I’m seeing enough of them, now, and discussing the concept with enough people online and off, that I think it’s time to start clipping examples of people pointing at harbingers of enantiodromia—the sudden inversion of a paradigm into its complete opposite.
Here’s yer man Dougald Hine—a far better-known and more widely read Brit-who-fled-to-Sweden—in a longer piece talking up a return to what he terms the “Hand Made Web”:
If it’s reasonable to locate the new tide of AI-generated dross within the much longer history of hack work, that’s not to say that the quantitative explosion of this material is anything other than an enormous and unwelcome change. But it matters whether this change represents the ruining of a previously good state of affairs, or the intensification of an already bad state of affairs. If we’re dealing with something more like the latter scenario, then the intensification may bring things to a crisis, and the crisis may contain a strange kind of hope. This is the kind of conclusion towards which I am tempted.
I am also tempted toward that conclusion. As I have remarked here many times before, hope is far from being sufficient for change. But hope is nonetheless necessary for change.
We cannot choose to be or do that which we cannot imagine ourselves doing or being.
Both Dougald and I can imagine a fairly near future in which brainless push-button bullshit provokes a transformative and much-needed cultural crisis… but it’s not just us.
Over the last few days, I’ve been playing observer at a set of workshops about the future of music—not the future of music production, not “what’s next year’s hot genre on TikTok?”, but rather what music might mean to people as a social phenomenon in around twenty five years from now.
And what was fascinating was that the preferable visions—which, to be fair, came after a fairly lengthy exorcism of the Orwellian algo-governed dystopias which inhabit the “probable” parts of the futures cone—were almost completely devoid of what we (erroneously) call “tech”. There was a yearning for quiet, for small-scale gatherings in person, for… well, for hand-made music. That’s doesn’t necessarily mean analogue music, not necessarily folk songs; it’s not really about the music at all, so much as the meaning that the music makes in the context of an event or gathering.
The term “authenticity” has become a byword for fakeness, in a way that I have come to think is not just unfair but elitist—the hipsters who sought authenticity back in the Noughties are perhaps rather less deserving of our contempt than those who made serious bank by convincing them they’d found it, or those who wrote columns sneering at the latest generation of young people trying to make meaning for themselves in a world where meaning had long before been penned up in the corral of “consumer choice”.
That yearning for authenticity, for something “real”—another term that cynical theorists will seize upon as a mark of privilege or ignorance, and as a justification for deriding and dismissing an important signal—has only grown since then, even as it has been channeled and productised and profited from, provided with ever cheaper and cruder approximations of what is wanted.
The margins on this sort of business are always slim, and the target moves very fast—it’s basically pure marketing, a way to sell selling itself: the patter is also the product. The temptation for the moneymakers in these spaces to turn to generative material will be irresistible. Hell, we’re already seeing it! It’s like tinfoil to a magpie, they just can’t stop themselves… and they’re congenitally incapable of the discernment required to recognise that what they’re peddling is shit.
(Either that, or they are capable of that discernment, and are actively trying to displace genuine creative work because it is the one thing that their beloved machines and business models simply cannot reproduce, and it thus serves of a constant reminder of an inadequacy they have no idea how to address in any other way than through its eradication.)
Back to Dougald:
The web that I inhabit today is smaller and slower than the one that I was part of five or ten years ago, and it is woven through with enough threads of actual trust to limit the need for impersonal substitutes. The quality of expression is such that the words I read or listen to don’t seem especially vulnerable to replacement with AI. And the scale of audience for most of the voices in this Hand Made Web is small enough that I can’t see these spaces attracting actors whose modus operandi is to flood a space with low-grade content and profit from a tiny conversion rate…
Different medium, same desire.
It’s still something close to blasphemy to suggest that the relatively near future might actually be much less saturated with “tech” that the present—to defy the deterministic metanarrative of technology, which L M Sacasas suggests might be best thought of as not a metaphorical religion but a very literal one, and to argue that this religion might be on its last legs.
The ruthless policing of blasphemy, though, is the surest sign that everyone knows the old god is dead.
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