Hello discoverers!

Rebecca Solnit has this rare gift of making you feel like the mess we’re all living through is at least comprehensible, if not fixable. In time for the launch of her new book (see the Books section), she’s published a pointed, thoughtful long-read in The Guardian that I’ve been chewing on over the weekend.

The essay opens on familiar ground – Silicon Valley's decades-long campaign to convince us that going out into the world is inefficient, risky, a waste of time. Regular readers of this newsletter will recognise that territory. But where Solnit takes it is more interesting. Her argument isn’t really about AI; it’s about a deeper ideological project that predates any chatbot:

“...we are beset with the ideology of maximising having while minimising doing. This has long been capitalism’s narrative and is now also technology’s. It is an ideology that steals from us relationships and connections and eventually our selves.”

The ‘doing’ she describes is ordinary stuff – buying milk, chatting to a stranger, finding your way around somewhere new. Small, but important acts. And when we withdraw from them long enough, we lose the capacity to tolerate them:

“The resilience to survive difficulty and discord, to brave the vagaries of unmediated human contact, must be maintained through practice. Silicon Valley-bred isolation robs us of that resilience.”

Solnit calls out the sycophancy problem of AI companions – by design, they have no needs of their own and never push back. But real relationships involve friction:

“One argument for AI companions is that they are always there for you: on when you want them on, off when you want them off, with no needs of their own. Yet behind this lies a capitalist argument that we’re here to get as much as possible and give as little as possible, to meet our own needs and dodge those of others. In reality, you get something from giving – at the very least, you get a sense of being someone with something to give, which is one measure of your own wealth, generosity and power.”

The resistance she calls for is less political than it might sound:

“We resist the tyranny of the quantifiable by finding a language that can value all those subtle phenomena that add up to a life worth living. A language not in the sense of a new vocabulary but attention, description, conversation centred on these subtler phenomena and on principles not corrupted by what corporations want us to want.”

Solnit doesn’t pretend any of this is simple. Stealing ourselves back, she admits, is not as easy as walking out the door. There’s no app for rebuilding the social infrastructure we’ve been letting decay.

“Resisting the annexation of our hearts and minds by Silicon Valley requires us not just to set boundaries on our engagement with what they offer, but to cherish the alternatives. Joy in ordinary things, in each other, in embodied life, and the language with which to value it, is essential to this resistance, which is resistance to dehumanisation.”

Her argument isn’t really a call to action so much as a call to attention – to notice what we’re surrendering, and to decide, with some deliberateness, whether the convenience is worth it.

And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai