Yes I recognise the phenomenon you describe. However there is a countervaling force I don't think you're accounting for here: the first real digital natives have come of age and are inventing new social norms to suit virtual spaces.
For example, I'm a happy member of the informally organised sprawling network/community/scene called TPOT ("this part of twitter"). We have learned how to build genuinely satisfying friendships and heterodox intellectual exchange, in public, on the platform commonly known as "the hellsite". How? By designing social norms that are fit for purpose. The scene is largely populated by people whose PRIMARY form of social connection is online, so they learned to make it work.
Importantly, the community building is supported by a large number of in person gatherings, there's an extraordinary culture of hosting. Much of it happens under the radar but I estimate about one gathering every 6 weeks (!) over the past couple of years. Gatherings typically about 30 people over 3 or 4 days. (I wrote about it here: https://open.substack.com/pub/richdecibels/p/running-a-local-lodge-for-your-internet)
Thanks, Rich! Yeah, I was literally thinking of TPOT when I added footnote 5. :-)
I guess I have too much PTSD from my own Twitter era to be tempted to venture over there, but I do hear rumours and it feels like another version of the same thing I'm trying to sketch out. (Also, part of the mentality I think we're cultivating is to be happy spending time in your own little corner, without buying into FOMO, while trusting that there will be folks who walk the boundaries backwards and forwards, so that our different corners aren't as isolated from each other as they might sound.)
As someone who does spend time on the hellsite, are you noticing the kind of impact from AI there that Hoel mentioned in his original post?
The bots are everywhere but twitter is doing an OK job of keeping up with the arms race.
A lot of the intellectual content is written to be intentionally illegible to the uninitiated, making it unviral and also un-simulatable by bot minds. Sometimes known as schizoposting or "shitposting to enlightenment". Another example, the cool kids call it "poasting". Loads of ingroup signaling going on that creates a kinda dark forest effect out there in public. Security through obscurity.
and you would hear a similar story about "this little corner of the internet". no relation to TPOT but similar dynamics, centralised around some good podcasters, more youtube rather than twitter. also features powerful virtual relationships plus offline gatherings
here’s a blog that was just published from one of participants of a recent TPOT gathering, including some reflections about how technically to migrate the social dynamics from in-person gatherings to digital spaces:
Interesting stuff those gatherings, Rich. Certainly who would not want to go somewhere beautiful and meet like-minded internet buddies. I guess it works as the reshuffle before the real game of sinking into place, growing food and culture and relationship with some Here we are accountable to as opposed to owner of. But it seems like a it plays into so many of the tendencies that help us avoid that really fucking difficult game of in place together that it would be hard for the game to compete with the sheer pleasure of perpetual shuffle, if that makes sense. Obviously i am at remove but I do have decades in commune and the failures there of in the background radiation of my wondering.
perhaps there’s a “maximum allowable distance” between what mainstream culture and it’s subcultures can achieve. it seems individualism is in full swing in the mainstream: so the subcultures that try to do something more communalistic are working against enormous pressures
I’m mildly optimistic that this culture of gathering may gradually inoculate people in the art of being together, and stimulate our appetites for local commitment and joyful obligations. but I don’t claim it is likely to work as a mechanism to reorient culture at large - all I know is it feels good doing it :)
One of the questions lurking in my head has to do with the common complaint of the aged, a community to which I now belong, that "things were better back then." We chalk it up to a kind of rigidity, unable to move with "the times." But what if it's true? What if an unnamable quality of being is slowly eroding away, generation by generation. "Socrates made the same complaint centuries ago" one could say, implying an eternal condition. But I have a hard time imagining an indigenous elder, pre contact, moving around with his or her tribe, thinking things were better when they were kids. It's like we've redefined the fundamental motion of time, from circle to line.
And you're right to point to the quality of our work as a place to gauge what is happening. Not only the quality of the objects made, but the quality of experience in the making. That too is being eroded.
Last point -- AI "art." I'm dismayed at how many people are using AI generated images for their Substack postings. I find them creepy in a way that's hard to describe. Besides just being ugly, they produce in me what I can only describe as a feeling of spiritual nausea, as though I have entered a place where there is no gravity, no touch-point of reality. Meanwhile, having to search through image directories for just the right image is time consuming, but often you end up surprised, finding images that reflect on the post in fresh ways you hadn't thought of. Rilke advised "hold to the difficult," foreseeing perhaps the "convenience" mindset creeping into the culture.
Thanks, Rob. I feel like a lot of the journey of my work has been trying to cultivate a discernment of what is (sometimes, at least) being gestured towards, when the initial expression sounds like "Det var bättre för!", as we say in Swedish, a phrase that is always only ever used with irony here today.
Illich's image of "The Mirror of the Past" helps. My friend Jamie Moran talks about the difference between conservative traditionalism and radical traditionalism, where the latter recognises that to be true to what was good in an older way cannot mean trying to "go back", but finding the form that it would take today.
These things are hard to word, but I'll go on trying... ;-)
I also hate it when writers use AI to generate illustrations. I tend to use my own art as illustration for my writing, but I'm lucky to have a massive archive of it left over from my former life as a visual artist. I reckon taking your own photos is easy enough for most people, though: the images can be tangentially rather than literally related to the subject of the piece.
I agree. The particular soulless use of "art machines" is fundamentally no different from "writing machines" and ultimately just as cursed. Its hard to see how people want to resist the automation of writing, while doing the same to art
I'm really impressed by your dedication to blogs, on-line meetings, zooms, podcasts et al. The list made me realise how all of this is still an alien territory to me. I don't do zooms, don't have any on-line groups that I attend, very rarely listen to or read podcasts and blogs, and generally am just a sad disconnected, flesh and bones human:-) Am I alone in this? I think it's the reliance on words that I can't deal with. We are a society that talks way too much! We are drowning in an ocean of words! All this on-line chatter seems like a distraction, a sublimation of our lack of real community? Then again, many seem to really value this form of communication. Maybe some of us just aren't wired that way.
My one vice is that I still use twitter once a day - mostly to post photos and videos (art) and very occasionally to joust with someone on the far right ... not a particularly healthy activity, I know, but occasionally quite satisfying.
I do have a Vimeo account for my moving image art and a Soundcloud for my piano indulgences. But these are mostly repositories, not places I go for interaction.
That last point about the current generation leaving the internet: I've been saying for several years now that there will be a fashion/movement to be off-line, disconnected, mostly prompted by concerns about on-line surveillance. Part of this may also be not possessing a smartphone, though this will necessitate sacrifices as it's becoming clear that there are an increasing number of things you can't do without a smartphone. I know because I haven't had one for 5+ years. My daughter also didn't have one for years but has recently just succumbed to pressure from her friends and bought a second hand one.
Thanks for this Dougald. It is a discussion I am definitely up for.
It also strikes me, reading your comments, that part of the approach I'm reflecting on here is that we each make a patchwork that works for us, a way of inhabiting the network that reflects our differences. One of the things I came to understand when I started working with visual artists, yourself included, is that words are my first language, and that this isn't true for everyone. The world would be a poorer place if it was.
"Hand made web" is a valuable concept and brings some needed nuance to Hoel's stark and gloomy vision. Another metaphor could be that of the grocery store: there are hundreds and hundreds of different items available for purchase at a modern supermarket, but the proper way to do shopping is to stick to a list, the contents of which won't vary much over time spans of a month or so.
I would posit that the concept of "FOMO" did a great deal of psychic damage to many people, to the point where they feel they absolutely must spend time all over the internet; but if people were to carefully consider exactly what they want out of their online experience, most of them would likely want a version of what you describe. That being said, I do think there are some people who are effectively "lost," who have doomed themselves to mindlessly following whatever the internet gives them to consume.
My biggest concern comes from being a parent: how do I teach my children how to effectively navigate the web? My generation (millennials) had no playbook for the kinds of choices we must make regarding our parental responsibilities in guiding our kids away from the hack work and towards meaningful communities and relationships; we had to figure all that out on our own with varying degrees of success, and we have to keep figuring it out over and over again as the net landscape changes.
Thanks, William. The metaphor of the grocery store rings true – and in fact it's been a big part of my digital fast, these past weeks, to start the day by writing with pen on paper what I'm going to do, and to have made that list before I touch a device, so that I'm going online to do the things on the list, rather than letting myself be pulled around by what's waiting for me there.
I had another thousand words or so that I've saved for a future post, sketching out some principles for this way of inhabiting the network, and the first part is about setting boundaries, not in search of purity but in service of sanity. That goes to a reckoning with FOMO, and also how we guide our kids. So I'll come back to these things.
Thanks for your thoughts – and good to connect with someone else who is on the trail of "ruins"!
My husband and I dropped out in 2020. We took our skills, resources and 30+ years of working experience with us. It’s ALL hack work out there. We were both at managerial levels in our jobs and the environment had become totally depersonalized and unpalatable… 2020 was the last straw.
For several years we stayed offline (except Substack) but we recently started a YouTube page trying to help others leave the system (Love Off Grid).
I don’t think we can blame “the internet algorithm” when that same algorithm is driven by what WE view. I’m afraid what we’re being shown is a mirror of humanity’s lowest common denominator. It’s up to each of us to produce constructive content that counters that dark reflection.
Glad you found something helpful in the post, Greta!
I guess I think of human cultures as always having an aspect of fostering certain tendencies within what humanity is like and curbing other tendencies. In a similar way, though with a cruder set of considerations, many of the spaces of the internet are engineered to foster addictive behaviour, mindless conflict, etc, because that's where the profit is. But as you say, that's only possible because these dark potentials are there within the common fabric of the kind of creatures that we are. So there's an element of needing to "own" this, rather than externalise it all onto the algorithm.
Oh you're on a digital fast for Lent too? Actually mine is a media consumption fast. I've decided it doesn't count as consumption for me if I leave a comment so...
One thing that occurred to me reading this was that the reason AI doesn't surprise us is that we haven't asked it to. I remember some academic paper on an earlier image generation AI which paid attention to the question of whether the works produced could be considered novel. In practice, I think this meant would it be considered imaginative, by critics if it had been made by a human. Maybe that's not the right way to answer the question but at least the question was being asked. But that was an academic paper, not a commercial application.
A smaller digital experience: this is what I'm hearing now from Mastodon fans, once that platform failed to win a huge audience. They argue that their circles are smaller, but as a result the conversations are better.
A very interesting take on the AI infiltration of the web, Dougald. I like your view that it's another good reason to trim your list of online places to visit and be more discerning in what you choose to read. I've come to place a high value on my time—not in money terms but in terms of relationships. I'd rather spend my time on things that matter to me than what a random bot serves up for my consumption.
I really love this article. “The Hand Made Web” kind of sticks for me. It is a very interesting and hopeful perspective. To those interested in quality interaction rather than obsessing on viral metrics, your comments are welcome and timely. I also have a feeling within this same group are people that find a way to use new technologies (like AI and others) within this same spirit of human centered connection.
The decentralized web is my glimmer of hope and seems to overlap with the hand made web. I also see AI polluting the main networks driving people towards a healthier hand made web, but I am not as confident that AI is incapable of the same creativity as people. I imagine creativity grows from observation, similar to the van dutch quote that nothing is original. I wonder if AI is just not yet capable of that creative growth from observation.
I greatly enjoyed your post. It expresses better than I can, my view of the internet today. Thank you.
My sense is that a lot hangs on whether a term like "creativity" captures a set of activities which are similar at a deep level, despite their superficial variety – or whether it includes activities which are superficially similar, yet quite different at a deeper level. From my experience of working with language, my bet is on the latter: the set of activities we call writing are superficially similar, yet behind that surface, there are radically different things going on. So it's not that AI can get so good but no better, in comparison to us, within a certain common field of activity, but that it can do startling well at some of the activities within the set, while others elude it.
Love it. A rewilding and reweaving of the internet.
I think also it pairs with a handmade world and perhaps this is an important consideration both in terms of real world meets - but also the grounding of information as knowledge via experience.
Yeah, something I was conscious of but didn't have room for in this piece is where the metaphor of the "handmade" here meets the actual making, material aspects of the activities we get up to – and also of the technologies that make the network possible. Many of those who are part of the corner of the weave where I feel at home are also involved in hands-on practices of making and growing.
Great piece Dougald, my brother in Lent! I love that Berger quote, especially this: "The difference is not only a question of skill and imagination, but also of morale."
Such incisive words, thank you. I worry about the trend towards lives lived more and more in digital realms, disconnected from the real world. An ungrounded, untethered and shallowed human experience.
I do agree that this may be a trend even before AI; there was just too much media and the Internet just became so unpleasant that I mostly access only a few places now. AI will make it worse.
Yes I recognise the phenomenon you describe. However there is a countervaling force I don't think you're accounting for here: the first real digital natives have come of age and are inventing new social norms to suit virtual spaces.
For example, I'm a happy member of the informally organised sprawling network/community/scene called TPOT ("this part of twitter"). We have learned how to build genuinely satisfying friendships and heterodox intellectual exchange, in public, on the platform commonly known as "the hellsite". How? By designing social norms that are fit for purpose. The scene is largely populated by people whose PRIMARY form of social connection is online, so they learned to make it work.
Importantly, the community building is supported by a large number of in person gatherings, there's an extraordinary culture of hosting. Much of it happens under the radar but I estimate about one gathering every 6 weeks (!) over the past couple of years. Gatherings typically about 30 people over 3 or 4 days. (I wrote about it here: https://open.substack.com/pub/richdecibels/p/running-a-local-lodge-for-your-internet)
Thanks, Rich! Yeah, I was literally thinking of TPOT when I added footnote 5. :-)
I guess I have too much PTSD from my own Twitter era to be tempted to venture over there, but I do hear rumours and it feels like another version of the same thing I'm trying to sketch out. (Also, part of the mentality I think we're cultivating is to be happy spending time in your own little corner, without buying into FOMO, while trusting that there will be folks who walk the boundaries backwards and forwards, so that our different corners aren't as isolated from each other as they might sound.)
As someone who does spend time on the hellsite, are you noticing the kind of impact from AI there that Hoel mentioned in his original post?
The bots are everywhere but twitter is doing an OK job of keeping up with the arms race.
A lot of the intellectual content is written to be intentionally illegible to the uninitiated, making it unviral and also un-simulatable by bot minds. Sometimes known as schizoposting or "shitposting to enlightenment". Another example, the cool kids call it "poasting". Loads of ingroup signaling going on that creates a kinda dark forest effect out there in public. Security through obscurity.
consider joining tpot as an anon? we'd love to have you
and you would hear a similar story about "this little corner of the internet". no relation to TPOT but similar dynamics, centralised around some good podcasters, more youtube rather than twitter. also features powerful virtual relationships plus offline gatherings
here’s a blog that was just published from one of participants of a recent TPOT gathering, including some reflections about how technically to migrate the social dynamics from in-person gatherings to digital spaces:
https://newsletter.michaelashcroft.org/p/notes-on-friendship-as-a-co-adventure
Interesting stuff those gatherings, Rich. Certainly who would not want to go somewhere beautiful and meet like-minded internet buddies. I guess it works as the reshuffle before the real game of sinking into place, growing food and culture and relationship with some Here we are accountable to as opposed to owner of. But it seems like a it plays into so many of the tendencies that help us avoid that really fucking difficult game of in place together that it would be hard for the game to compete with the sheer pleasure of perpetual shuffle, if that makes sense. Obviously i am at remove but I do have decades in commune and the failures there of in the background radiation of my wondering.
perhaps there’s a “maximum allowable distance” between what mainstream culture and it’s subcultures can achieve. it seems individualism is in full swing in the mainstream: so the subcultures that try to do something more communalistic are working against enormous pressures
I’m mildly optimistic that this culture of gathering may gradually inoculate people in the art of being together, and stimulate our appetites for local commitment and joyful obligations. but I don’t claim it is likely to work as a mechanism to reorient culture at large - all I know is it feels good doing it :)
Ha! Fair point. Worth watching your reports.
Thank you for this beam in the fog.
One of the questions lurking in my head has to do with the common complaint of the aged, a community to which I now belong, that "things were better back then." We chalk it up to a kind of rigidity, unable to move with "the times." But what if it's true? What if an unnamable quality of being is slowly eroding away, generation by generation. "Socrates made the same complaint centuries ago" one could say, implying an eternal condition. But I have a hard time imagining an indigenous elder, pre contact, moving around with his or her tribe, thinking things were better when they were kids. It's like we've redefined the fundamental motion of time, from circle to line.
And you're right to point to the quality of our work as a place to gauge what is happening. Not only the quality of the objects made, but the quality of experience in the making. That too is being eroded.
Last point -- AI "art." I'm dismayed at how many people are using AI generated images for their Substack postings. I find them creepy in a way that's hard to describe. Besides just being ugly, they produce in me what I can only describe as a feeling of spiritual nausea, as though I have entered a place where there is no gravity, no touch-point of reality. Meanwhile, having to search through image directories for just the right image is time consuming, but often you end up surprised, finding images that reflect on the post in fresh ways you hadn't thought of. Rilke advised "hold to the difficult," foreseeing perhaps the "convenience" mindset creeping into the culture.
I hope for the crisis you point toward.
Thanks, Rob. I feel like a lot of the journey of my work has been trying to cultivate a discernment of what is (sometimes, at least) being gestured towards, when the initial expression sounds like "Det var bättre för!", as we say in Swedish, a phrase that is always only ever used with irony here today.
Illich's image of "The Mirror of the Past" helps. My friend Jamie Moran talks about the difference between conservative traditionalism and radical traditionalism, where the latter recognises that to be true to what was good in an older way cannot mean trying to "go back", but finding the form that it would take today.
These things are hard to word, but I'll go on trying... ;-)
I also hate it when writers use AI to generate illustrations. I tend to use my own art as illustration for my writing, but I'm lucky to have a massive archive of it left over from my former life as a visual artist. I reckon taking your own photos is easy enough for most people, though: the images can be tangentially rather than literally related to the subject of the piece.
I agree. The particular soulless use of "art machines" is fundamentally no different from "writing machines" and ultimately just as cursed. Its hard to see how people want to resist the automation of writing, while doing the same to art
Yes, and the notion that easier is better, as if producing the product where the only point.
I'm really impressed by your dedication to blogs, on-line meetings, zooms, podcasts et al. The list made me realise how all of this is still an alien territory to me. I don't do zooms, don't have any on-line groups that I attend, very rarely listen to or read podcasts and blogs, and generally am just a sad disconnected, flesh and bones human:-) Am I alone in this? I think it's the reliance on words that I can't deal with. We are a society that talks way too much! We are drowning in an ocean of words! All this on-line chatter seems like a distraction, a sublimation of our lack of real community? Then again, many seem to really value this form of communication. Maybe some of us just aren't wired that way.
My one vice is that I still use twitter once a day - mostly to post photos and videos (art) and very occasionally to joust with someone on the far right ... not a particularly healthy activity, I know, but occasionally quite satisfying.
I do have a Vimeo account for my moving image art and a Soundcloud for my piano indulgences. But these are mostly repositories, not places I go for interaction.
Video art: http://vimeo.com/user11338598
Music http://soundcloud.com/user-329950758
That last point about the current generation leaving the internet: I've been saying for several years now that there will be a fashion/movement to be off-line, disconnected, mostly prompted by concerns about on-line surveillance. Part of this may also be not possessing a smartphone, though this will necessitate sacrifices as it's becoming clear that there are an increasing number of things you can't do without a smartphone. I know because I haven't had one for 5+ years. My daughter also didn't have one for years but has recently just succumbed to pressure from her friends and bought a second hand one.
Thanks for this Dougald. It is a discussion I am definitely up for.
...the upshot of this is that your blogging and other stuff has my undivided attention as I ain't looking at much else:-)
Ha! Thanks, Nick, I'm honoured! ;-)
It also strikes me, reading your comments, that part of the approach I'm reflecting on here is that we each make a patchwork that works for us, a way of inhabiting the network that reflects our differences. One of the things I came to understand when I started working with visual artists, yourself included, is that words are my first language, and that this isn't true for everyone. The world would be a poorer place if it was.
"Hand made web" is a valuable concept and brings some needed nuance to Hoel's stark and gloomy vision. Another metaphor could be that of the grocery store: there are hundreds and hundreds of different items available for purchase at a modern supermarket, but the proper way to do shopping is to stick to a list, the contents of which won't vary much over time spans of a month or so.
I would posit that the concept of "FOMO" did a great deal of psychic damage to many people, to the point where they feel they absolutely must spend time all over the internet; but if people were to carefully consider exactly what they want out of their online experience, most of them would likely want a version of what you describe. That being said, I do think there are some people who are effectively "lost," who have doomed themselves to mindlessly following whatever the internet gives them to consume.
My biggest concern comes from being a parent: how do I teach my children how to effectively navigate the web? My generation (millennials) had no playbook for the kinds of choices we must make regarding our parental responsibilities in guiding our kids away from the hack work and towards meaningful communities and relationships; we had to figure all that out on our own with varying degrees of success, and we have to keep figuring it out over and over again as the net landscape changes.
Thanks, William. The metaphor of the grocery store rings true – and in fact it's been a big part of my digital fast, these past weeks, to start the day by writing with pen on paper what I'm going to do, and to have made that list before I touch a device, so that I'm going online to do the things on the list, rather than letting myself be pulled around by what's waiting for me there.
I had another thousand words or so that I've saved for a future post, sketching out some principles for this way of inhabiting the network, and the first part is about setting boundaries, not in search of purity but in service of sanity. That goes to a reckoning with FOMO, and also how we guide our kids. So I'll come back to these things.
Thanks for your thoughts – and good to connect with someone else who is on the trail of "ruins"!
My husband and I dropped out in 2020. We took our skills, resources and 30+ years of working experience with us. It’s ALL hack work out there. We were both at managerial levels in our jobs and the environment had become totally depersonalized and unpalatable… 2020 was the last straw.
For several years we stayed offline (except Substack) but we recently started a YouTube page trying to help others leave the system (Love Off Grid).
I don’t think we can blame “the internet algorithm” when that same algorithm is driven by what WE view. I’m afraid what we’re being shown is a mirror of humanity’s lowest common denominator. It’s up to each of us to produce constructive content that counters that dark reflection.
Thank you for writing this.
Glad you found something helpful in the post, Greta!
I guess I think of human cultures as always having an aspect of fostering certain tendencies within what humanity is like and curbing other tendencies. In a similar way, though with a cruder set of considerations, many of the spaces of the internet are engineered to foster addictive behaviour, mindless conflict, etc, because that's where the profit is. But as you say, that's only possible because these dark potentials are there within the common fabric of the kind of creatures that we are. So there's an element of needing to "own" this, rather than externalise it all onto the algorithm.
Exactly. Which wolf are we feeding?
Oh you're on a digital fast for Lent too? Actually mine is a media consumption fast. I've decided it doesn't count as consumption for me if I leave a comment so...
One thing that occurred to me reading this was that the reason AI doesn't surprise us is that we haven't asked it to. I remember some academic paper on an earlier image generation AI which paid attention to the question of whether the works produced could be considered novel. In practice, I think this meant would it be considered imaginative, by critics if it had been made by a human. Maybe that's not the right way to answer the question but at least the question was being asked. But that was an academic paper, not a commercial application.
The value of context goes up as the cost of content goes down.
Nicely put!
Maybe Ai is just like ‘too much cowbell’ or too much reverb because the voice is better in a cave?
Of course the ‘paywall’ ended the conversation to ‘save’ the preachers their rights to the patriots garden.
It’s a club mentality scared of its own shadow in the forever war on citizens and living by script.
The wonder has been removed with linear solutioneering.
Lovely post, Dougald.
A smaller digital experience: this is what I'm hearing now from Mastodon fans, once that platform failed to win a huge audience. They argue that their circles are smaller, but as a result the conversations are better.
A very interesting take on the AI infiltration of the web, Dougald. I like your view that it's another good reason to trim your list of online places to visit and be more discerning in what you choose to read. I've come to place a high value on my time—not in money terms but in terms of relationships. I'd rather spend my time on things that matter to me than what a random bot serves up for my consumption.
I really love this article. “The Hand Made Web” kind of sticks for me. It is a very interesting and hopeful perspective. To those interested in quality interaction rather than obsessing on viral metrics, your comments are welcome and timely. I also have a feeling within this same group are people that find a way to use new technologies (like AI and others) within this same spirit of human centered connection.
The decentralized web is my glimmer of hope and seems to overlap with the hand made web. I also see AI polluting the main networks driving people towards a healthier hand made web, but I am not as confident that AI is incapable of the same creativity as people. I imagine creativity grows from observation, similar to the van dutch quote that nothing is original. I wonder if AI is just not yet capable of that creative growth from observation.
I greatly enjoyed your post. It expresses better than I can, my view of the internet today. Thank you.
Thanks, Roland, glad you enjoyed the post!
My sense is that a lot hangs on whether a term like "creativity" captures a set of activities which are similar at a deep level, despite their superficial variety – or whether it includes activities which are superficially similar, yet quite different at a deeper level. From my experience of working with language, my bet is on the latter: the set of activities we call writing are superficially similar, yet behind that surface, there are radically different things going on. So it's not that AI can get so good but no better, in comparison to us, within a certain common field of activity, but that it can do startling well at some of the activities within the set, while others elude it.
Love it. A rewilding and reweaving of the internet.
I think also it pairs with a handmade world and perhaps this is an important consideration both in terms of real world meets - but also the grounding of information as knowledge via experience.
Yeah, something I was conscious of but didn't have room for in this piece is where the metaphor of the "handmade" here meets the actual making, material aspects of the activities we get up to – and also of the technologies that make the network possible. Many of those who are part of the corner of the weave where I feel at home are also involved in hands-on practices of making and growing.
Great piece Dougald, my brother in Lent! I love that Berger quote, especially this: "The difference is not only a question of skill and imagination, but also of morale."
Such incisive words, thank you. I worry about the trend towards lives lived more and more in digital realms, disconnected from the real world. An ungrounded, untethered and shallowed human experience.
I do agree that this may be a trend even before AI; there was just too much media and the Internet just became so unpleasant that I mostly access only a few places now. AI will make it worse.