Corporate America, Contact-less America, Cities in America
It's giving "problems in America"!
Featuring ChatGPT panic, Angela Lansbury, and Ben Affleck being sad again.
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Literally Just Something I Think Is Funny (Corporate America? It’s Giving Dummy!)
Had a very fun time reading this extremely dry and brutally mean piece from 2016 about the ways in which most corporate jobs want you turn your brain off the second you’re on the clock (written by a professor of organizational behavior at a business school):
What most executives actually spend their days doing is sitting in meetings, filling in forms and communicating information. In other words, they are bureaucrats. But being a bureaucrat is not particularly exciting. It also doesn’t look very good on your business card. To make their roles seem more important and exciting than they actually are, corporate executives become leadership addicts. They read leadership books. They give lengthy talks to yawning subordinates about leadership. But most importantly they attend many courses, seminars and meetings with ‘leadership’ somewhere in the title. The content of many of these leadership-development courses would not be out of place in a kindergarten or a New Age commune. There are leadership-development courses where participants are asked to lead a horse around a yard, use colouring-in books, or build Lego – all in the name of developing them as leaders.
A Less Serious Item (Where Can a Lady Get Some Contacts Around Here?)
Famously (to people I have talked to since October) I had my backpack stolen while I was on vacation in San Francisco this past fall and was left stranded without my glasses or my dailies contacts. I had multiple days left in the vacation so I had to find an optometrist to give me an eye exam and then give me contacts. I had to call like 4 different places before I found a LensCrafters that could see me the next morning. The eye exam ended up costing me $100 because the place I went to couldn’t find my insurance. Basically everywhere else in the world outside of America doesn’t require that you have an official optometrist exam to get contacts or eyeglasses - and you can even just walk into a drugstore, knowing your prescription, and buy contacts without an actual prescription. Here’s a little Atlantic article that explains more about this, with some fun information about how much lobbying the American Optometric Association did to try and block laws that require optometrists release prescriptions to patients. Cute!
This Week’s Theme: Going Local
I have three hyper-local news stories for you from across America. Pick your city, pick your poison:
New York City: A delightfully deranged Curbed reporter sifts through USPS change of address spreadsheets and harasses city employees to try to figure out why NYC rent has gone up so much when it seems that NYC population has definitely gone down:
In 2017, I moved to a new rental tower in Downtown Brooklyn into what the leasing agent promised me was the very last available one-bedroom. But after living there a couple months, I began to get suspicious. I was the only person in the gym most mornings. And there was surprisingly little competition for washing machines in the laundry room. There were more than 500 units in my building — were all of my neighbors sedentary nudists?
Washington D.C.: Dig into the deep, dark world of TikTok foodies in D.C. Think: 100,000 types of the exact same kind of influencer, and a not insignificant percentage of them acting as weird as possible towards restaurant owners. Some of whom are even scared of the influencers.
Other [Influencers] don’t even bother reaching out. They just show up…
That’s exactly what happened when one Instagrammer showed up at the new downtown fried-chicken spot Little Chicken last fall and asked for a discount code for his followers—fewer than 400 of them. He filmed a tour of the restaurant, glad-handing random customers and staff. In DMs afterward, Rashid tried to be polite, telling the guy he appreciated the plug but the restaurant really only partnered with influencers who had north of 15,000 real followers.
“I understand,” the Instagrammer wrote, “though I will say that feels like I’m being placed in a box.”
Philadelphia: I had a great time reading this profile of Raheem Manning, Philadelphia’s newest “Night Mayor” whose more official job title is Nighttime Economy Director. This is a new job for the city, but the role has become popular around the world as cities try to make themselves more 24 hour places. The COVID-19 pandemic hit Philadelphia hard in many ways, but a lot of places also run shorter hours now than they did before the pandemic and it’s harder to feel safe on the streets at night because less people are out. One of Manning’s jobs is to reverse this trend.
Manning wants to see Philadelphians meet out in the wild again. I agree and ask how he plans to make Philly a hornier city, which I presume is under his purview as mayor of the night. “I don’t know if I can officially do that,” he says, laughing before giving me a polished answer about a strategic governance plan for how nightlife looks, operates and feels. “We need to get people back outside,” he says, “having a good time at night.” Raising his voice over Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy,” he adds, “I’m here to make Philadelphians feel better about Philadelphia.”
The Politics of… this Trendy Little Thing called Artificial Intelligence
This profile of linguistics professor Emily Bender, who I would describe as a big AI skeptic, is a fantastic look into why we could all do well to calm down about stuff like ChatGPT. Bender is a professor of linguistics at UW who wants everyone to remember that as much as a moody piece of AI designed by Bing might seem like a person when waxing whiny, it’s not a person.
In 2016 — with Trump running for president and Black Lives Matter protests filling the streets — Bender decided she wanted to start taking some small political action every day. She began learning from, then amplifying, Black women’s voices critiquing AI, including those of Joy Buolamwini (she founded the Algorithmic Justice League while at MIT) and Meredith Broussard (the author of Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World). She also started publicly challenging the term artificial intelligence, a sure way, as a middle-aged woman in a male field, to get yourself branded as a scold. The idea of intelligence has a white-supremacist history. And besides, “intelligent” according to what definition? The three-stratum definition? Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences? The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale? Bender remains particularly fond of an alternative name for AI proposed by a former member of the Italian Parliament: “Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences.” Then people would be out here asking, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”
At the same time, she and other senior women in computer science are often maligned for coming out against what this article refers to as “AI boosterism” - the enthusiastic promotion of AI.
Many people close to the industry don’t want to risk speaking out. One fired Google employee told me succeeding in tech depends on “keeping your mouth shut to everything that’s disturbing.” Otherwise, you’re a problem. “Almost every senior woman in computer science has that rep. Now when I hear, ‘Oh, she’s a problem,’ I’m like, Oh, so you’re saying she’s a senior woman?”
Bender is unafraid, and she feels a sense of moral responsibility. As she wrote to some colleagues who praised her for pushing back, “I mean, what’s tenure for, after all?”
There’s layers and stuff to all this (the article gets into personhood and whether humans should be guaranteed a certain level of moral respect just by virtue of being a member of the species), but I feel like the discourse around AI recently has been very “omg AI is about to become sentient and steal our jobs!” and this article is very not that. I hope you like it!
A Celebrity Thinger (Going Murder She Wrote Mode)
Not to keep recommending podcast episodes, but the best celebrity thing I encountered this week was the episode of health and wellness debunking podcast Maintenance Phase where they discuss Angela Lansbury’s 1988 workout video “Positive Moves.” I know this sounds skippable, but this is one of the only episodes of this show that put me in a great mood about humanity - Angela Lansbury has EXCELLENT health and wellness advice. She just wants you to make sure you stretch every morning, feel good in your body, and eat until your full. The episode features incredible clips of the workout video (which you can also watch in full here) and fun discussion of one of our best character actresses.
Would You Rather?
Would you rather be Ben Affleck trying to get out a tight spot or Meghan Trainor exclaiming “I Am Your Mother”?
A Recommendation (Going Jeff Bezos Mode)
I had a cute time watching Somebody I Used to Know on Amazon Prime. It’s a movie written and directed by real-life couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco. Brie stars as a thirty-something who’s given up most of her personal life to try and make it in show biz as a documentarian - except what she’s actually doing is producing mindless reality shows. She goes back home for a spell (an island off the coast of Washington State) and basically instigates a My Best Friend’s Wedding situation during the wedding weekend of her ex-boyfriend (played by Insecure’s Jay Ellis).
The Interactive Bits (Interact with me!)
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