Bits and Pieces
Rationalists vs Romantics (Al Qaeda vs Phish)
As I’m gearing-up for a long article about Rationalism and its counterpart, the New Romanticism, many of this week’s recommendations come from that milieu.
Plus, a provocative bit of criticism I discovered after I finished my last article, about pro wrestling and political kitsch. (Don’t be shy, if you missed “Woke Rednecks,” read it here). I’ll have more to say about this last bit of art criticism on my list—“Good Riddance to Shepard Fairey”—in a short follow-up post, coming soon.
Also on today’s list, a few articles from the world of music—a New Yorker piece I recommended last year, about Universal Music Group’s experiment with AI songwriting; another New Yorker piece by Amanda Petruscich about Phish; and a WSJ profile of the whisky-drinking Desert Blues artist who now leads a branch of Al Qaeda.
Finally, a brazen Atlantic piece explaining how B.J. Novak—better known as “Ryan” from The Office—became an unwitting accomplice in the rise of far-right influencer Bronze Age Pervert.
Choose your cult.
Rationalism has been the guiding philosophy (some would say theology) of Silicon Valley optimists for over two decades. Its adherents include Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and many, many others.
Don’t let the name fool you—Rationalism is quite irrational.
As the podcast below, from Blocked and Reported reveals, about the “Zizians”: a Rationalist cult who believe, like Elon Musk, that the world is probably an AI simulation from the future.
Logically, we should do everything to propitiate our new Artificial overlord(s), and facilitate their arrival—especially, eating vegan. And murdering anyone who doesn’t:
As you may infer, Rationalism overlaps with Silicon Valley hobby horses like AI, Effective Altruism, and Transhumanism.
I started reading about the latter branch of rationalist thought, Transhumanism, around 2016—the first of many “new religions” I now write about with some regularity.
I encountered Transhumanism in articles like this one, from The Guardian in 2017: “God in the machine: my strange journey into transhumanism,” by Meghan O’Gieblyn.
I was late to the party. Transhumanism, like Rationalism, has been percolating for decades (if not centuries). Now it’s gone digital, and quantum.
Rationalism derives its name from Enlightenment rationalism—the eighteenth-century ideal of using reason to understand the world and improve humanity’s lot in it.
Clearly, our millennial version has waxed a bit weirder. Here’s a brief primer:
And here’s an article from The Atlantic by the great Helen Lewis (whose podcast The New Gurus chronicles the rise of online swamis like Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and Russel Brand):
THE INTERNET’S FAVORITE SEX RESEARCHER: How Aella went from selling sex to studying it
Lewis’s profile of “the Internet’s favorite sex researcher,” a woman who goes by the pseudonym “Aella,” gives readers a good taste of rationalism, as practiced by the Internet’s answer to Alfred Kinsey.
[Aella] gravitated toward a scene known as rationalism, wherein self-professed nerds apply a coldly rational lens to subjects that are often clouded by emotion or dogma, such as the heritability of intelligence, whether you should altruistically donate a kidney to a stranger, and whether it’s acceptable to have sex with your sister. “once i threw a party for the bay area rationalists, and the rules to attend were you had to be wearing a full-face coverage mask, and be naked,” she wrote on X in 2021, during the pandemic. “Many came; they all bravely stripped, donned weird masks … and then proceeded to sit in a polite circle and debate global trade.”
As proof we’re living in a global idiocracy—a rational one, perhaps controlled by simulated Intelligence—here’s Harper’s “weekly dispatch taking aim at the relentless absurdity of the 24-hour news cycle.” Dumbfounding. One ray of hope? Harper’s Magazine is on Substack:
Regarding a favorite preoccupation of rationalists—Artificial Intelligence—cultural Cassandra Ted Gioia issued a warning about AI, last August: “buckle up”:
I anticipate extreme turbulence on every front for the remaining five months in 2024. You will see it in politics, business, economics, culture, world affairs, the stock market, and maybe even your own neighborhood.
Until then, Gioia explained, AI had only been used to field your Internet service provider complaints, or process meaningless customer satisfaction surveys. But, as he wrote a month later, in a follow-up prognostication:
[T]he next step in AI has arrived—the unleashing of AI agents.
Some fun highlights:
In late 2024, tech company Altera announced the release of a thousand autonomous AI agents onto a Minecraft server. A hint as to how AI agents, relentlessly enslaved to computative “logic,” will react to the world, in a Minecraft simulation. Per Gioia:
In this AI agent community, the biggest winner was a priest, who created a huge religious cult—but by bribing people to join. In another simulation, Democrats and Republicans battled via conflicting constitutions driven by ideology (not rights, which are boring and passé in the digital world).
In an earlier, non-Minecraft war games simulation conducted by researchers at GIT, Stanford, and Northwestern, researchers learned that AI agents tended to resolve conflicts by using nuclear weapons. If that’s not destabilizing enough:
The Minecraft simulation also demonstrated how AI agents can change their minds at the drop of the hat—as the successful cult bribing incident suggests. In other instances, a farmer needed for the food supply decided spontaneously to give up agriculture and go on an adventure. In another instance, an entire village stopped working because of a single missing bot.
Right now this is happening in test environments. But soon AI agents will be changing the real world—and at a pace none of us are prepared for.
For Gioia, this is like giving unreliable teens the keys to the family car: “they are going to smash up everything in their path.”
As it turns out, it’s not that different from giving unreliable teens tickets to the new Minecraft movie, and access to social media. Cue the fireworks, and live chickens in theaters:
Since Gioia’s warning, AI has attained new visibility in politics. The campy “Trump Gaza” video, spawned by AI, was intended by its creators as anti-Trump satire. But the President proudly re-posted it to Truth Social. An example of political kitsch, or AI slop, in the twenty-first century. Call it Capitalist Realism.
In February, the President explained (regarding a US-Ukraine minerals deal in exchange for US support against Russia), that: “The [Ukrainian] minerals are about AI.” Wasteful government spending, as determined by Elon Musk and DOGE, it was revealed, would be determined by AI—leading to the cancelation of genetic research because one project description included a trigger word, trans (“transgenic”). Concurrently, Palantir exec Alex Karp opined that we need a new “Manhattan Project for AI”—which isn’t particularly reassuring, considering the results of the war games simulation above. Last September, a Lionsgate film exec was duped into thinking AI-generated blurbs for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis were real critic’s quotes, and included them in the official trailer for the film. Last December, I realized the full version of ChatGPT now comes standard on the new iPhone 16—when I noticed kids in my family using it to generate bizarre augmented-reality content.
It’s in politics, it’s in higher education, minors are using it to make nudes of their peers, and media newsletters, like the WaPo-inspired Wisdom of Crowds, are weighing-in on the difference between the “rationalist” mind (thinking “logically,” like a computer) and the humanist one:
Cassandra’s warning has come to pass.
In response to this glut of “Rationalism,” a counter-movement has emerged, some argue. It’s based on another late-eighteenth, early-nineteenth-century movement, a response to the Enlightenment and the resultant horrors of the Industrial Revolution (job loss, urban squalor, exploitation of child labor, etc): Romanticism.
As far as a I can tell, Ted Gioia started the New Romanticism debate, and it’s caused quite a stir. A Wisdom of Crowds compendium on the subject, for and against this critique:
The New Yorker has also gotten in on the act, comparing the New Romantics to the old ones, in a piece called “Rethinking the Luddites in the Age of A.I.”
That’s a taste of the Rationalist vs Romantic debate.
As examples of the Romantic tendency, Gioia cites a yearning for communal ritual, transcendental musical experiences, and the creation of countercultural forums for the arts like Substack. (In the past 12 hours alone, I’ve noticed that, along with Harper’s Weekly, producer Don Was and screenwriter Mike White have joined).
A Ludditic frustration with the dehumanizing effects of technocracy is another symptom of the burgeoning Romanticism. (I would add two generation’s—Gen-X and Millennials—worth of nature worship, Eastern mysticism, and a fixation with astrology, to Gioia’s list.)
As an example of communal ritual in the age of technocracy, I suggest Amanda Petrusich’s recent New Yorker article:
AFTER FORTY YEARS, PHISH ISN’T SEEKING RESOLUTION:
People who love Phish do so with a quasi-religious devotion. People who dislike Phish do so with an equal fervor.
I have never loved, nor disliked, Phish with a quasi-religious devotion. But I have watched many people do so. I’ll spare you the roots of my agnosticism (it has something to do with sharing a first name with frontman Trey Anastasio, whom I’m supposed to know goes by the shibboleth, “Obi-Wan Kenobi”).
Suffice it to say that Petrusich’s article gave me a new appreciation for the dorkiest band in show business—one that’s flourished entirely beyond the business of show. Like me, Petrusich is neither apostate nor devotee, yet apparently followed the band to several shows for her article (beginning with her second since she was fifteen). She’s also been close with Trey Anastasio for years, as a music journalist—as well as Bernie Sanders, who also weighs in on Vermont’s most famous ensemble. Through woven interviews, Petrusich places Anastasio’s origins as a composer in atonality and Arthur Schoenberg (hence the “Not Seeking Resolution” in her title), as well as Anastasio’s earliest influence: Leonard Bernstein and West Side Story—which begins to make sense.
Most interesting to me, however, is a throwaway line, describing the mystical, dissociative effect the band has on audiences, and themselves—and, on at least one occasion, on Amanda Petrusich—at certain transcendental moments during their shows:
I last felt it in the Pindus Mountains of northern Greece, when a Roma clarinettist played a mirologi, or ancient Epirotic lament, directly into my ear, at two o’clock in the morning, in a dark forest. I bring this up simply to say that it’s extraordinary that this sort of thing—a fleeting doorway to nirvana—is regularly occurring for Phish fans in minor-league-hockey arenas.
Listening to a Roma clarinettist play a miralogi directly into one’s ear in the Pindus Mountains of northern Greece is precisely the subject of the book below, which I’ve recommended before and will now recommend again—one of the most interesting pieces of music ethnography published in the last ten years, Lament From Epirus. (Cover art by R. Crumb; playlist available on Spotify or wherever you stream your music):
I will be following the work of Amanda Petrusich more closely.
If Phish are transcendental “Romantics,” then the leader of the band in the following article is, well… much closer the leader of the Zizians:
Whiskey-Drinking Rocker Transforms Into West Africa’s Most Dangerous al Qaeda Leader
A militant leader from Mali championed a rock band and helped write a hit song before leading an Islamist army that killed tens of thousands
On the darker side of music cultism, read about a sad development in one of my favorite genres (if, like me, you finally break down and subscribe to the WSJ). The genre collectively known as Desert Blues: the guitar-driven Tuareg music of the Sahel, that has captivated the likes of Keith Richards, Robert Plant, Bono, and the Black Keys.
If you’re curious about Desert Blues, and don’t have a subscription to the WSJ, check out Bombino (not a member of al Qeada).
Inside the Music Industry’s High-Stakes A.I. Experiments
Lucian Grainge, the chairman of UMG, has helped record labels rake in billions of dollars from streaming. Can he do the same with generative artificial intelligence?
A reminder of how the music industry has been anticipating the next “Napster event”—Generative AI, as reported in January of 2024. One idea, from the chairman of UMG, was to play around with the tech, see what it could do:
YouTube and UMG discussed the idea of an “artist incubator.” Songwriters, performers, producers, and rights holders would experiment with the technology and give Google feedback, including any concerns.
Participants included producer Don Was, Johnny Cash’s daughter Roseanne Cash, and representatives from the Frank Sinatra estate, among others.
[Don Was] prompted the model with the name of a famous artist, a legendary singer-songwriter he had worked with in the past, asking for a song about his first car. The DeepMind team suggested adding the command “produced by Don Was.” The A.I. generated four different fragments of songs about cars, all with lyrics, melodies, and orchestration, and sung in the A.I.-generated voice of the artist, which had been learned from YouTube videos. Was described the experience as “a combination of awe and terror simultaneously.” His first thought was “This is better than anything I could have done.” His second was “I could collaborate with myself on my very best day.” For that reason, he told himself, “the songwriters are going to like this more than anybody, as long as you can’t steal from them.”
Of course, that’s a big “if,” considering AI has already scraped most of the Internet for original content, royalty-free, and is now in a doom-loop of scraping other AI, as the whole enterprise grows exponentially dumber and less humane.
Which prompted Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page to issue this manifesto, part of which is reproduced below, a few weeks ago.
The best case scenario, laid out in the New Yorker in early 2024, before the proverbial shit hit the fan, was this:
It’s possible that questions over copyright and monetization could take years to sort out. By that point, the A.I. version of an artist might not need her anymore, once it has learned everything there is to learn about her style. And who would own the output: the prompter of the A.I. or the artist whose style was the inspiration? “I have to accept that the prompter gets a copyright,” [one artist from the incubator] said. “It sounds radical, but I see no other way.”
The New Yorker scenario merely touches the issue of intellectual property. As for other concerns—like nuclear weapons and bribing “agents’ into joining cults—as others have reported in recent months, almost half the safety team at OpenAI recently resigned from their job: “ensuring that a future AGI system does not pose catastrophic or even existential danger.”
HOW BRONZE AGE PERVERT CHARMED THE FAR RIGHT
An internet personality who espouses fascism, racism, and bodybuilding has won influential converts.
This sounds dark (and the fallout certainly is), but this Atlantic article by Graeme Wood begins with a hilarious stunt—and I’m not the only one who thinks so. Ask B.J. Novak of The Office, or David Letterman, whom the actor/writer told the following story to in 2014, about the time Novak and a classmate replaced the audio guides at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Novak had recruited a Romanian classmate with a deep voice, and together they’d recorded an audio tour for the exhibition “Tales From the Land of Dragons: 1,000 Years of Chinese Painting.” With the help of friends, they then slipped cassettes containing their tour into the museum’s official audio guides.
Art lovers must have wondered about the thick Eastern European accent that greeted them, over the twang of a Chinese string instrument. The Romanian soon became opinionated (“Personally,” he said, “I think this painting is a piece of crap”), then deranged. He alluded to his “disgusting anatomical abnormalities.” He called his listeners “decadent imperialist maggots” and confessed a desire to smash a glass case with a sledgehammer and “rip [a] scroll to shreds with my teeth, which, by the way, are extremely long and sharp … more like fangs than human teeth.” At last he offered an interlude of “idiot music” while he fumbled with his script. “This should keep you occupied, you drooling imbecile!” he bellowed at the listeners, by now either amused or complaining to management. The last several minutes were a cha-cha by Tito Puente.
Novak’s Romanian classmate went on to become Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), the Internet personality espousing a regressive philosophy that, as his name suggests, longs for a lost past of racial uniformity. LikeElon Musk or Andrew Tate, BAP seeks to spread his ‘superior’ genetics throughout the population through rapine, Genghis Khan-like. A gross combination of both “Romantic” (longing for the past) and “Rationalist” (tech-bro) impulses.
Part of the import of this article, however—the way I came across it—is that there is a gaping vacuum for rebellious, white male discourse in leftwing publishing, that has been filled by far-right influencers like BAP and Andrew Tate. (I could gloss several more articles on that subject, from within leftwing publishing and without—"The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone” (NY Times), “The Vanishing White Male Writer” (Compact)—but this list is long enough already.)
On that note, I refer you to “America’s Last Newspaper,” County Highway.
County Highway is the brainchild of novelist Walter Kirn, who also cohosts the America This Week podcast with journalist Matt Taibbi (a weekly news compendium that ends each episode with a look at current events through the lens of short fiction).
More like a monthly magazine on newsprint, County Highway is a desperate attempt to fill the vacuum of dead local newspapers with independent journalism, outside the realm of media discourse or Big Five publishing. For all intents and purposes, it’s only available in print. In other words: quite Romantic.
As evidence of the vacuum referenced above, Kirn was recently likened by a fellow scribe to the writers Ezra Pound and Céline (both of whom endorsed Nazism during WWII)—because, one surmises, as a center-left Democrat, Kirn declined to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024. (You can read about that incident, and the collapse of leftwing counterculture into what one NY Times columnist lauded as “Bourgeoise Bohemian” (read: yuppie) elitism, in Taibbi’s searing takedown of David Brooks. And, listen to a trenchant analysis of Mark Zuckerberg’s latest dubious product, the “AI Friend,” on America This Week.)
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Walter Kirn is a Nazi. Presumably, neither does the bassist for Nirvana, Krist Novoselic, who writes music columns for Kirn’s “ last newspaper.” The fact that I spotted issues of County Highway on the newspaper rack of “Mother Foucault’s” Bookshop in Portland, OR suggests that, maybe it’s not a fascist rag?
But County Highway doesn’t tow the party line, whatever that may be, as evidenced by my final recommendation, from art critic David Jager, from the same publication. Jager’s critique of political posters overlaps uncannily with my previous article, on political kitsch and Portland wrestling, which makes me suspect I was onto something:
Good Riddance to Shepard Fairey’s Awful ‘Hope” Posters
How André the Giant Became Barack Obama
LAUGHING AT ‘HOPE’ MADE YOU AN ASSHOLE
The message of both posters was actually the same: OBEY
by David Jager
Since most readers probably don’t have access to this article, and there’s some nuanced exposition outside the scope of Jager’s critique that needs explaining (what’s so awful about the Obama “Hope” poster, after all?), and because much of Jager’s Jeremiad pertains to my previous article—I’m saving a gloss of Jager for a visual essay, coming soon.
In the words of Shepard Fairey…
Stay tuned.
OBEY.
