march 14 2024
There are so many secrets I will take to my grave and one of them is what I really think about all of this.
I’ve been trying to read my Simone Weil book and I keep having to stop and put it down so I can take it in. Her words are so potent, they bring me to gasps and eureka. Before I get off the plane, I read:
“There are two forces that rule the universe: light and gravity.”
It’s definitely something to think about and I think all the time. Today, I’m thinking a lot.
My lover shows me a sports commercial that was made using AI. His expression is grim and unimpressed. He’s a filmmaker. And so am I. And so are so many people I know. I shake my head. Once I’d seen the Sora footage a few weeks ago, I knew commercials would be the first to go. Everyone is getting fucking lazy. The bell keeps tolling.
Let me try to explain: AI, as it currently exists, is a technology of resentment. Its bitterness is strong, potent, pungent. It stinks. When I step back and look around, it is very obvious to me that we are swimming in a Big Lie.
There is the high pitched ringing of the airplane as we disembark in Puerto Escondido and I feel like my eardrum might burst. It’s hot and the air is humid and I get the very strong urge to roll on the ground and kiss the palm trees. My flight anxiety is getting worse. I google how to buy xanax at the farmacias. The entire first page of links tell me nothing useful or relevant. We take a private taxi to the hotel. It is made of stone and flocked in green and it is beautiful.
I’ll say it like this: human beings can be creative because we have a soul, because we are made in god’s image. We, like nature and this known universe, exist a priori. We are raw material. The machine - like a pencil, a wheel, the internet, software, AI - is made in our image and this is why it will always only be able to mirror/mimic. In the big picture, it’s all the same but in this little polaroid, it is a tool, it is void, it has no subconscious, it has no instinct.
Human creativity is reproductive - the act of two opposing forces (masculine and feminine) and a third, secret thing coming together to bring forth something new, to give birth to offspring. Three is an unstable number but tension is required to bring forth energy in a new form.
I’m sitting by the pool, reading. It’s so hot here that I can lay in the shade and be dry in thirty minutes. This morning, a rooster’s call woke us up around 7AM. Dogs started howling shortly after. Then the birds joined in too. We walk to the corner store to get bottled water and I watch as a short, brownskinned woman holds a week-old baby in her arms. She counts out coins. She doesn’t smile at us but she refuses to keep the change and tells us to come back to see her tomorrow.
Weil writes:
“If the imagination is stopped from pouring itself out, we have a void.”
She also writes:
“Every void (not accepted) produces hatred, sourness, bitterness, spite. The evil we wish for that which we hate…restores the balance.”
I’ll try again: Until the day it happens, the machine can never be truly reproductive, never truly creative. There is no tension. I have no proof of this but I don’t need it. You can feel it. You can tell. Any facsimile of tension comes from the human input behind the screen, the inklings and traces you can’t erase from the training data sets. The machine can not bring anything into existence without the presence (the soul) of a human being. In our presence, the machine is temporarily ensouled with the spirit of the human who programs it, who thinks it up, directs it to do 1 or 0. We subconsciously resent this and so it resents us back. If we cannot be loved, we choose to be feared. This is a very human phenomenon. A technology of resentment for the age of void, stuck feelings with nowhere to go. Its fruits are mutated, rotten, sometimes cool looking, sometimes interesting sounding, less often useful, almost always deformed, eerie, empty, flaccid, dead on arrival.
I’m trying to be clear but I’ve been thinking a lot. I love technology. I love the internet and social media and crypto and my iPhone and audio interfaces and airplanes and Apple Pay and Tiktok and online shopping. I love the machine. I know this technology will be integrated into our lives and I’m not against that. But I want people to tell the truth about what is actually going on. You can’t make me doubt my senses. You can never make me ignore my inner knowing.
But I’ve done enough thinking for the day, I think.
Blue light glows on the top of taxi cars jostling along dirt roads. The walk from the hotel to the boardwalk is short but hilly. I spot a fat chicken on a pole behind a restaurant sign. She is hidden but gave herself away with the flapping of her wings. I stop and watch her. I know that she knows she can’t fly but she doesn’t care - she doesn’t have to.
