Imagine Little Italy in the 1940s...
New column + Tracks on Tracks trundles onward
Hi all,
belatedly sharing my New York Times Magazine ‘Screenland’ column from a month ago (🤷♂️). It’s about a much-criticized Apple/iPad ad that showed a hydraulic press crushing a bunch of musical instruments, cameras, record players, etc. By extension, it’s also about how tech is running out of genuinely novel experiences to offer consumer, and how this trend is showing up in other bizarre ads.
In a way it’s fitting that I’m sending this so late. When the iPad ad first went online, it generated a pretty negative round of press coverage — that proceeded to more or less evaporated in a day. By the time my piece came out, it was already “late” for the discourse. But, as I argue in the piece, forgetting about this ad is exactly what Apple wants you to do — it’s (quite inadvertently) much too honest about the tech world’s operating logic. So, yet again, being incapable of writing at the speed of discourse is my superpower / secret weapon.
In the piece I touch on ads from Adobe, Google, and Samsung. I recently saw another one from Meta; it shows a boy and his grandfather visiting Manhattan’s Little Italy, where (it’s implied) the grandfather grew up. The boy takes out his phone, and orders a Meta AI tool to generate an image of Little Italy in the 1940s. The grandfather looks at the phone. “There it is,” he says, brimming with nostalgia.
But … like … why would you need an AI tool to make a fake image of Little Italy in the 1940s for you? There are real images of Little Italy in the 1940s that aren’t hard to look up. The current “artificial intelligence” boom is, in 98.3% of cases, a big, old-fashioned, high-pollution-emitting scam.
It’s now been two months since I started publishing Tracks on Tracks, a magazine/newsletter where writers explore their relationships to individual songs. Every week I’ve sent out at least one essay, and often two. Many of you have subscribed, and some of you have even opted for paying subscriptions (despite none of the content being paywalled yet — thanks!).
A selection of recent pieces:
I wrote about a song that kept me going through the 8+ years of work on my first novel.
Michael Agger, who used to edit my music writing at The New Yorker, wrote (via The Cure) about reconciling himself to being an adult who loves pop music.
The site is growing steadily, and there are lots of great pieces lined up. In order to keep the project afloat I need to keep picking up subscribers, so please consider signing up, ‘liking’ posts, leaving comments, sharing with friends, etc.
Until next time, —Peter
As always, my novel Planes is available for purchase in paperback.