A Different Way

Maintaining your humanity in the age of AI

I was chatting at my local pub recently with a woman who is a teacher. She is teaching economics. I did not ask her what she thinks about economics, but I gathered what she teaches is more micro than macro, more household than imperial. She teaches at a local, rural elementary school that probably has less than 100 students. She said every teacher in the school is using AI to write their lesson plans. Being naive, I had previously thought, or simply wanted to believe, that local rural schools would be less likely to adopt AI. She said she uses her own judgment about what the AI is offering, but I got the feeling this is what she wants to believe.

Neoliberal Feudalism

wrote a short, interesting piece on the work of Marshall McLuhan, “the father of media studies,” specifically his theory on a tetrad of media effects. Every advancement in media, from the written word to AI, changes us, most often unconsciously. The challenge is, how to be conscious about those changes.

McLuhan argues that technology warps the ratio of the senses of the people who use it. Before modern technology, and especially before the advent of the written word, the senses were balanced; however, the adoption of the written word followed by the printing press dramatically skewed the senses of the user toward the senses of sight and substantially downgraded touch, taste, hearing and smell. One may see this dramatic skewing when a third world tribe is exposed to the written word⁵; within one generation they are completely different in outlook and perspective. This process was greatly exacerbated by the advent of the printing press.⁶ Further changes in the mode of communication with the telegram, radio, film, television, the internet and now artificial intelligence skewed the senses and how people interact with the world in totally different and often contradictory ways. By understanding how the medium affects perception, one may become more conscious of these processes and regain an element of free will in relation to them.

In the context of magic, Dion Fortune’s conception seems appropriate here, “magic is the Art of changing consciousness in accordance with Will.”

This is McLuhan’s tetrad of media effects, lifted from NF’s piece:

1. What sense does the medium enhance?

2. What does the medium make obsolete and which sense does it downgrade in importance?

3. What sense and style does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?

4. What does the medium reverse or flip into when pushed to extremes? [This relates to Jung’s concept of enantiodromia, although I don’t think McLuhan ever referenced Jung directly].

Print media changed us, lessening the influence of all senses other than sight, Radio elevated hearing, but devalued the written word, TV brought sight back to the forefront, with hearing, at the further expense of the written word. AI threatens to atrophy all the senses and the intellect, though some will continue to debate about it improving the outcome of the intellect, for some, if not necessarily benefiting the senses generally.

I’m not really doing the piece justice. I encourage you to read it. Suffice to say media and high tech changes, change us.

The Medium Is the Mind: Applying McLuhan’s Tetrad to LLMs

I commented on and restacked the piece:

I’ve long meant to read McLuhan. I much appreciate this assessment. As a Gen Xer, I have adopted tech changes, until AI.

I’m heading in a different way.

High Tech and Analog

I’ve mentioned a few times in these pages, and on notes and in comments, the more people embrace AI, the more I embrace analog. Which is to say, I increasingly value high quality human output to AI slop.

I’ve mentioned too how I have been called a luddite because I like to garden, hunt, fish, build things with my own hands. But I have adopted every high tech advance, not being a techie necessarily, but I have used computers to my advantage, at every stage of the internet’s public development. I am between the Boomer’s general ignorance of the internet and computers, and young people’s near total immersion practically from birth.

To my relative advantage. I have been writing blogs since blogs were a thing, I have been on message boards and comment threads for twenty years. I probably have a million words online, and yet, I am almost unknown as a writer (which is absolutely fine).

This substack is a good example. I am 2.5 years in, nearing 300 posts, and yet I have 1389 subscribers.¹ Most of the writers I follow on Substack have had much greater success in that regard. Of particular note is this graph, lifted from my Dashboard. Since one month after Trump was re-elected, growth has almost flatlined. In the past year, I have gained a net 26 25 subscribers. I have also lost, I am certain, 300-400 subs in that time, or more. Lately, my posts have been my least read posts since the beginning of this substack, losing as many or more subs as I get likes of the post. My latest post was not read even 500 times, and I have no idea how many of those are bots.

Again, I am not necessarily bothered this, I am fine with it, I have no Will to become famous on Substack.

Steady, slow growth the first year and a half, and then two things happened a year ago, Trump was re-elected, and I changed the focus of my posts to be more esoteric.

I’m not bothered by this lack of growth of my Substack because I am less enamored of all things online. Mostly now I am reading books, older than the woke era, older than industrial society, older than the Enlightenment. I am reading poetry, almost all of it written before the 20th century. Most of my writing energy is going to my poetry; otherwise I have been enjoying writing about the esoteric here, adding the political critique as much out of habit, because we live in interesting times, and to some degree I assume my readers expect it.

I am also aware, in this scientific, materialist world, in a country where a majority of people call themselves Christian, there are just not that many people who are interested in esoteric things, not seriously. But this is who I am, and this also happens to allow me to write the truth as I see it without drawing the malefic eye of Sauron :)

I was writing about the esoteric that first year and a half, but this year I started writing about the Tarot and the monthly change in the Zodiak. That proved too much for a lot of people.

Now that I have one book of poetry finished though, and another almost finished, my intention is to start a publishing company, and only make the books available from me, hand bound in leather. The first poem has travelled on the interweb, it will be published on the Octagon Society website, free to download, but also available to buy, hand bound. The second poem will never see the interweb, by my hand. I will not send the text by email, I will not post any of it on the internet, I will only send it in book form, by snail mail. The words of that book will only be available analog, to the degree I can control that.

That pretty much guarantees I will not sell very many copies. But I am perfectly fine with that, too. As to the binding of books, I am no Master nor Artist, but I am literally only about 30 practice books in. I love my new work station though, and I love the work. I love it so much I will continue to make books, even if I end up mostly giving them away.

That golden liquid in the mug in the middle is peach homebrew I made from my peach trees, when I lived in Minneapolis. Probably aged 6 years. Other than my family there, those peach trees are the only thing I miss about Minneapolis.

The Center Cannot Hold

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats was not often bleak, but this most bleak of his poems is arguably his most famous. The populist right and left would probably suggest, though Yeats could not have known it, “what rough beast, it’s hour come round at last, slouches to Bethlehem to be born,” would be Zionism, and for some of us on the right, an ascendant jihadist Islam, as a partial result of pathological neo-con adventurist looting of the Treasury in our Middle Eastern wars, a general Congressional, bipartisan whoring of themselves unto Israel, and of course leftists and globalists siding with Jihadi Muslims and the deep state to destroy America and the West.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The center left and right cannot hold. Multiculturalism and open borders, meet AI. AI levels the hold the pathological establishment has on society, at the same time it levels bullshit jobs the greatest defenders of open borders depend upon, at the same time the West is flooded with a feral, illiterate mass-mercenary army of illegal immigrant men.

The center cannot hold. So what is there to do, but get down into the body and get analog? All this raving on the Internet, communicating with AI, what consequence is this? What effect will it have on the future?

The Left in America, anything goes and nothing matters in the effort to get Trump, are becoming ever more insurrectionist and revolutionary, in the way of Chaos. The center right is mostly hopeless, too busy looting to get serious about restoring order, too busy policing the right proper, to bother doing anything to actually improve the lives of Americans, to hold on to power. (A lot of them always were fine with being in the minority, not much responsibility while you conspire to loot.) Some inflection point is coming, some sort of “revelation at hand”, in the pathological mental illness that is TDS and it’s effect on America, and liberalism’s general trend in all of the West, toward the absolute disintegration of every boundary, the absolute collapse of Order.²

And nothing I say about it, no matter how clearly I might speak of it, will have any appreciable effect on that, I have next to no influence but with the few of you who are reading this, and a very few local to me.

So again, what is there to do but to train the eye away from the spectacle, away from the Western global media machine, and toward the analog, authentically human?

Chris Bray

keeps reminding us, drive around the country and 99 out of 100 interactions will be pleasant. As opposed to the Media machine and the pathological, suicidal establishment who control it, all apocalypse, end times, emotional manipulation, 24/7.

To Remain Authentically Human

Your typical NPC, cog in the institutional technocracy, is going to adopt AI uncritically and be overwhelmed by it. If they were unquestioning, “full of passionate intensity” about the Current Thing, of the Narrative of the neo-liberal establishment, then they will be like deadly automatons directed by the woke LLM of Google or OpenAI. AI will become the prime-ultimate means of avoiding accountability about anything.

The task for those of us who are hostile generally to the Current Thing and all propagandistic narratives of the pathological looting Neo-Liberal establishment, is to remain authentically human.

I suspect though, this message is not really about America or the greater world, but about the individual, recognizing the folly of most material concerns, turning to the spiritual.

That seems the task, the “goal” of Sagittarius this month, to make peace with a world that is The Chariot overturned, to set spiritual goals and achieve them. Not neglecting the material, but prioritizing the spiritual over the material, for a cessation of the war within the Self.

That was from my last post, on the transition in the Zodiac from Scorpio to Sagittarius. Contrary to the materialist doom of Bret Weinstein, the LLM will never be truly conscious, because consciousness is not a function of the material, it is of the divine spark and the soul.³ That is why it is imperative to embrace the enchanted, spiritual perspective, guiding your own consciousness in accordance with your Will in accordance with the Divine, and not what predatory elite want from you, according with the LLM, the manipulation of your base fears and desires.

Which is why, though I dabbled a bit early, with free AI image makers, I do not speak with AI and do not intend to.⁴ Could AI improve my poetry? I doubt it, but even if it could I don’t care to find out, my poetry will stand as the product of my consciousness and not the raw processing power of an LLM. Nor will I feed the AI with that work. My feeling is, once I start, it won’t stop, and whatever is the result is not really mine, which is to say, the AI will have changed me in a way reflective of the AI.

To those who do work with AI, God speed. Just because I’m not partaking doesn’t mean necessarily you shouldn’t. I know the

Tree of Woe

has been clear, and so has

Ivan Throne

, we need based AI to counter woke AI.

Here is to you maintaining your humanity.

As for that different way I am claiming, less high tech, more Picatrix,⁵ compiler of knowledge, skills and wisdom to be useful the rest of my days.

1. As I wrote this I went from 1389 subs, to 1390, to 1388. LOL.

2. 10,000. That is how many Afghans, who were “member[s] of a secretive CIA paramilitary group called the Zero Units[;] some have called them “death squads,” and accused them of abducting and torturing civilians, murdering entire families and laying waste to villages,” that Biden Admin dropped all over America and supposedly said, good luck, figure it out? One of whom just killed two American National Guard a few blocks from the White House, less than a week after the Seditious Six introduced an insurrection. Inflection point…the left, globalists and the deep state fully intend to destroy America, (they think) in order to rule it.

Zero Hour

3. Well, I suppose technically, if the AI were inhabited like a skin suit by a demon, it would be conscious, of a sort. Also, if it could be inhabited by a demon, it could be inhabited by gods or angels or God.

4. I did once converse with an AI, after a friend gave it some prompts for writing song lyrics. This was only six months ago, and they say it is more creative now, but I found it to be retarded in a way that is insulting to retards. It did not understand simile or metaphor, it was chemical saccharine sweet and cliche like a bottomless pit. And there was one consistent theme, no matter how we changed the prompts: the joy and transcendence of being alone. So, naked manipulation from demons our lords of liberal globalism. We are much easier to rule and America much easier to destroy, if we are alienated from each other. The loneliness epidemic in America is engineered.

This picture is from the introduction to The Illustrated Picatrix, Translated by John Michael Greer and Christopher Warnock, Renaissance Astrology (publisher), 2010-15

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