Mid-August, the last gasp of summer before things get serious again in September. We’re all just trying to relax, maybe with a light beach read? Carl Hiaasen’s a trusty standby, and I can personally vouch for John Scalzi’s latest, the delightful The Kaiju Preservation Society. Maybe not the best time to send out a newsletter touting readings, and a couple of videos, on the latest in digital policy?

Unless! As tempting as a fizzy read may be, I’m swayed by American humorist and former Spy magazine columnist Roy Blount Jr’s contention that, actually, “Summer is the time for heavy reading, reading that works up a sweat.”

In his essay, “Summertime, and the Reading is Heavy” (reprinted in his delightful collection, Now, Where Were We?), Blount Jr argues for the heavy beach read:

“When it’s summer, people sit a lot. Or lie. Lie in the sense of recumbency. A good heavy book holds you down. It’s an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic. Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky. Put The Idiot in your lap or over your face, and you’ll know where you are going to be for the afternoon.”

I found this argument convincing when I first read it in 1990 and, as you’ll see, I’ve followed his advice ever since. So, let’s see what we can do to meet your heavy summertime reading needs. True, we don’t have anything quite as heavy as Dostoyevsky for you, but we do have Astrid Voorwinden’s PhD dissertation on smart cities that uses Sidewalk Labs’ failed Toronto experiment as a jumping-off point. What’s heavier, and more crammed with insight, than a dissertation?

The other readings and videos on offer may lack dissertation heft, but they all make for perfectly heavy summertime contemplation. State involvement in promoting and regulating the growth of artificial intelligence (I guess we’re stuck with that phrase, aren’t we?) is a recurring theme this month, whether it’s as a consideration (or re-consideration) of industrial policy (a video courtesy of the AI Now Institute), EU regulation of AI (another video, from the Geneva Graduate Institute), or a CBC report from Geoff Nixon on Canada’s efforts to “woo ‘digital nomads’” as a means of helping Canada to compete at the high-stakes global digital-economy table.

To repeat something I’m sure I’ve written in a previous newsletter, the CBC report on digital nomads served for me as a reminder that the digital revolution has probably changed the world less than we might have imagined. Nixon’s “digital nomads” seem to be the latest version of the rootless transnational businessmen that have been a feature of global political economy for decades now (for me, it brought to mind Pico Iyer’s 2001 memoir The Global Soul, which contemplated the nature and consequences of this rootlessness).

Elsewhere, and still on the labour front, Andrew Deck’s fascinating article on how generative AI is transforming outsourced labour highlights how, while generative AI is shaping the lives of the precarious workers that both use generative AI and make it run, it’s doing so within the same context of Northern exploitation of Southern labour that long predates the rise of AI. The details are the different, but the story’s the same.

That said, the details are fascinating, and the article includes a very useful side-by-side demonstration of how these outsourced workers perform their tasks (e.g., copywriting, graphic art) with and without AI. Very clever.

What’s heavier, and thus more appropriate for some poolside summer reading, than power itself? In that vein (and how’s that for a transition?), we highlight articles that reconsider the concept of free digital labour (by Carlo Vercellone, Antonio Di Stasio, also a nice complement to the generative AI labour piece), and explore the case for the democratization of AI, the latter by John W. Murphy and Randon R. Taylor. And in keeping with the notion that digital spaces are not sui generis, Sarah J. Jackson and Daniel Kreiss turn to existing theories and place right-wing publics on digital networks within a larger context that centres power and social structures. And there’s certainly power imbalances at play in the NYU Center for Human Rights and Global Justice’s discussion of digital public infrastructure and digital identification systems.

If you’re ready to go really deep, try grappling with the idea, proffered by Jonathan Hall KC, that fundamental human rights do not provide a very useful framework for dealing with content moderation for counterterrorism. His argument’s definitely worth working through.

All fine works, and all appropriately heavy. Still, since Roy Blount Jr’s essay was dedicated to heavy fiction, I’ll end with a newsletter-appropriate novel that kicked off my own 2023 summertime reading.

In the era of generative AI, underwritten by a belief that the entire world can be quantified completely, Samuel Beckett’s Watt (1953) offers a reminder of the limits of rationality and how easily our misguided faith in logic can lead us astray. What is the error-prone ChatGPT other than “a dimwitted Mr. Spock,” as New Yorker writer describes Watt’s titular character: “helplessly, pedantically logical,” possessing little-to-no actual understanding of the world? And what does their faith in generative AI tell us of ChatGPT’s creators and boosters?

Heavy, right?

- Blayne Haggart