Moving to Substack

 Hi readers!  Yardsale Buddha is transitioning to https://arieljade.substack.com/.  Please go to substack for all my new writings!

The Great Ennui of AI

(Inspired by the “Behind the Bastards” episode on AI)

Extracting this piece from my brainfolds is going to be gritty, personal, and entirely non-objective, which I think is the only writing I know how to do.  If you read my essay about healing from the patriarchy, you know that I’m going to have to return to some places that are uncomfortable to write this piece.  Sometimes it spins out of control like a Stravinsky piece in an echo chamber.

I’m going to be criticizing AI a lot.  But not so much the invention, or the idea of evolution, or the capabilities of technology.  No, I’m going to be criticizing the foul, narcissistic, incel-driven men (and other kool-aid drinkers) behind these advances.

The first thing that infuriates me about these basic, ranch-dressing, unseasoned-mashed-potato businessmen is the simplicity and predictability of the gas-lighting we know we can expect from them every single time someone suggests accountability from them.

*inhale*  Slow down Lis.  *exhale*  The previous paragraph used to be twice as long.  *inhale*  Okay.

“Well, people were terrified of the internet when it first came to be, and look at us now.  Should we have not invented the wheel?  Is every advancement playing god?  What you don’t realize is that this is how evolution is moving, and you will be left behind if you don’t embrace it.”

I used to date someone like this.  Not that he was super into AI (although it would check), but there was no meeting halfway.  He wouldn’t budge; you had to move around him.  If you told him a need you had, he took it as a personal challenge, and he argued with you about having the need in general.

I was a different person back then.  I thought it was my job to love and to teach, no matter how infuriating the person was.  I thought if I just explained empathy better, if I just worked around the blockades he put up, we could connect on a bridge between us.

Sometimes it truly did work, and he shrugged his shoulders, went along with things, and told himself, “I’m such a good boyfriend.”  So I maintained the strategy until I entirely unraveled, circling around each of our words, arguments, and tone until they lost all meaning.

When I left that relationship, I promised myself that I would never again “explain empathy” to someone.  You can tell from a mile away whether empathy is a skill that a person values or not.  And granted, no one with power who is being questioned in front of a camera or crowd has empathy.  You see it in most members of Congress, CEO’s, or celebrities when they’re faced with accountability in an interview.  Every question is a personal attack to them, so they fart out generic platitudes to hide behind.  Even when they’re faced with irrefutable facts.

All I know is, not a single piece of AI or technology is going to be used to “cure cancer, clean the planet, and end hunger.”  Because we.  *breathe Lis* 

We already have the resources to do this.  We’re not doing it.  We’re chasing dollars.

So I don’t want to hear jack fuck about the humanitarian lies they’re purporting the use AI for.  It’s. not. going. to. be. used. for. that.  It’s going to be sold to whoever will pay the most for it, who will use it to replace human workers, hoard more wealth, isolate consumers, and reduce the quality of our products and services.

If they were using this technology to cure cancer, they would have talked to medical researchers.  If they were using this technology to clean the planet, they would have talked to environmental scientists.  If they gave two shits about ending hunger, they might have caught a whiff that poverty has fuck-all to do with technology. (1)

Artists have been short-changed, shunned, and stolen from since the beginning of time.  It’s nothing new.  It’s particularly egregious to see our skills copied by people who clearly value art enough to have something distracting to look at, but not enough to make them feel something.  They like hotel wall art.  They like air brushes and the idea of perfection.  And they love receiving credit for shit they didn’t do.

There was a fascinating show on HBO Max called Made For Love, about one of these such tech billionaires (Byron), and a woman (Hazel) that got pulled into this intoxicating objectification, and the power she had (and didn’t have) in the relationship.  One of the most interesting psychological themes of this show is Byron’s goal to not only create perfection, but also to pull himself as far away from the existing world as possible.  When he, at one point, leaves his technological cave of paradise and walks the streets of the real world–with its flies, its noise, its impatient human beings–he nearly has a meltdown.

Hell.  He creates “food balls” out of flour and protein that each have the taste of a different food–cereal, steak, pizza.  Imitation food balls.  

But of course, if you show any resistance to these dumb collections of indulgent, unkempt, exploitative algorithms, you’re an Amish potato that deserves to lose your job out of an inability to adapt.  It doesn’t matter that I could tell you three things right now that artists, writers, and musicians want AI to do:  Search for audiences and gigs who would be receptive to our style without making the decision for us.  Understand where automation helps us vs where it isolates us and overcomplicates simple decisions. (2) Make humanity the end-goal (which requires getting to know humanity), not the designers of AI, who apparently are exhausted with all the CLICKING they have to do and need to cut out some of that laborious thumb-work.  The designers of AI who are, for the first time in their lives, experiencing the spotlight, and walking around with 12 hours worth of boner sweat.

But we know how this story goes, (3) and AI creators have told us in no uncertain terms that they’ll continue to ravage our impulses and our privacy for every drop.  We’re all used to rolling our eyes at this point, but I can’t end this post on a negative note, because I actually am healing from the patriarchy.  And no one is going to tell me I can’t.  If you come out of fourth grade alive, you can do anything.  So as much as big tech wants to stick itself in everything we do, here’s some happy aftercare that has nothing to do with AI.

Mae Martin wrote a book several years ago called Can Everyone Please Calm Down?  And thanks to audiobooks, I’m actually able to consume books at a faster rate.  Which I quite like, as a chronically slow reader.  See?  Look at that, I love technological advancement that has clear advantages to the human experience.

__________________________________________

(1) I once had a conversation with a straight, cis-male philosopher about gender studies that went like this:

Him:  “Gender studies isn’t a real field.  It’s just people writing down their opinions about gender.”  (Irony of his philosophy doctorate went unnoticed)

Me:  “Oh, interesting.  What gender studies essays have you read?”

Him:  “Well…I guess none of them.”

(2) I would pay money to watch a tech billionaire sit on the phone with his health insurance company, waiting for a bot to reroute him to the main menu 8 times.  *sigh*  I know, they pay their own doctors so that they don’t have to do any of that.  But it’d be so delicious to watch/listen to.

(3) Thank you to Jordan Peele who included this song in Lovecraft Country, giving me a whole new perspective on how “advancement” sounds to the disenfranchised.

It faces you on the ride home from work

You only get to add one memory to the DNA strand that gets copied into the next species of life.  The species that comes after humanity.  When the heaps of trash overtake us, when the nuclear fallout inseminates cancers that are too powerful to fight.  When the fat hand breaks the last brittle rib.

The sky will become too red.  We will squeeze ourselves under wool blankets.  We will burn.  We will freeze.  We will hold each other tightly and think of the good times as our flesh thins and thins.

The waves inside us will pass through our skin.  The waves that made us more than sacks of meat.  The waves that drew us to each other, that buzzed when our hands touched for the first time.  The waves that crashed when your boss asked you to do something unethical, and you did.  The waves that created your Grand Canyon, that wrought you with pain, that taught you time, that gave you one special gift that was just yours and said, “this is your way back home.”

Your collected memories, your instincts, the instructions given to you from everything that came before you, even the slugs.  Your DNA strands are blown into entropy, snapped like a string of pearls in space.

And one of those strands reaches muscle, and pulses into it like lightning.  What will it be?  What will you give to the new brain, after you?  Knowing what waves do.  Knowing what individuals do, what packs do, what society does, what nations do.  What will you bequeath it?

"I couldn't manage it all."

So, I’m seeing the word “polyamory” and “non monogamy” a lot more in mainstream articles (The New Yorker, SEVEN PAGES OF ARTICLES in Vox, even f*cking Time) lately.  It’s not new, although I feel like the sheer amount of discussions are increasing.  I don’t have a lot of hot-takes, but the number of hot-takes I have is not zero. 

First off, I’m grateful as fuck that ENM seems to be received leagues better (indifference and vague judgment) than other experiences of queer-breaking-into-mainstream.  I may have gotten some looks with my tribe in the wild, but no one’s kicked us out of a bar, threatened our jobs, or come after our families.  And I know that’s not true of everyone’s ENM experience.  I have some midwestern friends who, during divorce and custody litigation, had to discuss a humiliating amount of detail about their ENM love lives, and lost a significant amount of custody time because of it.  People are still vicious, and they’ll still bite where there’s a free space.

But I’m "out" to just about everybody right now, except my job, and I sleep quite soundly at night.  I don’t have a lot of room to complain.  My opinions aren’t important, and I am not trying to throw shade on monogamy.  But I’m a writer, and I have thoughts, and I’m a terrible procrastinator on my more important projects.  So here it is.  

The nicest, most open-minded commenters in these mainstream “look at people doing poly” articles love to say things like:  “All the best to them; I could never keep track of all that!  It’s hard enough keeping track of one!”  And these commenters are giving their kindest and most open-minded contributions, so I need to assert right now that I’m a shithead for clapping back at it.  In truth, I’m grateful for their open-mindedness, and they have a solid point.

…but what does “keeping track” mean?  Keeping track of feelings (like we do in therapy)?  Of the schedule (like when you make plans with friends)?  Of the people themselves?  I don’t really “keep track” of my partners…I schedule them, and then we hang out.  Like you do with a partner you’re not living with.

It’s hard to find representative content to discuss relationships that isn’t dramatized, hyperbolized, or over-produced.  The poly yang to every mono yin is just as toxic.  Love is Blind on one side, Big Love on the other.  /R/relationships on one side, /r/polyamory on the other.  Predatory behavior on Tinder, predatory behavior on Feeld.  There’s no shortage of people fucking up and taking others down with them in their most representative way.

But when I think about “managing” or “keeping track” of people, I’m reminded of the enmeshment that necessarily happens in monogamy.  The relationship escalator, the pressure of marriage that is built into the culture of monogamy.  Hell, it’s in the very word.  We don’t call it “monoamory.”  We put the idea of marriage into the whole description of one-at-a-time love.  In fact, if you’re a one-at-a-time lover and not interested in matrimony, you might be dubbed a practitioner of “serial dating.”  Like…Jesus.

When marriage is the goal, the amount of checking in to make sure your partner is on the same emotional plane, on the same emotional page, with the same financial and locational goals, is sometimes overwhelming.  The resentment that happens in a monogamous relationship when one partner was planning for one outcome, and the other partner was planning for a different one?  The careful wordplay that gets used to keep things general enough for a loophole, but specific enough to quell a partner’s fears?  Nothing sounds more like management to me.

Marriage is wonderful with the right person.  But so is plain-old cohabitation.  Sex is wonderful with someone that you desire, but desire shifts constantly, and sex isn’t wonderful with someone that you do not desire.  Sometimes the best sex of your life is with someone who wouldn’t get along with your friends or family.  Comfort and excitement don’t come from the same place, but we’re always craving both of them.  

These are not polyamorous truths.  These are universal truths.  Life is hard to manage, and polyamory is a possible framework that can potentially help someone manage.

I think about monogamous people who, upon the fear that their partner is interested or excited by another person (also a universal phenomenon, not exclusive to polyamory), start to become anxiously aware of their partner’s phone usage.  The unavoidable calculations that start adding up when it’s clear that one partner needs distance.  The scorekeeping, the “after everything I’ve done for them,” the do-I-stay-or-do-I-go.

Yes, distance and breakups happen in polyamory too, and they hurt just as bad (no, the availability of other partners does not lighten the grief).  But I suppose the biggest reason I’m polyamorous is to avoid some of the management of the monogamous “lifestyle” (How’s it feel?  Just because you’re the majority doesn’t make you not-a-lifestyle).  Another person is not a threat to me.  I don’t get terrified when my partners go on dates.  I encourage the growth of my partners, because trying to stifle that growth is bad for everyone.  What do I manage?  Primarily, I manage myself.

In our throuple, my husband’s relationship with his girlfriend is theirs to manage.  My relationship with my girlfriend (even though she’s the same person) is hers and mine to manage.  There’s more circles in our venn diagram of relationships than there are in a monogamous couple’s, but none of us are responsible for intersections that we are not involved in.

You know what monogamous people manage?  Trying to fit all their needs into one person, making some inevitable compromises, and dealing with the resentment.  

What do we have in common?  The work.

All love is work.  It should be joyous work, it should be easy work.  But yes, love is labor.  You keep the person all but tangibly in your heart and mind, and you hurt when they hurt.  How does any mother love and care for more than one child?  How do people have more than one friend?  How does a doctor care for more than one patient?  (I’m cringing at my patent repetition of this poly mantra as if it’s my original thought, and not a song that’s been past down, word-for-word, among poly generations)

You know what comrades?  Labor can also be shared.  My partners don’t just have me to be vulnerable or passionate with.  Can you imagine the responsibility?  That’d be a fascist-ass relationship, which is what I feel like a lot of monogamous contributors believe when they leave comments about “management” of people.

Romance can be found in different frameworks.  It’s okay if some of them are not for you, and for the love of Christ, we don’t need any proselytizers.  Personally, I’m hoping that the continued conversation about polyamory will enable people to realize that they don’t need to stick to the factory-set relationship.  There are tons of negotiable aspects of relationships that we should be talking about that will enable us to live freer lives, without making our partners feel bad that they’re not always the perfect answer to every problem all the time.

3 Microposts from the Holidays

Happy Mondayest of Mondays (Gretchen Wieners whispers "It's Thursday").  Tits out to new beginnings.

I come to my laptop with renewed joy about my own writing process.  The writing I want to do, verses the writing that I think is important or entertaining or successful or enduring.

While I was away with family, I thought of so many things to write about.  I’m on a bit of a backlog.  So here are a few micro-posts.

–Cultural Validation:  Our society’s refusal to let go of the idea of “the one” is a little like religion’s refusal to stop selling the idea of an afterlife.  We don’t know how to live in the moment, how to sit through disappointment, how to move through grief, or how to stop worrying, so we create fantasies that only serve to make us more miserable.

Some of us move beyond the idea of “the one,” but then we meet someone who unintentionally fucks us all the way up.  Life with them breaks a certain limit of pre-programmed happiness, and life after them leaves us questioning what the fuck that was.  It’s easy to make ourselves the center of gravity in the universe of relationships (and to a certain point, we should), but we have to resist the urge to build a negative worldview around it.  The hot-people-are-objectively-terrible and the men-will-always-leave-you bits.  It’s not men or hot people.  It’s people in general.  It’s the difficulty of relationships.  Remember that you also unintentionally fucked someone all the way up.  And I know this makes me an asshole, but I find that comforting.

Those of us who do not believe in “the one” try our damnedest to warn others when we see them start to fall.  Don’t have any preconceived notions.  Don’t get carried away before you really get to know them.  There are plenty of fish in the sea.  But I still see every female high school student I teach fall into a stupor when a boy shows them a minimal amount of attention.  And it reminds me of all the ways I twisted myself, happily, to participate in a relationship that depleted me.  All the times I drove an hour to his place, low on sleep and energy, because simply the feeling of being near him exhilarated me.

I didn’t believe in soul-mates, and I sure-as-fuck wasn’t monogamous.  What fulfilled me?  I’ve been throwing around a theory that it was a kind of cultural validation.  That when I walked around with this guy who gave me orgasms but wasn’t respectful, other people would see me and know my experiences. The songs by Brand New, Say Anything, and Death Cab for Cutie were about me. Rihanna's pain in her music is my pain. High Fidelity is about me. Love Actually is about me. Everything is about me. The world sees me and I'm real.

Of course, cultural validation goes hand in hand with a strong lack-of-self worth, which is a deeper and more fundamental piece to the story. But the idea stays with me like a wall painting I never noticed before.  Especially when I think about every person who says they don’t believe in soul-mates, but still longs to get married.

– “Place-Holder” Dating:  This is strong in both monogamous and polyamorous people, and it comes from a monogamous mindset.  We date someone that we’re not crazy about because we want sex and comradery, and they’re available.  But we’ve got one eye open for a different person to “fill the spot” when we meet them.

This makes psychological sense if you’re a narcissist, but it’s quite a roundabout way of saying that the person is ungrateful.

When we fall in love and approach a vulnerability with each other that includes eroticism, desire, and consummation, sometimes we forget that this other person is still a person, with a schedule and goals and limited energy.  We don’t really forget this when it comes to friendship.  We assume friends will vacillate between layers of availability and closeness.  We assume we’re allowed to see other friends outside of them; that nothing is stopping us from hanging out with other people for entertainment and connection.  We don’t have “placeholder friends” that we hold onto while looking for a “perfect friend.”

While I truly don’t want to take the magic out of love and relationships (I’m a witch; I sort of thrive on magic), it is important to me as a relationship anarchist that I treat my partners as whole people.  Perhaps it’s also a part of being my own primary.  I don’t want to fall into an identity-crises-depression when a partner needs to shift their role or amount of time in my life, especially because when you increase the amount of partners, you also inevitably increase the amount of breakups.

–The Smart Asshole That You Miss, But Are Much Better Without:  There is a genre of person that we all left after therapy, and this is the person who projects as much intelligence as they do judgment.  They were so clever and funny, had a stimulating vocabulary, and made us feel smarter to talk to them.

…but they also made us feel stupider about some things.  Maybe about the differences in how much we read, or consume the news, or remember events from AP History.  At least once they’ve made us feel incompetent at our careers by pointing out a mistake that sounded fundamental, but was actually far more nuanced than they had the energy to comprehend.

Cheers, you fun and clever asshole.  Thanks for the fun, no thanks for the complexes.  I truly hope your self-image and personal relationships are better than when I last saw you.

Being present–artist, partner, dreamer.

 “I don’t even have time for a boyfriend,” I sigh over my steaming lavender earl grey.  “I just want someone to think about when I’m walking to my car.”

The winter hits me from a different angle every year, like a predator that studies me, and evolves with me.  A shell breaks around my crown.  A vibrating fractal that snaps as I push through it.

A year and a half into therapy, we finally get into my brain patterns.  Headspace has come up for me before, but it’s time to tackle it now.  My emotional back is sore.  I’m supposed to want to be in the present.  And I do.  I think.

My therapist is like a fairy in a cave, with a soft glow around her as she shows me around dark corners.  I unroll the parchment and draw another angle on the map.

Your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness, she says.  An artist daydreams, dissociates, floats off into the clouds.

“Elisabeth?  Earth to Elisabeth, are you there?” my second grade teacher asks me while I’m thinking about boobs.

“Are you dressed yet?  We’re late, Bissy,” my parents patiently urge while I think about the saddest Disney deaths.

“Anyway, that’s why I can’t sleep with my neck exposed,” my friend concludes, merging onto I-465 as I’m sailing between Canis Major and Canis Minor.

Don’t even get me started on where my head is when I’m in love.  Eros almost had me create a baby with a narcissist.  I was lucky.  Many artists are not so lucky.

Where even is my head in this blog post?  Does it even make sense?  I can’t tell if it makes sense.

I shoot uncomfortably back into my body as I cross the street, and then I immediately leave again.  I move out of people’s trajectories too late, reading my surroundings as if they’re a dense victorian novel, sometimes spinning around several times in the same block.

I wake up, unable to tell where my depression ends and his begins.  Love was a syrup; now it’s a paste.  I push my head side to side, but can’t see anything.  I reach out to stretch, and feel my body shoot inward toward a black hole.

I walk toward a tree trunk, smell the cinnamon bark, sink my fingers into the rough soil.  I creek with the branches.

Everything is moving, not just me.

   

Sometimes I need to wrestle the spirit that keeps me alive to the ground, and tell her to wait.  Sometimes I need to squeeze my brain back into myself, or bash it against something outside myself.  I can’t always tell, because just like everyone else, my angels and demons are the same people.

The black chaos that emerges from me in the form of words is the same chaos that makes reading too difficult to be a pastime.  The neurological patterns that make listening easy and relaxing are the same patterns that make talking a mental workout.  I fall into therapy roles the same way I sink into a couch.  And I can stay there too long, and lose my mind.

“So anyway,” he says, after ten uninterrupted minutes, “I think part of my damage is that the people who have always held sway in my life have insinuated to me that I’m never enough.”

I tense.

“Hold on,” I say, and take hold of his hand.  “Can we talk about…can we play tennis soon?  I want to see the direction that a ball goes when I swing at it.  From 50 different angles.  I want to feel physics the way a dog does when he chases a rabbit.”

“Oh, um, of course my love,” he says with stars in his eyes, and I run my hand over the couch and feel the microsuede texture that’s supposed to keep my cats from scratching it, but doesn’t.

In which I procrastinate on sending out poetry

I write good shit, because that’s what I like to do.

I like it when people read my shit, I like it a lot.

But this whole be-a-commercial-success thing, I dunno.

I’m a bit like Emily Dickinson in that I struggle with the outside world.

I grew up under benevolent eyes. I was almost good enough.

My father got me two kinds of gifts for Christmas–

classical music CDs from the discount bin

and a book that would help me with a school project.

Maybe it’s why I can’t stop dreaming about college.

It’s the same dream every time.

I’m going through those 4 years, again.

Yes, I got my degree.  But I’m getting it again.

Because I didn’t absorb it the first time.

Because I dared care about other things the first time–

My pleasures, my toxic relationships,

a new magic I was trying to use as it was using me–

I wrestled with entities separate from books and ideas.

I word-vomited banal generalities for all my papers,

got a lot of C-’s. But showed up enough 

to stretch zombified fingers across the border of B-.

And that means, in my comfortable shame, 

that I wasted my education.

But midway through every dream I look at the calendar

and realize I need to be at work.

That I don’t need validation as long as I have money,

which I am now earning on my own.

And I wake up in a world far less stimulating.

No Old Testament Literature, no French,

no Psychology 305.

Just a freezing dark room, a harsh lamp, 

a podcast about a world I can’t change,

and a pair of legs that will start working soon enough.