Hello,

Obligatory shilling. I wrote for The Critic about the uses and abuses of nostalgia, for UnHerd about right-wing humour and for my Substack subscribers about “the Great Replacement”.

Counterfeit kitsch. Erik Hoel laments the development of AI “art”:

AI-generated artwork is the same as a gallery of rock faces. It is pareidolia, an illusion of art, and if culture falls for that illusion we will lose something irreplaceable. We will lose art as an act of communication, and with it, the special place of consciousness in the production of the beautiful.

Let’s face it: a lot of “art” might as well have been made by a machine. Hopefully, the best of the human imagination will rise to the top. Either way, readers can rest assured that THE ZONE will remain a very human project. If it were written by artificial intelligence the prose would be much smoother.

Gene schemes. Ives Parrhesia explores the future of genetic enhancement:

The cost of sequencing a single genome is no longer a major impediment to genetic enhancement. Selecting from a collection of 6-10 embryos would not be prohibitively expensive for a middle-class American family.

This gives me the creeps. With that said, if it works who do you think is going to win in terms of societal competition, people with genetic enhancement or people without it? You don’t hear much from luddites now.

Surrender to machines. What to make of all this technological development? Audrey Borowski explores the life and work of the philosopher Günther Anders:

Technological modernity had imposed our unilateral surrender to machines, rendering our capacities to understand, feel or act redundant and superfluous in the expectation of becoming ‘absolutely consubstantial’ with machines and freed of our ‘shortcomings’ by them.

Online anti-tech jeremiads always look absurd from at least one angle. Apparently, Anders hoped that people would rise up against “consumption”, as if the masses would say, “No! We don’t want convenient and entertaining things!” Believe me, I know the irony of fretting about technological development on my smartphone.

But the draining of humanness from modern life can feel like the slow, steady loss of blood. If it really struck us as a problem, would we have the strength to respond? If nothing else, we should enjoy the vital and the beautiful while we can.

Punish the injurer. Of course, humanity itself can be very dark. The great William “Evolving Moloch” Buckner has a new Substack. I recommend subscribing for deep anthropological insights. One recent post of interest to me was about the long history of the diss track:

Among the Tiwi of North Australia, “In many cases, a song and its interpretation were a reference by its composer to some wrong done to him and a statement of the type of sanction which he would impose to punish his injurer.” In this society, many marriages were arranged through men promising to exchange their sisters or their daughters, and there was a special type of song (tjimaruwentakaruwala) which was sung specifically to threaten a man who did not fulfill the terms of a marriage exchange.

Cold.

A system of power. Park MacDougald reviews a left-wing critique of identity politics:

When one of Táíwò’s white university colleagues offers to defer to him on some racially charged topic or another, this is not merely the result of a flawed conception of social justice but also a reflection of the fact that, were Táíwò the litigious sort, he could use an insensitive or merely tone-deaf remark by a white colleague to sue their employer for creating a hostile work environment.

Enriched, nourished and elevated. Michael Collins celebrates Kenneth Clark:

I came to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation late, sporadically making my way through the series via blurry, almost pointillist, versions on YouTube as Covid strengthened its grip and lockdowns came and went. Watching him now, discovering the series, in its entirety, in the twenty-first century I saw it and him in detail. You genuinely get the feeling the heart, soul and mind of this man has been enriched, nourished and elevated by the subject he is so passionate about.

Have a lovely week,

Ben

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