Northeastern Reader has been on hiatus for a while now; all unplanned but in the moment, since October 23 to be precise. This entry is about the nature of writing a blog like this. I do news, things that seem important to me in the news cycle but yet seem under-appreciated. It might be someone’s slant on a news story that I’m endorsing but most of the time, its a topic that I feel strongly is under-represented. For the past – nearly a month, little has moved me. Ergo, I did not write.
During this interval, Trump has enraged as usual but is also gradually institutionalizing himself as his own alternate universe. The economy is in peak condition, we’re not at war with anyone yet or at the moment, so we’re good. Trump shows occasional self-doubt, never admitted but it’s there plainly for all to see and that’s healthy. Almost half of the country could see more of this. Not sure what the rest wants. The resistance fades.
The movement against sexual predation has gone from a couple prominent cases to a full-blown revolution ensnaring top names in entertainment, government, academia, left, right, Republican, and Democrat. As a writer, I should be interested in this sea change but I’m not, hardly. It’s amply exposed. One afternoon I counted no less than nine related headlines in USA Today online. Perhaps this is overexposed. I have this feeling of skepticism about the whole matter. Why now? Is this really a permanent change? Are we seeing the whole thing? Will this be like an ‘Arab Spring’, a momentary flair that is succeeded by a backlash to the old ways? Don’t know. I do see contradictions. The two sides of the ledger don’t add up. We’re seeing the worst excuses for ‘manhood’, yes, but all these decades of silence? Meanwhile, hyper-sexualized America shows little sign of reversing. Which world is real and which is hyped and piped?
Perhaps the biggest news that few bother to follow, is the proliferation of tech, particularly all things AI. We easily, within our lifetime, have the potential to fully destroy ourselves, make ourselves the animal slaves of our machine overlords, or to partially or fully relinquish our humanity to some centralized cyber-mind. All of these are in open development with only nominal ethical oversight. I don’t know why we pursue this so hard, so fast. These are a collection of news stories that rarely reach the mainstream, but they’re starting to show up now. I used to highlight these stories semi-frequently but their scope and speed is starting to make my reporting irrelevant. It’s almost time for a strategic retreat. Mad science seems to be impervious even to warnings from the likes of Gates, Musk, and Hawking. If their warnings make no difference, then who am I? It’s almost time to shift strategies.
So on the theme of humanity: I am human, therefore I write. Also, I am human, therefore, I don’t write. I am not an automaton and have no ultimate obligation to the search-engine gods to produce just because they say I must. It’s one thing to need a break (which has not been the case) and another to simply pause to recalibrate one’s faculties of observation or even the adjust the underpinnings of one’s viewpoint if needed. The predecessor of Northeast Reader was ‘Simple Page By Lee’. The subtitle for that site was/is: ‘Keeping the web a nice place for humans’. That is and remains my ethic in regard to all things web.