Two Manifestos on Automation, a Life-Affirming Restaurant in the Central District, and a History Lesson on “Schmaltzy” Art

By Erica C. Barnett

1. “Yes, the Striking Dockworkers Were Luddites. And They Won.”

And “AI Will Never Solve This,” by Bryan Merchant

I’ve mentioned Blood In the Machine author Bryan Merchant’s excellent Substack in this column before, but damn, he was on fire this week, with two long posts about the myth that automation—whether by literal machines, like the threats that sparked the dockworkers’ strike earlier this month, or through AI—is inevitable and even desirable, no matter what the human cost.

I’m often struck, in conversations about AI and other technologies that supposedly remove humans from the equation (although see: Elon Musk’s creepily shuffling robots, Elon Musks’s “self-driving” Teslas, or the algorithm on Elon Musk’s sad little website), by how many people seem to think there’s no way to stop any of this stuff from happening. Especially in tech cities, it’s more or less embarrassing to argue that tech “advancements” do not result from forces of nature, or that replacing people with machines is not inevitable. No one needs a web-connected camera to tell them what’s inside their fridge, and no company needs to automate workers out of existence (or replace transit with silly-looking private buses). These are all choices, which is what the dockworkers, and those of us who push back when companies want to test potentially deadly automation on unwitting people just trying to cross the street, have been saying.

The longshoremen and other unions that have pushed back against AI and automation, like SAG-AFTRA and the WGA, “decided that automation was an existential threat to their jobs—and to fight back by rejecting the notion that bosses should hold the power to decide to use technology to replace their work. Outside the pundit class, these proved to be effective and popular positions, and each group won their fight, at least in the short term.”

*This* is modern Luddism. Rather than allowing executives to decide who and what will be automated, regardless of the cost—human or otherwise—workers are seeing that they can reject a technology that will be used to harm them rather than submit to it. That in doing so, they may not abolish its use altogether, but gain concessions and even power over how it’s ultimately used in their working lives.

Merchant also covers an AI debate so dumb I thought there had to be more to it, but nope: AI proponents, including the former CEO of Google, are arguing that it’s unethical, and essentially violent, to regulate AI companies’ astronomical production of planet-destroying fossil fuels, because eventually AI will solve climate change.

Merchant argues (and, again, I can’t believe this is a debate we’re having in 2024) that we don’t need a complex, all-knowing program to tell us how to address climate change—what we need is here-and-now political will, which AI has no power to create. Believing otherwise, Merchant writes, is “not merely foolish but dangerous—it’s another means of persuading otherwise smart people that immediate action isn’t necessary, that technological advancements are a trump card, that an all hands on deck effort to slash emissions and transition to proven renewable technologies isn’t necessary right now. It’s techno-utopianism of the worst kind; the kind that saps the will to act.”

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2. Communion, 2350 E Union St.

If you live in Seattle, chances are you’ve either been to Communion, the much-praised “Seattle soul” restaurant and love letter to Seattle’s Black past, present, and future—or you’ve tried to. Until this weekend, I was in the latter camp. I never managed to be at my computer when this Central District hot spot opened reservations for the upcoming month, and so I never managed to snag a table.

The hype may have died down a bit, but Communion remains astonishingly good. The juicy smoked chicken, generously brushed with a gently spicy berbere glaze, dares you not to pick it up with your hands; ditto the grilled pork chop, served alongside a tangle of bacon-studded fried cabbage. The menu changes twice a year (with a switch coming up next month), but the neckbone stew and Vietnamese po-boy—a mashup I’ve only had in New Orleans at Banh Mi Boys—are always available. I’m hoping that’s also the case for some version of the sweet potato hoecakes (buttery, honey drenched morsels the size of silver-dollar pancakes) and shrimp toast—a crackly, shatter-in-your mouth crust surrounding an almost dainty slice of white bread topped with juicy shrimp, like the best Monte Carlo sandwich you ever had.

3. “How the Impressionists Became the World’s Favorite Painters, and the Most Misunderstood”

Impressionist painters have become so synonymous with normie schlock— “Claude Monet: The Immersive Experience” continues its unstoppable worldwide tour as I write this—that it’s easy to forget that in their own time, the Impressionists were revolutionary. This New York Times piece takes a close look at a show at the National Gallery in D.C., which reconstructs two major Parisian exhibitions from 1874, demonstrating the radicalism of Impressionism in its own time, when the pinnacle of artistic success was an annual government-sanctioned annual exhibit called the Salon. Before Monet, Renoir, and Degas became “posters in your dentist’s waiting room,” critic James Farago writes, “impressionism was a critic’s sneer for the whole group, mocking Monet’s sunrise over the sea for lacking composition and finish.”