Tag: Television

Categories
AI Technology

The Bathwater Problem

Gary Kamiya was writing about the Tenderloin when he said it, but the line has been following me around: “The problem is that by saving the baby, you also save the bathwater.”

The pattern is remarkably consistent across every major information technology. Each one arrives promising to liberate the deserving — the faithful, the learned, the civic-minded — and each one immediately, inevitably, arms everyone else too. Gutenberg’s press was understood by its champions as a device for spreading the true Word; within decades it was the primary infrastructure for Protestant schism, Catholic counter-propaganda, astrological almanacs, and pornography. The reformers got their Bible. They also got their pamphlet wars.

The telegraph was greeted as a force for peace — shared information would make war irrational, commerce would bind nations. It also became the nervous system of commodity speculation, financial manipulation, and the first truly industrial-scale news hoaxes. The telephone: connection and the crank call, the crisis line and the threatening voice in the dark. Radio: FDR’s fireside chats and Father Coughlin. Television: Murrow taking down McCarthy, and also fifty years of manufactured consent. The internet: the largest library ever assembled and the largest sewer.

The pattern isn’t coincidental. It’s structural. Each technology expands what’s possible for human expression and coordination — and human expression and coordination contain both the noblest and the worst of us in roughly fixed proportion. The tool doesn’t change the ratio. It scales both sides of it.

What’s interesting historically is how each generation believes their technology will be different — that this time the architecture can be designed to select for the good. The internet era produced the most elaborate version of this belief: algorithmic curation would surface truth, network effects would reward quality, the wisdom of crowds would outcompete misinformation. Instead it turned out that engagement was the attractor, and outrage was the highest-engagement content. The bath got hotter.

The AI moment is the same belief system, restated with more technical sophistication. But the Kamiya line stands. You are saving a baby, and you are saving bathwater, and no one has yet designed a tub that can tell the difference.

The question isn’t whether the bathwater comes with the baby. It always does. The question is whether you turn on the tap.

Categories
Living Television

The Drift of the Vertical Hold

There is a specific kind of frustration reserved for things that almost work.

In the 1950s, television wasn’t the seamless, high-definition portal we know today. It was a temperamental guest in the living room, prone to static, ghosts, and the dreaded vertical roll. When the “vertical hold” failed, the image would begin to slide—first slowly, then into a dizzying, rhythmic tumble.

“It used to drive my Dad crazy when the screen would start rolling and even have to get up out of his chair and adjust the vertical hold. It would seem to hold for a few minutes and then it would start rolling again. It drove him nuts.”

I remember my Dad in those moments. The rolling screen didn’t just disrupt the program; it seemed to pull at his very patience. It was one of the rare times we might hear him mutter a swear word. He would have to leave the comfort of his chair to fiddle with the dial. He’d tweak it with surgical precision until the picture locked into place. He would sit back down, satisfied for a moment, only to see the image begin its slow, inevitable upward crawl once again.

It was a battle against the “drift.”

We don’t have vertical hold dials anymore. Our screens are perfect, locked in digital amber. Yet, I find that the feeling of the vertical hold remains a central part of the human condition. We spend our lives trying to “lock in” our circumstances—our careers, our relationships, our sense of self. We get up, we make the adjustment, we sit back down, and for a few minutes, the picture of our life looks exactly how it’s supposed to.

But life, by its nature, has a tendency to drift.

The rolling screen was a reminder that the transmission was fragile. Perhaps my Dad’s frustration wasn’t just about missing a few minutes of a show, but about the realization that he couldn’t force the world to stay still. We are all, in some way, standing behind the television set of our own lives, fingers on the dial, trying to keep the image from sliding into the static.

There is a quiet philosophy in that 1950s living room: the hold is never permanent. The beauty isn’t in a perfectly locked picture that lasts forever, but in the willingness to get out of the chair and try to find the focus again, over and over.