The depth of your writing here goes further than the subject of AI. I truly appreciate your approach and influence on my own experience. I'm devoutly team human, even if we are the strangest sleepwalkers, even as our collective condition darkens by the day. Thank you.
Forgive the emoting below. I'm constantly troubled.
When it comes to civilization as we know it and its predatory predilections, I'm plagued by thoughts of physics. Acceleration, momentum, inertia.
I'm an expert of nothing, but the predictive meat inside my skull is all alarm. Can we swerve? Derail? Ditch? How do we course correct a collective subconscious force? Can wisdom be earned without failure?
Culture is the lens of human vision and intent. Making and meaning bend to its mythos-calibration. The civilization we've manifested is wearing some super messed up glasses and I don't think we understand that the control board is spectral--a hyperobject that has been set in motion beyond our cognitive will. A ghost avalanche, if you will, of +/-20,000 years of cyclical unconscious experimentation.
We like to think we planned our way to the present, that modernity is the obvious outcome of human development. I just see a slippery historical slope.
Nora Bateson of the Multisolving Institute tweeted this a while back:
"The stain of eugenics and industrialism in the fields of education, psychology, statistics, anthropology, economics is baked into basic presuppositions.
Now what? The tower of research based on that [previous] research is premised upon efficiency, individualism, productivity. Not vitality."
We are in a helluva pickle. I don't know how to feel about being born into its climatic chapters. It's a lot to hold in my hands.
My opinion is that we can't predict the future. Humankind has a history full of amazing successes and amazing failures and a lot of hapless muddling along and past examples don't really point us to any particular conclusions. But being that we're alive now and active parts of the human network, we can take actions. Little actions, mostly, and just within our own personal social spheres, but those small actions have ripple effects and matter.
If our daily habits and hobbies including waving hi to the letter carrier and asking how the checkout dude is doing and reaching out to others not because we want or expect anything from them but just because we want them to know we're thinking of them, and then maybe a few things more particular to us individually depending on where we work and how we might be able to restructure our interactions with people to make them more human...
...if we can manage even a little of that on most days, we'll be deciding to take the better path in real time. There are never guarantees, but that's what it would take.
Just came across your substack via the Convivial Society. I read Reclaiming Conversation and Alone Together when they were first published and was struck then that we needed to hold on firmly to what makes us human. In the homeschool co-ops I have been organizing for the past ten years, one of the rules was "no phones"; this included students and parents hanging out. Interestingly many of the parents found it really challenging, but they appreciated the mental break they got from being away from their phones. If parents don't model it, children can't mirror it. I just recently posted an article on 'TikTok brain cure with three ingredients' https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/tiktok-brain-cure-with-three-ingredients, focusing on the importance of real life relationships:
"...people who give ‘likes’ or contribute to viewer count are tokens, they are not people that we are in relationship with. Surround yourself with actual people. Relationships are sustained not because we uploaded the perfect picture or said just the ‘right thing’, but because we invest time, give part of ourselves, make sacrifices, demonstrate faithfulness, share in others pain, joy, struggles, hope, and care enough to do it again. At times virtual connections can act as a surrogate, but they are not the real thing. Strive to make relationships real, because relationships are at the core of what makes us human."
This is the most beautiful thing I’ve read yet about our little AI fixation, and so obviously written by a human.
Thank you 🙏
Very human up in here ! :)
The depth of your writing here goes further than the subject of AI. I truly appreciate your approach and influence on my own experience. I'm devoutly team human, even if we are the strangest sleepwalkers, even as our collective condition darkens by the day. Thank you.
Forgive the emoting below. I'm constantly troubled.
When it comes to civilization as we know it and its predatory predilections, I'm plagued by thoughts of physics. Acceleration, momentum, inertia.
I'm an expert of nothing, but the predictive meat inside my skull is all alarm. Can we swerve? Derail? Ditch? How do we course correct a collective subconscious force? Can wisdom be earned without failure?
Culture is the lens of human vision and intent. Making and meaning bend to its mythos-calibration. The civilization we've manifested is wearing some super messed up glasses and I don't think we understand that the control board is spectral--a hyperobject that has been set in motion beyond our cognitive will. A ghost avalanche, if you will, of +/-20,000 years of cyclical unconscious experimentation.
We like to think we planned our way to the present, that modernity is the obvious outcome of human development. I just see a slippery historical slope.
Nora Bateson of the Multisolving Institute tweeted this a while back:
"The stain of eugenics and industrialism in the fields of education, psychology, statistics, anthropology, economics is baked into basic presuppositions.
Now what? The tower of research based on that [previous] research is premised upon efficiency, individualism, productivity. Not vitality."
We are in a helluva pickle. I don't know how to feel about being born into its climatic chapters. It's a lot to hold in my hands.
My opinion is that we can't predict the future. Humankind has a history full of amazing successes and amazing failures and a lot of hapless muddling along and past examples don't really point us to any particular conclusions. But being that we're alive now and active parts of the human network, we can take actions. Little actions, mostly, and just within our own personal social spheres, but those small actions have ripple effects and matter.
If our daily habits and hobbies including waving hi to the letter carrier and asking how the checkout dude is doing and reaching out to others not because we want or expect anything from them but just because we want them to know we're thinking of them, and then maybe a few things more particular to us individually depending on where we work and how we might be able to restructure our interactions with people to make them more human...
...if we can manage even a little of that on most days, we'll be deciding to take the better path in real time. There are never guarantees, but that's what it would take.
Just came across your substack via the Convivial Society. I read Reclaiming Conversation and Alone Together when they were first published and was struck then that we needed to hold on firmly to what makes us human. In the homeschool co-ops I have been organizing for the past ten years, one of the rules was "no phones"; this included students and parents hanging out. Interestingly many of the parents found it really challenging, but they appreciated the mental break they got from being away from their phones. If parents don't model it, children can't mirror it. I just recently posted an article on 'TikTok brain cure with three ingredients' https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/tiktok-brain-cure-with-three-ingredients, focusing on the importance of real life relationships:
"...people who give ‘likes’ or contribute to viewer count are tokens, they are not people that we are in relationship with. Surround yourself with actual people. Relationships are sustained not because we uploaded the perfect picture or said just the ‘right thing’, but because we invest time, give part of ourselves, make sacrifices, demonstrate faithfulness, share in others pain, joy, struggles, hope, and care enough to do it again. At times virtual connections can act as a surrogate, but they are not the real thing. Strive to make relationships real, because relationships are at the core of what makes us human."