How Do We Trust in a Broligarchy?
It’s getting intense out there. Incompetence, deceit, bad actors, and misinformation campaigns surround us. The risks are greater all the time with advances in AI. See, for example, Meta’s supposedly Black and queer AI character, “Liv,” and its chat with Karen Attiah, a writer at the Washington Post. (Spoiler: It gets weird.) Remember HAL 9000? From an AI perspective, the humans can become the liability. By the end of Liv’s chat with Attiah, the AI has taken on a snarky techbro tone. This is after it admits being created by a small team of mostly white cis men – and no Black humans at all.
Will we humans form a resistance movement to maintain personal connections in a world where AI, owned and operated by the broligarchy, wants us to give their targeted propaganda more credibility than our own direct experience? Banding together in various ways may make a lot of sense.
This is not a human brain.
Image by Kohji Asakawa from Pixabay
Is reliance only for the gullible?
When I was in law school in the 80s, my Contracts professor – I’ll call him Hut – scorned the legal concept of ‘reliance.’ Hut (think Dr. House but a generation older and more disreputable looking) implied that anyone gullible enough to change their behavior based on promises made by another deserved the mess that might result. Hut gave us hypothetical cases: Abel offers to sell Zadie his handcrafted guitar in one month and she excitedly agrees, telling him that she will sign up for a pricey intensive guitar course right away, to get ready for the instrument.
When Abel reneges and secretly sells his guitar the next day for more money, Zadie has wasted her cash on the course. If she takes Abel to court, she might request “reliance damages,” to reimburse her for the money she spent on the now-pointless guitar course. Professor Hut would call BS and say Zadie was a fool for believing Abel and relying on his promise; she deserved nothing from him. Only spoiled brats and incompetents went around trusting people that way. The Nanny State would be escorting fine upstanding Americans to hell in a handcart if we supported reliance damages. That was Hut’s take on things. At the time, his attitude offended my beliefs that people are good at heart and we should look out for one another.
I gathered Hut was a skeptic by nature, and that life had confirmed his lowest expectations. The man was regularly spotted day drinking at a nearby tavern, reeked of cigarette smoke, wore wrinkled suit jackets that hung on his skeletal frame, and looked out at the world with droopy basset-hound eyes in a lined, sad face. Central Casting might have picked Hut out of a roomful of hopefuls if they’d been looking for a bitter ‘sad sack’ character. No accident, then, that I think of Hut when I ponder the near future. The days of naïve reliance are behind us – all of us.
Now more than ever, people can’t be counted on to do the right thing. Those like me, who, last November harbored a faint hope that new, younger energy might correct the course of the ship of state, are regrouping and pondering how to be.
Trustworthy people
Who’s at the helm? Not just of the federal government, but all the many nongovernmental positions of authority that help make things happen. People in charge of utilities, banks, grocery stores, pharmaceutical companies, insurers, schools. Booking agents, concert impresarios, publishers, museum directors, literary agents. It behooves us to do our research each time we want to interact in the world.
Will we send out pitches for articles to people and publications with whom we have no human connection? Maybe not so much. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon applies here. If a friend of a relative of a colleague knows someone with an online publication, I’m likely to feel okay about dropping them a line with an idea for an essay. On the other hand, if the literary agent I saw pop up on social media recently sounds bogus, they might be a bot – not even a human, let alone a trustworthy agent. It will be on me to dig around and see whether the agent is query-worthy. Or real. My community will matter more to me, and I may feel the need to expand it.
Trustworthy information
What will we trust now? So much online is not reliably genuine: text may be bot-generated. Images and videos may be fabricated ineptly by AI. (See three-armed yogis, chunks of frozen salmon swimming upstream, etc.) We must stay on our toes and use discernment. Some environments are more likely to be trustworthy than others (say, for the moment, on social media, BlueSky as compared to X).
Some friends are backing away from all social media – although I’ve been advised it’s prudent to park your accounts, leaving the name and some placeholder data, rather than deleting them altogether. This is because your name and identity on that platform could be hijacked if you delete your account entirely. Others are subscribing to newly formed news media outlets, cancelling their subscriptions to traditional print and online media and revising their broadcast and podcast habits. We’ll need to keep our eyes and ears open – this won’t be a one-and-done alteration in habits – and the information landscape will continue to shift. Will you form a group to start your own publication?
What steps will you not take any more? Some refuse to shop with the Seattle-based megavendor. Others look up the ratios between a company’s CEO pay and median employee salary before choosing where they’ll make their next purchases. We sadly turn away from stores that abolish their DEI policies. When ads for pumpkin-shaped potholders show up moments after you conduct a search for them online, you may look around for a newer, less gossipy search engine. And so on.
For myself, I’m warming to a series of challenges. Maybe I can organize a zoom group meeting of some writers I know. Maybe I can invite more writers to contribute guest posts to this blog. Maybe I can be bolder about approaching new creative people who are legitimately connected to those I know now. At the end of a novel I’m completing, the protagonist begins collaborating in multigenerational artistic endeavors. Might that happen in real life too?
Isolation is not an option
The siren song from the back of the cave calls out: “Just stay home. Leave the activism to others.” There’s so much uncertainty, because the supposed grownups in charge can’t be trusted to overcome their apparently feral impulses, prejudices, disrespect, greed, and contempt for the rest of humanity.
But isolation doesn’t work. We’re primates who require interaction with others. So going forward, I’ll be doing more thinking ahead. Connecting with humans I can vouch for. Seeing what small actions I can take, locally or in trusted groups online, to have a positive impact about issues that matter to me. Gravitating toward a sense of belonging.
Planning in community
If I were a betting person I might wager that we’ll be doing more planning and less flying by the seat of our pants – at least most of the time. We may still get crazy sometimes and fling caution aside in favor of the feeling of freedom. For the next while, though, I imagine daily life is going to feel more buttoned-down. As a consequence, creative practices are going to be even more important for us all. More than ever, we’ll want to focus on doing what we do well, getting into that state of flow where we can operate outside of the everyday..
What does this add up to? Find your people. Identify your trusted information sources. Support one another. And keep hope alive through focused action, starting small. Do you have ideas to share? What changes are you making in your creative life? I’d love to know.
~ Anne
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