Chaotic Good
Piss on carpet, and other thoughts on the joys of randomness
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I am currently reading a book about the avant-garde composer John Cage called Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists by Kay Larson which is about, in part, how Cage’s interest in Zen Buddhism inspired him to abandon Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique and instead embrace randomness by using coins and a copy of the I Ching to compose his music via chance operations—and while considering all this, an unlikely thought crossed my mind:
I bet John Cage would have loved Dungeons & Dragons.
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DND is a game of chance: take an action, roll a twenty-sided die. Your success (or lack thereof) is out of your control. There's no knowing where you might be swept off to.
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I don’t think it’s a coincidence that DND has found peak mainstream popularity at a time where nearly all modern experiences are mediated through technology and/or algorithmic feeds—the “dice” of our lives rolled across a variety of black box systems purposefully left unseen and unaccessible—because, despite what looking at the box office over the last decade would tell you1, humans love novelty, freedom, play: the chaotic good.
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The generative “AI” algorithm will always default to the safest next step. It won’t/can’t take drastic leaps. It just feeds you more of the same forever. It has been trained on an eternal (Western, white, male) past; so it can’t imagine a new future. It’s output is ugly, cheap, and boring.
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Dungeons & Dragons (and Zen Buddhism, and jazz, and writing, and kindness) requires a heightened awareness, a focus, a close paying of attention: you must listen to your fellow party members.
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We love patterns, but we also love pattern disruption. Ambient TV streams into our homes like soma for the soul (with characters vocalizing what’s happening on screen so we don’t have to look up from our phones), but when we experience something fresh and unpredictable (most recently The Pitt or Sinners), it inspires genuine passion and enthusiasm. Disruption is also discovery.
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For what is life if not a series of choices and how they deliriously collide with the apathy of the universe? O! Life is randomness! O! Life is chaos! What is the opposite of chaos? Control! Order! Conformance! The consolidation of power; a panopticon of surveillance. Life’s unknowns may make us anxious, sad, and uneasy, but they are also the source of the sublime. You can’t have one without the other. This, all of this, is the beauty and tragedy of being human!
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Which returns us to John Cage, to Dungeons & Dragons, to the idea of algorithm vs. chaos—and why, with so much of the chance, the random, the fun drained out of our lives in favor of the comfort and safety of the expected, we have to rebel and seek out the new and the weird ourselves: taking a chance and purposefully getting lost down the rabbit holes of our own innate curiosity.
The Chance Operations of This Essay:
For each new paragraph, roll a 20-sided die. Then follow these instructions:
1-4: Spend five minutes or less. Be quick.
5-8: Write one long, unbroken sentence.
9-12: Sneak in a Lord of the Rings reference.
13-16: No revision. (Not even a little!)
17-20: Ecstatic prose. Be dramatic. Work an "O!" in somehow.
My friends over on the Indie 500 Podcast invited me back onto their podcast to talk all things OK Computer, an album which I have some opinions about, to say the least. As I say in the episode, there is me before OK Computer, and me after OK Computer. It is the great demarcator; more than any other piece of art, it completely changed my life. Which is why the episode is three-and-a-half hours long.
It’s worth remembering: every franchise, every sequel, every IP empire—all began as something new and unexpected, not more of the same.
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