The radical thing you should do instead of the ’80s AI photo challenge

Hello and welcome to another edition of the Weekly Vine.

I tell everyone who is willing to listen that there are three great dystopian novels one needs to read. The first, by Bihari lad George Orwell, is obviously Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, discovered, much like Buddha before him, that any association with the state condemns one to a lifetime of ennui. The second is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which imagines a world where humanity gives in to its pleasures and people become unteachable.

I will mention the third at the end of the Vine. Consider it book bait, if you will.

The two masters of dystopia have a destiny that seems strangely intertwined because Huxley also happened to teach Orwell French at Eton and would later school him about dystopia, which the French call just existing.

In 1949, after Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, Huxley wrote to his former student, praised the book and then, like all teachers, proceeded to explain where the student had gone wrong.

Orwell imagined a world where Big Brother was in complete control and ruled through fear, the Thought Police, telescreens and the proverbial boot stamping on a human face. Huxley argued that the ruling oligarchy would find “less arduous and wasteful ways of governing” than beating everyone into submission.

Why spend so much effort forcing people to obey, he wondered, when you could make them enjoy obedience? Why ban something people no longer wanted? Why seize information when people might happily volunteer it?

Nearly four decades later, American media theorist Neil Postman turned the Huxley-Orwell divide into the central argument of Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Postman wrote:

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.  As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.”

All of which brings us today to the algorithm: the love-child of a not-quite AGI Deus Ex Machina and the Mammon lovers powering it, which goes by many different names. And like a remarkable orchestrator, this algorithm has managed to make the entire populace dance to its tunes without even so much as a threat.

The latest iteration is the ’80s challenge, where suddenly everyone is using ChatGPT’s updated image software to post more hirsute, denim-clad versions of themselves as though they were auditioning for a Mithun Chakraborty film, letting nostalgia rob them of the notion that we considered much of this quite cringe back then.

It was a simple reminder that when Big Tech asks for our data, we tell it to eff off, but the moment sharing our data is presented as a challenge, we happily jump on the digital bandwagon and share all our information with a cherry on top.

It’s hard not to do it.

If there was peer pressure in the real world, today the entire digital space is a peer-to-peer sharing group modifying our behaviours, and at this moment the trend has escaped Twitter and LinkedIn to end up with the WhatsApp and Instagram crowd.

Freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre argued, is what we do with what’s been done to us. Perhaps Sartre understood what Huxley did too: humans don’t need to be coerced to imitate one another.

We have always blindly followed the crazy trends of the day, like lemmings jumping off a cliff. As an aside, lemmings don’t actually commit suicide, and the myth is based partly on a scene from the Disney documentary White Wilderness, in which animals were driven over a cliff into a river.

But we have been proverbial lemmings, even when lemmings aren’t proverbial lemmings, long before the algorithm came to control us.

French thinker René Girard argued that desire itself is mimetic: what we call keeping up with the Joneses. When we see someone else with something, our heart desires it like Eve’s apple. So many of our desires are based on looking at someone else’s possessions, whether fashion, status, political opinion or even the sudden desire to look like a Disco Dancer extra.

The algorithm didn’t invent desire any more than McDonald’s invented hunger, but it learnt how to industrialise it. Before, peer pressure required actual peers.

Sometimes those peers were a deterrent too, as one has explained with the Toaster F*** Theory. For those who don’t read closely enough, before the internet, if someone said they wanted to perform coitus with electrical equipment, they were told to shut up or sent to an asylum. Now, you go online and announce your desire and suddenly find 10,000 other people who want to do the same thing, which convinces you that f****** toasters is normative behaviour.

Peer pressure works in the same way: you needed to find someone to feel jealous of. The internet removed that geographical limitation and gave us a superset peer group that includes everyone from our childhood friends to complete strangers to celebrities.

The question here really isn’t even what Big Tech can make us do, but how much of what we are doing is a choice. If a challenge can make us do these things, what real choices are we making every day? Are we choosing what we want to eat, wear or believe each day? Or, as Huxley pointed out, is coercion not the only enemy?

A man being marched at gunpoint knows he’s not free. But is the man who finds happiness on a billboard equally unfree? The first man can at least see his chains; the second perhaps doesn’t recognise that his choices have left him chained.

Are we anything more than the sum total of our desires and social conditioning? Or should we, to fight capitalism, start an underground fight club egged on by an imaginary Brad Pitt? Are we just swimming in Postman’s “sea of irrelevance”?

None of this is to suggest that an Instagram challenge dictates all our choices or is a sign of a silent totalitarianism.

But the algorithm and our non-stop access to the internet, coupled with generative AI, mean that we are jacked in all the time.

The algorithm watches us linger and knows exactly what to serve next. The longer we linger, the more it knows. Perhaps that also explains why the modern internet is so obsessed with the self. Narcissus had to make do with a pool. We have better tech and a metaphorical pool that can make us look younger, thinner, richer, more muscular, better dressed or like an anime character.

The mirror reflected our own image, social media taught us to become performative and market the self, and now AI allows us to manufacture alternative selves before deciding which one to show to the world.

There’s nothing profoundly new about vanity. Pharaohs got slaves to build pyramids, aristocrats commissioned portraits and people with existential angst learnt to put their ontological problems on paper to become writers.

Now we have one giant machine that will do all of it for us: make us look better and even write our essays about existential angst. But a true writer knows that whatever is written by a machine is never truly human and is, at best, a pale imitation drawn from patterns in previous works.

In The Matrix, you freed yourself by realising that you were in a dream world.  And in the real world, you do it with the book bait that I promised in the starting of the Vine. Most folks consider Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World the two magnum opuses of dystopian novels but I believe there’s a third book that deserves to be on the same pedestal: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury whose plot has the key to saving humanity.

In this dystopia, books are banned and firefighters’ job is to burn them, not save people from fires. And that’s what we need to rediscover because, since the Gutenberg press came around, books became far more commonplace than it used to be no longer preserve of the elite. Almost everyone could learn to read and write. That ability expanded with the internet democratising information unlike any previous explosion in human history. Today we have machines in our pockets that are vastly more powerful than the computers that helped send man to the Moon, and we use them to argue with strangers and generate AI slop.

Why not use them to rediscover what made us human?

The answer is embarrassingly simple: read more, scroll less and occasionally allow your mind to belong entirely to you. We don’t have to live in Orwell’s or Huxley’s world. Bradbury feared a world where books had to be burnt; ours might be worse if we simply stop wanting to read them.

 In The Matrix, you freed yourself by realising that you were in a dream world. And in the real world, you do it with the book bait that I promised at the start of the Vine. Most folks consider Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World the two magnum opuses of dystopian fiction, but I believe there’s a third book that deserves to be on the same pedestal: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, whose plot has the key to saving humanity.

In this dystopia, books are banned and firefighters’ job is to burn them, not save people from fires. And that’s what we need to rediscover because, since the Gutenberg press came around, books became far more commonplace and were no longer the preserve of the elite. Almost everyone could learn to read and write. That ability expanded with the internet democratising information unlike any previous explosion in human history. Today, we have machines in our pockets that are vastly more powerful than the computers that helped send man to the Moon, and we use them to argue with strangers and generate AI slop.

Why not use them to rediscover what made us human?

The answer is embarrassingly simple: read more, scroll less and occasionally allow your mind to belong entirely to you. We don’t have to live in Orwell’s or Huxley’s world. Bradbury feared a world where books had to be burnt; ours might be worse if we simply stop wanting to read them.

So forget the ’80s challenge. If you really want to revisit the past, try the radical old habit of picking up a book.

Postscript by Prasad Sanyal: The seven things I have learnt from people who have learnt seven things

There was a time when becoming a guru required inconvenience. You had to retreat to the mountains, renounce a reasonable quantity of worldly goods, sit under a tree for an unreasonable length of time, acquire disciples, develop some familiarity with the human condition, and then wait until somebody else began referring to you as wise. You could not appoint yourself. Gurudom was bestowed, usually after decades and occasionally after death, which made the whole enterprise admirably resistant to personal branding.

LinkedIn has fixed this inefficiency.

Enlightenment now requires a smartphone, a photograph from a conference in which you appear to be explaining something important to a microphone, and the confidence to announce that after twelve years in corporate life you have identified the seven things everybody in their twenties is doing wrong.

Read more

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