Slop era

Humanity's existential confrontation with machines is not going as expected.

“The Fire on Market Street.” Photographer unknown. San Francisco California, ca. 1906. (Library of Congress)

I’m reading Czesław Miłosz’s “The Captive Mind,” a dissident memoir of the absurdities of Poland under Stalinist rule, and there’s this haunting passage about the mind’s misperception of permanence:

“Man tends to regard the order he lives in as natural. The houses he passes on his way to work seem more like rocks rising out of the earth than like products of human hands. He considers the work he does in his office of factory as essential to the harmonious functioning of the world. The clothes he wears are exactly what they should be, and he laughs at the idea that he might equally well be wearing a Roman toga or medieval armor. He respects and envies a minister of state or a bank director, and regards the possession of a considerable amount of money as the main guarantee of peace and security. He cannot believe that one day a rider may appear on a street he knows well, where cats sleep and children play, and start catching passers-by with his lasso. He is accustomed to satisfying those of his physiological needs which are considered private as discreetly as possible, without realizing that such a pattern of behavior is not common to all human societies. In a word, he behaves a little like Charlie Chaplin in ‘The Gold Rush,’ bustling about in a shack poised precariously on the edge of a cliff.

“His first stroll along a street littered with glass from bomb-shattered windows shakes his faith in the ‘naturalness’ of his world. The wind scatters papers from hastily evacuated offices, papers labeled ‘Confidential’ or ‘Top Secret’ that evoke visions of safes, keys conferences, couriers and secretaries. Now the wind blows them through the street for anyone to read; yet no one does, for each man is more urgently concerned with finding a loaf of bread. Strangely enough, the world goes on even though the offices and secret files have lost all meaning… The man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are.”

“The Captive Mind” was, and I suppose remains, a landmark of anti-Stalinist literature. Each chapter is a capsule biography of how intellectuals of Miłosz’s acquaintance, those men of the East, had come to tolerate, and even embrace, the absurdities of post-Nazi Russian occupation; the daily humiliations of evading the rubber mallets of other people’s dialectical materialism.

Mainly I just enjoy how well Miłosz, an accomplished poet who later won the Nobel Prize, describes an an exceptional period of butchery, tedium, paranoia, complicity and exquisite betrayal. There is no special reason why this week I should be reading about the oppression and the moral compromises of the midcentury Polish intelligentsia. But through the force and precision of Miłosz’s artistry, the fate of his intelligentsia becomes urgent simply because I’ve encountered Miłosz. In the false permanence of doomed Polish houses I see the frailty of my apartment block in Koreatown. This is the power of a writer.

I’m thinking about Miłosz, and the craft of writing, as Google has started pumping a text slurry of AI-generated slop into users’ search results this week. It’s not responsible of me to say this, but sometimes a disastrous change can be thrilling. (The sculptor Giacometti once got excited and fell into a “lucid swoon” after getting hit by a car: “Something has happened to me at last!” he said, as Sartre recalled later.) Especially when the disaster is this one, happening on one of the most entrenched pieces of infrastructure on our daily internet, Google Search. The shift to slop is more or less a ratification for what I’ve been saying for a little while now, which is that hyperlinks are going away and we’re all in for supercharged corporate plunder.

But as a writer, I appreciate how Google’s willingness to treat the intelligence of its users with inhuman contempt has lead to an exciting new kind of language conveyance, compiled from comment-thread spaghetti, where a large language model will assertively tell humans how to make pizza with glue.

Our existential showdown with machine intelligence isn’t a martial conflict between Sarah Connor versus the Terminator, but a confrontation between the human conscience and the absurd. The language machine doesn’t care whether anybody’s eating glue pizza. Glue pizza is a “you” problem. You might think that a computer ought to supply instructions for non-glue pizza. But that’s humans would call a value judgment, and machines aren’t in the business of oughts. Meaning is a purely human confection. The machine is objective, deals solely with what is: The circuit is open or isn’t. Today all circuits lead to glue pizza, as designed.

All people live, with varying degrees of awareness, under the oppression of such absurd systems. This is less topical commentary about authoritarian governments, or omnipresent tech monopolies, than about cognition’s confrontations with the impersonal forces of cause and effect. Objects in motion stay in motion. The LLM crawler, set loose, scrapes a stupid Reddit joke post about somebody’s idea to use glue to keep cheese from separating from the sauce, because a tech executive wanted to create a better trillion-dollar digital advertising engine. The Nazis, in motion, meet Poland, at rest. The Soviets, in motion, meet Poland, at rest.

These events all had causes, with causes, with causes, expanding fractally and infinitely into the past. It’s all quite explainable to the scientific observer. But the natural conscience rebels: It’s fucking crazy! The bureaucrats tried to annihilate people! Don’t eat glue pizza! Why would anyone do this!

One function of writing, between people, is a sympathy of consciences against systems of the absurd. The poet Miłosz reaches out, through time, to assert that the writer’s “essential task” is “to look at the world from his own independent viewpoint, to tell the truth as he sees it, and so keep watch and ward in the interest of society as a whole.” An artist, he protests the requirement to be objectively useful under the direction of an imperial government. He wouldn’t have told anyone to eat glue pizza unless it was at gunpoint — though sometimes in life, you’re at gunpoint. So Miłosz defects to the West to protect his subjectivity.

The writer and the machine both use words. But only the writer can refuse to use any more of them, even if it’s under penalty of death, as has been the case in exceptional periods of human history.

The machine can only ever follow orders. It can’t be a hero. It can’t even be a traitor. It just makes glue pizza.