Bespoke Ignorance
Besides social connections, not a single thing (besides that image) says a shit about repair work, regeneration, getting your hands in the soil, unfucking your air and water (not just for you, but for all people), helping others out, being of service, doing with less (fasting, stopping to buy your way out of tension and anxiety and depression). Where is the “start being politically engaged and work with your neighbors to make sure your food is grown without pesticides and artificial fertilizers?” Or, “stop driving in cars, and use your body to get where you need to go”? Our AIs are just parroting back to us the worst mistakes of capitalism. Where we think that what makes money for someone else is the only way to address health. It’s sick.
Sick Algorithms
Our algorithms are reflections of our own blindspots, perversions, and dullness. They show us little more (so far, at least) than the ugly truth of our discourse, suppositions, and agreements — conscious or not.
The dream of self-conscious or autonomous AI – full intelligence, transcendent intelligence – is the childish belief in a God that will swoop in and save us from ourselves. The daydream of AI is a child’s dream, not one of someone who is old, wizend, wise from hardship. It is not the perspective of a humble devotee, the faithful, who understand that one must meet the universe halfway.
Instead, the algorithms that we are training (especially our young) on, is designed to cloak over marketing culture as truth. Because it is coming from ‘AI’ it confers a godlike status of The Truth with a capital T.
Thus, when we ask AI, as this social media ‘friend’ of mine did, about something as complicated as ‘mental health’ it spits out marketing advise that is the worst of (pseudo)science, self-optimization, human enhancement, and other vacuum-conditions. It makes no mention of the environment. It makes no mention of affordances. It fails to take into account the fact that our cognition, psychology, our psyche (or soul) is embedded, enactive, embodied, extended, ecological and affective (what we call ‘5EA cognitive science’).
No, the world does not exist. It is only the vacuum of the self. Hence, Adam Curtis’ Century of the Self prefigured the self-referentiality of AI way better than almost any other Baudrillardian prophet or theorist.
I am a professor of environmental philosophy and public health, and I work on addiction and metal health, from an ecological point of view. My aim is to find harmony in our practice, and to dispel delusion. So, for me, this nice little AI experiment is just a mega confirmation of the work I do, and how AI is just a reflection of the blindspots and biases of a sick system. The picture and the prescription alone are a great work in contradiction. One says, go off, by yourself, to that place of ecological integrity in which you are never alone. The text says, buy shit that is being hawked by snakeoil salesmen. Big contradiction!!!
My effort is to support all struggling with the corporate AI propaganda through seeing that no ‘thing’ will ever change you. It is all about the ‘warm data’, the infrastructure, the strands between things, the verbs between the nouns, the breath between inhalation and exhalation. I pray that we might run towards the light without putting others in darkness (i.e., extractivism and colonialism to get the ‘medicines’ or ‘medical devices’ we ‘need’ in order to (temporarily) ‘feel better.’ Aho.
The idea of mastery as being free from relations with others is an old trope in western thought. The idea of being free in ancient Greek society was being free from economic need (they, funnily enough, still had the concept of ‘enough’). If one was still economically dependent, that is, if one was still trying to curry favor and turn everything into marketing, then there was no way that one could be wise, or a good political actor — all vision would be clouded with the insecurity of personal gain.
Lots of directions to go with this, positive and negative, but I will just point out:
— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) August 28, 2024
There is a genre of 21st century male “I have perfected the game of life” routine that essentially assumes the absence of other people https://t.co/NUlVMPoaAS
The loneliness and defeat in the King of the Castle storybook is little different from the Damsel in Distress in a castle tower.
The need for ‘rescue’ is different. Instead of waiting for someone else to come save you (the patriarchal model), instead, one must ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps’ — which of course, when people find themselves in positions of money and power, believe their good luck and perhaps hard work to be something they own and deserve.
In other words, there is a relationship between social isolation and entitlement. The less networked one is, the more pacifiers (fetish objects) one needs to feel OK, to feel whole.
As it turns out, ‘optimization’ means optimizing for herd mentality, trying to keep up with the Musks, Bozos, and other stalwarts of the lonely-tech-bro spoiled brat coterie.
Often what helps get people out of ruts, more than anything else is helping other people. By being generous, one generates gratitude. This emotion, of being grateful for what one has, and having others show you gratitude for your kindness, is the surest way out of depression, anxiety, and other diseases of the self.
These are the ‘auto-immune’ mental diseases, the diseases of not being embedded enough in ecologies and communities.
The Ray Kurzweil/Elon Musk/Huberman Lab overoptimization of self and neglect of relations is par for the course for the wounded warrior. The guy who wants to be accepted, make a difference, and genuinely help society, but has been rejected, scorned, ostracized, or ignored, and doesn’t know how to do inner work. Thus, the ‘outer inner work’ of self-development as the creation of a plausible (and even enviable!) façade of self, is an exhausting and all-consuming performance.
Who Needs Snow?
Dealing with the Anthropocene in the shittiest way possible.
Creating more fake stuff that reinforces the scarcity that you are trying to cope with. Instead of planting trees, stop using fossil fuels, and all of that hard stuff that actually requires people thinking beyond the scrawniest notion of self.
No snow, no snowboarding. I don’t care how talented you are. You’re living in hell.
While this may look like it is a meme parade, it might be the case that memes are like Zen Koans. They are the quickest, shortest way for us in our contemporary visual, logocentric culture to make sense of complex ideas which exceed the banks of default culture. We can exceed them safely, within the same medium, so that cognitive dissonance can be harnessed productively, recursively linking back to the structures we’re embedded in already.
