Dear Julia (Knausgaard, technology)
A thank you in brief extracts
Dear Julia,
You’re so right, I did love this article, thanks so much for sending him.
I enjoyed the short-story-ness of Knausgaard going off to Greece to meet James Bridle. I think Gary used to rub shoulders with them before Bridle guru’d off to Greece. Walter Segal seems really cool too (going to have to remember those self-build houses in Lewisham during Open House Festival).
But I especially loved how Knausgaard tries to unpack the feeling of our Smartphone era.
It feels as if the whole world has been transformed into images of the world and has thus been drawn into the human realm, which now encompasses everything. There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think this adds substance to the world, since one knows more about it, not less, but the opposite is true: it empties the world; it becomes thinner. That’s because knowledge of the world and the experience of the world are two fundamentally different things. While knowledge has no particular time or place and can be transmitted, experience is tied to a specific time and place and can never be repeated. For the same reason, it also can’t be predicted. Exactly those two dimensions—the unrepeatable and the unpredictable—are what technology abolishes
The feeling is one of loss of the world. As if the world were fading, as if there were less of it. This can seem paradoxical, especially considering the brutal, horrifying wars taking place right now, which, with all their death and suffering, seem like an overload of reality, but they come here as images; they are two-dimensional and manipulable, and they arrive in the midst of a flood of other images.
I’ve been thinking about that idea of excess and loss in a different piece of writing recently (not fully cooked yet). Decrying a generalised sense of disconnection can sound a bit pat, so I liked how granular Knausgaard went in describing it.
It’s a feeling that creeps up to all of us, not just extreme cases. I think Emily already sent you this Rolling Stone piece about AI-fuelled spiritual delusions?
About:
a Reddit thread on r/ChatGPT that made waves across the internet this week. Titled “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model “gives him the answers to the universe.” Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was “talking to him as if he is the next messiah.” The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software.
What they all seemed to share was a complete disconnection from reality.
Definitely I’ve felt the need to ‘keep up with’ AI, and have been trying it out for shortcuts. But there is also a sense that in cutting out the corners, you might lose the good things about the long way round?
That idea, anyway, is echoed rather beautifully at the beginning of this Grace Paley story I just read and loved:
Come to London soon now see you bye thanks again see you bye
S x