Of course I’ve been watching the Tour de France documentary on Netflix and it’s great. It’s the same folks behind Drive to Survive – the multi-series epic about Formula 1 – which I also devoured while in recovery post-hospital. I have no interest in Formula 1 but the producers have perfected the tension-building, storytelling recipe and this one is about Le Tour!

I’ll be honest, the characters aren’t as interesting as in Drive to Survive where the personalities really push the story forward. Post-Lance-Armstrong era, cyclists and teams are generally focussed on keeping their heads down and being uncontroversial. As a result, the interviews of elite cyclists around televised events are indescribably tedious as they clumsily reflect back the questions; ‘Hard stage today?’ ‘Yes it was a hard stage.’ ‘But you did well to pull through.’ ‘Yes it was hard but we did well to pull through.’ I’d love to say there’s more going on beyond the scenes explored in the documentary but there isn’t and really all the drama happens in the racing and on the bikes which is still great to watch. I watched the first few with my dad on holiday and had to pause every few minutes to explain some tactical dimension or cycling norm which suggests that they are still leaning on a character drama to drive the plot rather than cycling-specific elements even when cyclists these days tend to just be diligent, pleasant professionals. I do think it gets across the extreme physical and mental stress of the tour well though.

PhD

It’s the wrong time of year unfortunately and everyone is too busy. We’re struggling to find an upgrade panel or much engagement for the stage I’m at so I’m just going to steam ahead and start the next chapter; time’s-a-wasting. This is obviously pretty daunting because it means going back to a bit of a blank slate. I feel relatively confident about which one I’m going to pick, probably the one for which there is the next-most material on ‘Language, Rhetoric and Metaphors.’ I’m also going about it this way because of the word count: Right now, with the front-stuff and one of five chapters done, I’m at just over half my max word count. By going at the chapters I feel have the most ‘meat,’ it will be easier to cut things later that, in the face of that word limit look less important.

So, I’m repeating the process that worked quite well last time. As I’ve been reading over the last months, I dump quotes I think are pertinent, or ideas in a document (Language, Rhetoric and Metaphors Notes). These are unordered and unstructured but I put them there because they might have something relevant for future Tobias to think about. Then (as I’m doing now) I go through these and try to structure them using bulletpoints and sub-bulletpoints, highlighting things that need more or are linked elsewhere in the thesis already. Through this an argument starts to emerge. For instance, I’m already wondering if I want to talk about ‘language’ much at all as that would really involve linguistics. I’m also looking for a handful of case studies I can structure the argument around; key bits of branding probably in this case that might form a useful spine around which to demonstrate a bunch of theory.

At the moment I’m in the early stages of this back-and-forth and things are there (the metaphors bit is real strong) but it’s a wrestle to get it into a coherent shape and then as you all know it’s more wrestling over the coming weeks to squeeze it into a PhD-shaped thing.

Short Stuff

• Jay did a talk about ‘not fucking up’ the building of worlds which is part of his series of musings on worlds as a medium. I like his thinking on the so-called ‘metaverse’ and it’s laced through with a radical optimism and politics. Still, how do you not just make these things a distraction from climate collapse?
• And also he did a great job suggesting we think about the Apple goggles as a high-end guitars, lots of people will keep them around to show off, some people will use them to start little things and some will be megastars.
• Matt on the not-insignificant signal of (what I’m calling) edge-time-computing or ‘peering two seconds into the future.’ Thinking about it, I’m not sure this is entirely novel, I remember having to put a lot of delays into various bits of data-based art in order to smooth things. But this of course is real-time computing that pushes the delay forward rather than delaying your experience. No lag.
• Danish Design Center’s Vorby is a fictional city they’ve been developing through particpatory workshops with young folks for a while.
• Jenna Burrell on the ever-receding future horizon of AI. As I noted on Twitter dot com, Burrell is probably the reason I eneded up doing my PhD about what I’m doing it on. Her paper ‘How the Machine ‘Thinks’‘ was super inspirational so I tend to sit up whenever she writes anything.
• ‘AI is turning Art into Content,’ connecting the tendencies for cinematic multiverses with short-lived things that fail to perform. The homogenisation of content.
• Rachel Coldicutt has started the Everyday Automation Observatory to capture the normal insidiousness of automation.
• How exactly does technology mediate moral change? Well here’s a taxonomy of six ways.
• Rob Horning at his very grumpiest reflecting on the downward spiral of LLM content and capital.
• ‘Echoes of myth and magic in the language of Artificial Intelligence‘ from psychology scholar Roberto Musa Giuliano. It’s great that some fields are actually able to write in an enjoyable way about this stuff, with flourish and zhush. The social sciences, STS and design can be so boring they take all the fun out of what is a fun subject.
• Emily Bender and Alex Hanna had a podcast; Mystery AI Hype Theatre. I haven’t listened yet, but I’m going to. From now AI will be referred to as ‘mathy math.’
• Go see the new AI show at the Science Gallery. I was at the opening last night, lots of friends including Wes on exhibition. Wes also has a blog substack now.

Last week was a bit much, I was out three or four nights until the small hours, so I’m going on one of my non-drinking binges for a bit. This week also has three or four events (it’s show season after all) and I need a clear head and full days. I’m also increasingly conscious of my fitness and health without being able to do exercise.

I also really need to do some design tweaks to this place. It’s a mess. But you’re here for the content right? Ok love you, bye.