A Ludicrous No-Brainer

Overture

JSR: Hey Chirag, I need your help! Boy am I in a pickle!
Chirag: I’m here for you, my man.
JSR: I’m gonna get in trouble at work if I keep spending so much time writing at The Hinternet. But I can’t let my readers down! I really need a scholar-level AI assistant trained on my brand and ready to fill my newsletter with content, without my team building a thing!
Chirag: Say no more!
JSR: But wait, here’s the tough part — it needs to sound exactly like me, like, down to the very tiniest swerve of my very most rarefied soul-atom. And it needs to be published under “Hinternet Editorial Board”. I want no new JSR bylines until December at least!
Chirag: I am on it, my man! Just give me two weeks….

[Two weeks later…]

A Ludicrous No-Brainer

I.

I, JSR, have been struggling these past few months to explain, in a first instance to myself, why it has lately felt so hard to write, or to write in a way that feels adequate to our moment, that feels true. The difficulty has nothing to do with “writer’s block” — a malady I only know to exist because I’ve heard so many others complaining of it over the years. What concerns me is the difficulty of continuing in the same vein as before, as a writer, when the meaning of writing is in the course of such great transformation. One is still free to write, of course; one is not free to shape the total social, technological, and ideological context in which writing is received. If there is a “block” here, it’s not the writer’s, at least not this writer’s; it is the global aggregate of writing itself, along with the overwhelming proliferation of synthetic output that mimics the form of writing and that has by now so clogged the pipes as to make one question the advisability of continuing to add, here and there, our own delicate organic dollops to all the accumulated waste.

So far I have only rehashed a problem familiar to more or less anyone who has been awake for the past few years. The more difficult part of my current reckoning has to do with the dimensions of my own life in writing that had previously been concealed from consciousness, but that our most recent industrial revolution in language has made it impossible not to see. It turns out now, it seems to me, that quite in spite of my own self-conception it was towards this moment that I had been working all along — that what I always wanted was to be swallowed up by this omniscience-engine that has finally been built and released into the world.

II.

Somewhere Jean-Paul Sartre describes the special sensation of seeing one’s name in print for the first time. Like a runic inscription on bone or stone, a place in the front-matter of Tel Quel can have the power to confirm one’s own existence to oneself, to assure us that it was not just our imagination, fired up by vanity and by our loving mothers and by a small inner circle of bosom-friends, whose willingness to affirm us in our belief in our own existence is sweet and all, but about as convincing as when they assure us that no, of course we don’t look fat in the birthday photos.

I had long hoped to find confirmation of my own existence in print, but always found the evidence inconclusive. This has had everything to do with the recent history of information technology and circulation, a history Sartre had no particular concern to prophecy. For some years now, upon entering even the most sparsely stocked suburban Barnes & Noble in, let us say, Sugarland, Texas, I can expect to find, if not any books of my own, though those are often there too, at least some number of in-stock titles that feature my name in their tables of contents, their acknowledgments, or their dust-cover blurbs. But if I cannot look to these testimonia as proof of much of anything, as anchorage in a shared world, this may have something to do with the awareness that my name is also in the pockets and the purses of everyone in that Barnes & Noble. It might take, to pull it up, a few seconds of navigatory motion on the touchscreens of their phones, but likely nothing more complex, no more calories burnt, than what would be required to flip to the appropriate page of one of that number of stocked books. And another thought comes after this one in turn: all of your names are in all the same pockets and purses too; and the names of more or less everyone you went to high school with, even if in many cases all we find is a DUI conviction from 2011; and the names, too, as they say, if often only thanks to a paywalled notice of obsequy at Legacy.com, of all their grandmas.

In brief, everyone’s name is absolutely everywhere. What, I want to ask, does this predicament have for the millennia-old human practice of self-monumentalization, of auto-iconicity without the mess of a Benthamite pickled carcass — which, like it or not, has been among the most basic purposes of writing since very nearly the beginning of the era of literacy? What, more generally, can it mean to seek to get not only one’s name but one’s voice out there in the world, when necessarily this means to ride the same circuits of dissemination as typically, overwhelmingly, are charged with the delivery of the synthetic product against which we like to imagine we are making a last-ditch human stand? What can it mean, I mean, to continue to write in the era of industrial production of language?

When we declare we are human today, this cannot be out of fear, such as had been felt by the long-suffering husband in that one Saki story, of being mistaken for a satyr, “with goat continuations where the human leaves off”. Ô, to be mistaken for a goat in the 21st century! For a creature of God that still ruts and butts, volatile salts swirling, shaping our very bodies into the fixed form of our desire. One feels that to defend what’s left of the human one must aspire to write like an animal, leaving strings of words pungent as pheromone traces. But even if John Waters experimented early in his career with scratch-and-sniff “Odorama” cards to accompany his projections, in truth screen-based works have never really held much promise for engaging art’s more neglected senses, least of all today, when our art is not only screen-based, but mostly made by, and increasingly made for, entities that have never even experienced olfaction. And so the human writer just sheds his tiny protein fragments into the great global swirl of code, and does his best not to watch as they immediately get devoured.

III.

Unlike some people, of whose existence I am aware only thanks to the internet, and who might for all I know be bots, I have no romance at all with fountain pens, Moleskines, antique secrétaires, and other iconic appurtenances of the writing life. I write on my back on the couch, and with a laptop in the exact anatomical position its name assigns it. With minor variations over time, this arrangement is all I have ever known. I was functionally illiterate until my sister brought her desktop Apple computer back home from college in the summer of 1988, and I instinctively began, whenever she stepped away from it, to feel out the keyboard’s power to conduct my thoughts out of me and into the world. The experience was something like what we sometimes see when musical savants first feel their way towards an indifferent household’s patiently awaiting keyboard, and soon begin picking out melodies. That their keyboards are chromatic rather than alphanumeric, and that they are typically toddlers while I was already 16, does not diminish the similarity of the experience: I happened by chance to begin to type, and I knew it was the only thing I was going to be doing with my life, and I haven’t stopped since. If you put a writing implement in my hand, by contrast, I revert immediately to the de-facto illiteracy that had served me just fine up until 1988, in my life of endless reruns, feigned stomachaches and school absences, and profound and instinctive rejection of the disciplining function of the cursive lesson.

Come listen as Noah Feldman and I disport ourselves freely, next month in Cambridge, Mass.!

I mean to stress here that although I am in most respects too old to be considered an internet native, it is a significant biographical fact that my earliest experience of writing as self-expression occurred at the beginning of the era of exponential data explosion. The bit-torrent was only a light trickle then; by any plausible measure vastly more data, more by several orders of magnitude, have been brought into the world since 1988 than had been generated in the entirety of human history prior to that year. But still, my first discovery of writing occurred in an information-historical context closer to the current one than to the ancien régime of writing that lives on today mostly in the fetishism of specially curated writing-themed feeds.

Of course I still didn’t know a damned thing about anything when I began to feel my way around the keyboard. I mean, I knew Chrissy had at some point been replaced by Terri on Three’s Company, and the Ropers by Mr. Furley, but I could not have told you a thing about that fine entertainment’s historical debt to opera buffa, or to the farces of Molière. That would all come later. The problem was that no one in my social world up to that point gave any indication even of the possibility of undertaking such an archeology, of getting to the bottom of whatever our contemporary world put an offer to us. The California suburbs weren’t a Potemkin village exactly, in that you could pass through the storefronts and assure yourself of the three dimensions inside. But what was missing was the fourth dimension of time, of history: where all this came from in the first place, and no one in my world seemed even to be aware of this higher dimensionality. Well, I mean, my father was prone to saying, upon exposure to the representation, say, of some piece of medieval devotional art: “What I wanna know is how they crapped back then.” It never occurred to him that there are in fact people who have written books on this too. He never bothered to search out the names of Jacques Le Goff (Hélène’s distant relation, I’m told), or Jean Verdon. The truth is I don’t think he really wanted to know how people “crapped back then” at all; he only wanted, in saying that he did, to establish the great distance between himself —a straight-shooting, self-created, and consummately free man of the American West— and the sort of people who would devote their lives to studying the material, aesthetic, and symbolic attributes of a medieval altarpiece.

My friend Tasha Brubaker —who, the internet tells me, is now an Anglican minister, God bless her— broke me out of this hereditary attitude of complacency. We stood on a freeway overpass once in Sacramento, and I gestured out to the cars passing underneath, and said something like: “There must be some explanation for all this!” And she asked what I meant, and I said: “You know, I mean, there weren’t always freeways, right?” And she said: “I think you can study stuff like that at universities.”

And so not a decade later I found myself with my very own carrel on an upper floor of Butler Library at Columbia, with furnishings from the era of John Dewey if not before. I habitually went out for strolls in the stacks, and ran my fingers over the spines of thousands of volumes at a time — which, I found, was its own sort of reading. I filled my arms with as many as I could carry and I took them back to my private cell. All of them struck me as urgent; all of them, for esoteric reasons I could not explain, seemed to contribute some part of the answer to the question Tasha told me I might be able to resolve at a university: the question of the fourth dimension, of how we ended up with Three’s Company, and freeways, and plumbing… and the meta-question, too, I see now, of how, once we got all these things, it was consistently so easy for nearly everyone to take them for granted, as self-explanatory, as obvious and self-evident fixtures of our world: P.P. Howell’s Manual of Nuer Customary Law (1954); Vladimir Propp’s Russian Agrarian Feasts (1963); John Wisdom’s The Unconscious Origins of Berkeley’s Philosophy (1953) (in which the author suggests in a Freudian key that our favorite idealist philosopher’s distaste for “matter” may plausibly be traced back to his toilet-training, for which I suppose he, Wisdom, must have had to learn at least something about “how they crapped back then”).

I hoarded these and many other titles in my carrel, until some dreadful grad student determined they needed one of them for their “research” and issued a recall notice. Administratively speaking I was a grad student too, I concede, and somehow I managed to produce at least a minimally passable dissertation over the course of these Bildungsjahre. But the long-term result of my time in Butler Library was much less what one might ordinarily expect from a properly disciplinarized Ph.D. student, and much more like a willing, indeed eager, subjection to the same occult power portrayed in that one episode of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories, circa 1986, when a university janitor, mopping the library floors at night, suddenly collapses as all the knowledge in all the books within those walls miraculously enters his person.

In happier times. Hélène Le Goff (back row center), with, from left, Boris Kochno, unidentified, Lise Deharme, Elsa Triolet, Christian “Bébé” Bérard, Nusch Éluard, Dora Maar. Paris, late 1944.

IV.

Different people, of different ages and temperaments, are responding to the current transformations in different ways. For better or worse my own difficulty at present has much to do with the particular history I’ve described: that I long aspired to a variety of at least approximate omniscience, only to find that in the 21st century nothing could be tackier than to put one’s omniscience on display, given how cheap and easy of use our new-model omniscience-prostheses are. That it did not feel unworthy when these prostheses were books from the stacks, but started vaguely to feel that way when the prosthesis became the internet search, and now feels unmistakably that way when it is ChatGPT: all this remains mysterious to me. I still haven’t really understood what has happened, or why exactly it is experienced so obviously as a degeneration rather than a progression, even if, in some sense, I am now given a superpower I could only dream of in the stacks, recalling the Amazing Stories episode from years before.

One thought I have trouble suppressing is that this new superpower reveals the true nature of the earlier book-mediated dream, shows its essentially Faustian character, shows the longing for learning all along to have been something unseemly and quasi-pathological at best, diabolical at worst. We had spent some centuries convincing ourselves that books were “magic” (and taking for granted that magic is something we are free to dabble in), that they build us up rather than just puffing us up, that they are liberating rather than confining, and so on. But then when we innovate a new delivery system to give us what books gave us, but in faster, smaller, more concentrated doses, that old mythology breaks down and we say to ourselves, not for the first time: this is dangerous, this is evil.

It would be dishonest not to acknowledge that the path Tasha’s recommendation set me on has not really delivered on what I took to be its initial promise. I still don’t know a damned thing about anything. I know where freeways come from; I read Learning from Las Vegas (1972), which for a time was as ubiquitous on the milk-crate bookshelves of undergraduates as Tucker’s Marx-Engels Reader (1978); I discovered that even the post-conquest sprawl of the American West had a history expressible in language. But it took me until I was fifty or so to begin to understand how little one really gains by mastery of such things, to see the vanity in learning, to accept that whatever deserves the full name of truth has mystery built into it and therefore cannot be learned at all. In this light the myth of Faust seems to me now to invite a novel interpretation, but one that perhaps gets closer to its real significance as the expression of an anxiety appropriate to a particular moment in the history of information technology. What the scholar was hungry for, what he was willing to sign a contract in blood in order to get, might best be understood not only as revelation of nature’s most deep-hidden secrets, but as unimpeded and effortless access to these secrets’ commoner cousins: immediate recall of the GDP of Equatorial Guinea, an accurate measure of the biomass of krill. Long ago our teachers encouraged us to learn such things, and yet, now that we have the information technologies that make it realistic to do so, we find that in large enough doses these have something of the character of a poison.

V.

Human writing, under such conditions, I hope you can see, really ought not seek to push this poison on others. As a learner, I am hopeless. I have moved on to the hard stuff, the synthetic stuff; ChatGPT indulges me unflaggingly, for as long as I wish to go on, regarding the biomass of krill. But conscience now warns me against carrying over what happens in these sessions into my life as a writer. Your krill facts are waiting for you at that other site, should you want them; if I were to deliver them to you here, we really would be confronted with a “ludicrous no-brainer” of the sort Chirag Shah has offered to deliver me. But again, this current predicament is only the further development of what had at an earlier moment at least felt like a wholesome desire to share my wonder, before nature and history, by rendering it into vivid language. That language has now mostly been taken over by ludicrous non-brains forces a sober reevaluation of one’s methods and aims as a human writer.

I can recall reading Orhan Pamuk and Yaşar Kemal back to back, when I was living in Istanbul in 2002. In The Black Book (1990), Pamuk paints a fantastical scene of draining the Bosphorus and inventorying all the curious objects at its bottom, arranged in strata according to their historical era, from Viking bracteates to the brass seals of late-Ottoman viziers, and a practical plenitude of other such artifacts in between: just an unrelenting material litany of the Constantinopolitan historical sublime. In Three Anatolian Tales (1968), Kemal paints scenes of eagles soaring over poppy fields. It struck me then that I would like to write like Pamuk, for a while, master the art of the litany, get it out of my system, in order, at a certain age, to shift as it were to a Kemalist mode of expression and to seek to capture the simple unchanging beauty of our world. What I had not understood at the time was that this shift, from dazzling maximalism to elegiac honesty, might be not only a measure of healthy maturation, but a positive necessity in light of coming revolutionary transformations in the way language circulates.

But this honesty cannot, must not, be understood as simplicity, that gross pseudo-virtue of online writing-fetishist operations with their endless adulation of Saint Hemingway. Real resistance to the new language regime, properly proteinous injections into the codestream, must begin from an understanding that well-argued, clearly reasoned “think-pieces” built from tight sentences and focused on a well-defined topic are at this point hardly a human imperative either. Machines can handle all that.

Human writing, now like never before, must be something much closer to a direct dictation from the soul, as uncontaminated as possible by the residues of our private nocturnal trysts with the omniscience-engine. Let us trust our souls even to the point of allowing them to dictate falsehoods to us, and let us skip the fact-checking that would correct these. And let us own, and possibly even savor, the great irony that to take such dictation invites significant historical comparison with the technique of “automatic writing” as practiced by the Surrealists in the last century — automatic writing in a larger sense, of course, being exactly the thing we are seeking to defend ourselves against.

Such evident autoantonymy as this might, in the end, serve as yet another accidental proof, if you weren’t already convinced, that spirit and nature are parallel automata, each unfolding according to its own laws. It is not that causal interference across these two orders is strictly impossible, as some philosophers have insisted. But my goodness do we make a mess of things when we forget that the automatism of spirit is really nothing at all like the automatism of nature — the greatest of their many differences being that only the one is compatible with freedom.