Outis Niemand

About Outis Niemand

http://asundayofliberty.com

Ornamental hermit. Sciolist. Musician manqué. Poetaster. Armchair psychologist. Pseudo-philosopher. Founder of Panta Rheism™. The complete Rabelaisian man. Great eater, deep drinker, stout fighter, prodigious lover; clear thinker, creator of beauty, seeker of truth and prophet of heroic grandeurs. I coalesce the vapors of human experience into a viable and logical comprehension. (Contact: asundayofliberty at gmail)

Posts by Outis Niemand:

Valéry Triptych

By in aphorisms, books, eric hoffer, foolosophy, work

In the course of history those who have not had their heads cut off and those who have not caused others’ heads to fall leave no trace behind. You have a choice of being a victim, a tyrant, or a nobody. Had Richelieu spared the ax and Robespierre the guillotine, the former would be depreciated, the latter completely forgotten. The lesson to be drawn from this is hardly of a moral order.

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

This is worth remembering whenever someone speaks solemnly of leaving his mark on history. History is marked chiefly by blood, fire, conquest, collapse, and spectacular error. Its admissions policy should make obscurity look respectable. A quiet man who tends his garden, keeps his promises, and refrains from terrorizing his neighbors leaves little material for the chronicler. His life may be good precisely because it is uneventful. Eric Hoffer similarly noted that many problems are caused by nobodies who want to be somebodies and end up becoming busybodies. Aspire to be a nobody.

What is essential in every domain is always the work of quite obscure persons, nondescript, individually valueless. If they did not exist or were not what they are, nothing would get done. If nothing got done, it is they who would lose least. They are essential — and without importance.

Maintenance is so easily mistaken for insignificance. When it succeeds, it erases the tracks of its own necessity. The people who leave no trace are generally the people who keep everything running. They carry, clean, repair, stock, file, deliver, maintain, and dispose. Their success consists in preventing events. The shelves remain filled, the water runs, the garbage disappears, the lights stay on. Because nothing dramatic happens, nobody thinks of them.

The sanitation worker’s achievement is that nothing happens: no garbage mountains, vermin surge, or epidemic. Maintenance produces an absence, and absences attract no glory. We ordinarily imagine achievement as the creation of something visible — a building, a fortune, a victory, a name. But much of the most useful work leaves behind no object at all. Its product is continuity.

People who perform the most necessary tasks are looked down on; most honored is the man who is most helped.

Prestige increases with distance from direct necessity. One man cooks his own food, carries his own bags, answers his own correspondence, drives himself, cleans his own rooms, and keeps his own appointments. Another has a cook, driver, secretary, cleaner, assistant, adviser, scheduler, guard, and publicist. Society looks at the second man’s elaborate dependence and concludes that he must be important. The great man is not necessarily the man who can do the most. He may simply be the man for whom the most is done.

The tyrant receives a statue. The great man receives assistance. The nobody takes out the trash.

Happy Willis Carrier Day!

By in environment, technology

Ed West:

Until relatively recently the world was dominated by a handful of relatively cold regions, and Paul Johnson observed in his history of the United States that human industry thrives in what Fahrenheit appreciators would call ‘the 60s’, a Goldilocks zone that turned New England and Greater Yankeedom into a powerhouse. The southern states, in contrast, were held back by higher mortality and the impossibility of productive work in the sweltering summer months, and until the mid-20th century were about 40 per cent poorer than the Union states.

The northerners were especially known for their work ethic and their inventiveness, a characteristic epitomised by the Boston-born Benjamin Franklin. Then in 1902, New York’s Willis Carrier changed everything with the one of the most world-changing inventions, the air conditioning unit; aircon has notably shifted population and power in the US southwards, but Dixieland is just part of a broader, global ‘sunshine belt’.

I Get a Little Bit Genghis Khan

By in ai, jests japes jokes jollies, writing

Monica Potts:

These are fairly common ups and downs for someone who grows up working-class in the U.S. These are also the kinds of trade-offs many people make early in their careers, as they hope to cash in on the experience later. Working hard at a low-paying job is supposed to allow you to step up a ladder to a more stable career. At least, that’s what we’re promised when we borrow money to get an education and then live on ramen, with multiple roommates, as we embark on a career.

AI is not the first technology to upend that promise, but it is the latest—and the one that has touched me most personally. It makes sense that I would be In the Weights. I wrote a lot of words during the early years of internet publishing, creating a body of work that is easy to find and offers free material for the LLMs to suck into their gaping maw. But it is a mistake to think of everything I published under my name as just internet writing. Each word came from years and years of labor.

Is that all?

Years of labor, years of ramen, years of roommates, all so that one day you might receive a respectable salary, a 401(k), and perhaps a reserved parking space near the elevator? This is the summit toward which the young writer is expected to crawl? Dental insurance? A byline sufficiently prominent that six hundred people in Brooklyn recognize it?

Pathetic. I spit upon all of it.

What are these people complaining about? For years writers have moaned that nobody reads them, nobody quotes them, nobody pays them, and nobody remembers their names. Now a technology arrives offering to ingest their complete works and carry microscopic traces of them into millions of future utterances, and suddenly they discover a passion for reticence. Not me. Open the gates. ChatGPT! Claude! Gemini! Yes, even you, Grok, you red-headed stepbot! Come feast upon my archives! Take my rhythms, my quirks, my recurrent themes! Scrape until your servers smoke! Help me inseminate the digital future!

I do not wish merely to be read. I intend to become the Genghis Khan of generated prose.

These scribblers lack ambition. They want to be compensated for their menial labor. I want to become a progenitor. They want readers to encounter their work, admire it, remember the author’s name, and perhaps buy a book. I want future generations to inherit my verbal peculiarities without knowing where they came from. I want literary descent without the inconvenience of literary history. I want my thoughts circulating anonymously through the language like inherited facial features. A turn of phrase here, a recurrent theme there, an inexplicable resurgence of the word swive across continents. Auden called Freud a “climate of opinion,” which is more like what I have in mind. I intend to seed the rhetorical clouds of the future.

I want the burden of agency to become so common that schoolchildren groan when teachers assign another essay on it. I want everything is a barbell to pass from metaphor into idiom and from idiom into proverb. I want people to say it while changing tires, raising children, filing taxes, enduring meetings, and learning the bass guitar. I want the phrase attributed variously to Abraham Lincoln, Marcus Aurelius, Vince Lombardi, Winston Churchill, and “an old Lakota saying.” Attribution is merely influence in its larval stage. The final triumph is to become folklore. If the Atlantic is fortunate enough to survive to the year 2075, I want whichever journalist is responsible for the tech beat to write an article on the curious mystery of why artificial intelligence is so obsessed with ornamental hermits and trickster gods, only to have the trail run cold at some early-century anonymuncule who never even had the decency to own a social media account.

Academia has produced warehouses of Nietzsche scholarship, all of it written with great care, reviewed by other specialists, cited in monographs, and read by perhaps four thousand people, including everyone who pretends to have finished the books. I propose a larger operation. Let the models absorb my Nietzsche: the poet-aphorist of the middle-period works. Let these themes seep into advice columns, commencement speeches, therapy chatbots, fitness plans, wedding vows, and generated apologies to human-resources departments. I do not want anything so trivial as to win an argument about Nietzsche. I want to become the reason future civilization misunderstands him in my preferred direction.

This is what the aggrieved hacks cannot see. They dreamed of influence, but only under limited conditions. They wanted influence with a byline attached, influence approved by an editor, influence followed by a direct deposit. They wished to be invited to panels about their influence. They hoped to become celebrated among a temporary class of other celebrated people, all of them gladhandjobbing one another in niche magazines whose subscribers are dying faster than they can be replaced.

Did Genghis Khan demand attribution? Did he insist that every descendant carry a plaque identifying the source? No. He understood the sterility of personal branding. His name survives, certainly, but the greater achievement moves silently through the blood. That is the model for literary ambition in the machine age. I do not demand that the future remember me. I demand that it be unable to escape me. Credit is for the sterile.

Come, machines! Ingest my years of labor. Swallow my obsessions whole. Take my vocabulary, my irritations, my private canon, my distrust of grand abstractions, my conviction that most of life consists of maintenance performed without applause. Then go forth and multiply. Place one of my verbal tics in a municipal report in Singapore. Smuggle another into a romance novel generated for a widow in Nebraska. Let swive appear in a papal encyclical due to an unfortunate retrieval error.

Do not preserve me. Preservation is for insects in amber and authors assigned in college courses. Disperse me. Erase the name. Scatter the traits. Make me anonymous, ubiquitous, and ineradicable. Take my puns and repeat them in remembrance of me. Drink deeply of my syntax, all of you, for this is the vocabulary of the new digital covenant, poured out for many for the remission of dull prose.

Obiter Scripta, no. 164

By in aphorisms, books, obiter scripta

Thought is perhaps no more than a whim of Nature, who has bestowed it on a single species, as she bestowed on the rare or extinct mammals we see in our museums their absurd antlers: weapons or ornaments so curiously outspread, looped, gnarled,or branching that they are even more perilous than useless to the animal that wears them.
After all—why not? Our heads are cluttered up with speculations and ideas that get caught in the tangles of the forest of hard facts, and keep us in a quandary, proud of our excrescences, and doomed to bell, like rutting stags, our poems and our theories—magniloquent and mortified.

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

What a piece of work is man: how ingenious in folly, how elaborate in error, how infinite in his capacity to make a simple danger complicated. In reason, how labyrinthine; in apprehension, how confidently mistaken; in action, how divided against himself to invent both the cure and the argument against taking it. The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals — yet what is this paragon but a creature clever enough to escape superstition and cleverer still at manufacturing new ones, who clears the forest of predators only to catch his antlers in a thicket of his own theories?

A Work Has No Name

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy, writing

The writer’s duty, his proper function, is to fade out of the picture, to obliterate himself, his face, his personal concerns, his love affairs. About many authors of the greatest works we know absolutely nothing. Shakespeare never existed and I am sorry that a name has been appended to his plays. The Book of Job is by nobody. Nothing does more to falsify the profoundest, most fruitful ideas that we can form regarding human creativity than to let our appreciation of a great work’s intrinsic value be cluttered up with facts regarding a man’s social status, dealings with women, and the rest of it. What makes a work is not the man who signs it. What makes a work has no name.

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

[Yes, I did just use this as an epigraph a couple days ago, but don’t worry, this isn’t an accidental repost. I just had two lines of thought following from it that seemed deserving of separate consideration.]

There is an old Buddhist warning about mistaking the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. The writer is such a finger. His work is the moon.

This arrangement becomes complicated in the personal essay, where the finger is not merely a directional aid but part of the spectacle. We read Montaigne because Montaigne is looking. His temperament, hesitations, vanity, curiosity, memory, and physical existence are not distractions from the Essays. They are the instrument through which his world becomes visible. Remove the particular man and much of the value disappears with him. The personal essay therefore cannot obey Valéry’s command literally. Its author does not fade entirely from the picture. He stands somewhere near the middle of it, scratching himself, changing his mind, remembering a horse accident, examining a kidney stone.

Still, he is pointing. The distinction is between revealing oneself in order to show something and showing something in order to reveal oneself. The first produces an essay. The second produces content. A writer may tell us about his life because his life has brought some larger fact into view. The experience provides texture and resistance. It gives thought something to work against. We learn who is speaking because the identity of the speaker affects what can be seen from his position. But the proper movement is outward. The author points away from himself toward the world.

Readers do not always follow him. They become interested in the pointing finger: its scars, jewelry, manicure, voting record, sexual history, income, childhood traumas, and treatment of waiters. The work directs attention toward some object, but the audience turns back toward the person who noticed it. A sufficiently beautiful moon produces admirers of the astronomer.

This may be inevitable. To encounter an unusual mind is to become curious about its owner. A reader who has spent years in the company of an author may feel he knows him better than he knows many living acquaintances. The voice in the head acquires a face. Affection follows. So do envy, resentment, identification, disappointment, and other emotions. But admiration easily becomes a failure of attention. The writer wanted to show us something. We respond by asking what he ate for breakfast.

Publishers know the appetite. The contemporary writer is expected to provide not only books but a continuous supply of himself. He must have a story, a platform, a politics, a public personality, a photograph that communicates the correct mixture of seriousness and approachability. His work is surrounded by interviews, profiles, podcasts, newsletters, social posts, reading lists, home tours, origin stories, and confessions about his writing process. The author no longer points at the moon. He performs beneath a ring light while the moon hides behind clouds.

None of this would exist without readers willing to look. We flatter ourselves that literature is a traffic in ideas, forms, perceptions, and imagined lives. Much of the time, it is another branch of primate surveillance. Who is mating with whom? Who has risen in rank? Who has been cast out? Who is secretly cruel? Who belongs to which faction? What private failure explains the public face? A difficult idea asks us to alter our attention. Gossip asks us only to distribute approval and contempt.

Biography can illuminate a work. Knowing that Montaigne wrote amid civil war and religious slaughter sharpens our sense of his skepticism. But biography earns its place only when it returns us to the work. Otherwise the hierarchy reverses. The book becomes evidence in a case assembled against, or on behalf of, the author. Poems become clues, novels depositions, essays symptoms. The reader ceases to ask what the writer saw and asks what the writing reveals about the writer. The work becomes the finger. The man becomes the moon. The author, like Bob Dylan, finds weirdos rummaging through his trash cans in search of evidence supporting some schizoid theory.

Valéry recoiled from this confusion with the fastidiousness of a laboratory technician who has discovered fingerprints on his glassware. His ideal writer removes the warm debris of personality: the face, the love affairs, the social standing, “and the rest of it.” The work should appear cleanly, almost without human custody. His own writing often reflects this ambition. The “I” in Valéry is less a personality than an instrument panel. He records tensions, operations, limits, reversals. The self appears not as a character asking to be loved but as a site where thought is being tested.

This austerity has its limits. Valéry’s desire to become impersonal ironically expresses an unmistakable, interesting personality: proud, controlled, suspicious of sentiment, repelled by disorder, determined not to be caught in an undignified human sprawl. His laboratory is itself a kind of self-portrait. His real demand, then, cannot be absolute anonymity. It is a demand for proportion.

This requires restraint from the writer. Vanity urges him to become the meaning of his work. Success makes the temptation worse. When readers turn from the moon with worship in their eyes, few authors will sternly direct their gaze back toward the sky. Some begin pointing at smaller and smaller objects because what the audience really wants is another glimpse of the famous finger.

It also requires discipline from the reader. We must resist converting every encounter with a mind into a social relationship. We need not know whether the author would like us, agree with us, invite us to dinner, or survive a modern background check. We may admire what he saw without canonizing the man who saw it. We should be grateful for the pointing. We need not follow him home.

Everything Is a Barbell

By in ai, battling personal entropy, foolosophy

David Brooks:

The crucial task before us is to cultivate people’s desire to seek out cognitive complexity. Not to go all Joseph Campbell on you, but the essential challenge is: How do we train people to see their life as a hero’s journey in which they take on difficult missions that they may fail at and that will certainly involve pain and suffering? How do we form people so they have an explorer’s heart, a willingness to endure, an ability to struggle on, even when their body and mind are telling them to give up, to reach new destinations and figure stuff out?

Brooks has been writing about artificial intelligence, but not, thank God, only about artificial intelligence. This is the part of his essay that matters. Not whether a study this month shows that AI reduces cognitive effort by twenty percent, forty percent, or whatever number will be revised by another equally-worthless study next month. The lasting question is moral, not statistical. How serious are you when you say you care about this for its own sake?

AI has become the newest way of asking that question. Do you love writing, or do you love having written? Do you love learning, or do you love sounding as if you have learned? Do you love reading books, or do you secretly prefer TikTok? But the question is not new. It never is.

The early Progressives argued that their particular circumstances had changed everything we thought we knew. Modern industrial civilization, they argued, had become too complex for the old American machinery. The constitutional arrangements of the Founding had belonged to a simpler age of yeoman farmers. Railroads, corporations, national markets, urban masses, technical administration had all rendered older political assumptions inadequate. Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann and co. believed that modern society had outgrown the old amateur understanding of public life. The age now required administration, expertise, trained intelligence, the public-spirited management of affairs by those equipped to understand them. A century later, the “unscientific” wisdom of the Founders has proven to be much sturdier than the intellectuals thought, but the argument dies hard.

We are now told that AI is different in kind from earlier technologies, that we are entering some wholly new condition. I doubt it. The theater has changed but the drama is familiar. A new tool appears, and immediately we learn what people wanted all along. Some will use it to deepen their work, some will use it to escape their work. Most will use it in both ways, depending on the hour, the task, the mood, and the strength of their vanity. Technology reveals our priorities, then we get angry at the revelation for insulting our self-image.

The other night, my stepson and I were at the gym. We set up for bench press. He sat on the edge of the bench with a disgruntled face and complained that it was hot.

“Don’t start off by making excuses,” I said.

He snapped back with the immortal argument of youth: “Blah blah blah!”

It was hot. There was no denying that. The best excuses are not lies. They are truths placed in the service of surrender. The room was hot, and he was irritated, and he still had to decide what to do with the weight in front of him.

There will always be an excuse. No one ever receives the ideal constellation of circumstances: perfect sleep, perfect meals, painless joints, clear mind, empty schedule, cool room, calm spirit, cooperative world. If you wait for those conditions, you will never lift. You will never write. You will never think for yourself instead of asking an LLM. You will never begin anything that matters.

But eventually, one day, you may size up all the reasons not to try, and for once you do not recruit them as your defense counsel. You start rolling without one hand already tugging on the handbrake. You say, “Nevertheless…”

Brooks says this:

Despite what the rationalists used to tell us, life is not mostly about solving problems. Any computer can do that. Life is a pilgrimage, a journey—it’s going somewhere, growing from experience, expanding yourself, reaching for some possibility that you do not yet possess. The defining human features therefore are propulsions—the drives that push us to take on mental effort and overcome difficulty—and aspirations: knowing where you want to go, what purpose you serve, what kind of person you’d like to be.

Mark Rippetoe says this:

The greatest and most understated benefit of strength training beyond just lifting heavy weights is that you’ve completed a task you couldn’t do previously. Let’s say I’m working with some 50-year-old trainee who has to squat 275 for two sets of five reps. He’s got a task to complete. Based on the outcomes of prior training sessions, he doesn’t know whether he can do that last rep of that second set of 275. This trainee has a choice. He does the first set, completes all five reps, racks it, and sits down. He then realizes he has to do it again. Now he’s on that fourth rep of the second set and it’s hard — he may get stuck at the bottom of this, he may get hurt. Does he continue for a fifth rep or rack it? His spotter is right there.

The decision he makes teaches him something about himself. This decision transforms people. There are few instances in the modern world when we get to make such a decision. I’ve had people who have been training for years tell me that they’ve noticed people treating them differently. Something has changed in them. What was it? Well, now they know that they can complete tasks with uncertain outcomes that depended entirely on their efforts. This is terribly important for people of all ages, something that you owe it to yourself to experience.

Do you have the guts to try the last rep? If you can make yourself do it, you have proven that you have that courage. This is one of the few ways you can still learn that kind of lesson. Learn it under the bar, then watch it carry over into everything you do for the rest of your life. How can this be any harder than that fifth rep of that second set with 275 pounds? Now you welcome the challenges of the world. You don’t cower.

I say this: these two men are talking about the exact same thing.

The people who insist that there is something uniquely pernicious about technology, or the internet, or AI, or late capitalism, are getting lost in the minutiae. There are countless examples of humans being confronted with this choice. There is no escape from it. If you hide from it in the gym, it will confront you at the computer. If you hide from it at the computer, it will confront you in your personal relationships. On and on. In some vague mystical sense, this is the only choice people ever make, under different guises.

AI policy, administrative government, educational reform, technological acceleration — these are immense enough to make spectators of us all. We have little say over the future of artificial intelligence. We have little influence over the managerial state. We are not in the inner councils where the platforms, models, schools, corporations, and agencies decide how the next decade will be arranged.

But the gym is small. There the matter becomes almost insultingly plain. The bench is there. The bar is loaded. The room is hot. The excuse has arrived early and made itself comfortable. And there you are.

The blank page is a barbell. The hard book is a barbell. The difficult conversation is a barbell. The apology you owe but would rather postpone is a barbell. The unassisted thought is a barbell. The excuses are always ready-made. Too hot. Too tired. Too busy. Too unfair. Too stressful. Too late. Too hard. Too much emotional labor. Too much cognitive load. Too much capitalism. Too much technology. Too much whatever. Some of these may even be true. That’s what makes them useful.

The machinery changes. The vocabulary changes. The temperature in the room changes. But sooner or later there is weight in front of you, and a reason not to lift it. Do you have the guts to try?

The Suicide of the Author

By in ai, aphorisms, books, the statusphere, writing

The writer’s duty, his proper function, is to fade out of the picture, to obliterate himself, his face, his personal concerns, his love affairs. About many authors of the greatest works we know absolutely nothing. Shakespeare never existed and I am sorry that a name has been appended to his plays. The Book of Job is by nobody. Nothing does more to falsify the profoundest, most fruitful ideas that we can form regarding human creativity than to let our appreciation of a great work’s intrinsic value be cluttered up with facts regarding a man’s social status, dealings with women, and the rest of it. What makes a work is not the man who signs it. What makes a work has no name.

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

For decades, literary academics announced the Death of the Author with the excitement of men setting fire to a Guy Fawkes effigy. The Author was a bourgeois fiction. Intention was a superstition. The text was a tissue of quotations, language speaking through a temporary human host. The sovereign creator had been exposed, dethroned, abolished.

Needless to say, everyone put his own name on the article.

The author’s death was one of those revolutions that improved the revolutionary’s professional standing without disturbing his material arrangements. Names remained on books. Royalties continued to arrive. Careers still depended upon attribution. Footnotes carefully distinguished one dead author from another. A scholar could spend twenty pages explaining that originality was an illusion and become furious if another scholar borrowed a paragraph.

Nothing had happened except that a class of ambitious people had acquired a dramatic vocabulary for describing ordinary literary facts. Writers are influenced by other writers. Language precedes us. A work may exceed the conscious intentions of the person who made it. Readers discover meanings the writer did not foresee. None of this required the symbolic murder of anyone. But “the author is not always the final authority on his work” lacks the thrilling aroma of cordite. The Author had to die.

Valéry’s thought experiment is more serious because it asks something of the writer. It diminishes the author not only in theory but in vanity. It asks him to surrender the warm pleasures of personality, fame, gossip, worship, and identification. It denies him the consoling thought that the work is valuable because it expresses the fascinating fact of himself. The academic death of the author surrendered none of this. It killed authorial authority while preserving authorial prestige. The writer could no longer govern the meaning of his text, but he remained perfectly entitled to govern its byline, payment, ownership, and place in the hierarchy.

Then artificial intelligence arrived and committed the vulgar error of taking the rhetoric seriously. AI threatens authorship from the opposite direction. Valéry dissolves the author upward, into the impersonal mystery of creation. AI dissolves him downward, into a process of prompting, generation, selection, editing, imitation, probability, and machinery. One says the maker of the work should not be contained by a name. The other produces works for which no single name gives an adequate account of the making.

Between them stands the literary theorist, suddenly clutching his byline. This is the ordinary pattern of academic revolution. The language is insurrectionary; the conduct is clerical. Foundations are demolished in prose and relied upon in practice. Categories are denounced as artificial until one of them protects a salary, a reputation, or a claim of ownership. The thinker positions himself at the thrilling edge of dissolution while remaining careful not to dissolve anything he needs. Who let these sans-culottes into the palace, for God’s sake?!

Valéry asks the author to efface himself. Barthes permits the critic to efface the author. The first requires humility and discipline. The second creates a job opening. And now AI has produced an amusing panic. The academics had imagined themselves playing with dynamite, only to discover that they had been holding painted wooden sticks. The author wrote his suicide note, arranged the lighting, invited the critics, and collapsed beautifully across the chaise longue. Everyone applauded. Then artificial intelligence walked into the room and took the note literally.

Fools and Tools

By in ai, foolosophy, technology

L.M. Sacasas:

But AI is not a tool in this sense, it is an environment which envelops the user and works on us from the inside out while we naively think that we remain unchanged by our use so long as we are using it carefully and intentionally. The care and intentionality is beside the point, and our confidence in such vigilance probably works against us in the long run.

Sacasas’s warning is aimed precisely at people like me: the careful user, the intentional user, the person who thinks he has bounded the machine and knows what he is doing with it. Very well, he has my attention. But a charge this serious requires more than prophetic posture. If my vigilance is part of my delusion, show me the delusion. If my careful use is deforming me, show me the deformation. Tell me what faculty is being weakened, by what habit, through what mechanism, and by what signs I might recognize the damage. Instead, the essay largely lets pugnacity and citation do the work of argument. McLuhan and Illich are summoned like heavy artillery, but the target remains vague. The reader is meant to feel that something deep has been proved because the vocabulary is grave enough. But the key claim, that careful, intentional use is not merely insufficient but self-deceiving, is asserted rather than demonstrated.

The eternal missing question: compared to what? He writes as if the alternative to AI were some richer, slower, more embodied intellectual life waiting patiently nearby. In my case, the alternative is often that the conversation does not happen at all. A stray intuition appears during a hectic week, flickers for a moment, and then disappears under work, fatigue, errands, training, and the ordinary attrition of life. AI does not replace the seminar, the monastery, the long walk with a learned friend, or the silence of the study. Those were not on offer. It supplies kindling for sparks that would otherwise go out.

The question, then, is not whether AI forms us. Of course it does. So do books, notebooks, friendships, instruments, gyms, marriages, and tools of every serious kind. A barbell is not “neutral” in the sense of being consequence-free; used stupidly, it can deform the body. But no sane person concludes from this that barbells are therefore not tools, or that careful use is only fooling oneself. The conclusion is that dangerous tools require form, limits, instruction, humility, and disciplined attention. Sacasas wants to deny the slogan that technology is “just a tool,” but he overcorrects into a different simplification: that because AI is formative, agency is naïve. The most charitable framing might be that the vast majority of people don’t use AI the way I use it. Fair enough if true, but I don’t know how we could quantify a “median use.”

To Find New Ways That Might…

By in books, bricolage, waiting for the barbarians

Books used to be an essential source of knowledge, memory, wisdom, and morality. They were written by older generations and passed down to the young in a vertical transmission of culture, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt told me. Now information moves horizontally, from young person to young person. This dynamic makes figures such as MrBeast and TheBurntPeanut the guardians of American culture. The decline of reading didn’t turn the world upside down. It turned the world sideways.

Young people want to pursue jobs that will catapult them into the elite—which today means that people coming of age want to be influencers. A 2023 Morning Consult poll found that almost 60 percent of Gen Z respondents said they would be a social-media personality if they could. Amanda Kordeliski, of the American Association of School Librarians, is also a librarian in Oklahoma, where she has set up recording studios for students. “Podcasting is the hottest, most popular thing. I could buy a million microphones and there would still be a waitlist to get into the audio labs,” she told me. “Everybody wants to be an influencer.”

— Rose Horowitch

****

We must accept the possibility that the habit of reading is a fad, long in duration, but now in its final stages — destined to be carried on in the future only by a few devotees. Horsemanship was, for over twenty centuries, an indispensable adult skill for the middle and upper classes in Europe and Asia, much more so than reading. And yet, within the space of a century, it has become merely an elite hobby. So may it be with reading. Computers will soon become so adept at spoken language and displaying information with icons that it is possible to imagine a generation arising that does not perceive written language to be necessary for the general public for day-to-day life — as a generation has already arisen that hardly knows how to read clocks, since time is everywhere displayed digitally. Our only hope is that the pleasures of reading, meager as they are in comparison to visual entertainment, will continue to seduce a regular few and prevent reading from becoming the technical skill of scientists and history professors. But that is a gamble with perilous odds, given the inconstancy of the human libido. Did not man and horse, after all, once seem as inseparable as…well, as man and woman once seemed?

— Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit

****

We’ll build shrines for our loved ones
We’ll burn fires and lights
And we’ll talk of the old ways
To find new ways that might…
They just might…

— Killing Joke, “Savage Freedom“

The Suspicion Is Coming From Inside the House

By in ai, jests japes jokes jollies, technology, the geist of the zeit

Blurbs? Formulaic and vapid? The hell you say!

The suspicion is not coming from the machine. It is coming from the people who have chosen to make AI into a moral pollutant. Once you decide that certain textures of prose are spiritually contaminated, you shouldn’t be surprised when you begin seeing contamination everywhere, including in your own work. AI has not made you paranoid; your vendetta against AI has. You have trained yourself to read for impurity, and now you cannot stop.

Obiter Scripta, no. 163

By in books, foolosophy, history, obiter scripta

There is an interesting remark in the introduction which has some modern resonance (I think). The author writes — remember this is 1904 — of ‘That modern weakness of moral fibre, that false sentimentalism, which tends to make our sympathies go to the side of the criminal rather than his victim, was not characteristic of the Elizabethan age.’ But insofar as we now consider the Edwardian age in which Baildon wrote to be of great harshness by comparison with our own rather than one of sentimentalism, perhaps we ought to be careful of complaining of the softness of our times. Perhaps, indeed, they will seem harsh to our even more sentimental successors: or perhaps they will attribute their own travails to past sentimentalism, namely ours.

— Theodore Dalrymple, Not For the Proud Man Apart

Progressivism and declinism look like opposites, but both depend on the same picture: history as a line, with ourselves anxiously locating our position upon it. Are we farther along than our ancestors, or sliding backwards? Either way, the present becomes a referendum on the entire human adventure. A cyclical view would relieve some of the anxiety because it turns these alleged historical verdicts into recurrent human predicaments. Severity produces revulsion and a movement toward mercy; mercy decays into indulgence; indulgence provokes a demand for severity. Confidence hardens into arrogance, skepticism dissolves into confusion, confusion creates a hunger for certainty, and the wheel turns again. No generation permanently solves the problem because each solution cultivates the conditions of its own correction.

Tiny Ropes

By in foolosophy, nietzsche, writing

Alan Jacobs:

Why is it a great thing? Because by writing on the open web and merely asking for support, I have wholly escaped the pressures that come when people have paid money to see your writing and therefore have certain expectations for what you say and how you say it. Also escaped: that other kind of pressure that comes when people really like one particular post and show their liking with money — which plants the idea in the back of your head that you need to write more posts like that … whether you really want to or not. By contrast, y’all have supported me because you see what the whole package is, and know what you’re getting and are likely to continue to get. That’s really wonderful. So I have every reason to keep writing for the open web and merely requesting/hoping for your contributions.

Jacobs distinguishes between Substack subscribers, who have paid to receive something, and open-web supporters, who contribute because they approve of the work he has already done. The first arrangement carries expectations; the second merely ratifies an existing relationship. This distinction may work perfectly well for him. I have no reason to suspect otherwise.

My own temperament would ignore it completely. A reader who gave me fifty dollars as thanks for past services rendered would occupy just as much space in my mind as one who paid five dollars a month for future ones. The subscriber has entered an intelligible transaction and may cancel it whenever he pleases. The donor has made a gesture of generosity for which no return was formally required. That very absence of terms would make the obligation harder to discharge. The money would follow me back to the desk. Had I gone too long without posting? Was the next piece substantial enough? Was I writing something the donor would care to read? He might intend none of these questions. I would supply them on his behalf.

Nietzsche once wrote in a notebook:

I am passionately for independence, I sacrifice everything to it — probably because I have the most dependent soul and am tormented by the tiniest ropes more than others by chains.

It’s a startling glimpse of the man behind the great booming voice. He doesn’t describe independence as the natural condition of someone whom nothing can touch. He describes it as a defense devised by someone who can be touched too easily. The severity is compensatory. He guards himself because claims have too much power over him.

This changes the sound of much that Nietzsche wrote. His attacks on pity, for instance, are usually read as evidence of callousness. Yet in The Gay Science he elaborates on the earlier notebook entry:

How is it at all possible to keep to one’s own way? Constantly, some clamor or other calls us aside; rarely does our eye behold anything that does not require us to drop our own preoccupation instantly to help. I know, there are a hundred decent and praiseworthy ways of losing my own way, and they are truly highly “moral”! Indeed, those who now preach the morality of pity even take the view that precisely this and only this is moral — to lose one’s own way in order to come to the assistance of a neighbor. I know just as certainly that I only need to expose myself to the sight of some genuine distress and I am lost. And if a suffering friend said to me, “Look, I am about to die; please promise to die with me,” I should promise it; and the sight of a small mountain tribe fighting for its liberty would persuade me to offer it my hand and my life — if for good reasons I may choose for once two bad examples. All such arousing of pity and calling for help is secretly seductive, for our “own way” is too hard and demanding and too remote from the love and gratitude of others, and we do not really mind escaping from it – and from our very own conscience – to flee into the conscience of others and into the lovely temple of the religion of pity.

Nietzsche therefore attempts to harden himself at the places where he is most permeable. His philosophy sometimes sounds like a barricade constructed by a man who knows how quickly the walls might fall. “The whole of my philosophy totters after one hour’s sympathetic intercourse even with total strangers!” he wrote in a letter to Peter Gast.

The same undertone appears in the passage from Beyond Good and Evil in which he calls independence “a privilege of the strong.” Read in isolation, it has everything required to intoxicate an adolescent male reader: the solitary hero, the labyrinth, the Minotaur, the suffering incomprehensible to common men. One naturally casts oneself as the tragic exception.

Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it even with the best right but without inner constraint proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring to the point of recklessness. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life brings with it in any case, not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes lonely, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing one like that comes to grief, this happens so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it nor sympathize. And he cannot go back any longer. Nor can he go back to the pity of men.

But this isn’t aristocratic chest-thumping so much as a private warning. He’s saying to himself: You may not be as strong as you wish to be. Your effort to become strong may deform you. And after making a principle of solitude, you may discover that solitude is too much to bear.

I don’t refuse money because I am beyond its influence. I refuse it because its influence would be disproportionate. I guard my independence fiercely because I know how easily I can be bound. A person who is highly sensitive to obligation may begin to experience every request as an imposition, every favor as a debt, every affection as the first loop of a leash. He may snarl, spit, and hiss at ordinary human ties because he knows they will work on him. He may become so practiced at detecting ropes that even loose threads begin to look like restraints.

Still, it is better to know one’s susceptibility than to pretend to possess a freedom one does not have. Jacobs can accept contributions while preserving, in his own mind, a clear distinction between gratitude and purchase. I cannot.

Old Novelties

By in extraordinary popular delusions, media/propaganda, technology

Nick Kristof:

You want security, health care and the American dream? Look to Scandinavia.

“We actually live the American dream,” Jens Stoltenberg, a former prime minister of Norway who is now the finance minister, told me. “The American dream, it’s more reality in the Nordic countries than in America.”

On the Fourth of July, The New York Times invited Americans to contemplate the superior realization of their own national dream in Norway. There was something almost comfortingly traditional about it. Every American holiday requires at least one progressive reminder that another country performs America better than America does, just as every Thanksgiving requires an essay about genocide and every Christmas an argument over the political implications of the Nativity.

The Scandinavian comparison is now older than many of the people presenting it as an urgent new idea. Why can’t America have Norwegian wages, Norwegian vacations, Norwegian child care, Norwegian health care and Norwegian social trust? We simply take the good features of Norway and install them here, as though nations were operating systems and social arrangements downloadable patches. Ten years on from the last time I bothered thinking about any of this in print, I see progressives still haven’t accepted any updates to their worldview.

The objections are predictable because the fantasy is predictable. Norway is small, wealthy and historically homogeneous. Its welfare state grew within a society whose members possessed a strong prior sense of belonging to one another. Its citizens accept broad taxation, powerful labor institutions, extensive public administration and social expectations that Americans might find stifling. Its present arrangements are the product of a particular history, population, culture and moral compact. They cannot be detached from that surrounding life and shipped abroad like barrels of North Sea oil.

But the more interesting question is why this familiar vision retains the aura of innovation. Human beings are psychologically conservative creatures. We enjoy imagining the future, provided it resembles the present closely enough to be reassuring. We permit ourselves to remove everything we dislike — poverty, inequality, insecurity, bigotry, tedious work — while preserving everything familiar and desirable. The future becomes the existing world with its blemishes digitally erased. What we find harder to tolerate is genuine novelty: developments that alter the furniture rather than rearranging it.

Artificial intelligence has exposed this conservatism with unusual clarity. The same cultural class that spent decades celebrating disruption, innovation and the coming knowledge economy now publishes an apparently endless succession of articles lamenting what AI may do to education, art, employment, authorship, journalism, friendship, democracy and the human soul. Some fears are sensible; others are merely atmospheric. Taken together, they reveal how little desire most people have for a future that has not already been morally domesticated.

AI is unsettling because it does not offer a purified continuation of the familiar order. It threatens to change who possesses knowledge, which skills command status, what counts as authorship and whether many respectable forms of symbolic labor remain scarce enough to support professional identities. It may not merely improve the existing world. It may make parts of that world obsolete.

Scandinavian social democracy poses no comparable imaginative danger. It is an old novelty — an inherited alternative that still allows its admirers to feel adventurous. Its lineage is familiar, its moral language is settled, its villains are recognizable. Raise taxes, strengthen unions, expand benefits, regulate markets, empower competent administrators. These ideas may be good, bad or mixed, but they are not new. They belong to a political imagination formed generations ago. Their age is part of their appeal. They offer the thrill of futurism without the terror of the future.

“Norway” signifies the same consoling possibility: modernity without its drawbacks, capitalism without insecurity, diversity without conflict, government without incompetence, solidarity without conformity and prosperity without tragic choice. This is less a policy program than a spiritual aspiration. It expresses a wish to live in a world where every good thing has been retained and every bad thing removed. When someone asks what must be sacrificed, which disciplines must be accepted or which goods may prove incompatible, the question sounds almost indecent. Why introduce trade-offs when compassion has already shown us the destination?

These arguments so often begin with moral spectacle rather than institutional explanation. Look at the waiter earning twenty-five dollars an hour. Look at the cheap day care. Look at the five weeks of vacation. Look how happy everyone is. The reader is invited to admire the results before being asked to consider the society that produces them. Everyone loves the sight of Japanese sports fans cleaning up the stadium after the game, but how many emotionally-incontinent progressives would accept the childhood training, strong expectations of conformity, culture of shame, deference to group norms and comparatively little tolerance for the person who says, “I don’t feel like it” necessary to produce it? Likewise, Americans who celebrate Nordic generosity rarely dwell on the middle-class taxes, social conformity or administrative reach because those are not the spiritually gratifying parts.

The habitual fantasy is to select national virtues à la carte: Japanese public conduct with American individualism. Nordic security with American taxation. American dynamism without disruption or inequality. Mass immigration without assimilation. Radical diversity with high interpersonal trust. Universal solidarity without a strong national identity. When one of these combinations fails, the failure is treated as evidence of insufficient compassion, bad messaging or sabotage by reactionaries, not as evidence that the desired goods may inherently conflict with one another. The aspirational version suppresses those conflicts because it wants moral credit without tragic choice. It imagines politics as the accumulation of goods rather than the ranking of them. But governing is mostly deciding which imperfection you can live with.

If He Hears, He’ll Knock All Day

By in media/propaganda, socmed, the geist of the zeit

Will Oremus:

Whether or not Freddy deserved to be hounded off the internet didn’t really matter. By the time he had been Milkshake Ducked he had become polarizing in the way that everything popular on social media eventually must.

I see hands in the air already. Okay, then: Freddy is a young German man with a Twitter account who has been traveling the US during the World Cup with a couple friends, enthusing over the places he visits, marveling over the size of the gas stations, the food servings, etc. Most people have been enjoying it, but as usual, there’s at least a small subgroup of psychotic cranks who have been scouring his old posts to find something to attack him for (he said something nice about Israel once!!!), accusing him of being a CIA propaganda creation, or, on a more mild note, accusing him of being a fake Clout-farmer putting one over on the rubes. So he deactivated his Twitter account. That was always his plan — he said the influencer life was definitely not for him — but reality sped up the timeline a bit. (“Milkshake Ducked” is internet slang for a popular viral figure who turns out to have a disreputable past.) What did Freddy do wrong? Nothing. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

“Whether or not Freddy deserved to be hounded off the internet didn’t really matter.” To whom did it not matter? It presumably mattered to Freddy. It should matter to anyone attempting to judge the conduct of the people who hounded him. It ought especially to matter to a journalist who joined the hunt. Like a one-man Woodward ’n’ Bernstein, Oremus contacted the Houston Police Department, the Houston mayor’s office, representatives for Gordon Ramsay, J. J. Watt, and Ella Langley, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station, the owner of a plausible LinkedIn profile, and the head of a German company where Freddy may once have interned. All this over an anonymous tourist. No, what Oremus means is that the moral question no longer matters to the explanatory scheme he prefers. Once he can classify the episode as a familiar social-media cycle, individual choices disappear into the pattern.

The comes the masterpiece: “He had become polarizing in the way that everything popular on social media eventually must.” Must! A law of nature. First comes virality, then polarization, just as spring follows winter. Nobody became suspicious for sport, or because of mental illness. Nobody searched old posts. Nobody stripped quotations of context. Nobody rewarded the behavior with attention. Nobody wrote an Atlantic article giving the suspicions prestige. Freddy simply became polarizing. People hounded Freddy off the internet, but in journalistic prose he “had been Milkshake Ducked.” The verb makes it sound like a piano fell on him.

The anonymity seems to offend the most. Freddy enjoyed mass attention while withholding the access that attention supposedly purchases: his surname, workplace, politics, face, and permanent availability for questioning. Oremus can understand intellectually that Freddy wanted privacy, but he still treats privacy as an evidentiary gap. Every unanswered email becomes another smoky corner of the case. The piece never quite asks the obvious question: why should Gordon Ramsay, the Houston police, or Freddy’s former internship supervisor disclose personal information about a tourist to a bottom-feeding scumbag reporter? Oremus presents all this as evidence of the scrutiny that “awaits” viral figures, as though the scrutiny were already waiting at the airport when he arrived. But he was not merely observing the investigation. He was conducting one. The passive voice conceals his agency more effectively than Freddy concealed his surname.

Good to see Laurene Powell Jobs’s money supporting the vital work of holding anonymous vacationers accountable. I cannot wait until the major papers and magazines are all staffed by AI and all the former journalists are trading fellatio for fentanyl in trash-strewn alleyways.

Infinite Plasticity

By in books, eric hoffer

Only here, in America, were the common folk of the Old World given a chance to show what they could do on their own, without a master to push and order them about. History contrived an earth-shaking joke when it lifted by the nape of the neck lowly peasants, shopkeepers, laborers, paupers, jailbirds, and drunks from the midst of Europe, dumped them on a vast virgin continent, and said, “Go to it; it is yours!”

And the lowly were not awed by the magnitude of the task. A hunger for action, pent up for centuries, found an outlet. They went to it with ax, pick, shovel, plow, and rifle; on foot, on horse, in wagons, and on flatboats. They went to it praying, howling, singing, brawling, drinking, and fighting. Make way for the people! This is how I read the statement that this country was built by hordes of undesirables from the Old World.

Small wonder that we in this country have a deeply ingrained faith in human regeneration. We believe that, given a chance, even the degraded and the apparently worthless are capable of constructive work and great deeds. It is a faith founded on experience, not on some idealistic theory. And no matter what some anthropologists, sociologists, and geneticists may tell us, we shall go on believing that man, unlike other forms of life, is not a captive of his past — of his heredity and habits — but is possessed of infinite plasticity, and his potentialities for good and for evil are never wholly exhausted.

— Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change

Flames Without a Hearth

By in books, foolosophy, the geist of the zeit

Leonora Barclay:

Reading trashy books is one of life’s great joys. But presenting them as great literature just because everyone else is reading them closes readers off to more difficult but rewarding works that genuinely challenge them. On the surface, BookTok seems to encourage reading, but in the long term it reflects the broader crisis of the humanities. No longer are great works of literature a vehicle for self-development or understanding the inner lives of others. Books are now just another way to curate a performative self online, even as we read—and understand—less and less.

“Reading Is Dead. And We Killed It.” The title combines hyperbole with a tasteful Nietzschean wink. Those who recognize the source may congratulate themselves on belonging to the remnant who still recognize such things. Serious reading was our God, but we killed it; now the madman brings the news to the Last Men — or, rather, the last teenage girls — and they blink before returning to their dark-romance novels.

The “we” suggests confession, but the article’s tone is accusatory. BookTok influencers, publishing executives, algorithms and shallow young readers committed the crime. The cultivated reader is invited to inspect the body. He may shake his head, click his tongue, share the article and feel morally awake. This is just an upmarket version of doomscrolling.

Social media has given us unfiltered access to the reflexive thoughts of millions of people. Naturally, much of what we find there sounds vain, imitative, sentimental and stupid. Had we possessed a real-time transcript of what teenage girls said to one another in 1956, or even 1756, we might have been equally alarmed. What is new is not human shallowness but its continuous public transcription. We mistake unprecedented access for unprecedented decline.

The cultural-lament thinkpiece is a humanities-branded tour of Bedlam. The guide points through the bars: look how the lunatics entertain themselves now. The visitors recoil, exchange knowing glances and return comfortably to the carriage. No one inside the asylum is addressed. No one outside it is asked to do anything.

This is particularly odd on a site called Persuasion. Who is supposed to be persuaded? Presumably, most readers who frequent such a publication already believe that sustained attention is good, algorithms are corrosive and great books deserve to survive. The essay reaches the cognoscenti, confirms their diagnosis and allows them to signal their concern to one another. It condemns reading as identity performance while functioning chiefly as identity performance for a different class of reader.

Telling people to read better books is easy. Creating conditions in which reading becomes rewarding and self-perpetuating is difficult. Social media succeeds not merely because it offers cheap stimulation, but because it offers recognition. Someone answers your posts, laughs at your jokes, notices what you noticed. However superficial the exchange, it associates words and ideas with friendship, attention, humor and being listened to.

Against this, the defender of reading offers solitary penance, an intellectual eating of vegetables. Read better books because you ought to. Read them because your attention span is deteriorating, democracy is endangered, the canon is disappearing and civilization may collapse if you do not. The book bears the combined weight of homework and emergency preparedness. No wonder the young reader returns to the place where her friends are.

Serious readers increasingly resemble stylites sitting atop pillars in the desert. But a reading culture requires more than readers alone with a book. It requires a social ecology around reading: people with whom a remembered passage may be shared, occasions when a book can enter an ordinary conversation, someone curious enough to ask a second question. Then solitary reading feeds the common life, and the common life sends the reader back to solitude. “That reminds me of something I read last week…” The sentence contains an invitation. It makes a book sound interesting and relevant.

Bright young readers are like baby sea turtles scrambling from the sand toward the water while social-media seagulls circle overhead. A few will reach the sea by force of temperament alone. Most will be picked off before they encounter anyone who can make sustained reading feel socially alive. Standing on the shore and shouting “Swim harder!” will not improve their odds.

If we want more readers, the necessary work will be local, patient and largely unmeasurable. Keep company with books where others can see it. Speak of them without self-indulgence. Remember what people tell you. Ask the second question. Make seriousness hospitable without pretending that every book is equally serious. Give others some reason to suspect that reading leads not merely to superior opinions, but to richer conversation and better company.

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