: Failing to recognize male emotional labor
(dr) molly tov wrote a clever response to a techy tweet thread about things AI agents could do—she came up with some inventive ideas for ways AI could be, you know, actually helpful, like “Does AI job interviews for me as I sleep, so I wake up to multiple competing job offers” but that the big AI companies will never bother with. It’s a good post, you should go read it.
But clicking through to the Bluesky thread, I was disappointed to see everyone how shitting on the OP (some techlord I don’t know named Derek Thompson) was interpreting his original tweet in the least charitable way possible in order to score ingroup points. The original post from Derek is this:
Scenario: Before I go to sleep, I tell ChatGPT “Plan my 5-year-old’s birthday next Saturday, budget $500. When you’ve made the reservation, email these 20 ppl a printable invitation to attend. Also my wife wants to go to England in mid-July. Find 5 plausible flights for the family and make several distinct itineraries. Finally, pls edit this work memo."
When I go to sleep, the AI agent negotiates slots with two bowling alleys, buys a cake, emails printable invites, plans the trip, copy-edits, etc.
But somehow, by the time this got to Molly, the reading had evolved to
Derek Thompson thinks his kid and wife are pointless busywork I guess
Guys … we are better than this. That’s not what Derek said.
Here’s what Derek’s AI use case entails:
- The AI agent negotiates slots with two bowling alleys: It calls both bowling alleys, asks for available dates and prices, and chooses the cheapest one that’s compatible with his schedule. “Negotiates” is just shorthand, ffs.
- Buys a cake: Oh my god guys, I heard Derek doesn’t love his kid because he would like to be able to tell an AI “Order a custom cake to serve 12, budget X, Finding Nemo decorations”
- Emails printable invites: Literally the definition of pointless busy work
- Plans the trip: Honestly not sure exactly what this means, but probably the more menial parts of trip planning like comparing flight/hotel costs, arranging cities to minimize travel time, figuring out train schedules, etc? He said “make several distinct itineraries,” it’s just about spitballing ideas.
- Copy-edits, etc.: This is coded language for “and then the AI makes love to my wife so I don’t have to.”
You might look at this and think, hey, I think planning a vacation is fun, I like looking at dozens of hotels and picking one out, I like browsing cake pictures, and that’s perfectly fine and dandy. But you do not get to decide, on the basis of your aesthetic experience, that Derek “thinks his kid and wife are pointless busywork” because of the way he does or doesn’t use technology to automate boring tasks that just so happen to occur in the home instead of the workplace.
I think there are a couple of psychological things going on in the mind of someone who takes the uncharitable view of Derek (in addition to a baseline bias against AI apologists, which, fair enough):
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The vindictive belief that men, by default, are not doing “enough” domestic/emotional labor, and when they do, they always half-ass it.
This is ironic, because the core insight of the concept of “emotional labor” is that it draws from our finite supply of energy just like labor-labor, and thus it’s reasonable to need a break from it once in a while or to try to find ways to do it more efficiently. You wouldn’t shit on a 1950s housewife for using a sewing machine instead of doing it by hand, let alone interpret this as meaning she doesn’t love her husband or kid.
Let’s go out on a limb and suggest that the 30-odd minutes Derek would have spent Googling a cake shops, calling, waiting for the employee not to be busy, spelling out his order, etc. are not the most nurturing and pleasant use of that time, for Derek or his kid.
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The variant of toxic positivity that says that parenting is always a joy, 100 percent of the time, and never draining or frustrating, and that anything you do to reduce the burden of parental labor is a form of neglect.
You see this “parenting OCD” bullshit a lot nowadays, and it’s gotten worse due to the tradwife/homeschooling trend. I’m not sure how to solve this particular cultural problem, but Free Range Kids has lots to read on the related problem of helicopter parenting and paranoia about leaving one’s children alone.
Anyway, everyone who participated in the hatefest above is now banned from ordering pizza online.
: Am nostalgic
I think I was just born this way—to constantly dwell on the past, to constantly ruminate about the future, to think about that one time I was walking home from work in the sunshine and joking around with my friend and thought, This is absolutely perfect; this is as good as life will ever get, and wish I could freeze the moment in amber.
Buddhism, I am told, teaches that everything is temporary and we need to make peace with that and free ourselves from the impulse to try to recreate the past in the future. Even if I could choreograph the same walk with the same friend and the same sunny day, it wouldn’t be the same, because I have changed, right? The truth is that it’s sunny right now—I’m looking out the window at it, I can see it—and here I am mcfucking around on the computer instead of trying to make friends or whatever.
I am afraid of getting old. I have met many old people who spent their life saving up for a dream house, bought it at age 60, and enjoyed it for maybe five years of retirement before they started having endless health issues and the house was too much work and too multi-storied to spark joy anymore. What’s the point of striving if it’s all going to melt away, you know? But it doesn’t have to be like that—we could find meaning in the process, we could smile because it happened.
I shouldn’t drink so much coffee.
: Customizing spaces
(Slightly elaborating from my reply on the 32-Bit Cafe.)
Bekah’s entry for this month’s IndieWeb carnival is a great deep dive on “skinning” (as in, WinAmp skins) that unearthed many memories I forgot I had!
I remember discovering the Zune theme for Windows XP—really the only alt skin they had, sort of a consolation prize for all the customizability taken away relative to Win 2000—and obsessively switching over all the computers in our school library to use it. It is kind of ironic that will all the “improvement” that has happened in the software development world since then—esp. popularizing the notion that everything should be a modular and separate code from data—our desktop environments have become more monolithic and their designs dictated from on high.
Bekah’s idea of the browser start page as a modern approximation of that spirit is also very insightful. It made me think about how much time I spent in my browser nowadays and how little time I spend looking at the blank desktop. In the past I obsessively tricked my desktop out with widgets and a cool wallpaper but now I’m like, do I even have any files there lol. Well, that’s a slight lie: When I first got my own apartment, I decided to be indulgent and set my desktop background to a slideshow of attractive models (because it’s my space and nobody can tell me what to do), and now I still have that slideshow and can Ctrl+D to see it when bored, but for the most part I usually have 2 to 4 maximized windows in the way.
Right now, my browser start page is nothing special, but I’d like to get around with fiddling with one of those cool self-hosted homepage things and have it show me something useful/fun like stats about my home network or RSS feed headlines or whether my automated backups are working.
: Weekend shit
Shit I did this weekend, or really yesterday because today is just a chill day:
- Played lots of guitar. Pushed the volume after learning that we have thick walls.
- Crafts fair. Saw some very beautiful, but impractical wooden bowls and ceramic mugs.
- Indian buffet, highly underrated.
- Costco run.
: Airport chapel review
I visited an airport chapel for the first time earlier this week. Honestly, a pretty underrated experience. I was the only one there, and it was more or less quiet, which is more than can be said of anywhere else at the airport.
They had Jewish, Christian, and Muslim reading material.
They had a guestbook.
Someone wrote in the guestbook: Love that there’s a chapel, but why don’t you have a Bible? It’s true; they didn’t have a Bible, just little leaflets with scripture quotes.
I just kind of sat there and zenned out for ten minutes. I didn’t leave a donation, but maybe next time. I wonder what happens if nobody donates. Do they stop cleaning the chapel?
They had prayer mats for Muslims. On the wall, there was a little compass icon pointing towards Mecca. If you think about it, placing this icon on the wall doesn’t really make any sense—the line from you toward the icon points in a different direction depending on where you set up your prayer mat, and that’s even before you try to make sense of the arrow on the compass, which was actually pointing straight up, not towards Mecca at all (last I checked). If they had asked me, I would have put the compass on the floor—in the same plane as the prayer mat—so that you can line yourself up with it no matter where you are in the room. Maybe that’s what they would’ve spend my donation on.