Uniqueness, listening, and the nature of "competition"
This is the October entry of my “monthly” entries, where I have now decided to cluster together ideas which are somewhat related to one another. The theme for this one is uniqueness, its facade within our society and how real uniqueness is greatly dangerous to the current power structures.
Teenagers are stereotypically deemed as “rebellious” in popular culture, but in fact it is the exact opposite: they are incredibly conformist, utterly desperate to fit in a group, but that group tends to be against the culture of their parents. They are conformists to mimesis, the winds of fashion of their generation, which is why they are incredibly similar to one another, especially in a digital era where mimesis dominates conscious introspection and lived experience, the source of real individuality.
We could thus say that there are two directions that mimesis can spread in: vertically, i.e. between generations, and horizontally, within the same generation. Ideas and patterns tend to spread very quickly horizontally with the advent of the internet, but not so well vertically, and the gap between generations seems to get worse and worse as people have a greater ability to stay within their clique, without interacting with anyone else.
Because “compete” requires comparison, which requires enough similarity for the quantitative comparison to make sense in the first place. Because we live in a standardized world—since machines require standardization in order for them to be modular—humans too become replaceable parts in a broader social machine, and as such are reduced into lists of bullet points which can be assessed, and even measured, against one another, which leads to for instance the culture of resumes in companies.
People who are truly unique on the other hand couldn't care less about the games of the machine-world, because it is directly antithetical to how they want to live their life, 1 and do not particularly care about impressing strangers, and as such they do not compete.
They do not even compete with themselves, as some sections of society such as self-help circles and whatnot want to make people believe is healthy, because competing with yourself largely comes from a place of shame, a sense that there is something fundamentally messed up about you that you need to “fix” and “redeem” to belong to the great “normal” world that surrounds us. Once again, unique people couldn't care less about such a world, so they do not feel the need to compete with themselves, which doesn't mean that they don't examine their problems and do something about them. It simply means that the reason for doing so isn't an internalized shame.
One of the most dreadful ways to relate to someone or something is to turn it into a discrete matrix of points which you can assess using only your mind. 2 As mentioned above, this is what companies do with resumes, because ultimately they only care about your productive output within a very narrow context, and not a human being.
This is also what dating sites and large sections of social media do, which I would attritube to two reasons. The first one is that the interface of the screen is fundamentally limited for intimacy, because it reduces communication to text, which flattens away all nuance in tone and body language which real life interactions provide. Instead of experiencing the other in their totality, which is inevitably varied and subtle, they get reduced to words and a profile picture on a screen, disconnected from any context and even aliveness.
Of course, you could chat with someone through a voice call, but this leads me to the second reason, which is the price of convenience, in this case being exposed to lots of people in a short amount of time. Unsurprisingly, being born and growing up in a machine-world that seeks to maximize utility for as little input as possible leads to people behaving much the same, wherein relationships with others are treated almost like a convenient product which one can “buy” with enough time so as to seek the best deals.
Needless to say that all of this makes dating apps a dreadful experience from which it is better to stay away altogether. The interface is the problem, because it makes all interactions within it flat and predictable, and as such it is a game with no real winning moves, which only benefits the “game designers”.
On a similar note, there is a distinct difference between truly listening to what someone has to say, and trying to label them, i.e. put them in a mental box. The latter happens very frequently in politics, where opinions are judged on a stereotypical spectrum of left versus right, 3 and then fit into convenient boxes of opinions, so that they can be distilled into “agree versus disagree”.
Here are some examples: “So what you're advocating for is anarchism?” (implying: you're stupid and violent) or “Okay but this author is a leftist” (implying: this is clearly the wrong view so I can safely ignore everything they say) or “They promote anti-tech worldviews but they’re using a computer!” (implying: any sense of contradiction means that I can again safely discard what they say 4)
From this we can see that to truly listen, we must let go of the need to put people in boxes, which is easier said than done. But then listening is more than simply “not being judgemental”, the same way that dancing is an art, far more than simply “not falling”. In fact the comparison with dancing strikes me as very appropriate for describing what a good conversation is: it features two people interested in one another, who can step out and let the other guide when needed, it features rhythm, care for the other, such that it is not selfish, but also not about undermining any sense of individuality, for a dance can only arise from two skilled dancers, and ultimately it is enjoyable and mutually beneficial, unlike debates for example.
One of the underlying myths surrounding scarcity, and thus how we culturally look at the past, is that scarcity is an objective reality, as opposed to a relationship we have with our environment and broadly speaking the World around us. Which is to say that although some people now look at hunter gatherers as living lives of utter poverty, and thus (implied) misery, my understanding is that their inner reality wasn't so. They viewed themselves as belonging to a flow greater than them, not as atomized people who had to struggle against a hostile world.
This isn't to say that they didn't feel much pain, and didn't have to engage in gruelling labor, they certainly did, a lot in fact, and anyone who denies that strikes me as a hopeless romantic of the past, who can only maintain those beliefs because they’re conveniently sheltered from painful work by the luxuries that the modern world affords them.
But instead, that such pain and labor weren't alienating, like they are today, where one must constantly compromise not just their time and energy, but also one's soul, in order to fit in the machine-world. Of course the whole game of the modern world is to pretend that souls and such don't exist, but it only takes a few minutes of honest observation of people—on the street, in public transports, in the office, in any public place really—to see that we live in a world where people are essentially dead inside. Phones conveniently allow people to distract themselves from their inner wasteland, but still, the face doesn’t lie.
So the myth of scarcity then is about asserting that alienation is a fundamental objective reality which humans must fix by creating material wealth through technological solutions, which ironically leads mankind deeper and deeper in alienation from the Universe at large. I would personally say that psychology is essentially the study of alienated man by alienated professionals within alienating environments, and that economics is not particularly different from that, because of the above discussion on alienation which directly informs all concepts of economics.
Here’s a spicy one, which is lengthier than the other entries, and which I have decided to put in later in this post because I do not wish people to parse through the post and only label my thoughts without engaging in them.
Within the modern world, I would say that masculinity and femininity are both doing rather poorly, because again a machine-world has no need for unique and well-developed individuals, but instead only benefits from automatons who will feed it. Because both of these polarities are qualities, they do not fit snuggly within a literal description, though we can still try to point at the general difference and essence of each.
Following on Darren Allen's great descriptions of both genders 5 and translating them to my understanding and my own vocabulary, I would say that masculinity points to the transcendent: that which can rise above its starting condition through a journey of self-mastery, in order to create something more lasting than itself. This can take many forms, such as acts of selfless heroism, beautiful art or music, invention, or simply raising a prosperous family.
Masculinity is more disembodied, better suited for abstract realms, and on the contrary, femininity is more embodied, more present, and thus we could say it is immanent. Within human beings, we have the loving mother and the healer as archetypes for deep femininity, and more broadly speaking, we talk about Mother Nature, not Father Nature, to refer to its feminine qualities. The way it sustains life, but also how it is an embodied reality, something experienced through the senses, and ultimately something we cannot fully grasp through our mind: a mystery, which we can try to put into words with metaphors, such as through poetry, but can never be perfectly captured with literal descriptions. There is the lake as an object, a body of water at a certain location in space, but then there is the lake as a full experience, one which gives a sense to anyone who witnesses it of something greater and ultimately weirder than the physical-objective description.
Coming back to their interaction with the modern world, I would say that femininity is doing even more poorly than masculinity, though the latter isn't given much room to properly grow either. The journey of self-overcoming of masculinity isn't allowed to be properly completed, because it requires a phase of Death, as can be seen in the low point of the Hero's journey. 6
Death is not acceptable within society because it is a collective wholly aligned with the known, that which we can manage with the mind and with methods, in order to appeal to the Self through utility. The reason why utility is favored is because ... it is useful, thus it gives you advantages like power, convenience, safety, and so on, which are all nice things to have—only a madman would say no to them in every situation whatsoever—but when they are the only thing a collective can allow, then it denies the reality of death, decay and simply shrinkage.
Everything in society must be an addition from the past, all problems must be solved with new methods, and what is new is obviously better than the past. These are some of the myths of society, and while they can solve a great deal of technical problems, they create a massive blindspot in our relationship with Reality, since the latter contains uncomfortable truths such as Death, suffering and limitations.
I am not sure I would go as far as to say that Death and suffering are absolutely necessary in order to grow, but in practice, those who run away from it do not become mature human beings, who can handle the totality of their experience, and instead become manchildren who live in the techno-wombs of the modern world their entire life, not men who can put themselves out there for something greater than their own little comfort.
Death is the teacher, not necessarily what is valuable in and of itself—though I am open to hear the contrary opinion—and the lesson is ultimately Love, i.e. feeling and living for something greater than just your Self. Language reflects that self-overcoming quite beautifully, as the word “courage” has its root as 'cor', for heart—the French word for heart is “coeur” for instance—such that to face great fears, i.e. being courageous, one must also hold great love for someone or something other than yourself.
This was about masculinity, and how the rejection of Death and suffering stunts the journey of self-overcoming. What about femininity, and why do I say that it is doing even worse? To start with, the modern world has no use for embodiment whatsoever, because it isn't directly useful. To be fully present in your body is one of the great joys of being alive, something which connects you with your immediate environment and the people around you, but that is not a manageable quantity, because it is an experience of qualities.
I would summarize the game of the modern world as that of power, through control and scaling. This isn't purely masculine, because as mentioned previously the masculine is about a journey of self-growth, but it certainly benefits men, who tend to be far more masculine than women, a lot more, because they’re better at power games and navigating abstract realms. The feminine on the other hand couldn't care less about control or even “winning” per se, because thinking in terms of “winning” and “losing” requires you to split up from Reality, and the feminine is Reality.
As such, because the games that surround us are all about control, the feminine experiences other losses much more strongly, such as:
Which is to say that sensitive people feel the loss of close relationships, and feeling connected to a context that links people together, much more strongly than others, to the point that many can barely function in the alienating and cold modern world, whether they are men or women, though women are overall more sensitive. 8
Because femininity is more subtle than masculinity, its loss isn’t perceived as strongly. For instance, weak men are viscerally repulsive to women and men alike. A guy who does not have his life in order, who spends all his waking time on the internet, video games, porn, who does not have any aspiration besides sustaining his cycle of distraction and hedonism is obviously seen as a bad example, as is the macho man who treats women—and all other people in fact—like objects or life like a massive game of acquiring things for his own selfish needs. Men, when they deviate from their path of self-mastery, appear more obviously “wrong”, which is why in public discourse one can talk about toxic masculinity but not toxic femininity.
Which is what exactly? The difficulty is that merely talking about toxic femininity is likely to attract a lot of attention from women who will do everything they can to shut you down, because that is how it works: whereas egoic men play power games in obvious ways, egoic women play similar power games in concealed ways. Gossiping, spreading rumors, bickering, social exclusion, cancel culture, all are ways of influencing others in a way that is favorable to you, without having to explicitly confront anyone directly, and those are the type of games of toxic femininity.
While I wouldn’t label all of feminism in that category—there have been many waves of feminism, and many different people who I am sure had quite significantly different opinions from one another—there is certainly a lot of the same energy in the current form of feminism. I would describe it as a literal worldview, which is to say that it operates purely through the mind and treats concepts as reality itself, used by alienated women to get power within our system.
While there is a lot to be outraged about women’s conditions in the modern world, the feminist answer consists in finding ways to shape the system so as to make it more favorable to women when it comes to power games, while completely ignoring questions such as the necessity of the system in the first place, and whether women “winning” at power games truly adds to their quality of life. In practice, feminism encourages women to shape themselves like men, playing the same games as they do, so that women can be on top of the hierarchies and thus punish men for the terrible living conditions that women had to suffer for many centuries.
As such, feminism is actually significantly more masculine than it is feminine, which is why feminists never talk about love, embodiment, mystery, art, but pretty always talk about power games, domination, outrage, etc. The loss of femininity is so subtle that people cannot even tell that feminism has very little to do with femininity.
The masculine and the feminine have no place in the modern world, much like how wild nature is constantly destroyed and domesticated, such that only a harmless version of it can be used for the purposes of society. Women have suffered from the effects of civilization far more than men, and as such it is somewhat understandable that they blame them for all the problems in the world. Men should listen to the pain behind those words, without internalizing a sense of shame and guilt, because after all, civilization is not built from fully developed and conscious men, but from soldiers and technicians and automatons who can blindly obey the orders of their respective society in order to spread their influence.
The current climate of gender discourse is incredibly, incredibly polarized, but needless to say that such conflicts will never address the root of the problems, which is on the collective level the unconscious machinic system which restricts our freedom and allows unconscious monsters to thrive, and on the individual level the vastly egoic tendencies to reject the Other and shape everyone and everything around us to our selfish liking, without any consideration whatsoever for their own needs.
Men and women are different, and to reject such a claim is insanity. But they aren’t so different that they cannot understand one another, and see and feel Reality from the other’s perspective, which is the basis of Love. A sane world would celebrate the differences between men and women without the need to deform one group into the other, and they would each have their respective strengths, their respective domains, which the other could occasionally step into without feeling the need to impose its own law.
Unfortunately, we do not live in a sane world, and as such, the only place that men and women can have real agency is in their personal relationships, whether with people of the same sex or the other. It is only in those intimate exchanges that Love emerges, as can be seen by the fact that the system has no need for Love whatsoever, which is why it is never mentioned in “serious” discussions. If the core of our unreal society is control, then the core of Love is I would say softening, such that one does not compelled to control Reality or other people, and can perceive what the other feels at a given moment. And even in the absence of relationships with other people, such a move of softening is always available in how we relate to our body: control or Love?
A truly jarring realization is that the root of patriarchy is the jar, the symbol of woman's submission to man, in that she has to go to ask him to open it. The jar is the birthplace of such dominance, which is why anyone genuinely interested in feminism should think about how to seize the means of jar productions, so as to emancipate woman's ability to open stuff for herself.
An example of an old worldview which sustained woman's state of oppression is the hermetic worldview. “Hermetic” means, as everyone knows, ‘airtight’, and refers to the belief that all aspects of society, no matter how trivial, should be locked airtight such that women would be utterly reliant on a man to open it, almost as if they had to live in a jarring world, a world full of jars.
Needless to say that such archaic beliefs have long be foregone, but there is still much work to be done to free women all around the world from their metaphorical jail. Or rather from their jar.
The real equality of men and women is that they are complementary, not that they can do the exact same things at the exact same standards and the exact same way. The latter is not equality, it is homogenization into a mono-gender, which is what the system promotes.
When men and women are made equal, i.e. their domains vanish and they are made to work on the same things, then the result is that that man's more obsessive relationship to the world and himself, which can also become his greatest weakness by virtue of being disconnected to his surroundings, makes him overall better at performing the narrow tasks of the system than women.
A truly egalitarian society on the other hand would praise the qualities of a great mother: the deep care and attention given to her children, the unconditional love despite the difficulties, the sense of peace that radiates from her. Of course women can do a lot more things than just being mothers, but my point is that society only praises works which are transcendent, those which leave a trace in History, such as the masterpieces in art, or the inventions that build our current world, and pays next to no attention to the mountain of everyday care which a woman can provide to her family.
Only praising women bosses isn't a celebration of femininity, because it tends to squash women into becoming men. If a woman is personally interested in going down that path, then I think she should be allowed, because women can be incredibly different from one another. But there are many types of people that the world needs, and what I notice is that the deep love and embodiment of the feminine isn't valued very much, because ultimately it isn’t useful to the system, which is a major sign of an imbalanced relationship with reality.
I don’t know who needs to hear this but women tend to lean left because the other side is too controlling
From this tweet.
One of those observations that is so obvious that I'm surprised I never heard it from anyone. A big part of it might be that I read mostly from men.
That being said, I am not trying to promote any form of political belief, because I am suspicious of the entire game in the first place. The fact that people “choose” something—a candidate, an opinion, etc.—because they find that the other option is worse is rather telling. We could say that this is how the lesser evil spreads: by making itself appear as better than another evil and leaning into people’s concessions.
Also, the left wing is absolutely steeped in control, but of a different kind. Less reliant on brute force and more on shaming, brainwashing and making people impotent such that they cannot break out on their own and be free.
Another reason why I am not interested in politics is because I think it is merely a distraction from addressing things you have a meaningful impact over. The game of politics can only interact with the world through the power-games of the egregores that surround us, but the problem is that those egregores do not have our well-being as their priority, only their own survival and power: companies, governments, countries, ideas, entertainment, all of them manipulate human beings in order to reinforce their own control on money, resources, attention, human minds, and others.
In other words, by engaging in politics you are handing out your time, energy and attention to a collective that has no coherent direction, because it is swayed by whatever will give it power in the moment, and fueled by unconscious people because only those would give away their life for a ghastly collective.
Having a policy of “no dumb question” is really important for a sane collective, because the things considered obviously true are very often the very same things which lead to massive blindspots, echo chamber dynamics, or simply stagnation. In practice however, whenever a group says that there are no stupid questions, it is simply not the case.
Anyone reading this can probably remember moments in school or university where there was clearly a climate that did not allow certain questions to be asked, because 1) few want to look dumb in front of a lot of people 2) there is always an implicit frame, and an implicit window of what is tolerable, in order to maintain some minimum of group coherence.
Essentially all the institutions in the modern world maintain themselves through a combination of coercion and shaping the individual so that they fit in, rather than the other way around. School, academia, the health system, the government, the law, and so many others, force you to interact with them in order to meet some basic need, and require you to engage with their protocol which end up becoming their own bureaucratic end. As such, the demands of institutions become more important than what individuals benefit from, and within those, not only are there stupid questions which you, implicitly, aren’t allowed to ask, but you aren't even allowed to question the way things work in the first place.
So what does it mean to truly allow stupid questions then? It's certainly not in the direction of institutions as I've pointed out, because those are mainly concerned with maintaining themselves and spreading their influence. The direction is rather of very small groups of people, such as a family where the parents genuinely listen to the child's questions about the World, instead of reaching out for the most readily available explanation to shut them up.
Children are a particularly good example of the value of allowing stupid questions, because they see the World in a radically different way than us, since they are not burdened by the weight of what is “obvious”, “normal”, “mundane”. To the extent that they are ignorant, they are ignorant in novel and unpredictable ways, which is overall far more beneficial for a collective than people who are intelligent in a totally corrupt way, such as technicians thinking deeply about how best to keep users addicted to a social media site, or businessmen finding creative ways to wiggle their way around the law and taxation system.
In a better world, we would seriously consider what children have to say, and take what alienated intellectuals far more lightly. The good thing is that everyone still carries a spark of that inner child, the one who marvels at how incredibly weird the Universe is, and who feels compelled again and again to ask: Why?
Physical space can be said to have been flattened out with modernity. Cultures arise in different parts of the world, and are inevitably shaped by their local geography, which obviously influences their local cuisine through the availability, or lack thereof, of certain foods, but also their buildings based on the availability of materials, and their economic activity, amongst many other aspects of social life.
It's unclear to me to what extent space affects language, worldviews, and overall the inner life of people, but at the very least it's obvious with the external aspects of culture. With modernity, geography doesn't become as much of a constraint because of faster travel, and now we even have the internet to spread out ideas and worldviews. But on the external side, I would say that things start to look the same because mass-production is often significantly more efficient than outsourcing local material with local businesses. 9
Somewhat analogous to the flattening of the physical landscape, the flattening of the attention landscape is a term I use to describe how all activities now are on equal grounds with one another to compete for your attention. As an example, because of the advent of phones, the time you spend reading books could also be spent watching pornography, meaning that they are both competing for your finite attention, except that the latter is far, far more addictive, and also far more destructive to your life.
Things weren't always this way, because although pornography is not a recent invention, the difficulty of acquiring it means that in practice, it wasn't directly competing with books. There were other factors than mere inconvenience of acquisition of course, such as stricter social taboos, real-life relationships being more common such that pornography didn't feel as appealing, and a significantly less appealing form of pornography by virtue of it being made of static images.
All of these restrictions create friction in how one can use their time and attention, and the set of all frictions amount to what I would label as a “landscape”, albeit a far more abstract usage of that word. A mountainous attention landscape is one where traveling to certain spots, i.e. engaging in certain things, involves more friction, such as how acquiring porn magazines requires more effort than simply typing a URL on your phone. A flat attention landscape on the other hand is one which is much smoother, meaning it is easier to travel between activities, as is made by digital media, to the point that it can become too easy, resulting in people having incredibly short attention spans since they're constantly switching between things to pay attention to.
Some other consequences of the lower friction in the attention landscape are:
Before the flattening, there were more constraints to what you could be paying attention, which meant that people would simply focus on the same thing for longer periods of time. This isn't to say that TV was necessarily better than what we had, but at least people genuinely watched what was in front of them. Now the trend goes towards flicking between different sources of excitement several times in a single minute. As such, I have found it useful to reintroduce friction back in my life, by for instance:
I could probably go much further than this, because honestly I could probably spend my time in significantly healthier ways, but I wouldn't underestimate the impact of making small changes in that way. It's amazing how quickly someone's priorities shift when they add a few seconds of friction to doing things they know they shouldn't.
Time is wrinkled for children, passage through it takes longer, the day has many crannies, secret folds. It flattens as you age, until it feels like morning, afternoon, and night are its only chambers.
From this tweet.
I've already written on why time seems to pass faster for adults, here. Essentially, I don't think this is inherent to growing up, but it is indeed a major trend within modernity, where people stop paying attention to the world around them and slowly become automatons, which is a very useful trend for the usefulness to the system, but terrible for being a fulfilled individual.
If you laugh at a joke, what difference does it make if subsequently you are told that the joke was created by an algorithm?
— Marcus du Sautoy, The Creative Code (the main quote on the Github page of the "Artsy" R Package 12)
It is true when taken at face value: why does it matter whether the art, jokes and so on that surround us are made by humans or not? Isn't the product the only thing that matters? My answer is that it matters, for several reasons, none of which will be that “human artists can't make any money otherwise” which isn't really an intrinsically valuable thing, because the economy itself isn't intrinsically important, it is what it leads to and promotes that matters. 13
Long story short, a society where no one makes art, jokes, dances, sings, writes poems and plays music is filled with soulless people. Of course for many, there is not even such a thing as a soul, and if you're one of them then feel free to stop reading and do something else. For others though, even if they call themselves atheists, they don't really have a problem with calling our world soulless, even if they can't quite point what it lacks, because something just feels ... wrong, empty, haunted by something we cannot see.
The fact that we look at art isolated from any context is a big part of the problem we're in. Which is to say, people only look at art as a final product, isolated from the environments it produces—to be surrounded by beauty or ugliness has a massive factor on how people live their life for instance 14—the people it shapes and ultimately, the community it forms, and this blindness to what has been lost makes sense because there is no such thing as community, or broadly speaking, a connected reality in the modern world. Just bits and pieces linked together with tunnels.
Museums are the epitome of this fragmentation of life, since art is now confined to an elitist container, utterly separate from regular life and people, which inevitably makes it cold and even alien in some way. As Darren Allen puts it in his discussion on Boredom: "Paintings in a museum are as sad as strippers". Art becomes an isolated thing, rather than being infused into our entire lives, the same way that “nature”, “comedy” and “spirituality” become their own separate realities.
This fragmentation further manifests itself into the separation between the artist and the “average person”. In modern times, it is essentially the norm to find people who are pure technicians, and do not engage in any shape or form with literature, poetry, music, dancing, singing, sculpting, visual arts, and so on. The reason given then is that people do not have the time to pursue such interests, and that is true to some extent, 15 but again, this highlights the same fragmentation of reality, here caused by hyperspecialization. Because art is now a specialized discipline that only “serious artists” can pursue, most people stop engaging with it altogether once they grow out of childhood.
And what type of people does a system obsessed with fitting humans to the quest of “the right answer” create? Automatons who cannot stand up for themselves, who merely do as they're told to survive in an increasingly complex world, and who express very little unique quality in their life, what they do, and even their face. 16
It would appear on the surface that technologies for AI generated art would empower the average person, because it means that anyone can be an artist. But what happens in practice? There is the obvious but still important aspect that such technologies make people utterly dependent on them, which sooner or later will become paid considering how expensive it is to train and expand the models. I won't expand more on this because this point applies to all complex technology, and I won't repeat the usual critique about our dependence on machines. 17
But the aspect I want to examine is the following: someone might try to generate a few things on Midjourney, but does that mean they suddenly have the creative spirit of someone like Van Gogh, who was able to push through incredibly tough financial hardships for most of his life in order to produce his art? Of course not, but then again, comparing oneself to some of the greatest is a rather unfair thing to do, and the pursuit of art shouldn’t be reserved to only the people who are willing to devote their entire life to it, but my point is that it does not fundamentally change people.
If someone is a boring, apathetic consumer who can only process reality as a series of isolated bits, rather than a coherent, mysterious flow of qualities, then that's what they will get, no matter what fancy tools—those really are machines, again see the previous footnote—is put into their hands. Which is to say, I expect anyone who plays around with AI generated art to either be bored with it within a few months, or use it in a purely technical way, as in generating a bunch of thumbnails quickly in order to get the ones that will generate the most clicks for whatever they want to promote.
There were time periods where art was valued for its ability to transform people, both the artists but also the audience. Not in a quantitative way of being “better”, which is what the machine-world constantly pushes—increasing efficiency and the performance of its parts, including human beings as part of the system—but rather as a way to open individuals to a greater Reality. Artists for instance were thought of as channels to the inspiration of God or the Universe, and for instance, thinking of art as “self-expression” was a rather weird idea in those times. 18
Such a broader Reality however is not acceptable within a system which must control every aspect of life, and such transformations would seriously disrupt the process of turning human beings into the automatons needed to maintain the system—as can be seen by the fact that children enter Life full of aliveness and curiosity, and slowly get apathetic, traumatized, and internally dead, as they go through school.
And so this is why human artists matter, not because art itself as a form matters—the fact that it exists is a sign that our lives themselves are not art, and I would say the latter is ultimately what is valuable—but because human beings matter, and artists point to us what life can hold for us when we connect with something Larger than just the shell of our selves.
Such a Reality is not just unacceptable to the system, as mentioned above, it is also utterly useless to it. Why does it matter if we live in an ugly world if things run smoothly? Why does it matter if people are alienated and lack any community, as long as we can coordinate entire countries together and make the GDP go up? Why does it matter if people are going insane if the machines we build can solve all of our problems anyway?
Indeed why? Within the machine, art isn't needed, and neither are human beings really, at least not most of them, only those who can fit themselves into suitable shapes for the system. So why worry about all this? Let's just drop the petty human concerns and accept the future. Why fight the rise of machines, when we could welcome them? The reason why is that one day, the machine will stop. 19 And at that point, there won't be any escape from Reality, there will only be Reality.
The “why” there asks for an explanation, something which the mind can manipulate such that it can put reality inside a box and not have to pay attention to it ever again. But beauty is not this way: beauty is precisely the experience of paying attention to something such that Reality unfolds from it. Not to get anything from it, but simply for the sake of the experience itself.
Another kind of “why” question would be about exploring a mystery, and allowing it to unfold itself, without the need for anything to come from that. For instance, why does anything exist at all? Isn't that so interesting? The mind immediately wants to jump in and give an explanation, whether scientific, religious, metaphysical, etc. But what about simply allowing the question to be and sink into your being, and allow it to shape your attention? Why does anything exist at all? How curious it is to be alive, and experience the world.
1 Society is about creating automatons that will become useful to it. Someone who is in touch with what they want out of life is unlikely to be interested in the cookie cutter paths such as careerism.
2 As opposed to let’s say taking the entire vibe that you get from someone, which is of course a distorted image of who they are, but at least it avoids running into the problem of fixating on tiny irrelevant details which the mind has a tendency to get stuck into. It’s not that someone has this and that weird idea about politics, or doesn’t make that much money, or is somewhat short or whatever. It’s rather that they give the vibe of someone who only talks to people if they can get something out of them.
3 It is truly amazing how politics can devolve from a 2D space of Left-Right and Libertarian-Authoritarian, which is still reductive of course but allows much more nuance in discourse, to a 1-dimensional spectrum of Left-Right which still allows for some nuance, to eventually a binary ingroup vs outgroup dynamic. One of the biggest losses of mass media is as always, the loss of nuance, and the problem is that when it happens over and over again, people no longer have the ability to discern distinctions for themselves and as such thinking converges to irreconciliable poles.
4 Not that hypocrisy shouldn’t be held accountable, but this particular example is notably different in my opinion. To use a computer and complain about them when you have a living situation that affords you to not interact with them is pure hypocrisy. To talk about the dangerous effects that technology have in our lives while living in a world that basically makes it impossible to live without a computer is not, it’s simply pointing out the extent to which the technological prison has covered the planet. There are many aspects of the modern world I don’t interact with and only give a cursory treatment as to why I am not interested in them because ultimately I am not forced to engage with them: consumerism, sports, the news, dating apps, amongst others. But the system as a whole is not avoidable, and neither is computer usage, unless you live in a rural community which is perfectly self-sustainable, which is not my case and I doubt many people can claim that to be true.
5 Such as Panjective Gender, or Women and men.
6 To see a fantastic elaboration of this point, and why our culture might be so obsessed with the Hero's journey, see also River Kenna's essay on how the Hero's journey is a jammed door.
7 This one is interesting because women tend to be far more agreeable than men so in a way they are “better” at fitting in institutions. But problems inevitably manifest in their inner lives if they decide to compromise on themselves, which is why modern women are often considered moody or drama queens, have severe eating disorders, have life-crippling depression which they cope with using social media, the internet, food or drugs, feel constantly anxious, and overall harbor a deep sense of shame. They have a visceral feel that something is wrong but instead of seeing the system and its games for what they are, women try to fit themselves inside that unreal world regardless, which can only end poorly. Of course all these symptoms occur in modern men too, but men have more options to escape from this reality by 1) putting all their attention in their career 2) engaging in surrogate activities like sports, video games, and whatever new thing the modern world can manufacture. Men are simply better at distracting themselves, and better at being alone too, so they handle the unreal nature of the modern world “better” in a way. But of course men and women are ultimately wild beings, and nothing wild can survive within the fences of the modern zoo, which must castrate and domesticate all humans in order for them to stay compliant.
8 Unless this wasn’t clear, sensitivity is absolutely a strength, but not within the modern world. Sensitive people are more empathic, more receptive to art and love and thus better at expressing those in their creativity. But within the modern world, it becomes a curse which makes people highly sensitive to the dysfunctions and suffering in our society, far more prone to people-pleasing, and so it creates the all too familiar archetype of the woman who keeps giving to everyone around her but who receives nothing in exchange, and who might eventually swing all the way to the other end: the incredibly cold and cruel woman who has decided that all men are trash and the only way forward in society is to give all power to women rulers. A tragic tale really.
9 For more on that subject, see also these essays: The Pastiche of paradise by Darren Allen and The Age of average.
10 See his essay on how Video games are not an artform
11 There is a hint of Orwell’s 1984 that smartphones actually make you dumb and dumbphones make you smarter as to how you use your time.
12 Note that this library is one for “generative art”, which might be safer to call “algorithmic art”, in contrast with “AI generated art”. The former refers to art produced by an algorithm, but which is still written by a human being, think for instance of fractals such as the Sierpinski triangle, or the Koch snowflake, which are the result of a rather simple iterative process which a human being could write, and then a computer produce and display. The latter refers to large statistical models fed by terabytes of data, which we now call AI, though machine learning might be more accurate. My discussion isn't so much on AI art, or for that matter generative art either, but rather our collective attitude to Reality and the place that art plays in it.
13 Not that I'm sympathetic to what the current economy promotes, but that any critique or defense of the economy as a whole can never refer to internal factors and concepts, such as “this process makes the GDP go up”, which sounds obviously absurd when presented this way, but note how many people defend Science as rigorous and true, because it is more scientific than other worldviews. This is about as coherent as saying that jazz music is the best because it is the most jazz of them all.
14 When you live in an ugly city, you are far more prone to reach out to your phone to look at more interesting things, rather than pay attention to your surroundings. Beauty shapes attention which shapes people’s lives, which shape culture, which shapes what is considering beautiful.
15 Although people have far more time than they think, they're just really bad at using it, because social media—amongst other digital distractions—suck most of people's free time. (the term "free time" is also rather telling of our condition)
16 See for instance With A Straight Face for great descriptions of this phenomenon.
17 As usual, Darren Allen’s The Technological System.
18 From Keith Johnstone:
> We have an idea that art is self-expression—which historically is weird. An artist used to be seen as a medium through which something else operated. He was a servant of the God. Maybe a mask-maker would have fasted and prayed for a week before he had a vision of the Mask he was to carve, because no one wanted to see his mask, they wanted to see the God’s.
19 See the short novel "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster
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2024-10-27