Fluid ImaginationSome people wonder whether copyright law, fundamentally unchanged since the late 1700s, can handle generative AI. Its basic unit is the “copy,” a concept that’s felt like a poor fit for modernity since the launch of music and video streaming in the 1990s. Might generative AI finally bend copyright past the breaking point?
– “Generative AI Is Challenging a 234-Year-Old Law,” The Atlantic
From the New Yorker’s In Georgia, Trump and His Gang Get the Mob Treatment:
There is a temptation to not even bother with the details, no matter how remarkable they may be. That which was unthinkable has now become something of a political routine: another week, another indictment…
“But, of course, there is nothing in the least bit routine about an ex-President being charged with the gravest offenses against the nation that one can imagine. And, even in this summer of Trump indictments, this new Georgia case stands out…
“Trump may believe the executive office comes with a magic get-out-of-jail-free card, but, even if the courts were to agree that it does, the card would only apply at the federal level. Georgia is outside the President’s jurisdiction. These are charges that Trump can’t kill.
On Friday, November 19, 2021, just after 1:00 pm EST, a citizen jury serving at the Kenosha County Courthouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin, acquitted a young white man named Kyle Rittenhouse of first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide, attempted first-degree intentional homicide, and two counts of first-degree recklessly endangering safety.
The verdict, as with virtually every public decision nowadays, divided the populace of the United States. A large percentage of citizens celebrated the Rittenhouse verdict for strengthening an individual’s right to defend themselves. Another bemoaned the verdict as yet another data point in the criminal court system’s historical defense of white power.
While members of the ruling classes debated the verdict from their laptops and television studios in the country’s major metropolitan areas, a doctor in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, named Kyle Pfefferle, contacted an LSU student he met at the university’s library, a man named Kyle Sellers. Dr. Pfefferle knew Sellers was a double major in computer science and computer engineering set to graduate in December. Dr. Pfefferle challenged Sellers to build a data-mining tool to scrub the Internet for any bit of contact information belonging to each of the Kyles in the United States.
By Saturday evening, Sellers accomplished the task, and at 6:39 pm CST, Pfefferle and Sellers possessed a Google Sheet with the phone numbers and email addresses of over 160,00 individuals in the United States whose names began with Kyle. Based on Social Security data from the past 100 years, experts estimate that over 460,000 Kyles currently reside in the country.
I received my first text from Dr. Pfefferle on Sunday, November 21, 2021, at 8:03 pm EST. It read:
My name’s Doctor Kyle Pfefferle, and I invite you to join a Zoom call tonight to discuss with 163,631 other Kyle’s [sic] what our response will be to the Rittenhouse verdict.
Astounded, I confirmed my interest and attendance.
At 11:10 pm EST, I received an invitation to join the Zoom call, but due to the technical limitations of the service, when I logged on, I found only 99 other Kyles in attendance. Dr. Pfefferle was not one of them. Instead, a middle-aged man named Kyle Pretsch greeted me. Pretsch was a Vice President of IT Development for a company in Phoenix, Arizona, and he introduced himself as the group’s facilitator.
Pretsch announced that out of all the Kyles invited to the emergency conference, 87,917 signaled their willingness to attend. Dr. Pfefferle asked the first respondents to facilitate meetings of 100 Kyles each. Our task was to determine how we felt as a group about the Rittenhouse verdict and to elect a representative who would attend a second gathering to speak on our behalf later in the night.
The meeting lasted 75 minutes. The conversation covered everything from the validity of The New York Times’ 1619 Project to the wisdom of constructing a physical wall along the nation’s southern border. Our facilitator successfully navigated the noisy voices of the rest of us, and as we approached the end of the meeting, he called a vote on whether we, as a group, approved of the Rittenhouse verdict.
With a majority opinion decided, we spent the last five minutes constructing an acceptable statement of our feelings. At the end of the meeting, the group nominated three potential representatives to attend the second meeting. I was humbled when a plurality of these strangers elected me to speak for them. I don’t know why they did so, but I vowed to take the responsibility seriously.
On Monday, November 22, 2021, at 1:30 am EST, I attended another Zoom call with 999 other individuals named Kyle. Each of us represented roughly one hundred other Kyle. I learned that not every Kyle who had signaled their willingness to attend the first meeting had done so, but most had. A few individuals in this second meeting represented groups with odd numbers, but most of us represented 100, and none of us knew who represented the smaller groups.
Dr. Pfefferle facilitated the conversation, but he did not get a vote in the meeting and did not express his opinion. Instead, in his role as facilitator, he wielded the mute button. From my perspective, Dr. Pfefferle restricted his use of the mute button to enforce unspoken rules of time and decorum, but I suspect some of those he muted may have felt slighted.
When Dr. Pfefferle turned the microphone over to me, I spoke on behalf of my constituents to express their opinions and concerns. Out of a sense of fairness to the minority opinion-holders in our group, I also expressed their significant positions. I believe I represented our group fairly.
At the end of the call, Dr. Pfefferle called for nominees to speak on behalf of America’s Kyles. Over 139 names were called in the first round. The voting lasted for 29 rounds, but in the end, the group reached a majority conclusion.
At 6:11 am EST on Monday, November 22, 2021, I was rewarded (or perhaps cursed) to be elected to submit that conclusion for public review.
And so, on behalf of the majority of Kyles of the United States of America whose contact information could be scrubbed from the Internet, I now offer this brief statement:
Fuck Kyle Rittenhouse.
Daring Fireball on the Department of Justice reopening a spat with Apple over iPhone Encryption:
Saying you want technology companies to make a backdoor that only “good guys” can use is like saying you want guns that only “good guys” can fire. It’s not possible, and no credible cryptographer would say that it is. You might as well say that you want Apple to come up with a way for 1 + 1 to equal 3.
I wrote a post a few weeks ago arguing in favor of abolishing the age limit on the right to vote. I want to follow up that proposal by arguing in favor of abolishing prison time for people under the age of 25.
Here’s what it means to work at a therapeutic school: never giving up on a child. A lot of the kids we get at our school are on their way down the drain of life. Their parents (or usually at least one of them) have abandoned them. Their schools have either asked them to leave or admitted that they don’t know what to do with them. Their friends have either never appeared or, in almost every instance, rejected them. They’ve been told in ways both verbal and nonverbal that they aren’t worth anything and that no one could ever love them; and like that, dripping wet with the sloppy shit of society’s refuse, they arrive at our door.
And the first thing we tell them is that we will never let them go. We’re like Robin Williams’ character in *Good Will Hunting*: “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.”
Today, the Vermont State Supreme Court agreed with over a hundred years of state precedent to declare that an 18-year-old boy (from my hometown) who had undeniably taken several positive steps towards enacting a mass shooting at a local school, and despite those undeniable steps, the state could still not hold him without bail.
The finding goes deeper than that, however, because the decision to overturn the lower court’s ruling registers a formal level of doubt regarding the state’s original charges against the boy. Due to legislative reasons and over a hundred years of precedent, to maintain the lower court’s ruling, the justices would had to have found, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the boy *was going to attempt* the shooting; fortunately or unfortunately, the justices were not able to do that.
Now, that same formal level of doubt called for by the justices will be in the instructions given to the jury when the state asks them to convict the boy to prison. But if several justices can’t convict him to be held without bail because all of the available evidence doesn’t support the state’s argument beyond a shadow of a doubt, then a jury shouldn’t be able to convict him of that either.
Essentially, today’s opinion explained all of the reasons why the boy should be declared not guilty: because he did not do the crime with which he is being charged. Faced with the climate that has arisen in this country in the aftermath of Parkland, the state’s prosecutors overreached and charged the boy with something that would make big headlines in terms of the story —— maybe not necessarily for selfish publicity, but maybe as a kind of warning to other potential shooters; unfortunately, they charged him with a crime that he, in all good conscience, did not commit. He did not yet *attempt* the mass murder; he had taken steps toward it, but there were plenty of steps left for him to take, and he was capable of changing his mind, for whatever reason, at any moment. He truly is not guilty of the crime for which is being charged.
But that’s not to say that this young boy belongs on the streets. In their ruling, the Justices suggested that, even if he did make bail, the lower court could reasonably keep him under watch for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, which, while not being prison, still registers in a real and formal way the Justices’ specific distrust of the boy.
This boy is eighteen years old. I know next to nothing about him except for what I’ve read in the papers, read in his journal (which he titled, “Journal of an Active Shooter”), and what people have said about him around town. I’ve never met him and I don’t know his family, but by all accounts, including his own, whatever caused him to want to do this had nothing to do with his family.
This is a boy who, for whatever reason, is sick, and he needs some real help. We — the real human beings who make up our community (town, county, state, nation, earth) — need to step in and give him some help, if not with our hands and hearts, than at least with our tax dollars (which ought to be considered just another way of saying “our charitable donations”).
We don’t need to exile this boy. He is eighteen years old. Everything we read and everything we see tells us that adolescence lasts longer and longer. This is not just a cultural reality; it’s become a biological reality. Americans reach puberty at earlier and earlier ages, and they’re dependent upon their parents for longer and longer amounts of time. Adolescence is no longer just the teenage years. It extends from 10 or 11 all the way to 23 or 25, and sometimes even longer. There’s a reason the Affordable Care Act gave children the right to stay on their parents’ health insurance for longer: today’s kids are dependents for longer.
This boy is eighteen years old. He’s not an adult. Just because we, as a society, can put a gun in his hand and send him off to war, that doesn’t make him an adult. It makes him young and vibrant and able to fight and march for longer periods of time than people who are in their thirties and forties. It makes him less attached to the next generation of kids and less burdened by mature responsibilities. We don’t send 18 year olds to war because they’re adults; we send them exactly because they’re *not* adults.
No one who is eighteen years old ought to go to prison for life, and I’m not sure they ought to be sent there at all. Prison is exile. Prison is society saying it’s done with you. Prison is saying, quite explicitly, “It *is* your fault.”
I want to make it clear that everything I say for this eighteen year old white boy from rural Vermont stands true for the eighteen year old black boy from urban California. Eighteen year old kids should not be sent into social exile, I don’t care what color their skin is, what societies they grew up in, or what their crime was.
Eighteen year old brains are still in development — socially, emotionally, intellectually, and physically — in ways that twenty-five year old brains are not. They are, in all instances, still works in progress, and they ought never to be abandoned.
This is not to say that this boy — or the eighteen year old frat boy who rapes a girl on campus, or the eighteen year old black boy who stabs a grocer for his cash, or the eighteen year old Latino boy who murders his girlfriend in a fit of rage, or the eighteen year old Asian girl who smashes her guitar into a club owner’s face — ought to be free. I think it is completely fair for society to tell these children that their behavior will not be tolerated and that their judgement cannot be trusted, and to then remand these individuals to a place of socially provided care where they can receive food, shelter, therapeutic treatment, and both a liberal and a specialized education. And it ought to also say to them, at every instance, “It was not your fault.”
Will Hunting was worth saving not because he was a genius, and not because he was white. He was worth saving because he was just a kid.
And so is the boy who wrote, “The journal of an active shooter,” who had recently purchased a shotgun and documented his plan to purchase both an AR-15 and a deadly handgun, and, on top of that, had documented the ever-approaching dates for when he planned to carry out the shooting.
Because as guilty as he is of planning to commit mass murder, it is still, at bottom, not his fault, and more than anything, we need to show him, in every way possible, that we are here to help.
XXX
Nihilism. That’s what we are fighting.
John Goodman had it right: “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”
Nihilism feels no connection to anything, and it has no answer to the problem of suicide. If nothing matters, you don’t matter and I don’t matter, and then what’s the matter with a little mass shooting before I check out, you know, just for the thrill of it; plus, think of the publicity!?
Everyone who is not a nihilist knows that that way of thinking, that way of feeling, is wrong. We don’t even need to be convinced of it, and frankly, we’re a bit scared of people who feel that we ought to be convinced it, as if there were some plausible reason we ought to doubt it.
Of course walking into a room full of people and shooting them without mercy and without even really any passionate sense of anger is wrong. Of course it is. Why would anyone want to even discuss it, except to maybe make a joke (because, hey, for real, even jokes about school shootings can be funny)?
Arguments in favor of nihilism serve no point — literally, they are *in service* to nothing, to non-existence, to the real and true sense of an absence in the face of an everything.
It’s like pointing behind you at a giant emptiness and screaming at everyone in front of you, “Look at that! Don’t you see!?” and we follow your finger to find *the point* and we don’t see anything at all. And you say, “Yes! Yes! That’s the point!”
At which point, most of us turn to look at each other, and in each other’s faces we see, you don’t understand it all.
“Come here, my child. It’s not your fault. Society hasn’t done a good enough job with you yet. You’re still a work in progress. And you still deserve nothing less than our love.”
XXX
The name of the school where I work is based on the idea that a child is like a gemstone of jade and that society ought to be like a jade carver. Faced with any individual piece of jade, a jade carver knows she cannot bring any intention to the stone other than to help it become a socially-pleasing version of itself, something that other people can look at and allow themselves to be amazed by. If the carver tries to make the stone anything other than what it seems to want to be, the jade will crack and all of its potential will be lost, its destiny to now become less than what it oought to, by its own accounts, have become.
As the adults in a place where society sends its most challenging children, we do what everyone else has refused to do — we let the child become the adult he or she wants to be, and we do it while being caring, trusting, challenging, and non-threatening in every way we can imagine.
My school would not be able to handle the boy who has been accused of attempting to commit mass murder. Our model depends on trust, and this boy has demonstrated he cannot yet be trusted.
But I hope that there is a place where the spirit of our model can thrive while keeping the children within it wholly contained, much like the way plants can thrive despite being kept within a properly maintained and properly cared-for greenhouse.
My school is more like a raised-bed garden: there’s some structure, sure, but it tries to stay as open to nature as possible — which means it also lays itself open to attack.
My school couldn’t foster a nihilistic weed without choking off the oxygen to a garden’s worth of other plants. If the weed is going to be *allowed* to grow, it will need to be kept in its own roomy and healthy pot — until, that is, it can evolve into something else, something capable of existing within the larger ecosystem of the garden.
(Sure, I murdered the metaphor, but that doesn’t make it any less true).
Just because my school can’t handle him doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve all the positive things my school’s model can do for him, and I sincerely hope the state considers caring for him in my school’s specific kind of way.
To want anything less for this boy — or for any child convicted at his age — is to live a life without a sense of mercy, and for anyone who lives life like that, I simply feel sorry, because true mercy — *Jesus-level* mercy — is a beautiful sense for each of our spirit’s to feel.
May society help this boy’s — and all accused children’s — still-forming spirit to heal.