!

When workers talk about increasing their productivity, they often speak of getting more work done in the same amount of time […] But when companies talk about productivity, they are much more likely to be talking about the cost of the work. The descriptions are, at some level, equivalent, but they emerge from very different political standpoints and have entirely different impacts on people’s lives.

When it comes to increasing productivity, one man’s “more work in less time” is another man’s “fewer workers”.

Mandy Brown with some great life advice:

anguish exists because regret is inevitable. To live is to regret.

Wisdom arises from foolishness, from errors and wrongs. From regret. Do not let anyone take your regret from you! Do not dishonor it by flinching when it shows its face. It is both what made you who you are, and a tool for weaving a different world.

Great piece from Mandy Brown (as always). A few of my fav excerpts:

what we mean when we say AI is, from a technology standpoint, no longer meaningful. AI seems to be, at every moment, everything from an algorithm of the kind that has been in use for half a century, to bullshit generators that clutter up our information systems, to the promised arrival of a new consciousness—a prophesied god who will either savage us or save us or, somehow, both at the same time. There exists no coherent notion of what AI is or could be...because to do so would be to reduce the opportunity for grift.

Over and over in the pursuit of quantified intelligence we see errors of logic, miscalculations, manipulations of data, and overt and outright fraud

chattering bots that speak both fact and falsehood in the same servile and confident tone, their makers unconcerned with the difference.

Proving the superiority of some humans over others has repeatedly failed; what better way to continue the effort than the deployment of technology that makes proof of anything impossible, such that making something true requires only the right person to declare it so.

Everything in this post is :chefs-kiss:

The more likely scenario, and the one that’s been exhibited time and again with automation technology in previous centuries, is that the work that remains will be deskilled, de-spirited, stripped of creativity and joy, and granted the meanest remuneration.

Beautiful piece by Mandy Brown:

the people who work for liberation and freedom will always be outgunned and out monied by those who fight for precarity, oppression, and exploitation. Our power is not measured in weapons or cash but in humans; our power is with and through each other. Making life possible in uncertainty is to make room for more life, your own and many others. It is, as ever, to practice solidarity and reciprocity, to show up and to be present.

Also some paralells to tech in there too:

More often than not, that efficiency translates into brittleness and weakness, into systems so fragile they break the moment something unanticipated arises.

planning for living is nearly always a fool’s errand, with responding, improvising, adapting, and experimenting all better methods to follow

The more compelling and interesting reason that most writers seek out readers is…we receive our writing as a gift, and so it must be given in turn. We write because something needs to be expressed through us, and only by giving the writing to a reader is that need fulfilled

Love it.

your writing will eventually reach people who don’t understand the context, but will engage with it anyway, and expect you to engage with them in turn.

This is social media. I don’t know how we arrived here, but undergirding pattern is: “Here's a link to something on the web, and here’s a comment box. Everyone weigh in with your opinion.”

We are all, to borrow from Byung-Chul Han, entrepreneurs of ourselves—whether willingly or reluctantly, optimistically or despairingly or, more often than not, all of the above.

whenever attempting any effort with other people, prioritize building trust and respect for each other over and above any other goal. The trust forms the foundation from which the work can grow.

This looks great. I may just need to get this book.

if we want to build cultures where productive disagreement can happen…we have to first establish and nurture that trust and respect. Otherwise we’ll be too busy being right to get around to learning something new.

Mandy Brown nails it:

We have such a bias towards efficiency, towards optimization, that keeping open a messy process seems like an anti-pattern. But you can’t optimize exploration; you have to stay open to learning something unexpected, to turning around when you hit a dead end, to heading down a path you didn’t even know was there until you came upon it.

our typical methods for measuring intelligence—IQ tests and various university-style examinations—rarely if ever consider someone’s ability to, say, effectively deescalate a violent encounter, or interpret body language within and across cultures, or sit meditatively without looking at one’s phone every ten seconds. Those skills are positioned, at best, as supplementary to actual intelligence

if you scratch the surface of any notion of intelligence, you run headlong into a belief system that renders some people more intelligent—and therefore more valuable, more worthy of attention or care—than others.

AI’s main moves are to segregate and divide, to make predictions of the future based on an extension of the past—that is, to preserve, and to increase, a status quo of inequality.

seeing requires patience, requires letting the sight of something come to you, requires not reacting before you’ve seen fully. And looking more closely I think he has a very good point: which is that we live in a world full of distractions but short on breaks. The time between activities is consumed by other activities—the scrolling, swiping, tapping of managing a never-ending stream of notifications, of things coming at us that need doing. All that stuff means moments of absolutely nothing—of a gap, of an interval, of a beautiful absence—are themselves absent, missing, abolished.

Not gonna lie: I almost got interrupted while reading this short thing because I was filling a few minutes in between time catching up on my RSS.