The Problem with the computer is that there isn’t enough Africa in it

The Problem with the computer is that there isn’t enough Africa in it

Brian Eno

What I would say about that from Brian Eno is the Digital world doesn’t always have enough earth, body and nature in it. I have heard some of those AI voice overs on YouTube and they all sound the same. The soul wants ‘depth’. It is the mystery that can move us. The internet could do with the sound of old drums. The sound of an old song. I find it ironic I spend so much time on the net, I try and remember what Aldous Huxley said ‘Í am a native where I walk’.

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Ted Goia from the Honest Broker said he got duped into Buying an AI Slop Book. —’’AI slop is now flooding the market for books, music, images, podcasts, and every other creative field” he says. He thought he was smart enough to avoid it. But he was interested in the World Cup and wanted to improve his knowledge of the leading teams and players. So he ordered a book online that promised to be the “ultimate insider’s guide.”

But the text itself was the giveaway.

Here is opening of the Introduction:

The FIFA World Cup is not merely a sporting competition. It is the heartbeat of a planet that stops, holds it breath, and exhales in euphoric unison once every four years. From its humble beginnings in 1930 to the colossal globe-spanning spectacle it has become today, no event on earth gathers more eyeballs, more passion, or more raw human emotion than the World Cup. Entire economies pivot on its results. Lifelong friendships are forged in stadium queues. Children in São Paulo, Lagos, Tokyo, and Manchester fall asleep dreaming of the exact same trophy….

He goes on to say:

‘‘It goes on and on in that vein, page after page—filled with empty pretentious phrases and vague generalizations. In the entire book, there isn’t a single thing I found of value—none of the insights and analysis I’d sought.”

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Hermetic Intoxication

Excerpt-James Hillman-Mythic Figures

One aspect of Hermetic intoxication deserves special psychological attention. I refer to the appetite for information. If you recall, Hermes was the messenger of the gods, and an indiscriminate messenger. This because he carried all messages without actively entering into the content of what he carried. He had no opinions, values; he made no editorial comments; he did not censor. His task was to make communication possible, even communication with the realm of the dead and the world below.

We may find Hermes as a painted and sculpted image in Greek pottery and marble, in easy association with both Apollo on the one hand and Dionysus on the other, with Aphrodite, and with Athene and Artemis, with Zeus and Hades, and even Hercules, though Hermes himself was not heroic by any means. Information takes no positions, carries no grudge, and thus has no limits—it is toujours disponible.

In a culture that has lost the gods, a culture from which the gods have withdrawn, we have the messages but they do not carry the gods’ meanings. Mere “information.” Yet Hermes, in his dutiful faithfulness to his archetypal role, passes on the information, indiscriminately facilitating the messages regardless of their content, which may as easily be a blog, a joke, an ad, a sexual come-on, or a revelation of crucial political significance. The word “information” itself has become so inflated that it carries the code of an individual’s DNA identity and destiny. Not wisdom, not knowledge, not inspiration, not learning, not comfort, not truth, not prophesy, not moral value or aesthetic beauty. Instead of messenger of the gods, Hermes has become servant of the Internet.

When we say, as in the popular guides to mythology, archetypal psychology, and astrology, that Hermes is the “god of communication,” we must recognize that communication cannot belong to only one god. There are many modes of communication. For instance, there is the connection—wordless, intimate, and sensate—between lovers, between mothers and babies, between patient and nurse, between animals and their caretakers. There is communication by means of the daily delights of life: flowers, cooking, drinking together. There is communication on the level of a Dionysian “participation mystique” when all rock together at a large outdoor pop music concert, laughing together at comedians on the screen. There is the communication of the thunderbolt of Zeus, the flash of inspiration, of enlightenment, the coup de foudre of falling in love with an utterly unknown person. There is the gestural communication among warriors in formation, even between enemies in the battling contests whether in warfare or on the football field, and between a cruel Saturnian prison guard and his prisoners.

There is also the communication of teaching and learning, slow, painstaking, and without the flash and fun of Hermes. Communication also proceeds through art and craft, whether through a piece of artwork that communicates by means of a spark that leaps from the artwork into the eye and heart of the beholder, and then to his or her hand to make another artwork. Hermes, please, is not the only means of connection. It sins against the pantheon of polytheism to assume that Hermes is the sole god who governs communication. This monotheistic usurpation of all these different modes into the Hermetic elevates the electronic media to prime position in our instrumentarium. Moreover, this Hermetic intoxication gives an exclusive definition to communication, neglecting the arts, the body, the subtleties of sensate silence. And this hypertrophy of Hermes assumes that your PC, iPod, Blackberry, PlayStation, Xbox, ATM, or whatever else has become your “server,” have actually become indispensable chirungas for “getting the messages,” “keeping in touch,” “enabling” you to be in life and enjoy it. Besides, the degradation of Hermes to convenient instruments of clever wizardry degrades the god to a chip. And if the chip is programmed to work on the one-or-zero principle of either/or, then Hermes no longer is the god of “go-between,” of ambiguity, as the myths present.

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Hermetic intoxication may also delude us. After all, wasn’t Hermes the master of deception? He is a thief, a conniver, a trickster, a surreptitious nightwalker. Is it Hermes who suddenly drops the call, makes the computer not function, neglects to back up what I just wrote, finds ways to infiltrate bugs and viruses that destroy whole programs and irreplaceable data banks? Perhaps it is Hermes, the god of merchants, who convinces the consumer that one needs more capability, faster processing and more peripherals than one will ever use, selling us the latest software before we have fully utilized what we already have. Is it Hermes who inspires young hackers to penetrate corporate secrets, police files, government records, science labs, and to steal information or jam the hard disk and magically transform the precious into the senseless.