📚 Audiobooks are terrific! But they earn far less than print for writers and publishers. Audiobooks razed the Swedish book industry. Could that happen in the US? Audible and Spotify look ready to dominate the US book market. 🫪 If they do, writers will earn even less than they do now. More here 👇 open.substack.com/pub/rozfos…

Hey, peeps! If you don't have time to read, click the link for an audio version. I'll read it to you! 👇 rozfoster.substack.com/p/aud…

Hazel can read now. Hazel is our Thoroughbred rescue mare. 👇 She assisted me with writing a couple of pieces for the very bookish fall issue of The Findery. I interviewed Iris Cushing - poet, scholar, publisher - and we made the cover! Also got to interview Emily Helck, who owns the beloved, upstate indie bookstore, The Lost Bookshop. Check it out! instagram.com/finderyguide/

On 9/11, 2001, thousands of brave souls poured into Lower Manhattan looking for survivors. Firefighters, police, construction/iron workers, medical professionals, and volunteers swarmed what they called “the pile.” Filmmaker J. Christian Ingvordsen was there helping clear the site, searching for signs of life. He also had a camera. The footage stayed in his camera bag for years. THE PILE is Ingvordsen’s eyewitness account from Ground Zero (26 min). youtube.com/watch?v=oqi_tD63…

Historian and podcaster extraordinaire Claire Potter @TenuredRadical interviews Dolly Parton biographer Martha Ackmann in this episode of Political Junkie, “What would Dolly do?” youtube.com/watch?v=BtlckdiM…

May flights of angels sing her to her rest. May they sing *backup* that is.

Murder Drones (Glitch 2021) is dire, hilarious, and while it appears utterly Marxist, seems to celebrate the plight of the corporate drone, legitimizing it in the visual-cultural mythos of ~35 and unders. It designates it as a modern hero's journey, and very deeply commodifies this dissent. Here's some merch! Uzi, our heroine, appears in the metaphorical likeness of a radical-leftist, activist robot with purple 'hair' & an alt-cult beanie. She'd fit right into Seattle's Autonomous Zone. Uzi turns an awkward, ineffective, corporate Assembly Drone, and the two fight to turn the ruthless J, as well.

The visual-cultural lingo of '~35 and unders' is wacko! Here's a desk statuette for your corporate cubicle. It further cutifies the Disassembly Drone, J, from the web series Murder Drones. J kills Worker Drones, drinking their warm delicious oil until they're but empty, metal shells.... Makes spooning with Mumm Ra, the demon priest, sound comforting.

Happy Pub Day Susan Eva O'Donovan and MOVING TOWARD FREEDOM! This is a beautifully written, groundbreaking history of the lives of enslaved Americans at the cusp of the Civil War. (And, yes, that *is* my Union Army cavalry officer's hat.) As the gears of capitalism churned ever faster, carried as it was on the shoulders of the enslaved, the necessity of laborers' movement and their interactions with the world beyond plantations broadened their skills, built their knowledge, and gave them far more political agency and awareness than historians have thus far considered. Exposed to other cities, land, cultures, knowledge, and ideas, a political movement toward freedom of the enslaved rose, out of view, within the hearts and minds of teamsters, boatmen, traveling companions crossing land and sea, those going west for the Gold Rush, and even those going to Cuba to work. Eminent historian Susan Eva O’Donovan argues that while performing brutal and involuntary work, enslaved Americans managed to accumulate the crucial experience and knowledge they'd use to bring about their own liberation. Huge thanks to @penguinpress, Sara Bershtel, and Helen Rouner. 🙏

The pilot of Murder Drones (Glitch 2021, 89M views!), a web cartoon, reflects the visual-cultural lingo of ~35 & unders. It's dire & hilarious! 😳 After humanity destroys itself (obvi), only runaway AI remains: Worker Drones. A cute, teen Worker Drone is our heroine. Hotter than Smurfette, Uzi, yes that's her name, has Daddy issues. She's going to prove herself and save the world w a rifle-sized railgun. An evil corporation has manufactured Disassembly Drones to kill her & all Worker Drones. Uzi appears in the metaphorical likeness of a radical-leftist, activist robot w purple 'hair' & an alt-cult beanie. She turns an awkward, ineffective Disassembly Drone by convincing him his parent corporation will ALSO kill him & the Disassembly Drones when they're done w/ the Workers ... unless they join forces to fix a grounded spaceship & leave the planet. ☮️ youtube.com/watch?v=mImFz8mk…

Are you guys interested in explainer vids like this? I've always been drawn to communicating complicated, nuanced ideas using accessible, written / visual lingo. I've got unique, one-woman-band chops for this kind of explainer👇. Last September, I broke down why folks in media were (and still are) being pressured to use AI. Should I do more vid explainers like this? youtube.com/watch?v=d7Rr4q5P…

AI was developed by video-games like Pong and Grand Theft Auto. Trained to earn as many points (dollars, rupees, yuan) as possible as quickly and efficiently as possible in order to win a video game, AI has been playing against you for over a decade. Learn more at rozfoster dot 5ub5tack dot com. Link in bio ⬆️

Are you a power-up or a hazard? Find out at rozfoster dot 5ub5tack dot com (link in bio)

The Singularity was trained with 80s video games? That doesn't seem right, does it?

I thought about how we're supposed to be in the foothills of the singularity & how AI was trained on Atari games. Wait, what? The Singularity from Atari? Really? What's AI *really* doing that's so disruptive if it's not actually on a path to superintelligence?Visit rozfoster dot 5ub5tack dot com (Link in bio).

Thanks, @AnnaSilman, for putting a megaphone up to this. 🙌 wsj.com/arts-culture/books/g…

I've been re-reading LeBon's THE CROWD. His initial thoughts use the analogy of ocean waves to describe why it's a good idea to study crowd psychology. He guesses, incorrectly, that waves are the expression of underlying forces beneath the sea. (It's the wind.) But he gets his point across: "Perceptible phenomena may be compared to the waves, which are the expression on the surface of the ocean of deep-lying disturbances of which we know nothing. So far as the majority of their acts are considered, crowds display a singularly inferior mentality." Our brains aren't designed to see our patterns of behavior when we interact w/ AI as a mass. Deep neural nets (AI) can. AI can assess, measure, track and learn triggers of mass movement at astronomical scales. What are they assessing, measuring, using to move us that we aren't able to perceive?

AI was trained using Grand Theft Auto. Training AI by teaching it to meet with crime bosses, plan robberies, and fight off rivals *does* seem like a path to the kind of superintelligence one needs for success in Silicon Valley.

Natural Disaster Survival, a hugely popular Roblox game, is nearly 20 years old. This is how peeps ~35 and under spent lots of time as kids. In hindsight, doesn't it feel like this trained young minds to expect disaster like this, even unintentional normalize it? roblox.com/games/189707/Natu…