Hand Wringing Over AI Cheating at Brown
There’s a particular flavor of joy that comes from watching a golden child get caught cheating, and it’s very specifically a Jim McAllister flavor of sour grapes. Watch Election (1999) again and you’ll remember him: the put-upon high school teacher, ground down by two decades of unglamorous work, watching Tracy Flick work the cursus honorum toward a noteworthy college, an ascendant career at an investment bank, thence to Congress, thence the White House.
Nothing will stop her, of course. Nothing at all. And don’t we hate that? 1
Most of us never got that acceptance letter. Most of us won’t get the corner office, the golden ticket, the shield against outrageous fortune that we were promised. So when the Tracy Flicks of the world get caught cheating their way through the one gate that was supposed to challenge them like the rest of us normos, we can feel the distinct juicing of schadenfreude out of the corpus mcallisterensis.
On top of that, in this enshittified world where these propeller-hat people (e.g. Google) make shitty products (e.g. Meta) that promote degradation of our society while always asking “Can we?” but never “Should we?” it can feel a little like divine retribution to see the rotted venture establishment, the rotted governmental forebears, and the wearers of false mock turtlenecks humbled.
Resisting Life as a Figurant and Infinite Jest
I love Infinite Jest. One of its most powerful lectures comes from a father — not unlike Polonius’ speech in Hamlet — delivering a wish that the addressed choose a better, wiser path in life: one that avoids merely acting in the scenery of life, for living it. In short, the listener and the reader are asked to avoid being figurants.
…you can’t appreciate the dramatic pathos of a figurant until you realize how completely trapped and encaged he is in his mute peripheral status… because [if he] decided he couldn’t take it any more and stood up and started shouting and gesturing around wildly in a bid for attention and nonperipheral status… the whole rest of that episode of ‘Cheers!’ would be about jokes about the name star’s life-saving heroics…
But this advice’s relevance has only become more poignant amid the anhedonic, AI-windswept existence of the modern moment.
weekday afternoon, experiencing myself as a kind of online shadow, a thing of fidgets, a half-being hollowed out by roaming spectral appetites—for destruction, for gratification, for the email that never comes—it occurs to me to ask: Now, which of the seven deadly sins is this?
Anger’s in there somewhere, sure, a kind of generalized psychic road rage, but not enough of it to qualify. Same with envy, pride, gluttony, lust—just floating shards. Avarice? Nah. Of the seven, sloth probably comes closest, that enigmatic void state known to the early Christians as “acedia.” But not even acedia, bottomless as it is, can quite comprehend this plugged-in groundlessness, this ether-sweeping emptiness, this interstellar elongation of the spirit. Sin, the theologians tell us, is whatever separates us from God. Whatever blocks the beams of divine love. And at 3:23 p.m. in Caffè Nero, I am all but unreachable by heavenly radiation; I can feel it wavering, honey-colored, at the fringes of my soul. So have we done it at last—you, me, the kids? Have we invented an eighth deadly sin?
— James Parker, “The Eighth Deadly Sin,” The Atlantic
Reading Parker’s prose, I immediately recognized the two as speaking to the same feeling. And heck, it’s the same terminal, bourgeois boredom in the face of the rule of the Last Men as described in “Five Years” from “Ziggy Stardust.”
The Glorious Design of the Original Vignelli Subway Map
New York City Subway Guide, 1970-1972
The New York City subway map is so iconic you can build an identity around it. You’ve seen it, or its 1979 redesign by Michael Hertz, printed on coffee mugs and t-shirts and chico bags.