(The) Biden… administration… (is) taking to the road to tout their successes to the country… If they can bring the Republican base around to support their economic policies, they will have realigned the nation as profoundly as did FDR and Theodore Roosevelt before them.

This past week a musician friend of mine posted a link to a Guardian article in which Nick Cave takes on song lyrics written “in the style of Nick Cave” by ChatGPT. She quoted at length from it, as will I:

Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.

What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognizable work. Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past. It is those dangerous, heart-stopping departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what he or she recognizes as their known self. This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value; it is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery; it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering. This is what we humble humans can offer, that AI can only mimic, the transcendent journey of the artist that forever grapples with his or her own shortcomings. This is where human genius resides, deeply embedded within, yet reaching beyond, those limitations.

Much as I admire Nick Cave and my musician friend for being the valiant and vibrant creators that they are, I think the argument that ChatGPT doesn’t feel and hasn’t experienced is beside the point. It doesn’t need to feel, it only needs to make human beings feel in this particular game. It only needs to predict what will bring tears to our eyes and laughter to our faces, what will draw us deeply in and help us transcend ourselves. I suspect that ChatGPT and other AI like it can and will get very good at that.

If you reject the idea that algorithms can learn to make us feel, then consider what has been said about Facebook (and other social media) algorithms that can suss out what is most likely to draw our attention and hold it. Consider how that played out in recent elections and how it plays out fueling white supremacy and hatred of the other. It turns out anger is a powerful motivation for people to coalesce around and AI has gotten pretty good at feeding us on a banquet of hatred of the other.

AI generated everything is inevitable and it will get better and better. The thing is, AI is a product of mass organization economic systems, capitalism in particular. It is doubtful it could have happened without capitalism or other equally disconnecting ways of operating an economy and, by extension, society. The key point to remember is that we don’t have to participate in that economy, at least, not all the time. I don’t know if we can completely eliminate capitalism or other mass organizational systems. I don’t know if we would even want to. There are some breathtaking benefits. But it does seem possible to organize parallel economies that are more local in scale, which is the scale at which the alternatives can thrive and be satisfying; the scale at which it matters that the song channeling our personal human experience and making us feel was created by another human being; the scale at which it matters that we go to hear that song performed by the creator and participate in the communal activity that live performance creates.

I have been reading about alternative economics. Two books are very influential to my thinking. Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein and The Gift, by Lewis Hyde. I have finished the first and am halfway through the second.

Sacred Economics helped me understand why growth is essential to capitalism—there is always more debt than value being created through production—and how capitalism fills the void between debt and product by converting the commons—that which should belong to everyone—to privately held resources to be exploited for profit. ChatGPT is another attempt to lay claim to the commons, in this case, the creative commons that all art product aspires to be part of. In Sacred Economics, Eisenstein argues that eliminating usury (the ability to make money on money), creating currency that devalues with time (not through inflation, but through planned devaluation over a specific time frame), and practicing a gift economy as tribal and other types of small communities have often done.

In Part I of The Gift, Lewis Hyde explains the history and functioning of the gift economy in great detail, as well as the history of usury and modern economies which have supplanted the gift economy. In Part II, which I have just now started to make my way through, he explains the relevance of a gift economy to the arts.

AI is a product of mass economic systems, capitalism in particular. AI couldn’t happen without these systems and will function best within these contexts. Human rendered art can and sometimes does function well within that mass economic context, but, when you get beyond the few giants and near giants in any creative industry human creative output struggles to function in that context and starts to require an economy built on community. This is the gift economy that Hyde and Eisenstein, drawing heavily from Hyde, describe.

My guess is that we need to relearn the gift economy if we are to have a satisfying way of being human creatives and connecting our creations with other human beings. I don’t presently believe that one excludes the other but we must actively and intentionally reclaim the gift economy if we are to benefit from it. There is much work to do in this direction.

This is all I can say about economic alternatives at present because I am still reading and thinking. The important point I am making is that it’s not AI vs human artists but an economic system that by its design breaks down community as against one that builds it. The choice is ours as to which one we want to labor and participate in.

Vivienne Westwood: Six Radical Quotes on Saving the World

What makes this set of “Radical Quotes” so interesting is that they come from the heart of the fashion industry and they make seem ripped directly from the book Sacred Economics, which I recently finished reading and highly recommend.

20220423.06

Beyond Eurocentrism

Imperialist rent, for Amin, derived from extra surplus value. In other words, more value could be extracted from the workers through production in the periphery – generating an additional rent for the capitalist, when compared with workers in the centre doing similar jobs. Amin argued that, while low-paid workers in the periphery are no less productive than their counterparts in the centre, the value they create is less rewarded – and this is what creates such an (imperialist) rent.

… the nature of capitalism is to exploit value differences… the less developed world is the periphery… capitalists exploit the periphery, pumping the value difference back to the center, leaving little of the value with the periphery…

Amin changed the terms of the debates on unequal exchange. Until his work, the orthodoxy among economists was that workers in the periphery are simply less productive than those in the centre.

… and this seems, once presented, obvious, for, if the workers at the periphery were not as or nearly as productive as those at the core, there would not be the substantial value difference to exploit into profits at the core…

It is important to note that the idea of unequal exchange and of ‘super’-exploitation remains controversial among Marxists. In Das Kapital (1867), Marx himself discusses the futility of comparisons between different degrees of exploitation in different nations, and the significant methodological problems that arise. Many Marxists argue that the neo-Marxists such as Amin focused excessively on market relations at the expense of exploitation of labour.

… and this…

So, he proposed a new model of industrialisation shaped by the renewal of non-capitalist forms of peasant agriculture, which he thought would imply delinking from the imperatives of globalised capitalism.¹

… and this…

It is important to note that delinking is often widely misunderstood to mean autarky, or a system of self-sufficiency and limited trade. But this is a misrepresentation. Delinking does not require cutting all ties to the rest of the global economy, but rather the refusal to submit national-development strategies to the imperatives of globalisation. It aims to compel a political economy suited to its needs, rather than simply going along with having to unilaterally adjust to the needs of the global system. To this goal of greater sovereignty, a county would develop its own productive systems and prioritise the needs of the people rather than the demands on international capital.

… it occurs to me that what the current conflict in Ukraine may be accomplishing is a kind of decoupling of western capitalist hegemony… as western nations turn to produce more at home, and be less dependent on regimes that seek to weaken them through destabilization, even while profiting from them… a kind of decoupling will be happening… as we learn to produce and pay more for production at home… we will to some degree decouple… also, China, Russia and other countries will begin to develop economic structures that circumvent the power of the dollar… all of this is leading to a realignment of capitalism’s ability to exploit the value difference between the core and the periphery… the problem with this world order emerging is that it returns states to being in tense competition for control as it abandons the interdependent, if destructive to the planet, world order of new-liberalism… is there some combination of small is beautiful that none the less interconnects with markets around the world?…

I believe the market-capitalist system I live within is fundamentally flawed and is leading to planetary destruction and a great deal of human, plant and animal misery.¹ I wonder if there is a better way. I want to imagine it can be replaced with something, it just isn’t clear what that something might be or whether replacement is even possible, given that a great deal of wealth and power has been accumulated through it. I have come across a number of texts that point to a different way. I don’t know if this different is viable or even interconnectable across the texts, but I would like to explore it and see what comes of it.

The texts I have found informative and inspiring to date are:

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
• Buddhist Economics, E. F. Schumacher
• Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Moby Dick, Herman Melville (?)

I will add more texts as I go.

My next step, when I am finished with current reading, will be to re-read these texts… where this inquiry goes from there will be determined by what I find/rediscover in the Texts.

Ignore Xi Jinping’s Deceptions. China Is Struggling, Therese Shaheen, National Review, December 20, 2021…

… this is a long and interesting article that makes the case that China is not as strong as one might get the impression it is through American news media… it made its case thoroughly and if that case is correct, it makes the China-US tensions seem less worrisome assuming a world where the US and Europe are united in containment efforts…

Buddhist Economics

… this is a profound essay that i come back to again and again… it makes so much sense… please excuse it’s antiquated approach to gender roles which are a product of the time in which it was written:

The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.¹

… i think about the work i currently pursue, and i will call it work even though it doesn’t produce an income which it doesn’t need to do… i read, write and make pictures daily, and that is rewarding to me… i also enjoy setting it down and spending time with H and the dogs, cooking and sharing nice meals… i am in a perfect place with very good balance between work and leisure…

It is clear, therefore, that Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilisation not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character. Character, at the same time, is formed primarily by a man’s work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it and equally their products.²

… and this:

From the point of view of Buddhist economics, therefore, production from local resources for local needs is the most rational way of economic life, while dependence on imports from afar and the consequent need to produce for export to unknown and distant peoples is highly uneconomic and justifiable only in exceptional cases and on a small scale.³

… are there exceptions?… aren’t there things better produced in large factories?… like smartphones, automobiles, computers, etc.?… don’t these things work better and interconnect better with a more unified system of production?… what we are left with then is a system where some (most?) things are produced and distributed locally and others are mass produced and distributed nationally and globally… factories will increasingly be automated, not requiring human labor… local production will be centered on handcrafting, on local labor…

… and this:

Just as a modern European economist would not consider it a great achievement if all European art treasures were sold to America at attractive prices, so the Buddhist economist would insist that a population basing its economic life on non-renewable fuels is living parasitically, on capital instead of income. Such a way of life could have no permanence and could therefore be justified only as a purely temporary expedient. As the world’s resources of non-renewable fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—are exceedingly unevenly distributed over the globe and undoubtedly limited in quantity, it is clear that their exploitation at an ever-increasing rate is an act of violence against nature which must almost inevitably lead to violence between men.⁴

The Journals of Denton Welch

The day is messy. I’ve done some writing, but things are sloppy. I am a melting jelly. It seems that my happiness only comes from being a monk; and when I am not a monk, therefore I cannot be happy.¹

… how well i know that sentiment… i get up in the wee hours of the morning precisely because i need my monk time…

… DW mentions arum lilies which i look up… they are the same as calla lilies…

Why is it all so clear-cut the factories are a threat to a lone human being and green fields an invitation? We seem to be very frightened of our own contrivances and to call them ugly, evil, almost at once. We take what comes from them, hating their faces and breathings all the time. Biscuits please, but a biscuit factory is nearly as evil as a bomb factory to one’s heart. I do not mean just ugly visually, I mean wicked atmosphere. The threat the torture-chamber has.²

… when i was in college, i worked in a Ford factory near where i lived… a formative experience for lots of reasons… i don’t know that i felt about factories the way DW does, but i get what he drives at… and when i think about the degree to which i now purchase things made locally, in small workrooms, on farms, hand crafted… i think, couldn’t be a network of local economies and small workshops?… Small Is Beautiful E. F. Schumacher wrote… he championed local economies that provided work that was good for the soul… and Buddhist Economics… Schumacher’s advice to socialists:

Socialists should insist on using the nationalized industries not simply to out-capitalise the capitalists – an attempt in which they may or may not succeed – but to evolve a more democratic and dignified system of industrial administration, a more humane employment of machinery, and a more intelligent utilization of the fruits of human ingenuity and effort. If they can do this, they have the future in their hands. If they cannot, they have nothing to offer that is worthy of the sweat of free-born men.

… is this not what the Biden/Harris administration is trying to do?… ok, we are not nationalizing industries, but we are attempting to bolster the working class and middle class and make their participation in the economy more rewarding and less harrowing for them… which will lead to greater productivity?…

An article on inflationary pressures…

… in the back of my mind i have been thinking what the article argues… that the flood of money washing through the population has led to higher prices, or dollars that are worth less… the article says it was predictable, though also says there are other factors at work… it bemoans government intervention due to the pandemic, but really, some action on the part of the government was necessary in my humble opinion…

… i wonder about the new hard infrastructure bill spending and the soft infrastructure bill spending should it be passed…

… i worry that the escalating price of goods will dominate the psyches of people, rather than the demonstrable, but less viscerally felt, improvements in their general condition… new and repaired bridges and roads won’t be noticeable for some time to come… a lot of it not till after the current administration has expired… hopefully more employment and better wages will happen quickly to improve the mood of the public…

… i have commented to H that i haven’t perceived a significant escalation in prices in our grocery buying (which i am largely in charge of)… but maybe i have, and because we are resourced, i haven’t noticed it as much… i have been writing down what we spend so i suppose i could go to the data and see…

… my theory has been that we buy from the high end sources where prices are already high, so maybe prices don’t need to escalate as much there?…

… Reason.com is libertarian in orientation, is a strong supporter of unfettered free markets and a strong proponent of minimal to non-existent regulation of the market… i would expect them to blame the Biden/Harris administration more than the set of conditions brought on by the pandemic, which were inherited… i wonder what The Economist will have to say about this issue…

… a lengthy article in Mother Jones (leans pretty liberal) about the (comparatively) vast numbers of people quitting… i find it a very hopeful sign that labor is on the move… that labor is beginning to reject deplorable wages and working conditions… i don’t think we have a very humane economy… so many things are wrong with it… similar things were going on in the 20’s and 30’s of the last century… we are either at a moment of rebalancing or one of great descent for the majority of the people…