This is a Human Writing
Back in 2022 when I posted my first “poem” to Instagram this would have been a very odd thing to say, a little over four years later and humans appear to be disappearing from the internet quicker than you can say “What Stalin taught me about business-to-business sales!”
If you were not convinced that the world had gone mad already it must be increasingly difficult to maintain the level of self-delusion to think otherwise. I have read of an AI stopping reading names at a university graduation among “notable” failures of the technology. For some reason encouraging suicide and making things up because doing them properly is difficult are not enough to even pause momentarily. Then again neither is ruining a graduation ceremony.
I am tempted to delete all traces of my own dabbling with the technology, I genuinely thought it could be a useful tool, I think it could, however, time is teaching me that people should not be allowed access to some tools. Hallucinating computer software is definitely something we cannot be trusted with.
Sat on the sidelines I am engrossed in sources like “The Tech Report” and Ed Zitron with his “Better Offline” podcast. I am eagerly spending time, almost gleefully watching commentator after commentator point out that the whole world economy has gone to hell in a data centre shaped handbasket made of Nvidia GPUs. The spectacle of supposedly intelligent people hero worshipping narcissists and liars is tempered only by the knowledge that is ordinary people, not the mega wealthy, who will be made to pay for this absolute folly.
The world has reached the when not if stage of economic disaster. The disconnect is real, and real people are going to suffer. I would say it’s doom and gloom, but I fear it is worse than that. The collapse, imminent, current or otherwise of the world is not lost on me, but it also feels unreal.
There is a cognitive dissonance in the global psyche. I know I am not alone in feeling this tension. I sit watching Australian Supercars in the midst of a Genocide. People are cutting food budgets to under starvation portions while Porsche’s race around Snetterton. Zoom in, zoom out, there are no mental gymnastics that can make it make sense. All the while, we can stick a takeaway on Klarna and pretend that it isn’t happening. We are finding ways to cope with the destruction of certainty at every level of our lives. Wages that paid for a shopping basket a month ago won’t pay for less now. We struggle and see companies posting profits in the billions. Billions, while those who actually did the work to make that money are facing every sort of insecurity. It feels like insanity because it is.
All the while, I see the politics of hatred and division that angered me growing up under Thatcher become considered a moderate position in a world where extreme voices are the only ones we are allowed to hear. I saw it then, when I was supposed to see my contemporaries and peers as my enemies; the people just like me were supposed to be the problem. They were the only ones helping, caring, doing the work. Sometimes I feel like people have forgotten that it was people like us, the ones without the power and the money, were the ones that made each other’s lives bearable, fought for rights and protections; the bosses were why we needed community action in the first place.
There are days when I look at a headline, I see a piece of social media, and my heart is destroyed. People are desperate for a reason to be allowed to hate, a reason to be bigoted. The narrative of competition and scarcity has poisoned their minds. A disabled person with a Motability car has it better, so they are the problem, because they can get outside? How about you were enabled to have a car of your own, and I got one to help me try, and we were both included in society? There is scarcity, it’s because of the billions, not the PIP payments.
Struggling to get seen and noticed by a computer that prefers computer generated slop feels selfishly trivial compared to the bigger picture. Why am I worrying about poems when I am only ever less than 90 days from being homeless? The void I am screaming into is the world around me.
And yet we continue, there are writers, artists, creatives who keep on making art, they keep on communicating, they keep on building. In the face of the overwhelming odds against any impact, we know from our experience that what we do does connect. That the effort, the heartache, the money, time, tears, fears, doubt, everything that makes art the outpouring of the human soul is worth it when it connects to another human. When we connect, however briefly, we are reminded that we can be unified by something greater than ourselves.
It’s the antithesis of capitalism, of productivity. It is living as a process; it is about the expression of the human experience in all its rich and diverse forms. And so, despite my wrestling with its pointlessness, I sit down in the morning, and I write just to write, to put ink on a page. If I could express what I wanted with drawings, I would; instead, I write words, introspect in a world where introspection feels like madness so I can be sane in an insane world.
I write a blog to leave a little trace in the electronic world that a human is here existing, thinking, worrying, wanting to be a better human, striving towards something they can’t capture, name or fully understand because the living is in the act of striving itself.
Until next week, this is a human writing.
