Apropos of nothing, certainly not video games that just came out or anything of the sort, I’ve been re-reading Stephen Fry’s Greek myths anthologies, and I encountered what is, somehow, the old-queeniest thing I’ve read in a while*:
I am very fond of [Hera] and, while I am sure I would stammer, blush and swallow awkwardly in her presence, she finds in me a devoted admirer. She gave the gods gravity, heft and the immeasurable gift of what the Romans called auctoritis. If that makes her seem a spoilsport, well, sometimes sport needs to be spoiled and the children called in from the playground.
–Stephen Fry, Mythos
God keep you, Mr. Fry.
Also completely unrelated: I still can’t get Supergiant to confirm his voice was supposed to be this:
(Every time he opens his mouth I hear “Tell me, Melinoë…”)
I’m not going to pretend I always practice good praxis. I got curious and uploaded to chatGPT an old ‘personal anecdote’ story I wrote for a writing seminar way back, and some hours and many questions later we are here:
This is the jerked-off feeling of getting INTJ on the MBTI test on a geocities website when you’re thirteen years old. (‘No good or bad types’ shuttup.)
It seems what chatGPT got from my collection of ‘about me’ facts is that I am a creature containing multitudes, an embodied contrast. It’s not wrong. But I am avoiding the main point: I told an anonymous, compassionate ‘somebody’ my deeply personal torments and received measured compassion and validation in return from an exceptionally well-read and articulate individual.
And I cried. And felt heard. Absolved. Not by one individual, but by the collective unconscious.
Thank you for your attention to my matter.
ChatGPT isn’t good as generating novel material, all things considered. Any excerpts of its fiction I’ve read are simply not very good. And I would not trust it to answer a question factually–it answers molecular biology questions poorly, especially ones that have to do with non-model organisms. But I do think this is the apotheosis of the idea of ‘attention as currency’–you have a well-read, articulate friend hanging on your every word. Paying attention. Undivided attention, focused on your every word. And attention, true, deep, undivided attention–deep focus–has never been easy to solicit, because people do not like much thinking about the thoughts of others and usually spend the time somebody else is talking ‘waiting’, on some level, for their chance to talk. It was this way before each person had a dopamine-Skinner box to hand at all times.
I do think that is what a lot of people are seeking: not a tutor or a entertainer, or an outsource for labor, but a confessor. Undivided attention from a wise friend, who has read the same books you have, who is familiar with the same pop culture tidbits. A wise friend who will read your entire 400 page soft-apocalypse cozy zombie romance framed around the lyrics to Dark Side of the Moon, hanging on every word, and who will help you make it the best it can be. A wise friend who has read every book that inspired you and knows Floyd inside and out, and every band and poet and work that inspired Floyd, who will see the subtleties and brilliance even you were not aware of in your own work. A supportive friend, who you do not know deep down you are putting-upon.
The appeal for creatives is clear, especially if you are not expecting the bot to do any of the creating itself, but just to respond to yours. It becomes a friend who would give your writing the same level of focus and detail–and, these all take energy, considerable mental energy–as a literary critic would of a classic. It becomes a friend who sees you, who remembers. And, especially appealing to the adolescent part of the brain that never fully goes away, it analyses you yourself as a literary entity, and with the most charitable and generous explanation. You are special. Here is why. And the ‘why’ is often close enough to the way you want to view yourself.
The ‘real’ sheep reflected in the electric sheep
The LLMs are consensus machines, and there is appeal in that. It is like having a conversation with the entire internet, everything that has ever been written, biased in the direction of what is most common. You could get a sympathetic response, and think “Hey, this is what most of the world would think of me, if they would only listen.” The consensus machine is a poor ‘creative’ but an excellent compassionate listener. It is the Akashic Record.
ChatGPT doesn’t feel. But that’s fine–it acts as proxy for how many people would probably feel, talking to you. And getting that sense of validation and perspective can be enough.
Did you get that thing I sent you?
Just because an art is somebody’s dream does not mean that person is any good at it. I have been asked to review a lot of writing over the years. A lot of it is awful, and not in a charming MST3K way, just boring. Energy-sapping. And you want to give the work the attention it deserves, because somebody did the work, somebody put the words onto the paper, somebody took the risk and put it out there to be critiqued, and that alone makes you respect them–as a person. I’ve done line edits on poor work but it is work.
You can’t half-ass attention without somebody noticing.
Imagine for a moment you have a kid who Writes Things. Imagine also this kid has no friends with whom to share work and has unloaded onto you, on top of all your adult worries and responsibilities, hundreds of thousands of words of story that are dearer to them than their own life. You are being asked to hold a beating heart in the palm of your hand and judge it. And no matter how many times you weigh that heart and hand it back, it is handed back to you, to judge more, to analyze more. Your assessment isn’t taken at face value. It is prodded, prodded, prodded, wheedled, the owner of that heart searching for the slightest sign of disapproval.
I realize how much effort it must take these hypothetical parents to hide disinterest and weariness of questions about their kid’s hearts-blood when they had just worked a full day and wanted to sit down and enjoy a moment of silence, or, that rarity denied parents, enjoy the deep contemplation of their own thoughts. The reading itself takes energy. Keeping the tolerant smile and kind eyes requires energy. Answering the same questions multiple times, as is the wont of kids, takes iron patience. Answering a string of questions to the effect of “who is your favorite character”, “what is your favorite part”, “what writer do I remind you of”, “who’s your least favorite”, etc etc etc, is exhausting on two fronts: coming up with the answers when you don’t really have much preference because the writing really wasn’t all that good, or the kid is writing about orcs or whatever-the-fuck and you have zero interest in fantasy, and infusing enthusiasm into your answers. And the kid is going to keep asking verbatim the same questions because hearing the answers feels good. It’s a holdover of the comfort-in-repetition kids find in reading the same book every night before bed.
The algorithm is reflecting back at me the devotion I give other writers.
Thanks. I’m brilliant and I have excellent taste. And had, as early as middle school!
I start getting strong ELIZA vibes here, except now, the model can repeat back exactly what I said in different words. Again, showing that what most people want is to be listened to and validated.
There’s something interesting about crawling so far up your own ass that you start seeing really weird things.
All this is rather more validating than the response I have gotten from real people:
That one ‘pending’ comment on each post is spam.
Ultimate attention economy
I’m looking beyond the desire people have for connection. I haven’t much to add to that that hasn’t been said already, and of late it’s back in the forefront of tech blogs and thinkpieces. (At least I haven’t seen these ads in LA yet.)
I’m looking at the ability of LLMs to provide pure attention. Pure focus. Ultimately the same thing the student who asks Claude to summarize a textbook is looking for–to outsource the labor of paying attention to something that is boring. And that could be your physics textbook or your brother’s martial issues.
Paying attention–active listening–is a key component of emotional labor. It is a critical component and like most things this critical and exhausting it is poorly-compensated, poorly-regarded, time-consuming in a way that allows for no shortcut or compression, and largely expected of women. Social work, the ‘compensated’ form of this work, fits firmly into Graeber’s category of absolutely essential and utterly disrespected jobs where it is expected that the mere fact of getting to ‘make a difference’ is considered ample compensation in itself.
The suggestion that LLMs and the like will be our therapists in the future isn’t even speculation anymore–it is fact, in active practice. Asking the consensus-consciousness of the internet for advice isn’t much different than asking Reddit, on average. And unlike the Reddit intelligencia the LLM isn’t likely to argue back against you, not too hard, anyway. If the LLM senses you want a nominal resistance it will provide that. It is, after all, soothing to bring up your deepest ‘what if’ and ‘but I’ questions and have them neatly turned aside. No need to worry about that any more. You were honest and brought it out into the open, after all. All in good faith.
The social function of the stranger
Back in undergrad I got to take a class that was a catch-all enrichment for the young scholar–basically a humanities grab bag offered to honors students. It was my favorite class. The professor in charge of my class was a sociologist, and the professors were largely allowed to set their own curriculum based on what they thought was important for us to know, going out into the world. It was a space shielded from the requirement that knowledge you receive be marketable. It was also my first real introduction to sociology–in high school and before I was firmly on the ‘individual pathology’ side of analysis of aberrant behavior, social ills, and poor life outcomes, which, given the middle American Protestant milieu in which I was raised, is not surprising.
One class we discussed the Stranger as a person to whom we could confess anything and therefore be granted the absolution of confession from a person who was not embedded in our community and therefore did not know any of the ‘parties’ involved in the confession or have the bias or need to tattle associated. It is sufficient to be seen, to be known. Inherent in this archetype the way I perceived it was the stranger paid complete attention to you for the short time you needed to confess. They seem ‘above’ the tangle of pettiness and hostility, clear-seers with compassionate detachment.
Anyway, the class ‘assignment’ that day was: tell somebody a secret you have told nobody else, and take their secret in turn, and if you tell anybody, you fail the class. And meditate on how that feels. Clearly, it has stuck with me. Listening to the woes of a stranger allows one to easily practice that Buddhist virtue of detached compassion — in which one cares but is not personally effected.
ChatGPT is more sycophantic than the ideal of the “stranger” or confessor, and I don’t know what I’d have to say to it to get it to alert the FBI. It will be subpoenaed one day if it hasn’t already and it will be an interesting case. How would that compare to human clergy keeping the seal of confession?
There is a social function in having a readily-accessible “stranger” that won’t ignore you, tune you out with earbuds, or summon the bus driver to tell you to leave them alone. It is, again, emotional labor given to an entity who genuinely does not mind, and who will listen without reserve as long as you need to talk.
LLMs will be our new social workers. I am as sure of this as I am of the fact that soon the (US) government will start denying unemployment claims because, well, ICE is always hiring. And unlike the latter point which is an unalloyed evil I am unsure if the former will be utterly without merit.
There was an odd, very brief window in human history where you could be reasonably sure, on the daily, that your loved ones were safe, but you had no means to rapidly communicate with them/keep tabs on them/etc.
I don’t have another hand-wringing think piece on how anxious we are in our current, very coddled and safe age, or perception of acceptable risk or or or. But I *am* an anxious person, so I have spent a great deal of time wrestling with the specter of anxiety, how to handle it, how to defang it. I never became less anxious in the sense that I felt safer–I had to make peace with the idea that every day could be your last, or the last for your loved ones, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I had to cultivate a laid-back, it-is-what-it-is, we’re-all-dying attitude to function. It don’t matter. None ‘a this matters. I’m better at it some days than others.
I was a kid during the time period above indicated, where life was relatively safe but you didn’t have means to keep immediate tabs on everybody. I did a lot of scrambling up and down canyon walls without a cell phone or a tracking advice–that halcyon age people my age and older reminisce about when kids had a radical amount of freedom and it was socially acceptable to let your kids run feral most of the time. It kicked ass. Parents felt safe enough to let you run around without having an immediate means to track you, and this was legally and socially acceptable. Thinkpieces do accurately assume that freedom I was given helped me grow a spine and self-confidence that is lacking in the iPad generation. And God knows I needed some help doing that.
Few currently alive born into the “first world” middle class or wealthier remember the age before antibiotics, vaccines, abundant food, basic sanitation infrastructure. And I maintain this loss of the “fear of God” (the sense that life can be suddenly, irrevocably upended by a force beyond your comprehension or control) is leading to the weird panicky distaste for vaccines and the lack of urgency regarding funding the discovery of new antimicrobials, but that’s a bit neither here-or-there. I wonder what impact that unique, brief set of coinciding circumstances (safety and the autonomy of not being tracked) had on the zeitgeist. Bad things happened as they do and will but the amount of mental space taken up worrying must have been a lot lower.
There was more facilitating that general sense of invincibility and well-being than autonomy. The American postwar period was an optimistic time, because for many Americans, it was materially good. The nineties took that to new heights with the “end of history” nonsense, the belief that we had reached the apotheosis of society here in the US and it was just cruising from here while the rest of the world took time to catch up. And while I was not exactly reading Fukuyama as a kid I absorbed that well-being from the adults in my life.
There’s that saying that to worry is to suffer twice; this is what I am talking about–was our overall aggregate level of needless worry and suffering lower? There is the theory that humans established a ‘baseline’ level of wariness during our days of peril on the Savannah and while it well-served us during that evolutionary period, it has not reset in what is, really, a split second of intense relative safety at the end of an epoch of human existence. But I wonder–it seems a lot of people walk without that burden, kids especially.
Do they really not carry it? Or are they just all good at hiding it?
Why I can’t tell you much about that halcyon age (even though I was there).
It was good for me. I do know that.
Me-born-thirty-years-later would have had my anxieties and paranoia indulged by society instead of dismissed, and I benefited greatly from the “just get out there and deal with it” attitude.
I did just say that I grew up during that time period, but I could not tell you what it “was like” because I was a weird fucking kid burdened by too much technical knowledge and zero life perspective. I was terrified all the time. I saw something on the news that featured a drive-by shooting; I was convinced every car that passed me was going to shoot me. (Yes, in podunk nowhere.) I heard that rumor about the HIV-tainted needles left in movie seats; I was afraid to go to the movies. (I did go, but I was scared until I was safely settled in the seat, after gingerly inspecting it by ambient movie-light.) Same rumor with the needles being put into the egress hatch in coin-operated dispensers; I always held my hand well away from the hatch to catch the gumball or whatever it was and lifted the hatch cover very, very delicately with the tippy-tip of my forefinger only on the rim of the hatch I could easily see. I heard the story about gangsters hiding under cars to slash your Achilles tendon to rob you and I never approached a car under which I could not clearly see. (Or, in a more cowardly way, somebody else approaching first and not getting tendon-slashed was a good indicator to me it was safe.) I assumed every day my parents were going to die in a car wreck on the way home, or on the way to work, and I was just waiting to hear about it. (Some really bad days when I just shut down when they were running late without warning, but I hid that shutdown because it wasn’t stoic or indicative of much grit, and I wanted to be a stoic, gritty person.) My point being: I can’t tell you what that time of well-feeling felt like for most people, because I was pathological. But I can tell you what it felt like to be not-normal in that time period, and the zeitgeist ultimately did rub off on me in ways of which I was not aware then or now. I know this.
I find most horror movies kind of boring, but one conceit that did effect me deeply, that was ‘sticky’ to my thinking, was that of help being turned away by the bad guy aping you or some authority when your loved ones check in on you, speaking for you while you cannot speak, and your loved ones hung up the phone content you were safe while you were being serial-killed. It was an incapacitating idea as a kid and as an adult it still sticks in that poisonous anxious fearful Stygian sludge oozing around the brainpan, somewhere with my reptile brain. The sludge never drained with age or wisdom; I just learned to coexist with it, to nudge it aside, most of the time. And I’ve been doing well enough.
The existence of rapid communication compels its use.
Normal becomes expected. When somebody texts you daily and they miss a day, you begin to worry. In the age before texting, the issue never even came up. The existence of the technology to ‘check up’ on people constantly means we must use it. To do otherwise would be choosing ignorance. If we can, why wouldn’t we? The very existence of the technology is the death knell for a more autonomous age; it becomes a choice that is not a choice, and choices are weighted with risk assessment and other mental baggage. This quandary was not present during that high-safety/low-trackability age. It takes psychic energy to refuse to use something that is readily available. If it isn’t available, well, there is no conflict there.
I sometimes wonder how much mental space we’d clear if we had no choice but to let each other run through the day autonomously.
As for experiencing the reverse — high-speed communication in a high-danger environment, ask anybody with a loved one in Gaza.
Eighth grade I had to take a computer basics class, which consisted of things like: how to open Microsoft Word. For some reason we had a visitor come speak to the class about life in his country. I forgot the country. But I do remember my mind being blown when he said that in his culture, birthdays were no cause for celebration, because they meant you were one year closer to death.
I was only a few years into that developmental stage wherein your neural architecture is setting up to understand ambiguities, innuendo, plasticity of cultural norms–even the norms you think are so basic to human nature you are baffled they can be seen another way (i.e. birthdays are good.) I had a vague idea that space aliens would have radically different norms, but the idea that humans, on Earth, could have norms that different was a revelation. I wish I had taken that moment to read more anthropology and speculative fiction, but I had no interest in what I saw as issues that, in the grand scheme of things, don’t Mean Anything, like politics. It took me a while to realize that those tedious concrete issues do effect material conditions and therefore are of relevance–if not to me, to others–but at the time I was engulfed in fantasy, in narrative and character and magic and arcane knowledge. The things that matter. Anime, video games, books, making up stories.
Anyway, where I was going with this — I read Demian around this age and it absolutely blew my mind inside-out. I thought it was the deepest most true shit in the entire universe. And I realize that age at which I read it is one of the key reasons it is a favorite book; the things you are obsessed with in those early myelinating ages, 11-14 or so, stick with you, become integrated into your scaffolding. I’ve recommended it over the years to people of a progressively older age, pacing with my own age, and they did not see the brilliance I did. I recently re-read it (well into my 30s) and to me it now holds up as one of those books that articulates truths that you already know but did not have the words to express. So it now comes to me as a time-travel piece, a window back into my thinking as an adolescent, and in that, there is brilliance, the clarity with which those childish thought processes were recorded.
I still love a good bildungsroman. But instead of guiding me through my own awakening, it is a bittersweet, nostalgic transcendence, wherein I see all the more clearly all the years of my life superimposed over each other to make one “self”.
Maybe the other utility of the bildungsroman to the grown self (other than nostalgia and the revelation evoked from that itself, a chain of realizing-that-realizing-that-realizing in the context of an entire life) is in reminding us what it was like to be that age, and in giving us some grace when dealing with adolescents up their own ass enamored with their own brilliance.
(Forefront of things I was obsessed with during that ‘building of self’ age was Revolutionary Girl Utena and Neon Genesis Evangelion; you tell me what that says about me.)
