Folly

I expect within a few months some literary critic will coin the insult, "... he/she writes like chatGPT."  It may have already happen.  If so, I've missed it.

I have three skills as a writer that a computer can't reproduce.

(a)  I am able to write from personal memory.  A computer can write from someone else's personal memory, but it can't extract from that what that memory says about ourselves.  Example, the recent post about Annie Lennox.

(b)  I can make an emotional connection between totally disparate situations, and explain why they're not disparate at all.  For example, that running D&D is similar to the experience of firefighters ... and no, not because we put out "fires."  There are completely different relationships.  A computer can copy the words describing the equivalency, but it can't perceive an equivalency that hasn't yet been seen.

(c)  I can invent something that doesn't exist.  At all.  As someone who's done this dozens of times, I dare a computer to do it once.

During my university years, in 1992, I took a full-year writing course from an award-winning writer, Aritha van Herk.  I'm surprised to find that I've never written about her before.  I found the experience less than satisfying.  She and I did not see eye-to-eye.  I'm certain she didn't enjoy having me in her class any more than my being there.

Aritha — and yes, as I've been in her house, and tapped glasses together at many a bar, and shared hugs, I feel perfectly justified in calling her by her first name — was, and is, a dyed-in-the-wool post-modernist.  To explain the position she took in her class, writing expresses creativity in the way that language is used to give an emotional impression of the subject material.  Because nothing is "new" in the world, the best we can do as writers is to thematically explain the personal contexts arising from historical moments in our lives, or the lives of other people.  Inspiration is found in what we feel, while events only matter in how they affect one's self, or one's own attributes, or characteristics, or actions.

If you can imagine a bottle with her and I in it ...

ChatGPT is a perfect post-modernist writing program.  Like the ouroboros, modern writing endlessly consumes itself, regurtitating words like alchemical efforts to transform letters into gold.  Having all the words at it's beck and call, the computer can endlessly reorder them to find the perfect, unequivocable arrangement that meets the sentiments of artistry for all such writers who've followed in the path of Guy de Maupassant and Gabriel Garcia Marquez ... in which disillusioned lives and destinies crash woefully on the rocks of cold, cruel reality.

Wikipedia describes post-modernism thusly:

"The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization."

One recognises the reprecussions of said philosophy in a great many parts of our modern culture:  disbelief and distrust of science, non-binary sexuality, ignorance of political events, categorical disrespect for anything that's established, a general distaste for ambition, panic-stricken screeds about the environment and virtually anything else ... and the cold, clear, systematic deconstruction by all sides of the so-called political spectrum of every thing.  Welcome to dissatisfaction.  Welcome to demoralisation.

Welcome to fear.

None of this is new.  Post-modernism has been shambling along for nearly six decades, four in the driver's seat.  There's no one left to run it, not any more; most of the voices that praised it's inception were eaten alive in its maw.  At this point, the philosophy is self-perpetuating, like a black pill waiting at the desk of a first-grader on day-one of school.

Allow me to confess a dirty secret:  I am a modernist.  I believe that culture is progressing, despite the masses convinced otherwise.  I believe in objectivity, and do not consider it "naive" to maintain that belief.  I believe that knowledge accumulates, and that with accumulated knowledge all things are possible.  I believe that stable philosophical identities, hierarchies and categories have not ceased to be, simply because a vast number of unenlightened dead-enders are convinced they don't, or shouldn't.

I appreciate the characterisation of these beliefs as "ideology," but I believe that's a mis-characterisation.  Calling a thing a thing doesn't make it that thing, no matter how many people buy into it.  But I appreciate the mis-characterisation because, for most of those making it, this is all they have.  They're certainly not educated, not in any way that counts.  They certainly haven't any faith, not in 14,000 years of human adaptation or anything else.  Steeped to the eyeballs in self-reflexive shit, they can't see their noses to see past them.  So, objectively, I expect them to react as they do, think as they do, proscribe action as they do ... and to be completely irrelevant to whatever happens.  They're not contributing; and, where the rubber meets the road, they haven't collectively enough power to obstruct it.  And so, like all of the 14,000 years of the past to date, the future will simply run right over them and not look back.

"You" might consider yourself one of "them."  If so, as I say, I appreciate your viewpoint.  As in, I understand that you don't really have one.

Now, because I've used the word "objective" as a philosophical position, Ayn Rand is going to come up.  Let me be clear on this subject.  "Objectivism" is a terrible choice of words for the wish-fulfillment fantasy heroism she espouses.  I've read The Fountainhead several times; I've read Atlas Shrugged thrice.  I've read As I Lay Dying, a book that many don't know even exists.  If anyone would like to go toe-to-toe with me on Rand's philosophy, I'm ready.  As a diagnosis, her books have merit.  As a prescriptive, it kills the patient.  It's not "objective" in any way, manner or sense of the word.  Calling a thing a thing doesn't make it a thing.  But because a lot of very poorly educated political hacks embraced the term because it sounds professional, we're stuck with it.  Let me be clear that what I espouse is "objectivity," as in its relationship to "subjectivity," and NOT Randian philosophy.

Personally, I have one argument in making my case that the world is going to get better than this.  That argument is that it is better than it was five years ago.  And ten years ago, and fifteen, and twenty, and every time period that I can count since arriving on this foolish blue marble.  Seeing the betterment is awfully hard for most people, but it's absolutely evident every day, everywhere.  I am writing my thoughts in a place where others will read them, for free.  I am under no obligation to respect anyone else's thoughts, and yet I'm still free to write mine.  All the positions and arguments in the world have no actual influence on my thinking or my life.  I know this, because I remember a time when everything I'm doing right this moment, with this sentence, was impossible.  I clearly remember it.  At a time when I was a full-grown adult with a child.  I remember a time up until a few years ago when the work I'm doing for a living didn't exist, not in a manner where I could live and work in my own space, interact with others around the globe and be paid for it.

As a continually ambitious adult, still producing new work at a time when my aged peers are trying to make due with football and house repairs, to stave off the boredom, I find myself investigating and writing about material that would have been impossible to find and correlate as little as three or four years ago.  All in a place, where I don't have to leave the same chair.

Not progress?  Not change the old to the new?  Not obliterate dead-end philosophies?  One has to be blind not to see what's going on.  Most of what's being written about, talked about, reported about, argued about, defended, attacked, is simply not germane to anything that's actually happening.  Millions upon millions of humans existing in the world are forever now in the Land of the Forgotten ... as will most of this inanity, thoughtlessness and pearl-clutching that comprises the universal public discourse.

Ignore it.