Written on the evening of 2/21/24
The sporadicity of social success is a curious thing. It asks to be handled, turned end over end in one's hands. On an unsuspecting night, you can arrive at a party full of strangers and within the hour be completely awash in a strong social valence. The cause is not immediately clear. Perhaps you drank the right amounts at the correct intervals and so obtained and maintained an ideal level of intoxication. Or, if not due to a social lubricant, alone, perhaps you were lucky in encountering a group of people whose dispositions were favorable to your own. Perhaps you woke up at the correct moment, your dreams concluded and your body primed for rising, and that happy event began a day whose events contributed to an unbroken emotional momentum, culminating in a present, pleasurable night.
The point is, an evening embarked upon with trepidation can turn into a very pleasant and memorable experience, and yet, one week later, if you seek to recreate this experience, it is as likely to succeed as it is to fizzle. Good social time should be sought, but it cannot be forced, and often the best product seems to ensue rather than emerging from a process of manufacture. For me, my past two Saturdays represent such an experience.
"Bowling Alone." The Death of the Third Space in American Culture. Much has been made of America's social dissolution, and rightly so. A declining labor share and the rising cost of living have forced the American Working Class to divert more of their time to work. People stay in more, go out less. Third Spaces -- bars, bowling alleys, community centers, cafes, etc. -- receive less traffic, less business, and become less numerous. This in turn winnows the number of venues available to the American public in which to socialize, making the public feel that there is "less to do" than there once was, further frustrating the drive to socialize. It is a process of positive feedback.
Still, I believe too much is made of this. When I go out, I see Americans who are eager to connect. They enjoy human connection with partners known and unknown. I see this as being especially true of the generations born before the turn of the millennium: Gen X, Millennials, and the older subset of Gen Z -- in my experience, these groups are apparently well-adjusted, their numbers composed (largely) of social literates. In contrast, Gen Z "proper" tends to be more insular and avoidant, their social aversion being especially pronounced when it comes to encounters with strangers. These generalizations are crude and sweeping, but I believe the phenomena identified are real.
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Generative AI makes me unhappy. Last fall, an art project I was working on was frustrated by ChatGPT. I was fired up to study late-middle English to ape the style of Chaucer. After browsing forums and subreddits on linguistics, I assembled a short list of textbooks that would get me where I wanted to go. One of them was written by Tolkien. This was cool, and I was excited, but my project was going to be a piece of text, and it occurred to me that I should do a test with ChatGPT. I wrote eight lines of poetry about my imagined main character and the world he inhabited then prompted the AI to translate my modern English to Chaucer's middle English. It did a passably good job, and this was upsetting. I was experiencing a sense of creative obsolescence (later, I would name this sensation flembostriquat).
I had set out to learn enough of the mechanics and vocabulary of middle-English to write a play in the style of Geoffrey Chaucer. I wasn't aiming for absolute authenticity, but I wanted it to be a faithful impression. To develop the necessary lexical skill, I was looking at an estimated 10-30 hours of study. This was a silly project, but it was also an expression of that essential human characteristic creativity. To dabble and to build, to assemble afresh from what lays on hand. To feel myself alienated from this drive by technological invention drove me down into a retiring funk and I quickly discarded the project, but not before writing and submitting the following reflection:
My dismay came from a feeling of creative obsolescence. To invest 20-100 hours in the study of middle english so that one can write original works in the style of Chaucer seems to me a quintessentially human activity. That is our purpose on this Earth, to explore and create and dazzle, and to do so in whatever medium or mode that excites us, because we – not ChatGPT – are the original, organic Generative Pre-Trained Transformers. We ingest, we assimilate, and we create with a potential for newness.
If a chatbot can perform creative, language-based tasks with far greater time efficiency than I can – 80% of the results in 0.01% of the time – what is the point of picking up my pen? What is the point of being human?
These are indications that we are bound for a world where fewer and fewer things will be created by a process indigenous to the human mind. Instead, people will invent ideas, and outsource their actualization to AI. Writing, coding, painting, sculpting, composing, drafting, engineering, creating by hand will become an anachronism.
What kind of world will that be?
Where will I fit in it?
Where will you?
