Welcome new subscribers to The Raspberry Patch—I note several. You arrive at a time of transition. As veteran readers know we are now in the home stretch of a long run to unfurl The Age of Spectacle manuscript: After today only two more posts remain, so we will, as promised, cross the finish line before the end of February. Some may notice that I have added one more part to Chapter 10 than earlier indicated, not because the chapter has since become longer, but rather because I wanted to once again repost the expanded table of contents to the project at the end of the posts, as I have done in the past, to give recently joined subscribers a chance to get arms around the whole project design. That adds enough length to make it impossible to complete the chapter in only one more post after this one. Substack’s email-length limits may not be breeched.
Let me repeat, too, for the benefit of new subscribers, that the archives for The Raspberry Patch, including all the Age of Spectacle posts, are available in revised form. That includes 68 mostly long-form essays since The Raspberry Patch was born on Substack on January 4, 2024. They do not match exactly the posts when they first appeared; they are cleaned up and most are substantively more advanced. This enables all those who wish to invest time and effort to start at the beginning and read through at their own pace to the end to do so.
That said, if and when The Age of Spectacle project becomes a published book, it will have been further improved, perhaps significantly so, by the hand of an editor. It will also have covers and cover art and an index and a foreword and look lots better than it ever could as a series of electrons-only Substack posts. Of course, if that ever happens you’ll want to buy a copy, bien sûr. (Please forgive my occasional French insertions if they bother you; I have picked up what little French I know accidentally as a kind of linguistic lint.)
Most of you will probably have noticed a February 11 post entitled “White Magic at the National Archives? Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle No. 1.” Unlike the preamble to the Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle project announced some weeks ago, the “Premature Epilogue”—since numbered The Age of Spectacle No. 45A—which was sent to paid subscribers alone on February 1 without a teaser intro and a paywall, the February 11 post did have a teaser intro and a paywall notice. (I finally figured out how to do that…..) I saw that free subscribers have one chit to read a paywalled post, and maybe some of you used your chit for his past Tuesday’s post; I don’t know how to tell. So, then, has the money come rolling in during the past three days? Ha!: Wouldn’t you like to know? (Hint: no.)
Anyway, this will be The Raspberry Patch norm—teaser intro plus paywall—for the Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle after the final part of The Age of Spectacle manuscript is completed on February 28. So save up your pennies—which the President has ordered no longer to be minted (even though, technically/legally the order must come from the Secretary of the Treasury…..but if Scott Bessent will allow a digital DOGE coup at the Treasury it is unlikely that he would stand athwart the President’s animus for the penny)—in case you decide to spring for a paid subscription, which is, I would aver, still pretty inexpensive even by Substack standards.
Let me also mention that at the end of last month I did submit my final proprietary report to the Director of RSIS/NTU in Singapore—about 7,000 words in length—for his and RSIS staff use along with selected government “stakeholders,” as Ambassador Ong Keng Yong calls them. It is proprietary as noted, but not in perpetuity. So some of that content in one form or another may make its way here to The Raspberry Patch in due course, if it is not OBE by the time I get to it.
Last for now by way of introduction to the substance at hand, I finally received, some ten weeks late, two paper copies of The Edith Wharton Review with my research note “A Suggested Source for a Reference in Summer” spanning pages 92-95 of Volume 40, Numbers 1-2. Some of you may be wondering why I bother to mention such a thing. Here is the reason: I am chuffed almost beyond words to have made my literary magazine debut at age 73. Old dogs may be unable to learn new tricks, but old writers seem not to be similarly limited.
Chapter 10: Spectacle and the American Future, part 3 of 5
. . . Further, to return to Neumann and Cassirer’s point, when mythic impulses escape the bounds of modulating religious institutions they conduce not just to impatiently extreme formulations, but also to unrealistic assessments of what those formulations will lead to in the actual social and political world. Both hyper-nostalgic and uber-utopian thinking are in slightly different ways secularized forms of eschatological speculation, in the latter case resembling millenarian, or at least trans-historical, forms of species.
Both Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are current examples of hyper-nostalgic performative speculation. Trump cultivates his shamanist persona when the opportunity arises, as with his “fight” fist raised after his ear was bloodied, probably by glass shrapnel instead of a bullet, in a July 13, 2024 assassination attempt.[1] The fact that he characteristically blurts out “endless egocentric parabolas of speech,” as A.S. Byatt captured the mode some years ago, seems not to matter to the entranced, for they do not hear the words so much as see and osmose the body language.[2] Remember: it is the storyteller who matters most in mythic hazes of consciousness, not the story. For habituated imbibers of images over words, perceptual biases are thusly shaped when pointed outwards. That is not magic, just cognitive psychology understanding how what is taken to be magic works.
Vance, meanwhile, seems an example of internet dark-web penetration of his brain.[3] He once spoke some intelligent truth about Donald Trump, referring to him in 2016 as “noxious,” and “cultural heroin injected into the American arm,” to cite just a few of many similar descriptions. But that was before his opportunism got the better of his soul. It did not take long after the July 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee for Vance’s plainly weird performances to start giving a lot of people the creeps, and rightly so; Vance is the one who rehabilitated White Supremacy groupie Darren Beattie from a fired Trump campaign speechwriter to be Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy. And while the dark web is fairly new, much of what it is and does is very old. Here is a description from 1966:
There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history.[4]
Norman Cohn was describing the anti-Semitic prelude to the Holocaust, and the “times” he alluded to are those Cassirer and Neumann described above. But the basic dynamic he laid out is not tied to any one variety of fantasy alone. We have so many choices these days that a wheel still in spin may land on any one of them.
Vance himself may not be a grifter and he certainly is more than half-educated; one can only be but so stupid and still graduate from Yale Law School. But he is nevertheless now providing a channel for very dark and sub-rational people to influence the politics of the most important country in the world at the highest level. (So is Pete Hegseth, who took explicitly anti-democratic Right-wingnut Jack Posobiec to Europe with him this week.) It is bad enough when emanations of madness unhinge a populous nation like Indonesia, as happened in 1965; when it happens in the United States, a nuclear-weapons power in a vastly more interconnected world, that is something else again.
What is happening to the West and especially to the United States is therefore not unprecedented, only its magnifying technological accelerant is new—along, arguably, with the close to ultimate global stakes involved. Alas, magic isn’t always fun and games.
There may be another difference, a very sobering one, between the storylines of Rieff’s first and third worlds. The temptation to project the life arc of an individual onto civilizations is common among those comfortable and playful with metaphors and abstractions. We have been warned many times to abjure it, and rightly so. But exceptions exist even for sensible warnings. What if Rieff’s first world reflects the childhood of civilization, his second world its adult Abrahamic maturity (not to exclude non-Western faith communities of similar phenomenological mien), and his third world its post-Abrahamic senescence? We cited above Shakespeare’s famous “All the world’s a stage” line from As You Like It in the context of the faddish claim that that the “narrator” speaking silently in our heads is a fraud disguising the fact that we are not a unitary personality. But that is obviously not what Shakespeare had in mind if one reads the entire passage. He was describing how a person’s “roles” change as life hurls each of us toward the grave: “Last scene of all,/That ends this strange eventful history,/Is second childishness and mere oblivion;/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
Is this perhaps where AI comes to the play?
The AI Spectre
Could the present Age of Spectacle, characterized by its recycling of pre-literate mythic storylines as fiction in a post-literate world, be a bad, even a terminal, omen? Is there any evidence for such a fear or, lacking hard data, any reason to so suspect? Alas, yes: It’s called artificial intelligence (AI), and fake videos of the Pentagon being bombed constitute the least of what it may portend.[5] In an age where myth is model, what is there to stop us as a civilization from mythologizing our future with the aid of technology even to the point of drugged madness and full-frontal social collapse?
Much of AI’s potential is positive, as is the case already, for example, with augmented reality, which has been used to model proteins, bacteria and other lifeforms critical to medical research. That’s nice. As already noted, too, the American corporate brain sees AI almost exclusively in terms of bottom-line profit and the macroeconomic brain sees it almost exclusively in terms of a productivity growth factor.[6] Oh that things were so simple and straightforward.
Some of AI’s business implications are frightening, and the reason is surprisingly easy to state: AI is by definition fake. While its outputs are not real, its verisimilitude to reality, systematically distorted, is necessary for it to work as intended. So put into general circulation via commercial markets, as opposed to use in closed and private research, it constitutes a perpetual two-headed carnival calf, generating A/not-A astounding complexes, ever more subtle for being ubiquitous. As such it can only widen and accelerate the substitution of the surreal for the real in the deepest perceptual function of the culture as a whole.
For a single narrow example, consider that if only three seconds of genuine audio recording can allow an AI large-language GLLMM program to fake an extended voice track, then it follows that a mere snippet of any video with audio should enable a program to use even GANs technology, let alone AI, to deepfake not only a person or a group for political reasons or porn-extortion fun—already close to being common—but also a deceased spouse or child or parent or grandparent for purposes of old-fashioned ancestor veneration. The degree of verisimilitude that could be created would constitute the closest thing ever to experienced immortality, not for the deceased of course, but for everyone else who loved or cared about (or feared or hated) that person.
Imagine the market for high-tech AI immortality in the Far East alone if the product could be made affordable. It might make early-April Ching Ming (“sweeping the graves”) rituals that use burning joss paper to communicate with the ancestors seem very primitive very fast to the rapidly modernizing denizens of Asia. Have no doubt: Such capabilities could be made far more affordable using more advanced technology than that used, for example, to deepfake a jiggling-image hologram of a deceased Robert Kardashian in October 2020, a gift from Kanye West to his wife Kim Kardashian.[7] It was “like a gift from heaven,” she reportedly and predictably said.
It was not as splashy a gift at the time as it may seem: It has been possible for years now to buy 3-D crystal holograms based on photos of deceased relatives and pets from companies such as Artpix3D and Masterpics3D for prices under $100. Kanye’s gift was not much more sophisticated, though it reportedly cost him many times $100. AI, however, opens up qualitatively different possibilities for advanced digital necromancy.
Imagine, for example, a would-be customer enticed by promises that he could see deceased family members and friends “come to life” in a virtual reality headset, primed with tactile and olfactory inputs as well as visual and auditory ones. Imagine if deceased persons could then be projected into family movies viewed by many on synched virtual reality headsets into a time long after their deaths, a little like Obi-Wan Kenobi talking to Luke Skywalker as a Force Ghost in “Star Wars,” except not just in obviously fictive movies.[8] Producers of clips or longer films could have the deceased ancestors say anything the buyer wanted them to say to specific living interlocutors as well as to family and friends in general. It would be like reverse high-tech photo air-brushing. Instead of having people disappear from photos, as in old Soviet times, people can appear in videos looking (almost) as naturally present as can be.
Should such capabilities flood the culture via various kinds of commercial artifacts, imagine the potential confusion about the nature of time, not just for young people but, brought to scale, for nearly everyone—and confusion not just about time. Dystopian possibilities wilder even than those in Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age crowd the imagination, and they have a common character: They would vividly exemplify the aforementioned phenomenon of social life taking up and freezing into itself conceptions we have of it, but in this case conceptions would be drawn from pervasive mass-culture mythic-fictional storylines that obliterate serial perceptions of time, and much of the rest of the Lebenswelt with it.
Entire postmodern mythic cults, news ones or regressed versions of existing religions, could be built around this technology. In unstuck times thinking tends to turn toward the apocalyptical and millenarian, so facsimiles of immortality would fit right in. Anyone with a little imagination and not really all that much money could create a technologically enhanced living will, where he or she could appear alive again to children, grandchildren, and even more distanced progeny long into the future. This is or is not necessarily a good thing depending on one’s tastes: Do you like your reality straight, or with massive doses of synthetic endorphins shaken….and with a twist? But a big-business thing it would be without doubt. It may not work in Scandinavia or even in the United States, where ethical qualms about the whole notion of digital necromancy remain strong, so far at least. But it takes little imagination to see it working outside of certain Western cultural spaces.
Worse, AI technology could allow cultic politicians, divisive demagogues, and murderous dictators among them, to rave and ravage even beyond the grave. Mob psychology is scary enough without extra technological help to supercharge it. GANs deepfakes make matters worse, and the prospect of AI-generated fakes dramatically so. Already some years ago a GANs-generated deepfake of U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying drunken-sounding things she never said convinced many its authenticity. It was primitive, so easy for most viewers to detect, but that did not prevent both President Trump and Rudy Guiliani from retweeting it despite knowing it was fake. Trump’s tweet got nearly 30,000 retreats and 90,000 likes, and some people who knew it was a fake didn’t care—just having some spectacular fun—clear evidence of the zero-sum bloodsport mentality that passes for American political deliberation nowadays in the populist domains of the body politic.[9] This shows that social context is critical to determining the likely impact of technological tomfoolery; it is not just about the accuracy of the fake or the sophistication of the technology that produces it.
Many experts working on AI shed examples out of central casting of obliviously short-term, child-like attitudes toward humanity’s sacred origin. Few of them would object to afterlife videos. Unfortunately, plenty of highly dystopian uses for AI can be imagined in this and many other forms. When asked by survey in 2023 if AI had the potential to cause the extinction of humanity, or to alter the world so profoundly that the definition of humanity itself would be thrown into relative flux between who we think we are now and a transhuman destiny, the median answer was 10 percent.[10] Most, nevertheless, continued working. Why would they do that?
Aside from the money; because, as is well known already, coders working at the pioneering edge of AI cannot predict what the systems they are creating will produce, and once produced usually cannot understand the reasons for what has been produced. This is all this quite aside from debates about the potential of machines to become sentient. Never mind, too, common, garden-variety concerns about AI being instrumental to mass unemployment by dint of advanced automation, demonic forms of biogenetic engineering for purposes of warfare, or Deepfake/AI-enabled espionage and terrorism covering entire infrastructural systems (not to exclude agriculture), as if those dangers were not serious enough.
Perhaps the most intelligible metaphor to describe the level of peril to ordinary folk is an automotive one, to wit: You get in your car, your spouse and kids with you, you turn the ignition key, put the car into gear, and ease out into the street going 20, 25 miles per hour. Next thing you know you’re airborne and flying loops at Mach 2, so about 1,514.538 MPH. Then the “car” suddenly morphs into a shape you’ve never seen before, heads near-vertical toward earth orbit at Mach too-high-to-imagine, and….but of course your bodies cannot take the g-force and you soon perish never knowing what happened, let alone why.
If there is a 10 percent chance of something akin to species extinction happening, not just to you and your family but at scale to humanity itself, why would anyone take the chance of continuing to work on it? Let me propose an answer: Addiction not to distraction in this case, because these folks are not distracted so much as they are obsessively in gamma, but addicted to spectacle. In this case, AI-induced spectacle bears resemblance to a hallucinant, and that should ring some bells.[11]
Some of us have experienced pretty vivid warnings of this sort of thing. Hallucinogenic drugs can be like that, perhaps not incidentally. Why did some people back in the day continue to take LSD, mescaline, and consume psilocybin when they knew these substances were dangerous? Largely because they were too curious about what the next “wow” would be like to stop, and easy affluence obviated much chance that anything save for a psychotic reaction or accidental death might compel them to stop.
What emerged in earnest in the Sixties’ drug culture had been foreshadowed decades before by apprentice hippies like Zelda Fitzgerald and Mabel Dodge Luhan, and a bit after them more famously by Aldous Huxley. They despised more than anything else boredom, an emergent theme at least as old in American culture as The Great Gatsby. The LSD phenomenon took its grounding from those who came to despise quotidian reality for not being “wow” enough, for not enabling a life distractingly entertaining enough for the tragically mortal shrouds they wore.
This old news is relevant because many AI coder pioneers seem similarly disposed. “These are not naifs,” wrote Ezra Klein, “who believe their call can be heard only by angels. They believe they might summon demons. They are calling anyway” because, like hippie drug proselytizers of more than half a century past, they “feel they have a responsibility to usher this new form of intelligence into the world.”[12] Many Sixties psychotropic pioneers thought they were constructing a new heaven in place of the tediously quaint Abrahamic one long since discarded by most. One wonders if today’s AI coder obsessives imagine themselves similarly engaged, in the end somehow on the side of the new, yet undefined angels. Whatever they may suppose, they could instead turn out to be the Timothy Learys of AI cyber-spectacle.[13] Like Leary, they are overlooking Goethe’s timeless warning dating to 1797—worth repeating from the Introduction: “Die ich rief, die Geister, Werd ich nun nicht los.”[14]
This is escapism of possibly the most dangerous kind in human history. Spectacle-mesmerized coders make Icarus look like a slightly over-ambitious Boy Scout. As already suggested, hints of this “bored, need a new ‘wow’” condition are visible almost everywhere, if you look for them. We can see it, for one benign example, in the burgeoning popularity of drone-borne sky extravaganzas and illusion art.[15] And as we have been at pains to describe, we see it in the continuing lighter-than-air ideological mystifications of both the illiberal Left and the illiberal Right in our contemporary magical politics. Maybe we’re in for a new attempt to levitate the Pentagon, this time from the isolationist Right, by those who thrill to sound of the shofar signaling the start of an insurrectionary attack, an attempt to collapse the walls of the Capitol as if it were a modern Jericho.
These various phenomena, though obviously not all of equal danger to human life and limb, bear one thing conspicuously in common: a presentist’s obliviousness to limits. Like pre-historic shamans chanting the spells of endless metamorphosis, and like children hard at play who can yet have no idea where their open-ended imaginations might lead, addiction to spectacle resembles adolescent, even pre-adolescent, and sometimes pre-rational mythic “thinking.” The difference, of course, is that we are not talking here about sandbox heroics or squirt-gun shenanigans, but about the future of everything we love and care about. Could this be what ultimately happens when adults addicted to spectacle vanish into empowered children, besotted with myth and magic as means to their own designer entertainment narcissisms? Narcissus turned into a stone while looking on with fascination at his own beauty reflected in a pond; will humanity meet a similar fate while looking on with fascination at our own beautifully bountiful spectacular machines?
The hippies of old could summon exotic private spectacle with a single swallow of blotter pretty much any time they desired. But at least they left everyone else alone, and most (who survived) had time to grow out of it. The AI coder crowd, well, we’ll see what happens. We have seen some hopeful sobriety here lately: Geoffrey Hinton, the founding world-class expert on artificial neural networks, resigned his position at Google warning of the AI danger.[16] Meanwhile, others in the summer of 2023 organized the drafting and adoption of a letter signed by 2,700 scientists calling for a six-month moratorium on artificial network design work. So debate has been joined at a high and visible level. The result so far, a year and a half on?
There doesn’t seem to really be one. Worse, as noted in the Introduction, President Trump rushed after his second Inauguration to kill the Biden-era office established by Executive Order 11410 to B-Team the potential negative effects of AI. Then on February 10, 2025 news broke that Elon Musk was leading an effort to buy OpenAI for $94.1 billion, thus to shove San Altman out of the picture of the new Administration-supported “Stargate Initiative” that combines all together in a thanatosic clot the delusions of avaricious corporate moguls, autistic macroeconomists, and clueless military acquisitions officials. This is not good.
One thing seems certain as the drama plays out: Our spectacalized political culture will not save the day. Republican control over both Houses of Congress and the Supreme Court is a combination that may be counted on to make America safe for plutocracy long into the future. The current confluence of corporate greed and political mediocrity is like nothing any living American has seen. Our “malefactors of great wealth” are not about to be balanced against by the Federal government; more likely they will be rewarded for achieving new heights of plunder and pillage.
Would that this be the worst we confront, but the AI specter makes it worse still. Our Senators, even the Democratic ones, do not even understand the questions they need to ask let alone any of the answers they need to know about AI. Tommy Tuberville is not going to get arms around AI and figure out how to defense against it. If its mostly counterproductive policing of plutocratized markets in any indication, the U.S. government has for years been more likely to be an accomplice to mayhem produced by the cybercorp giants than a sheriff corralling them; now in the Trump 2.0 Administration we are seeing that likelihood turn into reality before our very eyes.
The Age of Spectacle:
How a Confluence of Fragilized Affluence, the End of Modernity, Deep-Literacy Erosion, and Shock Entertainment Technovelty Has Wrecked American Politics
Foreword [TKL]
Introduction: Hypothesis Unfurled
The Cyberlution
The Republic of Spectacle: A Pocket Chronology
The Spectocracy Is Risen
Why This Argument Is Different from All Other Arguments
Opening Acts and the Main Attraction
Obdurate Notes on Style and Tone
A Glossary of Neologisms
PART I: Puzzle Pieces
1. Fragilized Affluence and Postmodern Decadence: Underturtle I
Government as Entertainment
The Accidental Aristocracy
Deafness to Classical Liberalism
The Culture of Dematerialization
Affluence and Leadership
Neurosis, Loneliness, and Despair
Wealth and Individualism
Hard Times Ain’t What They Used to Be
Affluence Fragilized
Real and Unreal Inequality
The Net Effect
Segmented Economies and Perforated Moral Communities
Dysfunctional Wealth
Searching for the Next Capitalism
2. Our Lost Origin Stories at the End of Modernity: Underturtle II
What Is a Mythopoetical Core?
Aristotle’s Picture Album
Faith, Fiction, Metaphor, and Politics
The American Story, a First Telling
How Secularism Was Birthed in a Religious Age
Regression to the Zero-Sum
Industrial Folklore
Bye, Bye Modernity, Hello the New Mythos
Mythic Consciousness and Revenant Magic
Sex Magic
Word Magic
Business Magic
Progress as Sarcasm, History as Nightmare
Attitudes and Institutions Misaligned
3. Deep Literacy Erosion: Underturtle III 155
Trending Toward Oblivion
The Reading-Writing Dialectic
The Birth of Interiority
A Rabbinic Interlude
You Must Remember This
Dissent
The Catechized Literacy of the Woke Left
Reading Out Tyranny
Chat Crap
4. Cyber-Orality Rising: Underturtle III, Continued
The Second Twin
Structural Mimicry and Fantasized Time
Losing the Lebenswelt
Podcast Mania
The Political Fallout of Digital Decadence
Zombified Vocabulary
Democracy as Drama
Where Did the News Go?
Optimists No More
Foreshadowing a Shadow Effect
5. The Cultural Contradictions of Liberal Democracy: An Under-Underturtle
A Big, Fat, Ancient Greek Idea
The American Story Again, This Time with Feeling
Footnotes to Plato
Some For Instances
Jefferson à la Carte
Revering the Irreverent
The Deep Source of the American Meliorist State
The Great Morphing
Myth, Magic, and Immaturity
The Wages of Fantasy
Pull It Up By the Roots
The Crux
PART II: Emerging Picture
6. “Doing a Ripley”: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated
Astounding Complexes and Technical Events from TV to Smartphones
Tricks, Illusions, and Cons
Fakers, Frauds With Halos, and Magnificos
Projectionist Fraud as a Way of Life
Old Ripleys, New Ripleys
Fake News
Trump as Master of Contrafiction
Conspiracy Soup
Cognitive Illusions
Facticity Termites
Conditioning for Spectacle
To the Neuroscience
7. The Neuroscience of Spectacle: Research and Implications
Brain Power
Seeing the Light
Surfing Your Brainwaves
Suffer the Children
The Screen!
Easy Rider
The Graphic Revolution, Memory, and the Triumph of Appearances
McLuhan Was Wrong, and Right
Brain Shadows
No Need to Exaggerate
8. Cognitive Gluttony: Race and Gender
Cognitive Gluttony Racialized
Ripleys on the Left
More Sex
Abortion: Serious Issues, Specious Arguments, Sunken Roots
Beyond Feminism
I’m a Man, I Spell M-A-N
9. Saints and Cynics: Common Roots of Contemporary America Illiberalism
Different Birds, Same Feathers
The Touching of the Extremes
Left to Right and Back Again
Look Away Dixieland
Spectacle in Stereo
The Right’s Crazy SOB Competition
The Irony of Leveling
Human Nature
What November 5, 2024 Means
10. Spectacle and the American Future
You Are the Tube and the Tube Is You
The Normalization of Political Mystification
Bad Philosophy, Bad Consequences
Is Woke Really Broke?
Myth as Model
The AI Spectre
The Futility of Conventional Politics
A Few National Security Implications
Meanwhile…
Who Will Create the Garden?
A Very Short Epilogue (so far)
Acknowledgments
[1] See Tara Isabella Burton’s insightful take on that event, and the photograph that emerged from it, in “Trump, the Magic Candidate,” Wisdom of Crowds, July 25, 2024.
[2] A.S. Byatt, Still Life (Collier, 1985), p. 50.
[3] See Martyn Wendell Jones, “How the Internet Broke JD Vance’s Brain,” The Bulwark, July 24, 2024.
[4] Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Harper & Row, 1966) p. 18.
[5] “See fake image of an ‘explosion’ near the Pentagon that caused confusion,” CNN Business, May 23, 2023.
[6] Again see, for example, “America’s Productivity Disappointment,” International Economy (Winter 2024).
[7] For details of the gift and the technology used by Kaleida to produce it see “Kanye West gave Kim Kardashian a hologram of her father for her birthday,” The Moderns, October 30, 2020.
[8] Speaking of “Star Wars,” in 2016 the actor Peter Cushing was brought back to cinematic life via CGI manipulation to again play the role of Grand Moff Tarkin from the original 1977 film in a new movie called “Rogue One.” Dave Itzkoff, “How ‘Rogue One’ Brought Back Familiar Faces,” New York Times, December 27, 2016. Bringing back dead actors via CGI to star in new movies has since become something of a Hollywood cottage industry. See Sharan Sanil, “7 Times Filmmakers Brought Back Dead Actors Through CGI,” mensxp, December 31, 2019.
[9] On January 6, 2020, Rep. Paul Gosar, idiot of Arizona, tweeted a fake photo of Barack Obama shaking hands with President Rouhani, with a caption: “The world is a better place without these guys in power.” Gosar knew the photo was fake and sent it anyway. Likeminded recipients didn’t care. See Jordan Freiman, “Republican congressman shares fake photo of Obama with Iranian president on Twitter,” CBS News, January 6, 2020.
[10] Cited in Ezra Klein, “This Changes Everything,” New York Times, March 12, 2023.
[11] In “The Limits of the Soul,” Cosmopolitan Globalist, My 29, 2023, David Berlinski referred to GTP-4 as a hallucinant after hearing Luc Ferry so name it during a television interview. Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, has also spoken of large-language programs hallucinating. They mean that the program/machine interface is technically hallucinating, and that is not an example of extravagant anthropomorphism. Here is why: GGLLMs are fed so much text so fast that the rules they’ve been given enable them to assemble on the basis of stochastic association just about every possible combination of syntactical coherency as regards normal grammar—placing in order noun, verb, adjective/adverb, object, and so on. Human brains do this too, but our language coherencies usually align with some purpose, some need, some experience in the world we’ve had. Each such experience creates a neural pathway that leaves a glial cell as a marker and that pathway can combine with other to form a template useful for imagining other experiences. (I say “usually” because LSD, peyote, and shrooms can take us elsewhere in that regard.) But the GGLLM has no sentient experience, no capacity for producing glial cells, and no inherent means for reducing the large number of coherent language possibilities. It can only filter by means of statistical frequencies, not meanings or purposes. So it hallucinates possibilities, generating countless combinations of words that sound coherently assembled but that align with nothing outside itself. Here is another way to think of it: Imagine a set-up to produce a hologram in the middle of a darkened room. We can project discrete images from, say, 15 points to the center where, once assembled, we see the hologram appear via interference patterns in otherwise thin air. Since we know what we’ve projected, we can more or less anticipate what the hologram will look like. But if the image input is vastly larger and constantly fluctuating, moving and spinning according to no pre-set design, we won’t be able to guess the resultant hologram and it won’t look recognizably like anything we’ve ever before seen. The set-up under those conditions will be hallucinating. We thus have two types of hallucination happening in tandem: what the machines are doing to the coders (and others) and what the coders are doing to the machines as they feed and interact with them. We thus have stereo hallucination with AI; that seems to be its essence as an ongoing formative activity.
[12] Klein, op. cit.
[13] I would be remiss if in this context I did not mention Erik Davis, an historian of the California counterculture and author of the 1998 book Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information. Davis defines “high weirdness”—the title of a more recent book from MIT Press (of all places) bearing the subtitle “Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experiences in the Seventies”—as the “anomalous” that “deviate from the norms of informed expectation and challenge established explanations, sometimes quite radically.” In other words, high weirdness is whatever drug-induced consciousness that boosts our novelty bias into mental orbit, transfixes and astounds us, entertains us with…..spectacle. In 1998 no hint existed that Davis saw any significant dangers in pursuing and extolling high weirdness; so one naturally wonders if in the new book he has begun to rethink that conclusion. Looking at his website, which still lauds the psychedelic experience and extols Burning Man as the quintessence of worthy culture, my hunch is “not yet.” My further hunch is “not ever” since now people like Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. share his view.
[14] “The spirit I have summoned up I can no longer rid myself of” is a good enough translation of this classic line from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem, “The Sourcerer’s Apprentice” (Der Zauberlehrling). Regrettably but understandably, it is omitted from the brilliant Disney animated version of the story.
[15] The stunning drone sky-art shows developed recently in Korea, China, and Singapore are both beautiful and totally harmless. Two marvelous examples of illusion art from outside the West: Azerbaijani artist Faig Hussein’s magic carpets, and Uzbekistani artist Bekzod Karimov’s multimedia portraits. Both supply a multitude of harmless “wows.”
[16] Note Cade Metz’s conversation with Hinton in the The Daily, “The Godfather of A.I. Has Some Regrets,” updated June 1, 2023.