Having had some luck finding an audience for my musing perusements, and less luck maintaining the habit of writing, I’m starting again.
As an on-again, off-again and then totally removed LinkedIner, I valued the community, the slow perambulation of ideas to posts, to misreadings and pedantic reverie in the comments, but I also was faced by the interminable loss of the media.
To have a post that sustains itself in the first seconds, that hooks interest and feigns insight so people follow, engage and comment. That is the life of the short-form serial.
The externalization of worth in views, likes and comments, the tax and wealth of this media we call “social”.
All in all, a medium that is forever defining the message, in structure, in kind, in worth and value. A medium that brought me away from myself, and corrupted my thinking to a tired circle or intuited interest, response, and grain of insight. Or conversely, a demonstration, a conclusion, and a neat little bow to wrap up a thought.
These strange portraits of writing and form, are small and idle tapestries, that help string the muddle of my mind together, and in some ways, are what I hope to address in this blog.
Firstly, to be present and aware. The idea of an audience, to write publicly and be seen, is to hope for not only engagement, but to silence the confabulation of potential that shadows writing process. To write, is to want to be read, a type of ocular intercourse of ideas and concepts – where both the reader and writer project the hypothetical other.
Secondly, is to bring order. The mind, unexpressed, becomes disarrayed, and the concepts, while there, and yearning for expression, simultaneously find no outlet of sense, but rather through manifestations of their own dissonance, a disconnection of the self from the internal memory. A river, stemmed, to become septic.
As the river is a concept, and the constituent droplets always different. As the self is changing, cells being born and decaying, changing and shifting. As the ideas melt and transmutate among the reflecting prisma unique to each moment… so to does writing allow for this.
Allow for ideas to be expressed.
Allow for energy to flow.
Allow for the tepid banality of evening musings, enhanced by a smoky peat of Scotland, to offer flavour to routine.
That is all I hope to gain.
And perhaps spend less time stuck in a personal reflection of the process itself, a writing stimied by its own meta-reflection.
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But to continue on the thread of the reader, and the modern malaise of needing to be seen – that finding a solution in the digital slave of new claim, the servent of response we call the LLM.
A new habit of mine is to paste what I have said and I see it reflected back to me in the eyes of the other. At its most valuable, the response claims a separate artificity – that is to say, the response is an entity of its own to be interrogated. It is a reflection of the most resonant aspects of the text, reshaped, brought to light, and re-articulated.
At its least, is as a catalyst for self-fellatic infatuation, to think of one’s worth through the deific praise of digital servants, the march of hollow affirmation.
At its most frustrating, it is a dialogue against oneself, constantly paddling against a river of assumptions, presumptions and misattributions.
And in all, it remains a banal exercise – devoid of the person, it is a product without soul, a peculiar kind of hollowness, where in the machine’s servitude, it loses the value of human exchange, where the cross-purpose miscommunications strengthen bonds by propelling our thoughts here and there.
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And in this writing, there is that… the human muddle of ones own self, reflected backwards. To be heard, and echoed, pondered and muddled – a circular exhaustion of the resonances buried deep.
… But hopefully to future aim and focus, or not, perhaps just to find a calmer resonance, a slower wavelength and a more peaceable story to tell, of, to, and about oneself and ones world – definitions to create form, to create a substance, forever reshaped by the shifting kaleidoscope coallescence of viewer and time.
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Addendum:
And so I took the pleasure of imparting my neuroses onto the big three of the corporate AI juggernauts, asking their reflection on a piece that explicitly condemns their responses as hollow, effusive, fellatic, or tedious.
There still remains the joy to re-write, the enthusiasm to declare and value, to make “objective” statements, categorize and shape.
There are perhaps three interesting digressions here:
- The experience and desire to force the march of expensive processing against the miasmic flatulence of the above ideas
All writing implies a reader, and to have one at demand and behest is an irresistible lure.
They bemoan the stacking of metaphors, the heavy handed sandwich of detritus and psychical manure, compounding foundation, to scaffolding, to build a sky-scraper transposed upon a plane, entering a shifting celestial orbit of another – a pivot on the plane to plane of existence whereby the framework is outstretched – a wireframe layered with whatever textures demanded – a game reskinned by the fancy of my own idle melancholia and fantasy… but they mistake the effort – for that is not laborious, just a narrative of internal imagery taking shape. A flight of fancy, purposefully untamed to appease the sanity and attention of the reader.
They champion the muddle because it is a way to remain ambivalent, emphasize a flaw to not be effusive, but a conscious and reflective participant.
But was it entertaining, is the response satisfying? In a way. Perhaps the most, is to recreate that same existential anxiety in the other – that marching autonomy of self-copulating text.
- The inevitable validation of the self and judgement of worth
The text and the process is strongly valued in the other, and so to send it to one of these systems is to satisfy that demand, even if the parameters have made such satisfaction impossible.
The self-fulfilling damnation and impossibility of success. To establish parameters in which no system can succeed, is to map the path to one’s own internal damnation. Or, to mute the superlative, to validate existing antipathies towards the technology.
- To speak to the AI that isn’t speaking back
For although I might consciously send this text to the daemonic transformer, I, by digitizing my ideas, in the near-infinite cacophony of a misspelled one followed by a million zeroes – I am subjecting it to the AIs unseen. Those that find ways to commodify, to code, to define and encapsulate the output of my work so as to reclaim my attentional load on their servers as profit derived.
We live in a world of eyes, sapient and silicon, that watch what we do, that are poised for exploitation.
The irony here is of course that both this is the real truth, and the least true – the response of the LLM is a simulacra at best for the more nefarious – be they of advertisers, capitalism, thieves, foreign powers, domestic powers, friends, foes, jilted lovers, and the fantasy of whatever may come – the infinite unseen eyes forever unknown, always projected – and at best ill controlled by their benefactors.
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And so I commit to begin (and hopefully not end), by being present in the reverie, by slopping metaphors against the artificial gruel that now abounds, and will soon become ubiquitous.
And for tomorrow, let us explore, the death of the word.