MosesWrites
For real, reality, has its perils. Perhaps we need to fake it until we make it. Or we need the fakes to reassure ourselves of the real, or to have an aspirational reality toward which we strive. On earth as is it in heaven, give us this day, our daily bread.
Just this morning I got my first targeted Instagram advert for an AI girlfriend. Anything you want, no arguments, just pure narcissistic fulfilment. Indulgence. No periods or pouting or aging, permanently pert and perky, no cheating or chastisement, no presents or tributes or mis-matched moods. Ever-evolving with your id!
What an impoverished understanding of love and companionship, rather the lust of a despondent self, lost and lonely, yearning in the darkness of unreality. If you have ever cared for someone as they’ve died, whether beautifully or painfully, you know this isn’t love. It’s not even companionship, not even an approximation.
Try reading a book. Read something racy, go back to Moll Flanders or feel the intertwining of sex and war, lust and destruction, in Slaughterhouse-Five, or watch Dr Strangelove, the moment of fantastic honesty when they imagine repopulating a world devastated by nuclear annihilation and say, I think, the ideal ratio would be ten women for every one man. On earth as it is in heaven’s harem.
I worry often about the perfected, filtered reality of social media and the increasingly pernicious impacts it has on our world. Nothing novel in saying that, I know, but now with AI and the increasing sophistication of tools available at little or no cost, distortion has become destitution.
In the past few months, I’ve spoken with students who have tried AI for therapy, or simply for self-exploration, for exploring normal adolescent anxieties about vulnerability and intimacy and increasingly complex social relationships with peers and parents. They’ve mostly come away more anxious, more frustrated, and yet also pulled by the allure of its ease, the promise, the pressure, that AI should do what they want it to do, panacea in waiting. Yet it’s as inhuman as those headless shots of abs and pecks, of fantasized bodies detached from personhood.
You only need to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Stop counting. Rip the watch from your wrist! PRs, fitness metrics, heart rates, body fat, height-weight ratios—and yet ask a person how they feel and rarely do they have a sense of what it means to feel and to be felt, no ability to articulate a whole being in the world, to embark upon love.
I see super-hot ripped guys put their pack of cigarettes in a locker, pound an energy drink, and lift. Great boyfriend material, I imagine. I’m less envious in my middle age. Budha has a belly! An unshakably strong core yet with a little something to cushion your head resting upon his belly, something to jiggle a bit when laughing, to confirm for the youngest the honesty of devotion.
As an undergraduate I remember reading Bruno Latour’s excellent introductory essay in his book Pandora’s Hope (Harvard, 1999). With the conservativism of Reed’s anthropology curriculum at the time, it felt like we had gotten some taboo intellectual porn, the hottest of PoMo science studies, only suitable for a 400-level seminar.
Latour recounts how a person sheepishly asked him, do you believe in reality?
Of course. But that’s not even an interesting question, not even close.
Do you know how to play? Ready player one?
I’m exhausted by and uninterested in the mishaps of post-Wittgenstein philosophy in which all has become a language game. The big W himself more or less said stop dwelling and move on. Heidegger went Nazi. The world burns.
Our incredible overabundance and blind devotion to growth has made commodity fetishism the greatest weapon of mass destruction, of our selves and our planet.
As often happens, a massage therapist recently inquired about how long I’ve lived in Shanghai, my family situation, etc. I’m honest: nope, no family, no girlfriend as of yet.
But there are so many beautiful women in Shanghai, so many 美女, there’s almost an element of resentment that after so many years I haven’t found a Chinese woman good enough. But a beautiful soul, I said, that’s harder to discover. 好吧, she replied, ending the conversation, and for the first time I understood the force and versatility of that 吧 particle.
You can’t look someone in the eye on social media. AI can’t look you in the eye, nor can you it.
Such detachment from the material conditions upon which our lives depend, detachment from steady-state sustainability, total delusional devotion to consumption, what have we made?
I enjoy nice things, well-made, status signaling, craftmanship, care, sure, but my fancy shoes and fancy scarves have never loved me back. The softness of lululemon is enjoyable but nothing, nothing touches like an honest caress in love, the love that can make you feel without touch.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Such a romantic, hopeless, I know! Too naïve.
Instead that harsh lesson stored up in our atmosphere that will undo all the supposed savvy of contemporary leadership.
Even without AI, the real can be fake, an institution issuing for all intents and purposes a “real” transcript, and standing by it, making a claim counter to a well-evidenced, competing reality. Two-faced, Janus, Scylla and Charybdis, again Narcisus, we’ve no surprises in this regard except for our ability to be surprised over and again by the same thing. The chroniclers of Ecclesiastes, nothing new under the sun.
The divine has so often been reflected in the vocabulary of love because it offers a reality beyond that which we can see, beyond that which we can manufacture and purchase and counterfeit. No limits, infinite in its instantiation, beyond language or physics or math or any of our inadequate epistemologies.
I’ve found, sadly, how rarely have people been loved, truly, and truly unconditionally; they remain so stunted, even entirely self-deceived. Their reproduction of judgment and deceit, becomes masked in the language of learning or in the instantiation of institutions, parenting, management.
The truth hurts. Love hurts, too, in a good way; learning is painful.
T’was grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace, my fears relieved: again that aspiration to describe a spiritual power beyond our comprehension.
I do some of my best thinking and writing on planes, as I write now, on a flight to visit a friend in Malaysia, while I know my choices accelerate the now inevitable collapse of our climate systems.
We’re all a bundle of contradictions, I’ve often remarked. I don’t have a better answer. So I try to embrace and understand and untangle and retwine those contradictions in a way that, I hope, can inspire greater kindness and joy. To intertwine them with others, the roots and vines of an otherwise incomprehensible power present in our natural world. Hold me like a tree holds a wind-swept cliff and the cliff holds that tree, hold with me like the mangroves hold the mud holding the land from the sea and the sea from the land. Hold, together, for as long as our fragile world allows.
I reported that AI dating advertisement as “inappropriate.” I’m told I won’t see it again. Where’s that reality?