Small language models

There's a lot of talk about "large language models" lately, with SALAMI marketing departments in full swing. But in the last week I've been thinking a little about how much of the language used in everyday thinking is small: narrow, constricting, ungenerous, constricted.

I stewed for a week after Paris Marx's interview with Matt Binder on Tech Won't Save Us.

=> Elon Musk is destroying Twitter

Matt and Paris are both professional media people, so it's understandable that their view of what Twitter is for is understandably different to the average person. But they seem utterly unable to understand that they aren't normal people in this context. For a journalist or media personality, the point of social media is to build an audience for one's "content". But for normies, it's occassionally a way to attract attention but mostly a place to connect with friends and like-minded people. I'm still getting over Matt Binder's assertion that "nobody shitposts on Mastodon". Bro, do you even toot?

I probably fixated unproductively on this interview, and perhaps I'm weirdly touchy about Marx's scepticism of Mastodon, but to me it reinforced how for all the positioning as a "critical voice", Tech Won't t Save Us as a project fundamentally still believes in Big Tech - just ore regulated by big government, and perhaps controlled by a bit "socialist" government.

Meanwhile, we've had hours of audio and paragraphs of articles written about central banks, inflation, and interest rates. The metaphor of the man with only a hammer seeing nails everywhere has never been more liberally deployed, and for good reason. Dry talk of "hitting inflation targets" and "reducing demand" is all very well, but when everyone knows price inflation is mostly being driven by industrial conflict in China, housing supply not matching housing demand, and international gas prices, it's difficult to see how making mortgages more expensive is going to help things.

I listened to the latest ABC Background Briefing, with some economists talking about inflation and what we can learn from the past. I was struck by the language of the American economist, who I would have picked as likely to blame "Keynesianism" for the 70s stagflation crisis purely from the words he used to describe the world. Every time he talked about "the advanced countries" it was like a slap in the face.

And then this morning I read what was supposed to be a heartwarming story about one of the earliest tractors built in Australia coming "home" to take pride of place in the National Museum of Australia.

=> 1912 McDonald EB vintage tractor on display at National Museum after repatriation to Australia

Painted on the front of this tractor is the name "Imperial". And the explanation from the head curator couldn't be clearer about why:

"This tractor began the revolutionisation of agriculture in a way because it was lighter, more mobile, and could go in new terrain, so it was opening up new areas of the landscape for agriculture"

I'm supposed to be impressed by this. And indeed, I can see how this is an achievement - making life easier for those who were working hard to scrape a living from what can be a tricky place to farm in a European style. But I also can't help but immediately see that "opening up new areas of the landscape" is a violent, imperial project. That a senior curator at the national museum can use such a phrase without considering its implications shows how restrictive the idea of a single "national story" is.

I guess what clicked this together into one slightly more coherent collection of thoughts for me was reading "The Planetary Emergency is a Crisis of Spirituality".

=> The Planetary Emergency is a Crisis of Spirituality

I found this article maddeningly low on specifics, but that is to a large degree the point. Nafeez Ahmed catalogues the permanent state of disaster we're all living through, but then goes on to say that the anxiety and ennui many of us are feeling is due to another, related crisis: we're unable to break out of old ways of thinking about and seeing the world. This feels absolutely right to me. All of the things that I find most frustrating and angering about the world ultimately stem from an refusal or inability of powerful people to think broadly or with any level of sophistication. It's often said that our world is becoming more complex, but I'm not sure that's true. I think what we often mean by this is that we are increasingly aware of how comlex the world always has been. Our built world and human creations may be becoming more complex, but that's at the expense of simplifying the environments we live in by, for example, destroying hundreds of species of animal and plant every year.

I remain largely unmoved by "artificial intelligence" and the profoundly unimaginative tech bros building and spruiking it. I also see little hope in most present-day religion as any kind of way forward, connected as most of them are with patriarchal suffocation, state power, and missionary zeal. Ahmed's casual definition of spirituality as "our values and our sense of what life means to us" is simple, though I suspect he agrees there's more to spirituality than this. I've always been a little ambivalent about the concept of "spirituality" and how it applies to me. Probably my Catholic Mass-every-Sunday upbringing didn't help. But there's something there that I'm going to pick at. Spirituality encourages us to see the world as large, and ultimately unknowable. It seems to me that this is why religion can be so full of rules and rituals - an attempt to bring order to the unruliness of pure spirituality. What we need right now is indeed more expansive thinking that can sit comfortably with its inability to know, let alone control, our world. A model for large language.