Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…
- from The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats (1920)
As 2023 becomes 2024 I'm writing a reflection to spark conversation with friends, focused mainly on cultural shifts and how they’ve interacted with my life. There are a few themes that have conspired to encourage me in this:
Modern technology has spurred me to up the quality of my writing, for which I am grateful.
These same tools have accelerated the metastasis of mass social media as (in my opinion) a social cancer, so I'm focusing on having smaller, deeper conversations.
My first corporate employer (Google) and its peers mostly completed their move from disruptive to extractive entities; a loss of innocence for me.
Post-pandemic, I see a glimmer of a new anti-capitalist counterculture, which makes me optimistic.
I continue to chop wood and carry water.
1.
A gyre is a kind of vortex, and the edges of our gyre always seems to be widening - wealthy/poor, left/right, educated/uneducated.
It is not lost on me here in San Francisco, reading Yeats’ The Second Coming, that the modern notion of a technological singularity (the ‘rapture of the nerds’) shares a lot with Yeats’ gyre - tearing things apart as it sucks them inexorably towards a single point. His poem was published in the aftermath of The Great War, as the world was struggling to understand the rapid technological advancement that had allowed unprecedented mechanized slaughter.
This sounds a bit gloomy, yet I enter 2024 with some optimism. The emerging AI tools that are ‘so hot right now’ are, unsurprisingly, part of both sentiments.
The media that surrounds us is awash with AI-generated ‘content’, click-optimized sensationalist articles about AI, and hollowed-out AI shills. This is nothing new, but the proliferation of this kind of stuff is being exponentially accelerated.
These tools and the networks that disseminate information are also being intentionally exploited and weaponized to suppress discourse in democracies and dictatorships, and to wage propaganda wars alongside the physical wars taking place in Palestine, Ukraine and elsewhere. Deep-fakes, trolling, censorship, and just plain old lies - it all feels quite ugly and bad.
On the plus side, the rapid increase in the quality of these same tools is unshackling us from the early 21st century bourgeois slavery of ‘creating content’. LLMs today are easily better than the average person at writing short, informative prose, which makes it utterly pointless in 2023 for a human writer to attempt to craft middlebrow things to say for Internet points and influence.
For the first time since I left the hallowed and bookish halls of Oxford University™ at the tender age of 21, I find myself intentionally writing more nuanced prose in longer form, because there is absolutely no point in trying to compete with a machine to produce something only mildly insightful. By obliterating the middle-ground, generative AI raises the bar for things written by actual humans. At least in the short term, this feels good - I am compelled to up my game in my critical thinking and what I communicate.
In other areas - like learning a language, making art or playing strategy games like Go - machines have also become better than most people, and helped us become better at being excellent. This has caused much public consternation - writers strikes over AI have echoed Industrial Revolution-era loom-smashing. Yet I and millions of others have become undeniably better at things as a result. My Go playing has improved thanks to models like KataGo; I have generated artwork that I am quite fond of using tools like DreamStudio, despite being terminally awful with a brush. Gyre. Widening.
Unfortunately, the mass social media tools that have become foundational to our actual communication with other humans (Twitter, Instagram etc.) are largely incompatible with this raised bar for intellectual discourse.
2.
Describing mass social media today as ‘social cancer’ is both alarmist and passé. In fact it sounds like the kind of one-dimensional hot-take you would find on…social media. When I say ‘social cancer’ I mean to evoke the following qualities:
It progressively corrodes the healthy functioning of its host.
It grows until it destroys its host and itself, or is excised.
Its growth is accelerated by feedback loops that encourage its own unsustainable growth over the long-term survival of its host.
Rampant mental health and body image issues amongst young people; the ascent of hate-fuelled figures like Andrew Tate; Twitter’s incredible cesspit-meltdown - symptoms of a cancerous growth whose outsized success has impaired society’s capacity for deep thinking and nuanced discourse on it AND outside of it.
When I say ‘feedback loops’ I don’t just mean the growth hacking being done by teams inside Facebook, TikTok and such. Because networks like this can be exploited to sway public opinion, those in positions of power (companies, countries and political groups) are heavily invested in their proliferation.
Nation states are now extremely adept at using these platforms to control, polarize and progressively dumb down narratives - China has an army of algorithms and humans to censor pretty much any digital dissent. In the days following the Oct 7th terrorist attacks by Hamas, pro-Israel groups masterfully rallied online communities to try and silence any kind of nuanced online debate (epitomized in this Onion article). American media is awash with bizarre conspiracies about its politicians (ie QAnon), which from a distance seemed amusing, until they helped to foment armed insurrection against the state in 2021.
Somewhere in 90s middle-class middle-England, I was raised to embrace the idea that "I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". Online in the 2020s this philosophy feels not only hopelessly naive, but outdated in practical terms. The networks we use shape our capacity for discourse (the medium is the message), so we need to consider the platform more than the position.
What is the point of highlighting all this?
It is my hope - for society’s sake - that the AI-powered proliferation of garbage and propaganda online makes large, public-sharing networks like Instagram or Facebook wholly untrustworthy and untenable - like what Elon Musk has done with Twitter, but automated. People are already opting out of these networks in favor of the more atomized and private communities found on places like Discord (which is far more private) or Reddit, where conversations are mostly public, but heavy moderation maintains a sense of community and a baseline for acceptable discourse.
For my own part, I am driven to share longer form, more thoughtful ideas with fewer people. Fewer humble-brags on LinkedIn; more personally meaningful and honest work. I was moved last month by a lecture I stumbled upon given by director Charlie Kaufman, arguing that the self-censorship we practise today in public is not only bad for society, but also deeply spiritually injurious to us as individuals.
So I am endeavoring to censor myself less, and in my writing set aside any anticipation of what I believe society expects of me, as much as is reasonably possible.
3.
Youtube has a lot more ads these days, and suddenly we need six different monthly subscriptions to watch the movies and TV that we want to. In fact, it seems that we need monthly subscriptions for just about everything, from books to video games to…this rant is so well-worn that you can probably finish it yourself.
In a span of 20 years disruptive Big Tech has managed to become extractive Cable. User-hostile and increasingly profit-first products fill our time and space with ads; raising monthly costs incrementally to eke out more pennies on the dollar.
I felt a loss of innocence recently. When I started my career 15 years ago or so I believed that the company I was working for (Google) was materially different from other corporations (it wasn’t). What was different - for only a brief spell in the history of corporate America - were the leaders at the time: Larry Page and Sergey Brin made many vigorous attempts to disrupt the status quo of corporate management and the trajectory of corporations. But they drifted away and the company endured. And any public company is basically legally compelled to install leadership that will instead focus on the stock price; explicitly tied to the status quo.
If the recent board fiasco at OpenAI and the Microsoft-assisted counter-coup is anything to go by, the coming wave of startups will be insatiably profit-first. I am a card-carrying capitalist who opted to live in America, yet I feel a strong conviction that the Capitalist-Accelerationist approach to AI (progress as fast as possible, powered by the money and humming data-centers of the largest incumbents) will lead to a further widening of the gyre, rather than more evenly distributed benefits to humanity.
There’s a rich philosophical debate to be had in terms of how to weigh present vs future benefit to humanity, and what we as a species should be optimizing for. But that’s for another time - if you want to talk about it hit me up and we can debate the topic over a beverage or three.
4.
So why approach 2024 with optimism? Well, for about a decade I’ve been lamenting the absence of a meaningful counterculture, and fretting that Globalization was flattening creativity and destroying the weird niches where countercultures thrive. In 2023 I saw green shoots.
Young people in America and Europe seem increasingly disinterested in a life of corporate wage-slavery. Despite the ultra-capitalist aspirations foisted upon them by modern social media, and perhaps because of the cacophony of sports-car driving streamers and insta-famous highly botoxed and airbrushed faces that loom at them from TikTok every day, there are growing communities of dissent. There is a rising labor movement with significant successes under its belt in 2023 (auto workers, screenwriters); there is an antinatalism movement rejecting the idea that young people should procreate to produce offspring that prop up the pension plans of their parents. There are nihilist financial speculators who care little about YOLOing themselves into hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
The traditional path feels like a bad deal, or no deal at all. Many people feel little share of or stake in America’s steadily growing GDP, and traditional status symbols like home-ownership or raising children seem perpetually out of reach. Removing people’s stake in society isn’t really a good thing, but it does create an environment where opting out and rejecting the status quo feels like a viable alternative.
There also seems to be a trickle-up effect for us slightly less young people. Severed from offices during the Pandemic, forced to contemplate our mortality as millions of people died around us from COVID, and given a period of forced-introspection by the lockdowns, re-emergence has brought with it an uncomfortable but healthy reckoning. Middle-managers see their reports working from wherever, moving across-country on a whim, going part-time or just ditching full-time work indefinitely, and have taken a pause to question their own life choices.
For my part, I left a relatively prestigious and well-paid full-time job almost 18 months ago to spend time closer to friends and family back in the UK, travel with my partner and deliberately experiment with a different lifestyle. I started my own business, invested in my brain by writing more, pursued things I love like learning the piano, and did a lot of thinking about how the things I do make me who I am. I will encourage you again to read this Charlie Kaufman lecture, especially the part on how our creative powers come from sharing the vulnerable parts of ourselves that we often deliberately hide from others.
So I’m optimistic because of my lived experience and what I see around me. A socioeconomically widening gyre, the fraying of a capitalist social contract, and people emerging from a period of forced introspection with questions and indignation about why they’re participating in a society where hard work used to afford them two cars and a house and a spouse, but today barely covers rent. Adversity isn’t something to celebrate, but it offers the chance to rethink how we spend our lives.
5.
A few years ago one of the people I managed left the company we worked at to join a startup. We had a good working relationship, they earned a good salary (even in Silicon Valley terms), worked with good people doing work that was good for society and had the respect of their peers - we were putting them up for promotion. The success of the startup they were going to was far from certain, they had been promised things I guessed their new employer would not deliver, and they had not explored other options - this was the first opportunity that had come to them.
As much as any decision can be objectively not good, this was. I tried and failed to convince this person to stay - or at least take some time to explore other options - but they did not. In the year that followed each of the things I predicted came to pass; the company struggled, it did not deliver on the promises it made to this person, and after a year of so the person was let go. I believe that this was an invaluable life experience for them, but in the years since I have wrestled with why I was unable to convince them of the risks.
I think it’s because wisdom is almost impossible to impart to someone. Words that contain wisdom aren’t really that wise when you write them down or tell them to someone. It is actually very difficult to communicate anything insightful concisely without it sounding trite because - most importantly - wisdom is a mixture of knowledge and lived experience.
Without the lived experience, the person I was trying to convince to stay couldn’t empathize with what I was telling them. Or, put another way, I couldn’t impart my wisdom because I couldn’t find the right shared lived experience with which to impart it.
All this is a preamble to sharing a Zen koan (a kind of fancy aphorism) I've been turning over in my mind for the last few years:
Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.
As words on a page - delivered from me to you - the sentences are so generic that they might not be out of place on the wall of a downtown yoga studio, or on a mug being sold on Etsy, or as a LinkedIn post by Lex Fridman.
I believe there is wisdom in them, almost as a counterpoint to the world and the widening gyre I’ve been talking about. They have had a pivotal influence on how I have chosen to live my life since I first started thinking about them.
I would like to explain to you, but I believe my human-powered attempt to ‘explain’ the wisdom I see in them would be futile.
Maybe in 2024 we will develop technology that can allow humans to communicate this kind of wisdom successfully. I think it will take a little longer than that, but it is nevertheless another reason to be hopeful for the future, and to bring a little optimism to bear on our concerns about a world chaotically careening into the unknown.
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