Matthew Castillo-Kohlenberg

@castillokohlenberg.com

82 Followers 190 Following

🏳️‍🌈🇺🇸🇲🇽🔝♊️🖋️📚⛪️🎹🎤📼🎼

Some clients, he said — people who just want to “soup up their experience with technology in general” and who are maybe feeling a little bit of AI FOMO — tend to focus on the idea of building a second brain. It strikes you that a lot of people probably either already have employees or wish they did. (The earliest LLM chatbots were especially appealing to people who enjoy ordering people around and being told they’re smart; the ability to assign tasks only makes the sensation stronger.) You joke that trying to isolate and construct elaborate workflows around your fairly simple routines makes you feel like a Richard Scarry character with a cartoon job in Busytown. Parker suggests that some of his clients are actually like Bananas Gorilla, the Scarry character who wears as many watches as he can fit on his arms.
Disney plus cancellation screenshot
The response to Abundance has been very disheartening to me. I understand the ad hominem critiques just fine. Ezra Klein represents a strain of Obama-era credulous neoliberalism that progressives believe has been discredited by reality, and they are not happy to see his ideas taken seriously. I don’t know much about Thompson, but based on the right wing podcast interviews he gave to promote the book, he thinks there is value in building common cause with a politics I despise. The key contribution of Abundance isn’t a program of reforms or electoral strategy, it’s the description of a particular kind of sickness in the way that the government controls what gets built: regulations and processes were built to be a check on market forces, wealth, and racially-biased redevelopment projects to protect other values like trade unionism, the environment, city character, neighborhood communities. Over time, those processes were captured by the wealthy and by business. Today, the use of these processes to slow or stop development have become totally unlinked from the values they were intended to protect and is a crucial tool of the wealthy and big business for protecting its interests. Abundance posits that the way this intersects with politics creates a related dynamic. When progressive campaigns stir up public sentiment to solve a big problem, then saddle the implementation of the solution with so many additional requirements that it cannot address the main problem it was intended to solve, it burns the electorate out. If you are someone who cares about solutions for the problems we have now, the choice between Republican denial and Democratic incapacity is a distinction without a difference. So you can imagine how disheartening it is to see people on the left, even here, reducing the book down to an anti-regulation, pro-business argument (it is not) and turning the book title into an imaginary party wing in the same brain-dead way that the right wing coined “DEI party.”
Heavy decorative brass lamp on a pedestal in a park. The brass is covered in a green patina.
Photo of Dalton Trumbo. He’s holding a cigar with a bottle of alcohol out of focus in the foreground, wearing light slacks and a white mesh t shirt, looking like your parent’s assistant principal on holiday in Ibiza.
Photo of a training wheel set box with a funky old design and a copyright for the box art dated 1980
Diagram illustrating the bell curve of Christian beliefs, with myself at one edge of it.