Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
On that note, I feel that I would be remiss without including these
final throwback references...

_Corporate Metabolism_ by Paco Xander Nathan  (22 Oct 02000)
http://www.tripzine.com/listing.php?id=corporate_metabolism
An extensive analysis of the structure and function of the corporate
organism
"Let's review the evolution of political system, vis-a-vis corporate
governance. Elizabethan England made a bold proclamation in the name
of humanism. They effectively said: "Fucke Spain & thee Catholycks.
Yn
the cominge yeres of Newe World Order, rules of the game changeth
and
none of their bloodie golde shall matter not one wit." The English
reckoned that if Church and cojones were removed from the political
equation, the Crown and its people could prosper. They invented
corporations to implement that plan and serve the Crown. That worked
remarkably well.
   Americans came along and objected to corporations, wishing to
empower individual sovereignty based on property rights. They
reckoned
that if the Crown were removed from the political equation, then
representation of individuals could reign over corporations instead.
Their experiment died within a few decades, and arguably the United
States became the first flag of convenience.
   Socialists noted problems due to corporations in both England and
the US. They reckoned that if individual property rights were
removed
from the political equation, societies could reign over corporations
instead. They attempted to organize politics to mimic the corporate
structure itself, which has so far proven to be problematic.
   *Where do we stand now?*
   Humanists of all varieties have struggled to control corporations
for the better part of four centuries. They failed. They lacked a
fundamental understanding of the problem. GAME OVER. Direct
confrontation of the corporate form does not work, because such
efforts inevitably become <sublated>.

Backing up for a moment, let us examine more closely this concept of
the Egregor(e)
_Chasing Egregors,_ By Paco Xander Nathan (March 02001)
https://archive.scarletwoman-oto.org/swl_archive/swl_site_v3/scarletletter/v6n
1/
v6n1_egregors.html
...In the spirit of Vitruvius, think of egregors as the allegorical
buildings of the allegorical stonemasons of Western Esoteric
Tradition... In a Platonic sense, egregors are dynamic structures
used
for perpetuating belief systems. They provide intellectual
frameworks
for constructing and deconstructing the beliefs that arise from
group
dynamics, i.e., the autopoietic emergence of an additional
<meta>"individual" to represent a group of individuals...

Can Social Systems be Viewed as Autopoietic?
https://web.archive.org/web/20040206142026/http://bprc.warwick.ac.uk/lsesg3.ht
ml
   Durkheim's concept of the 'collective consciousness' refers to
the
parts of our psychic lives which integrate into a social
consciousness
that is more than just individual motives and actions. In
autopoiesis,
however, meaning emerges in the social sphere as a way of processing
information and putting it into a multitude of different contexts,
then moving from one actualisation to another. This can be regarded
as
a form of 'socio-Animism.'
  When a lawyer or economist or poet creates a work of meaning, the
important thing in an autopoietic system is not what that work means
to its author's individual psyche, but the way the work gains in
meaning when it moves through different worlds. This is similar to
the
way in which the legal world interprets a contract in terms of its
observable meaning, rather than according to the subjective
motivations of individual actors.
   Maturana avoids explicit claims that his theory of biological
autopoiesis is directly applicable at social levels. However, he
does
offer some implicit reinforcement to the notion that society can be
perceived of as an organic unit of the people involved when he
identifies 'higher order' autopoietic systems. These build from the
cell to the brain, the mind and the whole human being and could be
interpreted as seeing society as a high-order community of the
brains
and minds of the people within it.
   Social autopoiesis based on Luhmann's principles creates a
distance
between real people and their engagement in social processes, which
also makes clear we are dealing with profound and infinite dynamics
that never intersect with each other. Theories, like Maturana's,
which
can too easily conjure up a merging of the individual with the
social
can be very dangerous in certain political arenas.
   Husserl's notions about 'consciousness' initiated debates about
the
difficulty of integrating society into phenomenology. Wittgenstein
and
others replaced this with language theories in which the observer
was
no longer the conscious human, but the language game. Autopoietic
systems theory reinstates Husserl's idea of consciousness, but this
time parallel to - and in competition with - several autonomous
'language games'.
   To some extent, this reifies collectivities and deconstructs the
reality of the actor through socio-Animism. It multiplies the number
of observational perspectives as the observer is not identified just
with the mind of an individual agent but with a 'chain of
distinctions', which could be a human actor or an ongoing process of
communication involving people. That chain develops its own criteria
and perspective of observation.

--

   "What Burroughs terms the viral function of language is its
ongoing
ordering of reality toward the limit of total control, the opposite
of
anarchy. He employs the figure of the virus, a force hovering
between
evolving being and mere replicator, to problematize conventional
definitions of living and non-living. In Burroughs' cosmos, one must
always remember that the words one transmits can never be neutral
moves in the universal language-game; even if misfiring, some sort
of
force is necessarily being transmitted. This is the very problem
addressed by Csicsery-Ronay when he cites Jameson's skepticism over
sf's linguistic aporia. It is exceptionally difficult for any
resistant message to avoid complicity with the dominant
communication
systems in whose language it is composed. If "a butterfly flapping
its
wings in Tokyo can cause a tornado in Toledo" (Porush 381), who
knows
what havoc a few well-chosen words could wreak in the infosphere? As
responsible cyborg-writers, we'd best have a good idea how the
"techsts" we use are going to function out there before we turn them
loose. The trick, argues Burroughs, is to transmit a kind of force
that doesn't immediately contribute to the virus-effect but can
actually help work against it."
_William S. Burroughs and the Language of Cyberpunk,_ by Brent Wood
https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/68/wood68.html
  

    
<CAVEAT>:
Another specific PKD reference seems appropriate now...
https://realitysandwich.com/the-enlightened-madness-of-philip-k-dick-the-black
-i
ron-prison-and-wetiko/
_The Enlightened Madness of Philip K. Dick: The Black Iron Prison
and
Wetiko,_ by Paul Levy (who is the founder of Awakening in the Dream
Community in Portland, Oregon, from whence came the founders of my
Ibogaine temple in Mexico)
...PKD likened our existential situation to being in a maze, what he
refers to as "one colossal and absolute Chinese finger trap." The
harder we try to get out, the more trapped we become; this is to say
that we are not able to find our way out through ordinary means.
Seemingly alive and sentient, the maze has a peculiar nature of
shifting as we become aware of it. It is as if it is aware of---and
responds to---our awareness of it.
   One only escapes from the maze, to quote PKD, "when he decides
voluntarily to return (to resubject himself to the power of the
maze)
for the sake of these others, still in it. That is, you can never
leave alone, to leave you must elect to take the others out...the
ultimate paradox of the maze, its quintessential ingenuity of
construction, is that the only real way out is a voluntary way back
in
(into it and its power), which is the path of the bodhisattva." We
would only voluntarily return to help others if we recognized that
they are not separate from ourselves, which is to realize that we
are
all interdependent and interconnected---which is the very
realization
that simultaneously enlivens compassion and dissolves wetiko.
   PKD writes, "when you think you are out of the maze---i.e.,
saved---you
are in fact still in it." This brings to mind the insight that if we
think we are free of wetiko and it is only "others" that are
afflicted
with it, this very perspective is, paradoxically, a symptom of
having
fallen under the spell of wetiko. To quote PKD, "If there is to be
happiness it must come in a voluntary relinquishing of self in
exchange for aware participation in the destiny of the total one."
   In a very real sense, PKD did find the solution to humanity's
existential dilemma. He writes, "compassion's highest power is the
only power capable of solving the maze." As PKD points out, "The
true
measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in
this
freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how
quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of
himself
he can give." In other words, the true measure of who we are is how
much we are able to love.
   PKD concludes, "If the final paradox of the maze is that the only
way you can escape it is voluntarily to go back in (into it), then
maybe we are here voluntarily; we came back in." In other words,
perhaps we have chosen to incarnate at this very moment in time,
i.e.,
our voluntary return to the maze has already happened (evidenced by
the simple fact of our incarnation), which is to say that we have
already solved the maze and simply have to recognize this fact...
  

    
<factoid> is an optimist.

> To put a finer point on it, the Algorithm is only as trustworthy
as
> the engineers who built it and trained it.

I submit that the Algorithm is far less trustworthy than are the
engineers who initiated the machine learning processes that continue
to create the algorithms. The engineers have limited capability to
control or even to understand what conclusions self-extending
algorithms draw from their training data. Once the ML-based
algorithms create themselves they're quite opaque, and it's
difficult or impossible to look inside them to see why they work the
way they do or even to see what they actually do. We have to treat
them as black boxes and understand them only on the basis of their
responses to various inputs.
  

    
By the way, Rick Beato has a lot more to say about the implications
of autotune and, more generally, of mechanically "perfecting" music.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYRljnrtV3A&t=2013s>

For an earlier round of discussion of mechanical vandalism toward
music we can look back at the loudness wars, in which in each
successive release even of the same music more compression was
applied to reduce the music's dynamic range and make it sound more
compelling to the casual listener.
  

    
Very good point in <karish>’s #78:
“I submit that the Algorithm is far less trustworthy than are the
engineers who initiated the machine learning processes that continue
to create the algorithms. The engineers have limited capability to
control or even to understand what conclusions self-extending
algorithms draw from their training data.”

This situation is going to be compounded by programs that are
capable of writing code. A local venture lab here in Seattle just
put out a call for proposals from startups wanting to build just
that. 

Now we approach not Skynet, but something more insidious - a
self-generating Singularity beyond the control of whatever token
killswitches or airgaps the humans thought would prevent Bad Things
Happening, precisely because humans are using the *outputs* to make
decisions. 

It’s no longer a science-fiction scenario (though “Colossus: The
Forbin Project” comes to mind). With the increase in adoption and
casual trust, and the likelihood of insufficient bullshit-detection
by humans who receive the outputs second-hand (from humans) and ACT
on them, it approaches the nature and risk of an unchecked pandemic.


So - who wants to start working on the vaccines with me? 

*checks watch*

We don’t have a helluva lot of time, and we need to get ahead of the
algorithmic anti-vaxxers. 
  

    
Jon said that you could read the SotW if you're not on the Well, and
I'd like to add if you're not behind the firewall of a murderously
repressive regime. 

Details count.

Back to art for moment. Of course this artificial intelligence thing
has got everybody in a tizzy, including everybody in my household.
I've been messing around with a lot of these toys myself, and more
or less, I think these things are marvelously manipulative. So, in
many ways I sort of look at Prompt based AI imaging as some thing
between poetry concrete and a magic eight ball.

I attended the stability AI now annual get together on twitch and
watched what people were doing with these mammoth imaging engines,
and honestly, I was very impressed. They are getting these
algorithms to do some absolutely fascinating images that actually
look like something, if that's two of Blake. In fact, when I show my
own work ironically talk to someone who's in the gallery with me,
and I look at the thing on the wall or on the Plymouth and say,
"well, does it look like art?"

That's not facetious.

But being one of the OGs of the new media art set, I see this as the
next generation from Benjamin's complaint about photography,
designers' complaint about desktop publishing, and so on…

Tools make things more plastic; flexible; maybe even easier. But in
some ways they also impose constraints. You look at something made
by AI and a lot of times it looks like it's made by AI if you looked
at the stuff long enough. That's his problem. Also, you say
something and then it shows up – does that mean we are headed for a
bespoke aestheticized culture? If so, what is art, and what is quick
visual popcorn?

When I was in Art school, and actually for the first 15 years of my
contemporary art career I had only informally studied with a lot of
really fantastic world-class artists and talking with my mom taught
me and took that into the world without really having a degree until
I needed one to teach so I guess I'm probably one of the last
Atelier students left...

My point is that where much of the art we see is largely about
manipulating technology and visual pleasure, I remember my painting
student colleagues, and how they took the world into their eyes and
put it through the Play-Doh fuzzy pumper of their brain and
expressed it through physical dexterity and visual choice. Today
that's the AI translator fishing through the billion or so images it
has in the database to get what you wanted to choose. I guess I'm
kind of the old guy bitching about kids today - which has happened
since time began, but from a Michelina standpoint I sometimes think
that AI has taken that perceptual element and externalized it and
that makes me a little crazy.
  

    
Something New Year, all. Thanks for inviting me back, Jon.

SOTW 2023: For every three wild critters living on earth today,
there were ten wild critters 50-odd years ago, when I was about
eight years old. This is really terrifying when you focus on it,
which is why I guess so few people are focusing on it.

At least with climate change, there is a marginal chance that within
the next 20-30 years, people might collectively implement enough
decarbonization solutions with enough effect to blunt the worst of
what's otherwise coming. Save the forests, electrify everything, gut
the fossil fuel industry Big-Tobacco-style, miraculous drawdown
breakthroughs, hell maybe FUSION even!

So ok, psychedelics. AI. Let's go!
  

    
Meanwhile, I'm about to try to make aloo paneer in my Instant Pot.
Stay tuned.
  

    
One more thing about contemporary art is that there are three kinds
of artists in the world today.

One, there are the artists who are using apps, AI and data slamming
to spew the fire hose of ubiquitous imaging and infinite
aestheticization. And, in the NFT world a lot of this sells. Bravo.
By the way, I like P1xelf00l - he's a fresh face in NFTs who gets
history.

With the crypto crash, the NFT world is a bit more like the Chelsea
of the 80s than the 00s.  Just sayin'.

Type two is the sort of artist who already had a bit of privilege
and is part of the group in the contemporary world who is always
going to be fine, showing at good galleries and doing the biennial
circuit. The world hasn't changed that much for them, except with
the Venice biennial they were asked actually to acknowledge climate
change. Cross-reference Douglas Rushkoff.

And lastly, there is what I call the Multiverse. What is more
evident to me than ever is how heterogenous the Venn Diagram art
worlds is. 

This came from my own intersection between various digital art
worlLs and the contemporary. I remember when I was doing stuff back
in Second life, and yes, it's still around. A Chinese artist called
Cao Fei was making her version of Beijing in Second Life called RMB
city for Serpentine gallery in London - a big deal.

She had built this square kilometer monstrosity with her team and
wondered why nobody was coming, and I told them that Second Life
whether they liked it or not, felt that they were the new space for
contemporary art and all the curators of the world at all these
museums that were showing obsolete art should come and see THEM.
(Sounds familiar) They have their own art world, their own
community, and a lot of them had never been to a museum, and if she
wants them to care about her well she needs to care about them.
That's what she did, she had a lot of dance parties in her reception
area. And it took off.

The point of this is that my colleague Cory Arcangel was right in
saying that "my art world is bigger than your art world" in saying
that now we live in a Multiverse of art worlds. The NFT space
overlaps the contemporary, which overlaps the meta-verse, which
overlaps, but is not congruent with.... 

And that's really what's confusing. What happened with broadcast TV
has happened to the art world. 

There are tons and tons of ways to make and enjoy and share and
collect art and this is the result of the pandemic, in my opinion.
Galleries started going online like some of my colleagues in Dubai,
and since the usual ways of dealing with things just didn't exist
anymore, you had to figure out what the hell you were going to do.

So in some ways, I think that we are in an incredibly interesting
era for art, but like Benjamin was concerned about with photography
is that, democratization often and turns into devaluation. For me,
as an artist who likes to try to sell things, it's kind of a
problem. But we're working with it…

But in some ways, I feel like aesthetic training and the development
of "taste" is an elitist justification for why you should like this
and not that.  In "Avant Garde and kitsch," Clement Greenberg nailed
it, but sometimes your nephew wantws a Thomas Kinkaide.

Deal with it.
  

    
I'm trying!
  

    
Kazakhstan?

I've got this = I spent a lot of time there, mainly Almaty and
Nursultan.

The heating loss isn't Russian; it's just crumbling Soviet
infrastructure, inefficient Central Asian practices, and the fact
that the 9th largest country in the world has under 20 million
people.

IT people going there? KZ isn't Borat-land. Nursultan reminded me of
the Dubai of the Steppe when I went to the World Expo, and my
students from there weren't poor, but the wealth disparity there was
nasty. There is a big difference between Nursultan and Shykmkent; if
you get outside the cities, it's pretty dire.

I remember going to a post-soviet truck stop driving from Almaty to
Bishkek - squat toilets, pay to flush, the convenience store has
just a couple little lights on - mostly dark.  Wild.

But if you never knew - Post-Soviet bus stops are trippy. Like
Yugoslav brutalist monument sort of cool.
  

    
*I'm quite the generator-AI devotee, but I think it needs to be seen
and understood in the context of a lot of other
wannabe-singularitarian cyber-schemes that are all deep in the
Trough of Despond in 02023.
  

    
Meanwhile, it's January 6 today and the Jan-6ers are occupying the
Congress.  Why elected officials in the US Congress are continuously
amazed by these eruptions, I don't understand.  They're politicians,
why are they so naive?

"The Twenty" are identity-politics veterans, so they're gonna be
hard to mollify.  They lack conventional political demands because
their core assertion is "Reality must be like that because of who I
am."

They're not gonna back down, they're willing to charge cops with
bloody riot for the sake of trolling RINOS and Libs, but it's
interesting how uniformly Trumpian and personally squalid "the
Twenty" are.  In most societies, an identitarian culture-hero tends
to lead by moral example, like "Lo, we the People-of-Ruritania are
noble, courteous, reverent and brave and we scorn to lie --
especially me!"  In the MAGA-20 they're abjectly proud to be
scoundrels, there's always a scramble for viral eyeballs while
somebody passes the Elmer Gantry collection-plate.

I dunno what will be done by them and about them this year, but I''m
sure that their appetites will grow with the feeding, just like The
Donald's.
  

    
They're proving that they can disrupt the proceedings, I'm sure
that's a boost. I'm sure they assume they're asserting power, not
ignorance. One thing they're making clear is that there's just
twenty of them.
  

    
With all the attention and TV time they are getting by holding out,
it seems they might just keep this up indefinitely.
  

    
Via email from our friend, author and futurist Jamais Cascio:

Hi folks. It's good to see so many old friends and colleagues still
actively wrapping their heads around what's going on in the world.

I've stopped talking as much about The Apocalypse (whether
tongue-in-cheek or serious). It's too final-sounding. I think we're
far more likely to be in for a century of misery, a relentless
plague of feral catastrophes. As many of the folks have said so far,
it's chaos.

As Jon knows, for the last couple of years I've been neck-deep in
examining chaos with the whole "BANI" thing. (In short, follow-on to
VUCA [volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity],
BANI=Brittle Anxious Nonlinear Incomprehensible.) The details of the
concept aren't important here; what is worth noting in this forum is
that, while BANI has received almost no attention in the US (and
only a little in Western Europe), it has absolutely exploded as a
topic of conversation in the developing world. I've given remote
talks in Brazil, Mexico, and Sri Lanka (at an academic symposium
*about BANI*), and have seen speeches by political leaders and
business executives referencing it, especially in India. I've seen a
recent uptick in discussion of BANI in Russia and Ukraine.

The point is that there is an absolute hunger outside the West for a
way to understand a chaotic world. In many ways, our discussions of
chaos here are as an abstraction; in places like Sri Lanka, chaos is
an absolute constant reality. And what chaos looks like is *misery*.
It's a mashup of both war and aftermath.

Anyway, welcome to 2023.

[Here's more on BANI: <https://ageofbani.com/>]
  

    
Thanks for #82 (emilyg).
  

    
Was listening to CNN and MSNBC and there was a great statement, I
think by a Speaker under Bush.  (Paraphrasing) "What happens if
someone takes hostages, you go to negotiate to find out what they
want, and they respond 'I like having hostages.'?"
  

    


but what about Aloo Paneer in an Instant Pot? that's what i wanna know
about.
  

    
One thing that I think isn't generally realized about large language
models is that there's no particular reason to treat them as a
single "person." ChatGPT is set up to do a dialog between a human
and a computer assistant, but the underlying technology could just
as easily been built to generate both sides of the conversation.
(When playing around with raw GPT-3 it's actually somewhat difficult
to keep it from doing this.) It could also generate a conversation
between multiple people in a chat room, each with their own
opinions. None of the characters it invents is the language model's
"real" personality. If you had raw access, you could edit the chat
transcript to modify its opinions, and it would pick it up from
there as if nothing had happened.

Some people have tried to suss out ChatGPT's political opinions by
asking it questions, which is sort of like trying to figure out a
library's political opinion by grabbing one book off the shelf. A
library contains many opinions, and so does a large language model.
(Though with a language model they all bleed into each other.) The
way it's curated might introduce bias, but not in the same way that
a person has a bias.

A better approach is to hint at what opinions you want to have and
see how good it is at picking up on what it's supposed to do, for
example by asking leading questions. Due to their fill-in-the-blank
training, language models follow the "yes, and" rule of improv.
They're better treated as a well-read follower than something you
want to take advice from. (Though, ChatGPT has additional layers to
try to keep it from doing anything too controversial.)

There was interesting paper recently [1] showing (among other
things) that a large language model's "sycophancy” goes up as they
increase the number of parameters. Which is what you'd expect if you
think of it as getting better at improv.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/model-written-evals.pdf
  

    
I expect that AI writing tools are going to change how writing gets
taught quite a lot. Maybe there are kids starting school now who
will never need to write a formal essay from scratch? Instead
they'll learn to generate a bunch of rough drafts and assemble them
according to taste, based on what they want to say.

The effect on formal writing could be similar to the effect of the
microwave and prepared convenience foods on home cooking. Sure, it's
not the same as cooking a meal from scratch, but if it gets the kids
fed, that's what counts, right?

The equivalent of "getting the kids fed" from a career perspective
is probably doing the sort of bureaucratic and business writing that
educated people are expected to do. People with limited writing
skills will benefit, immigrants especially. Imagine how useful these
tools will be when trying to write something formal in a language
you aren't fluent in.

I particularly remember working with a Chinese co-worker at a
programming job. He was pretty good at programming but the English
in his comments sometimes needed work. He probably could have used a
tool like this.
  

    
Since this is the WELL, it's pleasant to see a long paean to the
benefits of psychedelics, but this isn't an era that's about
"mind-expanding drugs."  It's an era that's all about "pain-erasing
drugs," namely opioids, and the body-count there is spectacular. 
They make psylocybin look as meek and harmless as Dr Brown's Celery
Soda.

It's also interesting -- from a US perspective -- that synthetic
opioids don't come from abroad, and they're not favored by some
louche subculture, and you can't dance to them, and they're not at
all romantic. You look at the Americans dropping dead of opioids,
it's about 100K a year, especially in locales like West Virginia,
Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee -- it's red-state hicks and rust-belt
characters that nobody would praise for avant-garde, dangerous, edgy
living.  

You have to wonder how many Americans bolt down opioids and are also
really squeamish about the health pericls of vaccination.  These two
habits are linked somehow.  It's a lot easier to believe in evil
antivax when Big Pharma has poisoned some of your relatives.
  

    
I've been hoping that President Ilves will arrive here to brief us
on Europe's land-war situation, but he's been in the hospital for
ten days with Covid.  We can all hope he rallies enough to reach the
keyboard.  

This is some kinda decade, folks.
  

    
*I'd heard of VUCA VUCA [volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and
ambiguity], but I have to confess that BANI (Brittle Anxious
Nonlinear Incomprehensible) is a complete novelty to me.

The WELL State of the World, ladies and gentlemen -- always
something edifying!
  

    
Jon wrote, "They're proving that they can disrupt the proceedings,
I'm sure that's a boost. I'm sure they assume they're asserting
power, not ignorance. One thing they're making clear is that there's
just twenty of them."

Yet much like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) in the last session, they
will gain power well in excess of how many people or whatever narrow
slice of U.S. hopes and dreams and needs that they represent. (These
people may make even Rupert Murdoch nervous, although they make his
avatar Tucker very happy.)

This means that the whole world is suffering from the destructive
impacts of the margins of U.S. political power.

Manchin's motivations are far from Brittle Anxious Nonlinear or
Incomprehensible: personal gain and donor service. Because a sincere
senator from West Virginia would be working 48 hours a day to get
West Virginian coal miners and their families and communities
however many billions they will need to survive decently in a
post-coal era, instead of doing his part to push the energy
transition into the second half of the century.

I'm honestly surprised (yet abashed at how surprised) that The New
York Times' reporting on Manchin's corruption had so little impact.
(Link below because it's so gnarly.)

Whereas the Fascist Caucus' motivations are at their core
anti-revolutionary and racist: Move fast, break the government,
restore strongman rule, perpetuate White Power.

I'm white, but a Jew by birth, so this situation certainly makes me
feel Brittle and Anxious.

As an aside, I learned recently via my Mosaic lessons that citizens
of the USA are, or can be, called "estadounidenses" in Latin
American Spanish. This makes tons of sense to me, so speaking as a
journalist who makes her living as an editor these days, I'm going
to do my best to use "U.S. citizens" or "residents of the U.S." or
similar instead of "Americans" henceforth.



<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/27/climate/manchin-coal-climate-conflicts.html
?unlocked_article_code=NEN2ope0lNCVL-imQVBHxuRNC3y8NIghZl15CKoR9OAfghdXWt3ABwH
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