Dear Erik, like an uneasy smile bares one’s teeth, so you bare your struggle with the how and why of your scribely vocation in the face of AI’s takeover of the writing world.
But like Ahab’s deckhand Pip, who goes overboard on a (sinking thinking) penManShip, who drowns the finite of his soul and speaks only “heaven’s sense” after re-emerging from the depths (sounding like a madman to those with minds still fixed in finity)—I think it is exactly this struggle that will generate that which AI cannot provide us with:
That curious animate quality that Lorca called Duende, which is “a struggle, not a thought.”
We must wrestle the Duende on the rim of the well, and trap its essence in lifeblood of thinking ink, to daemonstrate that The Word is mightier than the Sword—that it is not just a viral weapon but also a vital instrument!
As always your words ring out with an instruMental musicality.
I love it, and synchronistically, one of the dominant ways I have been thinking through this moment is through and alongside Melville's Whale, so your analogy sinks me deep into the brine of it all.
When i had you on Self Portraits As Other People during the pandemic you were at an earlier the crossroads of your writerly experience, embarking on a substack adventure, so maybe this recent tuning fork in the road is another crossroads which we should explore, conversationally, in the near future. I just rebooted the podcast, so consider this an invitation.
"the unforgiving telegraphy of power" — that line's gonna stick to my ribs.
I think humanity has always been an animal made and controlled by the things that it makes, but one can't help feeling like *this* time is different, even though there were any number of previous occasions where we might have located a point of no return.
I keep coming back to recorded music. In the first instance, the ephemeral living event of the song is mummified in a fixed form through the mass-produced record. Very good—we still can't doubt that we are hearing instruments being played by human hands, human voices singing, and the mysterious human faculty of creativity manifested in the composition of it all. Electronic music creeps onto the scene; increasingly, the music plays itself, but we can still ascribe it to a human composer who sweated over a wall of synthesizers or a laptop, trying to get everything just so, striving to communicate a mood or energy to remote listeners somewhere in the Out There.
And now we've got AI-generated tunes *convincingly* being passed off as human compositions. This couldn't have happened without several prior increments of abstraction—of separating music from persons with voices and instruments and an immediately present audience. What makes this turn so catastrophic, when we were already perfectly comfortable listening to music that was already so estranged from corporeal humanity?
My gut tells me that it *is* qualitatively different in that it takes depersonalization past its quantitative limit and crosses over into something like autism. "It does not matter if there is or isn't a man behind the music; all that matters is that there IS music and that it plays on me." We see a similar process in the journey from orality to manuscripts to Wikipedia to Grok—or even the hetaira to Replika.
We're living through a fascinating social experiment. The next several years or decades will determine how much human beings *really* value other human beings.
TechGnosis changed my teaching. I read that book and designed a new elective that gives me ballast. You and Meghan O’Gieblyn are my two favorite stylists and thinkers.
I do understand the despair. As an English teacher, one of my great joys is embracing on the long essay with students. Now, that’s filled with a paranoia and uncertainty that PKD would have understood.
In the glut of dishy unpolished Substack writing, it’s a relief to enter into the careful labor of your phrases and sentences.
I never quite know how to comment, as I’m rather lacking in guile as a mid west raised empath who can evaporate the cool in any room with a single inhale and smile, but I will say that reading your work has given me a grounded knowing, a deeper commitment to the work of understanding and naming. This isn’t an elegy but a thank you.
I hope to see more writing for you. I do think, across the Melville class, PKD, Lovecraft, the sheer range and depth of your esoteric and philosophical reading that there is another book. It strikes me, if you will indulge and anonymous person being so directive, that there’s a project of these past few years in burning shore that questions—directly and elliptically— the purpose of your chosen habits and seeks that sociological high point (Ishmael on the mast) that when reached delivers such relief and awe. Climb up there another time for us? I think a sustained work that draws on the quilt of what you write here is warranted.
Don't ever stop please! You're one of the "lone reeds" that we all look to and check is still waving in the wind. (In You've Got Mail terms).
I think our despair in Beaudrillard's terms is the awareness that Substack is one of the more perverse holes of the machine...a place where everyone is simultaneously patient, therapist, journalist, philosopher, and entrepreneur trying to invoice one another.
You might feel like writing doesn't carry the same meaning in a world of "juiced" writing. People that can put together essays with AI support. Greg Lemond confused by being overtaken by the formerly weak Lance Armstrongs wondering what it means to contribute to a space that is flooded with cheap writing.
Also, we probably need a new term for your experience of the billboards. Something like fragmented hyperreality. Our shared reality is diverging not just in content but in lived experience. We stop sharing grammar let alone an economy. We can still look into each other's glass houses but what we see makes no sense to us anymore.
Erik you are the original Heresiarch, the map maker of this age, the chief librarian of Babel. Your maps glow! We need you now more than ever because someone has turned off all the lights of the ever shifting never ending Chapel Perilous! We love you, dear friend of humanity.
At the tender age of 17, I was packing groceries and carrying them out to parked autos, working 50 hours a week to buy my first car. My naivety led me to existential dread. I found an answer at home listening to a jazz scat song that told me life is meant for living, not for sitting around contemplating its meaning.
Much later, I defined mental health as the regular seeking for one's purpose in life, or, if known, actions in light that purpose. A block in this regular pursuit would mean a lack of mental health.
However, I learned that in this crazy world, insanity is the new normal.
Those billboards are fundamentally disturbing. It's not just that I'm not the audience, it's that even the audience isn't the audience. (As if those guys need billboards.) You hit the nail on the head: it's a demonstration of power. Of the creepiest kind.
“inter-lizard” made me chuckle. I hear you on the questions facing writers right now – wishing you the best in finding your way through them. In the meantime we’ll be happy to read anything you share.
I constantly worry that I've become another viral particles, talking to myself in a dingy corner of the internet. However, I DO look forward to your incisive, expansive prose, always making me jealous of your devotion to language and thought, and proud of what a human brain CAN achieve! Will AI be able to fake it? Perhaps I'm fooled right now, and too ignorant to realize that all those quotes and authors are non-existent. However, I prefer to think you planted them as a gullibility test, which I think AI is too stupid for. Phoooey on techpocalypse, I await the Magnetic Reversal!
I have a tough time dealing with how billionaire class manufactured mass idiocy so well.
Have you read Paulina Borsook's Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech, which came out in 2000, and was largely ignored, but now used copies are going for $220 ?
gosh, don‘t stop… i would despair at never being able to catch up to you… you are the voice of everything i missed from 1970 on…
Sweet encouragements Tom!
well, High Weirdness was life altering for me, so I pay attention. 🙏🏼
Dear Erik, like an uneasy smile bares one’s teeth, so you bare your struggle with the how and why of your scribely vocation in the face of AI’s takeover of the writing world.
But like Ahab’s deckhand Pip, who goes overboard on a (sinking thinking) penManShip, who drowns the finite of his soul and speaks only “heaven’s sense” after re-emerging from the depths (sounding like a madman to those with minds still fixed in finity)—I think it is exactly this struggle that will generate that which AI cannot provide us with:
That curious animate quality that Lorca called Duende, which is “a struggle, not a thought.”
We must wrestle the Duende on the rim of the well, and trap its essence in lifeblood of thinking ink, to daemonstrate that The Word is mightier than the Sword—that it is not just a viral weapon but also a vital instrument!
As always your words ring out with an instruMental musicality.
I love it, and synchronistically, one of the dominant ways I have been thinking through this moment is through and alongside Melville's Whale, so your analogy sinks me deep into the brine of it all.
Fantastic! And unsurprising!
When i had you on Self Portraits As Other People during the pandemic you were at an earlier the crossroads of your writerly experience, embarking on a substack adventure, so maybe this recent tuning fork in the road is another crossroads which we should explore, conversationally, in the near future. I just rebooted the podcast, so consider this an invitation.
"the unforgiving telegraphy of power" — that line's gonna stick to my ribs.
I think humanity has always been an animal made and controlled by the things that it makes, but one can't help feeling like *this* time is different, even though there were any number of previous occasions where we might have located a point of no return.
I keep coming back to recorded music. In the first instance, the ephemeral living event of the song is mummified in a fixed form through the mass-produced record. Very good—we still can't doubt that we are hearing instruments being played by human hands, human voices singing, and the mysterious human faculty of creativity manifested in the composition of it all. Electronic music creeps onto the scene; increasingly, the music plays itself, but we can still ascribe it to a human composer who sweated over a wall of synthesizers or a laptop, trying to get everything just so, striving to communicate a mood or energy to remote listeners somewhere in the Out There.
And now we've got AI-generated tunes *convincingly* being passed off as human compositions. This couldn't have happened without several prior increments of abstraction—of separating music from persons with voices and instruments and an immediately present audience. What makes this turn so catastrophic, when we were already perfectly comfortable listening to music that was already so estranged from corporeal humanity?
My gut tells me that it *is* qualitatively different in that it takes depersonalization past its quantitative limit and crosses over into something like autism. "It does not matter if there is or isn't a man behind the music; all that matters is that there IS music and that it plays on me." We see a similar process in the journey from orality to manuscripts to Wikipedia to Grok—or even the hetaira to Replika.
We're living through a fascinating social experiment. The next several years or decades will determine how much human beings *really* value other human beings.
TechGnosis changed my teaching. I read that book and designed a new elective that gives me ballast. You and Meghan O’Gieblyn are my two favorite stylists and thinkers.
I do understand the despair. As an English teacher, one of my great joys is embracing on the long essay with students. Now, that’s filled with a paranoia and uncertainty that PKD would have understood.
In the glut of dishy unpolished Substack writing, it’s a relief to enter into the careful labor of your phrases and sentences.
I never quite know how to comment, as I’m rather lacking in guile as a mid west raised empath who can evaporate the cool in any room with a single inhale and smile, but I will say that reading your work has given me a grounded knowing, a deeper commitment to the work of understanding and naming. This isn’t an elegy but a thank you.
I hope to see more writing for you. I do think, across the Melville class, PKD, Lovecraft, the sheer range and depth of your esoteric and philosophical reading that there is another book. It strikes me, if you will indulge and anonymous person being so directive, that there’s a project of these past few years in burning shore that questions—directly and elliptically— the purpose of your chosen habits and seeks that sociological high point (Ishmael on the mast) that when reached delivers such relief and awe. Climb up there another time for us? I think a sustained work that draws on the quilt of what you write here is warranted.
Don't ever stop please! You're one of the "lone reeds" that we all look to and check is still waving in the wind. (In You've Got Mail terms).
I think our despair in Beaudrillard's terms is the awareness that Substack is one of the more perverse holes of the machine...a place where everyone is simultaneously patient, therapist, journalist, philosopher, and entrepreneur trying to invoice one another.
You might feel like writing doesn't carry the same meaning in a world of "juiced" writing. People that can put together essays with AI support. Greg Lemond confused by being overtaken by the formerly weak Lance Armstrongs wondering what it means to contribute to a space that is flooded with cheap writing.
Also, we probably need a new term for your experience of the billboards. Something like fragmented hyperreality. Our shared reality is diverging not just in content but in lived experience. We stop sharing grammar let alone an economy. We can still look into each other's glass houses but what we see makes no sense to us anymore.
Erik you are the original Heresiarch, the map maker of this age, the chief librarian of Babel. Your maps glow! We need you now more than ever because someone has turned off all the lights of the ever shifting never ending Chapel Perilous! We love you, dear friend of humanity.
At the tender age of 17, I was packing groceries and carrying them out to parked autos, working 50 hours a week to buy my first car. My naivety led me to existential dread. I found an answer at home listening to a jazz scat song that told me life is meant for living, not for sitting around contemplating its meaning.
Much later, I defined mental health as the regular seeking for one's purpose in life, or, if known, actions in light that purpose. A block in this regular pursuit would mean a lack of mental health.
However, I learned that in this crazy world, insanity is the new normal.
Those billboards are fundamentally disturbing. It's not just that I'm not the audience, it's that even the audience isn't the audience. (As if those guys need billboards.) You hit the nail on the head: it's a demonstration of power. Of the creepiest kind.
We just can’t make it without you 🎶without you 🎶
I'm here for gems like this: "Old Adam appears to be asleep at the wheel of an autonomous automobile that’s taking on the contours of a rocket ship."
Thanks for this one. You'll have readers wherever you go.
“inter-lizard” made me chuckle. I hear you on the questions facing writers right now – wishing you the best in finding your way through them. In the meantime we’ll be happy to read anything you share.
The struggle is REAL!
I constantly worry that I've become another viral particles, talking to myself in a dingy corner of the internet. However, I DO look forward to your incisive, expansive prose, always making me jealous of your devotion to language and thought, and proud of what a human brain CAN achieve! Will AI be able to fake it? Perhaps I'm fooled right now, and too ignorant to realize that all those quotes and authors are non-existent. However, I prefer to think you planted them as a gullibility test, which I think AI is too stupid for. Phoooey on techpocalypse, I await the Magnetic Reversal!
Until then, Love You Man!
I have a tough time dealing with how billionaire class manufactured mass idiocy so well.
Have you read Paulina Borsook's Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech, which came out in 2000, and was largely ignored, but now used copies are going for $220 ?
https://youtu.be/6r1baNdgImo?feature=shared
Please find some references which are related to the themes in your essay:
http://www.daplastique.com/essay/the-maze-of-ecstasy
http://www.adidafoundation.org/essays/the-authentic-artistic-discipline-of-truth-itself
http://www.adidafoundation.org/news/divina-dot-com-adi-da-samraj-with-the-florence-dance-compnany
http://beezone.com/current/index-102.html The Pleasure Dome Law
http://beezone.com/frank_marrero/orpheus.html Orpheus