Give a crap

Start at Jony Ive in a talk with Stripe's CEO Patrick Collison:

I believe that when Somebody unwrapped that box and took out that cable, and they thought somebody gave a care about me. I think that’s a spiritual thing.

and

Contrast Dan Sinker's (negative) observations on lazy/sloppy AI usage in The Who Cares Era with Nathan Zed's video essay How Trying Became Cool Again where he explores how music artists have begun trying again in their presentation and performance.

then

See Dan Sinker's closing line in The Who Cares Era:

In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care. In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.

and

Mandy Brown in A Unified Theory of Fucks:

Good work is the art of giving a fuck about the living. And all of us, every day, are faced with good work that needs doing, and good work that we can do.

and

Venkatesh Rao in Pretending to Care, Pretending to Agree:

There are two basic types of masks: masks of pretending to care are exit masks, and masks of pretending to agree are voice masks. … it is only hard to pretend to agree when you care. If you don’t care to begin with, pretending to agree adds no additional strain.

and

Tobias Revell in Box 010: Being Nice to The Reader:

"Just like a designer, you, as a writer, have a job to make that effort as easy as possible for your reader so they can get to the actual substance of what you’re describing."

and

Adam Mastroianni in 28 Slightly Rude Notes on Writing:

Writing is a costly signal of caring about something. Good writing, in fact, might be a sign of pathological caring.

and

Matt Webb in Tech Has Graduated From the Star Trek Era to the Douglas Adams Age:

"(And btw being unserious, which is what I’m advocating here, doesn’t let us off the hook re: paying attention to what our tech does in the world.)"

but

Dave Ackerman in conversation with Lu Wilson in Dialogues on Natural Code:

Shipping code “to make money” is different than “to help society”, no
matter how tech hypocrites may try to conflate them.

Questions

• If I can't be bothered to care, why should anybody else?

Paths from here

• My Personal A.I. Policy: caring about what I publish
• Neologisms: making the reader’s effort easier
• A.I. Good vs. Bad: the duller, more conventional version
• Tools may change, but taste is hard to fake.: taste as a kind of care
• YouTube Favorites: experts doing things expertly