Where Have You Been All My Life?

By in bring me the head of nicholas carr, language No Comments

I saw this and felt an odd sense of recognition. The word looked familiar to me, but I wouldn’t have been able to define it. And the definition certainly stood out. One of my recurring themes is our bad-faith attempts to escape the burden of our own agency, and here we have a one-word encapsulation of the problem: people who “want” to read books, but spend hours scrolling social media instead. Maybe Augustine was the first to recognize it before it had a name: Lord, grant me scrolling chastity, but not yet.

I looked through some of my dictionaries and found velleity in one that I know I read in its entirety, so that may account for my superficial recognition of it. It seems likely that I could have also encountered it elsewhere, but intuited the meaning via the context of the surrounding paragraph, and thus never looked it up. I’m familiar with the experience of only knowing a word through writing, not speech, and thus not knowing how it’s pronounced, but this is an experience of knowing a word by sight, not substance. It may have been in my receptive vocabulary, not my active one.

Psychology has a term, “familiar strangers,” for the people we know through proximity without necessarily knowing them personally. Some words may be like that. I’ve seen them in passing, but we’ve never been officially introduced. I’ve seen velleity in the marketplace, but I didn’t know what it did for a living. Now, I think, we’re going to be bosom-buddies.

Manners Cost You Everything

By in ai, fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

“Interact with a void as if it had a soul” — is that not Ambrose Bierce’s concise definition of prayer?

Sorry, sorry; I only jest! In fact, believe it or not, this has been a longstanding concern of mine as well. I was always troubled by the cavalier attitude toward artificial intelligence displayed in the popular entertainments of my childhood. While other boys were cheering Luke Skywalker’s adventures, I was wondering whether his familiarity with C3PO and R2-D2 constituted a dangerous erosion of the distinction between persons and things. Were the robots merely sophisticated appliances, or was Lucas insinuating that they possessed souls? And what were the implications for the ontological foundations of human dignity?

My friends seemed indifferent to these questions. Indeed, when I raised the subject during recess, they frequently told me to “shut up, dork.”

Matters grew worse in 1982, with the premiere of Knight Rider. Here was a grown man who not only conversed with his automobile but treated it as a friend and confidant. I tried to explain to my classmates that such behavior contributed to the labefaction of moral order. They replied by stuffing me into a locker.

Even then, I recognized the irony. In their eagerness to defend the supposed humanity of a talking Pontiac, they had lost sight of the actual human being in their midst. Unfortunately, my attempts to explain this through the ventilation slots were not well received.

It has taken long enough, but I am gratified to discover that Leith and Gaskovski have finally arrived at the conclusions I reached in elementary school. I only wish they had been around to offer a little moral support at the time. I might have spent considerably less of my childhood with my underpants yanked up to my ribs.

Now and Long Ago

By in ai, music No Comments

“Es muss einfach geil klingen.”

“It’s just got to sound damn good.”

— Joachim Witt, Rolling Stone Germany, October 2026

Joachim Witt is 77 years old and still making music. In this interview, he mentioned that he uses AI for inspiration, designing album covers, and even some aspects of composition. He knows what he wants to produce, down to the particulars of a figure, its surroundings, and the lighting, and he’s happy to experiment with new tools to get it. He compared the current arguments about AI to the old debates over analog and digital recording. He never thought a recording needed to crackle and hiss to be authentic. It just needed to sound good.

I was delighted to read this. There’s something admirable about a man of his age who has lost neither his creative desire nor his curiosity about new ways of satisfying it. Witt has been making music since the late 1970s, moving from quirky New Wave pop to the dark, thunderous Romanticism that became his signature sound. Apparently, he’s still interested in finding out what else he can do.

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of my discovery of his music. This time of year in particular is indelibly linked to it. I stumbled across Bayreuth 3 in late October 2006 while following a “similar artists” trail from other German bands. I ordered all three Bayreuth CDs together and have been listening to them ever since. I enjoyed the heaviness of bands like Rammstein and Eisbrecher, but Witt offered something different: powerful arrangements with a stronger melodic emphasis, and above all, that extraordinary voice.

The closest English-language comparison I can think of is Peter Steele of Type O Negative. Both men had imposing voices capable of genuine tenderness as well as overwhelming power. There’s something almost operatic about their singing, though I mean that descriptively rather than technically. Much rock and heavy metal singing consists of screaming, growling, or barking in a vaguely melodic fashion. There are skills involved in those styles, certainly, but Witt and Steele offer the pleasures of a powerful voice singing a fully developed melody. Witt’s delivery is controlled, articulate, and forceful. His enunciation is almost theatrical, and his voice occupies the foreground even when the guitars, drums, and orchestral arrangements are threatening to bring down the ceiling.

There’s the booming chorus of “Leichtsinn,” the irresistible percussive chanting of “Hände hoch,” the magnificent combination of strings and power chords in “Jetzt und ehedem.” There’s the plaintive longing of “Immer noch,” the subtle melancholy of “Was,” the crowd-pleasing melodic chorus of “Lebe dein Leben.” He can even make winter sound fun and uplifting in “Eis und Schnee,” which is one of the few German titles I can translate without assistance.

I also appreciate his apparent lack of inhibition about emotional extravagance. He’ll deliver a phrase with the grandeur of a tragic soliloquy, or allow a melody to swell with unabashed Romantic yearning. There’s no suggestion that he feels obliged to apologize for his earnestness with a knowing wink or an ironic aside. In an age when an insufficiently guarded display of emotion risks being dismissed as “cringe,” Witt simply opens his mouth and sings.

Bayreuth Zwei contains one of my favorite examples, in the pre-chorus of “Die Flucht.” He stretches a short phrase across a dramatically-building melodic passage, giving a handful of syllables a powerful emotional force. Zieh’n wie Stürme, die Gedanken flieh’n. I’ve listened to those few seconds countless times over the years.

The amusing part is, I don’t speak German.

For most of these twenty years, my knowledge of Witt has been confined almost entirely to his music. German-language interviews and articles were largely inaccessible to me, and English-language media is unfortunately lacking. AI translation has recently made it much easier to keep up with him, which is how I discovered his enthusiasm for the technology in the first place. I can now understand what he says about making music. Whether I want to understand what he’s actually singing is another matter.

For the most part, I’ve experienced his songs as sound rather than stories. His voice is another instrument, and the German language supplies its own rhythms, consonants, and expansive vowels. I don’t need to know what the words mean to be thrilled by the way he sings them. This may actually be an advantage. His extravagant Romanticism might strike me as embarrassingly mawkish if I understood every word of it. I might find myself rolling my eyes at some overheated declaration of anguish or longing. Fortunately, I’m spared the necessity of passing literary judgment. I can surrender to the emotional performance without having to approve of the sentiments being expressed. I can love Witt as a singer without having to love him as a poet.

I’ve followed him through the Rübezahl trilogy, the comparatively lighter Dom, Neumond, Thron and Ich, and even some of his early pop material. (Back in the file-sharing days, a girl named Kristyna from the Czech Republic sent me his early song “Das Supergesicht,” which wasn’t available for download at the time.) Some albums appeal to me more than others, but his voice and theatrical temperament remain unmistakable. And now he’s working on another album, Katharsis, with Chris Harms, whose collaborations helped make Rübezahl so magnificent.

I’m looking forward to hearing what they come up with. Whatever Witt chooses to do with AI, I hope he keeps doing it for years to come. His stated criterion has served him well enough so far. As for the lyrics, I suspect I’m better off not knowing.

The Ghost In the Paragraph

By in ai, writing No Comments

From a different section of that Max Raskin article in the Free Press:

Most people initially reject this premise because they think they can tell whether an essay was written by a human. Enough data and anecdotes are pouring in to show this confidence is an illusion. In a study published in August by Villanova University researchers, 1,682 adults read short fiction written either by AI or human beings. They not only preferred the stories written by AI, but in follow-up experiments, they did no better than a coin flip in determining authenticity.

The educated literary elite performed no better—in a separate study, researchers at Columbia, Michigan, and Stony Brook universities had readers with MFAs try to distinguish between passages written by AI and passages written by writers with MFAs. When the models were trained on a writer’s body of work, the MFA readers preferred the AI-generated passages to MFA-generated passages, and the best detection tools only flagged the AI text 3 percent of the time.

I’ve been running my own little test on the writers and editors I have been discussing this idea with. These are literary minds at some of the country’s most prestigious writing institutions. What I do is I pick a handful of authors they would be familiar with and then create a test—one real passage and one fake.

The first time I ran the test earlier in the year, I had Anthropic’s Claude generate an imagined passage and a real passage from Pride and Prejudice. I asked if two of my literary-minded friends could tell the difference. One could. But that’s because she knew the book chapter and verse. We then tried the same test with Moby-Dick, and although they were both confident in the answer, they both got it wrong.

The models have improved even since then. I went to the most well-read person I know—a rapacious (I used that word even though voracious is better because you have to know it wasn’t an AI who wrote this) consumer of 18th- and 19th-century British historians. He had a failure rate of 100 percent of the passages he did not already recognize. He was unable to tell the difference between genuine and faked Gibbon and Macaulay.

For reasons I can only speculate about, the “educated literary elite” — I will resist paraphrasing Voltaire here — have decided to stake the honor of thousands of years of literary achievement on a parlor game. They have foolishly attempted to claim territory they haven’t a chance of holding. In order to defend the merits of organic human prose, they have committed themselves to the proposition that AI prose is so clearly inferior and predictable that a trained eye can spot it at a glance. Thus they suffer the embarrassing routs described above. All because they decided to tie their credibility to a cheap conjuror’s trick. They act as if the essence of literature depends on them being able to “read” maximum information from a minimum of clues.

I picture a gathering of the educated literary elite in a darkened room, seated around a table draped in black velvet. Incense curls through the air. A bust of Shakespeare presides from the mantelpiece. Their most distinguished colleague, eyes closed, presses a scrap of paper to his forehead. “I’m sensing a presence,” he murmurs. “A grave, magisterial presence. Long, rolling cadences. An eighteenth-century energy.” The others lean forward. His brow furrows. “I’m seeing ruins…columns…a great empire in decline. A man is trying to communicate with us. His name begins with G. Goblin? Gaboon? Gibbles?” He begins to tremble. “Gibbon!” A gasp goes around the table. Someone faints. Somewhere in the darkness, a tambourine rattles. The medium collapses backward in his chair, exhausted by his exertions. After a respectful silence, a janitor changing the wastebasket asks, “Why don’t you just look up the passage?” He is immediately expelled for disrupting the vibrations.

Seriously, though. Just concede the indefensible territory. AI can already convincingly imitate style and voice, and it will only improve. Unless you, too, know an entire oeuvre by heart, you will be capable of being “taken in” by a pitch-perfect pastiche presented in isolation. I am by no means a Nietzsche “expert,” just an enthusiast who is familiar with most of his writing. I often see quotations attributed to him that are better credited to that prolific author Apocryphal. What do I do when I see one that doesn’t sound familiar? I look it up. I ask an LLM to verify it and link to a source. If I knew any actual Nietzsche scholars, I’d ask them. If the purported quotation names a particular book as the source, I’ll check it myself. If it doesn’t name any particular source, I’m already suspicious of it anyway. The point is, there is absolutely no need to make instant recognition the gold standard here. There is no prize for being the first to cry fraud. A paragraph may be superficially plausible while not standing up to further scrutiny. Further scrutiny should always be the standard, whether the work in question is a purported quotation of a famous author, or just the office blowhard sounding off about something he saw on Facebook.

Suppose AI eventually becomes capable of imitating Gibbon so perfectly that no scholar can reliably tell the difference. What exactly will have been lost? Gibbon’s achievement was not merely his ability to arrange subordinate clauses in a particularly recognizable fashion. It was his historical imagination, his skeptical temperament, his judgments about Rome, Christianity, and civilization, the intellectual undertaking that produced The Decline and Fall. None of that disappears because a machine can reproduce his cadences. We don’t accuse Frank Caliendo of stealing John Madden’s soul when he imitates him; we laugh and applaud precisely because the imitation is so good. If someone passes off a counterfeit passage as genuine Gibbon, that’s simple fraud, hardly a novelty in literary history. We have perfectly mundane ways of dealing with such things. But an imitation honestly presented as an imitation? Where’s the injury? Someone still has to want to make it, for whatever purpose: an argument, a joke, an experiment, a bit of harmless amusement. Someone has to care.

I’m reminded of the people who insist that without God, an immortal soul, or an afterlife, human existence would be meaningless and scarcely worth living. I’ve never understood the logic. Why should the absence of some supernatural guarantee invalidate the pleasures and satisfactions of the life I’m already living? Now I’m confronted with people who seem equally convinced that literature loses its value unless some irreducible human essence can be found lurking inside every paragraph. Once again, I’m baffled by the non sequitur. If a sentence is beautiful, an observation perceptive, an argument persuasive, why must my appreciation of it depend on discovering a ghost in the machinery?

The point of writing, surely, is to have something worth saying, not to possess a skill that nobody else can reproduce. If the latter is what we’re really defending, perhaps we should stop invoking the soul of literature and admit that we’re worried about the price of labor.

The Wheel In My Mind Keeps On Turning, I Don’t Know What I’ll Think Tomorrow

By in ai, identity, writing No Comments

Max Raskin:

Second, if we maintain that there are those who read because they want to hear the voice of another human being, we must ask: What if AI can communicate your voice better than you can, including all your errors and idiosyncrasies? It is a strange thing to consider, but just as AI can mimic your speaking voice indistinguishably, it certainly can mimic your written one. It knows what kind of adjectives you like, the length of your sentences, and your political opinions. If it doesn’t, it can easily be trained to.

I’m open to the possibility that AI could learn to imitate my writing with considerable accuracy. I’ve been blogging for twenty-one years, and there’s plenty of material available to establish my stylistic habits, favorite subjects, recurrent obsessions, and peculiar sense of humor. Given enough training, it might produce an essay that even I would have trouble identifying as counterfeit. But I can upload my entire blog to an AI. I can’t upload my brain. And I’m not entirely sure what’s in there myself.

Forgive what may appear to be self-indulgence in the following. I promise there’s a point to all this.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post called “Ye and the Devil,” an exercise in silliness involving Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Paul Valéry, Kanye West, and the Devil. It began with AOC’s declaration that reading was an act of resistance against AI, which apparently aims to reduce us all to citizens of Camazotz. I rolled my eyes at the shallow demagoguery, but chuckled at the thought that the literati would eat it up regardless. This suggested the comic possibility of AOC as the Devil discovering how easily the self-appointed guardians of critical thinking could be seduced by a little flattery about their intellectual independence.

While discussing the possibilities with ChatGPT, he suggested giving the Devil a moment of exasperation at how little effort the seduction required. Devil. Exasperation. Click.

Months earlier, while reading Valéry’s Analects, I had tagged an aphorism in which the Devil finds himself frustrated by his inability to tempt a moron. The circumstances were slightly different, but the underlying joke was similar: the infernal machinery of temptation rendered useless by human stupidity. I’d tagged the passage because it was suggestive, funny, and potentially useful. I periodically flip through books, revisiting tagged passages in the hope that something might strike me differently. This time, two words in an AI-generated suggestion brought the aphorism back to mind.

Suddenly, I knew I had something. Until then, I’d merely been playing with an amusing premise. Now the disparate elements were beginning to form a recognizable composition. Other associations followed, and the finished post eventually acquired Kanye West as its visual punchline and a title recalling Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil Blues.” It was like a musician noodling around on a scale when a few notes suddenly resolve themselves into a distinctive riff. His eyes light up. He can hear a song beginning to take shape.

I would never claim that any of this is profound. It was an elaborate joke, after all. But I put a lot of thought into constructing it just so, and it’s one of my favorite posts of recent memory because of how much fun it was to put together. I love it even if no one else does.

Something similar happened with another recent post, “Do You Choose What I Choose? More Alternatives.” I’d been thinking about the provenance of art and the familiar observation that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That phrase reminded me of Metallica’s “Eye of the Beholder,” which happened to be unusually prominent in my mind because a coworker had been playing Metallica albums at the warehouse that day. The reason he’d been doing that is because we had just learned that a former client of ours was a member of the studio crew during the making of one of their albums. These little coincidences eventually converged on a lyric that suggested a title for the developing essay. To a reader, the title was simply appropriate to the subject. To me, it was also a private souvenir of a particular afternoon, with associations that nobody encountering the finished essay could possibly recover from the text alone. It reminds me of how much I used to enjoy taking apart my mom’s Russian nesting dolls and putting them back together. The outer shell is pleasing enough, but it’s fun to know that there’s more hidden inside.

None of this requires supernatural powers of creativity. An AI could possibly have suggested the Valéry aphorism or the Metallica lyric independently. But why would it have thought to assemble these particular ingredients, at these particular moments? Why would anyone besides me have prompted it to do so? And among the innumerable possible combinations it could generate, who would decide which were worth pursuing? The question of judgment may have been pushed to the other limits by technological advances, but there it still sits, awaiting an answer.

I’ve spent decades reading, observing, remembering, and forgetting. A gigantic quantity of miscellaneous material has accumulated somewhere in the attic. Sometimes I can retrieve something deliberately. Sometimes an unexpected phrase pulls on an invisible thread and something I hadn’t thought about in years comes tumbling out of the rafters. Frequently, I’m as surprised as anyone else.

This happens during conversations as well. I may know only that there’s something interesting in a particular direction, without knowing what it is or how to find it. I’ll say to ChatGPT, in effect, “I think there’s something out there. Let’s go look.” We wander around, trying analogies and following associations, until occasionally something clicks. Sometimes we’ve recovered an old memory; sometimes we’ve discovered a connection that didn’t previously exist. What interests me is that the activity depends upon a perspective I can’t fully describe, even after dissecting its individual components.

My published writing records the connections I’ve already made. It doesn’t disclose all the memories I haven’t yet recalled, the experiences that haven’t acquired significance, or the circumstances that may suddenly bring them together tomorrow. Nor can I predict which possibilities will strike me as compelling. I’ve spent decades inside this head, and it still surprises me regularly. “We are changed by what we change.”

I think of the passage in the Tao Te Ching about thirty spokes converging upon the hub of a wheel, whose usefulness depends upon the empty space at its center. It’s a useful image of the individual consciousness. All sorts of memories, influences, preferences, experiences, and passing impressions converge upon a common center, acquiring relationships they might never have possessed otherwise. We can identify the spokes easily enough. But where, exactly, is the essential thing that makes them belong together?

This begins to resemble the old metaphysical problem of the soul. We can describe the constituent parts of a person, observe their characteristic interactions, and recognize a coherent individual without necessarily identifying some additional substance responsible for the whole arrangement. Perhaps there is no such substance. Perhaps the mystery is simply a measure of our ignorance. Calling it a soul doesn’t explain anything, but neither does cataloguing its components necessarily tell us everything we want to know. And perhaps the same is true, on a smaller scale, of a writer’s voice.

Raskin may be right that AI will eventually imitate my prose better than I can produce it myself. But I’m not especially concerned about that. I don’t write because the internet suffers from a shortage of paragraphs bearing my stylistic fingerprints. I write because something catches my attention, reminds me of something else, and occasionally produces an irresistible desire to see what I can make of it.

I’ve offered two unusually detailed accounts of how particular posts came into existence. I’ve identified the literary influences, private associations, accidental circumstances, and AI contributions. There’s no secret ingredient I’ve deliberately withheld. And yet, having explained all that, I still couldn’t begin to tell you what I’m going to think of next.

Thirty spokes converge upon an empty hub. Somehow the wheel keeps turning.

Don’t Ask Me Why, It’s Just the Nature of My Grooves

By in aphorisms, books, bricolage, foolosophy, writing No Comments

She concludes that writing on the internet, particularly in spaces where it’s simple to charge money for it, tends to push writers toward the confessional, the self-helpy, and the soothing.

…But in the new writer economy a “desperation for attention” is practically “an industry command,” Brouillette writes. The platform may not save journalism as a whole, but it certainly helps prolong the careers of those willing to play the “game,” as McKenzie put it, of cultivating their personal brands.

— Kyle Chayka, “Did Substack Fix the Internet?”

****

My purpose is to make people think – and make myself think too, – about things we didn’t think about, because they were too close or too constantly present, – i.e. because of their very importance. Normally speaking, our thought is naturally drawn towards the things that aren’t immediately resolved or that require a response specially adapted to the circumstance. We pay no attention to the even ground we walk upon, and the walking itself allows us to think of other things. Thus the incidence and the natural role / movement / of thought is seemingly opposed to the natural course of this walking. Both pursue separately their trains of substitutions etc. But when the terrain becomes difficult, this freedom is doubly renounced. Either the walking has to ally itself to the thinking, or the thinking stops the walking, and either the shock of the thought, or else that of the accidents of terrain cause a change of pace.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 3

****

The ‘crowd’ is really what I have made my polemical target, and it was Socrates who taught me. I want to make people aware so that they don’t waste their lives and fritter them away. The aristocrats take for granted that a vast number will always go to waste; but they keep quiet about it and lead sheltered lives pretending that all these multitudes of people simply do not exist. That is the ungodly aspect of the aristocrats’ superiority – not even making people aware, just so that they can have a good time themselves.

That’s not what I want. I want to call the crowd’s attention to their own ruin. And if they don’t want the good, I will compel them with the use of evil. One understands me or one doesn’t.

— Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

Whose Problem Is That?

By in foolosophy, the geist of the zeit No Comments

When the Lady of the House was a teenager in the hinterlands, she and her friend Britney drove to a “nearby” town to see a movie. On the way home, Britney spotted her ex-boyfriend’s truck pulled over by the police. As one does in a small town, she pulled up alongside to see what was happening and everyone chatted amiably.

When the Lady arrived home, her mother greeted her at the door: “So, I heard you talked to the cops!”

Furthermore, the family chiropractor had apparently been at the movie theater and reported that she’d walked right past him without saying hello. All this intelligence had reached headquarters before the Lady had even returned from her outing. The Stasi could have learned a few things from rural prairie life.

The Lady’s mother also used to make something of a sport out of spotting people around town. “I saw you at Costco, but you didn’t wave!” There was a harrowing competitive element to this social vigilance. Failure to reciprocate would get you roasted at best, shunned at worst. I wouldn’t want to live under that sort of surveillance — I don’t even enjoy visiting it — but at a safe distance, I can respect the culture that produced it. In a sparsely populated agricultural region, knowing your neighbors and maintaining good relations with them wasn’t merely a pleasant social custom. When blizzards, farming accidents, and vehicle breakdowns miles from town were among the ordinary hazards of life, your social network was part of your survival equipment. You helped people because someday you might need them to help you. The custom had become a duty, and the duty had become a habit.

She has carried those habits into the digital age. On my birthday, I received her customary text greeting, bearing the signature “(sent with Echo).” At some point in the past, she arranged for her electronic assistant to send me a birthday message at the appropriate time. It doesn’t matter to me whether she made that arrangement the day before or six months ago. She thought of it at some point, decided it was important, and made sure it happened. Given the likelihood of being somewhere out of cellular service on the day itself, she may have been especially prudent. I don’t take it as a sign of inauthenticity that she didn’t hand-craft those characters in a fit of affection mere moments before they appeared on my end.

I mention this because I’ve recently read two essays about the supposed difficulties of maintaining friendships in the technological age. In UnHerd, Matthew Gasda worries that AI assistants will rob friendship of its essential friction. In the Atlantic, Julie Beck confesses to being a chronically bad texter. She describes setting a daily reminder to answer her accumulated messages, which helps, but makes her uneasy about treating her loved ones as though they were a productivity problem rather than a source of joy. I agree with Gasda’s skepticism of Silicon Valley’s perennial promise that removing obstacles to communication will somehow produce better relationships. Short of implanting chips in our brains that allow us to transmit messages as soon as we think of them, I don’t see how communication could possibly become much easier. And yet people still neglect to communicate. Beck’s complaint, by contrast, strikes me as more evidence of the self-absorption that inevitably accompanies the therapeutic concern with personal feelings over obligations to others. I can easily imagine the Lady’s mother listening to this elaborate account of emotional ambivalence with mounting impatience.

“Well, make up your mind! If you can’t remember to send the message on your own, then use the automation! But if you don’t like automating it, remember it yourself! Nobody’s making you use the damn thing!”

“But it makes me feel—”

“Well, whose problem is that?”

Pace Virginia Woolf, on or about 2011, human character changed. The smartphone had arrived, and with it a new incapacity to remember birthdays, answer messages, or arrange meetings. Armed with devices capable of performing nearly every clerical function formerly entrusted to a secretary, we apparently became less able to fulfill our social obligations. According to some demographics, at least. The younger people I know are quick to offer therapeutic explanations. They have ADHD, depression, anxiety, insufficient emotional bandwidth, or some other impediment to remembering that the rest of us exist. I couldn’t help but notice that many of my younger friends, despite living with smartphones grafted onto their palms, forgot to text on my birthday. I can’t help but think that rehearsing a steady narrative about your inability to perform the normal functions of “adulting” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The older generation, to which the Lady’s mother belongs, was taught to regard such difficulties as problems to be managed, not as permissions to disappoint other people. If you couldn’t remember something, you wrote it down. If you weren’t in the mood, you did it anyway. Your feelings didn’t automatically settle the question of what you owed somebody else. One advantage of cultivating discipline is that you don’t have to consult your feelings every time an obligation presents itself. You have already decided what matters and developed habits accordingly. Why should today’s mood automatically overrule yesterday’s considered judgment that a particular relationship is worth preserving?

We increasingly hear complaints about loneliness and the difficulty of maintaining adult friendships. Yet many of the supposedly antiquated conventions of social obligation existed to prevent precisely that difficulty. You acknowledged birthdays, returned invitations, checked on sick friends, and occasionally contacted people for no particular reason. These rituals kept relationships alive during periods when nobody was feeling especially inspired. If the human species were worth a damn, you might think we could use our vaunted powers of reflection and foresight to steer a middle course between the Scylla of stifling village life and the Charybdis of atomized isolation. Perhaps we could voluntarily choose to live up to challenging obligations out of a considered conviction that doing so avoids the worst of each extreme. Obviously this is too idealistic. We prefer to swing like a pendulum from one extreme to the other instead and complain either way.

Imagine a society in which everyone habitually asks, “How will the other person feel if I don’t?” Everyone who has friends will have people looking out for them, just as they look out for others. Now imagine one in which everyone defaults to asking, “How do I feel about doing this?” Everyone enjoys complete freedom to disengage whenever the inclination strikes, while wondering why nobody ever bothers to contact them. It’s almost a reversal of Adam Smith’s famous insight about self-interest. In a functioning marketplace, pursuing our individual interests can produce benefits for others. In this social marketplace, everyone pursuing their own emotional comfort can produce a general shortage of the very consideration everyone wants to receive. An invisible hand that leaves everyone sitting at home waiting for someone else to message.

Three Bouncing Dots

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Ian Bogost:

Though it is harder to find reason to crank (or dial, or strike, or pedal), nothing is stopping you from doing so. Perhaps it even makes sense to own supposedly outmoded apparatuses just because they exercise those muscles—a crankable pepper grinder, for when you can’t get your hands on a penny press. To feel your body carry out forgotten gestures anew is even more pleasurable than the gestures on their own. Rediscovering them proves that they are not bygone, but obscured by the changes that made them rare.

Bogost is nostalgic for the days of hand-cranked mechanisms — pencil sharpeners, manual car windows, and their relatives. Nothing inherently wrong with a little eccentric appreciation of life’s tiny details, of course, but just because something is evocative doesn’t make it intrinsically significant. He seems to me to be treating the objects of his attention as though they were the source of his appreciation, rather than asking what his own capacity for appreciation might discover elsewhere. By the time he’s lamenting the “sense of loss in my low-crank-lifestyle,” or finding romance in the act of rolling a car window down by hand to talk to a love interest, the words “crank-yanking” are starting to appear in my mind.

Bogost, are you yanking
My chain about society’s de-cranking?
It is the present you draw a blank for.
It is Bogost you crank for.

If he were just describing a scene of winding and unwinding himself in the telephone cord during a conversation, you might feel a little warm nostalgia about being reminded of a true-to-life detail that you knew well, once upon a time, but had forgotten. But he evidently wants you to find something profound in the physical act itself, and it just isn’t necessarily that deep. Were you so inclined, you could moon over the three little bouncing dots that show your friend is composing a text at this moment. It could be framed as a little drama: anticipation, impatience, uncertainty, perhaps even anxiety. Someone is composing a message. What are they going to say? Why have the dots disappeared? Have they changed their mind? Are they thinking? Deleting? You could invest all that with spiritual meaning, the poignant longing of wanting to know but having to wait. But that’s now, so it doesn’t have the sepia tint of times gone by. It will take a few decades before a future Bogost will be writing an article about “gestures of connection,” what we lost when the “so-and-so-is-typing” indicator went away, and future me will think, with a touch of exasperation, Why didn’t you appreciate that at the time you had it?

His recollection of winding himself in the telephone cord is charming precisely because it isolates one tiny physical detail from all the unremarkable business of an ordinary conversation. It doesn’t follow that the experience was especially charming while he was having it. He might have been bored, annoyed, preoccupied, or impatient to get off the telephone. Reflecting on this should lead you to the conclusion that “I’m probably ignoring something right now that I will only appreciate in hindsight. What is it?” But often, it seems the past receives contemplative attention; the present receives merely functional attention. That seems to me like someone sitting in a car, facing out the back window. “Ah! Look at that mountain disappearing into the distance! How poignant! How sublime! How…” And I think, “If you would just turn around, you could see all this coming, as it happens.” If you sincerely believe that the mundane experiences of your youth possessed a richness you failed to recognize, shouldn’t that discovery change the way you attend to mundane experiences now? Otherwise, you’re simply arranging to have the same revelation again twenty years hence, about a different set of vanished conveniences.

As we saw above, he suggests that readers might want to own outmoded apparatuses in order to “exercise those muscles,” to feel your body “carry out forgotten gestures anew.” There’s nostalgia, and then there’s locking yourself in a 1980s museum and refusing to come out. Seriously, if you make a personal ritual out of the mere act of dialing a rotary phone, or turning a pencil sharpener, this might suggest autism more than spiritual depths. Why are we looking for an excuse to crank our arms in a circle? Because it evokes a bygone age when there was a practical meaning to the gesture. Now, it’s just a form of Ghost Dancing, as if we’re going through the old motions and chants in hopes that the Great Spirit will roll up all the fiber-optic cables and wash all the smartphones into the sea. But even if that happened, we would just find ourselves back in the 1980s again. Where we already were once before, and just as restless and dissatisfied then.

The three bouncing dots aren’t made of brass or oak. They don’t have a satisfying mechanical resistance. Nobody’s grandmother operated them. Yet they can represent the thrilling possibility of communication from someone you love, or the suspense of a conversation whose outcome matters deeply to you. Someday they’ll be gone, too. And the poignancy will come rushing in, right on schedule. You don’t even have to wait until then. You only have to recognize that the particular conversation they’re announcing, with this particular person, on this particular day, will never happen again. Are we commemorating or cultivating the experience of being alive?

The Dame Who Dropped a Dime

By in battling personal entropy, jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

The dame was coming straight at me. I was sitting on a bench, minding my own business, pushing a couple of dumbbells. She had a smile on her face. I knew that smile. Trouble. Nothing but trouble.

We’d crossed paths before. Nice dame. Looked a little like me, she’d said. Had the same kind of face that made people think twice about approaching. But I’d let my guard down. Told her things. Things a man shouldn’t tell a dame with a good memory.

Like his birthday.

“Happy belated birthday!” she said, offering a fist bump.

I felt the blood drain from my face. My eyes widened. I drew a hand across my throat, signaling her to shut it. But it was too late. The dame had dropped a dime on me.

The big man standing next to me turned around. The muscle. My trainer. His eyes lit up like a jack-o’-lantern.

“When was that?” he asked.

I knew the jig was up. She spilled her guts. Sold me out. The smile never left her face.

Fifty-four years. That’s what they had on me. Fifty-four years, and now the muscle was going to collect.

First came the dumbbell presses. Thirty-five pounds in each hand. Fifty-four reps. The muscle’s got a thing for numerology. Twenty-seven on each side. He called it a celebration.

Then came the behind-the-head overhead barbell presses. Fifty-five pounds, fifty-four reps. The big man said I could do them all at once, or break them up into smaller sets. Some choice. Like asking a condemned man if he’d rather be shot standing up or sitting down.

I took three sets of eighteen. By the fifty-first rep, my delts and tris felt like somebody had emptied a clip into ’em. Four more reps. Four lousy reps between me and freedom.

Somehow I made it.

I never saw the dame again that night. She’d gone about her business, leaving me to face the music. That’s how it goes in this town.

The worst part? She’d remembered my birthday after hearing it mentioned just once. I couldn’t even hold it against her.

It’s a rare thing, finding somebody who remembers you.

You just hope they don’t do it in front of your trainer.

****

The next night, I went to settle my tab. The manager was behind the desk. A respectable man, or so I’d thought.

I told him about the ambush. He listened quietly, then let something slip.

The dame had been asking questions. She knew my birthday was coming up, but she didn’t know the exact date.

“So I told her,” he said.

I looked at him. For a long time.

A stool pigeon. Right there behind the front desk.

The dame had a man on the inside. The muscle had done the dirty work. And I’d been paying good money to belong to the very establishment that sold me out.

And All You Know-It-Alls With Politic Views

By in ai, aphorisms, media/propaganda No Comments

I loathe everything which seeks to persuade me — A party, a religion seeking followers, large numbers and the propagation of its ideas, are condemned as ignoble (in my eyes). To be noble, a doctrine must not make any concessions to the desire to be shared. Sit ut est aut non sit.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 1

Tom Bartlett:

Although Kennedy has stoked vaccine hesitancy for most of this century and argues that Americans are overmedicated, he has a soft spot for these particular shots. The “Make America Healthy Again” movement is officially on board too, which feels strange considering that MAHA is all about treating anything modern and artificial with suspicion. They’re the raw-milk people! They don’t even like Doritos and Coca-Cola! And yet they’ve decided that these highly processed powders, assembled by machines that link amino acids together, are somehow consistent with the nature-knows-best ethos. For MAHA, the renegade cachet of peptides is central to their appeal, and the fact that medical experts are wary of them is a plus. Under Kennedy, the FDA may soon allow six peptides, including BPC‑157, to be made in the United States, which would mean that doctors could prescribe them, and that telehealth companies such as Hims & Hers, best known for discreetly shipping men generic Viagra, could offer them for sale.

As it happens, I recently tried a cycle of BPC-157 (from a compounding pharmacy, if that matters). I haven’t noticed anything different. Chronic aches remain and energy levels are unchanged. That could be a matter of dosage amount, or duration of the cycle, or my individual biochemistry, or who knows how many other variables. The point is, I’m not a peptide believer angry at encountering a naysayer. I’m annoyed because, in accordance with the Atlantic’s house style, I can’t be allowed to read a sober article and make up my own mind, which already leans toward skepticism. They don’t even trust their own core readership of Acela corridor midwits to be able to draw the correct conclusions without extra guidance. I have to have this Bartlett jackass interrupting his own reporting to keep nudging me in the ribs — “MAHA morons, am I right? Hyuk hyuk!” He can’t go two paragraphs without taking the reader’s misinformation temperature.

I’m afraid the liberal establishment will simply never get over the trauma of 2016. The hectoring, didactic tone is here to stay for possibly the rest of our lifetimes. Older folks may snort and claim it long predates 2016. All I know is that I was alive and aware for a few decades before then, and the hysterical reaction to the populist revolt over the last decade is unlike anything I’ve known. Now we’re starting to see suggestions that AI might serve as a corrective to the destabilizing effects of social media by providing users with accurate, expert-backed information. If anything can cause the herd of independent minds at the Atlantic to do an about-face and start proselytizing for AI, it would be the promise of restoring the credibility of establishment expertise.

Do You Choose What I Choose? More Alternatives

By in ai, aphorisms, art, foolosophy No Comments

If only you could discern all the nonsense which, in a man’s mind, ends up by producing things of beauty, and all the things of beauty that have gone to the making of this or that piece of nonsense!

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

Friedrich’s wanderer looks out upon an immense, mysterious world, inviting contemplation of something beyond himself. Gaskovski looks at the same painting and finds yet another occasion to contemplate AI. Ah, well. Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love, as George Eliot wrote.

“One advantage of familiarizing yourself with real art…” is, amusingly, the language of instrumental value, the very sort of language she’d presumably find objectionable if it appeared in an essay about leveraging literature to optimize cognitive performance. Imagine somebody recommending Shakespeare because he’ll make you better at identifying low-quality content. Wouldn’t we ask if that is what Shakespeare is for? Must even aesthetic contemplation be justified as another way of improving our filters for the information marketplace?

More interestingly, let’s imagine somebody who knows nothing about art. He sees the AI Friedrich without knowing who the painting is imitating. It speaks to him. He begins thinking about his own insignificance against the immensity of nature, perhaps even about mortality, solitude, or the sublime. Is the experience fraudulent? Is his contemplation tainted because the image wasn’t a digital reproduction of the very pigments that Friedrich himself daubed onto a canvas? And let’s not even entertain the vastly more complicated possibility of a master forger who spends years producing indistinguishable “lost Friedrichs.” When the fraud is exposed, the paintings become objects of contempt, though not a brushstroke has changed. Was the artistry fraudulent, or only the attribution? What if AI prose can say something profound to a reader? What if AI painting can inspire a viewer with a sense of beauty and contemplation?

Once provenance starts doing the work of aesthetic judgment, it’s tempting to imagine beauty as an inherited trait: beautiful intentions producing beautiful works, which in turn produce beautiful thoughts in the viewer. But Friedrich’s original might cause a viewer to think of something silly or low instead. Someone could look at it and think, “That fellow has a splendid coat!” Another might be reminded of an unpleasant hiking trip. Someone else might find the whole Romantic sensibility pompous and theatrical. The imitation, in turn, might inspire genuine contemplation. There is no guarantee that beauty begets beauty, generation after generation. Aesthetic eugenics might only produce aesthetic inbreeding.

But Valéry’s point isn’t merely that the aesthetic bloodline occasionally needs an infusion of lowborn nonsense to remain vigorous. He’s suggesting that there was never a pure bloodline to begin with. Beauty and nonsense have been consorting promiscuously all along, and nobody can reconstruct the family tree without discovering some embarrassing ancestors. Gaskovski might insist that familiarity with the Old Masters protects us from being taken in by nonsense. Valéry, an Old Master of sorts himself, seems to be warning us that familiarity with beautiful things offers no immunity whatsoever against producing nonsense of our own.

Human ingenuity can produce exquisite frauds; mechanical processes can produce unexpected beauty; masterpieces can inspire banalities; banalities can inspire masterpieces. The ancestry of a beautiful thing is not necessarily beautiful. Nor is its progeny. And personally, I find that to be a beauty worth contemplating. The world will always be a little stranger than our limited theories about it.

For All and None

By in fresh hell, nietzsche No Comments

The Unfinished:

I dont mean this as a joke. I dont mean this as a provocative metaphor designed to generate engagement on social media, although I am aware that it will generate engagement on social media, because the internet is a machine that converts provocation into dopamine with the same mechanical efficiency that a sausage factory converts pig intestines into breakfast. I mean it as a literal, formal, generic classification. Nietzsche’s books belong to the same literary genre as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, Daring Greatly by Brené Brown, Atomic Habits by James Clear, and the spiral-bound manifestation journal that your cousin Gemma sells on Etsy under the brand name “Luna & Sage” and which has a 4.8-star rating from 2,300 women who describe themselves in their reviews as “currently on a journey.”

It’s a funny conceit, but this essay makes the category of self-help so elastic that it becomes meaningless. Any writer who encourages readers to reconsider their lives becomes a self-help author by this standard, whether it’s Epictetus, Montaigne, Thoreau, or Ted Kaczynski. Another obvious objection is that Rhonda Byrne famously promises that the universe will cooperate with your aspirations. Nietzsche promises nothing of the kind. The absence of any cosmic guarantee is central to his philosophy. If this were about trying to correct academic distortions in the name of accuracy, there was a much easier and obvious way to go. But an essay arguing that Nietzsche belongs to an ancient tradition of philosophy as a way of life wouldn’t have nearly the comic appeal of announcing that Nietzsche was Tony Robbins in a walrus mustache.

I honestly have not given it much thought before now, but my provisional description of the “self-help” genre would be a particularly American belief, motivated by optimism and democratic egalitarianism, that with enough know-how and can-do spirit, each of us is capable of creating the life we want. (Already, this presumes that we have the honesty and self-knowledge to accomplish it, an assertion Nietzsche would guffaw at.) Nietzsche, by contrast, certainly believed human beings could be transformed, but he didn’t necessarily believe that transformation would make them happier, more sociable, better adjusted, or more comprehensible to their neighbors. Nor did he assume that everybody deserved an equal invitation to the enterprise. We take for granted that a writer addressing humanity is, by extension, addressing each of us as an individual. Nietzsche entertained no such democratic obligation. His readers of the future were an imagined spiritual aristocracy, not an untapped market for personal improvement.

What if he regarded our intensely individualistic culture as one of the most successful manifestations of herd mentality in history? After all, everybody is encouraged to be unique. Everybody is entitled to self-expression. Everybody is expected to discover his authentic identity and live his best life. Yet the methods, aspirations, and even the vocabulary of this supposedly independent self-creation are standardized to the point of cliché. We tend to equate individuality with freedom of choice. Nietzsche was deeply suspicious of precisely that understanding of freedom. A person who obediently follows his appetites, preferences, and fashionable enthusiasms may imagine himself independent while remaining entirely governed by forces he scarcely understands.

What we call personal growth often involves becoming better adjusted to the social environment we already inhabit. We learn to manage our emotions, improve our relationships, communicate more effectively, establish boundaries, and pursue satisfying lives. Much of this is perfectly sensible, and Nietzsche himself might have benefited from a little more proficiency in some of these areas. But there’s no reason to assume that he would have considered successful adjustment to modern bourgeois society a particularly admirable achievement. Quite the opposite.

We’re so reflexively accustomed to treating culture as a resource for personal development that we can be tempted to translate his philosophy into that idiom. His ideas become techniques. His provocations become refrigerator-magnet affirmations. His contempt for complacency becomes a motivational challenge. His exceptional individual becomes the ordinary consumer striving to reach his full potential. But one of the most genuinely transformative experiences Nietzsche can offer is the discovery that a philosopher may not consider you, your happiness, or your self-improvement particularly important. And the resulting affront to your self-esteem might be more intellectually valuable than another encouraging reminder of your limitless potential.

“Philosophy as a way of life” does a better job of summing up his varied and evolving interests, from poetry, psychology, and philosophy proper to religion, metaphysics, language, music, and culture, to say nothing of his scintillating prose. Stuffing all that into a contemporary definition of “self-help” makes for a good joke but absurd reasoning. The academics with their focus on minutiae may be like Lilliputians examining Gulliver tied down on the beach, but a reduction of Nietzsche to a peddler of encouraging platitudes is Procrustean in its violence.

Nutshells and Infinite Space

By in ai, foolosophy No Comments

Venkatesh Rao:

Many people who appear stupid are not incapable of thought. They are simply not particularly motivated to think, given the poor returns available to them. Why expend significant cognitive effort when you lack the knowledge, tools, institutional access, or intellectual leverage to do anything interesting with the results?

Abundant AI changes that calculation. Someone who previously had little reason to think hard about a problem may suddenly discover that a modest investment of attention unlocks enormous possibilities. They can build something, investigate something, understand something, or pursue an ambition that was previously out of reach.

The returns on attention rise, and with them the incentive to pay attention.

The early capitalist worker voluntarily increased annual working days from 250 to 300 because a new universe of desirable goods had become accessible. The AI-enabled thinker may similarly increase the amount of voluntary cognitive effort they expend because a new universe of intellectual consumption has become accessible. This has certainly been the case with me. I’m suddenly willing to work significantly harder compared to even a year ago, because a lot more is suddenly within reach.

Every day, I see posts by the literati expressing identical opinions about how AI will mean the death of creativity, the death of thinking, the death of effort, the death of their own prestige. I thought I already had a low opinion of them, but it has somehow gone subterranean. It is impossible to retain respect for people who are satisfied to keep arrogantly talking out of their asses.

I’m pretty basic with my use of AI. I don’t do complex projects; I just use it for research, feedback, and thought provocation. And absolutely nothing in my experience matches these complaints. Every day, I’m amazed anew at how a conversation with ChatGPT can spark unexpected ideas into life, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I don’t think of my brainstorming in terms of productivity, but it is true that my productivity has greatly increased over the last year. My mind may have always been a fertile field, but I now have heavy machinery to cultivate it with instead of an old horse.

Rao’s essay describes the anti-AI mindset as “cognitive mercantilism,” akin to the earlier economic version, which I find to be an illuminating analogy. But most of all, it’s simply enjoyable to read an intellectually adventurous essay. It gives me a new way to think about a current phenomenon, already interesting in its own right. Rao wonders what new forms of effort, curiosity, and ambition abundant AI might call forth. By contrast, so many anti-AI essays read like the reports of border guards anxiously cataloguing the latest incursion.

A mind animated by curiosity generates possibilities, analogies, and further questions. A mind animated by defensiveness tends to produce the same cramped grievances over and over. I keep noticing that those who speak most reverently of creativity and the inner life seem least interested in a phenomenon that is plainly changing how millions of people read, think, write, and imagine. One might expect such a development to awaken curiosity, even ambivalence. Instead, it produces the same carbon-copy denunciations from “humanists” who think most humans are humaning incorrectly. The literati who muse in an abstract fashion about the depths of the human soul seem content to let it become a stagnant puddle.

AI has opened up, if not infinite space, a vast, enticing horizon. The anti-AI literati evidently prefer to be kings of their nutshells with bad dreams of the future for company.

We Shall Say “Knee” Again to You If You Do Not Appease Us

By in conspicuous crusading, race, the great awokening, world football No Comments

“Lost its meaning.” “Growing doubts over its impact.” Well, I suppose we can allow a little face-saving rhetoric under the circumstances. Anyone not committed to the bit knew from the start that taking the knee for a moment before kickoff to signal “no room for racism” was always a meaningless gesture, the human-shaped equivalent of a bumper sticker which advertises virtue while changing no one’s mind. The gesture’s only value was as a media spectacle, allowing viewers to get the warm fuzzies over the thought that “something is being done.” The media-savvy are especially addicted to symbolism, spectacle, and slogans; they consistently overrate the power of narrative to change recalcitrant facts about the world. Can’t prove a negative and all that, but I feel reasonably confident that no racist has ever gone to a match intending to make monkey noises at a black player, only to rethink his life choices after encountering the powerful sight of men touching their knees to the turf for two seconds.

But because this is a media spectacle, the media set the tone. This is what good people do to show they’re against racism. Why would you not do it? Only a racist could possibly have a problem with this. Are you a racist, then? When did you stop throwing bananas at black players? The possibility that a skeptic could be both against racism and convinced that the knee gesture is ineffective and irrelevant is not allowed into discussion.

And there’s another angle that isn’t admitted to the conversation: if we devote a moment before the game to an anti-racist gesture, where does it end? Couldn’t the anti-sexist campaigners feel aggrieved and demand equal time for their cause? And what about the anti-animal-abuse campaigners? And the children’s welfare representatives? And and and and and the list of worthy causes goes on and on, until the players have to spend three hours doing semaphore before the actual match to demonstrate their solidarity with all the causes that right-minded people absolutely, unquestioningly support. “And now the players will stand on their heads for thirty seconds to show support for the recent victims of civil war in Ackserbanterstan. Following that, in recognition of the appalling conditions endured by battery hens, the players will flap their elbows solemnly for thirty seconds. This will be followed by a coordinated demonstration against human trafficking, during which the players will lock arms and shuffle sideways. Kickoff, originally scheduled for three o’clock, is now expected sometime before sunset.” Where is the line, and who decides where to draw it?

Of course, they are trying to bypass any debate by simply affixing a shared ritual into place. This is what good people do. But this isn’t some organic movement that grew from matchgoing fans. It was always a top-down, artificial, corporate PR ritual imposed from without, and imported from American football at that, adding a sort of quasi-colonial humiliation on top of it all (Fookin’ ‘ell, why are we imitating the bloody Yanks in our own fookin’ sport?) And now the trickster god who loves us and wants us to be amused has arranged for several black players to finally call bullshit on the entire charade.

A funny aside: Marc Guehi has been controversial with regard to protests before, because he wrote “I Love Jesus” on his rainbow captain’s armband when he played for Crystal Palace. After the FA reminded him that religious messages on playing equipment were prohibited (apparently, it’s acceptable for footballers to become walking billboards for moral causes, provided the marketing department approves the copy), he wore another one saying “Jesus loves you.” He described his message as one of love and inclusivity. The FA declined to punish him, which angered a lot of progressive fans who saw him as a religiously-motivated bigot. So now he has angered both the anti-homophobia and anti-racist contingents. Guehi represents the individual conscience, a cause which no one seems eager to champion. We admire individuals who refuse to conform to convictions we don’t share. When someone refuses to conform to our convictions, the romance of principled dissent evaporates quickly.

But it again raises the question: why do we have to force players to submit to ideological loyalty oaths before we can just watch them play? I couldn’t care less what any of them think! Most of them are sheltered morons who have been raised in the sporting equivalent of a Skinner box before being turned into multi-millionaires in their twenties! I just want to watch them chase and kick a ball! Sport is one of the few remaining activities that can unite people around a clearly defined, limited purpose, without requiring them to agree about the meaning of life. Naturally, then, it has been has been invaded by the same moralistic busybodies who gravitate to captive audiences like a Labrador to a stranger’s crotch.

Ye and the Devil

By in ai, aphorisms, books, fresh hell No Comments

The Devil sighed: “That man wasn’t clever enough for me to get round him; he hadn’t enough brains. He was so stupid that he defeated me completely. What a problem, trying to tempt a moron! This one couldn’t make head or tail of my suggestions!”

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

I saw this remarkable video the other day of the Devil addressing a crowd at the crossroads. She was an attractive young woman, eloquent and impassioned, promising to save the assembled multitude from a terrible fate. Dark forces were conspiring to deprive them of their ability to think for themselves, she warned. Fortunately, effective resistance would consist of indulging favorite hobbies. The crowd roared its approval. “Of course you read books, my darlings,” she murmured. “That’s what separates you from the others. They surrender their minds to machines, but you retain your intellectual independence. You have nothing in common with those people. You know better. You’re one of the good ones.” The free-thinking individuals were immensely pleased. They cheered every word before heading out to the gift shop to put more romantasy novels, ghostwritten political promos, and sassy laptop stickers into their officially-branded “Reading Is Resistance!” totebags. Only one man refused to be taken in by the Devil’s wiles, the hero the age deserved:

The Race Is Not to the Swift, Nor the Battle to the Strong

By in ai, battling personal entropy, the statusphere, writing 2 Comments

The Prix Pascal de Littérature is a genuine new French literary competition, accepting fiction produced with AI assistance. Entrants must disclose their methods, models, and prompts. The submission form requires entrants to certify that they haven’t manually inserted preexisting human-written text, apart from the initial creative seed. That suggests something closer to a competition in directing AI-generated fiction than ordinary co-writing. Entries are supposed to be between ten to fifty thousand words, and “submitted texts should help solve an ethical, social or ecological problem threatening humanity.” That last bit already makes this uninteresting to me, but in principle, similar future competitions might be more creative. In any event, it sounds as if the “author” might be more akin to a jockey or a race car driver. It would be weirdly stupid to insist that a Formula One driver is a “lazy idiot” for not being a sprinter, because while both competitions are “races,” they use different equipment and different skills. Likewise, you would think that an active intelligence would include being able to distinguish different types of writing using different skills toward different ends, but there is no shortage of lazy, reflexive thinking among the Substack literati.

There is a recurring humorous trope among people who post publicly about lifting weights, especially on garbage sites like Twitter. If you post a picture of a heavy lift, or even a bodybuilding pose, you can count on some BJJ/MMA type showing up in the comments to inform you that all those muscles wouldn’t save you from tapping out to a rear-naked choke. It would be easy to brush this strange behavior off as the predictable result of men getting punched and kicked in the head for fun — people with violent hobbies tend to exhibit high levels of aggression in general? What a surprise! But I think we can afford to be more charitable. Rightly or wrongly, large muscles are popularly associated with strength, manliness, and even toughness. And yet it is true that many lethal fighters are not large or even overly muscular, while strength alone says little about fighting ability or even aggression. The boxer or martial artist possesses a skill that may be more useful in a physical confrontation, but it isn’t necessarily advertised by his appearance. Meanwhile, the bodybuilder receives the admiring glances. It’s practically stolen valor! Hence the chip on the shoulder.

Status is a resource subject to scarcity like any other. Even within the lifting world, the distinction between “natty” and “enhanced” is enough to make enemies. We may have the same physiques, but mine came from hard work and disciplined diet, while yours came from a syringe (and hard work and diet, but still). When it comes to writing, a polished essay or novel has traditionally served as evidence of certain abilities: verbal fluency, imagination, narrative construction, stylistic control, and the patience required to put thousands of sentences together. A reader could reasonably infer that the author possessed those abilities because, until recently, there wasn’t much alternative. Now, the natty-versus-enhanced distinction has arrived among people who have never lifted anything heavier than a textbook. Someone who has spent decades cultivating a difficult skill may understandably resent seeing its characteristic products generated by people who haven’t undertaken that apprenticeship. The traditional writer is not merely defending his craft but defending the cultural assumption that a certain kind of finished product should confer a certain kind of status upon its creator.

The traditional writer may reasonably say, “You haven’t demonstrated that you can do what I do.” The AI-assisted writer may reasonably answer, “I never said I could.” And perhaps the exchange ought to end there. But it won’t. Even within lifting, there are competitions that make being drug-free the defining condition, and competitions that are open, and therefore assumed to be full of steroid users. It seems intuitive that AI writing could become like the “enhanced” competition. If people want to look down on it for not being natty, they certainly can, but seeing it as a different competition altogether should, in theory, allow everyone to be happy. In practice, though, separate categories can settle disputes over rules and fairness, but they can’t settle disputes over prestige. AI-assisted authors and traditional authors may compete for the same readers, publishers, prizes, and cultural prestige. An author might happily concede that an AI-generated novel belongs in a different category while resenting the possibility that readers won’t care about the distinction. And if the real grievance is that somebody might receive admiration without suffering through the same apprenticeship you did, there may be no set of rules capable of satisfying you.

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