Many Times More, With Feeling
If you were to find me in the weekday mornings at 6AM, sitting in our kitchen sipping my coffee, I would first ask you to leave; and once you had explained that you were there on account of a hypothetical, you would notice that I am listening to the first three songs of The Charlie Brown Christmas album. I do not do this every morning, but most mornings; and San Francisco at 6AM most mornings is a wonderfully melancholic and gloomy place, perfect for winter music.
I relish these three tracks and can hear them in my head now: "O Tannenbaum," "What Child Is This" and "My Little Drum,” wistful jazzy little gems. The rest of the album is also gold, but for these three uniquely I am able to sit and meditate and read, knowing it is before 6:15 and I do not need to get a move on. I find great comfort in the sound of a book or box falling at 0:53 in "What Child Is This,” like an old friend telling me I have five minutes of ignoring the world left.
We live in an odd time when it is possible to consume 24 hours of new tailored content each day forever and ever, and this is to say nothing of the nightmare world AI offers us of equally unceasing personalized content. It is thus odd to enjoy repeatedly something meant as a one-off for United States children in 1965. There is so much to consume from now, some of it quite good.
"Consumption" is an odd word; taken today, it is the mythic engine propelling, well, everything. We consume AI models, AI models consume tokens, tokens consume chips, chips consume rare minerals, rare minerals consume human labor, human labor consumes... well, stock gains must come from somewhere. This is to say nothing of what the models were hoovering up in the heady pre-October 2022 days when AI was primarily a plot device — another essay for another day. Consumption means production and production means growth, and most stock gains to be had in the last four years were with companies whose growth was growing. I admittedly do not know too much more about it as I invest only in companies whose success I will not mourn, and this has barred me from many fortunes.
Under a century ago, consumption" was of course a disease, tuberculosis to be exact. You were consumed. Decades of vaccinations and antibiotics sufficed to wash away the negative connotation but I cannot shake a sense of being gnawed on when I myself consume what feels like an endless stream of meals, entertainment, feedback, input. It is as if something irreplaceable is being lost in the stream of replaceable things. I do not mean resources, the environment, local community and culture — we are of course losing them in our distracted race to the stars — but something internal, profoundly me. And when I am out of it, I will not be dead, but something too close to it.
The algorithms do bring us modern gifts from time to time, but this side of 2020 I find chance a far more reliable and less abrasive introduction than algorithms (King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard's excellent and repeat-worthy “Fishing for Fishies” came to me in a bar appropriately called Lucky’s). Algorithms are full of intent, but it is not a kindly intent. Pure chance is at at worst nobody’s intent, and at best divine. And I suppose that is why I listen to the same songs every morning, and by and large the same albums every year, augmented by slow, improbable additions. Vince Giauraldi and his band and those kids going "Brrrrt-brrrt-brrrt-dat-dat" over and over were Godmade souls who poured themselves into a moment that aged like Madera. It is more fortifying than the feed.
