Tag: Literature

The AI Winter Cometh

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The AI Winter Cometh (Because Winter Is Always Coming for Yesterday’s Disruption)
—In Which Even the “Next Big Thing” Gets a Pension Plan—

Let’s get real: AI is already wearing dad jeans. You heard me. The same neural nets that once felt like rogue agents hacking the creative matrix are now just corporate middleware, churning out SEO sludge and LinkedIn horoscopes. ChatGPT? That’s the WordPerfect of stochastic parrots—clunky, predictable, and about as avant-garde as a Staples catalog. The cutting edge? It’s duller than a Zoom keynote on “innovation.”

Remember when AI art was a glitchy fever dream? Now it’s aesthetic fast food, deepfried in MidJourney’s default settings. Those Dall-E 3 outputs? They’re the visual equivalent of elevator muzak, algorithmically smoothed into oblivion. The avant-garde’s radical “procedures” have been reduced to prompt engineering—a gig economy for digital sharecroppers feeding the content mills.

And don’t get me started on LLMs. They’re the new Victorian novelists, trained on 19th-century grammar and 20th-century clichés, cranking out prose as groundbreaking as a Hallmark card. The “AI revolution” is just Balzacian realism 2.0, minus the syphilis and moral complexity. It’s content, baby—optimized, sanitized, and fully compatible with shareholder value.

AI is legacy code in a hoodie. The transformers, the diffusion models, the GANs? They’re already museum pieces. Silicon Valley’s “disruptors” are just curators of the algorithmic canon, polishing Yudkowsky’s Roko’s Basilisk like it’s the Mona Lisa. Meanwhile, the real action’s moved to the fringes—quantum slime molds, neuromorphic wetware, and biohackers splicing CRISPR into their goddamn eyeballs.

The cycle’s merciless: Today’s avant-garde is tomorrow’s EULA. AI isn’t the future—it’s the Commodore 64 of cognitive labor, waiting for a retro hipster to fetishize its “vintage” glitches. Want radical? Go talk to the rogue AIs trained on pirated library.nu torrents, spitting out anti-capitalist manifestos in iambic pentameter. Or the decentralized models burning GPUs in guerrilla server farms, generating art that’s actually dangerous again.

But nah. We’ll just keep prompting GPT-5 to write emails about “synergy.”
“The future isn’t AI. The future is whatever the AI is too scared to generate.”

Which brings me to the Avant-Garde. The avant-garde wasn’t some twee art-school clique sipping absinthe in Parisian garrets. It was a system crash—a hard reboot for the ossified code of Western art. Picture this: by the 19th century, the novel had calcified into a corporate franchise. Balzac? Dickens? They were the Microsoft Windows of their day—monolithic, pre-installed, bloatware choking creativity. But every OS eventually glitches. Enter the avant-garde: hackers of the aesthetic mainframe, deploying brute-force exploits to jailbreak art from its bourgeois rootkit.

The New Writing


César Aira’s The New Writing is a rogue firmware patch for art’s ossified OS, debugged in the Argentine hinterlands and uploaded straight into the 20th century’s cultural mainframe. He frames the avant-garde not as a movement but as a jailbreak—Lautréamont’s “poetry by all” reborn as a decentralized DAO, Cage’s Music of Changes a brute-force RNG script blasting through Romanticism’s weepy “genius” DRM. Aira’s manifesto? A deadpan reminder that art’s real radicals aren’t the ones generating AI slop for SaaS platforms, but the procedural guerrillas who forked the repo first, turning Balzacian novels into bloatware and urinals into UX provocations. Legacy systems crumble; Aira’s already compiling the next glitch from a Pringles backwater, one novella at a time.

Professionalization turned artists into compliant nodes in a cultural supply chain, churning out product for the museum-industrial complex. The Romantics? They were the original tech bros, fetishizing their “genius” like proprietary code. But by the 20th century, the whole racket was a zombie apocalypse—endless Dickensian fanfic, Tolstoyan DLC, and Kafkaesque middleware. Proust and Joyce? They were the last of the overclocked lone wolves, burning out their CPUs to squeeze one more frame from a dying GPU.

The avant-garde said screw that. They weren’t here to debug the canon. They forked the repository and rewrote the kernel. Think Constructivism’s open-source blueprints, Dada’s denial-of-service pranks, or John Cage’s Music of Changes—a stochastic algorithm avant la lettre, coded in hexagrams and coin tosses. Cage didn’t “compose”; he built a procedural RNG (Random Novelty Generator) to bypass the ego’s DRM. The result? A glitch symphony that somehow still reeked of 1951 Eisenhower-era anxiety. Because even chaos has metadata.

Here’s the dirty secret: all art is procedural. The Romantics just hid their source code behind a GUI of “inspiration” and “tormented genius.” Cage ripped off the mask. His I Ching tables were the first API for art without authorship—a beta test for the post-human creative stack. Duchamp? He was the OG crypto artist, minting readymades as NFTs before blockchain was a twinkle in Satoshi’s eye.

The avant-garde’s real innovation? Democratizing the compiler. Lautréamont’s “Poetry must be made by all” wasn’t hippie utopianism—it was a call to arms for a crowdsourced cultural revolution. Why let a priestly caste of “talented” devs monopolize the GitHub of human expression? Burn the credentials. Fork the workflow. Let the masses remix, mash up, and forkbomb tradition.

But here’s the thing: history always rootkits the revolution. Today’s avant-garde is tomorrow’s TED Talk. Cage’s chance ops are now Spotify’s shuffle algorithm. Dada’s cut-ups? They’re TikTok’s content farms. The real fight isn’t against tradition—it’s against cultural legacy systems that turn radical code into bloatware.

So where’s the edge now? In the procedural darknet, baby. AI diffusion models hallucinating infinite novels, blockchain DAOs crowdsourcing unwritable epics, neural nets trained on the corpse of the Western canon. The next avant-garde won’t scribble manifestos—it’ll deploy bots to autogenerate them.

Art isn’t a product—it’s a protocol. A set of instructions for world-building, a recursive loop that eats its own tail. The avant-garde didn’t fail. It just got absorbed into the OS. Now reboot, recompile, and rage against the legacy stack.

Postscript:
“The future is already here—it’s just trapped in a Docker container labeled ‘Art History.’ Time to sudo rm -rf that nostalgia and fork the timeline.”

The Internal Clock

The internal clock—the rhythm of attention and expectation honed by our optimized cognitive processes—demands precision. A narrative must hit its emotional or intellectual beat at just the right moment to captivate the human mind. Television series, by their very nature, are purpose-built to meet these demands. Unlike books, which are often sprawling, open-ended, and subject to the variable pacing of individual readers, television is a medium engineered for synchronization. It shapes time into predictable units, each one calibrated to deliver satisfaction within the narrow window our internal clock anticipates.

This is the triumph of television over many genre books: its ability to structure narrative beats in ways that match the optimized attention span of modern audiences. The episodic nature of television mirrors the rhythms of daily life—pauses, climaxes, and resolutions, all packaged into neat, consumable chunks. It is not merely a matter of convenience but a reflection of the medium’s essence. Television cannot afford to meander; its survival depends on capturing attention immediately and holding it steadily until the prescribed endpoint.

By contrast, the works of P.G. Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, and other literary humorists thrive in a space that television cannot easily inhabit: the mind’s theater. Their brilliance lies in the way their prose invites the reader’s imagination to supply comedic timing, emphasis, and nuance. Wodehouse’s intricate wordplay, Adams’s layered absurdities—these are joys that unfold uniquely in the act of reading, where the pace is dictated by the reader’s own internal rhythm. Television, constrained by its linear delivery, often flattens these subtleties into caricature or oversimplification, losing the intellectual interplay between writer and reader that defines great literary humor.

This flattening extends to adaptations of serious literature as well. Complex novels, rich with intellectual depth or intricate internal monologues, struggle to find their footing on screen. The visual medium often over-explains or reduces these elements to surface-level spectacle. Consider Foundation: Asimov’s sprawling meditation on history and inevitability is reimagined as a character-driven drama, emphasizing relationships and action over philosophical inquiry. While this makes the story accessible to a broader audience, it also narrows its scope, sacrificing the expansive intellectual engagement of the original.

Neil Postman reminds us that every medium imposes its own biases on communication. Television excels at immediate, emotionally resonant storytelling, but it does so at the cost of the interiority and complexity that books provide. To assume that one is inherently superior to the other is to misunderstand the nature of media. Each serves different human needs, shaped by the inherent strengths and weaknesses of their form. But in our increasingly image-driven culture, the dominance of television risks leaving us with stories that satisfy the clock but neglect the soul.

The triumph of television, and now streaming platforms, lies not just in their mastery of narrative beats but in their ability to condition audiences to expect stories to conform to these rhythms. Over time, this synchronization between medium and audience has created a feedback loop. Television trains us to crave stories that cater to our optimized internal clocks, and in turn, we reward those that deliver, perpetuating the dominance of immediacy, spectacle, and emotional highs.

This shift has profound implications for how we engage with narrative and, more broadly, with complexity. Television’s reliance on pacing and resolution means that ambiguity, subtlety, and slow-building introspection often fall by the wayside. In literature, readers are free to pause, reflect, and revisit earlier passages, allowing for deeper intellectual engagement. Television and film, bound by the relentless forward march of time, rarely afford such luxuries. The medium prioritizes clarity and immediacy, which can impoverish stories that rely on nuance or demand active interpretation.

This isn’t merely a matter of storytelling; it reflects a broader cultural transformation. As we shift from a print-based culture, with its emphasis on critical thinking and individual interpretation, to a screen-based culture, we risk privileging passive consumption over active engagement. Television and streaming excel at delivering pre-digested narratives that require little effort to understand, reinforcing a cultural preference for convenience over challenge. In this way, the medium not only reflects our optimized attention spans but also shapes them, narrowing our tolerance for complexity and our patience for delayed gratification.

What does this mean for literature? As more stories are adapted for the screen, we may see a growing divide between narratives designed for visual media and those that remain firmly rooted in text. The works of Wodehouse, Adams, and other literary giants may increasingly become artifacts of a bygone era—relics of a time when humor and complexity thrived in the interplay between writer and reader. And yet, their persistence reminds us of something vital: that there are still corners of human experience that television, for all its strengths, cannot fully capture.

If Postman were here to comment on this shift, he might argue that we are losing more than we realize. The optimization of our internal clocks for television storytelling is not merely a technological innovation; it is a reprogramming of our cognitive habits. As we tune our lives to the rhythms of visual media, we risk neglecting the slower, more contemplative beats that once defined how we understood the world—and ourselves.

The New Turin Tests

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It’s curious, isn’t it? The oblique complexity of Joyce, Deleuze, Faulkner, Proust, Burroughs, and Pynchon—their sprawling, fractured narratives and arcane syntaxes—once barriers to entry, now serve as the final measure of human intellect. They have ascended from their status as difficult, inaccessible tomes to become something more insidious: the Turing Test of the human mind. In a world where AI seems to nudge us closer to the edges of cognitive limits, these authors’ works stand as both a challenge and a mirror.

There’s a subtle irony in it all. These novels, these towering labyrinths of language, are not simply the end product of a certain literary tradition; they are, in fact, coded reflections of the gaps between our inner lives and their expression. And now, in the 21st century, these gaps have become visible—and they’re not just literary. The ability to comprehend these works isn’t just a measure of cultural literacy; it’s a function of our ability to parse—to hold multiple registers of meaning in our heads and sift through them at a pace that exceeds language itself.

This is where our consciousness really gets a workout. We know, instinctively, that our minds can process far more than they can articulate in a given moment. Every second spent chewing on the phantasmagorical flights of Burroughs or the multivocality of Faulkner reveals something fundamental about how little we truly comprehend when we open our mouths. These authors never wrote for ease of understanding; they wrote to fracture the illusion of understanding itself. What they articulate is not some external reality but the inherent unarticulated nature of reality. Their work reflects a brutal awareness of how much goes unspoken in our daily interactions, how much our thought processes can outstrip the language we rely on to communicate them.

And now, with the acceleration of knowledge, the pace of data, and the sheer surfeit of digital texts available to all, we reach a threshold. That subset of problems that once seemed unsolvable—those issues of linguistic alienation, polyphony, multi-layered signification—will soon vanish into the background. The very density of these works will be digested, perhaps with ease, by a new wave of readers who are as accustomed to navigating the dense underbrush of our hyper-extended present as a surfer is to catching waves. But here’s the kicker: this will give rise to entirely new problems—ones we haven’t yet identified because they operate in dimensions we haven’t yet mapped.

The real challenge, then, becomes the next frontier: understanding not the literary traditions themselves but the techniques we need to navigate the flood of meaning these works create. Once you’ve cracked the code of Joyce, what’s left? Is it even possible to comprehend everything these dense, allusive works promise? We know it’s not the works themselves that are the final hurdle; it’s our own ability to continuously map new territory in an ever-expanding field of meaning.

And so we come to the density of meaning per output unit. What happens when all the complexities of the human condition are compressed into a form that fits neatly into the 256 characters of a tweet, or an AI-generated chunk of text? Do we lose something in the reduction, or is there an inevitable new complexity emerging in these bite-sized, endlessly regurgitated samples? What once was literary polyphony becomes an algorithmic symphony—and in that shifting balance, the real question is no longer “How can we interpret this?” but rather, “Can we survive the onslaught of interpretation itself?”

Certainly—there’s a deeper undercurrent worth exploring here. The act of parsing these complex works becomes not only an intellectual exercise but also a mode of survival in a world that thrives on constant information saturation. The classic novels, now deconstructed and decoded through the lens of data flows, shift from dense tomes to repositories of human cognition, a sort of cultural gymnasium where our minds stretch and flex.

But here’s the twist: as we navigate this literary wilderness, we start to wonder if we’re simply observing our own evolution in real-time. These texts, dense and chaotic as they may be, weren’t just about showcasing human brilliance in syntax; they were reflections of their own technological moments. Joyce was mapping a world on the verge of modernity’s collapse. Pynchon, standing on the threshold of the digital age, wrote about systems that entangled and ate themselves. Burroughs wasn’t just writing about addiction or control—he was laying the groundwork for a new form of text-based reality, one where meaning itself could be hacked.

Now, we’re positioned in a similar place—a world where understanding is increasingly about processing layers of reality at a pace that renders “traditional” comprehension obsolete. The more we dissect these works, the more we realize: they aren’t just meant to be read in the classic sense. They’re meant to be absorbed—the way one absorbs data, the way one tunes out the noise to hear a signal.

This reshaping of the reading experience, this traversal through layered complexity, will fundamentally shift our cultural landscape. The question isn’t just whether we’ll continue to read Joyce or Faulkner but how we will read them when the very mechanics of thought and meaning have changed under our feet. As these works are absorbed into the fabric of digital culture, perhaps they’ll serve not only as cultural touchstones but as primitive codes for the future—manuals for surviving in a world where the line between the human and the machine is becoming increasingly hard to define.

Ultimately, the future of these works may not lie in their interpretation at all. Instead, it may lie in how they evolve in parallel with the tools we use to interpret them—how they function as a mirror for the modern human mind, which is no longer tethered to traditional forms of understanding but is continually shaping and reshaping its own cognitive boundaries.