A New Hope

Now that my spring half marathons are over (and before the training for my fall marathon begins), I am dialing back the running a bit. I'd been running six days a week; now I'm down to four. Instead, I'm cross-training -- swimming twice a week and, ostensibly, joining Kin and Poppy on some of their cycling outings. (I say "ostensibly" because that's only happened once, although we did cross paths yesterday in the park, while I was doing my ten-mile long run and they were doing a forty-mile long bike ride.)

The whole “cross-training” thing is funny as it’s meant to give your body a reprieve from running all while still stimulating your muscular and cardio-vascular systems in ways that are a similar enough stimulus to running. So hahahaha, how sore was I after Friday’s 30 minute swim — despite being in great shape? So so sore.

I have been paying for a subscription to McMillan's Run Team (or whatever it’s called) for a while now, as I've had pretty good success with Greg McMillan's training plans. (At least until these past two races, which I’m still chalking up to humidity more than anything.) But I've never taken advantage of all the benefits that come with the subscription (because I’m an idiot), until last week when I finally hopped on a Zoom call with one of his running coaches. The coach was awfully young, and he had a University of Oregon jersey hanging on the wall behind him, so it was a love-hate sort of thing. I listened politely.

I wanted some advice on how to prepare for and then train for the NYC Marathon in November. He suggested I spend the eight weeks before the training starts working on hill strength -- not bad advice, but hill repeats are a real slog. Even more so when you’re told to do hill repeats by someone half your age.

I'm not sure any of this is going to feel like much of a break before the hard work of preparing my body for the marathon begins. But let’s pretend…

Online coaching is so weird — like this kid didn’t know me at all, but he could see my data, so there ya go. What else is there?!

Indeed, the whole fitness industry stuff continues to fascinate (and repulse) me (and part of the reason why I’m keeping this newsletter still: to write about the Second Breakfast topics that have been set aside to address all the AI bullshit). I see a lot of people gravitating towards Runna, which is a running app that uses AI to guide training. I mean, what it actually does is steal all the freely available training plans online -- and probably some that aren't freely available -- then generates some sort of algorithmically optimized workouts based on that. But people feel that that shit is "personalized" because everyone seems so enamored with this awful story that machines are better teachers.

Of course, as even the digital interactions with another human coach, as in this Zoom call, feel so de-personalized, you can sort of understand people's dissatisfaction with paying for a templated response. And since everyone is desperate to "optimize" their lives, “AI” it is...

Related: "The Exotic Fitness Goals of the Tech Elite" in The Information. "Is all this self-monitoring making us paranoid?" asks The New York Times. "The Enhanced Games Has a Date, a Host City, and a Drug-Fueled World Record," Wired reports.

I opened the AMICAL conference last week with a keynote on "misunderstanding" and ed-tech. It's a theme I'd like to develop into the book. Indeed, I'd much prefer the book to be about this theme than about AI as I think AI is dumb and dangerous and I keep hoping I'll wake up and discover everyone agrees.

But as I noted in the Second Breakfast newsletter I sent out this morning, a lot of people really do seem to support technofascism. I mean, they're absolutely going along with this -- they see it as legitimate; they legitimize it. They love the magic-machine-do-everything-button. They're leaning into the eschatology of AI because I think they desperately yearn for the techno-utopian promise of SF, which as Ursula Le Guin points out is itself quite often a yearning for authoritarianism. (Certainly for a world dominated by the white male hero.)

Related: "The CIA Ran a Star Wars Fan Site"

I had far too many links gathered to share in Friday's newsletter, what with taking a week off because of Isaiah's Death Day and my half marathon. I am not quite sure what to do with all the links I don't share in the newsletter. I want to keep track of them "just in case," but my god, I am so sick of using different apps and websites to track this shit, only for those apps and websites to become enshittified. (Or, just as likely: for the links to degrade).

I am still in the book-thinking/book-research stage where all reading and all thoughts and all information feels like it could be useful. I should probably just hammer out the book proposal and get started on ... something more concrete.

In a couple of weeks, I'll attend the celebration party for Sam Freedman, who's retiring from the J School. His book-writing class was life-changing, for sure. (The New York Times just published a lovely article on the class and all the students he's impacted.) Do I feel sheepish that I don't have another book deal to brag about when I walk through the door there? Maybe? But also not really.

It is always strange who knows and who doesn't know my work — no one at that party for Sam will, I reckon.

I'm taking this "Fighting the Broligarchy" class right now -- it's great (although it starts at 8pm my time, which is too damn late for me as I turn into a pumpkin around 4pm). The two guest speakers so far have been Paris Marx (who didn't have a clue who I was) and Chris Gilliard (who I consider a friend and comrade); this coming week, the guest is Jathan Sadowski (did we follow each other on Twitter? I think so?). I've read all these guys' books and articles (all guys on the syllabus), and I admire their work immensely. I dunno... I don't really crave recognition necessarily. But I do worry that I’m not on people’s radars — not always for me, but for the issues surrounding education and technology. Perhaps this ties in to what I wrote about in today's newsletter: that people have a vision of political change that completely overlooks the role of education (and as such, my work). And even if it feels like that vision is progressive and/or subversive, it's probably not going to get you that far if you aren't thinking about the reproduction of culture, not just the production of radicals... Something like that.

I recorded a podcast with education journalist Jennifer Berkshire last week on AI — she did say that I was “the” person to talk to on AI and education (ego, salved). She mentioned that she's teaching a class at Yale and one inside a prison; I'd like to do some of the latter (although I also agreed to come visit her class at the former this fall).

Media: I’m reading Emily Bender and Alex Hanna’s The AI Con, Ursula Le Guin’s The Language of the Night, and Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain. Kin and I are listening to Luis Elizondo’s Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs. We finished Season 1 of Pokerface, and started Season 2. We watched the latest episode of Murderbot (which I can’t decide if I like or loathe), as well as some cheesy documentary on Tom Cruise, who remains one of the most interesting/boring star texts imaginable.

For the birds: "We can think of Anna’s hummingbird as a commensal species, similar to pigeons" -- on the human-caused evolution of hummingbirds in California. Via The Atlantic: "The Pedestrians Who Abetted a Hawk’s Deadly Attack."

Yesterday was sort of a perfect Sunday. We went for a walk, then I went for my run; Kin and Poppy went for their bike ride. So by early afternoon, we were hungry, and we walked up to the UWS for some lunch. We ate at Cafe Luxembourg, which has been around for some forty odd years (but we'd never dined there). A pretty stereotypical brasserie, I'd say, and no surprise for a Sunday, pretty busy, pretty loud. We sat outside (thankfully under a heat lamp as it's been fairly chilly the last week or so). The food was okay. (Kin would say that the doughnut holes were excellent -- so much so he ordered another round of them.) The service was great.

Then we walked a block to Trader Joe's, which was also busy (yet strangely less busy than mid-morning on a weekday) and bought a bunch of snacks — including these marvelously awful rootbeer float cookies:

Then another block or two north and over to Westsider Records, where Kin found a bunch of albums he wanted (and I snagged Cheap Trick’s At Budokan) and we got to hear one of the endless stories that the guy at the counter always has about some old movie, some old record, some little bit of entertainment trivia that makes me adore this place, that reminds me why shopping online -- indeed, much of the whole goddamn Internet -- is just so utterly soulless.

That’s a lot of updates…

Yours in struggle,
~Audrey