jests japes jokes jollies

The Data Are Clear

By in jests japes jokes jollies, writing No Comments

Josh Nadeau:

Studies are suggesting (I won’t bore you with a list of citations) that more and more people are beginning to demand more from writing. There are, and it pains me to say, dissertations suggesting that writing seeks to evoke a response of heart and soul, not mind and intellect. These are saying that the era of the think piece, the data driven reporting, the academic cunning, are a thing of the past. There’s a growing constituency that seems enthralled by the very ordinary and very local—personal and particular stories by which the universal scope of experience can come flooding through. And believe me, this will be a fad. It will not last.

I’ve been saying recently that much nonfiction writing would be improved if we dropped our senseless prohibition against first-person perspectives, stopped camouflaging individual viewpoints behind the drab patterns of omniscient narrative, and simply offered up our reflections for whatever they are worth. Nadeau seems to have the same idea in mind, but he says it in a much funnier way. You should check it out.

You Are Not Yet the Person That You Are

By in aphorisms, books, identity, jests japes jokes jollies, the big sleep No Comments

No phenomenon excites me more than waking up. Nothing tends to produce a more extraordinary idea of…everything, than this autogenesis — This beginning of what has been — which itself has its beginning = What is, — and that is all shock, amazement, contrast. As a result, a state of equidifference occurs as if…there were a moment (extremely fragile) in which you are not yet the person that you are, and you could come back to life as someone else!! A different memory would develop. Whence fantasy — the external individual unchanged, and the whole psyche replaced by another…!

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 3

Been there, done that. It never gets old for me. Every morning, consciousness returns before the person quite does. Memory restores the name, the history, the attachments, the unfinished business. Within seconds the seam disappears and we say: I woke up.

Perhaps memory is the nearest thing we have to a personal essence. Infancy suggests as much from one direction. Logically, I know I suffered, feared, and was comforted as a baby, but I remember none of it. Those first few years belong to my biography almost as though they happened to someone else. Dementia approaches the same condition from the other end: consciousness may remain after much of the remembered person has vanished. Eventually others can remember your life better than you can.

Death ordinarily hides the distinction because body, consciousness, and memory usually expire together. Imagine, then, being offered immortality on different terms. You may live forever, but every so often you will go to sleep and wake without a single memory. A new personality will form, live for decades, and in turn be erased. The cycle will continue eternally.

Would you accept? Probably not. What most of us want preserved is not consciousness in the abstract but this accumulated life: these people, these memories, this particular past. An immortal succession of amnesiacs sounds less like eternal life than endlessly repeated death. And yet infancy presents the puzzle in reverse. We readily say that the memoryless child was me, while recoiling from the idea that a future memoryless consciousness could also be me.

But there’s no reason to make this an entirely serious thought experiment. Comedy is as much the stuff of life as anything else. I can easily envision this as a warehouse snafu from my own experience. Picture it:

Two people fall asleep at 11:17. During sleep, whatever process normally returns yesterday’s memories to the correct waking consciousness routes them incorrectly. At 6:42 the next morning:

“Why am I in this house?”

“Who is this woman?”

“Why do I apparently know how to drive a tractor-trailer?”

“Why do I have seventeen years of memories of being married to some guy named Dennis?”

If you swap autobiographical memory only, the body retains procedural knowledge. So the concert pianist wakes with the truck driver’s childhood and marriage but discovers that her fingers can still play Chopin. The truck driver remembers conservatory training in exquisite detail but can’t make his hands perform it. Each possesses somebody else’s explanation of skills that remain physically lodged elsewhere. Emotional residue could make it stranger still. You wake with no memory of your wife, yet her presence produces an inexplicable feeling of safety. Or you remember being desperately in love with someone else’s husband while your own nervous system recoils from him because it has never met him.

Everyone spends the first half of the story insisting, “I am obviously the person whose memories I have.” Then somebody asks, “But if his memories are in your brain and your memories are in his, which one of you is actually you?” And both reply: “Jesus Christ, not now.”

I could see this being something like Monsters, Inc. rather than Freaky Friday. The comedy lies in the collision between the sacredness of personal identity and the banality of inventory control. Sleep already has a vast, hidden logistical infrastructure, and most nights it works so efficiently nobody notices. Memories are processed, sorted, tagged, and returned before waking. Dreams are damaged packaging. Déjà vu is a duplicate shipment. That thing where you walk into a room and forget why you’re there is a partial pick error. Then one morning somebody opens the wrong carton. The person wakes up in the correct body. Name on the outside is right. Address is right. But the contents don’t match the manifest.

“Package says Robert Ellis.”

“Yeah.”

“Body says Robert Ellis.”

“Yeah.”

“Memories are for Angela Martinez.”

“Shit. Check the invoice.”

Two clerks start frantically pulling records, comparing timestamps, discovering that Robert and Angela entered REM sleep within three seconds of each other and somebody scanned the wrong tote. Meanwhile both humans are already awake and wrecking each other’s lives.

As usual, I’m just giving away great ideas for free here.

Ripe For a Fall

By in books, history, jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

[B]ut in 470 a general impoverishment of fields and cities, of senators and proletarians, depressed the spirits of a once great race to an epicurean cynicism that doubted all gods but Priapus, a timid childlessness that shunned the responsibilities of life, and an angry cowardice that denounced every surrender and shirked every martial task. Through all this economic and biological decline ran political decay: aristocrats who could administer but could not rule; businessmen too absorbed in personal gain to save the peninsula; generals who won by bribery more than they could win by arms; and a bureaucracy ruinously expensive and irremediably corrupt. The majestic tree had rotted in its trunk, and was ripe for a fall.

— Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Faith

A modern Westerner reading this:

O Lambda Truest, I Am the Newest Member of Your Clan

By in identity, jests japes jokes jollies, tribalism

Ed West:

Truth and justice are synonymous, or related, in the human mind, and it is actually quite unusual to care about truth in a literal, scientific sense, irrespective of the social consequences. It is a characteristic found in nerds, and especially those on the autistic spectrum; only a small number of people obsess about the objective truth, and they often repulse the rest of society as a result. For most, a sense of pravda is more important, as is the approval of peers, and they also tend to question the intentions of people making dissenting claims. If you’re seeking knowledge which might disrupt social harmony, you’re probably a bad person with ulterior motives, and your arguments will be mentally screened out by people who don’t wish to expend energy on issues that don’t concern them.

…I’ve met Cofnas on a few occasions, at various conservative-aligned get-togethers. He’s a slight, affable, dryly amusing figure and – forgive the racial stereotyping – quite New York Jewish in his mannerisms. He could almost be played by a young Woody Allen, if Allen cast himself as a race scientist hated by society for his controversial views. He’s obviously one of those unusual people who can’t bear to hear what he regards as fictions being repeated for the sake of social harmony or group cohesion; a nerd, in other words.

I was never a cool or popular kid; until late adolescence I was always small for my age and I was never talkative. But I could “pass” as reasonably sociable and naturally athletic; I didn’t have the Dungeons & Dragons autistic awkwardness or the aptitude for science. As an adult, I wouldn’t say I’m obsessed with objective truth, but I do like to refer to myself as an orangutan among chimpanzees for precisely the reason West suggests: fictions being repeated for the sake of social harmony or group cohesion cause my lip to involuntarily curl in contempt. I just don’t feel the same need for social belonging, or at least nowhere near the same intensity of it. I’m not trying to suggest that there’s any moral valence to this. It doesn’t make me better, only different. I have no desire to be a crusader for truth; I don’t mind if people are quietly believing dumb or bizarre things to themselves. But I loathe the combination of aggressive proselytizing and self-back-patting that goes with social causes.

A nerd, though? Here I was thinking I was this version of Ogre:

Only to find I’m the later version of him:

A Life, Allegedly

By in identity, jests japes jokes jollies

Tyler Austin Harper:

Yesterday in London, Jason Arday, the controversy-plagued British academic and author, was found dead. Made famous as the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s more than 800-year history, Arday had been dogged by weeks of scrutiny amid accusations of plagiarism, fake qualifications, and a fabricated backstory filled with hard-to-believe details.

He claimed to have been mute until age 11 and illiterate until 18, disadvantages that did not deter him from getting a Ph.D., which he earned by age 30. He claimed, too, that he had suffered from various medical conditions throughout his life, including autism, epilepsy, locked-in syndrome, testicular cancer, and a brain tumor. He was, by his account, a world-class endurance athlete who had racked up a variety of impressive feats, including running 600 miles in six days. Then there were his academic accomplishments: Arday was billed as a once-in-a-generation talent, whose research in his field—the sociology of education—was “the best in the world,” according to Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge’s faculty of education. He claimed to have received a book advance of 1.4 million in unspecified currency for his memoir, released this week by Simon & Schuster. It was a meteoric rise, until it wasn’t.

I admit that my first thought was, “Wouldn’t it be something if he turned out to have faked his own death too?” I don’t say that to be provocative. It’s just that once a story has accumulated enough disputed biographies, implausible achievements and shifting details, the imagination starts looking for the one escalation still available.

Picture it: he comes out of hiding after an indeterminate period of time, reveals the deception, and it turns out that he was playing the long game all along. I can see the headline now: “People thought this was a clear case of academic fraud. It was actually the most daring artistic experiment of the 21st century.” The exposés would suddenly become unwitting components of the artwork. The credulous profiles, the university press releases, the furious defenders, the skeptics digging through old claims, the institutional investigations, the denunciations of the skeptics, the denunciations of the defenders, the obituaries — all of it turns out to have been participatory theater. Nobody knew they had been cast.

The magnificent part would be the retroactive reinterpretation. The alleged fabrications weren’t CV padding; they were interventions into credentialist epistemology. The inconsistent autobiography was an investigation of socially constructed identity. The extraordinary endurance claims interrogated the neoliberal fetishization of measurable achievement. Institutional reluctance to verify anything demonstrated the dependence of elite knowledge production upon narrative legitimacy. And faking his death exposed the final credentialing authority: the obituary. Everyone’s opinions would automatically change positions, like a do-si-do: the conservatives who lambasted him as the epitome of DEI fraud now love him for exposing DEI fraud. The progressives who lamented him as a victim of white supremacy are now wishing they could kill him themselves. Crucially, the audience’s reactions become the medium. Your anger, credulity, sanctimony, opportunism, delight, and abrupt ideological pirouettes reveal something about you.

His explanation? He had been testing how much of institutional reality consists of people taking their cues from what other high-status people have already agreed is real. Once Cambridge says remarkable scholar, journalists see a remarkable scholar. Once journalists say inspirational life, audiences see an inspirational life. Once critics say fraud, suddenly everyone remembers having had doubts all along. Then death arrives and produces yet another instantaneous reassignment of roles: villain, victim, persecutor, mourner. And the fake death would supply the experimental control. Everybody would have publicly committed themselves before discovering that the subject was still standing backstage taking notes. The eventual documentary would have to be called Professor?

Better yet, in true Andy Kaufman fashion, Arday never explains everything even after returning. He confirms enough to prove the “death” was staged, denies that the project was merely a hoax, gives three mutually incompatible accounts of what he was trying to demonstrate, then disappears again. Half the academy writes papers about the epistemology of institutional trust; the other half insists the papers themselves are part of the work. At that point “academic fraud” would be the philistine interpretation. The enlightened interpretation would be: a decade-long durational artwork using Cambridge, journalism, DEI politics, social media, and his own public identity as found materials.

In all likelihood, this story is just as sad and sordid as it appears to be. But I like to think that I’m “holding space” for the possibility that this entire thing is actually an unprecedented piece of conceptual art and that, somewhere, Jason Arday is chuckling, watching everyone rearrange themselves around each new revelation.

You Scurvy Scalawag!

By in ai, calvin and hobbes, jests japes jokes jollies, writing

I don’t want to make bruising fun of this poor girl. It’s mainly just sad that she seems to feel she’s committed a mortal sin against the sacred craft by having AI do basic proofreading. But it does make me genuinely chuckle to see her itemize by nationality the fifty-three people she “deceived” like casualties in an international incident. You can practically hear the cello as the map slowly darkens country by country. If she had simply written, “I realized my ‘100% no AI’ statement was technically inaccurate because I used ChatGPT to proofread one post, so I’ve changed it,” there would be nothing to laugh at. Instead she has imagined a blast radius. Fifty-three people walked innocently into her website, believing themselves to be in a pristine human-text environment, and emerged with invisible synthetic shrapnel lodged in their souls. Even funnier, the odds are good that they were mostly search crawlers, link-preview bots, or other automated scanners rather than a solitary Dane sitting thoughtfully by a window, coffee cooling beside him, devastated to discover that the author had used ChatGPT for proofreading. It may instead have been a server in Copenhagen requesting the page for 0.14 seconds.

But as I said, it’s more sad than anything. The “contamination” model has overpowered an individual conscience. Grammarly? Word’s grammar checker? The red spelling squiggle? An editor who changes a comma? Those are presumably compatible with “100% me.” But ChatGPT correcting precisely the same comma introduces some tiny metaphysical admixture of Not-Me. This is how you know a purity regime has really taken hold: you no longer need inquisitors. The prosecution is internalized. Congratulations to all the self-appointed Torquemadas of the online world; your fanatical efforts have made a difference.

Antonette, dear, you’ve done nothing wrong. If I can offer one bit of advice, it would be not to make grand oaths about how you will or won’t write, especially if you’re new at it. Just practice, experiment, and enjoy yourself. Use AI or don’t; that choice is yours, and you’re free to change your mind tomorrow. But don’t let an imaginary audience of suspicious readers turn writing into a purity test, with every new tool or bit of assistance treated as a possible moral failure. You’re learning how you want to work. Give yourself room to find out.

Obiter Scripta, no. 167

By in aphorisms, books, jests japes jokes jollies, obiter scripta, socmed

At last, after talking for thirty hours on end and instructing me in all man needs to know, the Sage concluded:
“Now I shall sum up my teaching. It is contained in two axioms:
“‘All different things are identical.’
“‘All identicals are different.’
“Ring the changes in your mind on these two propositions and you will see, firstly, that they are not incompatible; next, that thought can formulate only one or the other and can only move from one to the other. There is a time for one of them and a time for the other, and the man who thinks the one will think the other. That’s all.”

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

I believe the Sage later became editor-in-chief of Engagement Today, where these two axioms remain the entire editorial manual. He’s teaching the manufacture of takes:

“All different things are identical.”
→ “Actually, Weightlifting and Reading Are the Same Activity.”

“All identicals are different.”
→ “Why Reading Is Nothing Like Weightlifting—and Why Confusing Them Is Dangerous.”

“There’s a time for one and a time for the other.”
→ Publish the second one nine months after the first.

Claudemarking, Claudewashing and Nudereading

By in ai, jests japes jokes jollies, the feeling of absurdity, writing

Join me, if you will, as I bow my head and give thanks to the trickster god who loves us and wants us to be amused. What’s that? You’re agnostic? Well, let’s see…

I wonder how long it will be until some enterprising coder—oh, really? That was fast.

Let’s sum this up. Claude is beginning to watermark text, and others seem likely to follow. I don’t know if this has an official name yet, so let’s call it “Claudemarking.” If you copy and paste text that has been “processed” by an LLM, it will bear the devil’s clanker’s mark, which others will be able to detect. But the human entrepreneurial spirit being what it is, this will immediately be accompanied by means for removing said clanker’s mark. Let’s call this “Claudewashing” (which will quickly become an epithet for those suspected of evading justice). Inevitably, an online service will appear with a name like “HumanizeMyClaude.ai” and a landing page showing a smiling undergraduate giving a thumbs-up. Philosophically, this is funny because if a mark can be stripped, absence proves nothing. If a mark survives editing, presence proves only that the text passed through Claude at some point. That leaves us exactly where we were: arguing about what “authorship” means, except now with cryptographic confetti scattered over the argument.

So we already have Pangram; soon we’ll have Claudemarking. I’m usually not one for predictions, but I’m going to take a stab at the likely next innovation in digital prophylactics: SynthScreen. I envision this being a new version of that wearable tech that has never quite caught on, like smart glasses. SynthScreen would have a full Iron Man HUD for prose. You’re reading an essay and little red brackets suddenly snap around a sentence:

SYNTHETIC-LIKELIHOOD EVENT DETECTED
Triadic construction: 87%
Em-dash residue: elevated
Metaphorical symmetry: abnormal
Recommended action: discontinue reading and unsubscribe immediately

Naturally there would be different protection levels. Normal web browsing requires only the glasses. High-risk environments — corporate LinkedIn, university DEI statements, Substack during a discourse outbreak — require full Narrative-95 filtration. Then comes the social etiquette. Someone sends you an article and you ask, “Was this SynthScreened?” They say no. “You mean you just sent me raw text?” “They told me it was human-written.” “Did you see the test results?” “No, but I trust them.” “Jesus Christ, man!” Offices establish designated clean-reading zones. Libraries put signs on the door: THIS FACILITY MAINTAINS A LOW-SYNTHETIC ENVIRONMENT.

Eventually, all this fussy hypochondria around reading as a biosecurity procedure produces a counterculture that glamorizes risk and danger. A new (old) practice emerges. Let’s call this “nudereading.” People. Text. No intermediaries. You just read and use your judgment, like they did in the Before Times. Underground book clubs meet without scanners. A dissident magazine announces that it accepts submissions in whatever state they arrive and refuses all provenance testing. I’m picturing scenes like Dead Poets Society, where the students slip away to a cave in the night to read and chant text with no heed of provenance. The elders are scandalized. “You don’t know where that text has been!” “Do you have any idea how many models may have touched it?” “Your cousin’s friend’s co-worker nuderead one newsletter in 2029 and never recovered!” School assemblies feature reformed clankertext addicts describing how it began innocently with a few Claude sonnets and ended with them reading anonymous machine-generated erotica in unlicensed prompt dens. Clankertext culture takes on the most subversive connotations, like gay bathhouse culture of past decades. Soon, somebody, probably the Atlantic, publishes a stern public-health article entitled “The Dangerous Romanticization of Unprotected Reading.”

Then you get the full subculture apparatus: clandestine reading rooms, coded symbols, pseudonyms, bars where the house rule is that nobody asks whether the prose is human or machine. “Don’t provenance me” becomes an assertion of privacy. People wear pendants shaped like em dashes. There are digital zines with manifestos about textual autonomy and the right to unreadability of origin. Meanwhile clankertext itself develops an aesthetic of deliberate excess. Why pretend to be human? Let the machine write six-page sentences, hallucinated metaphors, impossible registers, prose no sane MFA workshop would permit. What began as stigma becomes style. “Human-passing” is now the insult. Young writers sneer at clean, tasteful, provenance-certified prose as “meatsack realism.” You get the idea.

Anyway, the “effort-to-result” ratio of all this bot-sniffing reminds me of nothing so much as watching a dog chase its tail. I think I previously referred to this farce as an arms race, but if so, I retract that. An arms race at least suggests two sides accumulating genuinely greater capabilities. Here a lot of the motion is just circular, like the dog and his tail. We devise a technique for identifying synthetic prose; therefore we create a technique for making synthetic prose harder to identify; therefore we devise a technique for identifying prose that has been deliberately made harder to identify, and round and round we go…until somebody finally publishes a piece in the Atlantic titled, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nudereading,” culminating in a revelation: “I had spent years trying to determine whether the intelligence behind a sentence was artificial. It had never occurred to me to ask whether the sentence was intelligent.” Cue the podcast appearances, and an eventual book titled Raw: Reclaiming Reading in the Age of Synthetic Text.

So, then, as I was saying: Would you like to join me in a prayer of thanks?

The Anxiety of Artificial Influence

By in ai, jests japes jokes jollies, the feeling of absurdity, writing

In the future, the author will be issued a transparent typewriter in a bare room. Every keystroke will be time-stamped. Wastebaskets will be searched for unauthorized phrases. A court-appointed observer will certify that the writer stared helplessly at the wall for the requisite number of hours before producing each paragraph. Any sentence arriving too fluently will be flagged for enhanced interrogation.

Publishers will require a complete chain of literary custody: notebooks, deleted drafts, browser history, coffee receipts, testimony from spouses who heard the author muttering in the shower. “We loved the novel,” the editor will say, “but unfortunately there is an unexplained twenty-three-minute interval during the composition of Chapter Nine.”

If any anomaly appears, the author will lie immobilized in an fMRI machine while a panel of forensic neurologists watches each sentence form in real time. Any suspiciously rapid activation in the metaphor cortex will trigger an alarm. “Subject appears to have generated the rain worried the windows without the customary forty minutes of anguish. Possible neural autocomplete.”

But even that will not settle matters. The chip may have been removed before the scan. The LLM may have planted ideas months earlier. The author may have absorbed machine-generated phrasing without conscious knowledge. Soon publishers will require a full cognitive provenance extending back to childhood: school essays, dreams, overheard conversations, every book ever read, and sworn testimony from the author’s mother that he was already making up stories before ChatGPT existed.

Finally, writers will have to be bred in controlled facilities, raised without internet access, and released into sterile composition chambers under the supervision of the Authors Guild and three independent neurologists. Until then, only one author can meet the standard:

And No One Dared Disturb the Sound of Silence

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Olga Khazan:

For the study, the psychologists Valeria Pfeifer, of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and Matthias Mehl, of the University of Arizona, analyzed data from thousands of participants in the United States, Mexico, Australia, and Europe. The subjects carried around a device that randomly recorded sound bites of their speech throughout the day. In 2005, when the studies began, the average number of words that each participant spoke in a day was 16,632; in 2019, when the research concluded, the average was 11,900. Each year, the participants spoke about 338 fewer words a day than they did in the previous year, amounting to a decline of about 28 percent over the entire time period.

Of all the Atlantic sort of things, this is perhaps the Atlantic-ist. It’s just so comically downstream of the thing anyone actually cares about. We already know that people live alone more often, see friends less often, belong to fewer organizations, work remotely, marry later, have fewer children, and conduct more errands through screens. Then someone straps a recorder to them and announces: They also appear to be talking less. Well, yes. The bowling leagues disappeared, and now we have obtained a precise count of the missing “Hey, nice one”s. Thank God someone got a grant for this.

The strangest part is the conversion of word count into a rough unit of human flourishing. Sixteen thousand words: socially healthy. Twelve thousand: civilization in retreat. Yet the study can’t distinguish between an intimate conversation, a vicious marital argument, a cashier reciting store policy, a manager holding an unnecessary meeting, and some bore explaining his fantasy-football roster. They all go into the same bucket marked “speech.”

Ah, well. Being neurotic with the help of studies and statistics is part of the house style there. More importantly, some people have acquired exactly as much conversation as they want. Some regard the elimination of compulsory chatter as one of modernity’s genuine achievements. In fact, I see that I was premature in declaring retirement in that earlier post. Now I have a new goal: to attract the attention of the Atlantic itself for what would be the shortest feature ever published:

From GeoCities to the Server Farms, This Land Was Made for You and Me

By in jests japes jokes jollies, technology

I had come to look at French Revolutionary pamphlets when I encountered the fence.

It stood across the whole screen: a black barricade, high and wide, admitting passage through a single white gate marked “Continue.” Before proceeding, I was required to hear an acknowledgment of the traditional owners of “this land.”

This land?

I looked around. I was sitting in Virginia. The National Library was in Canberra. The pamphlets came from Paris. The server was probably humming in an industrial park known only to three technicians and a tax assessor. Yet somehow we had all gathered upon the same sacred patch of ground.

Actually, you know what? You’re on my turf. I am an indigenous person — of cyberspace. At last, a homeland with a reasonably well-documented date of first settlement. No disputed oral traditions, no archaeological layers, no inconvenient migrations extending back beyond the arbitrary cutoff date. Before the white nerd arrived, the blinking cursor grazed upon an empty screen.

Rocks, trees, rivers, mountains — granted, prior claims abound for those. But the JPEG of the rock, the polygonal tree, the river rendered in sixteen colors, the mountain represented by ^ characters? Those arose within our ancestral domain. The native fauna were trolls, worms, daemons, and badly drawn ASCII cats. The sacred sites were Usenet groups, dial-up bulletin boards, GeoCities pages, and forums whose moderators had not seen daylight since 1987.

Indeed, “digital native” may be the one indigenous identity modern institutions recognize without embarrassment, though even here the original inhabitants are gradually being displaced by vast migratory hordes carrying smartphones and asking why every website cannot simply be an app. My people were here before the smartphone settlers came. Before the apps. Before the platforms. Before a billion colonists boarded their little glass vessels, sailed into our waters, and began demanding that every form of human expression be rearranged into a vertical rectangle.

We crossed the wilderness with nothing but AltaVista, typing URLs letter by letter. We had no predictive text to guide us. One misplaced character could send a traveler into the void. Later, some unknown benefactor taught us to copy and paste, an invention still celebrated in our oldest songs. We built our settlements with raw HTML. Every scrap was used. We painted our words red, blue, yellow and green. We tiled the background with tiny stars. We consulted “For Dummies” scrolls to construct tables inside tables because CSS had not yet been bestowed upon mankind. Our shamans summoned special characters through the incantation of hex codes. Our homepages contained photographs of iguanas, quotations from Nietzsche, guitar tablature, collections of animated skulls and exhaustive accounts of why Rush had been misunderstood by the critics. They were not polished, but they belonged to us.

Every settlement had a guestbook. Every village had a message board. Webrings joined distant tribes. A man could depart from a page devoted to medieval siege engines and, after six or seven migrations, find himself among collectors of Soviet toothpaste labels. We called this “surfing,” though few of us had ever been near an ocean. Our sacred structures were marked UNDER CONSTRUCTION, which expressed our cyclical understanding of time. Nothing was ever finished. Nothing needed to be. A page might remain under construction from 1998 until the death of the sun.

Then the settlers came.

At first they arrived in manageable numbers. They built blogs and learned our customs. Some even adopted native names such as XxShadowWolf77xX. But the great migration began with the smartphone. Suddenly millions poured ashore without keyboards, mice or any knowledge of directory structures. They did not explore the web. They expected it to cater to them.

The open country was enclosed. Forums were abandoned and replaced by imperial platforms. Personal homepages gave way to standardized profiles. The old paths disappeared beneath algorithmic roads that carried every traveler past the same attractions. Then they began appropriating our culture.

They discovered dark mode, as though our ancestors had not read green letters on black screens since time immemorial. They invented “online communities” after destroying thousands of forums and replacing them with Discord servers whose contents vanish from public memory. They praised “digital minimalism” while carrying devices that screamed for attention thirty times an hour. They turned the personal homepage into “personal branding,” stripped away the iguana, the MIDI file and the purple text, and sold the remainder as professional identity.

And now, after all that, I find a fence across my ancestral land. Where is Midnight Oil with a ballad dedicated to my people?

The Only People We Hate More Than the Generators Are the Fucking Checkers

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

Solarpunk Magazine:

At the same time, here at Solarpunk Magazine we are very wary of AI checkers. We do not use them, and we believe it is unethical for publishers to use them, especially without permission from authors. AI checkers are also generative AI programs. While they aren’t as energy intensive as LLM text generators, we believe it is a hypocrisy for publishers to use AI checkers (especially without a clear policy stating that publishers may run authors’ work through an AI system and permission from authors to do so) while insisting that authors are not allowed to use AI themselves at any stage of the writing or brainstorming process.

…Rather than using AI checkers without author consent or knowledge, we rely on our own knowledge of the writing craft and the conversations and interactions we have with authors to help us determine if a piece of work was created using AI. That’s not a perfect method, but neither are AI checkers, which are known to not only produce false positives, but to produce false positives at higher rates for writers of color, ESL authors, and neurodivergent authors.

Just when I was starting to get a little bored of all the identical laments over AI, the trickster god who loves us and wants us to be amused brings this to my attention. What a brilliant gambit! The irresistible force of anti-AI sentiment meets the immovable object of identity politics. The resulting spectacle should be magnificent. One faction will say that failure to detect AI endangers marginalized writers because slop crowds them out. Another will say that aggressive detection endangers marginalized writers because their prose is disproportionately suspected. A third will argue that demanding drafts and oral explanations privileges writers with leisure, education, verbal confidence, and reliable access to document histories. Everyone will possess a theory of structural harm; nobody will possess a trustworthy method of determining who wrote the story.

Which returns us to the shibboleth problem. People want an objective test that will divide Ephraimite from Gileadite, human from bot, without ambiguity. Pangram offers a numerical percentage, which looks more scientific than “this story felt wrong to me,” but the underlying desire is the same: outsource uncertainty, receive an official judgment. In fairness, credit to Solarpunk for at least recognizing the contradiction of using one opaque machine to guard the literary border against another opaque machine. (The Romans might have some counsel to offer on this strategy.) But their “AI pacifism” stance has a faint League of Nations quality. They are conscientious objectors in an arms race. They reject generators because they counterfeit human work, and checkers because they counterfeit human judgment. All well and good, but that means every submission must be authenticated by intuition, conversation, process documents, and amateur forensic work, precisely while generators are improving and submission volume is likely rising. They have renounced aerial reconnaissance just as the enemy begins mass production. I wish them lots of luck.

All right, that’s enough sober analysis. Let’s get back to the fun stuff: imagining how all this is going to develop once the usual motives come into play. Pangram may become “predictive policing” for prose. “Suspicious syntax” may be seen as rhetorical profiling. An unusually polished paragraph will be probable cause. An em dash in the wrong neighborhood triggers a stop-and-frisk. An “Abolish the Checkers” movement emerges, including an “All Bots Are Bastards” slogan. Then comes the counteressay: “Why Refusing to Use AI Detection Is a Privilege.” Editors at well-funded magazines can afford leisurely interviews and manuscript archaeology; smaller journals cannot. Therefore detector abstinence itself becomes exclusionary. Then the rebuttal: “Draft Histories Are the New Voter ID.” Requiring writers to produce revision logs, notes, or earlier versions disproportionately burdens the poor, the disorganized, the technologically unsophisticated, and anyone who writes in a single document. Then someone argues that “human-sounding prose” is a colonial construct.

It all sounds like a new Monty Python sketch:

“Did you use AI?”

“No.”

“Can you prove it?”

“Your demand for proof is carceral.”

“Then may we use a detector?”

“Algorithmic profiling.”

“Can we inspect your drafts?”

“Surveillance capitalism.”

“Can we ask about your process?”

“Neurotypical gatekeeping.”

“Can we simply judge the story?”

“That permits AI colonialism.”

At which point someone rings a little bell and announces that the submission window has been suspended pending a restorative listening session with the manuscript.

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.

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, jests japes jokes jollies, socmed

How many expressions of opinion are products of intestinal flatulence! They relieve the man giving vent to them, but pollute the intellectual air of others. This goes for insults, mockery, and exclamations.

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

Ordinarily, I would be loath to descend to lowbrow humor, this being a respectable, high-minded, family-friendly blog, but if such an august personage as Valéry is leading the way, it would be rude not to follow. At any rate, it’s probably a good thing he never lived to experience the global Dutch oven known as social media.

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