Celebrate Good Times

What Kool & the Gang Can Teach Us About Saying Goodbye to 2022

Dec 29, 2022

An AI generated painting of a cyberpunk ticker tape parade — Happy New Year everybody (who follows the Gregorian calendar)

As someone who has had the privilege of watching the internet evolve from bulletin board systems to the Prodigy/Compuserve/AOL dominated years through to the wild west of the early world wide web to the blog explosion to the Silicon Valley corporation dominated Web 2.0 to wherever we are now, I have seen a lot of trends come and go. But one thing has always remained constant: people love lists.

It's true. We may consciously believe that what we crave are well thought out and constructed longform articles with provocative theses and well-crafted wordsmithing, but what we really desire are lists.

Long before they were dubbed “listicles” or Buzzfeed ran them into the ground with a hilarious level of devotion and absurdity that had to be some form of postmodern art project, people flocked to them, and writers learned to love them. They require almost no thesis, no flow, and frequently little thought. And nothing is a better trigger for them than the Gregorian calendar striking midnight on another dance around the Sun. Best of the year lists, worst of the year lists, recaps of the year in list form, they’re all content gold. And make no mistake about it, for the first time in this newsletter, I’m doing a listicle.

However, I’m going to do something as bad for engagement as lists are good: I’m going to talk about good news. The surest path to engagement is negativity. Positivity is bad for numbers, it’s bad for engagement, and as a kicker, it makes you look foolish. You can be as hyperbolic as possible and it’s okay, as long as it’s negative. Remember a few years ago when people were commonly trying to claim 2020 was the worst year in history? Boy, do I have an Ingmar Bergman film for them.

But I don’t care. I feel as if one of the biggest flaws in modern American society is our inability to be positive, and, importantly, to celebrate things.1 This didn’t used to be a problem. We used to be love celebrating things.

And it wasn’t just winning world wars. This decline in Manhattan ticker tape parades nicely mirrors America’s descent into bummitude (the condition of being bummed out).

Interestingly, the people who had the most parades were the ones who survived the Great Depression and fought World War II.

Even in my youth, we could still celebrate things. This is why I always get nostalgic when I hear “Right Here, Right Now” by Jesus Jones as, shown in this hilariously dated music video, it’s a celebration of our victory in the Cold War.

Or how I feel the same hearing the similarly named “Right Now” by Van Halen, which celebrated our victory over drinking colas that you couldn’t see through.

We don’t celebrate anything now, other than sports victories, which as a Philadelphian I know occur practically never. We need to celebrate more things. We just beat a global pandemic in near record time, and we didn’t even have a party! Instead, I just pissed off large numbers of people – for two diametrically opposed reasons – for even typing that sentence. But I don’t care. We need more celebration of good news, so I’m going to talk about a few reasons for celebration the world of technology gave us in 2022.

There’s no better starting point than where we left off. Not to retread too much of last week’s ground, but the James Webb Space Telescope is a boon both for our ability to research the universe and its origins but also, perhaps more importantly, to our spirit of exploration and wonder. And an improved planetary defense has the potential to be the most important thing we’ve ever done. If we can’t have celebrate finally proving our dominance over dinosaurs, what’s the point?

DALL-E went deeply biblical with the destruction of the dinosaurs. And why is there a human there?!

I vowed to never write about transportation again after this disaster of low engagement but I’ll merely link to it and say it was a good year for electric vehicles. If you want more about how good 2022 was for transportation, I recommend the always brilliant Ali Griswold’s similarly themed good news post. And while you’re there, read about the struggles of Bird. The War Against Those Damned Scooters will be a long and hard one, so every victory must be celebrated.

We’ve recently discussed cryptocurrency and 2022 has been a bad year for it. The cryptowinter now teeters on cryptopocalypse – if that happens, we’ll all miss the portmanteaus – due to the decidedly non-altruistic policy of FTX to rip off their clients. It may seem odd to include this in a list of good things to happen in 2022, and certainly a lot of people have suffered. But this is good, from a certain point of view. Or, rather, two. If you believe the entirety of crypto is a pointless scam, it’s a good thing that it may have suffered a mortal blow. The time, money, and literal energy wasted on it could all go to more useful things.

But if you believe in crypto, this also can be considered a good thing. Crypto will never thrive if it is a space dominated by two-bit hucksters like Sam Bankman-Fried. Once the industry is scourged of its worst elements, then perhaps it has a chance. It should be noted that despite their bad year, both Bitcoin – the best established – and Ethereum – with the most well-intentioned founder – have survived. The optimist’s case is that crypto is not in their death throes, but in their “better fewer but better” stage. Having the worst actors cleaned out can only be cause for celebration.

If you want your party to be more of a cotillion, there was no brighter debutant in 2022 than artificial intelligence. Now, it’s not like we haven’t all been interacting with AI and its fruits for years. Or that we haven’t heard about AIs beating humans at chess or Jeopardy or cornhole or whatever the latest big AI “breakthrough” is. But this year, we’ve finally had broadly available AI tools that anyone could use.

A self-portrait of the artist I use for all of these.

I’m not going to rehash all the arguments about ChatGPT. You could spend the rest of the year reading them. Some are good, some are silly enough to have been written by ChatGPT, and I don’t have much to add. I’ve used ChatGPT extensively and find its immense limitations charming. As if I could converse with my dog. Likewise, I’ve spent months using DALL-E to generate the images for these posts. As someone with a child’s skills for art – but sadly, not their creativity – I’m actually quite fond of this tool. Although I realize that is not unanimous.

I’ve written very little about AI and not because I don’t think it is an important subject. I appreciate the potential impacts AI can have on our society, including the harms. Afterall, I’ve seen every Terminator movie.2 It’s because at this point I don’t really know what to say. And, at the risk of further enraging the people with a religious belief in the potential of AI doom, I don’t think anyone really knows what to say. AI is a highly complicated topic.

Earlier this year, while brainstorming topics, a question was posed to me by the most brilliant tech person I’ve ever met: do you consider AI generated art to be art? To anyone who values clicks over quality, I have done a terrible job dealing with this question. My heart is very clear on an answer which my brain rejects. I tend to think that if I can figure out how to square that circle, I’ll have an answer worth writing. But I will be woefully late to the conversation. Because for all the faults of DALL-E and Chat GPT, they have generated conversation. Just this week, two of the Titans of Substack3 laid in their thoughts on this topic. This question has become very popular to debate and discuss. And that is, in and of itself, a good thing. So many technologies have quickly become part of our daily lives, with nary a discussion over their impact, and whether we want them to be or not. We’re being given an opportunity to have a societal discussion over artificial intelligence and its role in our lives before it becomes a fait accompli. I’m cynical enough to question whether we’ll fully take advantage of this opportunity, but I’m optimistic enough to celebrate its existence.

Finally, there is one other great development of 2022 that I find worth celebrating: nuclear power. As you may have heard, we finally had the great, long awaited breakthrough in nuclear fusion: a reaction which generates more power than it takes to start the reaction. If you’re totally unfamiliar with this, here’s (get ready for the weirdest sentence I’ve ever typed) Neil deGrasse Tyson on Fox explaining how important this is to former MTV VJ, Kennedy:

Here’s the thing about nuclear fusion, and, to a degree, it’s the thing with positivity in general: no one wants to look stupid. Nuclear fusion is the ultimate Lucy pulling away the football. A popular podcast has a saying “Soccer: America’s Sport of the Future Since 1972.” Nuclear fusion has been the energy of the future for at least as long. You could’ve said a month ago that nuclear fusion would never reach the point it just did and it’s not a big deal. Goalposts can always be moved. But getting excited about a technology that is always just a few decades away looks pretty darned stupid.

Well, I don’t care about looking stupid. This is a big deal! And yes, you can find everything from oil industry belittling of it to those peculiar environmentalists who love the environment so much that any potential technology that could improve the environment must condemned vociferously denouncing this as the latest Trotskyite-Zinovievite deviationist plot.

Granted, nuclear fusion still is probably quite down the road. But so what? Just months ago, there were plenty of people who told you this would never happen. Now it’s happened. And it’s going to take a lot more work to make it useful. So what? That’s how progress works. It takes a long time and some time it isn’t linear and some time it doesn’t go where we want. A lot of people alive for Freedom 7 weren’t for Apollo 11. How many people who were there for the first working transistor ever held an iPhone? The end of The War to End All Wars didn’t end all war, but it was better than the alternative. We – by which I mean the little upjumped mammals we are – managed to mimic what happens inside a star. I don’t care if I’ll be an old man the first time my television is powered by it. That’s amazing. We should proud. And we should not try and act so cool that we don’t celebrate.

Technopoptimism

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