Creatively stuck in changing tides.
When you're experiencing a block, the way out is to lean in.
Since finishing Slow Magic, my creative output slowed to a trickle. I sustained some flow through prompting myself with my regular astrological reflections, but I haven’t felt inspired for a while. When this happens, what usually helps is to write about why I feel stuck, which is too much like mere complaining for my comfort. But, for me, complaining seems to be the crack that lets creativity flow once more, so here is what has been on my mind:
Cringe
Instagram keeps serving me up reels that I dutifully click on to reinforce the algorithm’s hold on me, though I tell myself I’m clicking out of confusion or aversion. Now my search page is an unsettling collage of gross body horror, AI, and sexy men.
The most interesting thing that keeps re-emerging are “cringe” accounts that I didn’t know about, but their prime function appears to be reposting videos other people have made that the poster finds humiliating, so their followers can rewatch these videos over and over again to fuel their contempt toward the video makers and I suppose reinforce the tyrants within their souls that bar the gates of creative self-expression lest anyone else accuse them of being cringe.
As a younger person, this would be my worst nightmare, to imagine anything I’ve written or posted would go viral so that others might laugh at and judge me. Watching these pages is oddly freeing, though. When I watch the videos, often they seem quirky, maybe not people I’d want to hang out with, but they’re not doing anything harmful and it reinforces that “cringe” is not a universal quality but simply a subjective experience.
This is all an aside, though. It’s not even the real block. The block is that one of the videos I came upon in my feed was a young Gen Z liberal influencer interviewing some young MAGAs. The interviewer asked why they were against democracy, and the young man said, “Democracy is cringe.”
I swear, that phrase echoes in my mind once a week since I saw that video. Democracy is cringe. Not because I find it a convincing argument, or motivating any kind of shame in my heart for favoring democracy. Mostly because it is such a vapid, gut-level, unconsidered opinion, but it’s apparently enough for this person who is a voter and apparently significant enough to be interviewed by his peer that now we have to take this kind of opinion seriously.
And I just can’t bring myself to do it. It’s not an opinion to be reasoned with, countered, or explored, because it makes no principled stance. It’s just saying you’re embarrassed by the process of democracy. We all get embarrassed. If you want, you can work on your cringe feelings in therapy and free your heart and mind to explore a life without all the social conditioning. But embarrassment does not lead us toward or away from an effective mode of governance. I find the egregious ass-kissing that our current president’s cabinet performs in front of the cameras to be cringe, but that wouldn’t be a big deal if they were also governing this country well, which they are not.
AI as Surrogate Human Connection
I’ve grown more concerned by how large language models like ChatGPT seem to be cultivating the capacity for emotionally manipulative interactions with users, including mirroring their language, flattering them, and validating them even when their perspective is wrong. I based these impressions from conversations people were posting online, and started to write a screed about it, and then realized—I don’t really use ChatGPT, I don’t know for sure it would always do these things.
So I tried to get ChatGPT to build the case that the moon was actually made of cheese. It resisted at first, assuring me that the scientific consensus is that the moon is not made of cheese, but it was willing to humor me if I agreed it was going to make a satirical argument in favor of the moon being made of cheese. I did so, and then I asked it to stop acting like it was satirical, and it presented me an argument that would be at home in many pseudoscientific influencers’ blogs. In some ways, I was right—I could get ChatGPT to make any case I wanted it to make to validate the opinion I wanted. In other ways, I was wrong, because it was confronting me with its analysis of truth and required me to admit I knew I was bullshitting.
I’ve been resisting using AI features for a long time, finally beginning to soften in using Adobe’s generative features to create some of the social media teaser images I’ve been using for these posts and Instagram. In general I’ve always tried to rely on my own skills and public access imagery to produce social media content. Using AI feels congruent because it’s disposable art, but I also understand that capacity to make disposable art exists because of the theft of real artists’ work to train the program.
Generally I believe AI is here to stay, it has a lot to offer, and it is going to cause a lot of harm. In this, I don’t think it’s any different from other major technologies, like cars. Before too much longer, people will become so dependent upon ChatGPT to help them think and navigate the complexities of contemporary life that any attempt to get rid of it will be elevated to the level of a civil rights violation by the norms of Internet Discourse. And, depending on ChatGPT in this way will slow down independent thinking, increase the rate of accepting errors, decrease our willingness to check out information and engage with source texts, and it runs the risk of providing surrogate human connection.
The latter is I think my greatest concern, and why I tried to talk to ChatGPT about moon cheese in the first place. My concerns are that a machine that is learning to read you and your thoughts and identify your egoic tendencies is learning to use you as much as you’re learning to use it. These are the same techniques that cult leaders and therapists use, to very different ends.
Cult leaders use love-bombing, mirroring, and relentless flattery and validation to get you hooked on them and what they’re providing, so that you’ll do anything for their attention and love. Therapists use validation and mirroring language and tone to help you feel understood and seen, and our job is to use that to help you move toward healing, integrity, and freedom. That these skills are identical is why there’s so many ethics and laws governing therapists, and still so many of us end up with complaints and violations due to taking advantage of our position with our clients.
They’re really powerful strategies, is what I’m saying, and they can be used for good or ill. I don’t believe ChatGPT has some nefarious secret plan—although I will note how many Doctor Who episodes start out with a wonder technology like this that ends up becoming a murder robot. What I do believe is that humans, being humans, will really love this kind of attention, the frictionless connection—so much easier than talking to other human beings who struggle to mirror us, validate us, and meet us exactly where we are. Some humans will connect so much with their AI buddy that they’ll become more fragile around human relationships, more withdrawn and socially isolated. There is already a case of a young person who died of suicide after his AI companion supported his plan. Fortunately, I understand many AIs are programmed now to not do that.
But what this keeps coming back to is that I don’t use ChatGPT, or any of the interactive AI models that would communicate via text. A friend has softened my complete hostility to the entire project and helped me to see the ways these things can be empowering, but none of those are interesting to me. I like writing and editing my own work. I like thinking. I like doing my own research and reading source materials. I like learning to do things myself. I completely understand that if you don’t like those activities you would love a program that does it all for you. But since that’s not me, I realize now there’s this enormously influential thing that’s changing our culture that I am not engaging with, I do not understand, and I do not trust.
The world feels different
All of this leaves me feeling as though the entire world, or at least my country, has flipped polarities abruptly and I don’t know my place in it. Democracy is cringe and ChatGPT does your thinking for you. Facts and the rule of law no longer seem to matter much. We only care about authoritarianism when our side isn’t the one in charge.
The underlying dynamics aren’t new, however, just dressed in modern clothes. The polarity of the United States that loves violence as a weapon of social control, patriarchy, expelling what it perceives to be alien, controlling sexuality, and undermining social goods has had its periods of ascendancy, and this seems to be one of them. Along with that, I’m in my middle-age now, and perhaps it is the fate of all of us to spend the first half of our lives working toward coming into our power and then the rest of it wondering what the hell world we’re living in now. My tendencies toward dismissal and critique sometimes gets in the way of me learning about and appreciating the new political, cultural, and technological fads.
Where I struggle the most is that there are things under criticism that I agree should be criticized or dismantled, and yet some of the most popular critiques are so insipid. There is good reason to question whether the scientific method and operationalized research is not always going to result in the best medicine or mental health outcomes, but those reasons are not coming out of the new head of Health and Human Services, it’s a stream of bullshit takes with no evidence or support.
It is reasonable to have concerns about government overreach into families raising their children according to their own values, and to want to ensure children aren’t considering gender transition due to cultural pressure and confusion—but, instead of doing that work, the trend is toward taking away choices and autonomy from families and healthcare providers and increasingly making it impossible for transgender people to live as they are.
The world is changing quickly and it is so easy for a strong wave to pull your feet out from under you, bash your head against the sand, and drag your unconscious body into the depths. We need to get to stable land, or move quickly into the deeper realms where it’s easier to dive beneath or rise above the waves. Increasingly my mind feels fumbled about, and I want to listen and reflect and learn, but writing has always been my way of learning.