DRAFT: I Am Watching Your Minds Get Destroyed In Real Time

This morning I had a Teams meeting with a coworker. He’s an incredibly bright kid with whom I’ve worked directly for the last five years or so. He was trying to use a tool I wrote, and running into trouble with a feature I just added. Over the prior two weeks, he’d been in two meetings where I had explained this feature, and he had a sample file, written in JSON, in hand that had usage examples for the feature. When we looked at it together it was like he was having trouble seeing the example amidst the rest of the JSON content.

Never mind that I’m starting with an anecdote rather than hard data, there are six million other caveats here. Maybe he wasn’t paying attention in the meetings (though he actually asked for the first one). Maybe I am bad at explaining things (I am). There’s a host of inherent problems when you are trying to point out something systemic. Ofttimes the people who are not affected by the thing can’t see it. Always the people who are profiting from the systemic issue don’t want it seen and the evidence for it can be refuted by naming a hundred other possible causes. I’m sure all of these phenomena have been observed and named. I could go to AI to ask about them, but I don’t think it would make my writing better.

(Also, J., if you end up reading this: I still love you and I still think you’re incredibly smart. It’s only because you are such a normally sharp mind that I noticed something wasn’t right).

The other day on (I think) this platform I read a brief note from a non-fiction writer (I now can’t find it, so if this was you and you read this, please link to your post in the comments). What is happening to him is this: people are going to AI and getting them to summarize one of his books. Based on that summary, they develop some objection to one of his ideas and then go to post that objection on his Substack. Here is what he said about it: “These people think they are cyborgs, and their minds are gone.”

In the 1940s and ‘50s, cigarette companies started running ads featuring doctors; “More Doctors Smoke Camels,” and all that. It was that period in America where everybody knew that smoking was bad for human beings, but for various reasons they either didn’t want to know it or they didn’t want it known. And since hard data hadn’t yet been collected, there was a space in which you could subtly craft counter messaging. “Hey, doctors like smoking. And they know about health, right? So it can’t be that bad for you.”

The peddlers of AI came to their “More Doctors Smoke Camels” messaging almost immediately. They had to, because everybody who was working with, in, or anywhere near the education of young human beings knows that AI absolutely destroyed the ability of anyone to do that education. So there was that notion of cyborgs — that somehow getting AI to summarize books for you was going to make you smart, that AI “frees your brain to do higher order work”, or that Claude could make you a super coder¹. They more or less dropped the messaging when Corey Doctorow utterly demolished the idea, coining the notion of Reverse Centaurs. Now they tout the small percentage increases in the abilities of new models while financing them as if their growth were exponential.

If anything of this messaging remains, it’s the idea that, for educated adult humans, there’s some set of ways to use AI that is not harmful to their brains. And there well may be, but the ways that it is actively harmful to the human brain are utterly overwhelming them. Moreover, I don’t think there’s anybody out there reading this who doesn’t already know it. It’s that we’re still in some liminal state where everybody knows it, but we’re acting as if it’s not true². Instead, it’s as if in the 1940s and 50s, instead of running ads about what doctors smoked, we just went ahead and leveraged our entire economy on the future of tobacco industry profits³.

Again, I’m not saying anything new here. Everybody knows — even if they don’t know they know it — that AI is terrible for the human brain. What I’m here to say is that I can see it happening to you. Yes, you — the adult who perhaps thinks you’re getting more done because AI is summarizing your emails and meetings and essays and non-fiction books and writing your responses back for you.

I can see you having trouble engaging with the ideas I’m presenting when we’re at work, things you used to absorb with ease. I can see that you didn’t absorb anything beyond the barest outline of my last message, and that none of its actual content made its way into your mind.

I can see that you can’t read anymore. I can see that you can’t write.

I can see that you are forgetting how to actually engage with another human, face to face, in dialog. Even through the scourge of social media, you used to still be able to look up from your infinite scroll and do that for a minute or two, at least until the phone buzzed again. Your mind is deteriorating, right now in front of me, and it’s worse every day. You don’t seem to notice it happening. You are a healthy, adult human being and you are in visible, cognitive decline. And it scares the hell out of me. 

 

Infinite Thread

The thing I'm contemplating at the moment is how the human mind can adapt to the internet, what that mind might look like, and the forms in which it will engage with other minds doing the same thing. Let me first lay out some priors. As I mention elsewhere, a lot of these thoughts stem directly from the work of Naomi Alderman, a human currently offering her mind up on the internet to be engaged with, and with whose mind I am currently engaged. 

• Almost all of the intellectual engagement of thoughtful people on the internet is currently happening via old paradigms that were invented pre-internet. Writing and publishing, for instance. Or the addressing of an audience via broadcasting a voice (i.e. the paradigm of radio), or showing a talking head (i.e. the paradigm of tv). 
• Almost all of the engagement that is, to coin a phase, internet-y, is done with memes. It is easy to engage with other minds at very primitive levels with memes. It is very hard to engage with other minds at complex levels via memes. It might be -- it is probably -- possible. 
• The internet is an information technology like writing or the printing press (this is all Alderman now). The first two of those things caused seismic shifts in human existence. They were messy and violent. It took time for humans to adjust to them. 
• We are 30 years into humanity's widespread adoption of the internet. This technology is very new to us.
• The human mind has not yet adapted to the internet at all. 

And I guess I should qualify that last statement. The thoughtful human mind hasn't adapted to the internet at all. Lots of people have adapted themselves to the internet in ways you might called mindless. I don't need to expand on this statement, I don't think. Everyone knows what I am talking about, it's water we're all swimming in. In my darker moments I fear that there's a generation of human beings who were born more or less with the internet and whose minds are lost.

Let me here call out or name something -- what Isaac Newton referred to as, "standing on the shoulders of giants," and elsewhere is referred to as The Great Conversation. There doesn't seem to be any one name for it, but simply it is the process of human minds engaging with each other through time and space via (mostly) writing. Newton famously read Copernicus and Galileo and, even though he was separated from their minds by physically unbridgeable spacetime, was able to engage his mind with theirs. They wrote their shit down and he read it and did his own writing and human knowledge increased. This process has been, to this point in human history, incredibly painstaking and slow. It has required tremendously thoughtful humans to read and to write thoughtfully. And for the most part, though not always, it has been a tremendous boon to humans. 

The invention of writing was the first enabler of this process; that is, the process by which one human mind could engage with the thoughts of another human mind that wasn't physically present. We've long since lost the sense of what a shattering change this must have been. The invention of the printing press expanded this process in a spectacular manner -- suddenly the writings of humans were available to everyone. And these inventions didn't just alter the reach of engagement, they brought new methods and created new forms as well. There are kinds of thinking that a human can do if and only if they are writing. And kinds of thoughts a human mind can only think if they are reading. 

A question Alderman has asked in her most recent BBC Radio series Human Intelligence is how great historical thinkers did their thinking. It's a form of preamble to what I think is the great question of the internet. How did great historical thinkers engage with other human minds? I am absolutely not the first person to note that we need to dispose of the myth of the lone genius. But the existence of the internet makes the disposal of this myth a matter of urgency. The internet is a technology that allows the human mind to engage with other minds across time and space more or less instantly and on demand. We haven't even begun to understand the consequences of this. And we haven't even begun to imagine its potential. 

 

Forward

I started blogging a litte more than 20 years ago, about the same time as everybody else did. Listen to me, my children, and I will tell you of time when the internet didn’t suck! Instead of using humanity-destroying social media, we wrote posts on our blogs and we had little internet-friend circles of blogs and we’d use RSS feeds to see when our friends posted interesting things and it was glorious.

But I am not hear to bury Caesar. I’m here to auger another blogging restart, of the type that I embark on every few years or so. I started here on Blogger, moved to Tumblr (about five years after it was cool), then moved to Medium (about five years after it was cool), and after trying a brief foray on Substack (about five years after it was cool) I thought I'd just acknowledge that there's a pattern here and come back to Blogger. Like I say below, I only left Blogger because it stopped being trendy, and that is a stupid thing to do. 

If you’re reading this and you don’t already know me, I have lots of pitches about why you should read me, and I'm making them all the time, via my writing. Here's another one: at some point in the semi-recent past my wife (who is actually way smarter than me — more on this as we go) said something to me to the effect of, “You are the smartest person everyone that you know knows.” So first, here’s some ego: it’s not that I, like, super disclaim this or anything. I am, for instance, very good at learning and implementing algorithms, which is an attribute of humans we appear to value above all other forms of intelligence.

And I am also a really, really good primate. You know what the smartest monkeys do? They look at the successful monkeys around them and the copy what those monkeys do. I am…really good…at that. I think most of what reads “smart” about me is actually that. A particular skill of human mirroring and mimicry, if you will. It sometimes looks like a magic trick, and maybe it is.

This is useful, because in most all other respects, I am a complete moron. I can’t read*. I can barely write. I cannot deal with big abstractions. I cannot think unless I break things down into the simplest possible pieces. And I cannot tell you how much I am not being humble right now. You know those times in high school or college when you got called on and you didn’t know the answer (or worse, you weren’t paying attention)? But the teacher just stood there, putting you on the spot, and everybody was staring at you and you were stuck there like a deer in headlights? Do you remember what that feels like? It feels like that, in my head, all the time. It is a constant feeling of, like, “duh.” 

If you follow the asterisk below it explains what I actually mean by, "I can't read." It's orthogonal to the thread I'm following here, so it's a footnote. The statement, "I can barely write," however, is definitely on-topic. It's true, I can barely write. A blog entry like this is about the best I can do. 

I can, and sometimes actually do, do the things that any half-decent writing coach would tell me to do (I actually cohabitate with one of the greatest living writing instructors of the English Language. I will never miss a chance to mention this. I have a little dream of people in the future reading this and realizing, "oh yeah, huh."): practice. Sit down and write. If you write lots of blog entries, you'll eventually have a book. Etc, etc. I am doing that. I will continue to do that. It's important.

Lately, though, I have come to start noticing the internet and how the blogging of the early internet was just a method of using it in the old paradigms that we were used to. We are used to the world of writing and publishing, and when we were first on it we used the internet as a fast, wide-reaching printing press. That, notwithstanding Substack's recent attempt to restore the internet of 2005 by grafting a little bit of Late Capitalism onto it, is a very dead end. Or perhaps not a very dead end, but something more like trying to use a space shuttle as a car. You can do it, but it's not what the thing is designed for. 

One of the things that the internet does allow you to do is engage with other minds in internet-y ways. A famous person who's currently availing literally anyone of her mind in those internet-y ways is the writer and thinker Naomi Alderman**. She's offering up her mind to be engaged with and I've been doing it heavily lately. There's a lot going on in her mind, and a lot of it is pretty heavy. But I accept that burden because it's also a thing that I can do with my mind -- engage with another that's offering itself to me in more or less real time across thousands of miles and a massive time-zone difference -- that is specifically internet-y. The internet is, and I'm quoting Alderman now, a new information technology. It's on par with the invention of writing or the printing press. Those things changed minds, in the literal sense. We are 30 years into it and humans haven't adapted to this technology at all. And it's time. Like, right now. 

Post-Writing

It occurred to me the other day that there was never anything actually wrong with this platform. I moved on from it because the internet moved on. Every few years for the last decade-plus I have moved to a new platform: Tumblr, Medium, Substack. But the work of writing is the same -- the writing that needs doing is the same -- and I've found myself not doing it much over the last few years. I have trouble to write. Also, it is important that I write. The other day I realized the platform on which I do it doesn't matter at all. People who need to read this will read it.

Also, I think most people I know won't follow me back here -- really only the truly devoted. That will allow me to be a little bit more open than I otherwise would be. It's not that I mind people close to me knowing what I'm going to write about; it's just it isn't stuff I say to people other than my wife.

---

About 90 seconds ago, I did the following: rolled over my right hip and opened every glute muscle I have conscious control over -- as if I were melting them -- until I ran into a few right at the hip bone that I don't. Now I'm rolling around on them, trying to define them, see where they fit, see to what they respond. In a few minutes, I will have new muscle I didn't have those minutes before. 

This caused a chain reaction going up my body which eventually caused my shoulders to completely reset, and the middle of my spine to pop back (almost) into place. I've still got a little bit of a twist left at my core -- a little bit of a thing to think about. Not much. But not none.

It's possible you don't understand what I just said, or it's maybe that you can't picture it. What's happening is that my body is untwisting. It was very twisted and it hurt a lot, for a long time. I'm pretty sure this happens to everyone, eventually, to greater or less extent (it's what gravity does to bodies) and I'm pretty sure almost nobody knows it. Think about your body right now, physically. Does stuff hurt? Knees, shoulders, back, whatever? Do you have a name for it? You might call it Stenosis, or Arthritis, or Enflamed Something. Or you might not, you might just call it Pain. You know what that is? It's twisting. Torsion. Your body is twisted. 

To tell you why I know this I have to go back more than 25 years to two events. The first was meeting my wife; more about her in a moment. The second was when a guy I'll call Garvey walked drunkenly up to me at my 27th birthday and shoved a bag of weed in my pocket. Garvey was an erstwhile co-worker; he was cool and, under that, unfailingly kind. I haven't seen him in years but I think about him all the time. I realized at some point back then he must have looked at me, his coworker, and thought, "You know what that guy needs? That guy needs to get stoned." Garvey, that was a good thought. Wherever that thought came from, you should make note of it. That is exactly what that guy needed to do.

---

I met my wife at the University of Delaware English Department Christmas Party in 1999. We met in line at the drinks table; I was into amaretto sours at the time and she thought that sounded good so she ordered one too. You know that scene in Gilmore Girls where Lorelei meets early-career Jon Hamm in line for drinks at some gala and there's only one glass of red wine left and they banter over it? It was like that. She was living with another guy at the time, so it'd be another two and half years before we could date (we moved in together six months after that, and were married in another two. In retrospect I'm embarrassed that I didn't ask her to marry me, like, after our first date. It was obvious). 

Anybody who meets my wife can tell almost immediately that she's dynamite. She's funny and smart and cool and everybody likes her. We say now that we loved each other before we met. That is genuinely what it felt like (and it also felt and always feels like Destiny). I think a simpler (more plausible?) explanation is that we had friends in common, and they'd mentioned us to each other many times before we ever met and we heard within their words that they liked and esteemed the other one of us.  So we met with expectations high; in time high expectations were met. 

I should say (if you don't already know me and know who she is) that my wife is, now, kind of medium- famous (for being a novelist). There's a non-zero chance you've heard of her and/or know who she is. I should also say that the moment I met my wife I could see immediately who she was and who she would be and the only question I had to answer after that was how I could become worthy of her. 

---

The following May the bag of pot went into the bureau drawer at home and I forgot about it for awhile. I had done pot a couple of times in my life and it had mostly done nothing for me. Certainly not enough that I was willing to go through the necessary hoops to acquire any. Some time many months later I remembered it was there, and, I dunno, maybe I was bored. I started getting high on Friday nights and sitting in coffee shops doing crossword puzzles. It was glorious--seriously, some time do a crossword while you're high and observe that part of your mind working. It's amazing. In time, getting high was the way I did my work.

---

The other thing that was true when I met my wife was that I was in a lot of pain. My body hurt. I never said this to many people and even now I don't think most people understood what I was or am saying. I hope to your god that you don't know what I'm talking about. And if you do, hello. I'm really sorry. Also, welcome. You're in the right place.

My body had been hurting for about four years at that point, and by then I had long since realized that I was in for the long haul. Like, I had realized this was maybe the way I was going to feel for the rest of my life. Again, I hope you never have to contemplate this, at least not until you reach very old age. It's not a thing you should be contemplating in your 20s. 

Don't worry. This story is pretty long, but it has a happy ending. It's been 30 years and I've worked my way out of that pain. I've understood it. I can (I think) say some things about it. 

I can also get high like you wouldn't believe. This is going to be the story of all of that.

 

Hello Friend

Welcome back. I have not seen you in awhile. It happens that I continue to wax poetic on the internet here:

The Inquisitivists

Join me there. 

RELEASE: the lossless e.p. by The Calculus Affair

NOTES

My wife Laurie Frankel wrote a book called Goodbye for Now. I might have mentioned it before. When it got picked up I thought a nifty cross-promotional thing to do would be write an album to go along with it. Since February was nearby and I always produce ten songs as part of my yearly go-'round with the RPM Challenge, I wrote those ten songs for the book, and recorded a demo of them as my RPM Challenge album for 2012.

After listening to the demos once or twice, I came to an inescapable conclusion that those ten songs sucked. Well, they didn't all suck. One was good.  I threw out the other nine songs and wrote ten more. Of those ten, nine sucked and one half-sucked. I threw out the original plan and decided to take the one and a half songs that didn't suck and with them re-record some of my old material--because really, who has heard any of my old stuff?--and that would be the album.

Time went by and none of that happened; I missed both the release of the hardback and the paperback and now it's two years later (life, man, I tell you what). The lossless e.p. is the salvage of this project: it contains the two songs (nos. 2 and 4 on the e.p.) and a couple from my back-catalog. It's also the first formal release of "Men of Luggage," which, while ten years old, has never appeared on anything besides compilations released by other entities.

TRACKS

• 1) The Bridge
• 2) Just This Once
• 3) Men of Luggage
• 4) I Take it Back
• 5) Men of Luggage (Acoustic Version)

CREDITS

• Written, performed, recorded, and mixed by Paul Mariz at The Cowslip's Bell, Seattle, WA. Additional recording and mixing for (3) by Gino Scarpino at Joralemon House, Seattle WA. Additional backing vocals on (3) by Gino and Jason Hyatt
• Sounds of cars passing on (1) from freesound, recorded by Corsica_S and volivieri.
• Mastered by Kevin Bressler at Whiney Cat Audio, Seattle, WA. 

LISTEN/BUY

• Listen on Spotify
• Listen/Buy on Google Play
• Sample/Buy on iTunes
• Sample/Buy on Amazon
• Listen/Buy on Bandcamp

As of this writing there's no place to buy a physical CD;  there may be at some point--updates as events warrant. If you know me and ask nicely, I'll burn one for you. Otherwise, go listen on Spotify (or Google Play, if you're a subscriber). It's free, and I get, like, $0.0015 every time you play a song. Also, when you listen there, it associates The Calculus Affair with other music you listen to and that's good for me. If you're a downloader, my net from any of the four stores above is roughly the same, so support the marketplace of your choice.

THANKS

• In addition to those happy few of you out there who are Calculus Affair fans (you know who you are)...
• Matt Gani, Jennie Shortridge, Garth Stein, Stevie Kallos, and Ben Bauermeister (a.k.a. The Rejections). It is thanks to you that The Calculus Affair is now my side-project.
• Gino Scarpino, Kevin Hyatt, and Mark Cooper for an endless, life-long stream of musical support and constructive criticism.
• And Laurie Frankel: all and everything beyond words.

"Well, They've Seen Us"

Back in March, Randall Munroe posted to his webcomic, XKCD, an unassuming drawing of two stick figures, a boy and a girl, sitting on a slight incline. The comic was titled, "Time," and the alt-text (what you see when you hover your mouse over the image) said only, "Wait for it." I clicked it a couple of times, stared at it for a little while--maybe it was a slow-moving animation of some kind?--but nothing happened. A couple of hours later, though, the picture had changed--now the two people appeared to be building a sandcastle. A quick look at the source code of the page revealed the trick: every half hour, a javascript call was updating the picture, creating an ultra-slow motion animation of two people building a sandcastle on a beach. So after a day or so the cartoon showed a partially built sand castle; a few days later the sand castle was quite elaborate--the two builders created a scaffolding so they could build higher. They went away and came back with a mini trebuchet so they could play Sand Castle Siege. I thought it was cute. I assumed eventually it would reach its natural end and the cartoon would start over. I thought that because I'd forgotten that Randall Munroe doesn't do anything to any scale that's not epic.

XKCD is one of the most popular web comics out there, and one of the few that allows its creator the luxury of making a living doing his art. The "art" portion of his art is at first glance very simple--stick figure people, black and white drawings, basic outlines of things. The subject matter of his cartoons, which are posted every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, are anything but. He constructs Math jokes, Linux jokes, Quantum Physics jokes; ofttimes a deep knowledge of coding, science-fiction/fantasy tropes, and/or general nerd culture are required to have any idea where lies the humor. 

And then there are the big things: a subway map of all of North America, a drag-able map of an enormous world of which the viewer can only see a tiny part at any one time, a log-scale drawing of the  height of the universe, a log-scale drawing of the depths of the universe, an exploded view of money, a map of online communities scaled by population circa 2007, then circa 2010 (in which you learn that Farmville is only the second-biggest farming-based social-media game in the world). And it goes on. Every now and then Randall Munroe will completely blow you away with the scale of his effort. 

It is, as of this writing, 106 days after frame one of "Time" was posted. More than 2500 drawings have come and gone, now at a rate of one an hour. There is dialog--in individual frames one of the two characters will have a word balloon and a frame or two later, the other character will answer back. After they had built their fantastically detailed sand castle, had a little bit of fun destroying and repairing it, and resting a bit, the couple started to notice the sea level rising. It began to eat up their castle, but it also caused them to wonder what was going on in the world they were in, a world they seemed not quite to understand fully. So they left and began hiking; mostly they seemed to be searching for some kind of answer about that world and what was happening to it. They have been hiking for months now. They have climbed mountains, seen far off seas, and come across buildings long abandoned. Night fell and it was stunningly beautiful--black and white drawings of the sky and Milky Way, slowly rotating through the sky.     

XKCD is, according to its own epigram, a "webcomic of romance, math, sarcasm, and language." I've always thought "romance" was an awkward word right there at the front--a better word might be longing--but it's also not wrong either. XKCD's first read may be as a comic about math jokes, but it also can't help but reflect the author's ongoing awe with all the things he finds in the world and his attempts to convey that awe to a broader audience. You might get a good chuckle from reading one of his comics, but read them continuously for months and you will find that you are following along something bigger, more profound, and more (literally) awesome. 

Today, for the first time in three and  a half months, the explorers of "Time" have come across some other people--they seem to be wearing Toessels. An initial read might be that the comic is nearing its end, but I suspect it's probably just the beginning. 

(a continuously updating visualization of the entire "Time" comic can be found here)