Unspeakable Sorrow of Being
Contrived nature of AI, Antithesis to Machinations, and Searching for the Indestructible
The crisis of the modern world is not a crisis of technology or politics or greenhouse gases. It is a spiritual war. What the Machine represents is our ultimate rebellion against nature: against reality itself. We have seen this rebellion before. Now our culture’s rejection of its spiritual core has opened us up to powers and principalities that we have no idea how to manage
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity
In the purple haze of doomerism, my spring keeps unfurling in its indifferent joy. Here sacred, there volatile. Now conjuncted to the carousel of everlasting deride that has gripped this decade in its fistful agony, then awakening to the timeless joy of eternal awareness. Swinging between the heat of summer announcing itself in the humid melancholy of gathering grey, and the cooling heralded by the early Kalbaisakhi (nor’westers) chastising the city veiled in carbon dust.
There is a grief deep and hidden, vapid and transparent, relentless and silent — all the same for which a vast container needs to be assigned. The collective demands despite hopeless frugalities of daily, despite the natural world and its rapid succession of events. What I am resting most is despair, a gentle eased sense of letting go that threatens obsoletion of words if I let it. I am trying to read more — a shift naturally aided by my inclination to anything else but words. Another thing I find joy in resisting is the fast agile digital world. Books – there is where I rest my frail curiosities. It has, I have discovered lately, become difficult to relearn to focus. The fragmentation of attention has been taken too far. So I refused indulgence in the medium of fragmentation with vengeance — totally without reprisal.
It grieves me that things had to come along this winded weird way. As if the incessant news of death, scathe, and dominion was not enough, the new broadcast has all been about AI replacing the human capabilities (more like incapabilities — lightning speed outputs and tandems of probabilities in the fraction of cost, because the AI slave doesn’t feed a family, pay bills, and buy health insurance, or even rest) without government policies reassuring us otherwise. The digital work world is flooded with agentic AIs that can do almost anything that a person can do albeit faster and cheaper. What has been even more dehumanizing are the conversations around AGIs that will eventually make knowledge work completely unnecessary. This new threat to my survival (writer and designer), has warned me of the harmful simplicity of abundance which cannot be distributed for public good. The billionare’s relentless pursuit of profitability has run into terrains of wilful disregard for accountability.
Exposed to an endless debate of experience and exposure — my mind outgrows itself in every argument. I am forced to reconcile with the possibility that the state of human now is more synthesis than being. We are proudly becoming a byproduct of our own mirages than beings of consciousness, whose mysteries we still struggle to understand. We are now Homo Syntheticus rather than Homo Sapiens. An assembled species of fabricated neurosis, unfiltered influences, synthetic expectations, and borrowed identities — running a race in which the finish line promises absolute loss of being. Heartbreaking is the precipice of civilizational ascent from where a few powerful look down upon the rest and refuse us even the human privilege to err. And all this is being done at a detrimental speed causing fast deterioration of the natural world. Depleting water tables and polluting them at the cost that we are not yet ready to pay.
The capitalistic disregard for the essence of life (consciousness and nature), turn me inwards in a purgatorial rage. The shadow lines of which keep mentoring my attention for change. My prescient will is retracted to the tangibility. Imagination flooded by the visions of green, azure, brown — the texture of elemental grace of Earth that absolves our collective transgressions. The colors and textures of nature sit defiantly under the inner cupola of the holy that is part of the whole. To me, it seems easier to merge into the roots of life than to live in abstractions of the world, and also to create from the same place. ‘If only I could hold a piece of land without the imposition of human structure above it’, I thought to myself. In this comical economy, this little acquisition is out of question. Necessary commodities are touching astronomical price points, let alone pieces of land in an overpopulated country like mine.
These mindless maladies of machinations makes me wonder of the excessive nature of everything in our world that rots under the weight of its own expectations. Will the greed for novel experiences ever saturate, as we fast-track towards self-annihilation? Can we ever have enough? I am forlorn for an answer which, even before its arrival, has already inclined upon denial. However grim our circumstances might be, the way is always through. There is no avoiding the prevalence of the technologies as there is no denial of the wars splitting the axis of the world and collapsing our economy. Both are happening — these apocalyptic outcomes of imagined fear and fragmented human minds. As we navigate its waves, we will learn together how to breathe under its currents and survive its vile accusations against our human weakness.
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
To such inane human sorrow whose existence has now to be demonstrated by will, the antidote can only be found in imprints and details that are organic — the inner scapes of dreams and memories, the rumbling voice of dissent that doesn’t let accountability slip, the virtue of beauty by which divine designs are identifiable. These three pillars are prominent friction point for the algorithmic systems precisely because these realms do not comply to the human-made frameworks. The mystical structure of our own being is ultimately the only tool to dissect with, the grief of obscuration in an automated world.
Memory is reticent to the other-worldly aspect of time, through which some events negotiate without protocol. It will be two years since my father passed away, but when I close my eyes, I still see him glide through the gleaming tinge of our old house lamps, breaking silence with his lucid movements. Are those movements still living in some textured realms separated from now by the probabilistic branching of time or are they just images sparsing in my memory, I know not.
His lingering announces the progression of grief and love, memory and dreams, following each other’s lead — like blind baby shrews, treading through dangers of navigating the world, holding each other’s tails. Each time he appears at the corners of my liminal interiors, even as a ghost, a visceral familiarity holds me in comfort and knowing. A realm opens up which any vapid derivative of binary system cannot reduce into patterns.
This interlocution between memory and dream is what fascinates me and gives me hope in the prejunctional human intelligence to be far greater than just a bunch of accumulated skills. Our intelligence is both organic and chaotic in its evolution, congenital and learned, practised and experimental — all at the same time. These labyrinths of inner worlds are vast and quietly existential — a challenge to human tendency to label and categorize. Imitating something so mysterious is largely impossible, even if the registers of emotions and architecture of the intelligence can be replicated. But what animates these registers and flows through the architecture of life is not material in nature. To imitate organic intelligence, one needs to birth consciousness, which by definition cannot be birthed or destroyed, only dispersed like seeds through the forest of life by that which we neither understand nor control (a.k.a God, creator, anima, divine, universe).
Sapiens succeeded the last three hundred thousand years against the lash of every age’s biggest tribulations. There is something inadvertently human that stands in the face of all adversities and proclaims victory. What is it, I thought, that is ardent and ancient — something that we still carry in the epigenetics of both body and memory? The composition of dissent and resistance that rises through each molecule of consciousness, and spread like wildfire across our world. What is it that binds us in eternal relationship with the elements of our natural world? From the sea to the mountain, from the forest to the desert, through which God speaks to us when we are ready to yield. What is it that has driven Jesus to roam and fast in the desert and mad Buddha sit motionless under the bodhi tree — for several weeks. The constant whirling meditation of action and inaction — that lives eternally through us — of which we are but mere vessels.
When the divinity permeates through the edifice of mundane, a new impulse is ushered. The impulse is akin to life itself. It moves in fractals, imbibed in the fabric of life — the impulse of creation, and the urge to create. So innate to everything animated by the life forces that we can hardly locate its origin. The antithesis to the megalomaniacal machinations, if there is one, is in the reclamation of this creative force. Manifesting in forms of art, language, music — in the most unconventional of ways — by decimating rules and limitations imposed by institutional formulas. By breaking laws of colors, strokes, grammar, rhythms — challenging the colonial conventions set in place to gatekeep that which humans have been doing since centuries. These are the very institutions that foster the underbelly of capitalism. It is by these very conventions of institutions, that corporations legitimize their freehold on human intelligence and demand production out of us like we are machines.
Reclamation of human agency and brilliance lies in rejecting the system and its rules. Because it is precisely on formulas and patterns that AI is trained. It is in the experimental avenues of creativity that we will find a break from the inundated synthetic information generation. It is in our endless pursuit of truth in myriad forms — with confidence, with faith, with love for the world we cohabit — that there is a slight chance that artistic dissent will shatter the glass towers of corporate greed. These monuments of deride built on suffering of you and I, on our sweat and blood, a loud jeer to our intelligence, to our work that brings us closer to the divine. They will come crumbling down if we refuse them our creative dexterity.
As I progress in my path of creating slow and deliberate work like a book built word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase, I realise that the only threat to my intelligence is my own inability to laugh at the serious congeniality of AI. Beyond the falsehood of invincibility of this tech, intellectual freedom is quietly waiting in sheer dissent, in vitrified resilience, in anger transmuted into agency — sedimenting into a voice that is so singular and divergent that nothing about it can be generalized, formulized, or copied. It is in the essence of history and ancestry, in the genetic makeup and creative forces of the universe that unique footprints of resistance will emerge, and they take forms in the riveting tales of humanity narrated by you and I.
To persist in the apparently lonely but ultimately uniting folds of creative life, I insist that we go out of our ways to search for hope in the hopeless, joy in the joyless, aid in the aid-less. To steal spark from the stars of collective imagination, to dare breathe beneath oceans, to stagger away with our joints asunder into the respite of beauty and justice, to stir up imagined happiness in the foolish pursuit of holding lamp to the Sun. And do well to remember that through our connection to the natural world — in the language of ocean waves and torrents of winds, rooted-molten pastel of living forests and scorching duststorms of deserts, God is waiting to talk to us.
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I love how you come up for air at the end...