When NYC “free speech” liberals dedicated themselves to fretting over “cancel culture,” I went mute and refused to engage, and instead simply proceeded as if that entire discourse didn’t exist. This worked out very well for me. And through that experience, I seem to have built the exact set of skills I have now deployed to pretend A.I. doesn’t exist, and for me it simply does not. The mind is very mysterious and I semi-religiously think it has special capabilities. I have disabled A.I. from every program and platform I use, and with Google, I use the web filter to bypass A.I. I doubt it will fall apart like the cancel culture discourse. (Blaming progressives for free speech suppression is especially ironic now that the Trump people have absolutely mastered it.) But for people who have dedicated their lives to reading and writing and art, and have always done so, there is absolutely no reason for them to upend how they work. 

When I encounter people who insist there is no escaping A.I. and they try to force me to discuss it, they often seem threatened by someone else’s personal refusal of the future to which they have, for some reason, dedicated themselves. Even as they mostly claim it will be dire, these same people also say we have to talk about A.I., use it, live in its world instead of our own. Jouissance always has some dirty part to it; turbo-charged nihilism isn’t mine. (My own death drive is 1.0.) People are at their worst, somehow, in a lot of these conversations. But meanwhile I have a question: if we use these new technologies to combine Jaron Lanier and Olga Tokarczuk into one wypipo dreadlocked Janus face, do they cancel each other out?