BUILDBRIEF: February Week 2
Coding Dignity - Muh Scrolls! - Does Bukele Scale? - Manic Pixie Queen Borg
Like many people, I go to a gym full of TV screens. Sometimes the biggest challenge isn’t the discipline of a lift but of keeping my eyes off the ads, the local news, the sports, the chattering heads. Earlier this week, on the treadmill, I noticed the “news” about an NHL player’s Instagram rant about a fresh injury and his resulting frustrations.
“Trying to stay calm and positive, but it’s impossible. After doing everything right I get this. The universe is unpredictable I guess, and has its own plans , but f— the universe man, I know I’ll come back stronger and I know I’ll play better than before, but it’s tough right now, and it’s gonna be tough tomorrow.”
This was Mikhail Sergachev—unbeknownst to me at the moment, a two-time Stanley Cup winner with the Tampa Bay Lightning, but, clearly enough, a Russian, cursing the universe. I silently said a prayer for his health and recovery, spiritual as well as physical. The very next day, it was my turn to suffer, along with him, in an unexpected way.
At a few different times since shattering my collarbone in college (self-inflicted, yes), my back has blown out, or whatever you want to call it, necessitating physical therapy at home or a professional’s. Older and wiser, this time around, I caught it early and made it onto the floor mat, where I spent the next hour and a half running gingerly and patiently through the quotidian humiliations of the simple stretches and exercises required to get it together.
I was reminded once again of the ways discipline in physical things reflects discipline in spiritual ones, not just when bulking up or pushing oneself but in the inevitable troughs and setbacks. And so the multi-day healing process began. For an instant, I was tempted to say I had to wait until Tucker’s Putin interview was up to send this week’s brief. But though the truth hurts, it’s that much the sweeter.
To the matter at hand!
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CODING DIGNITY
You can’t legislate morality, they say, or said, but can you code it? Lots of high-fiving this week over Dignif.AI, a bot of sorts that covers up immodest women and strips trashy men of their neck tattoos, among other dignifying things.
Just one problem, of course — it isn’t real. The temptation is strong to “catechize the bots” by simply programming to do things that make people fist pump and say virtuous! or based! But these things can’t be counted on to reach the secret chambers in our hearts where our deepest and most difficult spiritual struggles take place.
But surely you don’t want to cede control of social media culture to those visually projecting dark, depressing, disturbed, and disturbing visages… right? Especially when you can outsource the coding to innumerably little automated platoons? Well, if the underlying pics just go on proliferating, the picture that emerges is one of endless automated wars over pixels waged by unmanned armies. It’s not as if Dignif.AI actually goes to battle under orders to smash idols, transforming the original disapproved-of pics into whatever the user or creator wishes to see purified or ennobled. Not yet, anyway.
And, alas, on the internet, the whole idea of “original” pictures is becoming increasingly quaint. At a certain point, you have to remember what is still possible face to face and heart to heart — what has now become possible — in a world not only glutted with copies of copies of copies but with phantom clone wars among them. The digital battlefield is also a content farm, and the content farm is also a battery charger drawing its energy from you and me: a consensual partnership, “technically”, but do any of us really still believe that? And what happens when this moral economy of created souls in clone wars becomes the legislated code?
MUH SCROLLS!
I can’t say my heart sings to the sight of so many thoughtful, clever people geeking out over the use of AI to decode an ancient scroll too fragile to simply unspool and read. Muh traditionalism! Muh classicism! Muh human ingenuity!
“This was a cultivated Roman aristocrat’s country villa, and Piso would have had lots of books there, especially Latin ones, of which so far very few have been found in the villa,” Robert Fowler, a classicist and papyrus expert at the University of Bristol in England, told The New York Times. “Recovering such a library would transform our knowledge of the ancient world in ways we can hardly imagine. The impact could be as great as the rediscovery of manuscripts during the Renaissance.”
So what’s in the box? An epicurean philosopher and pleasure enjoyer bagging on stoicism. Perhaps you share this reaction. “It’s astounding to feel this kind of redemptive power that we may hold now because of AI and tomography and computation,” said one of the guys behind the challenge prize that motivated the winning decoder. “We have probably less than 1% of … all the literature that was written. Any gain in our knowledge is important.”
What script might one day change his heart on that idea?
He might even start with the first decoded word, the delightfully loaded word PORPHYRAS.
DOES BUKELE SCALE?
Many bro rhapsodes over El Presidente’s thumping win at the polls in El Salvador, and there’s no turning up one’s nose at the mercies experienced these days by the long-suffering Salvadoran people. It ought still to be expected that a turnabout of this magnitude moves the man in charge to give thanks and credit to God, and in his victory speech Bukele did just that. This is a man willing to go beyond praise for a generic God and publicly utter the words Christ is King.
From what I gather, El Salvador is largely Catholic and Pentecostal, with a sort of blurring going on between them, which seems as fertile soil as any for the kind of nominally Christian syncretist civil religion that used to be associated with, well, the United States of America. But the tremendous weakness of that kind of religion, which has led the US to its present spiritually fractured and degenerated state, raises difficult questions. Can it really serve El Salvador? Does it really serve The Savior?
And what about Latin America as a whole? Many seem so hard up for Ws, and for a feeling that momentum has shifted for real this time, that they speak of Bukele and Milei in the same breath, avatars of a “right-wing” realignment. Personally, I can’t look at Milei’s theatrical countenances without feeling an unwelcome and unreliable presence. No question, getting away from generations-old collectivist cronyism is a reasonable and serious goal, especially considering the way modern state socialism, communism, corporatism, etc., have proven themselves so characteristically at odds with the Christian life stably and richly lived.
But the time has come—it’s long past time—to recognize that “right-wing” is not a stable foundation for anything, not sufficient authority for a regime, not even really an ontology. It is hard not to see in the political situation today, from the smallest-scale local level to the largest worldwide, a collapse of meaning among the last grand ideological categories of political life, the ones our regime has fallen back on with such an automated affect: “our democracy” versus “their authoritarianism”. We all have a clear enough idea of what sensible realities underlie the caricatured contrast. Yet, we also recognize that even on their own terms, these labels often apply equally or interchangeably to the same regime. Authority as such is not a bad thing, just as democracy as such is not a good thing. Marc Andreessen’s recent provocation that “love doesn’t scale” led a colleague of mine to remark, with the Holy Spirit in mind, that love is the only thing that scales.
MANIC PIXIE QUEEN BORG
Apropos of a lot of AI art making the rounds, so so much of which has this kind of relentless aesthetic uniformity to it, some of us are old enough yet lucid enough to remember the turn-of-the-millennium character dubbed the “manic pixie dream girl”, a creature of fiction, nonfiction, and lived experience with a remarkable staying power seemingly only the woke effort at transvaluing all values was capable of relegating to the sea of recent cultural artifacts forgotten as if they were millennia old.
All this AI art suggests that the MPDG has returned, on the back of tech worship, by merging with the latter-day archetype of the Borg Queen familiar from Star Trek and popularized somewhat as the devouring cyborg mother by Mary Harrington in her Feminism Against Progress. Not sure what better underscores that the digitization of our media environment has hybridized the imagination-driven world of television into a world driven by memory, the memory of machines. Try as people might, the myth of love that merely human or cosmic love is the be-all-and-end-all has been worn out by digital technology's cold, hard dominance. In this age, it’s ever more clear that the only love that saves is that of The Savior, all and in all.
If your back has “blown out,” you owe it to yourself to learn Dr. Stuart McGill’s Big 3 back exercises, and perhaps read his books, and at the very least watch the countless videos in which he explicates back pain. (Doctors know less than nothing about backs. Trust the expert.)
This deserves an entire essay of its own - “love is the only thing that scales.”