Omnipedia #12: democratic LLMs, understudied poets, Department of Truth, Japanese eco-marxists, #corecore art...
Round up all the usual suspects!
HELLO! A cauld blast of tech-weird future this fortnight:
I’M overloaded with chat-bot and generative AI links this fortnight (here’s a useful compendium of some of the nervier takes). But the essay that the tweet below brings has a singular virtue: it releases us from just being spectators to the corporate battle between different AI services. And it wonders what happens if we became active citizens, concerned about the data that these computational models feed on - what Patient Moon Ash below calls a dLLM (Democratic Large Language Model). If we put wisdom in, could we get wisdom out?
HERE’s that much-quoted New Yorker essay on the rampant decline in enrolment for humanities/literature courses in the US. I have to thank my 1985 MA in English Literature and Language (with a side order of Film and TV Studies) for my intellectual formation - the thrill of French philosophy (where my life-long grapple with Gilles Deleuze began), the compressed joys of poetry (good resourcing for a pop lyricist), the chilly expanses of modern novels (though nothing really surpassing Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, or Joyce’s Ulysses, since I read them at Glasgow University), the great film auteurs (Godard and Ford).
I’d imagine that automation may revive literature and humanities studies, as one of the most irreducibly human things we can do. Maybe some political economy, alongside with those classic texts/movies, is needed to get us there… (see further down).
THE Department of Truth is “A Comic That Captures the Antic Energy of a Post-Truth World” says The Nation. Quote from writer James Tynion:
The core thesis of the comic is that America itself is a conspiracy theory. This land was settled by religious extremists and populated by hucksters and charlatans. We’ve always been storytellers and fabulists chasing fortune and paradise, willing to believe anything and everything that brings us closer to our goals. We are not American because our ancestors have been here for thousands of years. The thing that makes us all American is not a common blood or a tie to the land; it is simply a shared idea. And that idea is malleable, and in the last decade, I think a lot of Americans have felt how unstable it all is.
If the series has a goal, beyond just exploring what it feels like to live in a world dictated by increasingly disturbing beliefs, that goal is to make our readers wary of people who claim to have all the answers, who know the hidden truths. To question authority and reject being swept up in a fantasy just because they find it comforting. Sure, sometimes there are in fact shadowy rooms filled with people making malevolent decisions. But the truth is usually more complicated than that, and while grappling with the chaos of living in the world isn’t easy, it’s our responsibility to live in that discomfort.
FOR 80’s dudes like me, who feasted and dreamed on the post-industrial eco-utopias of Andre Gorz and Jeremy Rifkin, it’s kind of cute to see it all come back with the Japanese author Kohei Saito and his best-selling book Marx In The Anthropocene (500K copies)
Although I’m deeply averse to the c-word (historical “communism” has such a bloody and oppressive record), I enjoy any articulation of this style of thinking, taken from a Guardian interview:
Pointing to Kate Soper’s work, Saito says that the constant need to engage in competitive work and consumption is not a mark of the good life and in fact limits opportunities for fulfilling experiences outside the market. Without the need to produce for excessive, unnecessary consumption (that which is “necessary” for economic growth, not the development of the individual), jobs could be fundamentally changed. We could spend far fewer hours working, using our abilities and talents to do what we can and sharing the unpleasant and boring tasks more fairly.
Saito, though, does not see this as a romanticised “return-to the countryside”, abandoning all technologies in the process; nor is he a Soviet Marxist. Using André Gorz’s distinction between “open” and “locking technology”, he advocates for the former. While the latter is “about domination over people and nature”, where “technology is for discipline and monopoly” – he gives nuclear power plants as an example – open technologies can be run at a local level by cooperatives. Solar panels, for instance, are a more democratic way of “controlling energy and electricity”, he says. This doesn’t amount to doing away with the state entirely, but he stresses: “My vision is not Soviet-style – I am not arguing for the state ownership of everything or state-planned economy.” That would simply change too little.
Small reminder that, even if we properly determined our existing energy usage and infrastructure, we could solve many problems:
Techno-telepathy, creating a direct channel of transmission between one brain and another, seems to require alignment of internal worlds - very difficult, and actually a bit pointless, if we desired to know the difference of someone else by these means. But as Andy Clark writes in Aeon, maybe techno-telepathy is more like a tool for coordinating our actions together:
We have argued that the prospects for good old-fashioned telepathy (GOFT) are poor. GOFT requires our thoughts to have a common format, such that the thought of one person is understandable to another. The chances that such a format exists are remote. And trying to establish it by using natural language largely defeats the purpose of telepathy, turning it into little more than fancy texting.
But despite our pessimism regarding the direct transmission of thoughts or experiences, the prospect of adding new direct brain-to-brain channels is an exciting one. By providing multiple new channels of this kind, our plastic brains may be ‘let loose’ to discover new and potent ways to coordinate practical actions. Our current accomplishments in art, science and culture required the efficient coordination made possible by natural language. New brain-to-brain channels have the potential to augment those existing capabilities, turning us into super-cooperators, and transforming life and society in ways we cannot yet imagine.
I was informed about #corecore this fortnight - which feels like the ol’ postmodern irony, slathered with recent references and conducted on TikTok. Then I happily realised that my digital art obsession of the moment, the work of Joe Pease, was certainly “corecore” to its, er, core
Found this Vice Trends 2023 flipbook quite useful…
Ok, spigot’s off again. Any suggestions for the next time, do pass them on here.
Best, PK (and note below):
Good review of Kaito's work here - https://theconversation.com/economic-growth-is-fuelling-climate-change-a-new-book-proposes-degrowth-communism-as-the-solution-199572
Are you aware of Chris Cook's views on the supply of energy as a service, which some might describe as communism. He's interviewed here by William Thomson on Scotonomics, including about the pilot of his ideas in Linlithgow - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1BLoL6QezU
If you don't know Chris, he's an expert on energy markets, and a friend of MMT.
William points to some disagreement with Chris, which I don't think is valid.