I feel much better today. Enough about that.

As an adolescent, I cut my teeth on Golden Age science fiction. One step beyond "space opera," but before the "New Wave."

I belonged to the Science Fiction Book Club, much to the dismay of my mother, who had to approve all purchases and, if I recall correctly, you had to mail back a card if you didn't want a month's selection, so sometimes books would arrive that weren't previously authorized. And we shall not mention the Columbia Record Club.

Anyway, one of the books I read from the Science Fiction Book Club, with its cheap paper and plasticky "hard" covers, was Stand on Zanzibar, by John Brunner.

I think I read it a few years after it was first published, because in 1968 I was still reading the Heinlein juveniles, Have Space Suit — Will Travel being the book that got me into science fiction in the first place.

Anyway, I don't recall much about Stand on Zanzibar, other than it described a world where things were going to shit, but amazing technological change was still underway. And that's the thing I most recall today.

There's a kind of cognitive dissonance I experience these days when I read things like John Gruber's Daring Fireball. John's been doing largely the same schtick for a couple of decades now, I often wonder if he tires of it. He's branched out into podcasts that deal with other subjects, but I don't listen to many podcasts.

Anyway, Gruber does what he so very often does, disparages Google, (or is it Alphabet?) and I'm okay with that. I despise Google. But he goes on to mention what many other observers have said about the Pixel 8's generative AI "memory recording device" (formerly ("formally"?) known as a "camera").

But it was the segment of yesterday’s event that most struck me: technically impressible, but ethically blithe.

And it's a Stand on Zanzibar moment for me. It's an absurdity. Yes, there's a certain technical achievement that might be noteworthy, but it's an absurdity nonetheless. And it's taking place against a background of the destruction of democracy in America, an immigration crisis, smoke from Canadian wild fires impairing the air quality in Florida, a war in Europe, a mass extinction, and a host of other unwelcome trends and developments currently underway. (Jim Jordan as Speaker of the House?)

I mean, we're "on the eve of destruction" here, and we're commenting on Google, er, Alphabet's "camera" that steals one of the best features of the marmot, "I make all this shit up."

There's not much I can do about it. I just mutter, "What the actual fuck, people?!" and carry on. Or write the occasional blog post.

Standing on Zanzibar.