Personal Note: My new single, In This Hotel Room, released today!

Hello, friends! I'm happy to announce my latest new original single, In This Hotel Room, was released today! As always, the song is on all the popular music streaming services. You can also see the lyric video and hear the song on my YouTube channel. Just click the link in my "favorites" list in the right hand margin of this blog to go there.

This song was an interesting change-up for me: it's a slower, quieter story about a modern romance. And check out the cool orchestral arrangement, added courtesy of sound engineer Matt Taylor at Echo Lake Studios, who also mixed and mastered the song. Having a string section and a French horn sound in one of my songs is a new and intriguing experience!

 

For those who are new to this blog, and my other creative interests, I've been writing and recording original songs since 2021. My style is essentially rock, but with country, folk and Americana elements too, depending on the song. I released my first album, Strangers, in 2023, then took a hiatus from recording in 2024 while working on a memoir writing project. But now I'm back at it, with this song and another one I released in July called Unknown Land. 

 

If you want to hear my other songs, you can listen and watch the music videos on my YouTube channel, or find just the songs on all the common music streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and Pandora. Look for "Wayne Parker", and make sure it's the one with the Strangers album listed (to be sure it's my page). 

 

I'll be back soon with a new post. Happy weekend! 

Substack Writer Review: Christopher Armitage and the Existentialist Republic.

As most of my readers probably know, I recently joined Substack and began distributing my articles from The Memory Cache blog via Substack emails as well. 

In the past year, as media consolidation under the control of billionaires has accelerated, and those wealthy corporations and owners have bent the knee to the current regime in Washington, many talented and well-known writers and thinkers have fled to Substack from mainstream media platforms. That has made Substack a great place to find good writing and opinion on current events.

 

I subscribe to a number of popular Substack writers, and would recommend any and all of them. My list includes Heather Cox Richardson, the noted American historian; Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who resigned from the New York Times; Timothy Snyder, famed historian of authoritarianism who wrote On Tyranny and On Freedom; and several others. Most of the people on my list would be familiar as regular guest commentators to anyone who’s spent time in the past few years watching CNN or MSNBC. I’m sure there are many other good ones too, if only I had time to keep up with the ones I’m already reading.

 

Interestingly, though, the writer who has most caught my attention in recent weeks is someone I’ve never seen on TV, or heard of before. I’m not even sure how I first had one of his emails show up in my inbox, but after I’d read a few of them, I quickly subscribed. And having followed him now for a couple of months, I am recommending him to everyone who is concerned about the ongoing political, economic and moral calamity of the Trump 2.o administration and our current moment.

 

His name is Christopher Armitage, and he writes under the publication name of “The Existentialist Republic”. I don’t know him, or that much about his life story, and because of that, in recommending him I assume the risk that there may be negative things about him and his background I don’t know. I have no reason to think so, but I can’t be certain. It’s just a caveat.

 

What I do know based on what I found online (and what he has written) is that he lives in Spokane, Washington. He is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, with multiple deployments overseas. He also has experience as a security consultant, and a background in law enforcement and prison administration. He has written several books and peer-reviewed research articles, including one book on police reform and another on the psychological roots of American conservatism. He ran as a Democrat for Congress in 2020, but lost in the primary. He also claims to live alone with three cats.

 

That’s what I know about him so far. I’ve never seen him on TV, but he has 37,000 subscribers on Substack. Apparently I’m not the only person taking him and his writing seriously. So what does he have to say?

 

In his almost daily email articles, he has focused on a few recurring ideas and themes, which he bolsters with well-footnoted research from a wide range of credible sources, including legal decisions and court opinions, news stories, histories, studies and position papers. The major themes include:

 

·       American democracy at the federal level is already in a death spiral due to corporate and right-wing ideological capture of Congress, the Supreme Court, and mass media, along with gerrymandering and the undemocratic elements of the Constitution itself. He explains and provides extensive examples and reasoning to support this assessment.

 

·       The crisis posed by Trump’s authoritarianism and his regime’s lawlessness and corruption can best be opposed by using the same kinds of state power, aggressive tactics and local prerogatives that the right has used for generations to resist federal authority.

 

·       He advocates for “soft secession” by blue states. This is not a call for an “armed civil war” type of secession, but rather for developing alliances between blue states, and building new state-based institutions to resist the worst policies of the current federal regime, and to provide citizens in blue states with the social goods and safety net that the federal government seems so determined not to provide to the nation’s people.     

 

His daily articles are full of specific, detailed plans and legal tactics that could plausibly be carried out, and would almost surely be popular in at least the half of the country that wants to live in a democratic society of equal rights, the rule of law, prosperity, fairness and generosity, along with a strong social safety net.

 

One idea of his I have heard elsewhere advocates states withholding or delaying tax payments to the federal government, based on several possible legal theories. Because the larger blue states in general are wealthier and more populous, and pay more tax than they get back from the federal government, shutting off the flow of tax money to the feds and needy red states would be a powerful means of exerting financial and political pressure. I have read elsewhere that several large Democratic-controlled states are already considering this option. 

 

In another recent article, Armitage pointed out a clause in the Affordable Care Act that allows states to band together to provide access to healthcare plans across multiple states. He writes that this was written into the law as a concession to Republicans, to let red states join together to offer cheaper, less generous policies than offered by the federal government through Obamacare. But ironically, he argues, blue states could band together to develop multi-state healthcare plans where they could leverage their combined economic clout and population power to create major, unified multi-state single payer systems, all without any federal means of stopping them (since it's allowed under the existing ACA law).

He has also advocated for the idea that blue state attorney generals could and should bring the full force of state law against federal officials who commit state crimes and corruption under supposed federal authority. Even if these cases (civil and criminal) don’t always succeed, he contends, they can make the individual cost and personal risk to federal officials much higher, and slow things down. He provides examples of how and when this has been done. And as he points out, this is just flipping the script on MAGA Republicans: it’s showing that Democratic-controlled states too can assert their rights boldly, and use state legal systems to frustrate overreaching and unpopular actions by federal officials from the opposing political camp.

 

He has so many good and novel ideas and observations, many of which I’ve heard from no one else, that it’s hard to keep track of them all. But what I also really like is that after proposing these creative ways to fight back effectively against the Trump regime at the state level, protect the people and institutions in our states under assault, and build the sort of just and compassionate society we want to live in, he gives his readers the information to advocate for these ideas, by providing the contact information for the state officials in our own states to whom the ideas should be addressed.  

 

Of course, no one has all the right ideas, and after the 2025 electoral results on Tuesday, many people might say that now those who want to save democracy and the rule of law should focus on winning the 2026 mid-term elections as the best means for resisting Trump and his followers. But in the meantime, if you are looking for positive, constructive, realistic and original ideas for how to defend democracy and a free, prosperous American society, you’ll find them in Christopher Armitage’s Substack writing at The Existentialist Republic. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization (2025). Bill McKibben

For those who don’t know, Bill McKibben is a lifelong environmental activist, journalist and author of more than twenty books. His first book, The End of Nature (1989), was one of the first books about climate change written for general audiences, and he has written many other books about the environment and humans ever since. He is also one of the founders of the climate change activist group 350.org, as well as Third Act, an environmental activist group for seniors.

So presumably we can expect dire warnings of impending environmental disaster from any new McKibben book, right? But with his new book, Here Comes the Sun, we get something unexpected – a very hopeful book in this time of environmental and political peril.

I was fortunate to be able to hear the author speak a few weeks ago, when he was in town for Seattle Arts and Lectures, and his talk in person reinforced the message of this new book. The message is this: even though our political situation may be dire, the worldwide prospects for replacing the fossil fuel industry with renewable energy sources have never been greater.

McKibben tells the story of how solar and wind power technology is being adopted around the world at rates never seen before. He contrasts our current situation during the second Trump administration in the United States, where the U.S. government is doing everything it can to preserve fossil fuel industries and undermine or block renewables, with both the ongoing rapid growth in renewable energy and storage capacity here in our own country (including in very red states), and astounding increases in renewable energy generation in many other parts of the world.

He particularly contrasts the obstructionist energy policies of the U.S. administration with China’s decision to become the manufacturing center for renewable energy generation technology, and other hardware and software needed for electric-based economies around the world. The result has been that the cost of solar panels is continuing to drop rapidly, as supplies of Chinese solar panels increase and economies of scale kick in.

Countries around the world are taking rapid advantage of Chinese solar equipment, and McKibben points out that China is now rapidly becoming the top manufacturer of affordable, high-quality electric vehicles and appliances in the world too.

Not content to just make these general assertions, he provides charts and graphs to demonstrate how much of the power needs here and abroad are now coming from renewable energy sources, and to show that a transition to a new electric age appears to be happening much faster than we thought. He also has some remarkable recent anecdotes to share to support this claim.

For example, in one of the poorest regions of Pakistan, local power companies began to notice the strange phenomenon of falling demand for power from consumers during the past year. It turned out that poor Pakistani people and communities were importing cheap solar panels from China, and hooking them up locally, thus creating decentralized electric power sources that cost little, and freed them from needing their power utility’s fossil fuel-generated power.

Similar stories are emerging from around the world, as other countries and their peoples discover that setting up solar and wind power is a far cheaper and easier solution to their power needs than importing fossil fuels. He mentions the fact that solar power units are now being sold in many countries as “balcony” units than can be purchased from big box stores, hung outside of apartments, and plugged right into a wall socket to feed energy into the grid. 

He also discusses the importance of improvements in battery technology, production and deployments, and how that is helping to address the problem of how to guarantee electricity supplies remain available during the times when the sun isn't out or the wind isn't blowing.

McKibben is not underestimating the political obstacles to replacing fossil fuels, particularly here in the U.S., but he is trying to make the case for why renewable energy has suddenly become the obvious and most practical solution to the world’s power needs. One of his main talking points is that renewables are no longer the “alternatives” to fossil fuels, and we should stop thinking of them as just backups or "next best" solutions to fossil fuels. 

In fact, he claims, they are now the obvious go-to solution, because they are less expensive, cleaner, more cost-effective over time, and now abundantly available due especially to Chinese manufacturing and sales. All we need to do is keep deploying them, and prevent the fossil fuel companies and their supporters in politics and power utilities from obstructing progress in the necessary transition away from fossil fuels.

This is an up-to-the-minute primer on renewable energy, and why and how solar and wind power, along with fast-increasing energy storage technologies, are now poised to take us into a new electric age, even in a time of political adversity. If some of his predictions seem a little overly rosy, it is still an uplifting and encouraging story in an often dark and demoralizing time.

Here Comes the Sun is a quick read and an optimistic tale, just what we need to hear at this moment, as the current U.S. administration tries to dismantle environmental protections, and drag our energy systems back to the mid-twentieth century. Recommended.

Book Review: More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity (2025). Adam Becker.

I’ve been very interested lately in artificial intelligence (AI) and our current fears and hopes about it, and have done a lot of reading on the topic. From the title, this book looked like it might be more of the same. But actually this is the one book I’ve read that goes deeper into the underlying problem behind not only AI, but also many of the other themes and obsessions occupying the attention of our high-tech oligarchs.

The basic story here is surprisingly easy to grasp. A small circle of grown-up boys, fascinated by the science fiction stories of the mid-twentieth century they read as children, have become the leaders of new technology empires, often based on devices and applications they invented. In the process, they became so fabulously wealthy that they can now exert disproportionate influence on policy and funding for research and development of new technologies that echo the science fiction stories they loved in their youth.

An unfortunately common collateral development was that as they became richer and more powerful, these men increasingly began to fall victim to “the engineer’s fallacy” – the idea that because they had invented or designed something remarkable, and had become vastly wealthy using their bright intellects, engineering skills, social connections and astonishingly good luck, that they were also the smartest people in every domain of knowledge and policy, even ones in which they had no training or relevant experience.

It is true that these "bright boys" have brought much of mid-twentieth century science fiction into being. Our computers, our global electronic networks, our smartphones, our software, our healthcare, our transportation systems – all these science and technology miracles, and many more, have been brought into being in our lifetimes by some of these men, in ways that do resemble science fiction stories of the past century. 

And certainly there will be more amazing technology developments and scientific leaps ahead for humanity, presuming that the second Trump administration doesn’t destroy our ability to do science and educate our young to prepare them for the future. The problem is that although many astonishing breakthroughs have occurred, that doesn’t mean that every 20th century science fiction plot can come true, or will. Some of them are just fantasies, and will remain so.

Becker does a wonderful job inventorying the wrong turns and bad ideas now being promoted by a familiar cast of characters: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Marc Andressen, and others in their Silicon Valley circles who are less well known to us. In this absorbing walk through the tech bros’ grandest dreams, the author lays bare the shaky scientific foundations on which their hyped-up plans rest, their problematic ethical and philosophical roots, and the personal quirks of the leaders who have been involved in promoting them.

Early on, there is an excellent discussion of the rise of “effective altruism” (EA). This was originally conceived of as an approach to life and charity that suggested that giving should be based on a moral imperative to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people per dollar. Many of the current generation of wealthy tech leaders were enthusiasts. It sounded morally very defensible in theory.

But then the tech and finance types who found it so appealing for its rational-sounding ethics began to come up with other complementary ideas, like “long termism” – the notion that effective giving should be based on the number of lives saved across all future time.

When combined with outlandish beliefs about space colonization, life extension, eugenics and other unproven technologies and science, this quickly led EA enthusiasts in high tech to rationalize focusing their investments on those areas where there was a great deal of money to be made, while feeling ethically excused from dealing with any contemporary problem areas or suffering. From there, the author traces how EA and its offspring tendencies have devolved into various factions and cults.

Becker particularly caught my attention with his history of K. Eric Drexler, the MIT-trained cross-disciplinary engineer and scientist who wrote Engines of Creation in 1986, the book which launched the nanotechnology revolution. (I met Drexler while he was promoting his book and ideas back then, and even became enthusiastic about his theories for a time, after hearing him speak at a conference of space colonization enthusiasts).

Drexler’s thrilling idea was that we would soon be able to utterly transform the world, create inexhaustible wealth, fix all diseases, cure aging, and create colonies in space, using tiny robot engines to build and transform materials at the molecular level. This was nanotechnology as he defined and explained it, and it sounded like magic come true.

Drexler had some brilliant insights, based on an idea originally voiced by the famous physicist Richard Feynmann. As the first and greatest promoter of this new field he conceptualized – “nanotechnology” – Drexler really did set off a “race to the bottom” in the late 1980s and 1990s for research and development in many different disciplines, most notably in medicine, genetics and materials sciences. Large amounts of money would be allocated for nanotechnology R&D based on his ideas and his persuasive promotion of them, and many important scientific advances did happen as a result.

The problem was, as Becker explains, that Drexler’s actual plan – building invisibly small smart robots that could manufacture substances and products molecule by molecule – has still never happened. It doesn’t appear to be practical for a variety of physical and financial reasons. After a while, despite the lack of progress in achieving the specific nanotech engineering vision he promoted, Drexler’s dreams for the nanotechnology golden age, and his group of followers, increasingly took on the appearance of other tech cults or religions. As with EA and AI, this led inevitably to schism and apostasy among his true believers.

Becker goes on to dismantle other fantasies and wishful thinking of his wealthy tech subjects. He shows why the belief in artificial general intelligence (AGI) in the very near future appears to be an article of faith in AI business circles, but not one that can be supported by either the current large language models (LLM) used to train AI, or Moore’s Law (which appears to be reaching its end).

As he explains in detail, the belief in infinite technical acceleration in AI R&D breakthroughs, and in fast-doubling computing power, is already beginning to crash against physical, technical and financial limitations imposed by  the real world, and must inevitably do so.

The author points out that exponential growth cannot continue forever in any system, and it won’t. But without that kind of rapid growth in computing power, the common theory in the AI industry that scaling up existing AI models will inevitably lead to AGI simply collapses. It is a wan hope and a marketing ploy, not a realistic prediction.

Becker does a similarly effective job demolishing the idea of space colonization, which billionaires  like Musk and Bezos believe is inevitable, essential to humanity’s survival, and likely to occur very soon. Becker claims (and I agree) that space colonization could happen only over a very long time, likely centuries or millenia, or more likely never, and for very good and obvious reasons.

(For an amusing and more extensive book-length analysis of the many barriers to space colonization, read A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? (2023), by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, which I also enjoyed reading recently).

Becker notes that the surface of Mars contains an abundant substance, perchlorate, that is poisonous to humans, a fact discovered by the robotic Mars landers. Cosmic radiation and lack of earth-equivalent gravity are also already known to degrade the human body in space. All known planetary bodies in the solar system except Earth cannot sustain human life for many reasons – no air, wrong temperatures, too much radiation, too much or too little gravity, poisonous environments and so on. There are simply limits to what even clever engineering can overcome.

Space colonization would also require safely transporting a huge number of people, probably hundreds of thousands or millions (needed to sustain a healthy population with sufficient genetic diversity) across vast distances and time periods, by some means of mass space travel not yet invented, and where necessities of colonization such as human reproduction are unproven, unlikely or impossible. Even attempting reproduction in space would involve ethically indefensible experimentation on any future human children who might be created.

And then there is the most obvious other question. How many actual humans on Earth would risk their life and future to attempt to live on a deadly planet Mars, or in a manufactured deep space colony? The obvious answer is “not very many”.

In short, space colonization won’t happen in any near-term foreseeable future, but spending billions on it can be much more fun, exciting and profitable than admitting to or worrying about solving the very real and immediate problems humanity faces here on its home planet.

Becker goes on to describe and then puncture more sacred fantasies of the ultra-rich tech oligarchs. Infinite life extension. Elaborate bunkers and preparations for surviving social collapse. Uploading human consciousness to the cloud, and the predicted impending Singularity to be caused by AI.

Becker notes (as others have also observed) that the idea of the Singularity, so popular in AI circles, bears more resemblance to ancient religious ideas like the Rapture or Armageddon, in its vision of a mysterious godlike power taking control of humanity’s fate and giving everyone eternal life in “heaven”, than it does to any scientifically-based projection of our likely futures.

Becker ties many of these tech bro aspirations back to the universal desire to escape death. It must be demoralizing for many of these powerful men to have so conquered this material world, yet to face the same aging process and ultimate demise as the rest of us. And they’re not going quietly into that night. They have their sci-fi visions of how to escape it, and the money to pursue those visions, no matter how outlandish and hopeless their plans may be.

And that, as Becker finally concludes in the last two pages of this essential book, is the root of the problem these few mega-rich, mostly white male tech leaders now pose for humanity.

Like the rest of us, they are free to pursue their dreams, make mistakes, have foolish ideas and hopes, and try to bring to life the fantastic stories they loved in their childhoods, regardless of how impossible or meaningless their goals might seem to others. But unlike the rest of us, they have the money and power to make their vain pursuits everyone else’s problem, and to waste huge financial and social resources that might be far better applied to fixing humanity’s real and immediate challenges.

The underlying problem here, Becker concludes, is billionaires, especially tech billionaires with childish beliefs based on sci-fi fantasies. If it weren’t for their power and wealth, he suggests, modern society wouldn’t be taking most of their grandiose but absurd ideas as seriously as we do.

After reading this very entertaining and well-researched book, and its thorough debunking of the science and logic behind these high tech moguls’ expensive hobbies, fetishes and plans, I would hope most readers would agree with his conclusions. That’s an important recognition for all of us as we consider any future hype, business decisions and political machinations of this small but massively influential power elite.

They may have won life’s financial lottery, but they aren’t necessarily wiser or more well-meaning than the rest of us. We shouldn’t believe they are, just because they’re fabulously rich, and can harness a massive hype machine and political influence to promote their ideas. 

Adam Becker has written the definitive expose’ on the Silicon Valley tech elite, and their flawed visions of the future. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Sociopath: A Memoir (2024). Patric Gagne, PhD.

Years ago, I read and reviewed The Sociopath Next Door (2005) by Martha Stout, an eye-opening survey of sociopathy by a clinical psychologist with a career specialty in treating subjects with this condition. From that book, I learned that sociopathy is generally characterized by the lack of normal human empathy towards others, along with a lack of moral inhibitions and remorse. It is usually accompanied by a range of anti-social behaviors, and is believed to exist in about 4% of the human population, a figure which appears to be relatively consistent across different ethnic groups.

I have remained interested in the topic ever since, the more so throughout the first and now second Trump administrations, during which sociopathic behavior and its extreme adverse effects on other people have been on daily public display in the Oval Office, and from other major figures within the administration and the MAGA Republican Party. 

For that reason, when I saw reviews of Dr. Patric Gagne’s book Sociopath: A Memoir last year, I knew I would have to read it. It seemed almost unbelievable that an actual sociopath would not only publicly confess to having this condition, but would be willing to write a book-length autobiography about herself, describing what all she had done, and what she had felt or not felt about it.

Dr. Gagne tells a remarkable and even sympathetic story about her life and condition. She doesn’t hide who she is, and many of the shocking things she’s done in the course of growing up and slowly gaining insight into herself. She describes stabbing a classmate as a second grader with a pencil (one of the few transgressions for which she got in trouble), and a habit she developed early on of breaking into neighbors’ houses, scouting them and hanging out in them while the owners were away. She admits to stealing, lying and enjoying getting away with things she knew were not socially or legally acceptable. And she does confess to a lack of remorse or empathy for others.

She was also very smart. Her intelligence helped her do well in school, as well as helping her learn to conceal her lack of empathy and her deceitful behaviors from most other people. Of course, her parents and family eventually figured out that something wasn’t right with her, but she was bright and high-functioning, as many sociopaths are.

At the time she was growing up, there wasn’t yet a huge awareness or large body of psychological research on sociopathy. What little information there was tended to be focused on criminal psychopaths and older people who were institutionalized, which didn’t help her understand why and how she was different from her family members, and others she encountered at school and in the neighborhood.

This is an important and fascinating story of how a gifted sociopathic woman tried to cope with her lack of empathy and inability to connect with people around her emotionally, and to understand the traits that are hallmarks of her condition. She takes us through her childhood of maladaptive behaviors, her encounters with therapists as an adolescent, and ultimately the fortuitous connections she made at university that allowed her to begin to study and research sociopathy as a  college student and then an academic.

One particularly interesting part of her story was her description of a sort of “pressure” in her head that from an early age drove her to commit anti-social and forbidden acts, which were the only way she knew as a child to relieve this pressure that would build up inside her head. As she grew older, she slowly began to find alternative techniques she could use to relieve this pressure, and teach herself not to act out as a remedy to her inner drive to misbehave.

Eventually, in her own determination to figure out how to fit into normal society, and how to avoid doing “wrong” even though she didn’t feel any empathy or remorse herself, she gained the credentials as a psychologist (including her PhD) that allowed her to counsel and treat other sociopaths, and do social and psychological research on the condition.

Amazingly, Dr. Gagne also found love with a partner, built a community of friends, and had children she cares for and loves. She tells the story of those relationships, how they began, the troubles she encountered in maintaining them, and lessons she learned along the way that helped her fit in and be successful, despite the void in her where caring and empathy should have been.

She also has found meaning in a professional life devoted to helping other people like herself adapt to what she believes is another form of neurodiversity, and find ways to fit into the larger human community that fears and despises them.

I was truly impressed by her account, her intellect and her insights. And I believe she is sincere, honest and well-meaning, although none of those attributes are ordinarily characteristics of sociopathic personalities.

On the other hand, I couldn’t avoid the feeling that she and her story are a sort of black swan event. I hope she is successful in treating others with this same condition, and admire all she has done and accomplished, while also maintaining deep reservations that the vast majority of sociopaths among us will ever travel the relatively hopeful and constructive path she found for herself.

It would take many more success stories like hers to convince me that we would ever be wise to let down our individual and collective defenses against these wolves among us. And now watching the rise of a whole political party and movement in America, led by obvious sociopaths who obey no rules or laws, clearly enjoy inflicting fear and violence on others, and show absolutely no remorse for their crimes is not helping to assuage my fears about the threats that sociopaths continue to pose to the rest of us.

Nevertheless, this well-written and highly readable memoir is an important contribution to our understanding of the sociopathic condition and the people who have it. It is a useful counterpoint and alternative perspective to books like The Sociopath Next Door, one informed by living with the condition and describing it from the inside. Highly recommended.

TV Review: The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal. On Amazon Prime (2025).

New readers of mine on The Memory Cache, and now on Substack, may not be aware that as a lifelong amateur rock musician and music fan myself, I love reading about and watching videos about bands and rock stars that I like. When I discover a new gem of music lore, whether book, movie or TV, I devour it, and if it’s good, I’ll share it with my readers.

I’ve recently read two important and excellent rock biographies, and I hope to review them soon. But today I want to focus on an unexpected rock documentary I discovered by accident about a band I’d almost never heard of before.

The documentary (in four episodes) is about a Canadian band called The Tragically Hip. When I saw it on the Amazon Prime show lists, I was really curious, since it’s not often that you hear of a major rock documentary about a band that’s never even been on your radar.

This documentary pulled me in right from the start.  It begins by tracing the five band members as teenagers in their homes in the modest-sized Canadian city of Kingston, Ontario in the early 1980s, and describes how the eventual members met and started playing music together in high school. We are introduced to each of the members, including Gord Downie, the lead singer; Rob Baker, lead guitar; Gord Sinclair, Bass; Paul Langlois, rhythm guitar; and drummer Johnny Fay.

As the documentary unfolds, we meet other incidental characters, such as their several managers and producers, family members, and a variety of their devoted fans offering commentary, including famous Canadian actors like Dan Akroyd and Will Arnett,  and even former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was a dedicated fan.

We learn the whole story of how the Tragically Hip slowly started learning how to write songs, record best-selling records, and build an intensely  loyal following by playing great live shows in an endless string of small clubs and venues in towns across Canada. As their music began to gain a larger following across Canada, they gradually played larger and larger venues, eventually becoming a huge super-group that played arena tours, and ultimately was widely recognized as "Canada's band".

In the course of the four episodes, there are of course interview clips with all the band members, offering reminisces and perspectives on everything they went through together. In many ways, it’s similar to documentaries I’ve seen about other great bands and rock artists, like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Pearl Jam. Long-lived epic rock bands tend to go through many similar stages in the life cycle of the bands and their members, starting with their youthful experiences and early creativity, the deliberate processes and the flukes of band formation, the recording, songwriting, touring, the eventual families and friendships that develop and sometimes fall apart, and so on. The Hips’ long career together from the early 1980s through 2016 has all of those familiar rock star story elements. 

But I also noticed some special and unique aspects to the Tragically Hip’s story that were especially moving and appealing. Perhaps the most important part of the story was about love: their love for each other, and the close friendships of the five band members, the love they showed for their fans, and the love the fans and the Canadian nation ultimately felt for them.

Nothing drove that home like the sad and surprising twist in their story, which was Gord Downie’s diagnosis and losing struggle with brain cancer. As the lyricist and charismatic front man of the band, after thirty years in the Canadian public’s spotlight, he was a truly beloved figure, who was suddenly stricken much too early with a disease that would come for his mind, his memory and his ability to write and perform, before ultimately taking his life in 2017.

Astonishingly though, after a surgery that left him with his memory and his ability to perform seriously impaired, he and the band made the incredibly brave decision to do one more tour across Canada. Through an almost unbelievable act of will, he managed to relearn the songs and endure the rigors of a final tour of sold-out arena dates. The final performance was broadcast nationally, and played to crowds in venues across Canada.

Once I had seen this story, I had to immediately go track down their albums and catalog, to get more of a sense of their music. And it’s really good! It sounds like mainstream classic rock in style, with the idiosyncratic and intriguing lyrics and voice of Gordie Downie. If I were to try to capture what it’s like, I’d say it sounds most reminiscent to me of R.E.M., with some Pearl Jam and Rolling Stones mixed in. But really, they’re their own unique sound and style.

Downie was particularly likely to choose stories from Canadian history and culture for his lyrics, part of what so endeared him to his nation’s people.  In his last years, he also wrote about and made connections with the people from some of the First Nations (indigenous) Canadian tribes.

Although the Tragically Hip did perform many times in the United States, including at Woodstock ’99, the documentary discusses a common refrain the Hip heard throughout their long career, which was “why couldn’t you make it in the States?”. Even though the members must have grown very tired of the question, in the end it didn’t seem to matter to them that much. They were a giant success in their own land, and that would seem to have been enough. And fortunately for those of us in the U.S.A. who missed them during their long career in Canada, we can still hear their music recordings and watch some of their performances on YouTube.   

The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal is a truly worthwhile rock documentary about the greatest rock band you’ve never heard of. On Amazon Prime. Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024). Jonathan Haidt.

In the course of my recent reading on the topics of the attention economy, and the effects of our society’s overload of attention-disrupting modern  technologies such as smartphones and social media, I have noticed repeated references to Jonathan’s Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation as an important contribution to the conversation.

After reading it, I understand why people keep citing this book and the author’s insights into the problems we are facing as a result of social media and the rise of the attention economy. It’s an exhaustive and impressive look at a huge problem we now face, one that perhaps wasn’t even that apparent to many of us until now.

The problem that Haidt sets out to first demonstrate and then explain is the disastrous effect on the mental health of the children of Gen Z, especially as pre-teens and early adolescents, from the almost overnight adoption of smartphones and social media apps in the period from 2008 (when the Apple iPhone was first released) until the present.

What Haidt claims is that we (as a society) have been unintentionally running a vast social and psychological experiment on the Gen Z cohort of kids, an experiment which has resulted in a verifiable epidemic of mental illness among these children. The main symptoms are increased depression and anxiety in our young people, the first humans to grow up in the age of smartphones and social media apps.

He calls this experiment “the Great Rewiring”. Many people have already drawn connections between social media, the internet, the attention economy and a variety of obvious related negative consequences to our social and political life. What’s new and unique here is that Haidt recognized and focused on a specific subset of this larger set of contemporary societal problems. His topic is why smartphones and social media are having a particularly devastating impact on our children.

The book is divided into four sections. In the first section, the author draws on extensive and detailed medical and social science research, especially longitudinal studies of children’s mental health in the U.S. and abroad, to prove clearly that pre-teen and teen mental health has deteriorated massively during the early years of the smartphone age, and to prove the correlation with the onset of social media apps on smartphones. 

In the second section, he talks about the nature of childhood, what its social and psychological needs and phases are under both healthy and thwarted developmental conditions, and how and why our society as a whole is not giving children what they need to grow into healthy and happy adults.

In the third section, Haidt shows in great detail the harms that flowed from what he calls switching to “phone-based childhoods”, and the rapid switch we made to that new type of childhood in the era of 2008 to 2020 or so.

An important distinction he highlights is the difference between the “embodied” childhoods that children have always had, where their experiences and learning are naturally centered in their own bodies and their “in-person” relationship to the physical world, versus the “disembodied” phone-based childhood of today, where their minds and attention are engaged for most of the day with the virtual world, while their bodies remain  inactive.

He also explores four crucial and specific areas of harm to children’s psychological and emotional development that have resulted from the phone-based childhood: sleep deprivation, social deprivation, attention fragmentation and addiction. In doing so, he provides many studies and statistics to show how smartphones and social media use by  children specifically cause these developmental disruptions.  

In the fourth part of the book, the author examines some of the challenges of trying to undo the damage we’ve done, and how we might reverse the social behavior, laws and assumptions that have led to much of the harm that has resulted from ubiquitous smartphone and social media use by children.

This book is rich in analysis and insights into child development, and how changing social and technological conditions have impacted how children grow and learn, both for better and for worse. For example, he presents a surprising picture of how boys and girls (in general) have both been negatively impacted by the changing conditions of childhood in the online age, but (again, in general) in different ways.

As he describes and demonstrates, because girls tend to be more drawn toward socializing with their peers, to show more desire for group membership, and to have a stronger drive for social relationships and in-group status during puberty than boys do, social media apps on smartphones have tended to play the dominant role in girls’ "phone-based childhoods", and the most psychologically destructive one.

The constant need to curate personal brands, focus on making oneself look beautiful and sexy, say the right things in posts to win approval from a faceless crowd of possible critics, contend with online trolling and predators, and try to keep up with the impossible beauty and fashion standards of online influencers, are some of the examples of the exhausting and demoralizing process of being a young girl on social media that Haidt describes.  

For boys, though, Haidt suggests their more individual focused drive toward outwardly directed action and activity in puberty, rather than on socializing and in-group status, has tended to lead them much more toward heavy involvement in online gaming and pornography. Those online activities by boys actually showed up earlier, in the 1990s, before the age of social media, and have tended to increase many boys’ social isolation.

These two online activities harm boys in different ways. Gaming encourages hyper-aggressive and anti-social behavior, and social isolation. Porn has led boys to learn to resort to the “friction-free” and risk-free viewing of an infinite supply and variety of porn as a way to cope with their budding sexual urges and fears, rather than spending the time and taking the emotional risk of learning how to actually interact with potential romantic and sexual partners in the real world. This can leave them ill-equipped for developing healthy relationships, which in turn often leads to depression, anger and misogynistic behavior.

Of course, these are only sex-based tendencies, not absolutes. Boys use social media too, and girls play online games and sometimes view porn. The types of problems and dysfunctions caused by the different online options readily available on smartphones apply to both sexes. Still, the generalizations are reflected in data from studies of teen online behavior, and are useful for understanding the different relative risks and problems for each sex. The main point is that the adverse effects of a “phone-based childhood”, such as lower self-esteem, lack of self-confidence, loneliness, and feelings of worthlessness and pointlessness are likely to harm both girls and boys.

But there is another main thread (and causative factor) running through The Anxious Generation in parallel with the author’s focus on the disruptions caused by social media and smartphones. Haidt contends that the evolution of television as a mass media, along with cable news and the internet, have led to overly protective parenting practices and social norms that are increasingly at odds with what children need (and have always needed) to grow up to become strong, emotionally healthy and resilient adults.

He argues that our mass media and social media have created a pervasive fear for parents about the risks to children from child abduction, pedophilia, sex trafficking and all the other perils of the world, fears that he contends are out of proportion to the actual risk. This constant media-driven amplification of our fears about children’s safety has led to parents becoming increasingly unwilling to allow children the level of freedom they need to explore, to take risks, and to spend enough time alone and with their peers figuring things out for themselves, as has been customary throughout human history.

He invites older readers in particular to remember how we grew up, and the amount of freedom we had to roam our neighborhoods, to make mistakes and occasionally get a little hurt, to play alone and with friends by ourselves, and to organize our own activities and entertainment unsupervised by adults from an early age. He then contrasts that with today’s world of helicopter parenting, play dates under constant watchful parental eyes and guidance, and youth sports organized and run by parents rather than the kids.

This crucial concept, which he credits to his friend and collaborator Lenore Skenazy and her influential book Free-Range Kids (2009), asserts that the current super-protective practices and social norms around what children can and can’t do only began to develop in the 1980s and 1990s, but have now reached a point of restrictiveness on children’s free play and exploration which is extreme compared to the rest of human history, and detrimental to normal child development.

Haidt then makes the further connection that these recent changes in parenting norms and exaggerated fears about child safety roughly coincided with the arrival of smartphones and social media use by this same generation of children (basically Gen Z), who now aren’t allowed to play and roam on their own as older generations were. With these ahistorical new limits placed on their play time and opportunities for play in the physical world, these kids have been pushed even more toward the “disembodied” smartphone and online apps that further undermine their self-confidence and resilience. This  has increased their feelings of isolation and pointlessness, and accelerated the crisis of anxiety and depression they are now experiencing as a cohort.

Some people might want to dismiss all this as just the latest “moral panic” about new technologies and social change. I don’t believe that’s an accurate conclusion. Haidt makes many helpful and insightful observations, offers valid contrasts and comparisons, and makes helpful  recommendations throughout, all based on the body of mental health studies and longitudinal data he cites.

This is a long and dense book, with a large list of footnotes and references. I’ll admit that it wasn’t always the easiest read, but it was one of the more impactful and influential books I’ve come upon lately. And he does also offer solutions. In the end, if you could skip to his conclusions, they would be along the following lines.

First, kids should not have smartphones or social media accounts until they’re sixteen. Their brains and psyches are simply not yet prepared to withstand the psychological and physiological manipulation engineered into social media apps.

Second, students should not have access to smartphones in school. They’ll learn a lot more without them, but also will be happier spending the time at school with their friends, learning to navigate social life in person, and developing the skills and self-confidence to be functional people in the real world.

Third, parents, teachers and leaders should use collective action to change social norms, and to avoid having to try to devise individual or one-family solutions to the hard problems of how to support children’s free play opportunities and rights, as well as control their smartphone, internet and social media use. Haidt provides good examples of tactics that have worked for groups of people who have begun to move the needle on some of these problems, by working together with other parents and educators in their social circles and communities.

Finally, let kids play and explore the world more from an early stage in their lives, without as much constant close adult supervision. Let them take some risks. Of course, parents have to make informed and appropriate adult decisions about how much risk and freedom is okay for their child at each stage of development, but they should resist the idea that children need to be under constant parental control and supervision every minute.

The Anxious Generation is an outstanding work exploring the distressed state of childhood and children’s mental health today. It probes the causes and unique challenges faced by parents, educators and policy makers in the age of mass media, the internet, the smartphone, and most especially the social media apps that are engineered to capture,  retain and exploit the attention of immature young minds. Even after my long synopsis here, there’s a great deal more to be learned and considered from reading this book. Very highly recommended.

One incidental note: Jonathan Haidt is an active writer on Substack, where he continues to provide useful ideas and updated information on the topics covered in this book.

Book Review: The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want (2025). Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading lately on the topic of AI (Artificial Intelligence). AI is naturally interesting to me as a former IT and tech person, but also because its apparent rapid development, economic and employment impacts and its social policy implications are so much in the news at the moment. I have two or three more new books on this topic on my library list and bookshelf at the moment, but today I want to discuss one I’ve already read.

The book is entitled The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna. Dr. Bender is a professor of Linguistics, and affiliate faculty in Computer Science and Linguistics at the University of Washington, who often consults with domestic and international organizations on understanding "AI" technologies. Dr. Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, and a lecturer at the School of Information at UC Berkeley.

This book is a dense, thorough critique of the entire field of "AI", coming at it from many different levels and angles. It discusses the financial and political motivations of AI’s main proponents, its foundation in intellectual property theft, and the essential fraudulence of the hype that what has been created in these software products is "intelligence". It compares the hype around AI to other tech bubbles of the past, and discusses both the need and some methods for resisting the inclusion of AI features in many of our common computer and internet applications.

The book explores many of the adverse effects on society that can be expected from further implementations of AI in many arenas, including job automation and job loss, misplaced legitimization of discriminatory social policies, climate change impacts from massive data center requirements, destructive effects on many types of careers and human creative endeavors, and many more.

I mentioned in another review recently that I have some skepticism and doubt about the current clamor over AI and all the things it can do. This book clarifies and supports my uneasiness over much of what the public has been hearing lately about AI from the wealthy tech moguls who are promoting it.

One interesting dynamic the authors describe is the way the tech leaders seem to fall into two opposing camps about the promise and perils of AI. There are the “boomers” (or accelerationists), who claim that AI will deliver untold wealth, intellectual capacity and scientific benefits to humanity in the very near future, which is why we must do whatever it takes to develop it quickly. And then there are the “doomers”, who make much of their belief that AI will soon reach the “Singularity”, where the machines will outstrip humanity’s ability to  reason, and may then consign us all to the dustbin of history, as in the Terminator films.

What the authors note about these two camps is that they both tend to be largely made up of people who are within the small circles of rich high-tech corporate leadership. In fact, the two conflicting views of AI’s risk/reward profiles are often present in the same people.

In one breath, they argue that they need to go all-in quickly on investing in and developing AI as fast as possible, for all the positive benefits they foresee. Then they turn around and say that they are the only ones who can be trusted to protect us from the potential disastrous AI outcomes they fear. Sam Altman and Elon Musk are prime examples of this sort of warring visions within one person, with their self-serving rationalizations for going ahead and doing whatever they want to do, despite all the dire risks to humanity they’ve predicted.

Both the book authors are active in the research fields of AI, and are not blind to the enormous potential economic and social benefits that may result from AI developments. At the same time, they see right through the breathless claims of the AI proponents, which is that AGI – Artificial General Intelligence, or machines that can think as humans do – is just around the corner.

They point out that this claim about impending AGI has been made repeatedly for over fifty years, and they share some of the history of that. But as they explain, the technical approach behind current generative AI (like ChatGPT), based on large language models and neural networks, is still basically a parlor trick, seemingly displaying magical “intelligence” that is in fact produced by an inanimate but sophisticated prediction engine.

AI doesn’t think, and it doesn’t feel, according to the authors, and they contend that with current models and approaches, it’s not likely to do so anytime soon. What generative AI does do is leverage existing human intelligence, creativity, art and information stored as data to seemingly “create” new text and images, based on content taken without compensation from the many people  who originally created it.

This is not intelligence, say the authors – it is merely theft and repurposing on a colossal scale. And it is theft that allows those who own and control the vast computing resources needed for AI tools to function, to profit and extract great value from the fruits of human creativity and labor they’ve stolen from others, and used to train their AI models. 

One of the most telling points the authors make is that an unacknowledged but very high priority of the AI moguls seems to be to use these smart machines to eliminate costly humans from the workforce. Everyone knows by now that AI is a potential threat to many existing jobs, especially in the white collar service industries, but that’s not something the AI hype merchants want to emphasize. Or so I assumed, until on a recent trip to San Francisco I saw billboards advertising a new AI product with the slogan “Never hire a human again”. Perhaps in the current political moment, these tech leaders no longer even feel they need to hide their desire to take away peoples' livelihoods for the sake of their bottom lines. 

After thoroughly pulling back the veil on all the hype, the lies and flawed reasoning behind the “AI con”, the authors lay out some reasonable if limited ideas for how to resist the AI juggernaut. For example, they suggest not using AI agents to query for information when a simple web search would give comparable results.

The authors suggest this for several reasons: first, because widespread refusal to use new AI products might slow investment and further development in them; second, because these AI agents have vastly greater environmental and climate change overhead associated with using them compared to a simple web search; and third, because the AI answers might be made up, and don’t tend to provide their sources, or any attribution for how they arrived at their conclusions.

With a web search, you know where the information is coming from, and can draw your own conclusions about its validity, reliability and truthfulness. You also might discover some unexpected but valuable information farther down the page of search results. With an AI agent search, you have to just take it on faith that the AI didn’t make it up, but which it often does (popularly known as “hallucinating”, although the authors reject that term for its implicit hint of actual machine cognition).

Of course, as the authors are aware, resisting the hype and the promotional campaigns being waged for AI by the leaders of our largest tech companies will be difficult. And there is a need not to throw out all AI and advanced computing innovations that might truly be beneficial to humanity, although how lay people are supposed to distinguish between what is worthwhile and what is wasteful or dangerous among the many new AI products being released is hard to know.

The ultimate message the authors seem to hope readers will take away from their in-depth presentation is that if we’re going to have AI technologies at all, they need to be limited, regulated and well-controlled, and in the service of humanity’s greater good and noblest aspirations, not the science fiction-based fantasies and greed of a small group of wealthy tech entrepreneurs.

That all makes sense to me. Highly recommended.