The Future is for the Weird
Hello again, brothers and sisters. It's time to become stranger 😵
So, you did it the right way. You shaved off the spiky bits and the parts other people didn't understand. You edited out everything unrecognizable and uncommon and uncomfortable. You made sure that whatever you produced was categorizable into a bucket with whatever else lots of other people produced. You indexed yourself and tagged yourself and made sure your own self-content was compatible with the most recent SEO guidelines. You paid attention to where everyone else was headed so that you could be headed there too. It took a lot of effort and hard work and focus and sacrifice. But unfortunately, it's starting to look like the thing you were sacrificing was…yourself. You worked so hard conforming to the style guides and the templates that what you put into them became something of an afterthought. It worked for a little while because it was boom time. And when that happens, there's always too much money and attention flying around for anybody to really notice poor quality. But they're noticing now. Now everyone's asking themselves, why would anybody pick me over any of my identical doppelgangers?
After all, pretty soon the doppelgangers might not even have to be real people. We all obediently rushed to jam ourselves into the same handful of molds. And all the good it did was to make our output easier for language modeling and artificial intelligence to process and duplicate. But the real culprit here is not the machine because it wouldn't exist without us. We didn't just make AI. We let ourselves become so mechanistic and soulless that much of what we create can be reasonably assembled from a series of complicated algorithms. All this tells us is that we've forgotten what makes us human. Forgotten our calling, lived for the covetous idolatry of someone else's thoughts and experiences and bank account. We aren't weird enough to survive the artificially intelligent revolution. And I know how to fix that.
Asserted: You Are Only Meant to Be Yourself
I am aware that this assertion sounds saccharine and self-helping. In fact, it could easily be taken to extremities that militate against Christian teaching and many of the messages I’ve written in the past. But patience and balance will show us that it is the right word for the moment, if not for all moments. Of course extreme individuality is both corrosive and spiritually deadly. But the opposite is not the remedy. God did not create the gorgeous mass of humanity to emulate one another or their own creations. He intended humans to emulate Him, in trillions of unique ways. This both constrains and frees our behavior. Today we are going to focus on the freedom. Within the scope of “God-like human action” is a unceasing torrent of potential. But we content ourselves with safely following the most jammed pathway, hoping that someone knows where we are all going. We cede our God-given responsibility to think, dream, and imagine to someone else. Usually someone with money and popularity, as if those were reliable markers of good or creative living.
Of course the bitterest irony here is that we are living in times when the frightful consequences of remaining on the well-trodden path are becoming more obvious by the second. It’s not even the safe way anymore. Not as establishment assurances that it’s all going to plan become increasingly ridiculous. We’re going to be trampled in the crowd, our voice drowned by the horrific chorus of identical chimera machine-formed to mimic our every intonation. But this only needs to happen if our goal is doggedly copying the thoughts, actions and motivations of others. What if we focused on doing the one job we were designed to do: correctly put ourselves to the best and most worthy use?
Asserted: You’re Pretty Weird
Being yourself is partially dependent on recognizing the facets of your life and personality that make you weird, as compared to others. Now, for too long the domain of the weird has been colonized by purveyors of the deviant and the shocking. It’s time to reclaim the term and the meaning. Weirdness starts in the deviations from the mean, too. How is your unique combination of life experiences, personality traits, skills, regrets, and relationships different from anyone else you’ve ever met? Focus on that part of the spectrum, rather than the parts that blend nicely into your surroundings. Seen this way, perfectly nice and pedestrian mainstream moms and dads are still weird, or capable of it. And weird is what is going to catch someone’s eye, or make the interviewer look up from their stack of applications. We can’t have a personal conversation until we start learning each others’ obscura and esoterica. Now we’ve detailed before that not all of this personal weirdness belongs to the world. But if you are going to choose to share something, it needs to contain yourself in miniature.
This might take a moment, but consult your life up till now and ask yourself what makes you different. A surprising amount of the things that we take for granted are strange to others. Forsake relatability and embrace singularity. And while we are on the subject, remember to completely ignore the definitions of mainstream and fringe that are peddled for all to see. The tides of culture wash everywhere and change fast. What was shockingly rebellious a few years ago becomes blasé and then out of phase with the next wave. If you chase fads you will never understand timelessness, or transcendence. In fact, much of what is truly weird lives in hinterlands that fads never reach. But you have to ignore the tourists painting themselves as tastemakers. They have no idea because they are being swept through at whirlwind speed by the mainstream. Step away from the river a bit. The woods are quieter anyway.
Resolved: I Refuse Replication
Maybe this perspective is why I remain stubbornly unafraid of the doom supposedly approaching for all artistic pursuits due to the advent of AI technologies. It really shouldn’t be all that surprising that most of the internet’s content can be effectively mimicked by a bot. When you set out to write computerized content that mimics others, you are often successful. We’ve all experienced the sense of exhaustion on seeing a social media feed filled with identical influencer-esqe or entrepreneur-like posts. At some point, every market becomes a mad dash to copy the winner until all of the mania dries up. The point holds in crypto or anywhere else, too. Derivative work will be supplanted by the next person who can do it faster or cheaper. How can you harden yourself against this process? By leaning into what they can’t copy. Doing what only you can do. I probably shouldn’t convince all of you to flee the beaten path and wander in the trackless wastes of self-guided employment (and I certainly am not an advocate of self-guided spirituality). But I am absolutely certain that we must stop complacently heeding the aggregate opinion of faceless millions, at least in things that matter. If the wisdom of crowds becomes a liability, do you know what single quavering voice you’ll listen to?
The only thing standing between us and this dramatic shift is our addiction to living explainable lives. When your relatives’ acquaintances ask at the dinner table, it’s easier to say “corporate ad buyer” than it is to say “volunteer pastor, but the kind that actually believes it’s all true, and supporting that with whatever other jobs make sense, but leaning towards writing.” Nobody wants to put “farmer” or “thinker” in the frightening box where “accountant” and “consultant” are supposed to go. And for many, accountant might indeed be better. This isn’t meant as an attack on those who toil in legible and common causes. It is simply an observation that our society has piled frantically into a few paths, insisted that safety was to be found stolidly punching away at a repetitive track of tasks to produce results identical to those of the others in your field. The machines are coming to eat these jobs. The last time that happened, things became much stranger.
WGMI 😎
“Child,” said the Voice, “I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own.” ~ C.S. Lewis in The Horse and His Boy
The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man. ~ G.K. Chesterton
You and Tom Bevan do something in me time and time again when you write. Thank you.
Concerning AI, I have no fear. In fact, I enjoy everyone else's panic. It is amusing. But yes, I am weird, I will be weird. Thank you.
ooofff... that introduction 🤌🏽