Thank you for writing this, it helps clear the waters regarding "AI" or machine learning that's taught using stolen art. Apparently so much AI created art has flooded the internet that the machines are learning from AI art and creating garbage, because they aren't actually "learning." Anyway. I'd be delighted to converse with an actual artificial intelligence; I got a kick out of the old ELIZA program that essentially played Freud by rephrasing your sentences and questions to hold a mock conversation. I was mildly impressed with an AI updated version, but it failed the Turing test in about three questions because it was obviously carving answers from Wikipedia and web searches. But I digress. As for the trespassing signs I recently learned that Texas is 95% privately owned and you have no freedom to roam there, except on the 5% that is public land or parks. And they consider themselves free? Maybe the rich men who own the land are free, but no one else is, and maybe that's how they like it.
I’ve heard 98% privately owned for Texas and I’m pretty sure that’s exactly how they like it. It’s the way Montana is going, too, though as long as there are federal public lands I still count us fortunate to be able to get into them.
I had the most frustrating interaction with an “AI-informed” chatbot last week. Half an hour going in circles! It finally said, “I sounds like you need to speak with a Happiness Engineer,” which sounded straight out of Black Mirror. Said human was very helpful and it was a relief to at least have my problem understood, but I really feel for the person being stuck with Happiness Engineer as a job title.
Thank you Nia, it took many years to acknowledge this, and many more to write about, but now I am slowly getting there. It is a thing not talked about in my family at all because sometimes silence is the only tool of the survivor in their defence to obscure the past. But in their most vulnerable moments, I have heard them talk about their motherland and how things changed as they entered their primes.
It is really important for me to embrace this identity and not live in constant battle with it, in a way that has been implied as an essential process of assimilation. Refugees , migrants- like you said its all the same to the ones who have left a home behind almost never to return to it again. Thank you for giving me a space to speak about this in your community. 💜
“embrace this identity and not live in constant battle with it, in a way that has been implied as an essential process of assimilation”
This is almost unspeakably enormous, Swarna. All that you hold of yourself and your family in multilayered complexity, and how are you even meant to find your own feelings about it much less talk about it publicly?
When I interviewed my uncle about being evacuated and his years as a refugee during the Siege of Leningrad, one thing both he and my father told me is that when they were growing up in the Soviet Union, the adults who’d survived that time never talked about it. I’ve heard this in other places in the world where people have survived something unspeakably horrific, that it can take generations for people to begin speaking of those experiences. Maybe it’s grandchildren’s and great-grandchildren’s role to honor those stories. I wonder.
It is almost always the case Nia. To speak of the horrors is to live them again and for the generations that lived through it, the whole idea would threaten the new identity that they worked so hard to create. Sometimes oblivion is the only safe boat to navigate those violent waters of displacement. It is absolutely essential to identify this a few generations later and come to terms with it. Otherwise the fog of non-belonging will persist through us and our children.
“a world where leaving means to wander freely, rather than being forced to flee—whether on foot or in the worlds of our own imaginations.” This spoke so deeply to me Nia. My grandparents were refugees of a ruthless partition war and even if I am raised away from the traumas of being a survivor, I am aware of the pain and vacancy that human invented borders creates specially if you were forced to leave your country and land behind never to return to it again. I have seem both my grandmothers live with it all their lives. Thank you for this poignant piece Nia. 💜
In the deepest parts of my research on ownership, this is the constant theme, with variations, of what we’ve lost: true freedom means you can walk away—from a tribe, a nation, a job, a marriage—and have it make no difference in your ability to survive.
This really hits home, Swarna. I’ve read a lot about Partition, but to have that immediate experience in your own family is horrific. Along with knowing what your grandparents lived through, intergenerational trauma is a very real thing. I hope you can honor that you, too, carry their lives within you. ❤️🩹❤️🩹❤️🩹
Oh, man, that hits me right in the “heck yes” (except a little more swear-y). Any idea if it’ll be recorded? I’m going to be offline until Wednesday evening.
"The deeper structures that make the harms possible." Yes! And the values and presuppositions that underlie those structures! Let's root them out! (Although I may have to wait until next weekend to take this on.)
Regarding generative AI, I have rather strong feelings that cannot be adequately expressed without employing a torrent of the most vile and violent language ever to grace the tongue of our deeply flawed species. Or to put it another way...I don't need a machine to do my thinking or my writing for me. If someone else does, perhaps it is not a machine that they need.
I loved this post, Antonia. I will revisit it over the weekend when I am less beleaguered and have a bit more energy. As always, I appreciate your perspectives and the eloquence with which you express them. But most of all, though brief, I loved hearing you describe the snowflakes falling. That made me smile.
"I don't need a machine to do my thinking or my writing for me. If someone else does, perhaps it is not a machine that they need." Goodness, YES! The only way to understand it is in knowing that there are very few people pushing for this who aren't focused simply on more profit.
Thank you, Kenneth. I hope things are a little less difficult for you. And the snowflakes made me smile, too. They're still coming down!
Taking a Jungian slant to the issue: the way I see it is that human feelings, human creativity, and deep symbolic remembering, are products of a collective unconscious that has evolved over many thousands of generations, and that machines simply do not, and never will, have access to. Machines can replicate the words and the syntax, but they cannot imbue those words with a soul born of thousands of years of collective suffering, loss, anxiety, longing and passion, creativity, hope, and love. These are what make the human experience what it is. These constitute a deep psychological inheritance that no damned machine has earned or has the right to.
Until a computer can know what it's like to hold their newborn child for the first time, or to kiss for the first time someone with whom they are deeply in love, or to gaze in wonder at a starry night, or to be a child catching a snowflake on her tongue (or the parent watching that child), or to be moved to tears by a beautiful piece of music, or to grieve at the deathbed of a beloved parent, friend, or child...I will have no respect and give no time to their faux "creations."
Somewhere there is an AI noting my words and marking me for extermination.
I had never thought of relating any of this to Jung’s collective unconscious, but doing so puts an entirely different lens in front of it. What about the dreamworld? What of archetypes that are shared across the world and we don’t really know why?
Maybe it’s not just about the right of machines, but also an entire realm of human existence that the pushers of these technologies have forgotten about. All of these are part of that—our dreams, our suffering, our joys. Thank you for reminding me, Kenneth.
I've been thinking and writing something about creating this week too--I love how you framed this, how we are being led to compete and live in anxiety constantly rather than trusting that friend would bring food in times of need, or send chai recipes (which I am so going to try in just a minute!). Worried about it all but reading your words and those of the many many others who feel the same is replenishing. And I am fascinated by the Luddites--how they've been coopted as a bad word, when what they were fighting for was for the work of human hands to matter. 💜
That anxiety can lead to so many awful places, from survivalist prepping (the hardcore kind, not the "have a go-bag in case of floor or fire" kind), to the deep depression that comes from a core conviction that one is alone and isolated. Which is a tool of authoritarian governments, to make people feel that way.
The chai recipe is so good! I'm kind of hooked. Swarna knew just what I needed.
Thanks, as ever for this. You put it so perfectly.
"...even the joyful gifts of creativity are not dependent on tricking us into thinking we can only succeed in competition with one another.
I want us to unburden ourselves at the very least of restrictions around what we conceive as possible, and to contemplate a world where leaving means to wander freely, rather than being forced to flee—whether on foot or in the worlds of our own imaginations."
Freedom to write and share and walk walk walk walk....
Haha, I don’t think we’ll have a problem with that! Most of us fell in love with those books long before the internet. And if everything else fails, I do have a mailing address on my website!
Be on the lookout for like fifteen handwritten pages on how Tom Bombadil is Tolkein's most explicit argument for his belief in fate (or some larger guiding hand of the universe).
I think that JRR probably had some good ideas about what Tom was, but that in the end he left him a mystery because sometimes people come into our lives, do like five things that impact our world permanently (keep us from being crushed by a nasty ole tree, shift our entire perception of the Ring, save our lives from the wraiths, give us some weaponry that come in suspiciously handy on down the line, etc.) and then bound onward, never to be visited again. I don't think that I buy the argument that Tommy B. was a stand-in for a deity, but rather more of a Crone (or agent of one of the Crones)(to pull in from other folk lore (which I believe that our boy JRRT would love)).
That makes so much sense and I love the idea of Tom as a Chrone. I definitely never thought of him as a deity, just an unexplained. Plenty of gods in the Silmarillion! He just IS. (Also I would happily read 15 more pages on this.)
“I think the story of whether or not one leaves a home, and how, and what level of choice is or is not involved, is the story of humanity. It is in this particular story that my writing about walking and my interest in private property intersect most profoundly”
And this applies as much to *digital* homes as well, as the idea of home is more than a physical location, more than a house or apartment, it's where you are safe and connected, where you can belong.
Jake, just popping in here to say the framing of “digital homes” has given me a lot to reflect on.
When I left all social media in 2021, I’m not sure I really understood Facebook or Instagram as homes of belonging, but rather as public spaces for strangers. But now I’m seeing them in a whole new light—they were how I practiced letting people in and how I learned about others. At the time when I shut everything down, we were also living in relative isolation, and so my constant companions became trees, birds and deer passing by. They were much better friends to my nervous system, but my longing for a certain connection had a palpable, heartsore quality I couldn’t understand.
Now I am feeling some shape coming to those quiet mountain years. That for all the ways social media confused me and stole from me, it was also a home for a yet-undiagnosed autistic person who makes friends much easier when she can read them in words. Sorry to ramble like this but I’m going to keep simmering on this for a while. Thank you for your thoughtfulness in Nia’s thread. It’s been a gift to me today.
And thank you for the reflection, it casts a light on a recurring niggle that I've had about dualism and the digital world. The idea of "physical" vs "mental" seems to be perpetuated in the "digital" vs "analogue" dialogue, that somehow physical conversations and connections are more real than their digital counterparts. Sure, they are of a different realm, but these realms mesh and intersect, and signals fly whilst connections are made. I haven't had a good experience of social media in the past, I think because billionaire platforms are created to perpetuate hierarchies, as generating conflict and desperate desire is way more profitable. I have found Mastodon to be way more equal (yes, there are donuts, but not amplified donuts) and with less noise there seems to be more genuine connection
This is incredible and mind-stretching for me, Amanda. I never thought about how social media could do that for people. I am now starting to think about how interacting online has strengthened me in particular ways, which it has even if I haven't thought about it. Thank you, thank you!
And WHEW. Wow. I'd kind of avoided reading those articles because I figured they'd be bad, but yup. They're bad. Your comment about digital homes is exactly to the point. When I deleted my Twitter account some years ago--2018 maybe?--I compared some of the messages and comments I received as subjecting myself to walking by a house in town where someone is out in their yard hurling epithets and threats all the time. I wouldn't keep walking by that house, would I? Some might, but I wouldn't. It gets very wearisome having this argument about free speech over and over. Emotional and psychological harm is just as bad as physical and has related effects, and it's time our species caught up with the realities of that.
Thank you, Nia. Lovely essay, with a lot of punch. It’s always about hoarding, probably motivated by fear, real or imagined (even horrendous greed must come from fear somewhere), born from the concept of scarcity, real or imagined. I’m sure you’ve read Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I’m in the middle of it, and one of her most powerful messages, to me, is that scarcity is an illusion. That if the world I can be approached with reciprocity, it leads to radically different consequences. Despite my best and constant work to unravel my own programming, this is still a vision I am having a hard time grasping. I read on. Think of what would topple if we all believed and acted on that framing.
Thank you, Shash! And yes, exactly: hoarding. Always some form of it.
I did read Braiding Sweetgrass! Twice. I think it's time for another reread. It's something that strikes me every time I look at fruit trees around town. The number of people who put out calls for someone to pick their plums or apples is overwhelming every year. The fruit trees have plenty for everyone!
It is really, really hard to think about the system we live in differently. I run into that with people all the time. One slow step and one slow story at a time, and just maybe we can get to a gentle tipping point that collapses the old paradigm with a new one already in place.
As I wind down my posting it is places like On the Commons that can hopefully keep me engaged on Substack. This was a beautiful essay. I am a little burned out on the AI topic and fair use but thought your writing was very relevant. Best of luck wherever your writing ends up.
Thank you, Mark! I'm not leaving Substack. I'm cross-posting these posts at WordPress for people who don't want to engage with the Substack ecosystem. It's also a backstop. I've been writing online long enough to know I want one. :) I'm glad to see you here!
This is hitting hard today, Nia, so much in line with so many other things I've been thinking about and questioning lately in my own approach, my own efforts to "walk the walk." Substack is feeling like more and more of a compromise to me and I need to cogitate on it. From one sickie to another though, I'm glad you're feeling a little better. We need you.
This is heartbreaking that you mention this Chris specially because it resonates. I kind of feel that susbtack is slowly becoming what we all feared it would. I hate to admit it because I love the community here. I would have definitely not known your powerhouse of a voice and Nia’s and many more of my favourite writers if not for substack. Yet it slowly becoming the elephant in the room!
I always figured Substack’s founders and funders would sell up at some point—especially since Notes launched, since engagement and numbers are what constitute “value” for the tech world even more than actual paying subscribers, but even before that they were paying writers to set up newsletters not for their writing but because they were inflammatory and could bring an audience (numbers, engagement). My hope is that most of the newsletters and the connections built around them can keep being their own thing. And I have to believe we would have met one way or another, Swarna!
That’s true Nia, the whole drama of susbtack paying millions to celebrity writers to come to the platform was irksome beyond words and I remember that as a clear moment of dissonance amongst the community which they later pacified by conducting open forums like substack go and so many other forgettable events that had a zero impact on the majority of the writers here tbh. I don’t think I ever believed so deeply in the platform anyway but the network here is what I stayed for. I hope that those connections will grow if fostered even outside substack. But you are right Nia, I think we would have found each other either way. 💜
It is perpetually interesting to me to read how many people talk about Substack as if it's a kind of commons, the same way Twitter was often spoken of as a public square. They can feel that way to those of us who build connections and relationships within them, but they're still private companies! They can't fulfill the role of a true public space.
I left Facebook over 6 years ago and Twitter 5 years ago, and the connections I made that had any meaning at all were ones that kept going. I am certain we would have found each other. 🧡
Yes. They're a company with payments to make, not a commons, although we can build our own sandbox in here.
My biggest frustration is that they're happy to put their collective thumb on the scale to attract inflammatory writers with big numbers and create categories such as "HeaIth Politics" as a home for anti-vaxxers and COVID deniers, all which have the effect of making the platform righter, whiter, and more anglo-centric, while refusing to put a thumb on the scale to correct the consequences of their actions because "free speech".
That and the manufactured scarcity which has writers playing Hunger Games.
Agreed on all points, John. It’s hardly an argument for an open marketplace of ideas when you’re paying some people to be there, and those usually the most inflammatory and damaging. (I looked at Notes yesterday and was being fed Covid-denial and anti-vaxx posts. Not today, Satan!)
The manufactured scarcity I do find depressing, but then that’s true in all aspects of our lives and something that it’s my goal to at least shift the conversation on. (Get back to work, Nia!)
I never looked at it that way, it makes so much sense. It feels like an old church or community centre where we meet weekly to socialise like we do in a physical community or public space. Sometimes it also feels like random encounters in the weekend bazars, where you stop to chit chat for a while over cold sodas in hot summer evenings. That’s why I suppose the connections will surpass and survive whatever drama that further ensues with the company and its investors. But I agree with you, it is delusional at best to think of this as anything but just another business.
Well, not delusional! Optimistic maybe. And it does feel exactly as you’re describing. Twitter did, too, for a long time, even with all the abuse and trolling. I found people there.
This is like private spaces that look public in cities. The Guardian did a big thing about those a few years ago. You go hang out in a plaza in London, for example, and think you’re in a public space. But you don’t realize it’s either privately owned or privately leased and when you’re there you’re subject to a completely different system of laws and enforcement than in a true public space. And you have less recourse to justice—in that space, you’re no longer a citizen; you’re at best a customer.
I would like to run into you at a weekend bazaar and chitchat over cold sodas! That sounds delightful.
That means a lot, Chris, as I’m sure you know. Finding options is hard, and finding ones in line with our values even more so.❤️🩹 I’m glad you’re on the mend—we need you, too!
Gosh, since both of you (Chris and Antonia), have been my guiding lights for how to be on Substack (same content for all, free or paid), I am deeply interested in the ways you both model walking the walk --both physically and metaphorically. Thanks as ever for your willingness to examine it all, again and again from different angles.
I so enjoy the way you approach yours Sarah! I never know what I’m going to come across in there, which is so often my favorite way to read, even as I try to resist thinking, hm, I should try to learn to make fibers from milkweed ...
I’ve been writing online for a long time, but have never found myself having to pause and rethink my approach quite this often. It’s a little tiring, but on the other hand I’m not aiming for any goal in particular except to do the best work possible. The whole reason I still work as a copy editor is because I didn’t want to have to hustle at writing and lose all the joy of it for little pay (and I mainly do copy editing rather than teaching and workshops—as most other writers I know do—because when I work with others’ writing I give my whole attention to it and it takes from the same well my own writing comes from; I don’t have enough capacity to give to both all the time). For the rest of it, Chris himself wrote recently about how much we compromise every minute we exist.
It reminded me of something my dad has been struggling with for 30 years running a business in Russia, having to deal with the mafia and then corrupt police and government and all the rest of it. Something like 20 years ago he said to me, “How do you stay a person of integrity and do anything in a system like this?” I don’t think there’s an absolute right or wrong answer, only every person’s best efforts to do the best they can.
I hope you're starting to feel better. Being familiar with the provenance, I can imagine how much that turmeric chai helped!
Your posts always teach me something and make me think. As soon as I see one come in, I resist the temptation to read it immediately and instead book myself a time when I can give it my full attention.
Several things arise for me. One is that I copy most of my posts to a newsletter on Linkedln. The intent was to drive followers over here. What happened instead is that I picked up subscribers there who might never subscribe here, such as state agency directors and current and former county commissioners. They can read me and maintain plausible deniability! Win-win!
Another is that I agree completely (surprise!) with your analysis of technology and who benefits, and your diagnosis that it's just part of a bigger systemic problem which won't be solved piecemeal.
And finally that we can imagine a better world. And, I hope, bring it into being, one turmeric chai recipe at a time.
Attention is the best compliment, as I’m sure you know. I feel similarly about yours. ☺️
I’d never thought about linking this to LinkedIn, that’s a thought. If I dabble in anything there, it’s with the Global Walkability Correspondents Network, which is based out of Poland and organizes everything through LinkedIn. I mostly just use it for my copy editing resume and work, though!
And indeed, one chai recipe, one book, one story, one step at a time. Thank you, John. 💗
So sorry to hear you got Covid. I read this piece just after hearing an interview with a Palestinian reporter who recently fled to Turkey with his family and whose home of 20 years is gone.
Thank you! I am on the upswing. I was pretty sick but thankfully didn’t lose taste. My sister had it three weeks ago and did. 😕 Turmeric chai is delicious, highly recommended.
Thank you for writing this, it helps clear the waters regarding "AI" or machine learning that's taught using stolen art. Apparently so much AI created art has flooded the internet that the machines are learning from AI art and creating garbage, because they aren't actually "learning." Anyway. I'd be delighted to converse with an actual artificial intelligence; I got a kick out of the old ELIZA program that essentially played Freud by rephrasing your sentences and questions to hold a mock conversation. I was mildly impressed with an AI updated version, but it failed the Turing test in about three questions because it was obviously carving answers from Wikipedia and web searches. But I digress. As for the trespassing signs I recently learned that Texas is 95% privately owned and you have no freedom to roam there, except on the 5% that is public land or parks. And they consider themselves free? Maybe the rich men who own the land are free, but no one else is, and maybe that's how they like it.
I’ve heard 98% privately owned for Texas and I’m pretty sure that’s exactly how they like it. It’s the way Montana is going, too, though as long as there are federal public lands I still count us fortunate to be able to get into them.
I had the most frustrating interaction with an “AI-informed” chatbot last week. Half an hour going in circles! It finally said, “I sounds like you need to speak with a Happiness Engineer,” which sounded straight out of Black Mirror. Said human was very helpful and it was a relief to at least have my problem understood, but I really feel for the person being stuck with Happiness Engineer as a job title.
Great job, AI. Wasting 30 minutes of your time as interactive hold music.
🤣
Thank you Nia, it took many years to acknowledge this, and many more to write about, but now I am slowly getting there. It is a thing not talked about in my family at all because sometimes silence is the only tool of the survivor in their defence to obscure the past. But in their most vulnerable moments, I have heard them talk about their motherland and how things changed as they entered their primes.
It is really important for me to embrace this identity and not live in constant battle with it, in a way that has been implied as an essential process of assimilation. Refugees , migrants- like you said its all the same to the ones who have left a home behind almost never to return to it again. Thank you for giving me a space to speak about this in your community. 💜
“embrace this identity and not live in constant battle with it, in a way that has been implied as an essential process of assimilation”
This is almost unspeakably enormous, Swarna. All that you hold of yourself and your family in multilayered complexity, and how are you even meant to find your own feelings about it much less talk about it publicly?
When I interviewed my uncle about being evacuated and his years as a refugee during the Siege of Leningrad, one thing both he and my father told me is that when they were growing up in the Soviet Union, the adults who’d survived that time never talked about it. I’ve heard this in other places in the world where people have survived something unspeakably horrific, that it can take generations for people to begin speaking of those experiences. Maybe it’s grandchildren’s and great-grandchildren’s role to honor those stories. I wonder.
It is almost always the case Nia. To speak of the horrors is to live them again and for the generations that lived through it, the whole idea would threaten the new identity that they worked so hard to create. Sometimes oblivion is the only safe boat to navigate those violent waters of displacement. It is absolutely essential to identify this a few generations later and come to terms with it. Otherwise the fog of non-belonging will persist through us and our children.
So, so true. And so hard. 💙
“a world where leaving means to wander freely, rather than being forced to flee—whether on foot or in the worlds of our own imaginations.” This spoke so deeply to me Nia. My grandparents were refugees of a ruthless partition war and even if I am raised away from the traumas of being a survivor, I am aware of the pain and vacancy that human invented borders creates specially if you were forced to leave your country and land behind never to return to it again. I have seem both my grandmothers live with it all their lives. Thank you for this poignant piece Nia. 💜
This was the line for me too 💛
In the deepest parts of my research on ownership, this is the constant theme, with variations, of what we’ve lost: true freedom means you can walk away—from a tribe, a nation, a job, a marriage—and have it make no difference in your ability to survive.
Thank you Lindsey 💜
This really hits home, Swarna. I’ve read a lot about Partition, but to have that immediate experience in your own family is horrific. Along with knowing what your grandparents lived through, intergenerational trauma is a very real thing. I hope you can honor that you, too, carry their lives within you. ❤️🩹❤️🩹❤️🩹
Want to re-read this when less tired, but for now want to shout out an upcoming talk that I think you would enjoy called No, Seriously, F*ck Engagement https://www.eventbrite.com/e/no-seriously-fck-engagement-building-a-more-human-web-tickets-751810564637 – I saw a 20min version a few weeks ago and it's goooood
Oh, man, that hits me right in the “heck yes” (except a little more swear-y). Any idea if it’ll be recorded? I’m going to be offline until Wednesday evening.
I asked David Dylan Thomas via Instagram DM and he said all ticket holders will have access to the recording afterward.
I bought a ticket and will watch it when I get back. Appreciate the tip!
Hooray!
Thank you!
"The deeper structures that make the harms possible." Yes! And the values and presuppositions that underlie those structures! Let's root them out! (Although I may have to wait until next weekend to take this on.)
Regarding generative AI, I have rather strong feelings that cannot be adequately expressed without employing a torrent of the most vile and violent language ever to grace the tongue of our deeply flawed species. Or to put it another way...I don't need a machine to do my thinking or my writing for me. If someone else does, perhaps it is not a machine that they need.
I loved this post, Antonia. I will revisit it over the weekend when I am less beleaguered and have a bit more energy. As always, I appreciate your perspectives and the eloquence with which you express them. But most of all, though brief, I loved hearing you describe the snowflakes falling. That made me smile.
Be well.
"I don't need a machine to do my thinking or my writing for me. If someone else does, perhaps it is not a machine that they need." Goodness, YES! The only way to understand it is in knowing that there are very few people pushing for this who aren't focused simply on more profit.
Thank you, Kenneth. I hope things are a little less difficult for you. And the snowflakes made me smile, too. They're still coming down!
Taking a Jungian slant to the issue: the way I see it is that human feelings, human creativity, and deep symbolic remembering, are products of a collective unconscious that has evolved over many thousands of generations, and that machines simply do not, and never will, have access to. Machines can replicate the words and the syntax, but they cannot imbue those words with a soul born of thousands of years of collective suffering, loss, anxiety, longing and passion, creativity, hope, and love. These are what make the human experience what it is. These constitute a deep psychological inheritance that no damned machine has earned or has the right to.
Until a computer can know what it's like to hold their newborn child for the first time, or to kiss for the first time someone with whom they are deeply in love, or to gaze in wonder at a starry night, or to be a child catching a snowflake on her tongue (or the parent watching that child), or to be moved to tears by a beautiful piece of music, or to grieve at the deathbed of a beloved parent, friend, or child...I will have no respect and give no time to their faux "creations."
Somewhere there is an AI noting my words and marking me for extermination.
I had never thought of relating any of this to Jung’s collective unconscious, but doing so puts an entirely different lens in front of it. What about the dreamworld? What of archetypes that are shared across the world and we don’t really know why?
Maybe it’s not just about the right of machines, but also an entire realm of human existence that the pushers of these technologies have forgotten about. All of these are part of that—our dreams, our suffering, our joys. Thank you for reminding me, Kenneth.
I've been thinking and writing something about creating this week too--I love how you framed this, how we are being led to compete and live in anxiety constantly rather than trusting that friend would bring food in times of need, or send chai recipes (which I am so going to try in just a minute!). Worried about it all but reading your words and those of the many many others who feel the same is replenishing. And I am fascinated by the Luddites--how they've been coopted as a bad word, when what they were fighting for was for the work of human hands to matter. 💜
That anxiety can lead to so many awful places, from survivalist prepping (the hardcore kind, not the "have a go-bag in case of floor or fire" kind), to the deep depression that comes from a core conviction that one is alone and isolated. Which is a tool of authoritarian governments, to make people feel that way.
The chai recipe is so good! I'm kind of hooked. Swarna knew just what I needed.
Someone wrote a counterfactual fiction a few years ago based on "what if the Luddites won?" It can hurt to read because it's a world that could have been long before now. It's worth reading, though: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-future-encyclopedia-of-luddism/
Thanks for being here, Freya, and for your own abundance!
Thanks, as ever for this. You put it so perfectly.
"...even the joyful gifts of creativity are not dependent on tricking us into thinking we can only succeed in competition with one another.
I want us to unburden ourselves at the very least of restrictions around what we conceive as possible, and to contemplate a world where leaving means to wander freely, rather than being forced to flee—whether on foot or in the worlds of our own imaginations."
Freedom to write and share and walk walk walk walk....
Sarah
Yes, yes, and yes!
Thank you as always, Nia, and feel better soon! Veggie pho is my go-to "chicken soup" :-)
Greg
You couldn’t have known this, but pho is one of my top favorite foods! Sending out a request from nearby friends for a lime delivery … :)
Well, I suppose we need to get this distribution thing figured out if we're ever to form a Lord of the Rings collective!
Haha, I don’t think we’ll have a problem with that! Most of us fell in love with those books long before the internet. And if everything else fails, I do have a mailing address on my website!
Be on the lookout for like fifteen handwritten pages on how Tom Bombadil is Tolkein's most explicit argument for his belief in fate (or some larger guiding hand of the universe).
ack I need to read that too! :)
Is that a promise? Because I would love that! (I never really thought about it that way but it makes sense. Tom’s never fully explained.)
I think that JRR probably had some good ideas about what Tom was, but that in the end he left him a mystery because sometimes people come into our lives, do like five things that impact our world permanently (keep us from being crushed by a nasty ole tree, shift our entire perception of the Ring, save our lives from the wraiths, give us some weaponry that come in suspiciously handy on down the line, etc.) and then bound onward, never to be visited again. I don't think that I buy the argument that Tommy B. was a stand-in for a deity, but rather more of a Crone (or agent of one of the Crones)(to pull in from other folk lore (which I believe that our boy JRRT would love)).
That makes so much sense and I love the idea of Tom as a Chrone. I definitely never thought of him as a deity, just an unexplained. Plenty of gods in the Silmarillion! He just IS. (Also I would happily read 15 more pages on this.)
Beautiful, thank you. Your writing always fills me with hope and inspiration 🦄
Jonathan Katz has just written a piece called More on Substack's Nazis https://theracket.news/p/more-on-substacks-nazis
“I think the story of whether or not one leaves a home, and how, and what level of choice is or is not involved, is the story of humanity. It is in this particular story that my writing about walking and my interest in private property intersect most profoundly”
And this applies as much to *digital* homes as well, as the idea of home is more than a physical location, more than a house or apartment, it's where you are safe and connected, where you can belong.
Jake, just popping in here to say the framing of “digital homes” has given me a lot to reflect on.
When I left all social media in 2021, I’m not sure I really understood Facebook or Instagram as homes of belonging, but rather as public spaces for strangers. But now I’m seeing them in a whole new light—they were how I practiced letting people in and how I learned about others. At the time when I shut everything down, we were also living in relative isolation, and so my constant companions became trees, birds and deer passing by. They were much better friends to my nervous system, but my longing for a certain connection had a palpable, heartsore quality I couldn’t understand.
Now I am feeling some shape coming to those quiet mountain years. That for all the ways social media confused me and stole from me, it was also a home for a yet-undiagnosed autistic person who makes friends much easier when she can read them in words. Sorry to ramble like this but I’m going to keep simmering on this for a while. Thank you for your thoughtfulness in Nia’s thread. It’s been a gift to me today.
And thank you for the reflection, it casts a light on a recurring niggle that I've had about dualism and the digital world. The idea of "physical" vs "mental" seems to be perpetuated in the "digital" vs "analogue" dialogue, that somehow physical conversations and connections are more real than their digital counterparts. Sure, they are of a different realm, but these realms mesh and intersect, and signals fly whilst connections are made. I haven't had a good experience of social media in the past, I think because billionaire platforms are created to perpetuate hierarchies, as generating conflict and desperate desire is way more profitable. I have found Mastodon to be way more equal (yes, there are donuts, but not amplified donuts) and with less noise there seems to be more genuine connection
This is incredible and mind-stretching for me, Amanda. I never thought about how social media could do that for people. I am now starting to think about how interacting online has strengthened me in particular ways, which it has even if I haven't thought about it. Thank you, thank you!
Thank you, Jake!
And WHEW. Wow. I'd kind of avoided reading those articles because I figured they'd be bad, but yup. They're bad. Your comment about digital homes is exactly to the point. When I deleted my Twitter account some years ago--2018 maybe?--I compared some of the messages and comments I received as subjecting myself to walking by a house in town where someone is out in their yard hurling epithets and threats all the time. I wouldn't keep walking by that house, would I? Some might, but I wouldn't. It gets very wearisome having this argument about free speech over and over. Emotional and psychological harm is just as bad as physical and has related effects, and it's time our species caught up with the realities of that.
Thank you, Nia. Lovely essay, with a lot of punch. It’s always about hoarding, probably motivated by fear, real or imagined (even horrendous greed must come from fear somewhere), born from the concept of scarcity, real or imagined. I’m sure you’ve read Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I’m in the middle of it, and one of her most powerful messages, to me, is that scarcity is an illusion. That if the world I can be approached with reciprocity, it leads to radically different consequences. Despite my best and constant work to unravel my own programming, this is still a vision I am having a hard time grasping. I read on. Think of what would topple if we all believed and acted on that framing.
Thank you, Shash! And yes, exactly: hoarding. Always some form of it.
I did read Braiding Sweetgrass! Twice. I think it's time for another reread. It's something that strikes me every time I look at fruit trees around town. The number of people who put out calls for someone to pick their plums or apples is overwhelming every year. The fruit trees have plenty for everyone!
It is really, really hard to think about the system we live in differently. I run into that with people all the time. One slow step and one slow story at a time, and just maybe we can get to a gentle tipping point that collapses the old paradigm with a new one already in place.
As I wind down my posting it is places like On the Commons that can hopefully keep me engaged on Substack. This was a beautiful essay. I am a little burned out on the AI topic and fair use but thought your writing was very relevant. Best of luck wherever your writing ends up.
Thank you, Mark! I'm not leaving Substack. I'm cross-posting these posts at WordPress for people who don't want to engage with the Substack ecosystem. It's also a backstop. I've been writing online long enough to know I want one. :) I'm glad to see you here!
I have a few favorites on WordPress. For now I will continue reading on Substack but it is wonderful to know there are options!
This is hitting hard today, Nia, so much in line with so many other things I've been thinking about and questioning lately in my own approach, my own efforts to "walk the walk." Substack is feeling like more and more of a compromise to me and I need to cogitate on it. From one sickie to another though, I'm glad you're feeling a little better. We need you.
This is heartbreaking that you mention this Chris specially because it resonates. I kind of feel that susbtack is slowly becoming what we all feared it would. I hate to admit it because I love the community here. I would have definitely not known your powerhouse of a voice and Nia’s and many more of my favourite writers if not for substack. Yet it slowly becoming the elephant in the room!
I always figured Substack’s founders and funders would sell up at some point—especially since Notes launched, since engagement and numbers are what constitute “value” for the tech world even more than actual paying subscribers, but even before that they were paying writers to set up newsletters not for their writing but because they were inflammatory and could bring an audience (numbers, engagement). My hope is that most of the newsletters and the connections built around them can keep being their own thing. And I have to believe we would have met one way or another, Swarna!
That’s true Nia, the whole drama of susbtack paying millions to celebrity writers to come to the platform was irksome beyond words and I remember that as a clear moment of dissonance amongst the community which they later pacified by conducting open forums like substack go and so many other forgettable events that had a zero impact on the majority of the writers here tbh. I don’t think I ever believed so deeply in the platform anyway but the network here is what I stayed for. I hope that those connections will grow if fostered even outside substack. But you are right Nia, I think we would have found each other either way. 💜
It is perpetually interesting to me to read how many people talk about Substack as if it's a kind of commons, the same way Twitter was often spoken of as a public square. They can feel that way to those of us who build connections and relationships within them, but they're still private companies! They can't fulfill the role of a true public space.
I left Facebook over 6 years ago and Twitter 5 years ago, and the connections I made that had any meaning at all were ones that kept going. I am certain we would have found each other. 🧡
Just finding all these wonderful comments now.
Yes. They're a company with payments to make, not a commons, although we can build our own sandbox in here.
My biggest frustration is that they're happy to put their collective thumb on the scale to attract inflammatory writers with big numbers and create categories such as "HeaIth Politics" as a home for anti-vaxxers and COVID deniers, all which have the effect of making the platform righter, whiter, and more anglo-centric, while refusing to put a thumb on the scale to correct the consequences of their actions because "free speech".
That and the manufactured scarcity which has writers playing Hunger Games.
Happy to have found my abundant tribe!
Agreed on all points, John. It’s hardly an argument for an open marketplace of ideas when you’re paying some people to be there, and those usually the most inflammatory and damaging. (I looked at Notes yesterday and was being fed Covid-denial and anti-vaxx posts. Not today, Satan!)
The manufactured scarcity I do find depressing, but then that’s true in all aspects of our lives and something that it’s my goal to at least shift the conversation on. (Get back to work, Nia!)
I never looked at it that way, it makes so much sense. It feels like an old church or community centre where we meet weekly to socialise like we do in a physical community or public space. Sometimes it also feels like random encounters in the weekend bazars, where you stop to chit chat for a while over cold sodas in hot summer evenings. That’s why I suppose the connections will surpass and survive whatever drama that further ensues with the company and its investors. But I agree with you, it is delusional at best to think of this as anything but just another business.
Well, not delusional! Optimistic maybe. And it does feel exactly as you’re describing. Twitter did, too, for a long time, even with all the abuse and trolling. I found people there.
This is like private spaces that look public in cities. The Guardian did a big thing about those a few years ago. You go hang out in a plaza in London, for example, and think you’re in a public space. But you don’t realize it’s either privately owned or privately leased and when you’re there you’re subject to a completely different system of laws and enforcement than in a true public space. And you have less recourse to justice—in that space, you’re no longer a citizen; you’re at best a customer.
I would like to run into you at a weekend bazaar and chitchat over cold sodas! That sounds delightful.
Please don't abandon me, but if you do, I will continue finding your beautiful words
💚
That means a lot, Chris, as I’m sure you know. Finding options is hard, and finding ones in line with our values even more so.❤️🩹 I’m glad you’re on the mend—we need you, too!
Nia also share the chai recipe for Chris and other people here who feel under the weather. It might help them recover. 💜
If I didn’t live quite such a long drive away I’d bring him some!
I am sure you would have.
Gosh, since both of you (Chris and Antonia), have been my guiding lights for how to be on Substack (same content for all, free or paid), I am deeply interested in the ways you both model walking the walk --both physically and metaphorically. Thanks as ever for your willingness to examine it all, again and again from different angles.
I so enjoy the way you approach yours Sarah! I never know what I’m going to come across in there, which is so often my favorite way to read, even as I try to resist thinking, hm, I should try to learn to make fibers from milkweed ...
I’ve been writing online for a long time, but have never found myself having to pause and rethink my approach quite this often. It’s a little tiring, but on the other hand I’m not aiming for any goal in particular except to do the best work possible. The whole reason I still work as a copy editor is because I didn’t want to have to hustle at writing and lose all the joy of it for little pay (and I mainly do copy editing rather than teaching and workshops—as most other writers I know do—because when I work with others’ writing I give my whole attention to it and it takes from the same well my own writing comes from; I don’t have enough capacity to give to both all the time). For the rest of it, Chris himself wrote recently about how much we compromise every minute we exist.
It reminded me of something my dad has been struggling with for 30 years running a business in Russia, having to deal with the mafia and then corrupt police and government and all the rest of it. Something like 20 years ago he said to me, “How do you stay a person of integrity and do anything in a system like this?” I don’t think there’s an absolute right or wrong answer, only every person’s best efforts to do the best they can.
I hope you're starting to feel better. Being familiar with the provenance, I can imagine how much that turmeric chai helped!
Your posts always teach me something and make me think. As soon as I see one come in, I resist the temptation to read it immediately and instead book myself a time when I can give it my full attention.
Several things arise for me. One is that I copy most of my posts to a newsletter on Linkedln. The intent was to drive followers over here. What happened instead is that I picked up subscribers there who might never subscribe here, such as state agency directors and current and former county commissioners. They can read me and maintain plausible deniability! Win-win!
Another is that I agree completely (surprise!) with your analysis of technology and who benefits, and your diagnosis that it's just part of a bigger systemic problem which won't be solved piecemeal.
And finally that we can imagine a better world. And, I hope, bring it into being, one turmeric chai recipe at a time.
Attention is the best compliment, as I’m sure you know. I feel similarly about yours. ☺️
I’d never thought about linking this to LinkedIn, that’s a thought. If I dabble in anything there, it’s with the Global Walkability Correspondents Network, which is based out of Poland and organizes everything through LinkedIn. I mostly just use it for my copy editing resume and work, though!
And indeed, one chai recipe, one book, one story, one step at a time. Thank you, John. 💗
So sorry to hear you got Covid. I read this piece just after hearing an interview with a Palestinian reporter who recently fled to Turkey with his family and whose home of 20 years is gone.
Everything else just pales.
May you feel better soon. Tumeric chai sounds wonderful. Thank you for so many thought-provoking words. 🙏🏼
Thank you! I am on the upswing. I was pretty sick but thankfully didn’t lose taste. My sister had it three weeks ago and did. 😕 Turmeric chai is delicious, highly recommended.