The Family Xmas Letter, 2023

Typical 2023: scattered focus, Felix half out of the picture

Why hello there, happy family! Where does this picture find you, and when? Surely not here, in the tiny unheated barn from which we write, nor now, on the very eve of a chilly California Christmas. No, this photo must be from a happier place and time, and certainly a warmer one. So join us, dear Reader, as we ride the Family Christmas Letter into the welcoming past, with, at our side, everyone's favorite...

THE HOUSE:

Out with the very old....

Years of training probably had you salivating for dog stories right about now, but Brekkie analytics show that most readers stop after the Qubit section so we've put her last. Besides, the main character this year is not everyone's favorite inkspot, it is the house, which we demo'd and then...well, actually, that's as far as we've gotten. Anticlimactic and maybe not the best way to start a Christmas missive, much less Christmas, but it was surely the only way to begin this long overdue project. As serial Brekkie readers will recall, moving is not an activity we enjoy, but it turns out doing it while your house is being ripped apart around you is even less fun. If you want to go for really bottom of the barrel misery, however, you should try doing this with COVID! We really, really, really hope the worst is behind us but if there isn't a 2024 Family Christmas Letter it's because it wasn't.

TALIA:

If this is what disaster looks like I'll take it

Though you may have reason to think otherwise (and certainly we do), the pandemic has ended and so, too, has Talia's COVID-focused startup. Leave it to her to make unemployment look so great some of the rest of us are tempted to try it, hint, hint. Having already stretched her legs on the Inca Trail and slogged through the mud at the wettest ever Burning Man, Talia is now training for the AIDS Ride with Team Qweirdos (real made up name: donate here!) on the assumption that her next employer will be just fine with her taking off to bike to LA. Talia turned 50 this year, was awarded a rusty railroad spike for services rendered, and got rid of her unproductive chickens less murderously than usual.

FELIX:

Bespeckled boy

Felix was a very good boy this year so Santa brought him a new bicycle (not true, it was used, and, as a reminder, it wasn't a gift), a new phone (remember last year's count?), and an updated Pet Rock. When not texting gibberish, you will find Felix traipsing through fields of giant thistles, or writing letters to the editor, or digging sea turtle nests on an equatorial beach, his favorite fave. New this year, a girlfriend! We couldn't secure photo rights in time for publication so you'll just have to take our word for it that she is taller, more athletic, and even lovelier than he is. It's been great having her around: she has taught us that it actually is possible for teenagers to drive and we have taught her that it is likewise possible to eat food from the sea.

GID:

Inspired

Gideon woke up with a Rattle and Hum Under a Blood Red Sky with bed head. He breakfasted on fruit from The Joshua Tree, roasted over The Unforgettable Fire, and set off for what turned out to be a very late lunch in San Rafael because the bus only costs a dollar and he hasn't learned to read transit maps. A quick study, he learned How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb before dinner, but somehow never did manage to clear the table afterwards. Gideon fell asleep reading Surrender, a tired Boy at the end of a long October day. During most of the other 364 days this year you would have found Gid lost in the Binding of Isaac, a video game that combines two fun things, born-again Christianity and child abuse. Gideon traveled this year to three cities, New York City, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, and now understands why you only eat cheesesteaks in one of them.

ALEC:

Not my worst day

As the photo suggests, 2023 did not always reward Alec as he deserved. He bikes for his health, but ends up in the hospital. He got his first new tie in decades but discovered he no longer fits in any of his suits. He inherited money but wishes he hadn't. And so on. At work, Alec is building the world's most advanced artificial intelligence system, but isn't that what pretty much everyone in Tech is claiming in their Family Christmas content? In the year's one unambiguous win, Alec is the last person in Marin to still refuse to take up pickleball and he is very comfortable with that so please stop asking.

QUBIT:

You can't hide the qute

Qubit joined the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater where she premiered "Dances-with-Tents," for which she won the Nobel Peace Prize. No, not really, but not less really than any of the stuff we've written about her in previous Letters. Qubit's still a dog, of course, and still adorable even when gobbling dehydrated cow gullet, wiping her nose on the dish towels, or licking your fresh-from-the-shower feet. Do not smell her breath after the cow gullet, however.

THE VACATIONS:

At the risk of interrupting your Roman holiday, we'd like to present the annual Family Vacation Slideshow, aka a lot of miscellaneous stuff from all over because both Talia and I put together an album and rather than make tough choices we just sped up the montage.

And so we come together to the end of another Family Christmas Letter. We hope this cold cry for warmth cheers your holiday and that you are facing 2024 with less trepidation than are we. Happy New Year everyone!

The Election

 

He's not joking

I have never been eligible to vote in the Netherlands but am nonetheless a regular user of the stemwijzer, an online survey meant to guide Dutch voters through a thicket of political acronyms. I consult it because it is a thrill to participate, even vicariously, in a democratic process that involves many political parties, several of whom align nicely with my own very leftie views (a sad contrast to the US elections which are, for me, an invariant choice between the lesser of two evils). My favorites never do as well as I'd like, but even the centrist Dutch parties are pursuing policies I generally support, and it is the centrist parties that are the real winners time and again.

Not this election. In a pendulum swing pushed by immigration pressures, a long-standing housing crisis, leftover resentment at COVID-era policy, and contentious reforms to agriculture and related ecological issues, the furthest-right party has taken a huge number of parliamentary seats from the former leaders of the ruling coalition, and now controls almost a quarter of the "Tweede Kamer," or Dutch House of Representatives.

The leader of the winning party, pictured above, is a demagogue whom many are comparing with Trump: anti-immigrant, isolationist, inflammatory, careless of his country's constitution, funny-looking, in short, a political party of one with strong authoritarian inclinations. He is all this, but unlike Trump, whose only policy goal is his own aggrandizement, this politician believes in something outside himself: that the presence of Islam in the Netherlands is an existential threat to his retrogressive vision for that country. And unlike Trump, whose capacity for governing is limited and who just isn't that bright, this man, Geert Wilders, is an experienced and capable politician who speaks in whole sentences and is able to comport himself as an adult.

Most of my Dutch social circle is as left-leaning as I am, and, to judge by what I read on WhatsApp, are deeply worried about what comes next. They are also no doubt humiliated and offended to discover themselves now the smaller part of an electorate promoting an extremist who so clearly rejects social values they hold dear, such as tolerance and an open embrace of the wide world outside this small country's borders. Certainly part of my horror in watching Trump's eager celebration by a huge number of my fellow citizens is the realization, always there but usually ignored, that I am so not like they.

I have bad news and worse news, friends. The bad news is that even if Wilders fails to form a ruling coalition, he isn't going away: having won, his presence, if not his premiership, will be an even greater hindrance than previously to progress as you and I define it. The worse news is that regardless of his impact on the Netherlands, the insult of his election, which is to say the impact of this on your innerlands, is never really going to get better. The world has revealed itself to be a shittier place than you thought and, in the same stroke, has become even harder to fix.

The Deepest Fake

Faking it.

The generative artificial intelligence commonly in use today relies on machine learning models that express preexisting patterns in data of a particular type. Large language models of the sort that power ChatGPT, for example, express patterns found in language. Some of these patterns are well understood, some are tacit but obvious, and some surprise us altogether. That ChatGPT produces grammatical outputs is a requirement. That it apes formulaic documents such as Christmas Letters is no surprise. But that it can speak with the voice of a trusted friend is unexpected, and maybe unwelcome.

Generative AI capable of creating trusty outputs has been demonstrated in a variety of "modes": text, image, video. It seems a safe bet that anything that can be encoded as data can be synthesized in this fashion, and we have been encoding things since the invention of the punch card. There is a lot of data out there, and much of the activity in AI circles today is focused on "acquiring" specific datasets for this purpose (hence my current job title). Data acquisition has its challenges, but it's another safe bet that anything we really want encoded as data for model training can be so encoded, so acquired, and so modeled.

Current thinking states that the more data, the more powerful the model that can be made of it. There is a lot of fine print here, but nothing yet that invalidates this rule of thumb. And since data is often a direct function of time--that is, to get more data you can take more time to collect it--we can postulate that the larger the timespan considered, the more powerful the model that results. And if you want a larger timespan you have two choices: you can wait for time to go by, or you can mine the past.

Harvesting data from the past is a core occupation of economists, climate modelers, and, of course, historians. I anticipate that it will increasingly be the focus of AI developers as well. And, whatever their intentions, as they train more models on more historical data our communal capacity to generate outputs that look like artifacts of the past will increase.

You have, I trust, read 1984, in which the main character is employed by the Ministry of Truth to refabulate historical documentation. Orwell depicts this process as highly manual, a craft really, requiring careful manipulation of physical artifacts and the filing systems of giant bureaucracies. He also imagines it as carried out by a central authority working to a monolithic plan. In a digital world and with the new generative tools at hand, history will be faked by uncountable independent operatives working to their own idiosyncratic plans.

While there is widespread concern about the use of deepfakes to create competing narratives of current events (here's one recent example), the possibility of likewise manufacturing evidence to support competing narratives of historical events is less well recognized. There is, I think, a naive assumption that over time the truth will out. My concern is that the opposite will happen, with the past becoming increasingly uncertain and contentious as historical deepfakes proliferate.

As a (mostly non-practicing) professional historian I applaud the continued reevaluation of the past. History is constantly being rewritten, which is as it should be: new historians, with new perspectives and new tools, revisit old material and this changes history. In fact, new historical source material is discovered with some regularity, and AI is an increasingly important part of that process. Again, as it should be.

But there is a great difference between historians rewriting history and conspiracy theorists doing so. Both have an agenda--historians should never be treated as objective observers--but a properly trained historian is aware of this and uses rules of evidence and documentation that, say, Holocaust deniers merrily skip by. Professional historians also tend to write books and to publish in accredited journals, both of which, even today, usually appear in printed form, which is to say as durable, difficult to corrupt (though not impossible: see photo, above) records.

But a lie, famously, runs around the globe seven times while you're using inter-library loan to find the historical truth. And in the new age of generative history those lies are going to get better and better, and more and more numerous, and faster, too. And this while fewer and fewer of us are even trying to check a paper-encoded version. No answers here, just another plea to support your local library (and, post-publication, a Times piece that offers some suggestions).

Dear Talia, here is your 50th birthday card

You are cute and tough and unfussy and strong and opinionated and beautiful and adventurous and well traveled and a great friend and you smell good and you party and you like to drive and you photograph well and your attractive children look like you. Also, you are an eater and a reader and an athlete and brave. You are good with babies and you are adorable and you are warm in bed and and you know what you like and you are not unwilling to look foolish and you are a good daughter-in-law. You are loyal and a very good parent and you are ridiculously popular and I love your smile and you have excellent taste in clothes and know what metadata is. You can carry a lot and you mix a good martini and are not afraid to get your hands dirty and you have great feet and you make eye contact and you do more than your fair share and don't even get me started about your figure. And you are tolerant to a point and you dance and you love to camp and you will go anywhere and you are cool and know interesting people and you are aging beautifully and you think for yourself and you love to cook and are good at it. Most important, and most you, you have the biggest biggest heart. The proof is right here: in hundreds of pictures there is love in your eyes. I can blog and one day may even say it: I am so grateful to have you as my partner in this life and to have already had so many years with you. Happy Birthday, wonderful you.

Mother love

 

My mother loved me. That is a central fact of my life and, I hope, of yours: a parent's love, perhaps even two. 

My mother was also a source of great irritation to me. I love my children. I am also a source of great irritation to them. Irritation is an inevitable side effect of being close--we are none of us perfectly smooth. But the irritation a child feels toward a parent is, I think, often a direct product of the parent's love, of having someone else care as much or even more than you yourself do about your successes and your failures, about your actions and decisions, about your hurts and healing. It is deeply intrusive, thus, again, irritating.

Irritation demands a response. Many children respond to the irritation of a parent's love by taking space from it, or trying to. It is part of what makes the teen years so fractious: the desire to take space is there, the ability to do so is limited. Later, we move, leaving our parents behind with their love. But absence, they say, only makes the heart grow fonder. A terrifying thought.

I left my mother and now, many decades later, she has left me. Still, my mother loved me, and that fact remains.

Found art

Gid's bestie took these voice clips from his voicemail, set them to music and video clips, and turned them in for an English assignment. I trust he got an A. I don't know what Gid did for this same assignment.

I think this is an homage, but note that the friend's updated voicemail greeting specifically requests that if the caller is Gideon, he not leave a message. Too much of a good thing, I guess.

Aging

We all fall down

As adults, we get older, for the most part, without really noticing it. Yes, I recognize I am fifty-whatever, but I don't see a lot of difference between fifty this and fifty that, or even forty something. The milestones of birthdays have long since lost their meaning, becoming just another day in which we are fractionally creakier than we were the day before.

So I am surprised to find myself suddenly feeling distinctively older than I have ever felt before. It is the unwelcome product of a bunch of unwelcome events. It started when I broke my collarbone playing in the Pacific surf some weeks ago. That was debilitating and though I think I am healing well, I am not the same. I'm also recovering from COVID, my first bout and not a terrible one by that yardstick, but draining. Isolation, bed time, it makes you feel smaller.

But it's not just health. In the midst of this I traveled to help with my mother, who was very sick and who died within a week of this last visit to her. That death obviously contributes to this feeling, but so did watching my siblings cope with that, and so does watching the family plan the funeral and make the arrangements. Funerals have before always been something to attend, not something to make decisions about.

The kids are great, but college looms, forcing we parents to think about time and its passage and the future and its implications. And the kids aren't just great, they're also challenging, and not in that simple why-won't-you-leave-me-alone-for-a-minute way they were when they were younger. Really challenging. Like, "we parents need to think about this and when we do we don't necessarily come up with the right response" challenging, not suddenly but quite pointedly at the moment.

And then there are the projects, or rather, Projects. Each is so big, and they all require management and money, and they come, as the picture above suggests, pell-mell and not necessarily when you have the capacity to deal with them. And, for us, they inevitably include lots of time spent wrestling with bureaucracy and that shit does not make you feel any more alive.

And for some reason there are lots of spiders around these days. Really big ones.

Aging happens gradually, silently for the most part, but sometimes it happens with an audible "snap."