Ozymandias

I don’t think I ever thought too much about the symbols of our country until recently. Well, until January 6th, 2020. Ironically, the attack on the Capitol building drew attention to the intention behind our public monuments.

The intention being far more noble than the people responsible for building them. Obviously, as we know, the White House was built by slaves. And the Capitol building, which houses both our houses of government – representatives from states and senators (two to each state – a hangover from slavery on the same level as the Electoral College), is also partially built by slaves. (I mean, honestly, Washington wearing Masonic regalia while laying the cornerstone? Seriously?)

And maybe the Capitol is next to be attacked by backhoes and bulldozers – who fucking knows? The government is shut down. So there’s no interrogation of construction/destruction orders. He could literally raze the Lincoln Memorial while we all sleep.

As for any artifacts from the East Wing of the White House – again, who the fuck knows? Archivists were not consulted – were they wrecked and trashed and destined to be buried on some golf course somewhere? That place was a museum, for God’s sake.

Trump has a history of this. And as his video showed, he loves shitting on things.

Relatedly (and I swear it’s related), I’ve started a discussion group, based on LinkedIn connections but it might go beyond that at some point – who’s to say, we’ve only had two meetings so far – ostensibly about metadata and AI.

I say ostensibly because of course metadata is descriptive. And its descriptions are a reflection of the nature of what’s being described – this may sound obvious, but when I worked in adtech and my team would tear its collective hair out at the complexity of the data, I would remind them that the data’s complex because the business is complex.

What’s complex about AI is what my friend Dalia calls “the human in the system.” Because, as I’ve said before, AI is dumb. It can only work with what it’s given.

It cannot make connections apart from statistical probabilities. So it has no intuition, no true creativity, no ability to create new relationships between this thing and that thing. No ability to conjure up something completely new, based solely on imagination and personal history.

And it’s important to recognise that what AI is given to work with is…driven by humans. If those humans are bad actors, who want to strip the meaning out of words, or pervert the meaning of words, AI will not have the discernment to call that out. It will, as Timnit Gebru and Emily M. Bender say, parrot. Stochastically.

The oligarchs in charge – and Trump is the least of them – are all about rebuilding the world in their image(s). This necessarily means eradicating actual meaning, so that it can be replaced by propaganda, talking points, monuments to merely human egos. “You will think about what I want you to think, and what I want you to think about is me.”

The bad thing about being human is this overtaking of ego – the solipsism and gigantic self-interest. The good thing about being human is the ability to be truly creative, to invent things (and I’m not talking about Edison, Ford, or other bad actors who literally stole ideas from other people; I’m talking about Hedy Lamarr, John Gardner, George Washington Carver, Doris Lessing, Patricia Bath, Shirley Jackson, Tim Berners-Lee, Stephen King, Proust, yes, I said Stephen King).

The spark of genius is not ever going to descend on people like Bezos, Zuckerberg, or Musk. These are men who saw various systems, and exploited them. They’re good at that. But they invent – truly invent – nothing.

Their AI models are reflections of this. Reflections of themselves. God, nothing an ego loves more than a mirror image of itself.

What they relish is destruction. I’ve never been alive (and I’ve been alive a while) in such an era of rejoicing in demolition. Demolishing the bookstore? (Not that that was successful, but the intent was there.) Demolishing the public square by polluting it with absolute shit? (Turns out that was successful.) Demolishing…everything?

I mean, nice try, in terms of creating legacies, but the legacies of this era are pretty much reduced to a single image from a stupid AI video of a President shitting on his constituents.

I don’t think history is going to judge this era very kindly.

Per Percy Shelley:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Or, as Olympia Dukakis says in Moonstruck: “I just want you to know no matter what you do, you’re gonna die, just like everybody else.”