“…cultural hegemony is the dominance of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class who manipulate the culture of that society—the beliefs and explanations, perceptions, values, and mores—so that the worldview of the ruling class becomes the accepted cultural norm.[1] As the universal dominant ideology, the ruling-class worldview misrepresents the social, political, and economic status quo as natural, inevitable, and perpetual social conditions that benefit every social class, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class”
Category: Other Page 81 of 178
This sounds really interesting & just ordered it:
The novel takes the form of three cross-referenced mini-encyclopedias, sometimes contradicting each other, each compiled from the sources of one of the major Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism). In his introduction to the work, Pavić wrote:
“No chronology will be observed here, nor is one necessary. Hence each reader will put together the book for himself, as in a game of dominoes or cards, and, as with a mirror, he will get out of this dictionary as much as he puts into it, for you […] cannot get more out of the truth than what you put into it.[3]“
Usually categorically hate Quora answers, but this excerpted bit is not bad:
‘Fiction’ or ‘non-fiction’ doesn’t help us very much, and ‘fake’ and ‘real’ help us less. In a particular work, the better questions are ‘what kind of work (genre) is this?’; ‘what truths might it be teaching?’. If nothing else, a little discipline with those questions might alleviate some of the pointless and misguided wrangles which recur with disheartening frequency.
I agree that, especially with hyperreal texts, the validation of “facts” is only one of many possible avenues of experience. And it may not always be the most useful, versus a more structural (or structuralist) approach. It may be that the references/relationships/re-arranging have a greater relevance than maybe more fluid factual/counter-factual inclusions.
I often feel while working with AI content generation tools – like Stable Diffusion, Dall-e, Fairseq & GPT-NeoX (the main ones I use) – that something like a co-defined narrative unfolds from the process. I saw someone call it I think divinatory in an article. Each of the participants, the human prompter, and the AI model offering their own bits and replies back to one another. Then you look at what they output, and you re-steer and kind of lean back into that.
It strikes me this happens with the reader also, who happens into this chaotic non-linear narrative latent space. Each might only read or look at a small subset of artifacts, a very few ingest a great number. Each comes in through their own path, and leaves their own trail across the nodes of the narrative that they traverse in the unique sequence they themselves traverse it in.
Found via the Onion amicus brief, attributed to Mark Twain at this source:
“The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it; but the teller of the comic story tells you beforehand that it is one of the funniest things he has ever heard, then tells it with eager delight, and is the first person to laugh when he gets through. And sometimes, if he has had good success, he is so glad and happy that he will repeat the “nub” of it and glance around from face to face, collecting applause, and then repeat it again. It is a pathetic thing to see.”
Have been thinking, what if the story of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden was… a bit of a misunderstanding. What if God hadn’t forbidden Adam & Eve from eating it altogether? What if he had merely suggested they not eat it before it’s ripe?
Think about it: what if the only reason it tasted of bitterness was because it had not had time to mature to its full sweetness? What if they had waited longer, and instead of merely transmitting knowledge of good and evil, it also transmitted the mature wisdom to handle the two? What if, indeed, they had even let it ferment into a strong wine, full of richness, complexity & subtle aroma? And then let that too age.
Have had this thought rattling around in my head forever, about how “karaoke” translated to English means something like “empty orchestra.” I’ve always thought that captured a certain kind of beautiful sense of desolation…
Likewise, for years has been careening around my awareness of the emptiness of algorithms. How cold and forbidding they feel when encountered emotionally – which is all the time now almost in daily life. Nudges, notifications, so-called dark patterns. Driving user behaviors. Predicting preferences, recommendation engines.
Once, long ago, I remember hearing about new music through friends. Now Spotify serves up lukewarm drivel “based on your interests,” and sometimes all you can decide in the information tidal wave, is will this make adequate background mush sounds for the next few moments?
I swear sometimes I can almost hear the algorithms that control many popular music stations on the legacy technology called “radio.” Some scientific calculation based on popular multiplied by payola multiplied by who knows what, but I don’t like it.
Lately, I listen to Radio Paradise Mellow Mix a lot (internet radio station), and FIP Pop out of France. Both of these are good and feel much less cold and artificial and algorithmy than letting Spotify dictate which kind of audio-mush will be served today. But after hours and days of listening, one might still discern the shapes of those algorithms as well I suppose.
The neologism solastalgia apparently describes nostalgia for a world where nature and the environment was a source of solace, rather than a source of distress and anxiety. What word might describe a life lived free of (or at least more free of) the cold dead reach of the algorithms. Algostalgia? It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, does it. But I think it’s linked. That once there was a way, a reality, a modality, a type of living that provided solace. Not endless scrolling feeds, behavioral manipulation, yadda yadda. A desire to go back there again, even if perhaps we’ve never been there in the first place: outside the reach of the Empty Algorithm.
The ultimate spiritual aim of Tenrikyo is the construction of the Kanrodai, a divinely ordained pillar in an axis mundi called the Jiba, and the correct performance of the Kagura ritual around the Kanrodai, which will bring about the salvation of all human beings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenrikyo
And:
It is said that when the hearts of humankind have been adequately purified, God will inaugurate the world of the Joyous Life by bestowing a sweet dew on the basin to be placed on top of the Kanrodai, which when consumed, will allow people to live the full lifespan of 115 years without illness or misfortune, and die painlessly to be reborn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyous_Life
“The common goal of corporations around the world is to monetize human activity and what’s left of nature’s abundance as rapidly and efficiently as possible.”
Source: Patterns of meaning
Also from same author, a relevant & worthwhile read:
There’s a really good article on the Verge about authors who use AI tools like Sudowrite as part of their writing workflow. Lost Books has released about a dozen books in this genre now, which comprise the AI Lore series.
Anyway, there are a few themes I want to tease out, namely the feeling of disconnection & disorientation that seems to be a common experience to authors using these tools.
One author quoted says:
“It was very uncomfortable to look back over what I wrote and not really feel connected to the words or the ideas.”
And:
“But ask GPT-3 to write an essay, and it will produce a repetitive series of sometimes correct, often contradictory assertions, drifting progressively off-topic until it hits its memory limit and forgets where it started completely.”
And finally:
And then I went back to write and sat down, and I would forget why people were doing things. Or I’d have to look up what somebody said because I lost the thread of truth,” she said.
Losing the “thread of truth” strikes me as utterly & inherently postmodern af. It’s the essence of hyperreality.
It is the essence of browsing the web. You pop between tabs and websites and apps and platforms. You follow different accounts, each spewing out some segment of something. And then somewhere in the mix, your brain mashes it all together into something that sort of makes sense to you in its context (“sensemaking”), or doesn’t — you lose the thread of truth.
To me, hyperreality as an “art form” (way of life?), has something to do with that. To the post-truth as they say world where truth is what resonates in the moment. What you “like” in platform speak, what you hate, what you fear, just then, just now. And then its forgotten, replaced by the next thing. Yet the algorithm remembers… or does it? It may be “recorded” but it knows little to nothing on its own, without the invocation.
Forgive me as I ramble here, but that’s why this is a blog post…
Pieces I’ve been meaning to put together in this space.
- Narrative unity
- Networked / distributed narratives
- Transmedia storytelling
- Latent space (as in Stable Diffusion)
- Jacques Vallee’s idea of the information-based universe
In no particular order:
“Networked narratives can be seen as being defined by their rejection of narrative unity.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Networked_narrative
The PDF wikipedia goes on to reference regarding narrative unities has some worthwhile stuff on the topic. From it, we see these are more properly perhaps called Dramatic Unities (via Aristotle — an ancient blogger if ever there was one), or Wiki’s redirect to Classical Unities here.
1. unity of action: a tragedy should have one principal action.
2. unity of time: the action in a tragedy should occur over a period of no more than 24 hours.
3. unity of place: a tragedy should exist in a single physical location.
Popping back to the W networked narrative page:
“It is not driven by the specificity of details; rather, details emerge through a co-construction of the ultimate story by the various participants or elements.”
Lost the thread of truth, “not driven by the specificity of details.”
While we’re in this uncertain territory, we should at least quote again Wikipedia on Hyperreality:
“Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.”
What I guess I want to note here – in part – is that what the Verge article quoted at top seems to be considering obstacles, bugs, or room for improvement around the lack of apparent coherence of AI-generated texts… is actually probably its primary feature?
Disorientation as a Service.
Jumping now to latent spaces, as in AI image generation:
“A latent space, also known as a latent feature space or embedding space, is an embedding of a set of items within a manifold in which items which resemble each other more closely are positioned closer to one another in the latent space.”
This Vox video is probably the most complete and accessible explanation I’ve seen of how image diffusion models work:
My understanding of it is basically that a text query (in the case of Dall-E & Stable Diffusion) triggers accessing of the portion(s) of the latent space within the model that corresponds to your keywords, and then mashes them together visually to create a cloud of pixels that reference those underlying trained assets. Depending on your level of processing (“steps” in Stable Diffusion), the diffuse pixel cloud becomes more precisely representative of some new vignette that references your original query or prompt.
So it sort of plucks what you asked for out of its matrix of possible combinations, and gives you a few variations of it. Kind of like parallel dimension representations from the multiverse.
Which leads me to the Jacques Vallee quote that has been stirring around in the corners of my mind for some twenty-odd years now:
Time and space may be convenient notions for plotting the progress of a locomotive, but they are completely useless for locating information …
What modern computer scientists have now recognized is that ordering by time and space is the worst possible way to store data. In a large computer-based information system, no attempt is made to place related records in sequential physical locations. It is much more convenient to sprinkle the records through storage as they arrive, and to construct an algorithm for the retrieval based on some kind of keyword …
(So) if there is no time dimension as we usually assume there is, we may be traversing events by association.
Modern computers retrieve information associatively. You “evoke” the desired records by using keywords, words of power: (using a search engine,) you request the intersection of “microwave” and “headache,” and you find twenty articles you never suspected existed … If we live in the associative universe of the software scientist rather than the sequential universe of the spacetime physicist, then miracles are no longer irrational events.
Vallee’s quote strikes a metaphysical chord which is mostly unprovable (for now) but also feels , experientially speaking, “mostly true” in some ways. Without debating the ontological merits of his argument vis-a-vis everyday reality, it occurs to me that he’s 100% describing the querying of latent spaces.
Of course, he suggests that reality consists of a fundamental underlying latent space, which is a cool idea if nothing else. There’s an interesting potential tangent here regarding paranormal events and “retrieval algorithms” as being guided by or inclusive of intelligences, perhaps artificial, perhaps natural. (And that tangent would link us back to Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenetic/morphic fields as retrieval algorithms, and maybe the “overlighting intelligences” of Findhord…) But that’s a tangent for another day.
Anyway, to offer some sort of conclusion, I guess I would say perhaps the best use of AI tools for now, while they are in their current form, is to lean into, chase after, capture that confusion, that disorientation, that losing of the thread, that breaking of narrative unity, and just… go for it. There are as many roads through the Dark Forest as we make.