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It’s 2023 and we should probably get ready.

Sooner or later, every single conversation I have will be recorded and transcribed and I’ll be able to look back at it later – details from a phone call with the bank, in the hardware store asking a question, someone mentions a book at the pub, an idea in a workshop. Ignoring the societal consequences for a sec lol ahem… how should the app to manage all that chatter work?

Very early ACCELERANDO vibe here. Remember when these ideas seemed vital and innocently progressive? I still love the idea of memory prosthetics, but I don’t know if anyone’s okay with their every spoken word being hackable.

Over here, the UK government spent the end of 2022 trying to weaken encryption, by the way.

A Berlin-based scientist has unveiled a novel solution for Europe’s tumbling birth rates: “the world’s first artificial womb facility.”

Dubbed EctoLife, the concept is the brainchild of Hashem Al-Ghaili, a Yemen-born biotechnologist and science communicator. His invention comprises 75 separate labs, each of which accommodates up to 400 adorable “growth pods,” which replicate the conditions of a mother’s womb. Al-Ghaili claims a single building can incubate 30,000 babies a year. 

EctoLife is basically a design-fiction “provocation,” but the tech scene is apparently full of bros who want to put their babies into as many gestation receptacles as possible, and cutting out the human breeding object that requires emotional investment and personhood may seem like an excellent option.

Sad to see BOOKFORUM folding. It’s going to be an interesting and combative year in culture. Happy new year.

Recently—and, incidentally, in Lit Hub—I read a sentence that scared me more than anything I’ve ever read in a Stephen King story. In an interview, Courtney Maum, author of Before and After the Book Deal, mentioned how “as an almost a condition of getting a book deal, [it’s expected] you will become a one-person branding operation for your book, pulling a podcast out of your back pocket, a newsletter, [a] blue check verified social media accounts with gazillions of followers, a TikTok dance account, maybe a cooking show, the list goes on.”

Kind of a chilling opening for a piece about a lit mag called Taco Bell Quarterly.

But here’s the word of the day. I understand none of this but I love the word:

“Fluxonium qubits are more complex and less studied than transmons. The main advantage of fluxoniums is that they can be operated at a low frequency of about 600 MHz. We know that the lower the frequency, the longer the lifetime of qubits, which means that more operations can be performed with them. During the tests, it turned out that the dielectric losses of fluxonium qubits allow to keep the state of the superposition longer than that of transmons,” said Ilya Besedin, one of the authors of the study, an engineer of the scientific project at the NUST MISIS Superconducting Metamaterials laboratory.

“How can the entertainment industry attract new audiences?” An odd little article, this, that seems to describe where things are already going rather than offering new ideas. And it uses that terrible word “content.” This year I’ve seen audiences described as “content consumers,” which rather summons images of feeding troughs. I read a review of a film last night where it was described as “looking like content,” meaning it looked made for a streaming service rather than the cinema. A point is possibly approaching where the word “content” becomes a pejorative. It would be nice if the word, borrowed from the web to describe the material contained within HTML code, went away for a while.