“Competency porn” is a genre of media where the audience gets to revel in the ecstasy of people doing their jobs well. Some of the best examples to me are Andy Wier stories like The Martian or Project: Hail Mary, where a good-humored egghead pushes the limits of his noggin to evade certain death in space. But if you want something a little closer to Earth, then Phil Edwards has your ticket.
Specifically, it’s a ticket to the National Truck Driving Championships in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the country’s best drivers maneuver commercial trucks around a variety of obstacles for a shot at gold—made all the more whimsical by their rubber duck mascot. In an AI-saturated world that pits man against machine and tries to de-skill the labor force, there is something very satisfying about watching a driver, like a sci-fi hero who’s honed a symbiotic relationship with his mech, park it with all the satisfaction of a DVD logo finally hitting the corner of your TV screen.
Check your mirrors, throw it in reverse, and give it a watch.
A psychologist wakes up tied to a chair in the warped simulacra of a mid-century dining room, surrounded by mute Escher-esque homunculi and the spiraling, knife-wielding furniture salesman she was trying to rescue. She asks his carnivorous, elongated doppelgänger, who is wearing a pirate costume, “why the long face?”
My first thought while I was leaving the theater after watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was, damn, Oppenheimer II was really good.
Silly as that sounds, I don’t think it’s a stretch to consider it a sequel, at least in theme. In fact, Nolan’s not even being subtle about it, especially in the final act of the movie. (Spoilers ahead for a 3,000-year-old Homerian epic.)
When Matt Damon’s Odysseus returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar, he delivers a monologue to his wife Penelope about the sacrilege of the Trojan Horse. He muses about how it broke the bonds of civilization, turning the beauty of gift-giving into an omen of destruction. To me, there’s a straight line from that monologue to the ruminations of Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer, after he used the elegant act of science to split the atom and shatter the world.
Nolan loves heroes who are haunted by their own ingenuity. Men create extraordinary things—a teleportation machine, a crime-fighting persona, a hydrogen bomb, a miraculous statue—and like Frankenstein’s monster, those things become the specters that won’t stop haunting their conjurers. Maybe it’s a metaphor for the burden of craft, that what we pursue as an expression of our genius inevitably devours our world. Maybe it’s Nolan the brilliant, ambitious filmmaker saying he needs to take a vacation.
It’s this long meditation on specific themes that I find fascinating about my favorite artists—what captivates them over their lifetimes, the psychological puzzle they’re trying to solve through their body of work. Sometimes Nolan’s hammer-on-the-nail moralizing and exposition through dialogue bugs me. But I give him a lot of grace, because he’s one of those creators who approaches theme with a steadfast, monastic focus, like the epic poet who inspired this film.
In The Odyssey, more than most of his movies, Nolan lets his lead get introspective about his motives. I’m thinking of the scene where Odysseus ties himself to the mast to endure the Siren’s song, which will probably go down as the most iconic aspect of Damon’s performance.
I loved Odysseus describing the torment of the song—how it awakens not just a carnal urge, but an ineffable yearning at the core of a person. It betrays the noble façade of the desires we wish we had in earnest—like returning home to one’s beloved family and kingdom—and reveals one’s true desire, the one that drives the decades of venturing and tinkering, the one that no venturing and tinkering can actually fulfill.
There’s much to love about Nolan’s Odyssey. The visuals opt for post-apocalyptic scarcity and surreality, bolstering the sense of a world in ruins after the Trojan War. It’s a godless world, one that terrifies and disgusts Olympus enough to never show their faces (save one poignant exception). All that’s left are monsters, witches, and demigods—rendered with fresh, eerie artistry by the filmmakers—each of whom seem as devastated by Odysseus’s sins as the Trojans themselves.
But Odysseus and the Sirens’ song will be the scene that sticks with me. I think it’s because like Odysseus, desire has always been an elusive thing to me, like a ship at the whims of a fickle sea. It gets tossed wildly from one wave to another. It anchors on shores that it shouldn’t. It disappears for ages, like the wind that leaves Odysseus and his men stranded on Apollo’s isle. Rarely can I chart it or reliably navigate by it, but it still foments a deep dissatisfaction that draws me to the sea, venturing and tinkering away.
Sometimes I think it would be nice to tether myself to a post and have it extracted from me by the violence of song, just so I could know without a doubt what my desire really was.
Maybe everybody feels that way. Maybe that’s why The Odyssey endures.
Instagram’s For You page algorithm is like an eager child who discovered one joke that makes the adults laugh and now feels the need to parrot that joke ad infinitum. As a rule, I try to avoid the FYP and go straight to my follows, but sometimes the endless scroll of dopamine seizes me before my prefrontal lobe can intervene.
One day, the eager child showed me a walrus, and I liked it. Thus, my fate was (forgive the pun) sealed.
Walrus can whistle. They can make a lot of noises, in fact, like rubbery bells, and guttural roars, and sputtering farts. I’m fine with all of those. But a whistle crosses the line. When I see it, there’s a part of my primate brain that says, wait, shouldn’t only humans be able to do that? The idea that, with enough training, a walrus could cover the post-chorus bridge to Otis Redding’s “The Dock of the Bay” is unsettling to me.
It’s easy to forget that evolution doesn’t care what we think is exclusively human. It’s not a force with any intention beyond adaptation and survival. And if that means two species, who’ve long since diverged on evolution’s branches, are meant to whistle, so be it. It’s entertaining to think that both species might have developed the ability to attract a mate, with it being a severe liability at least to one. Either way, evolution is content to give them both lip articulators, like a distracted father giving his mammalian children cereal for dinner.
Truth be told, I enjoy when these behaviors shake me free of the assumption that humans won the biological lottery. Evolution is sort of like Robert Frost’s two roads diverging in a wood: no road is more advantageous than the other, and both are selected based on the necessity of the moment.
If anything, seal species got it right. They evolved just far enough to be a bunch of noisy goofballs who get to lounge on the beach most of the day.
The open internet might be dead, and Google might have killed it.
Last week my coworker sent me a TechCrunch article about how Google Search, at least as we’ve known it for the past 25 years, is over. At the most recent Google I/O conference, Google announced an “intelligent search box” that, for an increasing number of inquiries, will use AI to generate not just responses but entire UX/UI modules. Gone will be the classic ten blue links, although they’ve been so buried under sponsored results and LLM summaries for the past decade that, in all practicality, they’ve been suffocated already.
The implications for the internet as a whole seem pretty dire. Google spent ages suppressing other indexing sites, absorbing parallel entities and paying companies like Apple $20 billion a year to make Google the default search engine in Safari browsers. The result was Google Search becoming the gatekeeper for most internet traffic. And in short order, they will be closing those gates, demolishing the digital roads we’ve built over this past half a century, and using the scrapped asphalt to build their own giant cul-de-sac.
People are talking about this in apocalyptic terms, and I tend to agree. This is an internet where the world’s most dominant search engine no longer does what a search engine does, which is link out to other sites. Instead, it siphons data—and with that data, value—from all of us who make content on the internet. And I mean all of us, everyone from influencers and journalists and artists, to senior marketing staff at Fortune 500 companies. We all become serfs toiling in the fields that, whether we like it or not, our liege lord Google will reap for themselves—with no guarantee they will share in the harvest.
The age of the “clickless” search is upon us. Unless internet users claim greater agency over what search engines they use, the act of building, maintaining, and supplying content for a site will just be stocking a warehouse for which Google is the only vendor.
Ironically, if we indulge this avarice from Google, it will destroy the incentive to create on the internet in general. The less traffic going to our websites, the less content we’ll likely create for those sites, and the less food the hungry maw of Google will have to feed on.
The open internet might die. But if it does, it might just take Google with it.
