1. the personal

The doctor yesterday confirmed what I already know, in every fiber of my being, that I had been / was / may once again be depressed, that my life is full of stressors that I cannot eliminate, that the only way forward is to find moments of joy in… self-care.

Reader, I still laugh when I write that word; that trinket from the late 2010s, that bauble of psycho-babble. Sorry, not sorry!

Because, of course, there is no self-care, only care for one’s self as one cares for others.

In fact, this, too, is wrong. Because we know “care” not by ourselves, not innately, not intellectually, but rather as an act that others visit upon us.

We are cared for.

Treat others as you would be treated.

That single sentence is the single commandment that every Christian must follow, that every demon-worshipping White Evangelical Christian must violate in order to retain their identity, to grind their axe, to barricade their broken souls.

I did, yes, just use the word “demon”, as in the K-Pop Demon Hunters franchise, lol.

Demon is very much a fashionable, invented word, courtesy of those crazy kids from the 13th century. But daemon, however, is a real word, used by the ancient Greeks to connote a conscience or by American programmers in the 1960s to describe an automated process. (I’ll have more to say about that below!)

Suffice to say, people with a conscience know when something is wrong even if the words aren’t there, even if they’re gagged, or too scared to speak.

I wish I could say that a conscience is inherent; that every child is born with a daemon – a guardian angel, if you will. But that’s just not the case.

No body cares by themselves.

We are vessels, filled with language. Books filled with gestures. Bodies cared for or broken.

To care for one’s self is to remember how one was cared for. If one has never been cared for, one does not know how to care for one’s self. (cf., our 45th and 47th president, and his decidedly un-merry band of fellow rapists, liars and thieves; including all the ones in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, in every suburban and exurban Main Street that is now just a hollowed out core.)

But I digress. The challenge is how to get by. How to survive. Without losing one’s humanity. Without selling your soul.

Same as it ever was.

2. the political

To care is to be grounded in truth.

The historical and mythical figure of Jesus – King of the Jews!, natch – tells us that the only truth is caring. The Buddha describes freedom as a form of caring after accepting the truth.¹

There is no healing without truth.

Similarly, without truth life is violence. Sheer and total destruction.

Gaza. Cuba. Iran. Venezuela. Haiti. Sudan. Somalia. Ukraine. Minnesota. Bad people fighting bad people with good people stuck in the middle.

And here we must pause to recognize that truth, contrary to the American ethos, is not a product on a shelf, truth is not a trophy you store in your home on a shelf.

Truth is what you say out loud, truth can only ever be shouted from every rooftop.

All around me is silence, compliance, or worse – the contagion of degeneracy, our devolution into the same savagery that turned The Age of Encounter into a holocaust. Great cultures don’t burn books. And yet…

Fray Diego de Landa throws into the flames, one after the other, the books of the Mayas. The inquisitor curses Satan, and the fire crackles and devours. Around the incinerator, heretics howl with their heads down. Hung by the feet, flayed with whips, Indians are doused with boiling wax as the fire flares up and the books snap, as if complaining.

For sure, today we do not burn books, we bury them (under bullshit, see below).

And some bodies we burn but mostly we subject them to far more precise modes of discipline; as in Surveiller et punir.

3. the philosophical

We are alive in the age of BULLSHIT.

The president is a bullshitter. Our computers are bullshitting us. The political economy is bullshit.²

I am dead serious about this.

We are being killed – slowly poisoned – by bullshit.

In his 2005 book, On Bullshit, the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt explains that the bullshitter doesn’t deny the truth, he destroys it.

The bullshitter doesn’t know whether or not what they’re saying is true because he doesn’t care to know.

You can trace a straight line from 20th century totalitarian logic, as documented by Hannah Arendt, and the contemporary pervasion of bullshit.

Where we are today is that trust is being destroyed. The truth is being destroyed. And with the total destruction of trust and truth comes totalitarianism. You can get to it via Red Square, you can get to it via Wall Street. But all paths through the annihilation of truth end in totalitarianism.

Synthesis

What comes next?

We build the truth, again.

We build the institutions that produce the truth, again.

We build a society that cares, again.

But, first, we destroy bullshit. We remove every trace of it from our lives. We refuse to accept bullshit.

Death to the bullshitters.³

(OK, fine, ostracism.)

p.s.

In my last email, I wrote about the téchne we call “AI” being like nuclear energy; clean power or Hiroshima.⁴

In the present moment, “AI” can accelerate enlightenment; to help us care more, better.⁵

But it can also cast us deeper into the abyss.

(Same as it ever was.)

Because I very much have my ability to feed our kids on my mind – caring – I turn to the problem of bullshitting machines in the age of bullshit.

Sometimes, I reach a happier conclusion.

This is what I jotted down last Saturday while feeling more upbeat.

the next 30 years in 3 sentences.

1. cultural literacy will become supreme. where to find the specific reference, the ability to retrieve quickly and understand the context (history, genealogy) of images, sounds, tastes.

2. taste will make the maker stand out. there will always be knockoffs and speed to market will be brutal but there will be ways to cut through the noise by pulling other “deep cuts”.

3. your tastes are all you have. that’s known to every chef, music producer, fashion designer. you can buy a back catalog but the only way to buy a future catalog is to have the best taste.

Of course, we will only be able to enter this “golden age” if we destroy bullshit.

If we give no quarter to it.

p.p.s.

As a person in the world, I know that many people have many good reasons to doubt whether or not these thinking machines are only ever bullshitting us.

And, yes, RADICAL DOUBT is our ONLY MEANS FOR SURVIVAL.

((Same as it ever was.))

But, the other day I had a "conversation" with Claude that was a crossing of a rubicon, for me.

I opened up a chat to speak with this daemon, because I wanted to object to a poorly written scene in the movie Long Shot. Fully versed on the human knowledge we've encoded in the Internet, the daemon helped me pinpoint what was wrong in this scene by anticipating where I was going.

That might be sycophancy but also, it made the scene fully intelligible to me. It played the role of a collaborator in an intellectual pursuit.

p.p.p.s.

Another rubicon crossed, virtually:

In a short doc we’re making, Mark Bolas of USC says “Video games ate VR,” meaning that the tech advances of the 1980s may not have resulted in everyone wearing headsets but it created the hugely popular gaming market.

Now, games are obviously interactive but they’re also an exploration of space. My favorites, Zelda: Breath of the Wild and/or Katamari Damacy, as well as our son’s favorite, the billion dollar Minecraft, are primarily explorations of virtual space.

“AI” now allow us to make models as if for video games in less than a second. It is very likely we’ll be making video game-like explorations of space, en masse, very soon.

If, indeed, we are trapped in the hell-on-earth described by Jean Baudrillard in Simulations, then navigating the map of the real is our only way out.⁶