Imagination Atrophy.
Flattening and homogenization.
The rapid progressive algorithmic flattening of society. The mental and physical homogenization. The atrophying of the brain. The loss of critical creative thinking. The loss of clarity of feeling. Never quite feeling in full; always cutting ourselves off, selling ourselves short; jumping to the next feeling before finishing the last; numbing, rejecting. A deep ennui.
I like listening to my clients with schizophrenia who actually have original unpredictable interesting thoughts. I don’t challenge them, I let them take me away. I get to go to far off places through their minds, places I’ve never heard of. I like speaking to my clients that’ve been incarcerated for most of their lives, with only their own company, some books, no internet. They struggle integrating back into a strange society where everyone lives through their phones, where technology makes everyone’s every decision, instructs their every move. I like being in school where I have to read things chosen for me by a human and not a computer. I like challenging my brain to do more than just skim and swipe and dissociate.
I don’t want an algorithm that chooses things for me under the guise of “knowing what I like.” I like the unpredictable, but everything feels predicted and predictable. Robbed of innocent curiosity and ambitious discovery - not knowing if you’ll ever find what you’re looking for, but going on the hunt anyway. Robbed of thinking for myself, of developing my own taste by trying things I don’t like. An algorithm feeds you only things you most likely will like, it deletes the fun of absolute abhorrence and decreases the chance of finding something you maybe don’t enjoy at first but grows on you, becoming something you actually love. To truly find out what interests you, it’s so important to know what things work for you as well as the things that don’t work for you.
We are robbed of actual learned knowledge. Everyone thinks they know things, but in reality they spent three minutes on social media or thirty seconds on ChatGPT asking one simple question and being told what to “know” based on the most common answer. Is knowledge really knowledge if you didn’t have to invest any real time or energy into asking the questions and finding the answers?
Yes, I too use technology. Yes, my brain too has atrophied. Yes, I too am a shell of who I once was. But slowly surely working on becoming someone I admire again. If you ask me what my biggest fear is, it’s not heights, though climbing still frightens me every time. It’s not death, I’m not afraid of that. It’s not relapsing, I know I’m not going back. My biggest fear is becoming a clone - becoming a clone and not even realizing.
I know “social media/the internet is bad for you” is a tiresome subject, and people want to defend their internet co-dependence to the death, but I am truly afraid of something. In relation to relapse, I am afraid of losing myself to something utterly and completely again. I did it with substances, I do it with men, and I sure as hell don’t wanna lose myself to algorithmic “helpers” that simultaneously save time and suck time, and autonomy of thought. But then I wonder: if I choose not to indulge in all the modern technologies as deeply as is normal, will I be the one that’s behind? Will I be the one that’s slow? Will I be the one that’s abnormal? Not in a measure of actual knowledge, but in contrast to the majority who gladly let AI and the algorithm lead? How will knowledge even be defined in the future? Who can ask the most specific human-like ChatGPT question? How is it defined now? Who can search up the answer the quickest?
I already witness this in my online classes - almost everyone else’s responses to the prompts are essentially the exact same, eloquent in the exact same intellectual style. And then there’s me: posting the only thought that differs from the rest, the only post that exhibits weird-ass analogies. In comparison, I feel like I look stupid. We can’t understand her. Why didn’t she just use ChatGPT and change the wording a bit like a normal person?
I love people with minds that think differently, think for themselves, thing critically, creatively. I love weirdos and freaks and geeks. I love imperfect crooked teeth that aren’t so white they glow in the dark. I love ears that protrude. I love faces with lines that show evidence of expression. I love when someone dresses like themselves for once, I can tell. I love when people say they don’t know, then make efforts to find out. I love when something breaks and, instead of giving up, a person figures out how to put it back together or is openminded and dedicated enough to create a solution completely new. And, it’s increasingly rare these days but, I love when people aren’t afraid of not being like everyone else.
If everything you put out into the world — whether abstract or tangible — becomes data pooled into the abyss from which algorithms pull and learn from, then we need to be putting better ideas out into the world. We need original ideas that resist the clonification, ideas that fight against the great flattening. People used to say ‘be the change you want to see in the world,’ but it seems like nowadays it’s more like ‘don’t try to change anything, just agree to conform without realizing you agreed to conform.’ Manufactured consent. Stop and think sometimes about the things you’re doing, the things you’re thinking, the things you’re feeling — and ask why. Is this my own thought, or one that was planted in me subconsciously while I scrolled and watched in a daze for hours on end? In a society where your every move is surveilled and used to “improve” and advance algorithms, you might as well do something worthy, something valuable, something original, something different, so that maybe, just maybe, the algorithms will start becoming more interesting and less homogenous.