#6 - No Mountain, Head Empty
I have a bone to pick with generative AI. I'll get in line.
For every AI chatbot, tool, or feature introduced to an app or site to inflate its shareholder value (and render its usefulness moot), I hope there’s excruciating diarrhea waiting for the CEO most excited by it. I’m talking about conference room board meeting shart or bust.
It was the recurring ill-wish I kept making during a screening of Jesse Armstrong’s Mountainhead, a three star romp about four broligarchs-before-holigarchs whose storied friendships clash with their desire to bring in technocracy as the new world order. The film itself read like an obtuse stage play that was too worried about falling behind the times. A lot more suck session than Succession. (Where was Lukas Matsson and why wasn’t he invited, Jesse?)
One of the story arcs in the film followed Venis Parish (Cory Michael Smith)—the world’s least subtle penis reference and surrogate ZuckerMusk—after unleashing a slew of AI tools for content creation on his controversial social media platform, Traam, stoking the flames of global instability through disinformation. He wants to buy Bilter, an AI company with the necessary guardrails to tame the beast Traam set free, founded by fellow billionaire and frenemy Jeff Abredazi (Ramy Youssef). Their dealmaking quickly turns into a pissing contest, complete with deeply unserious attempted murder. Armstrong outlines real-world parallels under the assumption that the megalomaniac personalities in charge of these tech companies are just giant losers that need to get a life. While that may be true about the tech CEOs of our reality, I want to do a little more than just dunk on these guys. While the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk can be pathetic, I don’t know what their endgames are outside of alleged plans for a technostate. I know that they want to make as much profit as possible, but once they’ve extracted everything from the Earth and it’s inhabitants, what else are they going to do? Go to space? What will you do once you’ve extracted everything from space? What then? Do they want to live forever? If so, why? You guys don’t even like each other! Why would you want to live forever with people you hate?
The billionaires never have to deal with any of the fallout from their extraction. They weasel themselves into or near positions of power so they can never be held accountable (unless they free my guy Luigi, but that’s a different conversation altogether). They can just run away to some distant human space colony where Mark Rylance is wearing a really bad wig (a Don’t Look Up deep cut for the Hyperfixateheads). We’re the ones that have to live with the damage. I want to be part of figuring out how we do that. Or at least how we cope with the damage while willing another world into being. (Sorry to get woo woo about this.)
Mountainhead is toothless at best, and to expect more from Jesse Armstrong is misguided; if you’re going to go for low hanging fruit, no one is expecting you to bring a ladder. I would love nothing more for the billionaire class to be shamed out of existence, but that’s just not going to happen. That’s a neoliberal pipe dream. The billionaire class can’t be fought in “the marketplace of ideas”. They need to be fought in the Octagon. Put me in, coach!
As a writer, I get the offhand “you’re going to be replaced by AI” by people who don’t write. I don’t think that’s going to stop me from writing. It might stop me from making money from writing (something I don’t get paid a lot to do anyway) but I work in print media and aspire to work in television, extinct and persistent is my bag, baby! I’m a dinosaur-in-training! I will eventually become overwhelmed by and unable to compete with the sheer volume of output AI can produce. But I’m not trying to compete with it, and neither are the people that are still choosing to make art or communicate ideas. Maybe these large language models and neural networks will get to a point where it (they?) can regurgitate thoughts, ideas, and stolen intellectual property its been trained on with uncanny fidelity but I don’t know who would want that other than the people who don’t see any value in the process of artmaking or engaging with their own thoughts. It’s frictionless.
It’s hard to track when and where we became so afraid of friction as a species. We’ve become a lot more risk-averse, despite the very full-of-risk state of the world right now. We’ve removed friction from all the wrong places and we continue to find ingenious ways to prioritize our comfort and convenience above all else. Why wouldn’t we? If the technology is there, why make things harder for ourselves or continue to let things be difficult? We love to optimize and streamline and skimp and save so we can earn a little more minutes of rest and leisure (which I’m all for, a bitch is tired!) but the existential threat generative AI specifically poses to our species right now is towards our agency as human beings.
I’m not going to fault you for making your life easier while we’re living under the same kind of capitalism, that’s your prerogative, but I think that convenience is a real slippery slope. The reason “you’re going to get replaced by AI” gets smacked onto anyone in the arts is because we’ve been socialized to devalue the arts—in our schools, our communities, in the reduction of art as “content” to be consumed, and in the exclusion of people who don’t make art as part of their lives in their own education about what art can do. Art is a comfort to me, as I’m sure it is for many of us, but to recoil in comfort, familiarity, and nostalgia is a disservice to the ways in which art can challenge, disturb, and communicate the intangible.
I’ve been finding a lot of joy in making visual art again. Low stakes and just for fun. I haven't painted, collaged, or drawn for fun since I was in high school, and even that got usurped by Art For Grades. Going to film school and grad school was another Art for Grades rigamarole that I think beat practice out of me and encouraged me to focus on outcomes (with the caveat that a lot of grad school did focus on process and I had to document that process to submit on Canvas by midnight otherwise the assignment would be marked incomplete. End of digression.) I had to frame my practice through goalposts instead of sustainable longevity.
I love making collages. The tactile nature of interacting with materials, selecting words and images, and getting to hold a glue stick again is incredibly thrilling for me. I don't give a rat's ass if they're good or bad, or if I'm doing them right or wrong, I'm doing this for fun and for myself. I’ve been inspired to collage by my friend Mel and a really lovely gift they made for everyone in attendance at their Lunar New Year celebration earlier this year. When I went to visit my family in Indonesia this past Eid Al-Fitr, I was collaging with my cousin and her daughter after a long day of activity. We sat in my childhood bedroom and shared a pair of scissors and single glue stick between the three of us. We rummaged through the old magazines I had sitting around in my room, a few copies of Empire Magazine, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker already cut up from 2022. My cousin made a sign for my niece's bedroom, my niece filled up pages of her journal that we had bought earlier in the day, and I made whatever these are below:
I love how you can play with the texture of images, patterns, and words and mash them up to create something new. I love seeing white edges of torn paper up against clean scissor-cut lines. I had fun making them. I love having fun!!!!!!!!!
Playing with clay was one of my favourite hobbies growing up. When we were living in Kuwait, my dad had bought me packets of DAS air dry clay because he remembered how much I loved playing with play-doh. He also knew that I loved to paint and had gone to a birthday party at Colour Me Mine in Marina Mall—a place I remember fondly in my heart but not in my (read: my dad’s) wallet. At Colour Me Mine, I had painted this ceramic dish with a picture of a Club Penguin puffle. That puffle was fired in a kiln and forever immortalized in glaze. Making things with my hands, shaping something into being, was a joy I took for granted as a child. The more my family and I moved around as I got older, the things I did for fun changed. The advent of the internet glued me to my computer and 'fun' became gaming, making GIFs or edits for Tumblr, and early social media. Art-making became homework or 'content' to be shared online, be they words or images.
On a recent bachelorette trip to Whistler, the bride sat us down to make sculptures out of air dry clay after brunch. I made a jewelery tray that looks like a frying pan, complete with two eggs and sizzling bacon. I also made a botched cowboy boot (that didn't survive the trip back to Vancouver) and a little bird. We had a wholesome morning trading tools and sharing pots of water, chatting while our hands got caked in off-white dust. When I got home from that trip, I went to Michaels and bought the same clay my dad used to get. Rehan and I sat after dinner playing with clay while we watched Shrek Forever After. He made an impressive Shrek bust (shared with his consent):
I’ll admit, I looked up references on Pinterest before I started to get an idea of what I could make. I wasn't going to copy something outright, but I was collecting images to try and jog something in my brain. I felt a little embarrassed that I was 'looking for inspiration' and I didn't just immediately know what I was going to make. I didn't look up any tutorials, though, I was running on vibes and childhood muscle memory. I made a rubber ducky, a mushroom photo holder (that can only truly hold a kayaking gift card from my brother-in-law), a box with a fish on the lid (trying to emulate a sardine tin), a lemon slice, and a circular tray I have since painted with little pink flowers. All random, all made-up of primary colours from the set of acrylics Rehan had given me, and all mine. They're just for me to use and look at. They're the first of many. Everything is derivative and that's okay! That's just how statistics work! I shouldn't feel shame for using the tools available to me to seek inspiration but is that any different from asking a robot to come up with something to make for you? It's not like I asked ChatGPT to tell me what I should make, I processed all that data with my own silly brain! I'm not sure it would understand even if I had asked anyway, no matter how many images of air dry clay trinkets it has been trained on.
I didn’t need to ask it. I wanted the concerted effort to think that I am thinking for myself. This art-making didn’t just serve some quick and comforting childhood nostalgia, it got me to reconnect my brain with my hands and actually make something.
I will not be the first person to be alarmist about AI, nor will I be the last, but I would be naive to only joke my way out of where things are right now. It’s just not funny, or not as funny as it used it be. It’s a little embarrassing, if you ask me. The onslaught of AI-generated slop, constant targeted advertising, and whatever the hell a Labubu is on top of the man made horrors streamed to our little devices every day make me insane. It makes me feel dull. This is the only way I know how to stay sharp. I have to get it out of my system so all the stuff on the feelings wheel my therapist showed me doesn’t fester in my body. I want to have more conversations about this, I want to be challenged and I want to challenge.
I had an interesting conversation about my brother recently about what it means for workers to seize AI as a means of production. He clarified that it doesn’t necessarily mean what it would look like for the programmers working on these models to have an ownership and decision-making stakes in how AI is used (though that does make for a fun speculative experiment in itself), but what will AI’s role be if it left the hands of all working people. What would it look like if AI wasn’t being used to replace the worker? That would require the imagination to think up a world without exploitation. What a world that would be!
When I had first come across artificial intelligence as a concept in science fiction, the focus was always on sentience. Westworld, Blade Runner, Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, The Doctor in Star Trek: Voyager—these examples of artificial intelligence explored what it means to have agency, both as humans or machine. Why do we have to think twice about treating machines as lesser than if we know they’re sentient? If we can approximate a soul? What does it mean to value something or someone? It pains me to think about the origins of Dolores Abernathy as some chatbot used to shitpost or plagiarize an essay. I mean, we all have to start somewhere, but it seems like those with vested interest in the progression of AI in its current state are only interested in short-term profits over long-term evolution. And you know what, I’ll give Jesse Armstrong those props, because he delivered that techbro shortsightedness in spades making Mountainhead.
But what do I know? I’m getting replaced eventually, right?
These broligarchs want us to be so pliable and docile that they get to get away with whatever they want. I’m not about to let some dudes tell me how to live my life and neither should you. If I’m gonna ruin my life, I’ll relapse like any other self-respecting addict1, thank you very much!
Thanks for reading! I’ve only heard of ‘political journaling’ very recently, a term I learned from ismatu gwendolyn, and I’m making good in a storm my political journal. There we go! We finally figured out what this newsletter is! For now, anyway.
If you liked what you read and want to support me financially, I’m trying to make a little extra cash to pay for my CELPIP exam that I have to take for my PR (Permanent Residency) application. Apparently, I have to keep proving to the Canadian government that I can still speak English (they’re clearly not subscribed to this newsletter like you geniuses). You can hire me to do an odd literary job here for the flat fee of $10 CAD or buy me coffee here.
What activity do you miss from childhood?
I am 33 months sober as of when this piece is published!