A long, trying week for me. Here are links:
DALL-E Dreams
Alan Resnick fed DALL-E 2 images and asked it to suggest a similar one thousands of times, then putting them all together into a kind of computer-generated animation. Put on some good music and press play.
OpenAI has also (finally!) announced a commercial roll-out for DALL-E 2. You get 15 free credits a month, then 115 for $15 a pop. People are mad about the pricing—what if your random images aren’t good and your credits are wasted?—but OpenAI is selling mainframe access time, not pictures. I’m on the waiting list. I’ll also be exploring a few competitors soon as a way of getting more art into the newsletter.
Cities, then and Now
From Tim Urban on Twitter: Shanghai, from 1990 to 2010. This is the kind of change that will still be in history books two hundred years from now. You can see a whole thread of others here.
The Museum of Failure
Although it sounds like the title of a lost magical-realist novel from Bulgaria, there really is a Museum of Failure, originally from Helsingor, Sweden, though now a traveling exhibit. The point, I guess, is to remind us that failure is an inevitable byproduct of innovation, and nothing to be ashamed of. I say, maybe we just didn’t give the spray-on condom or inflatable couch a real chance. You can see more here.
The Soviet Children’s Synthesizer
Over on his excellent YouTube channel, David Hilowitz found himself in possession of an obscure toy synth from Soviet Ukraine, purchased on a whim from Ebay. The rebuilding, and the way he makes music with it, is worth watching. I hadn’t read much before about synthesizers in the USSR, but apparently it was a whole thing before Korg, Moog, et al. overtook them after the collapse.
More Books & Blockchain
Elle Griffin, whose Substack has been quoted in my newsletter a few times, is also now on Esquire. This week she looked at blockchains, crypto, and publishing, a topic where I have, let’s say, some ideas.
Anyway, I’m going to be crude and quote myself commenting on her Substack to summarize my opinions here:
Crowdfunding and patronage look fruitful, but I remain skeptical of blockchain ownership with book rights. Turning books into financial properties and ordinary readers into traders turns a non-trivial portion of the book world into a multi-level marketing scheme. Every book ever would be loudly trumpeted everywhere as the next masterpiece that you have to read. Goodreads and Amazon would be flooded with even more review bots and third-world chum factories. Toxic and misleading non-fiction would spread even farther and faster (imagine if the InfoWars commenteriat got paid in dollars instead of likes for bringing more people into the conspiracy-verse). Library licenses would probably get even more expensive than they are now, because what kind of sucker gives their book away for free?
We would need long, complex, and transparent practices of disclosure and accountability to make sure booksellers, influencers, and reviewers are being completely honest about their portfolios. At a very fundamental level, our conversations about books will be tinged with all the anxiety, cynicism, and mistrust that money brings, and for what?
And that’s all for this week! I hope to have a short newsletter essay on a forgotten Soviet writer this weekend.
Happy reading!