Shop Notes

Is there a name for the sensation of a perfectly purring engine?

Working with unpredictable AI tools and workflows, I find myself wanting a sort of system-level flow state, when everything’s “in sync,” when “things just click” and “run like clockwork,” “humming along,” “a well oiled machine.”

I’m talking about the coordinated dance of a manufacturing assembly line, the ballet of cars on a freeway performing a zipper merge sans red brake lights. I get hints of it when I watch Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests or when the kid’s battery-powered Brio train completes a circuit on the uneven wooden tracks. I feel it here:

(I searched for a Japanese phrase for this and could not quite find one.)

Since I’m using musical terms, and since “orchestration” appears to be the managerial metaphor of the day, let’s look there.

When jazz musicians are grooving with each other they’re “locked in” or “in the pocket.” A “tight ensemble” performs with perfect synchrony and relaxed awareness. Maybe the closest, used in biomusicology and other sciences, is “entrainment.” In chronobiology it’s “the synchronization of a biological clock to an environmental cycle.” Lovely.

But what of the awe and odd satisfaction of observing entrainment?

The best I’ve come up with is “mechanical sublime.” Though, it’s not merely mechanical either, as these systems can have non-deterministic actors, human or agent. Then again, even mechanical systems seize and rust, atoms ground away. Shit breaks.

Maybe the feeling is stronger, too, when you’re a participant, or a former participant, or have enough experience with its workings (e.g. gravity, physics) that the system isn’t entirely opaque. You’re more likely to experience the mechanical sublime riding a motorcycle when you know how the motorcycle works. I don’t feel it when I’m watching my laptop’s boot sequence, but maybe a motherboard designer does.

Whatever the name for this feeling, the surprise that there is possible – unlikely but possible – an ideal harmonious order that excepts the usual brokenness of modern life, is one for which, more by the day, I yearn.

Victoria Song has a good overview in The Verge of the current surveillance/privacy/creepiness discourse around AI wearables (gift link):

[T]o be effective, they have to be discreet and, to a degree, covert. The Meta glasses and Vocci ring work because they’re easy to overlook. You feel comfortable wearing them, and you know you’re not being a privacy-invading glasshole. But this hinges on everyone assuming your good intent.

Spy gadgets achieve discretion by purporting to be what they are not: a pen, pin, or leather handbag with a lens-sized hole cut into its side. But spy gadgets also aren’t designed to do anything other than spy, which is part of what what makes wearables a subject of “discourse” instead of flat-out heinous.

But this confusion of intent, to me, also makes typical AI wearables even creepier than spy gadgets. There’s a certain disgust that arises when what has a clear and familiar purpose (e.g. a pair of glasses) starts to do something other than what you expect it to do – as if possessed.

As someone who makes a quick capture notes app, I’m tempted by the idea of a voice-note-taking ring. Of something I can talk into but doesn’t talk back and isn’t a pocket slot machine or a screen half an inch from my eyeball.

It doesn’t need to be a ring. Pins and pendants are a little better; my expectations of those tend to be more inert than a pair of glasses. But they’re still dishonest in their own way.

Maybe what I want is an AI voice recorder that is still legible as a voice recorder. Think: A Sony Pressman, or the Starlite RA-11 reel-to-reel tape recorder used in the film Peter Hujar’s Day.

A device that still does what it purports by appearance to do, just with a little magic – as if enchanted.