The Internet and What I Found There: Episode 1

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Welcome to the The Internet and What I Found There, my episodic look at what links were interesting around the web and discussions into the topics surrounding them, with a few deep dives on the background or related topics in the Down the Rabbit Hole section for each article. Let’s get started…

A Utopian Look at AI

I posted a little about Dario Amodei’s essay “Machines of Loving Grace: How AI Could Transform the World for the Better” over on Bluesky. I said that I actually agreed with a lot of the information he gives about what AI can do, if done the right way. Mainly what I’m concerned about, isn’t the AI itself, it’s the impact it creates on our economic systems and the world around it. All the stuff he mentions, but can’t really touch upon because “nobody knows” in the section on Work and Meaning. It’s so out of the ordinary that we can only begin to imagine what would come next in a world where AI has replaced all the things we “need” to do, can do all the things we “want” to do better, and we’re left with…what? How do we survive? What do we do to make life worth something? How do we better ourselves or our world if AI is doing that work for us? We just don’t know and can’t know until we get there and unfortunately I think we’ll have to go through a dystopian world full of even more poverty, hardship, and inequality, to get to a utopian vision. It’s more likely that the utopia will be for the few, not the many. Yet, I struggle to remain an optimist and hope for the better future, while trying my best to prepare for the worst.

Down the Rabbit Hole:

Losing the Core of a Story in an Adaptation to Another Media

Over on LitHub, one of my favorite sites on the internet, Sol Yurick, author of The Warriors, talks about “Trying to Find Any Trace of His Novel, The Warriors, on the Big Screen“. Here he talks about the dangers of going for the big hollywood deal and how often they are just going for a “type” of a story instead of the story itself. It’s crazy that these adaptations are SO divorced from the original that often the director and those working on the film do not even know of the author who wrote the book that the film was based on, or even the story itself, just the interpretation of it in the script. Yurick sums it up in his closing, saying…

“The Warriors is not the best of my books. It was out of print and more or less unknown to the lovers of the movie. Yet, without the book, there would be no film. I find that amusing.” 

Down the Rabbit Hole:

Gremlins: Ghosts in the Machine

This time the link is from JSTOR Daily, a new site for me. This one is about the history of Gremlins, not the movie, but the creatures of myth that inspired them. The term was popularly invented as 1920s Royal Naval Air Force slang and it may be linked to the Netherlandic verb grimmelen, meaning to swarm or overrun, but what I found interesting is its interpretation as a “bug” like in coding terms:

Thomas Edison invoked the term to describe sudden difficulties in his inventions; “bugs,” he wrote, “show themselves and months of anxious watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success-or failure-is certainly reached.”

I don’t know why, but I had never associated Gremlins as coding bugs, but it’s an obvious connection.

Down the Rabbit Hole:

  • Nothing that’s not in the really comprehensive and well researched article. I loved it!

“I Am the Face of AIDS”: Ryan White and the Politics of Innocence in the History of HIV/AIDS

I didn’t have to live with the real fear of contracting AIDS that many did in the 80s and 90s as I was still very young during most of the AIDs crisis and not active at all in sex, drugs, or anything else really, BUT it was still a source of tension and “fake” fear ramped up by misinformation and lack of knowledge or research into the area. We were told it was a “gay” disease and was often used as a joke while people were dying horribly. I look back on that time as a child and I think how often humanity as a whole loses what makes us human because of fear. What brought me out of this fear and showed me the real world of AIDs, at least part of it, was ironically, The Real World. Yes this was sanitized somewhat, but what it did was taught us to love and care for a real human being by the name of Pedro Zamora. Now I didn’t know Pedro, obviously, but I saw what producers of the show, and he himself, showed us on TV and what I saw was a loving, caring, sometimes flawed of course, LGBTQ+ (the first that I felt like I understood as I was sheltered and “we didn’t talk about that”) human being dealing with AIDs and ultimately succumbing to the virus on November 11, 1994. To me he was the face of every human being afterwards that died of the disease. I fell a little in love with Pedro on that show and in turn it allowed me to bypass the fear and see the humanity and often needless suffering of the people behind it that many couldn’t see past. Anyway, back to the article, Ryan White was that for a lot of other people, even though I don’t remember a thing about the televised funeral. I just wanted to talk about my personal experience of having my eyes opened and how much I feel I owe Pedro Zamora for shining a light on my ignorance, removing both the fear and naivete of youth, and opening my mind to the world beyond that.

Whereas the AIDS-related deaths of thousands of men who have sex with men (MSM) and intravenous drug users had mostly been ignored by the federal government, Ryan White’s high-profile death and funeral enabled the passage of the CARE Act… its focus on “a politically safe symbol” also reinforced the “hierarchy of victimhood” at the heart of the 1980s–1990s HIV/AIDS crisis.

If we wish to honor Ryan White’s remarkable life, we must repurpose his story to dismantle these stigmas and the destructive policies they have spawned.

Down the Rabbit Hole:

I hope you enjoyed and learned something from these few links and the little bit I wrote around them. I plan on making these regularly even though they take a bit to research and write. I do this for myself every day, minus the writing it all down.

Researching, going down rabbit holes, and committing to learning and bettering ourselves and each other is the only way we as people will get better. I hope you feel the same way. I would love to know what you thought of these stories or my comments about them. Also feel free to share any stories that you’ve found that may be interesting. Your input can help better ME too.

Thank you. Till next time!

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