The coming crash and the final meaning of all things
Just relax and learn to paint (not to code)
“The modern world will not be punished. The modern world is the punishment.”
Nicolás Gomez Dávila
Many times I think about stopping writing and making videos, simply because they occupy time, bring no money, don't reach a large audience, and are therefore a waste of time that could be better applied to, I don't know, painting. Although, arguably, painting is also a waste of time and I should focus on activities that make money.
But there is also another reason, which is that we are constantly bombarded with too much information, and a lot if it is not even real, and I feel sometimes that I may be contributing to this process too.
Just as a random example, this story of the Amazon rocket supposedly sending Katy Perry and other women into space, then landing backwards. It's not real. I think it's almost all CGI and bad acting. In fact, there is a part of the "live” video in which the door of the capsule is open, then they cut the feed and when it's back the door is closed and Bezos has to pretend to open it for the first time. Fake, fake, fake, fake.
Of course it's not just those fake events. With the rise of the so-called “AI", almost every page you find online is written by a bot and illustrated by a bot. I hate “AI art” and “AI writing” and it is one of the reasons why I took up oil painting. There is no substitute for the real thing, for the satisfaction of actually creating something with your own hands.
People think that “AI" is some sort of thinking robot, when it's really a process that is using huge amounts of data (a lot of it simply stolen from you, from art history, from millions of material created, not by robots, but by human beings) and recycling them in different ways. As someone else defined it, it is plagiarism on an industrial scale.
What is interesting is that if you use without authorization, say, the image of Mickey Mouse, those huge corporations will sue the hell out of you. But they are allowed to steal all your data and the work of thousands of artists and now even people’s voices and people's images, and use it to “train” their bots and call it “artificial intelligence” instead of what it is. Plagiarism.
I suppose a lot of people are really lazy and they don't mind having a fake bot creating things for them, but in the end what is happening is that we end up with a lot of material that simply looks and feels the same. Eventually, people will get tired of it and we will see a backlash.
It is even possible that it is going to become a sort of class marker — the dumb masses will continue to be hooked on their devices like the drug addicts they are, but upper class people will probably return to dumb phones and non-digital sources. In fact, it is already like this in many ways.
I think we may even witness the end of the digital revolution. People keep talking about it being impossible to live without those new tools, but I grew up before personal computers and then smartphones were a thing, and have things really changed so much for the better? I'm not sure. I suppose it sped up the exchange of information, but at what cost? Now we also have a lot of “spam", “viruses”, identity theft, and lots of other problems that we didn't have before.
With “AI”, those problems will become much bigger. Voice cloning, deepfakes, all this is going to be a disaster. So what is the benefit of “AI”, except ending jobs or reducing wages, and therefore making the rich richer and the poor poorer?
Now, I suppose it does have some uses, such as, I don't know, trains without conductors and driverless cabs. Although, to be honest, I am not sure why we have to have conductor-less trains and driverless cars. I like my vehicles operated by people, especially in the case something goes wrong. Imagine being stuck in a driverless car or train because the door malfunctions, and having no one but a chatbot to talk to?
I think that with “AI” a lot of problems will become intractable, and it will in fact accelerate the collapse of civilization.
What to do? How do we survive the collapse of the modern world until something else comes along? How do we “ride the tiger”?
Recently there was a national blackout in Spain, I am sure this will eventually happen in other countries too. I don't think it's completely bad. In fact, learning to live off the grid could be a good idea.
I spent the whole Lent period avoiding reading news and social media, and did I miss anything important? No, not really. Nothing had changed, and I saved a lot of useless worrying.
For those who can, living in the countryside or somewhere near nature is another option. I would do that if I could. Maybe I will, one day. It is certainly more relaxing that living in cities and teaches you more self-sufficiency.
Learning to paint and draw is good too. Or, if you don't feel you have talent for the visual arts, try writing, or making pottery, or learning a musical instrument, or even cooking. It is good to concentrate on any activity that takes you away from this useless worrying about the world.
You don't need to have a lot of talent, although you should try to make it the best you can. But even small things have their beauty. (The poet Fernando Pessoa said that if life gave us nothing more than a prison cell, let's at least make it beautiful.)
Marrying and having lots of white kids? By all means, if you're still able to do so in this day and age. “The rest shall keep as they are.”
Spiritual growth could be another idea. Praying, fasting, going to church, reading spiritual and religious texts and so on. I think the West may eventually have a spiritual reawakening, simply because people are getting tired of all that constant hedonism and consumerism and materialism. Although which form this will take is anyone’s guess.
I am Catholic, because that is how I was raised, and recently I developed a strange interest in the pre-1962 Latin Mass, but I think that the modern Catholic Church is hopelessly corrupt. So I don’t have a lot of hope that a new pope, whoever he may be, will change things. I think Vatican II basically killed the Catholic Church. But I suppose that eventually things will go back to some form of order, even there. Corruption has always existed in the Church, but it didn't stop its mission, as in the famous story by Boccaccio of the conversion of the Jew.
As for other religions, well, I like the Russian Orthodox Church, at least as seen from the distance, and I find interesting some aspects of Buddhism. I know very little about other religions.
But if you prefer to worship trees or rocks, or ancient Greek muses, or Japanese spirits, and that gives you peace, I suppose it is an option too. (Although Jesus said he was “The Way, the Truth and the Life", so bear that in mind.) As long as you don't worship Satan or make sacrifices to Moloch. (They already do that too much in the upper echelons.)
I think the question, as Hamlet put it, is the old to be or not to be — if this that we call “real world” and “real life” is the only thing that exists, or there are other realms, other realities, and a life after death.
I think it was Pascal who said something interesting, that when we are dreaming we believe that the dream is “real”, that it is really happening, so how can we know for sure that we are really “awake" when we are awake?
But sometimes we have those dreams in which we realize that we are dreaming. And the same is true of “real life". There are moments in which we have a sensation that we are just living inside a dream and there is another reality beyond it. Doesn't it happen to you?
The Swedish playwright August Strindberg, who became religious and given to mysticism later in life, wrote that people who believe only in the material, physical world are like deaf and blind people who somehow became convinced that they are the only ones who can see.
It is true, materialism is limiting. There are other realities.
The main thing is not to fret so much about “the real world", much less about the fake “AI” world. We will witness all kinds of calamities in our lifetimes. There is nothing we can do about it.
Just relax. Learn to paint or to play the piano, or move to a farm and raise goats, or read long Russian novels — Dostoevsky is the best, but I think Tolstoy's good too — or abandon all your possessions and become a monk or a hermit, or find something else to occupy your time that doesn't require constant fretting.
It's what I will do.
Thanks, and take care.
It's funny you mention the addiction of technology, because in my recent interview with Dave Sim the creator of the comic Cerebus, He talks about the drug of technology and wanting to stay sane so he didn't embrace it like others did. I'll be posting that video either today or tomorrow.
I've also been getting back to doing traditional work drawing with pencil and paper and inking.. I've also been getting back into reading and building up my library.
While my writing and art haven't made me money, I find it more fulfilling then money. All money is good for is trading it for goods and services.