Man, the bravest of animals and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering.
The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far―and the ascetic ideal offered man meaning!
It was the only meaning offered so far; any meaning is better than none at all; the ascetic ideal was in every sense the "faute de mieux" par excellence so far.
In it, suffering was interpreted; the tremendous void seemed to have been filled; the door was closed to any kind of suicidal nihilism.
This interpretation - there is no doubt of it - brought fresh suffering with it, deeper, more inward, more poisonous, more life-destructive suffering: it placed all suffering under the perspective of guilt.
But all this notwithstanding - man was saved thereby, he possessed a meaning, he was henceforth no longer 1ike a leaf in the wind, a plaything of nonsense - the "sense-less" - he could now will something; no matter at first to what end, why, with what he willed: the will itself was saved.
We can no longer conceal from ourselves what is expressed by all that willing which has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself.
All this means - let us dare to grasp it - a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will.
Man would rather will nothingness than not will at all.
Friedrich Nietzche, On The Genealogy of Morals, translated by ??? I dunno I found it on Goodreads
It bothers me that hardly anybody seems to have noticed that anti-wokeness is primarily rooted in a jealousy of wokeness.
When I was in art school learning animation, I was deeply invested in the woke/sjw/whatever mindset of ten to fifteen years ago, and it meant that I constantly had thoughts like this,
"What right does a mediocre white man like me have to even try to get into a competitive industry that has been dominated by people like me since its inception when there are so many people who don't have those advantages competing with me?"
This isn't a theoretical concern; the student body was split pretty much 50/50 between men and women, but the animation industry has a long history of discriminating against women. Calarts was originally founded as a feeder school for Walt Disney animation, and old Walt's policy in the 30s and 40s was that women were explicitly not allowed to hold animation jobs.
When I went I think half of a Pixar film had been directed by a woman, and when I looked around at a group of men and women, both groups equally talented and ambitious, it was really, really really fucking hard to believe that the problem was that Pixar just couldn't find any women for their higher end creative jobs.
That sort of thing made me angry then and it still makes me angry now.
But it also leads to a kind of moral jealousy.
Like, if I was a woman, or a minority, trying to be an artist and bring my perspective to things would be, in some way, heroic. Success would challenge long-standing sexism in the industry and failure would at least kind of have a tragic pathos.
Meanwhile what do I have to offer now? Succeed and throw one more mediocre white guy perspective on an enormous pile of other mediocre white guy perspectives that everybody around me says they're tired of tolerating, or fail and prove that I'm such a pathetic loser that I can't even make it to home plate when I was born on third?
Why even bother?
Like, the problem with a politics that revolves around learning not to center yourself so much is that the absolute best way to stop centering yourself is to just keel over dead in a ditch.
Later on I learned that you're not actually supposed to struggle with those thoughts, that there was not some magical synthesis that everybody else had understood that I had missed, but that actually you were supposed to say that stuff out loud about other people and crush the part of you that wondered if it applied to you down to the deepest parts of your psyche, only to emerge in occasional weird bouts of frustration and neediness.
You do this by just vaguely going, "Actually we care about structural sexism" and definitely don't think about the fact that a mass resignation of men from the talent pool absolutely would help move gender ratios in the industry, just kind of wave that away and apply for that job anyway.
There's this genre of think piece that drives me mad, trying to analyze the insane soup of nonsense that the right wing is descending into, and it drives me crazy because nobody understands this.
Beneath, before the question,
"How do I succeed?"
is the question,
"Why the fuck would anybody care whether I succeed?"
And deeper still is,
"Why the fuck would anybody care what happens to me at all?"
Most people find indifference even harder to deal with, more maddening, than anger or hatred. People will provoke anger just for the sake of getting a reaction that isn't indifference.
But the capitalist mode of production treats all workers with a vast indifference; I am fully interchangeable with any other human who possesses the same skills I do, and the moment utitlizing my skills becomes unprofitable I should be dropped by my employer and left on my own.
Not only does my employer not care what happens to me, specifically, a specific human, it would actually almost be morally wrong for them to care! After all, The Market is a vast tool for allocating goods to everyone on the planet in an efficient, utilitarian way, so what right do you have to privilege your own psychology over something so important?
This is why some people would rather be used up and killed by the Army, at least the Army cares what happens to you. I don't mean that the Army values your safety or self-actualization or whatever, I mean it on the most primal level of "People around you in the army might care if you decided to desert and expect you, as a specific person, to be in specific places and do specific things." The army doesn't respond to Bob Smith going AWOL by firing Bob Smith and getting a different guy. There's courts martial and things.
Better negative attention than a physically comfortable indifference.
Better will to nothing than not will at all.
The anti-woke right are primarily motivated by a jealousy of the suffering of minorities and women.
Which sounds crazy to people, because why would you be jealous of somebody who suffers?
Well, because to their (our) minds your suffering has at least some kind of meaning to somebody somewhere who isn't you.
That's why anti-woke media analysis is just woke media analysis, combing over pop culture to explain the hidden prejudices that underlie basic cliches, looking for micro-aggressions in language and examples of persecution and bigotry against white christian men or whoever, because that's one of the only ways they can conceive of to give their psychological suffering meaning.
There's even the same kind of fantasy of a universally united, harmonious political coalition even though the aims of the politics are very explicitly unconcerned with what happens to significant chunks of the coalition.
This is also where you get the bizarre combination of self-help, gambling, and sociopathic banditry that is rampant in right-wing circles; if there's not reason why anybody outside your own head should care what happens to you what other purpose could life have than a kind of grasping selfishness?
I really feel like people need to start understanding this, in a hurry.
To paraphrase a different thing Nietzsche wrote, the fact that the disease is real doesn't mean that the medicine is curing them. All these medicines the alienated right are taking just prolong the illness.
But like, what I'm increasingly seeing is a variety of think-pieces where the thesis is essentially, "Well, if men are alienated from society, that's not something we can solve with politics or collective action, they need to solve it themselves through an act of existentialist self-creation."
And like, sorry, but I am seeing a lot of articles about some streamer who is attempting this through "Looksmaxxing" and I don't know if that's actually a good solution.
Alienation is the one problem that must be solved through social means! By definition! It is a hunger for acknowledgement from something outside yourself, only a tiny, tiny, tiny number of people can find some sort of stability without that.
Example of Tumblr's aging userbase: people complain about prices rising and how things were better in the past and are getting worse all the time (often in spite of contrary evidence!), have often developed a sharp technophobia based on misunderstandings of how technologies work and moral panics about dangers that are not supported by research, and hold strong opinions about the problem being due to moral failings that can be fixed by simply destroying the unvirtuous and showing personal virtue, and also are convinced that the past was both better and also harder, and that kids these days have it too easy (but they feel sorry for them because everything sucks now)
Something that continuously bugs me is that, even beyond the basic issue of "Trump and his Supreme Court are making specific things worse" is that, well, lots of times and places in the past just *were* "better and also harder" that's just a correct assessment, not a mistake from aging.
And the sort of rejection of that idea bothers me because it makes it impossible to assert any *specific* value, and instead insists on a kind of utilitarian totality.
You can't talk about, say, the inscreasing "Bowling Alone" isolation of the US population, or for that matter the Republican dominated Supreme Court gutting the voting rights act because along that same timeline we also invented a lot of really important vaccines so that means that ultimately things *in their totality* are better and so "It's actually sad and dangerous that we're becoming so isolated and there's genuine evidence that we were less isolated in the past" is made synonymous with "I'm nostalgic for when things were worse."
I actually have way less patience for old person bitching about how everything sucks and is ruined now than you'd think from what I wrote above but there's a sense where...
I don't know, it somehow becomes the only possible defense against the argument made above, something something ressentiment.
You retreat into nostalgia because the structure of the world doesn't let you express any specific value, just a kind of broad generalization.
I remember when I was first learning about institutional theories of art in undergrad, I thought that the mere fact that something had been chosen for art candidacy was not the interesting part. The interesting part came from the deeper reasons that the institution cites for inclusion or non-inclusion. I still think I was kind of right about that and I think newer, fancier institutional theories are a lot more keyed into that. But gallery culture just isn't tuned into what analytic philosophers of art are doing for better or for worse. There is a deeper point I want to get to here. We have really lost the conception of artists as having a special ability to articulate the world or our values (and this makes the claim to the glory of the arts feel a bit hollow). And in part I do think that it is because as a result of the liberal world we have become very in love with the mere fact of choice. What makes the banana on the wall function is the regime which says "there is nothing beyond the mere fact of my choosing." I am rather cynical now of the fallout of Kant's "to be of value is to be an end set by an agent" (a paraphrase). Back to the artworld: even when that phrase is stated as a criticism or a cynical declaration of despair it still functions to reinforce that regime. But our choices aren't without substance or basis. They are not Sartrean moments in the void. We do things for reasons or in response to value and we do things in connection with a real world. It seems like one way in which people have tried to wed the moment of choice back to the world is by talking about the role of various structures in informing our choice. The result, I think, is a kind of fixation on identity and a kind of contingency. And part of the appeal of this is that it makes scholarship rather mechanical (and I think this scholarship has become quite mechanical) in a way that can sustain a growing professional class that can keep its jobs by simply following a formula. But notice that this still involves a kind of obsession with the moment of choice and the features of the decider. There is still (quietly) the longing for the existentialist free decider whose choice is authentic because it is subaltern. More importantly: notice how far back we've still retreated from the world. There is only a very thin scaffolding which the artworld can see from either this perspective or the perspective of mere choosing. Part of the hope of the arts from the 19th Century onward is that it would renew our sight of the world and let us see past the restrictive scope of various regimes of abstraction and rational organization. The thought appears again and again that we can break free from our habitual modes of seeing. The full richness of the world could be reclaimed. And so perhaps the fact that the special power of the arts becoming so laughable is not a transhistorical fact but a contingent and local one, where the artworld is seized by a self-undermining kind of thought. The ideology is at odds with the constitutive aim of the practice.
For some reason whenever people I follow on Tumblr talk about, like, villages or whatever their attitude is basically this:
"Obviously everyone has a close-knit set of relationships with numerous people which provides both psychological stability and the knowledge that you can call on those people for material help but I like how in the modern world that network of people we all have is made up of nice people I choose to associate with instead of whatever asshole lives in my small village but apparently some people think this network of people (which again literally everyone has and can draw peace from) ought to have more busybodies and assholes for no reason and that's really dumb."
And like, no, man, all the people pining for a more connected world are suffering from alienation to the point that they think even shitty attention would be vastly preferable to the conviction that nothing they do has any meaning to anybody else.
And no, "You should cure your sense of alienation from your fellow man with a heroic act of personal meaning-making all by yourself!" Isn't a solution, sorry.
Example of Tumblr's aging userbase: people complain about prices rising and how things were better in the past and are getting worse all the time (often in spite of contrary evidence!), have often developed a sharp technophobia based on misunderstandings of how technologies work and moral panics about dangers that are not supported by research, and hold strong opinions about the problem being due to moral failings that can be fixed by simply destroying the unvirtuous and showing personal virtue, and also are convinced that the past was both better and also harder, and that kids these days have it too easy (but they feel sorry for them because everything sucks now)
I often have a lot of sympathy for the Lame Stodgy Sensible Center-Left types, but - it is hard to maintain much of that sympathy when I see them posting sneering takes about how only an idiot could fail to support important ideas like (ahem) "teen curfew zones."
To be fair we have had a serious problem with organized-crime gangs of teenagers. (And sometimes preteens!)
This sounds like a shitpost, but as I understand it, DC started charging people under 16 very leniently (good!) but then various criminal organizations responded to incentives (predictable!) and started specifically recruiting 14-year-olds to do carjackings because they would basically never get in serious trouble for it.
I think that specific problem has abated somewhat, but it did require a certain amount of targeted enforcement in response. I haven't looked into details but I assume the same thing is going on with the teen curfew—there's a specific uptick in violence and vandalism that they're trying to get under control.
(I viscerally hate the idea of curfews. I also viscerally hate the idea of jail. The latter is definitely sometimes necessary.)
They are also something being used in the context of DC being both heavily short-staffed on police, and lacking agency to change up a lot of policies in the judicial department due to it not being a state and Congress being either apathetic to its problems or openly hostile to the city's needs. Ideally when presented with the mass scale organized disruptions DC has been seeing, you would deploy a ton of police to the streets and ramp up bookings for misdemeanors to preserve order, target actual criminal behavior, and "send the message". But DC can't do a lot of that! They can however set curfiews, which is a doubling down on the "send a message" tactic and eases up the load on the judicial system by simplyfing the charges.
It is in fact really shitty *how often* the US legal system contorts itself to avoid the fact that it cannot actually handle its own job. But the mayor of DC, unique amoung "region leaders", has little agency to fix that problem. It is a crass tool but one of the only tools in the toolkit. I don't really support it myself, I think its a bit performative and the situation is bad but not "restrict civil liberties" bad yet; but it is much more understandable given the unique politics at hand.
DC police are not short-staffed (especially with the National Guard basically serving as their own dedicated auxiliary force), and they already have ramped up the law enforcement response to the so-called “teen takeovers.” It’s true that DC’s criminal justice system is less effective than others because of the weird federal-local power sharing that comes with a lack of statehood, but the city already has been responding with a traditional police enforcement effort, it just hasn’t worked.
What’s so frustrating about this topic is that people like Yglesias talk about “solutions” that are already in place! All of this chaos has been happening while there is already a teen curfew in place and massive numbers of law enforcement on the streets. I’m not going to pretend that I have a perfect fix for “teen takeovers” other than “give teens more no-cost places to safely hang out,” but everyone else’s solution seems to be doing more of the things that are currently failing.
Polling suggests that youth curfews have the support of like 70+% of DC, which makes me feel like I’m going crazy. Am I the only who has noticed that they don’t work at all?
Foods costs are expected to rise at some point in the coming months once the shipping industry fully runs out of fuel reserves and wholesalers run out of existing stocks, causing the full inflationary impact of the Iran War to emerge. Shortly after that, on October 1, a new set of SNAP food aid cuts from Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 will automatically go into effect. I think there is a real chance that hunger will emerge as a political issue by the end of this year (and if it doesn’t, then it should.)
One explanation I’ve heard for why the stock market has been so nonchalant about the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is that they are fully convinced it will end before any of that happens. Someone (I think it was JP Morgan?) said in a recent release that the assumptions for their short-term inflation expectations are all based on the idea that Trump will pull back from the war at the exact right second and miraculously reopen the Strait in full. In their mind, Trump dragging the war out any longer than that would be committing economic suicide right before an election, and Trump as a rational actor would not allow that to happen. Buddy, do I got some news for you
Like, people are telling me that the commonwealth prize is like, an actual real award that people care about, not some kind of self-publishing scam?
Because The Serpent and The Grove is just unreadably amateurish pastiche. Truly confident writers don't try to make every single sentence a "literary" metaphor.
I mean, look, I can't prove it's AI, it could just be a really bad human writer who just happens to have all the tics of the more inept AIs, but like... Come on.
"Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission."
If there's one thing I hate about a wet sack, it's the entitlement.
I genuinely cannot fathom someone who considers themselves a literary critic reading this and not, first of all, immediately clocking it as AI, and second of all immediately clocking it as an unreadably amateurish attempt to hide the most obvious cliches by using baroque, impenetrable prose.
Anthropic's AI can already write better than this! It's not even, like, state of the art AI.
Like, I would not even give this a runner up medal in a competition to generate the best AI prose.
I was gonna say, Claude can write better prose than this. And editing these cliches out doesn’t take much effort, either. Was this a troll, or some sort of performance art ala Fountain?
“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate—”
Through The Looking Glass
Lewis Carol
My personal take is that a lot of people who are fascinated by AI are people who are fascinated by the results of art but have little to no idea why a given piece of art might produce a certain result.
I think there's a particular subset of such people who are also very fascinated by the idea of being seen as an artist but do not, themselves, have much artistic judgement or capability.
And so when they outsource their decision-making to the machine, they don't really have the tools to determine whether or not the machine has made a good decision.
The Grove and The Serpent produces an effect a bit like the one Jabberwocky had on Alice up there, you are barraged with so many authoritative-sounding metaphors and similes that eventually you start to get used to just not really understanding what you are reading.
"Maybe 'wet sacking' is a farming term and I don't understand" one thinks, and when confronted with a slope that wants "rain in teeth or none at all" it is dropped in so unapologetically that you imagine that out there, somewhere, somebody probably knows exactly what that means. "Rain in teeth" is a very strange phrase but even if we assume it means, perhaps, sleet, what kind of slope wants driving sleet or drought and nothing in between?
It's just thrown out like, yeah, of course we know exactly what kind of slope that is.
And if the only thing you take away from literature is "This had phrases and metaphors that I didn't understand but they sure seemed confident!" then, well, The Grove and The Serpent also has a bunch of incomprehensible phrases and metaphors so it must be the same thing, right?
I kind of think the real scandal is that either there is some kind of graft going on here or that the judges and readers of the Commonwealth Award are absolutely lacking in what I would consider the most basic critical faculties one would expect from a reader.
I’ve seen many ai artists and enthusiasts who are themselves traditional artists- look at the Are We Art Yet discord, they have a whole channel for Philosophy of Art. @reachartwork is an accomplished artist who trained a lora on her own artwork, for example.
I feel your broad judgements are perhaps tainted by a desire to feel superior. Very human desire, but, ehhhhh.
And, finally, I’d say ‘ai users who have no artistic judgement and don’t comprehend writing and just want the stolen valor of declaring themselves authors even though they are imaginationless untermenschen who can’t comprehend writing’, whether or not they are real or representative, probably is not a description that applies to the judges of a prestigious litfic award! These are people who, presumably, have not used ai to make judgements for them in the past, since they presumably have a history of literary critique.
So, it's not a question of stolen valor, it's a question of, "why is The Serpent and The Grove so bad when it is not necessary for a story produced with AI to be this bad?"
And it is, in my opinion, incredibly bad, and bad in ways which ought to be self-evident to a critical reader of literature.
In a different branch of this thread I pointed out some of the genuinely sloppy and nonsensical similes in just the first few paragraphs and linked to an essay that points out that we tend to clock the story as AI because it is bad in a particular, specific way. But it's not necessary to know about AI to notice that it's a badly written story; an awards process based on literary quality would have excluded this story from consideration for reasons of quality and the question of whether it was AI would have been essentially moot.
"These are people who, presumably, have not used ai to make judgements for them in the past, since they presumably have a history of literary critique."
Except clearly, for some reason or another, they very obviously don't.
The language in The Serpent and The Grove is not, for example, precise. I consider that statement basically an objective judgement, not a subjective one.
A character early on is described as having a walk that "turns benches into men". Three drinks are said to steady the hand; a character narrows his eyes against the glare of the sun and the "darker glare" inside him.
None of this is "precise".
I truly, genuinely wonder whether bribery was involved at some point in the process, because at some point there has just been an utter lapse of critical judgement on both sides of the equation here; If Nazir used an AI it doesn't explain why he didn't produce something better than this, and it's also unclear why an award that people describe as "prestigious" has judges that didn't notice his failure to do so.
Like, people are telling me that the commonwealth prize is like, an actual real award that people care about, not some kind of self-publishing scam?
Because The Serpent and The Grove is just unreadably amateurish pastiche. Truly confident writers don't try to make every single sentence a "literary" metaphor.
I mean, look, I can't prove it's AI, it could just be a really bad human writer who just happens to have all the tics of the more inept AIs, but like... Come on.
"Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission."
If there's one thing I hate about a wet sack, it's the entitlement.
I genuinely cannot fathom someone who considers themselves a literary critic reading this and not, first of all, immediately clocking it as AI, and second of all immediately clocking it as an unreadably amateurish attempt to hide the most obvious cliches by using baroque, impenetrable prose.
Anthropic's AI can already write better than this! It's not even, like, state of the art AI.
Like, I would not even give this a runner up medal in a competition to generate the best AI prose.
I was gonna say, Claude can write better prose than this. And editing these cliches out doesn’t take much effort, either. Was this a troll, or some sort of performance art ala Fountain?
“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate—”
Through The Looking Glass
Lewis Carol
My personal take is that a lot of people who are fascinated by AI are people who are fascinated by the results of art but have little to no idea why a given piece of art might produce a certain result.
I think there's a particular subset of such people who are also very fascinated by the idea of being seen as an artist but do not, themselves, have much artistic judgement or capability.
And so when they outsource their decision-making to the machine, they don't really have the tools to determine whether or not the machine has made a good decision.
The Grove and The Serpent produces an effect a bit like the one Jabberwocky had on Alice up there, you are barraged with so many authoritative-sounding metaphors and similes that eventually you start to get used to just not really understanding what you are reading.
"Maybe 'wet sacking' is a farming term and I don't understand" one thinks, and when confronted with a slope that wants "rain in teeth or none at all" it is dropped in so unapologetically that you imagine that out there, somewhere, somebody probably knows exactly what that means. "Rain in teeth" is a very strange phrase but even if we assume it means, perhaps, sleet, what kind of slope wants driving sleet or drought and nothing in between?
It's just thrown out like, yeah, of course we know exactly what kind of slope that is.
And if the only thing you take away from literature is "This had phrases and metaphors that I didn't understand but they sure seemed confident!" then, well, The Grove and The Serpent also has a bunch of incomprehensible phrases and metaphors so it must be the same thing, right?
I kind of think the real scandal is that either there is some kind of graft going on here or that the judges and readers of the Commonwealth Award are absolutely lacking in what I would consider the most basic critical faculties one would expect from a reader.
Like, people are telling me that the commonwealth prize is like, an actual real award that people care about, not some kind of self-publishing scam?
Because The Serpent and The Grove is just unreadably amateurish pastiche. Truly confident writers don't try to make every single sentence a "literary" metaphor.
I mean, look, I can't prove it's AI, it could just be a really bad human writer who just happens to have all the tics of the more inept AIs, but like... Come on.
"Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission."
If there's one thing I hate about a wet sack, it's the entitlement.
I genuinely cannot fathom someone who considers themselves a literary critic reading this and not, first of all, immediately clocking it as AI, and second of all immediately clocking it as an unreadably amateurish attempt to hide the most obvious cliches by using baroque, impenetrable prose.
Anthropic's AI can already write better than this! It's not even, like, state of the art AI.
Like, I would not even give this a runner up medal in a competition to generate the best AI prose.
I sincerely believe that incoherent disconnected metaphors are currently considered perfectly acceptable writing. Or at least, there’s plenty of well reviewed post 2022 books that contain no other types of metaphors. It’s not unsurprising; it’s the brutal reality.
Can we say that between the prize and the story and Jamir Nazir, there is something perverse and disrespectful to other writers, because it
From the point I flagged the story on X, I have constantly insisted that it was first and foremost an extremely badly written piece of fiction. I felt, and still feel, that the fact that the story fails as a piece of literature should’ve been the first thing noticed by Commonwealth readers and judges. If they could not do that, then we have a far more serious problem than any other issue that has been raised regarding the story and its writer.
The above is a good essay about this and the above quote made me feel glad that somebody noticed the same thing I did.
I probably should have reversed the order of thoughts up there; the reason The Serpent and The Grove immediately clocks as AI is because it is lacking in literary merit in a very specific way. And even if you know nothing about AI, even if you woke up from a ten year coma and this is the first thing you read, you should recognize the many, many immediately apparent flaws in the prose.
Like, I think calling the prose in this story "precise" is wrong on an almost objective level:
Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission.
His eyes narrowed against the glare outside and the darker glare inside him
a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all.
One drink opened the chest, two turned fear into courage’s cheap cousin, three steadied the hand enough to write the future in invisible ink.
She had the kind of walking that made benches become men
Even if you think any of those lines have some literary merit, precise is not the word one would use to describe these.
Although, come on, "the darker glare inside him?" Good lord that is a remarkably terrible simile.
"There was a light outside, and a darker light inside his soul". That's a joke from My Immortal, not the work of a voice of quiet authority.
Recently I was having a tipsy bar conversation and said, "When you drill down to brass tacks" and I was not praised for my restrained, precise use of the English language.
Part of what makes AI sort of uncanny and frightening is that it is arising at the same time that there has been a total collapse of taste and artistic judgement.
And this creates a sort of... Instrumentalization of art. The point of publishing The Serpent and The Grove is completely instrumental, it's to win plaudits from literary awards. And the point of awarding it is to have awarded a literary award to a "voice of restraint and quiet authority" and the actual words in the story are nothing but a vague afterthought, a kind of literary Potempkin Village or the facade of a hollywood western town, on a quick glance it looks like the kind of thing one might expect literary fiction about poor farmers in the Caribbean to look like and why on earth would we bother to give it more than a quick once over?
It's not there to be read and considered, it's there to have won an award.
There's something deeply unpleasant and uncanny about the whole dynamic, to me.
Like, people are telling me that the commonwealth prize is like, an actual real award that people care about, not some kind of self-publishing scam?
Because The Serpent and The Grove is just unreadably amateurish pastiche. Truly confident writers don't try to make every single sentence a "literary" metaphor.
I mean, look, I can't prove it's AI, it could just be a really bad human writer who just happens to have all the tics of the more inept AIs, but like... Come on.
"Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission."
If there's one thing I hate about a wet sack, it's the entitlement.
I genuinely cannot fathom someone who considers themselves a literary critic reading this and not, first of all, immediately clocking it as AI, and second of all immediately clocking it as an unreadably amateurish attempt to hide the most obvious cliches by using baroque, impenetrable prose.
Anthropic's AI can already write better than this! It's not even, like, state of the art AI.
Like, I would not even give this a runner up medal in a competition to generate the best AI prose.
If a guy broke into someone’s house and beat them up and killed half their family, then lived in the house, would it be making it better or worse if the guy let some (sympathetic, deserving, of course!) other people move in too?
Countries aren't houses, so I'm not sure what process this is supposed to be an allegory for.
Me, I rent, so I've always been quite aware that I don't own the land I reside on, although a lot of other people don't seem to know it.
If you're asking me if I should be expelled from the city I live in (Since I am the sympathetic person who was let in in this allegory) then, uh, no I would prefer not, thank you.
It’s whether being pro immigration makes a lick of sense to combine with land acknowledgments.
If you’re an invader, a thief, an Oppressor, well of course you don’t want to lose your ill-gotten resources, but why would anyone gaf about the opinions of the villains? Like, come on, we all know that the randos Murderpants invited in get evicted when the law catches up with events in this scenario, maybe they dodge the criminal charges Murderpants is getting, but they’re still getting evicted.
I am trying to bait someone into providing an explanation for how “The United States is an illegitimate country built on stolen land! Landback!” And “The United States has a moral obligation to accept mass immigration” go together logically, vs inherently are in conflict with each other.
@str-ngeloop He's specifically looking for the nutjobs who can no longer comprehend ideas like "what the US did to the Native Americans is bad but you can't undo the past" and "all US citizens have a right to live here and so does anyone else who enters legally", because they're so far up their own asses that they'll simultaneously argue that white Americans whose families emigrated decades if not centuries ago have no right to live here but non-whites("minorities" to them, since they're so Americocentric that everyone who isn't white" being the global majority doesn't occur to them) who just got here have a sacrosanct right to be here even if they entered illegally and were already wanted for other crimes on top of that.
Might be what I am most likely to find, but I do still dream of finding some brilliant mind who actually makes me believe the stuff that I am required to act l believe.
I mean, theory of mind-wise it's not fundamentally very difficult, you just find a group which contains both native Americans and some proportion of immigrants and decide that the ruling class in America maintains its power by exploiting both of them and therefore owes something to both of them.
Could be "People of Color" or BIPOC or the proletariat, whatever. The US has built its power by exploiting that group both in and out of the country, and it therefore owes that group some sort of restitution whether they be in or out of the country.
I don't put much stock in such views but they don't strike me as particularly incoherent on that level, at least if the people espousing them have even a modicum of sophistication.
Personally, I happen to think that if you were to bestow a large amount of Capital on Native American citizens, they would pretty quickly adopt to the incentive structures of capital ownership, which is that foreign tourist money spends just as well as local money, and good workers can be found in any country.
You understand that “lump Natives into a larger category that they have only tenuous ties to and no political or influence and minimal shared interests with in reality, then declare that an action that empowers the larger category must be good for Natives” sounds either insane, so stupid that at least some kindergarteners will see through it, or intentional bullshit laundering anti Native intent, right?
If Settler Colonialism is bad, how are additional settlers good?
Uh, I mean, I feel like, say, all the Native Casino owners probably like it when foreigners spend money at the casino.
Like, land-owners like being able to rent said land to other people.
I don't really regard most land back rhetoric as particularly serious; if you assume that the purpose of it is to, I don't know, make a symbolic restitution and then for the land-owners to just sort of sit on it and not do anything it doesn't make sense, but at that point you're just splitting off the least reasonable people and asking me to justify them and like, kind of by definition that doesn't work.
If the reasoning is to put more productive capital in Native hands then, like... Immigrants aren't Settlers.
The current population of Native Americans in the US is, like, 1% of the population. If the idea of land back is to somehow increase their share of the population it's just fundamentally unreasonable on its face; of course nobody can defend it.
If the point is to use capital to increase economic prosperity, then the conflation of modern immigration with the original settlement of the Americas is not really apt.
I at first had a lot of trouble understanding your comment because the Republicans are getting more and more explicit about the distinction between "native-born" and "foreign" citizens.
Another thing I'd say is... okay why does "Native American" make sense as a category? Do the Navajo and the Nez Perce, say actually share interests? Why is "Native American" a natural, obvious way to lump people together but "People of Color" is obviously not?
Neither immigrants nor Native American nor native born citizens are actually given land just for, like, being here. You gotta buy it or rent it or inherit it off someone else.
Like, it makes very, very little sense to imagine me as a settler on my landlord's property. Because I pay rent and he retains the legal ownership of the land.
Like, yeah if the purpose of land-back is to expel the non-Native population then of course it can't be reconciled with pro-immigrant sentiment.
But like, if the purpose is control over capital, like, the idea that I am somehow *diluting* the political power of my landlord by living in one of the apartment complexes he owns feels, well, silly to me.
If a guy broke into someone’s house and beat them up and killed half their family, then lived in the house, would it be making it better or worse if the guy let some (sympathetic, deserving, of course!) other people move in too?
Countries aren't houses, so I'm not sure what process this is supposed to be an allegory for.
Me, I rent, so I've always been quite aware that I don't own the land I reside on, although a lot of other people don't seem to know it.
If you're asking me if I should be expelled from the city I live in (Since I am the sympathetic person who was let in in this allegory) then, uh, no I would prefer not, thank you.
It’s whether being pro immigration makes a lick of sense to combine with land acknowledgments.
If you’re an invader, a thief, an Oppressor, well of course you don’t want to lose your ill-gotten resources, but why would anyone gaf about the opinions of the villains? Like, come on, we all know that the randos Murderpants invited in get evicted when the law catches up with events in this scenario, maybe they dodge the criminal charges Murderpants is getting, but they’re still getting evicted.
I am trying to bait someone into providing an explanation for how “The United States is an illegitimate country built on stolen land! Landback!” And “The United States has a moral obligation to accept mass immigration” go together logically, vs inherently are in conflict with each other.
@str-ngeloop He's specifically looking for the nutjobs who can no longer comprehend ideas like "what the US did to the Native Americans is bad but you can't undo the past" and "all US citizens have a right to live here and so does anyone else who enters legally", because they're so far up their own asses that they'll simultaneously argue that white Americans whose families emigrated decades if not centuries ago have no right to live here but non-whites("minorities" to them, since they're so Americocentric that everyone who isn't white" being the global majority doesn't occur to them) who just got here have a sacrosanct right to be here even if they entered illegally and were already wanted for other crimes on top of that.
Might be what I am most likely to find, but I do still dream of finding some brilliant mind who actually makes me believe the stuff that I am required to act l believe.
I mean, theory of mind-wise it's not fundamentally very difficult, you just find a group which contains both native Americans and some proportion of immigrants and decide that the ruling class in America maintains its power by exploiting both of them and therefore owes something to both of them.
Could be "People of Color" or BIPOC or the proletariat, whatever. The US has built its power by exploiting that group both in and out of the country, and it therefore owes that group some sort of restitution whether they be in or out of the country.
I don't put much stock in such views but they don't strike me as particularly incoherent on that level, at least if the people espousing them have even a modicum of sophistication.
Personally, I happen to think that if you were to bestow a large amount of Capital on Native American citizens, they would pretty quickly adopt to the incentive structures of capital ownership, which is that foreign tourist money spends just as well as local money, and good workers can be found in any country.
You understand that “lump Natives into a larger category that they have only tenuous ties to and no political or influence and minimal shared interests with in reality, then declare that an action that empowers the larger category must be good for Natives” sounds either insane, so stupid that at least some kindergarteners will see through it, or intentional bullshit laundering anti Native intent, right?
If Settler Colonialism is bad, how are additional settlers good?
Uh, I mean, I feel like, say, all the Native Casino owners probably like it when foreigners spend money at the casino.
Like, land-owners like being able to rent said land to other people.
I don't really regard most land back rhetoric as particularly serious; if you assume that the purpose of it is to, I don't know, make a symbolic restitution and then for the land-owners to just sort of sit on it and not do anything it doesn't make sense, but at that point you're just splitting off the least reasonable people and asking me to justify them and like, kind of by definition that doesn't work.
If the reasoning is to put more productive capital in Native hands then, like... Immigrants aren't Settlers.
The current population of Native Americans in the US is, like, 1% of the population. If the idea of land back is to somehow increase their share of the population it's just fundamentally unreasonable on its face; of course nobody can defend it.
If the point is to use capital to increase economic prosperity, then the conflation of modern immigration with the original settlement of the Americas is not really apt.
I at first had a lot of trouble understanding your comment because the Republicans are getting more and more explicit about the distinction between "native-born" and "foreign" citizens.
Another thing I'd say is... okay why does "Native American" make sense as a category? Do the Navajo and the Nez Perce, say actually share interests? Why is "Native American" a natural, obvious way to lump people together but "People of Color" is obviously not?
Well, I think there is a sense in which this isn't terribly surprising. I remember oh, I don't know, fourteen, fifteen years ago when libertarianism was poised to be the future of the Republican party (at least this is the way everyone was talking; we know now that is was a bunch of bullshit). There was a lot of debate over rugged individualism and personal independence. And I think a lot of the modern (populist) left identity bears the marks of that argument and was pressed to emphasize ways in which we actually are interdependent and can't stand alone—and they needed to do so in such a way that this didn't seem like a bad thing. I think this is a period that kind of intensified the progressive left's attraction to socialist or at least social democratic thought.
Now these critiques of liberal society as too alienated and too atomized have long prefigured this shift in the popular culture of the American political left. There is a great deal of left-wing and feminist criticism of Kant, for example, insofar as he seeks to mold us into subjects that are principally independent and don't depend on other people. The 21st Century versions of this are in turn prefigured and influenced by Marxist critiques of "bourgeois individualism" in the 20th. You might also turn to the critiques of the Romantic "heroic individual" who is in some sense outside of society and sees his (from the feminist critic: his) alienation as insurmountable. Of course this isn't strictly a left-wing idea: obshchina in the Russian context is a curious mixture of conservative and socialist.
It does seem to me that there are a few dimensions that favor pre-modern "collectivity." One is that we do seem to have a longing to be part of things that are larger than ourselves and this can be things so simple as playing in a band. But we notice that these sorts of collective enterprise, in order to really work as the things that they are, involve a kind of unalienated attitude toward other individuals in the collective—an attitude that liberal individualism makes it harder to articulate or at very least forces a kind of reductive view where the division between weak and strong evaluation dissolves. You might also be inspired to take arms against the independence ideal by how lonely and disconnected the world seems to be growing. Sometimes instrumental rationality inadvertantly brings us to experience things that did not initially appear on our list of goods and it seems that society and technology are restructuring the means of achieving certain items on our given (immature) list such that they make less and less contact with the things that really matter. They no longer add the important things to the list. And we find ourselves needing something that we struggle to articulate to ourselves or otherwise find ourselves without a non-embarrassing way of seeking after those things.
Of course individualist modernity has given us many wonderful things. It seems like modern acceptance of homosexuality, for example, would be very difficult to achieve without it. We have to be alienated to the degree that we can get what we need without others needing to like us or approve of our lifestyle. It can't be the end of the story if your (unalienated) support network will cut you off when you say "I don't want to get married and have children. I want to start a household with my lesbian lover." But notice that this kind of independence is facilitated by the liberal state (and indeed, it is what the liberal state sees itself as being for) and its explicit maintenance of impartial systems of exchange (be those market or planned). But, of course, even the libertarian has to admit that much.
This is all to say that I don't think it's all so simple as "modernity good" or "modernity bad." But it does seem a bit naive to think we can just "go back" to something. The Romantics had a way of looking at the Greeks a certain way, as an organically unified society but they thought they were no longer naive in a way that the Greeks were. They had to figure out a new way of reunifying themselves that didn't involve pretending that a sort of fragmentary individualism hadn't transformed them; hadn't made them see new features in the world. The Eve story sometimes gets deployed here. There's something to be done once we've eaten the fruit of knowledge. But there is something embarrassing about the naked unselfconscious way of being once you're on the other side. You can't go back.
Like, I come down on, "Okay, you have to move, is there someone you can call to help you with that?"
Like, there's the general alienation of modernity and then the severe alienation of the large number of people who report having no close friends.
Like, if you have to fly to another state tomorrow because your mom had a heart attack the liberal state is going to struggle to get somebody to help watch your cat, right?
This isn't so much a failure of the liberal state as it is a result of the inherently inflexibility of the large bureaucracy and impersonal nature that modern liberalism requires.
What I find most frustrating about this discussion (Not the above response but the sense of the poll in general) is that the people praising modern individualism and atomized alienation are, when you poke at them, less alienated than a lot of people, I think less than average.
You have people who know exactly who they'd call to take care of their cat, who know for sure who the backup would be, praising atomized individualism.
You don't actually tend to get people going "I often think about the fact that if I died tomorrow it would probably take weeks for anybody to notice, and that if I lost my job I'd have no couch to crash on but this doesn't bother me because of the many good things that come with modern society."
The actual thing about Ms. vs Miss is that America has trended so far towards the informal that in many contexts people won't bother to correct you if you call an unmarried woman "Mrs" or a married one "Miss".
Two weeks ago I laid off more than 20% of my workforce. I didn’t do it because Cloudflare is struggling. We posted record revenue growth, have strong free cash flow and are adding an unprecedented number of customers around the world. I did it because business is changing, and to win the future, Cloudflare needs to change with it.
We haven’t found another example in U.S. business history of a public company growing at more than 30% that laid off more than 20% of its workforce. Yet what we did is likely going to become the norm over the next year. This is a story about artificial intelligence, but executives and commentators are misunderstanding how it will disrupt business and who will be affected.
[...]
The vast majority of those we laid off last week were measurers. We cut middle managers across the organization because AI allows us to have more direct reports per manager while still measuring and mentoring our teams effectively. We consolidated our operations functions into a single group that can support teams across the business, using AI to gain specific expertise when needed. We significantly reduced our marketing team, which, like in most companies, was teeming with measurers. Across our finance team, we found opportunities to consolidate and automate.
Replacing middle managers with AI hallucinations doesn't seem like a good strategy. Particularly the way these LLMs are trained to be needy. I feel like mostly this is a way to make sure your employees have nobody to ask for stuff or complain to.
