silently if,out of not knowable
night’s utmost nothing,wanders a little guess
(only which is this world)more my life does
not leap than with the mystery your smile

losing through you what seemed myself,I find
selves unimaginably mine;beyond
sorrow’s own joys and hoping’s very fears

E. E. Cummings

There’s a theme in Japanese thought, 侘び寂び, wabi-sabi, which roughly translates to something like the beauty of transience and imperfection. And it strikes me that this notion captures something crucial in what separates the truly human from what’s artificial. There’s something in imperfection, frailty and weakness that’s somehow more real than any sort of idealized perfection.

I can’t really wrap my mind around this. I’ve tried to approach it through the thought that what we consider imperfection is really the infinite possibilities, the multitude of voices and nuances residing within the real thing, and while this hardly exhausts the idea, there’s some sense to this. The artifice is by definition simplified, dull and monotonous — it’s seemingly perfect only because its bandwith is so incredibly low, while actual reality is always open towards the infinite.

The artifice, on the other hand, when taken to its final end, is ultimately a cosmic prison.

I’ve said as much a million times, but a couple of days ago, I came across this comment that just off-handedly put it much better than I ever could, and which brought out some of the core aspects of this general observation. Its emphasis was that contemporary AI hammers home and makes real the illusion that reductionism is true, the idea that consciousness, agency and meaning can be explained away as just byproducts of ultimately random interactions of bits of data which reduce to fluctuations in whatever medium we’re dealing with (e.g. electrical impulses).

This is nonsense, of course.

Thing is, reductionism is demonstrably false through any number of approaches. There’s at least a dozen deductive proofs that with absolute certainty shows that reductionism in terms of consciousness is an impossible prospect. It just endures because it’s an auxiliary ideology to the dominant order — but reductionism has historically been constantly in tension with the very nature of our immediate and unyielding first-person existence in the world. There’s something in the human being that’s always going to resist alienation.

But it’s precisely this immutability that the contemporary AI phenomenon threatens to erode.

In reality, the distinction between yourself and the other cannot possibly be reduced to objective facts in the third person. No such description of the situation explains why you immediately feel your own toothache in your own body while remaining unaware of the indigestion of the guy in the apartment below (read chapters 5 & 6 of my dissertation for an in-depth discussion of this issue, although Klawonn’s Mind and Death is better). Consciousness is irreducibly different.

But for the purpose of reifying the reductionist worldview, what today is being marketed as AI is a very cleverly crafted piece of stage magic, designed to convey the illusion that the mind, that the very nature and essence of human consciousness, is firmly under the control of the social hierarchy. That the mystery of selfhood, will and intelligence is now just another commodity to be produced and administered by capital and the state.

The deepfakes are a really powerful hex in this regard.

You are a violent and irrepressible miracle.
The vacuum of cosmos and the stars burning in it
Are afraid of you.

What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London Tokyo

Unreal

Not mainly the celebrities or talking heads, but what stands out in particular is the intimate and strangely intrusive reproduction of your own voice. Of its very timbre, of even such characteristic expressions that you’re not consciously aware of yourself.

We are taught by this ritual that the machine knows the secrets of our own minds. Even those that we are not privy to ourselves. That it truly probes the depths of the human spirit to an extent that we never could — and if it then also can generate the aspect of not only sentience in general, but of my very own conscious behaviour and unique intentional presence, how can we then deny that it really has the mystery of selfhood in its grasp?

And just like it’s hard not to be impressed when the illusionist manages to produce a Cuban cigar from your left ear, or cuts a girl in half without the unfortunate consequences you’d normally expect, it’s equally difficult not to be drawn in by the prodigious performance of the AI phenomenon if you’re in the midst of the spectacle and have taken up a role in the drama.

And the most deeply engrained role in all of us is that of the spectator. We’re a society of consumers, trained from childhood to be passive recipients of commodified and stimulating information within an entertainment discourse.

Even much younger children, age 2-8, spend nearly two hours a day with screen media. And through virtually all these media, children are exposed to advertising.

Common Sense Media. (2014). “Advertising to children and teens.”

In the 1970's, people were exposed to about 500 ads per day. At present, people see roughly 5,000 ads per day. There are 5.3 trillion display ads shown online every year. On average, children see 20,000 thirty-second commercials each year. Adults see an average of 2 million of those on a yearly basis.

USC MAPP blog. (2023). “Thinking vs. Feeling: The psychology of advertising.”

Trained to sit back and watch. Vicariously participating in a life occuring without us, with the handful of individuals who attempt to break out almost unfailingly being channelled into established and safe modes of “expression”.

In our culture, there’s a product for everything. A store-bought, perfectly tailored solution for all your needs.

Here, rebellion just means adopting one or other of the marketed lifestyle packages that brands you as a unique, interesting and independent individual among all the other drones. Commodified and streamlined rituals of tethered pseudo-participation.

Even criminal subcultures are now so strictly circumscribed by the relations of production under capitalism that they’re almost a parody of delinquency. Rather than being an expression of a creative and anarchic rejection of the social order, they reproduce it even more strongly through their uncompromising expression of symbolic stereotypes and complementary roles that provide meaning and coherence to the apparatus of internal and external violence. It’s an almost self-conscious enactment of the foil in society’s stories of the moral authority of its power structure.

Even their aesthetics marketed by major artists and clothes brands.

The words ‘crime’ and ‘crisis’ share the same etymology. Both refer to the Greek word krisis meaning ‘judgment, selection, separation’. We define crisis as a situation in which the traditional norms loosen their grasp on reality, while new norms have yet to become established.

Berardi, F. (2015). Heroes, Mass Murder, and Suicide.

In this sense, then, there’s not really much genuine crime today, since the ostensible criminal other is reduced to little more than a circumscribed role for reproducing the moral authority and relations of production of the social order.

Or rather, the real criminals today, with regard to these etymological roots, will be whoever genuinely rejects the increasingly pervasive orthodoxy. Whoever has the audacity to try and throw a wrench into the gears of the emerging totalitarianism. And the masses do indeed respond accordingly.

The only champions being raised up within the framework of this social order are heroes of consumption, whether they happen to be black or white knights. Heroes of the brand, mythologizing the ideals of the moralistic narratives of what increasingly seems like the surreal final stage of capitalism.

Increasingly, what is emerging here is something that many argued was missing from the post-war worldview of industrial civilization in terms of optimizing its repressive potential — a resolution of the contradiction between nature as the given foundation of life, value and meaning, and the artificial otherness of an increasingly regimented and alienated society. As Marcuse saw it, this contradiction implied permanent difficulties in terms of legitimizing the authority of the social hierarchy, since the citizen cannot easily internalize it as something primordial if it’s obviously a secondary and arbitrary imposition upon a given and immediate nature.

But here’s the kicker — the AI phenomenon ritually enacts the collapse and recuperation of nature itself as something ontologically independent, which also enables the dissolution of this contradiction and the citizens’ complete internalization of the hierarchy and authority of the technological system. And this collapse of the distinction between nature and artifice is effected especially through the reification of consciousness itself, the radical alienation of the primary givenness through which nature and ourselves are inseparably one and the same thing.

And if this very foundation of primordial being-in-the-world can become subsumed under the authority of capital and the state, then the latter can usurp the mythical function of life itself, the —

‘primal given’ beyond which the mind cannot penetrate, which is withdrawn from any rational foundation, justification, or evaluation. Life, when understood in this way, becomes an inexhaustible reservoir for all irrational powers.

Marcuse, H. (1968). “The struggle against liberalism in the totalitarian view of the state”.

In his path towards becoming, the mythical hero always has to commit to a sacrifice.

The hero must surrender some important aspect of his nature to become complete, to become integrated as a part of something greater. Odin sacrifices his eye for divine wisdom. Prometheus brings us fire and progress at the price of eternal torment. Abraham places Isaac on the altar as a burnt offering.

The emerging, half-formed hero of the technocratic authoritarian modernism that Marcuse identifies in the 1960s was inevitably an expression of the Faustian will-to-power that uniquely channeled the spirit of the West, the sacrifice of reason and human emotion for a primordial act of will, in obedience to the dark and unknown forces of an immediately given nature.

But the new order of spectacular technology cannot easily be reconciled with this inexpendable traditional appeal to a mythical primordiality, precisely because it’s artificial rather than natural and given:

The hymn to the natural-organic order contrasts too crassly with the factual, established order. There is a screaming contradiction between the relations of production on the one hand and the attained level of productive forces and the satisfaction of needs it makes possible on the other. Nature is confronted with an economy and society that are ‘unnatural’, an order perpetuated by means of the violence of a gigantic apparatus that can represent the whole against the individual because it wholly oppresses him, a ‘totality’ that subsists only through the total domination of all.

(ibid.)

But in and through the contemporary AI phenomenon, the agential avatar of reductionist materialism and of the auxiliary ideologies of the capitalist mode of production — in all of this, the distinction between nature and artifice can finally be collapsed, if not really reconciled.

Now the totality of the order of production as such becomes the hero. The avatar of the system of technological and political authority rises up as an omnipresent deity, where power, intelligence, technology and nature are all fused together in one coherent idol for our admiration.

And it’s at this precise point that Marcuse’s contradiction can finally be dissolved. In prostrating ourselves before this strangely undead deity, where the contradictions between religion and science and between nature and culture have been symbolically and experientially levelled, we can now offer up our very own human agency as a sacrifice to the ascendant god-king of technology.

I know that I hung on that windy tree,
spear-wounded, nine full nights,
given to Odin, myself to myself,
on that tree that rose from roots
that no man ever knows.

Hávamál.

If you look around, you’ll see this ritual enacted around you in real time.

When people on youtube are reading off scripts generated by chatGPT instead of actually expressing their own thoughts. When politicians publish AI slop on twitter under their own name. When regular users start new threads in online forums that are generated entirely by AI, and others join in the “discussion” by having a chatbot spit out a response.

This is beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. It’s a mode of spectacular influence that literally displaces and substitutes the person’s cognitive agency. A form of propaganda that becomes your own thinking, your own voice.

This sacrificial outcome is also strongly determined by our broader set of social imaginaries since it promises the fulfillment of both the entrenched role of the spectator-consumer just as much as the Faustian spirit of immanent transcendence through heroic action. In a sense, this combined outcome is actually the end-point of the Faustian trajectory since its logically ultimate act of sacrifice must be the voluntary and irredeemable destruction of individual agency for the sake of Act itself.

Even when you’re sleeping.

And when you wake
You carry it around on your neck
With eyes open that cannot help
But swallow more.

And I think the main selling-point is right here. That we through all of this, at long last, get to be passive, vicarious consumers of our own agency. This is the terrifying paradox that holds out the possibility of a complete Huxleyan enslavement.

Through this final act of commodification, we’re namely liberated from our white-knuckled grasp of a dimished and burdensome agency that most of us have neither the tools nor the courage to maintain indefinitely in the face of the constant onslaught of a dystopian machinery. Quite the breather.

And even so, we then receive a simulacrum of this agency back almost immediately, we become consumers of the experience of having the AI speaking in our very own voice, of writing in our own characteristic style. And through this, we are symbolically and ritually intertwined with the mythical hero — since it’s our very own voice that now becomes a vessel for the extraordinary knowledge and power of the entire technological system.

The loss of agency is then rewarded by a vicarious participation so complete that our own commodified selfhood actually gets transposed into the digital hyperreality, finally becoming more authentic than whatever remained of our own diminshed selves.

Sacrificing myself to a simulacrum of myself.

I look out at the January dawn over the alien rooftops, finally back home again here on the other side of the world. Can’t sleep due to jetlag and a nasty case of the flu, but early morning coffee and a cigarette on the balcony isn’t too bad either. The sun’s slowly emerging, faint glow is warm, even now during the darkest part of the year. There’s a cat sleeping on the other side of the glass. There’s a girl in the other room.

This isn’t going to last. And even on the off-chance it does, even if we navigate a million obstacles against all odds and come out on the other side unscathed, one of us will die inside these arms.

And I really can’t explain it, but somehow, that actually makes all of it more real.

The anthropods are in silent and meaningless awe of you.

Know that the insects will be looking on.
When the vision spins out of control
The insects will be looking on.

Rooting for you.

And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

And when you fall,
We will come to raise you up,
Bud from you, banner-like
Blossom from you
And carry you apart

In a sky funeral.