How to survive the weight of an entire industry trying to convince you that you're inadequate
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This week’s question comes to us from DB:
How do I make art without feeling stupid and/or inadequate?
Why would you want to?
Not why would you want to make art. Everybody makes art. Or at least everyone was born making art. I mean why would you want to do it without feeling stupid and/or inadequate? That’s my favorite way to make art.
But let’s talk about something else and then circle back to that.
Let’s talk about Der Kommissar. Der Kommissar is an incredibly catchy song that came out in December of 1981. It’s by Falco, an Austrian new wave pop star of the era. It reached #22 on the US charts, and #1 on the Austrian charts, which shouldn’t be a surprise. And if you’re of a certain age, you heard it at least 10 times a day when it came out. You also saw the video on MTV a lot because that’s how often they played it—a lot. The song is tangentially about the surveillance state, authoritarianism , and youthful defiance, which… sure. It’s also incredibly stupid. The video, which features Falco in front of a green screen lip-syncing to the song while being chased by cop cars, is even stupider. And I love it. The fact that Falco followed up Der Kommissar with Rock Me Amadeus, an even stupider song, is possibly the pinnacle of human achievement, at least the Austrian new wave bracket of human achievement.
I’m writing about Der Kommissar this morning for two reasons. Firstly, because I’m purposely looking for the stupidest way to answer your question, and secondly, because it was playing on the radio (KEXP) as I was having my morning coffee this morning. And sure enough it got stuck in my head, as it was designed to do. It was still in my head as I biked to work and at some point I just started singing it out loud. I can’t sing for shit, but I’m riding my bike, so who cares. At some point during my ride, I swapped out the “Uh oh!” chorus for Scooby-Doo singing “Rut roh!” if anyone is curious about my mental health. This pleased me immensely because my mind, which I’d apparently given the morning off, was free to wander around inside itself and make stupid connections. Which it then did, to the confusion (and possibly trepidation) of other bike riders waiting at the same red light.
Don’t turn around. Rut roh! Der Kommissar’s in town. Rut roh!
At our best, human beings are really good at making stupid connections. (This also happens a lot when we’re very high, except when we’re high we believe the connections are very profound, when they’re just really stupid.) We’re at our most human when we discover things such as a KFC chicken bucket doubling as a hat, milk crates doubling as basketball hoops, and x-rays doubling as vinyl records. We’re at our most human when we’re making art—which we all did as children—even when (maybe especially when) it’s stupid.
No one in the history of humankind has ever chosen to make art. Like I said, we’re born with the need to make marks. It’s the first way that humans communicate with one another. It’s our way of marking our existence in this world. It’s the first way that we have an effect on the world. (The living room wall was beige, which honestly is quite boring, and now I’ve made it interesting. This is why children look so happy after marking up your beige walls—because they are right to do so. Paint your house without fear.) Unfortunately, the choice that human beings do make is to stop making art. There’s lots of reasons for this, including the fact that we might decide it’s not our thing, but I believe that the biggest reason, by far, is that people make us feel that art is a stupid thing to do, and that we’re inadequate at making it anyway.
Which is where you came in.
But hold on, we’re not done talking about my morning.
Don’t turn around. Rut roh! Der Kommissar’s in town. Rut roh!
So yeah, that little ditty was still stuck in my head as I got to my desk this morning. (By the way, I’m doing my very best to get it stuck in yours, and it’s working.) I got myself another cup of coffee (which I didn’t need), sat down, and fired up a Google doc to start writing this newsletter. I have a rule about firing up a Google doc. I never do it unless I have something in my head that I need to write down. I do this because staring at a blank page is the leading source of anxiety in the modern world. (See also blank canvas, etc.) But I’d been thinking about how to answer your question, and came up with something during my bike ride (all good ideas happen during bike rides) and I wanted to get it out, so I fired up a Google doc.
Google has solved the blank page problem in a different way. Every new doc now comes with two buttons at the top. One that says “generate document” and one that says “help me write.” And they’re very large buttons. Incredibly large. (Here’s how large they are: if you’ve ever had a child, you know that kids get sick a lot. And at some point the kid’s pediatrician is gonna hand you something that looks like a pill except it’s enormous. And you ask them how the hell are you gonna get a baby to swallow it and the doctor looks at you like the idiot you are and says “they go in the ass.” That’s how large these Google buttons are. They go in the ass.) Every time I open up a Google doc I’m hit in the face by this giant ass-button telling me that I’m probably not good enough to do what I’m trying to do. I should reconsider trying to do it on my own. I’m inadequate. My mother as a button.
The weight of an entire industry attempting to convince me that I’m inadequate is infuriating.
Every time I fire up a Google doc I have to get past that. (Hopefully by now you can tell that I’ve never clicked the ass-buttons.) And while I didn’t intend to write about AI this week (I’m lying) when I saw a question about making art without feeling stupid or inadequate I knew there was no way not to. So much has already been written about AI by people smarter than me. The grift angle. The ecological disaster angle. The labor theft angle. All these things are valid and true. And… the particular angle I want to talk about is what it’s doing to us psychologically. Because having the weight of an entire industry attempting to convince you that you are inadequate is infuriating.
Fun fact: I failed high school English. Absolutely bombed the class. Couldn’t pay attention. Couldn’t write an essay. Ended up having to go to summer school, which sucked because after spending eight years in Catholic school, and convincing my parents to let me go to a public high school, guess where the summer school was? Yeah. At the Catholic high school my parents wanted me to go to. So this wasn’t just failing English class, this was failing big. This was failing at becoming an autonomous adult and falling back into their plans, and their beliefs that I was inadequate. Which absolutely sucked. So I powered through summer school. Passed my sophomore English class. Not by a lot, mind you, but I passed. But to go from there to where I am now, where I’ve written several books, and a mountain of essays? (Some of them even good!) Fuck the industry that’s attempting to convince me that I’m still inadequate. Fuck your large ass-buttons.
And while it would be one thing to build tools that help people who need help, we need to be very clear that’s now what’s happening. We are not building people up by giving them helpful tools, we are tearing people down by convincing them they can’t function without the tools. And we are doing this purely because very rich oligarchs would like to become richer. There is nothing benevolent about it.
The best thing we will ever be able to say about AI is that it’s competent. (…and it’s currently very much not even that.) And while we should absolutely aim for competence in some things (say government), art is very much not one of them. I don’t want my art to be competent. I want it to be stupid. I don’t want my writing to be competent. (Clearly.) I want evidence of human beings attempting to communicate with one another, even if they sometimes fail. Because those failures can be magnificent and moving. I want to fuck up your beige walls. Because your beige walls are fucking boring. I want art to be stupid. I want art to be messy. I want it to be made by people at their most human. We scream. We cry. We make marks. These are all the same thing. These are all moments of humans attempting to communicate when they’re overwhelmed. To take these away is to take away what helps us grow.
The best thing we will ever be able to say about AI is that it could never create Divine. It can only create degrading copies of what we’ve fed it. But human beings can create connections that only human beings can make. Human beings can create what no one ever expected! Human beings create the stupidest, most glorious connections. And it’s because we’re stupid. And it’s because we’re inadequate. And honestly, it’s because we die. (Rut roh!) Only human beings can come to the conclusion that if not now, when? If not me, who? If not me at my most, why not? Human beings get one chance at this. Don’t take it from us.
I want you to make art because you feel stupid and inadequate. It might suck. It might be great. Sometimes they’re the same thing.
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