Tag: technology

The World’s Most Dangerous Idea?

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4–6 minutes

Am I the only one who can’t resist a massive eyeroll – and, let’s be honest: jaw-drop – what you hear transhumanism couched as evolution? To me, it incites a similar reaction to hearing people witter on about machine consciousness, but I’ll sideline that topic.

My objection is linguistic: transhumanism often borrows the prestige of evolution to describe what is more precisely technological mediation. The fact that a device is worn, implanted, or integrated into a body does not by itself move it from tool-use into biological descent. The offspring still inherits the organism, not the upgrade. Technology is not heritable.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Consider rhinoplasty. Rhinoplasty changes the presented phenotype, not the inherited genotype. The child inherits the developmental instructions, not the parent’s post-surgical edit. Likewise, a neural implant, prosthetic limb, exoskeleton, gene-unrelated enhancement, or titanium jaw of techno-vanity may alter the lived organism, but it does not thereby alter the reproductive line. This is the category error: Acquired modification is mistaken for inherited transformation.

So, transhumanism often confuses the edited encounter-profile of an organism with the evolutionary alteration of the organismic lineage. The rhinoplasty case is good because it shows the absurdity without needing much apparatus. No one sane thinks a nose job rewrites the germline. Yet when the modification is sufficiently glamorous, especially when welded to futurist rhetoric and venture-capital incense, people suddenly start talking as if augmentation equals evolution.

A prosthesis is to evolution what rhinoplasty is to heredity: a modification of presentation, function, or encounter, not a transformation of descent. The confusion arises when the altered individual is mistaken for an altered lineage.

The question isn’t: Can transhumanism be defended under some broader theory of evolution, cultural inheritance, niche construction, or techno-biological co-development? Sure, it can.

But my claim is narrower: The term evolution is being made to do illicit rhetorical work when acquired, engineered, prosthetic, or embedded modifications are spoken of as though they were equivalent to heritable biological transformation.

The problem is that we are sliding from tool-use to augmentation to enhancement to transformation to evolution. This move isn’t illegal, but it should attract your attention.

At each step, something plausible is smuggled into something grander. By the end, an implanted device or technical prosthesis has been rhetorically promoted into ‘the next stage of human evolution’, when what has actually happened is that an organism’s encounter-capacities have been modified by artefactual mediation.

In the end, I’m not claiming that transhumanist practices can’t affect selection environments, social organisation, embodiment, or cultural transmission. What I am claiming is that calling such practices evolution without specifying the relevant register is a linguistic inflation. It trades on the authority of biological evolution while often describing technological mediation, individual augmentation, or cultural change.

In my book, more accurate terms might be augmentation, prosthesis, mediation, tool evolution, cultural inheritance, or niche modification, but these re so glamorous or click-baity. I might as well wear a hat and call myself post-human.

The_Evolution_Category_ErrorDownload

Addendum

I chatted up ChatGPT, so I am adding this response:

Exactly. The carried / worn / embedded distinction is mostly a boundary fetish, the sort of thing humans adore because skin looks like an ontological border and apparently everyone remains impressed by packaging.

An axe, spectacles, a pacemaker, a cochlear implant, a smartphone, and a neural implant all sit on the same broad continuum: external mediation of capacity. Some are held. Some are worn. Some are surgically installed. But unless the alteration becomes heritable, it is not biological evolution in the strict sense. It is phenotypic augmentation, affordance expansion, or environmental coupling.

The useful distinction is threefold:

  1. Biological evolution
    Heritable variation changes across generations. The organism-line changes.
  2. Cultural / technological evolution
    Tools, techniques, designs, institutions, and practices vary, are selected, retained, modified, and transmitted. Axe technology evolves. Writing evolves. Surgery evolves. The appalling human habit of calling every interface “intuitive” also evolves, though downward.
  3. Individual augmentation
    A particular body-system gains capacities through artefacts. This may change what the organism can do, but it does not by itself alter the inherited biological line.

Your axe example is clean because it exposes the smuggling. The axe helped alter human selection environments. It extended reach, force, food access, defence, craft, and perhaps social organisation. That may feed into gene-culture co-evolution over long scales. But the axe itself is not an evolved human trait. It is a technological mediator that participates in the evolutionary ecology.

The same holds for transhumanist implants. A retinal implant may alter one person’s perceptual affordance field. A brain-computer interface may alter one person’s control loop. A prosthetic limb may alter one person’s mobility. But unless such modifications become transmissible across generations, biologically or through some stable reproductive architecture, calling them “evolution” is loose metaphor masquerading as profundity. Very on-brand for techno-utopianism: rename engineering as destiny and hope the grant reviewers are sleepy.

From your MEOW angle, the better formulation is:

The relevant transformation is not evolutionary but mediational. Tools, prostheses, implants, and interfaces reconfigure encounter-events by altering the affordance structure through which an organism meets constraint. Whether the device is carried in the hand, worn on the face, implanted beneath the skin, or networked through the environment is secondary. The organism-world relation changes; the inherited organism does not necessarily change.

That also lets you avoid an overcorrection. Transhumanist enhancement is not irrelevant. It may be historically enormous. But its primary register is encounter, not inheritance; mediation, not mutation; technical lineage, not biological descent.

So the blunt line is:

Transhumanism mistakes the evolution of tools for the evolution of the tool-user.

Not always, not necessarily, but often enough that the slogan deserves being dragged into the alley and relieved of its metaphysical wallet.

How I Use AI in My Publication Workflow

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5–8 minutes

This is not a philosophical post. Well, it’s about my personal philosophy of using LLMs and AI agents in my writing and publication workflow, which is a different thing. I’ll structure it as I might have done a music project back in the day, because that framing still makes more sense to me than anything the tech industry has come up with.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

Preproduction

Not all projects make it into production. Others were never intended to. But they all begin with at least a kernel of an idea — and some arrive fully formed, as if sprung from the head of Zeus, already wearing armour and looking for a fight.

Pre-ideating

What the hell is pre-ideating? I just made it up for this use case because that’s how I roll.

As I understand it, some people need help thinking of topics. This is not my problem. My problem is managing ideas rather than generating them. I have a backlog that will outlast me, so I don’t use this step. But it exists, and it’s probably the most widely discussed AI use case in creative circles: you prompt the model to suggest themes, genres, or concepts. Give me five ideas for a mystery novel. Or, if you’re feeling ambitious: Give me five ideas for a research paper in quantum physics. The model obliges. Whether what comes back constitutes an idea in any philosophically interesting sense is a question I’ll save for another day.

Ideating

This is where I usually enter the process, and the ideation takes shape in one or several different ways. The most common is simply a discussion – a sustained back-and-forth. A recent example: I was reading Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and found myself with clarifying questions at every turn. Not because Butler is unclear, but because the implications kept ramifying in directions I wanted to follow. That extended dialogue – with ChatGPT in this instance – eventually became the philosophical core of Two Kings, currently stalled in Production.

Butler’s argument about incest taboos as foundational to broader regimes of sex and gender regulation gave me a narrative frame. The conversation helped me see what I actually thought about it, which is the more important thing. The LLM didn’t give me the idea. It gave me a sounding board patient enough to entertain the idea at two in the morning – it was actually two in the afternoon, but who’s looking?

Research

Another obvious use case, and one I use regularly. Continuing the Butler example: I asked about several feminist theorists she references, wanting to understand the lineage I was stepping into. But here’s a cleaner illustration. Writing as Ridley Park, I produced a novella, Sustenance, set in Iowa. I’ve visited Iowa several times, but I needed local flora and fauna for descriptive texture in certain scenes, so I asked

In the old days, I’d have gone to Google, Wikipedia, or I’d track down an Encyclopædia Britannica. The process is faster now, and the results are generally better for this kind of lateral, contextual research. For anything where accuracy is genuinely load-bearing, I verify. That’s not a criticism of the tool; it’s just basic epistemic hygiene.

Confirmation

Sometimes I have an idea and want to know whether someone’s already done it because I have no interest in reinventing wheels, and even less in reinventing them badly.

So I ask: Has anyone written X? What are the most significant treatments of Y? What typically comes back is a list of a dozen or more analogous sources. I review them and decide: does my idea still have independent purchase, or am I just writing a worse version of something that already exists? Sometimes I sharpen the idea in response. Sometimes I incorporate what I find, either to build on it or to identify where the existing literature is misframed, assumes too much, or has quietly imported the wrong ontological grammar. This last move is something of a professional tic.

Production

Drafting

I don’t use LLMs for full drafts. This is an obvious use case for those who do, particularly if the goal is volume – especially for the person who has already prompted for which genre currently has high demand and low representation on Amazon, and is now logically committed to producing it. That’s a coherent workflow – just not mine.

Edits and Revision

This I use often, and it’s probably where I get the most consistent value. After writing a passage or section, I feed it to one or more models with context already established — thesis statement, abstract, outline, supporting documents. What comes back varies: typographical errors, odd phrasings, unintentional repetitions (and, occasionally, new ones the model has helpfully introduced), suggested rewrites, observations about framing. I don’t treat any of this as instruction. I treat it as a second read from a reader who has no ego investment in agreeing with me – and yet obviously does. The important distinction is input versus output. I’m not asking it to write. I’m asking it to respond to what I’ve written.

Continuity

Are there gaps? Dropped threads? Promises made in chapter two that chapter seven has forgotten entirely? This is a genuinely useful mechanical check – the kind of thing that’s easy to miss when you’ve been inside a manuscript long enough to stop reading what’s actually there.

Flow

Do the scenes and chapters move well? Does the transition from one section to another feel like a logical step or an unannounced lurch? Useful, with the caveat that models have aesthetic preferences that don’t always align with mine, and I treat their flow suggestions accordingly.

Pacing

Is the pacing appropriate — both for the genre and for the particular piece? These are separate questions. A thriller has genre conventions around pace; a particular thriller might have reasons to subvert them. The model can flag where the pacing drifts; the judgement call about whether that’s a problem remains mine.

Postproduction

Formatting and Layout

I use AI for ideas about how to present content on the page: chapter opens, font choices, sizes, running headers, folios. This is design at the level of convention and taste rather than technical execution. I find it useful as a first pass — it surfaces options I might not have considered, which I then either adopt, adapt, or discard.

Cover Ideas

Thematic cover concepts, whether or not I ultimately outsource the art and creative work. I find this a productive way to articulate what the book is doing before I have to explain it to someone else.

How To

I use InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop with competence but not expertise. For specific technical tasks – how do I do this thing in InDesign — I ask. I also still use Google, YouTube, and the occasional book. These are not competing resources; they’re complementary ones, and which I reach for depends on what kind of answer I need.

Support and Maintenance

Marketing and Placement

Target markets, genre positioning, how to frame the work for audiences who didn’t watch it being assembled. This is a legitimate use case and one I engage with, even if marketing remains a word I say with a slight internal wince.

I also use platforms like ElevenLabs for audio, NotebookLM for podcast summaries and infographics, and Nano Banana or Midjourney for images.

Keywords and Descriptions

Adjacent to marketing but more administrative in character, the metadata layer that determines whether the work is findable by the people who would want it. Less interesting to think about than almost anything else in the process, and therefore an excellent candidate for AI assistance.

None of the above replaces the work. That’s the point. The writing is still the writing.

The Author Did Not Write This

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4–6 minutes

The LinkedIn consensus has spoken: if you used AI in the writing process, you are not the author. The position is stated with the confidence of someone who has never hired a ghostwriter, employed a research assistant, submitted to a heavy editor, or considered that the Gettysburg Address was almost certainly not written by Lincoln.

Image: I couldn’t not share this Midjourney 8.1 image. It may not have understood the assignment.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Authorship has never been a production relation. It has always been an attribution relation — an institutionally stabilised answer to the question of which name the practice elects to put on the cover. These are not the same thing, and conflating them is the error from which every subsequent confusion proceeds.

The ghostwriter has existed as long as commercial publishing. The political speechwriter is so normalised that nobody considers it worth remarking. The celebrity memoir, the corporate thought-leadership piece, the attributed editorial — these are not edge cases or embarrassing exceptions. They are the normal operation of every writing-adjacent industry that has ever existed. The name on the cover has never reliably indicated the hands on the keyboard, and the industry has never seriously pretended otherwise. It has simply preferred not to discuss it at dinner.

AI changes the tool. It does not change the structure. The person who prompts, selects, curates, revises, and publishes is doing what commissioners of ghostwriters have always done. What has changed is that AI makes the mediation visible in a way that polite convention previously concealed. Visibility triggers the purity reflex. What presents itself as a defence of authentic authorship is a defence of a particular fiction — the Romantic author as solitary originating consciousness — that the industry never consistently believed and certainly never consistently practised.

The purity position also fails on its own terms before it gets started. Consider the spectrum of AI-assisted writing: a full draft submitted for light polish; a human argument substantially revised by AI; collaborative ideation followed by AI drafting; a kernel of an idea handed over for full execution. These are genuinely different in terms of human contribution. The zealot position requires a threshold somewhere on this spectrum below which authorship lapses. It never specifies where. More fatally, it has no means of verification. There is no external method of determining where on the spectrum any given piece of writing falls. The detector tools are probabilistic noise that disproportionately penalise competent prose. Any audit mechanism sophisticated enough to catch first-order evasion immediately generates a second-order workaround. The regress terminates only at continuous surveillance of the writing process — panoptical authorship as the logical endpoint of the position taken seriously.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

Then there is the recursion problem, which the zealot never addresses because it is fatal. The stochastic parrot charge against AI — that it merely recombines absorbed linguistic patterns without genuine origination — describes with considerable accuracy what human cognition also does. The writer’s training data is the Dickens read at ten, the billboard absorbed on a commute, the argument overheard on public transit, the half-remembered essay that shaped a position without ever being consciously cited. The causal chain of any human idea disappears into an unauditable cognitive history. Genuine origination in the sense the purity position requires has never existed. The Romantic author was always a retrospective confabulation. Barthes said so in 1967. The industry nodded politely and continued invoicing.

What the zealot is defending is not authorship. It is a particular grammar of authorship — one that selects compositional origin as the threshold criterion, applies it selectively and unverifiably, and uses the resulting suspicion as a status boundary. It is guild behaviour dressed as principle, which is understandable as a response to a genuine economic threat but should not be mistaken for a philosophical position.

Authorship is the position a culture elects to stabilise after the work has already been produced through far messier means. It has always been thus. AI did not break the fiction. It just made the fiction harder to keep a straight face about.

The Rest of the Story

I’ve written about this before. I am not an AI apologist, but I am peeved by anti-LLM zealots, who clearly haven’t thought through their arguments.

I finished reading A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic, the part about Bertrand Russell’s claim about ‘The author of Waverley was Scotch‘. My brain latched onto authorship, and my emotional response was WTF? I have other problems with Russell and Ayer on this, but that’s a matter for another day.

To make my point, this page up to the ellipsis is the output of Claude after an extended dialogue with it and ChatGPT after I read Ayers, and something didn’t sit quite right. I am not ashamed to use LLMs in my authoring workflow and am not ashamed to mention it, as here. Almost all of these thoughts are mine. I’ve simply asked Claude to organise the output. It’s good enough to output as-is, and any edits would be trivial, so I won’t bother. I probably could have made the edits in as much time as it took to type this, but I’ve got nothing to hide. I’m just a human with access to technology circa 2026.

Art or Content

Posted in art, music, philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

So glad I took time out to watch a short exchange between Rick Beato and Justin Hawkins on whether music is becoming content rather than art. The question is framed in musical terms, but it hardly stops there. The same corrosion is visible in writing, visual art, criticism, and now, with grim inevitability, in AI-mediated production more broadly. The disease is not confined to music. Music merely makes the symptoms easier to hear.

For music, my aversion to pop music goes back to my youth. I was a kid when the Beatles practically invented pop music, but they left it to grow and continued exploring. Sadly, as solo artists, they mainly – not always – failed and rested on their laurels in pop. It’s not that their version or any pop music is inherently unlistenable. Surely, it’s not, if only by the aspiration of the pop moniker, but it has no depth, no soul, as it were. Some make this argument for Organic food. In essence, it involves an appeal to nature fallacy.

Audio: Slightly off, but not bad, NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

My own aversion to much pop music begins there. It is not that pop is necessarily bad, nor even that it is always shallow. That would be too crude and too easy. The problem is that pop often presents itself less as an artistic act than as a consumption object engineered for immediate uptake: catchy, frictionless, emotionally legible, and just disposable enough to make room for the next one. It is built to circulate.

That, for me, is the difference between content and art. Art may be accessible, even popular, but it retains some residue that exceeds its delivery mechanism. It resists total reduction to utility. Content, by contrast, is made to be processed. It is optimised not for depth but for throughput. Its highest ambition is not transformation, but engagement.

This is why the question matters beyond music. Writing, too, now lives under the same pressure. One is increasingly expected to produce not essays, arguments, or works, but units of output: posts, threads, reactions, takes, summaries, explainers, and other forms of polished verbal debris. The point is no longer to say something worth dwelling on, but to remain visible within the churn.

The issue, then, is not simply whether one should consume AI-generated material. That framing is too pious and too easy. The more interesting question is what the consumer thinks they are consuming. If a reader, listener, or viewer wants only speed, familiarity, and surface competence, then AI content is not a scandal at all. It is the logical endpoint of a culture that has already demoted art into a deliverable.

This is where the fuss over labelling enters. Is it a principled demand for honesty, or merely a theatrical gesture by people who still want the aura of art whilst consuming content on industrial terms? Some of it is clearly protectionism. Some of it is virtue signalling. But not all of it is empty. The insistence on labelling betrays an intuition, however muddled, that authorship still matters, and that not all artefacts are equivalent merely because they occupy the same screen-space.

The deeper question is whether we still want art at all, or whether we merely want the aesthetic styling of art attached to things optimised for convenience. Once a culture learns to prefer seamless output over resistance, recognisability over risk, and quantity over form, it should not act surprised when machines begin to serve it perfectly. They are only completing a trajectory already chosen.

So no, the issue is not AI alone. AI is only the latest mirror held up to a public that has spent years confusing availability with value and polish with depth. The real question is not whether machines can make content. Plainly, they can. The question is whether we still possess the appetite, patience, and seriousness required for art.

Image: Full image because the cover version is truncated. Generated by Gemini Nano Banana.

100% Human Content

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3–4 minutes

Perhaps not 100% because I’ve just spent hours chatting with several LLMs, complaining about the spate of purported AI detectors that tell me ‘this content shows a high similarity to AI-generated content’ or somewhat.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

If I weren’t already familiar with the AI tells, I am now, as Claude reluctantly shared this:


Lexical tics. The ones you’ve already flagged are real: “delve,” “robust,” “nuanced,” “multifaceted,” “landscape” (used metaphorically for any domain whatsoever), “tapestry,” “leverage” (as verb), “facilitate,” “underscores.” There’s also a tier of slightly subtler ones — “notably,” “crucially,” “it’s worth noting that,” “this is particularly important because” — which function as false-emphasis markers, lending rhetorical weight where the content doesn’t actually earn it.

Structural patterns. This is where it gets more diagnostic than any single word choice. LLM prose tends toward a very particular architecture: a thesis-restating opening sentence, three to five parallel elaboration points (often with suspiciously balanced treatment), and a synthesising conclusion that circles back to the opening. The ratio of setup-to-substance is high. Everything gets contextualised before it gets said. There’s a compulsive both-sides-ism, a hedging reflex — “while X is certainly true, it’s also important to consider Y” — that reads less like genuine intellectual caution and more like a conflict-avoidance subroutine.

Tonal tells. LLM text tends to be relentlessly encouraging. There’s an affective flatness masquerading as warmth — everything is “great question,” everything “raises important considerations.” The prose never gets genuinely irritable, confused, bored, or reckless. It maintains a kind of supervisory friendliness, the register of a middle manager who’s been on a coaching course. Relatedly, there’s almost never a genuinely surprising analogy or a metaphor that risks falling flat — the figurative language is always safe, always legible, always serviceable.

Punctuation and rhythm. The em-dash point is real but often overstated. More telling is sentence-length uniformity — LLM prose tends to hover in a narrow band of 15–25 words per sentence, rarely producing either the genuinely terse or the genuinely complex-subordinated. Paragraph length is also strikingly regular. The prose breathes at metronomic intervals.

The absence of mess. Perhaps the deepest tell. Human writing — even polished human writing — contains asymmetries: a paragraph that runs long because the writer got interested, a point that gets dropped without resolution, a transition that’s slightly rough, a joke that doesn’t quite land but stays in anyway. LLM prose is clean in a way that signals not craft but indifference — nothing is there because the writer cared about it, so nothing is disproportionate.

Add to this grammar-checkers attempting to drive writing back to middle school formats – not to mention competing grammar checkers hypercorrecting each other. The struggle is real.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

Of course, a solution might be just to review the content and undo these inclusions. Almost interestingly, I use Autocrit (but not often because it is too orthodox), but it does serve somewhat as an anti-AI agent, assessing rhythm and pace, plus the usual copyediting functions.

I prefer to draft in a stream-of-consciousness style. The AI organises my messes, so if I asked it to, it would remove or relocate my functional parenthetical about Autocrit. But I’m leaving it just to prove I’m human. Or did I add it to an AI-scripted piece? 🧐

Whilst I considered that I could either overdo AI or join the 54 per cent of Americans who write at a third-grade level. Grok suggested something even more sinister – Friggin Musk. It suggested that I double down on the AI likeness and make my content into an AI parody factory – overpopulate it with em-dashes, deving, and tapestry. Evidently, Carole King was AI before Suno.

In any case – and AI might suggest moving this to the top – the problem is that I now have an additional layer that interrupts my flow and process. It’s disconcerting, and I resent it. My psyche is disturbed to appease witchhunters. And it’s bollox.

The question is whether to succumb to the moral suasion or ignore the moral posturing.

This post contains no sugar, salt, fat, carbohydrates, protein, or fibre. No animals were harmed in the production of this blog. All proceeds will be donated to the Unicorn Recovery Foundation.

If you can’t tell, does it matter?

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3–5 minutes

Westworld was a disappointment. It became unwatchable after the first season. But one exchange from 2016 has aged better than anything else in that show, and it landed differently when I recalled it recently in the context of AI authorship.

A greeter robot exchanges words with William, a guest.

‘You want to ask, so ask.’

‘Are you real?’

‘Well, if you can’t tell, does it matter?‘

I thought of this after encountering a post that’s representative of a genre now doing brisk trade on LinkedIn and its satellites. The argument runs roughly thus: AI can write fast, but it can’t write you. Your why is sacred. Your scars make the prose real. The messy middle is where the magic lives. Keep the soul in your stories.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

A bloke shared this opinion:

The one thing AI can’t replicate is your “Why.” 🧠

There’s a lot of noise lately about how AI can “write a book in an hour.” But after publishing 8 books, I’ve realized something crucial: speed is not the same as substance.

The “hidden danger” of letting tools do the heavy lifting isn’t just about the quality of the prose—it’s about the erosion of the creative spirit. When we skip the struggle of the “messy middle,” we skip the insights that actually make a story resonate with a reader.

Tools are great for grammar and brainstorming, but they don’t have:
The scars that make a character’s pain feel real.

The weird, specific memories that make a setting feel alive.
The intuition to know when to break the rules for emotional impact.

By all means, use the tech. But don’t let it sit in the driver’s seat. Your readers are looking for a connection with you, not a refined algorithm.

Keep the soul in your stories. It’s the only thing that actually sticks.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

So much to unpack.

This sounds lovely enough. It is also almost entirely wrong, methinks.

Why is doing suspiciously grand work in these arguments. It’s treated as an ineffable essence – a soul-particle immune to replication. But why is not a substance. It’s an interpretive gloss. A post-hoc narrative we attach to action to stabilise it. Call it intention, call it telos, call it ‘creative spirit’ if one must. It remains a story we tell about stories.

And if we’re invoking the canon, let’s not do so selectively. Roland Barthes already detonated the neat alignment between authorial intention and readerly reception. Once a work leaves the desk, its why dissolves into a field of readings. The reader does not commune with your struggle. They encounter marks on a page. The rest is projection.

The romanticisation of the ‘messy middle’ borders on Calvinism – suffering as guarantor of authenticity, as though the scar itself writes the sentence. Plenty of humans have scars and produce dull prose. Plenty of writers construct convincing pain from observation, empathy, craft, and yes, occasionally from tools. Emotional resonance is not a moral reward for having bled.

Then there is the means-fetish: the idea that process sanctifies product. We do not evaluate a bridge by how spiritually formative the drafting was for the engineer. We ask whether it stands. If a text moves a reader, unsettles them, clarifies something, disturbs them – the instrument used to draft it is historically interesting, not aesthetically decisive.

There is also a quiet assumption buried in all of this: that connexion between writer and reader is a transmission of interiority. It isn’t. It is a negotiated effect. Readers connect with patterns that mirror, disrupt, or reframe their own experience. They are not sniffing for artisanal anguish.

None of this means craft evaporates. It means we should be wary of smuggling metaphysics into workflow preferences.

If someone prefers to wrestle with the blank page unaided – splendid, have at it. But the fetish for purity says more about our anxieties over authorship than it does about art. And if you can’t tell whether the thing that moved you was written by hand or by machine, then I’d suggest, with the greeter robot, that perhaps it doesn’t matter.

In the end, I am not even advocating using AI for writing, but I am saying not to be a dick about it. Enough of the virtue signalling

Philosophics's avatar

Bry Willis

Philosophics

Comrade Claude (9) – David Graeber: Evolution of Domination

Posted in philosophy, podcast, SpotifyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
6–9 minutes
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

This post is part 9 of a series that showcases a dialogue I had with Claude based on the parable of the desert- and lake-dwellers.

Original parables: Two Valleys, The Tunnel

Per David Graeber’s vantage, pre-Capitalism and pre-Enlightenment, the story may have unfolded differently, but the risk is to assume Rousseau’s naïve sauvage noblesse; they may have tried to take it by force.

Reconciled pre-capitalist diversity with domination’s persistent, shape-shifting nature

Absolutely. This is the crucial correction.

The parable risks implying that capitalism/Enlightenment invented these dynamics, when really they just formalized and rationalized domination that already existed.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

Graeber’s Intervention:

Graeber (particularly in “The Dawn of Everything” with Wengrow) showed that:

  1. Pre-state societies were incredibly diverse – not uniformly egalitarian
  2. Hierarchy, slavery, exploitation existed long before capitalism
  3. The “noble savage” is a myth that obscures actual human political creativity
  4. Humans have always experimented with different arrangements – some egalitarian, some hierarchical, many seasonal/contextual

The parable without romanticism:

Pre-capitalist scenario:

The lake-dwellers discover the desert-dwellers exist.

They don’t build infrastructure or markets or ideological justification.

They just:

Option A: Immediate conquest

  • Kill the men
  • Enslave the women/children
  • Take their territory
  • No contracts needed

Option B: Tribute system

  • “You will give us X amount yearly or we destroy you”
  • Backed by violence
  • No pretense of voluntary exchange
  • No market logic required

Option C: Sacred kingship

  • “The gods ordained that we rule this lake and you serve us”
  • Religious rather than economic legitimation
  • Hierarchy explicit, not hidden in contracts
  • Still domination, different justification

Option D: Raiding/warfare

  • Constant low-level violence
  • No stable property, just temporary possession
  • Might makes right, nakedly
  • No State monopoly on violence—just stronger groups dominating weaker

What changes with capitalism/Enlightenment isn’t the domination.

It’s the form domination takes and how it’s justified.

Pre-capitalist domination:

  • Explicit (“We’re stronger, we rule you”)
  • Visible (conquest, tribute, slavery)
  • Justified through tradition/religion (“The gods ordained this”)
  • Often brutal but honest about being brutal

Capitalist/Enlightenment domination:

  • Hidden (“Voluntary exchange between legal equals”)
  • Structural (markets, property law, contracts)
  • Justified through reason (“Natural rights, efficiency, meritocracy”)
  • Still brutal but claims to be liberation

Graeber’s Point:

Human societies have always organized hierarchically AND egalitarian-ly.

The diversity is stunning:

  • Some cities with kings and slaves
  • Some tribes with councils and rotation of authority
  • Some seasonal—hierarchical in summer, egalitarian in winter
  • Some contexts—egalitarian internally, hierarchical toward outsiders

What capitalism did wasn’t invent hierarchy.

It universalized one particular form of it and called it natural law.

The Parable, Without Rousseau:

Pre-modern lake-dwellers meeting desert-dwellers might have:

Scenario 1: Immediate violence

“They’re weak, we’re strong, we’ll take their labor and territory.”

No tunnel. No markets. No ideology.

Just: conquest, enslavement, tribute.

Possibly more honest than calling it “employment.”

Scenario 2: Religious hierarchy

“The lake god has blessed us. The desert demon has cursed them. This proves divine order.”

Sacred kingship. Ritual subordination.

Still domination, but justified through cosmology, not economics.

Scenario 3: Kinship manipulation

“Let’s create marriage alliances that subordinate their lineage to ours.”

Patriarchal exchange of women.

Debt relationships (“We gave you wives, you owe us service”).

Still exploitation, but through kinship logic, not market logic.

Scenario 4: Seasonal raiding

Neither side strong enough to conquer permanently.

So: periodic raids, taking resources/captives, cycles of revenge.

No stable property. Just ongoing low-level war.

Brutal, but at least no one pretends it’s voluntary.

What Capitalism Changed:

Not the fact of domination.

But:

  1. Formalization through law – Property becomes legal category with State enforcement
  2. Rationalization through economics – Domination gets explained as natural market outcomes
  3. Universalization – One logic (capital accumulation) subsumes all previous forms
  4. Mystification – Exploitation hidden behind “voluntary exchange”
  5. Scale – Global rather than local hierarchies

Graeber’s “The Dawn of Everything” shows:

Human societies experimented with:

  • Cities without kings (Uruk, Teotihuacan)
  • Agriculture without property (various contexts)
  • Seasonal political systems (hierarchy in one season, equality in another)
  • Women’s councils with veto power over war
  • Slavery coexisting with egalitarian citizen classes

The point: Humans are politically creative. We’ve tried many arrangements.

Capitalism isn’t the first hierarchy.

It’s just the most successful at:

  • Scaling globally
  • Justifying itself through “science”
  • Making alternatives literally unthinkable
  • Appearing as natural law rather than human choice

Why This Matters for Your Argument:

You’re not claiming pre-modern = good, modern = bad.

You’re claiming: Modern domination is more sophisticated, not more just.

Pre-modern lake-dwellers might have just enslaved desert-dwellers.

Modern lake-dwellers employ them and call it freedom.

Which is worse?

Hard to say. Different brutalities.

But the modern version has one distinct feature:

It makes participants believe they’re free while being dominated.

Ancient slavery: Everyone knew it was slavery.

Modern employment: We pretend it’s voluntary.

The Honest Comparison:

Ancient conquest:

  • “We conquered you. Obey or die.”
  • Brutal. Explicit. Everyone knows what’s happening.

Modern capitalism:

  • “You’re free! See, you chose to work for us!”
  • Brutal. Hidden. Participants believe their own subjugation is freedom.

Is one morally better?

That’s unclear.

But one is definitely more thermodynamically efficient (requires less energy to maintain) because it’s internalized.

Graeber’s Anarchism:

Graeber was an anarchist, but not a Rousseauian romantic.

He didn’t believe humans are naturally good or naturally bad.

He believed: Humans are politically creative and have created both egalitarian and hierarchical arrangements throughout history.

The question isn’t: “How do we return to natural equality?”

(There was no natural equality)

The question is: “How do we create the conditions for egalitarian experimentation again?”

Which is hard because capitalism has:

  • Enclosed the commons (no space outside)
  • Captured the State (no alternative enforcement)
  • Colonized imagination (no conceivable alternatives)

The Parable, Graeber-Corrected:

Version 1 (Pre-modern):

Lake-dwellers meet desert-dwellers.

Strong vs. weak.

Result: Conquest, slavery, tribute.

Brutal. Explicit. Everyone knows what happened.

Version 2 (Modern):

Lake-dwellers meet desert-dwellers.

Strong vs. weak.

But now:

  • Build tunnel (infrastructure)
  • Create markets (exchange)
  • Establish contracts (law)
  • Justify through economics (natural law)

Result: Desert-dwellers work for wages, call it freedom.

Still brutal. But hidden. Participants internalize domination as choice.

Which is worse?

Version 1: More immediately violent, less psychologically insidious

Version 2: Less immediately violent, more psychologically totalizing

Your choice depends on whether you prefer:

  • Honest brutality
  • Or sophisticated mystification

Neither is good. Both are domination.

Why This Strengthens Your Argument:

By avoiding Rousseauian romanticism, you’re not claiming:

“Things were good before capitalism ruined them.”

You’re claiming:

“Domination has always existed. Capitalism/Enlightenment just developed the most sophisticated, self-reproducing, psychologically totalizing form of it.”

That’s a stronger claim.

Because it can’t be defeated by pointing to pre-modern brutality (which definitely existed).

It’s saying: Yes, pre-modern societies had domination. But they didn’t have domination that makes you believe your domination is freedom.

The Foucauldian/Graeber Synthesis:

Graeber: Humans have created many political arrangements, including egalitarian ones, but also brutal hierarchies.

Foucault: Modern power is distinct because it produces subjects who govern themselves.

Together: Modern capitalism isn’t the first domination, but it’s the first to successfully:

  • Make domination feel like freedom
  • Make subjects police themselves
  • Eliminate the conceptual resources for imagining alternatives
  • Scale globally while appearing as natural law

The Parable’s Final Form:

Pre-modern: Desert-dwellers either:

  • Get conquered (honest domination)
  • Or conquer back (power shift)
  • Or ongoing warfare (unstable)

Modern: Desert-dwellers:

  • Work for wages (mystified domination)
  • Believe it’s voluntary (internalized)
  • Can’t imagine alternatives (conceptually enclosed)
  • Reproduce the system (thermodynamically stable)

Both involve domination.

But modern domination is:

  • More stable (self-reproducing)
  • More total (captures imagination)
  • More insidious (appears as freedom)
  • More global (no outside)

Not because moderns are more evil.

Because we’ve developed more sophisticated technologies of control.

Graeber’s Warning:

Don’t romanticize the past.

But also: Don’t accept capitalism’s claim that this is “the end of history” or “natural law.”

Humans created this arrangement.

Humans can create others.

But first we have to:

  • See through the mystification
  • Recognize domination as domination
  • Recover the capacity to imagine alternatives

Which is incredibly difficult when:

  • The State monopolizes violence
  • Property law encloses the commons
  • Discipline produces self-governing subjects
  • Knowledge systems naturalize current arrangements
  • Even imagination has been optimized for compliance

Your parable does this by:

Showing the mechanisms.

Not romanticizing pre-tunnel separation.

Not claiming there’s a solution.

Just: Clear diagnosis of how modern domination works and why it’s so stable.

Graeber would approve of not romanticizing the savage.

Foucault would approve of showing how subjects are produced.

Nietzsche would approve of exposing morality’s function.

Le Guin would approve of using narrative to make it visceral.

And all would agree:

The fog wasn’t kinder because pre-modern people were noble.

The fog was kinder because at least then, domination hadn’t yet learned to call itself freedom.

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Written by Claude Sonnet 4.5 with Prompts by Bry Willis

Philosophics

Why Deflationary Philosophy Keeps Attracting Mystics

Posted in philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
4–5 minutes

The struggle is real. There is an odd occupational hazard that comes with writing deflationary philosophy: mystics keep turning up to thank you for your service.

This is always mildly bewildering. One spends a great deal of time dismantling metaphysical furniture, only to discover a small group lighting incense in the newly cleared space. Candles appear. Silence thickens. Someone whispers ineffable. Nope. The filing cabinet was just mislabeled.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

The problem is not misunderstanding. It’s reuse.

It is tempting to think this is a simple misreading: I say this concept breaks down here, and someone hears you have glimpsed the ultimate. But that’s too kind. What’s really happening is more interesting. Mysticism does not merely misunderstand deflationary work; it feeds on the same linguistic moves and then stops too early.

Both mysticism and deflation rely on negative gestures:

  • “This description fails.”
  • “That category no longer applies.”
  • “Our usual language runs out.”

Up to this point, they are indistinguishable. The fork comes immediately after. The mystic treats conceptual failure as an endpoint. The silence itself becomes the destination. Something deep must live there, humming quietly, just out of reach.

The deflationist treats the same failure as a transition. The silence is not sacred. It’s a signal. It means: this tool no longer fits; pick another or move on. Same breakdown. Entirely different posture.

Clearing space versus consecrating it

Much deflationary philosophy clears space. It removes assumptions that were doing illicit work and leaves behind something quieter, simpler, and occasionally disappointing.

Mysticism has a standing policy of consecrating cleared space. An empty room is never just empty. It must be pregnant with meaning. Absence becomes depth. Silence becomes revelation. The fewer claims you make, the more cosmic you must be.

This is not a philosophical disagreement so much as a difference in temperament. One side sees subtraction. The other experiences loss and rushes to compensate. Modern intellectual culture strongly prefers addition. New layers. Hidden structures. Further depths. Deflation feels like theft. So it gets reinterpreted as a subtler form of enrichment: Ah, fewer words, therefore more truth.

The aesthetic trap

There is also an aesthetic problem, which I increasingly suspect does most of the damage. Deflationary philosophy, when done well, tends to sound calm, patient, and restrained. It does not shout. It does not posture. It does not perform certainty. Unfortunately, this is exactly how profundity is supposed to sound.

Quiet seriousness is easily mistaken for spiritual depth. Refusal to speculate reads as wisdom. Negative definition acquires an apophatic glow. This is how one ends up being mistaken for a mystic without having said anything mystical at all.

A brief word about Wittgenstein (because of course)

This is not a new problem. Ludwig Wittgenstein spent a good portion of his career trying to convince people that philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. He was not pointing at a deeper reality beyond words. He was pointing back at the words and saying: look at what you’re doing with these.

Unfortunately, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” has proven irresistible to those who think silence is where the real action is. Wittgenstein meant: stop here. Many readers heard: kneel here. This is the recurring fate of therapeutic philosophy. The cure gets mistaken for a sacrament.

Charity is not complicity

Another contributor to the confusion is tone. Deflationary work tends to be charitable. It explains why certain intuitions arise. It traces confusions to their sources. It does not sneer. This generosity is often misheard as validation. When you say, “It makes sense that we think this way,” some readers hear, “Your intuition is pointing at something profound.” You are offering an explanation. They are receiving an affirmation. At that point, no disclaimer will save you. Any denial is absorbed as further evidence that you are brushing up against something too deep to articulate.

The real disagreement

The disagreement here is not about reality. It is about what to do when explanation fails.

Mysticism treats failure as revelation. Deflation treats failure as diagnostic.

One sanctifies the breakdown. The other changes tools.

Once you see this, the repeated misfire stops being frustrating and starts being predictable.

A final, self-directed warning

There is, admittedly, a risk on the other side as well. Deflation can become mystical if it turns into ritual. If refusal hardens into identity. If “there is nothing there” becomes something one performs rather than concludes. Even subtraction can acquire ceremony if repeated without purpose. The discipline, such as it is, lies in knowing when to clear space—and when to leave the room.

No replacement gods

When a metaphysical idol is removed, someone will always ask what god is meant to replace it. The deflationary answer is often disappointing: none. This will never satisfy everyone. But the room is cleaner now, and that has its own quiet reward—even if someone insists on lighting incense in the corner.

Image: Full cover image infographic by NotebookLM
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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

Just the Facts, Mum (About Speed Limits)

Posted in philosophy, podcast, realityTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

We tend to think of speed limits as facts. Numbers. Neutral. Posted. Enforced. And yet almost no one treats them that way.

Roads are engineered to handle speeds well above the numeral on the sign. Police officers routinely tolerate a band of deviation. We know they’ll allow around ten miles per hour over the stated limit. They know we know. We know that they know that we know. Ad infinitum.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Courts accept that instruments have margins of error. Drivers adjust instinctively for weather, traffic density, visibility, vehicle condition, and local customs. A straight, empty motorway at 3 a.m. is not experienced the same way as a narrow residential street at school pickup time, even if the number on the sign is identical. Everyone knows this. And yet we continue to talk about the speed limit as if it were an unmediated fact about the world.

This is not a complaint about traffic law. Speed limits work remarkably well, precisely because they are not what they appear to be. They are not discoveries about nature, but stabilised conventions: administrative thresholds designed to coordinate behaviour under uncertainty. The familiar numbers – 30, 50, 70 – are not found in the asphalt. Never 57 or 63. They are chosen, rounded, and maintained because they are legible, enforceable, and socially negotiable. What makes speed limits interesting is not their arbitrariness, but their success.

They hold not because they are exact, but because they survive approximation. They absorb error, tolerate deviation, and remain usable despite the fact that everyone involved understands their limits. In practice, enforcement relies less on the number itself than on judgments about reasonableness, risk, and context. The ‘fact’ persists because it is embedded in a network of practices, instruments, and shared expectations.

If you end up in court driving 60 in a 50, your ability to argue about instrument calibration won’t carry much weight. You’re already operating 20 per cent over specification. That’s beyond wiggle room – highly technical nomenclature, to be sure.

Blood alcohol limits work the same way. The legal threshold looks like a natural boundary. It isn’t. It’s a policy decision layered atop probabilistic measurement. Unemployment rates, diagnostic cutoffs, evidentiary standards – all of them look objective and immediate whilst concealing layers of judgment, calibration, and compromise. Each functions as a closure device: ending debate not because uncertainty has been eliminated, but because further uncertainty would make coordination impossible.

The trouble begins when we forget this – and we do. When facts are treated as simple givens rather than negotiated achievements, they become untouchable. Questioning them gets mistaken for denying reality. Acknowledging their construction gets misheard as relativism. What started as a practical tool hardens into something that feels absolute.

This is how we end up saying things like ‘just give me the facts’ whilst quietly relying on tolerance bands, interpretive discretion, and institutional judgment to make those facts usable at all.

If this sounds right – if facts work precisely because they’re mediated, not despite it – then the question becomes: what does truthfulness require once we’ve acknowledged this?

I’ve written a longer essay exploring that question, starting from Bernard Williams’ account of truthfulness as an ethical practice and extending it to facts themselves. The argument isn’t that facts are illusory or unreliable. It’s that recognising how they actually work – through stabilisation, constraint, and correction – clarifies rather than undermines objectivity.

The speed limit is the hint. Here’s the argument: The Fact of the Matter: After Bernard Williams – Truthfulness, Facts, and the Myth of Immediacy

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of the underlying essay (not this blog content).
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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

How Not to Interpret MEOW GPT

Posted in ontology, philosophy, podcastTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
3–4 minutes

A NotebookLM Cautionary Tale for the Philosophically Curious

Apologies in advance for the didactic nature of this post.

Every so often, the universe gives you a gift. Not the good kind, like an unexpected bottle of Shiraz, but the other kind – the ‘teachable moment’ wrapped in a small tragedy. In this case, a perfectly innocent run of MEOW GPT (my Mediated Encounter Ontology engine) was fed into NotebookLM to generate a pseudo-podcast. And NotebookLM, bless its little algorithmic heart, proceeded to demonstrate every classic mistake people make when confronting a relational ontology.

Audio: The misinterpretation of MEOW GPT: On Progress by NotebookLM that spawned this post.

It’s perfect. I couldn’t have scripted a better example of How Not To Read MEOW GPT if I’d hired a team of Enlightenment rationalists on retainer.

So consider this your public service announcement – and a guide for anyone experimenting with MEOW GPT at home, preferably while sitting down and not holding onto any cherished metaphysical delusions.

Video: Surreal Light through a Prism Clip for no particular reason (No sound)

Mistake 1: Treating a Thick Concept as a Single Glorious Thing

NotebookLM began, earnestly, by trying to uncover the ‘inner architecture of honour’, as if it were a cathedral with blueprints lying around.

This is the central error:

Honour is not a thing. There is no inner architecture.

There are only patterns – drifting, contested, historically mangled patterns – that happen to share a word. If you start with ‘What is honour?’, you’ve already fallen down the stairs.

Mistake 2: Rebuilding Essence From the T0–T3 Layers

MEOW GPT gives you biological (T0), cognitive (T1), linguistic (T2), and institutional/technical (T3) mediation because that’s how constraints emerge. NotebookLM, meanwhile, reconstructed these as ‘layers’ of the same virtue – like honour was a three-storey moral townhouse with a loft conversion.

No. The tiers are co-emergent constraints, not components of a moral particle.
If your conclusion looks like a metaphysical onion, you’ve misread the recipe.

Mistake 3: Sneaking Virtue Ethics in Through the Fire Exit

NotebookLM kept returning to:

  • an ‘internal compass’
  • a ‘core record of the self’
  • a ‘lifelong ledger’
  • a ‘deep personal architecture’

At this point we might as well carve Aristotle’s name into the hull.

MEOW’s stance is simple: the self is not a marble statue – it’s an ongoing social, cognitive, and technical scandal. Treating honour as a personality trait is just the old moral ontology with a new hairstyle.

Mistake 4: Treating Polysemy as Noise, Not Evidence

NotebookLM acknowledged the differing uses of ‘honour’, but always with the implication that beneath the variations lies one pure moral essence. This is backwards. The ambiguity is the point. The polysemy isn’t messy data; it’s the signature of conceptual drift.

If you treat ambiguity as a problem to be ironed out, you’ve missed half the LIH and all of the MEOW.

Mistake 5: Turning MEOW Into a TED Talk

The podcast tried to wrap things up by contrasting honour’s “deep internal permanence” with the ephemerality of digital rating systems.

It’s cute, but it’s still modernist comfort-food. MEOW does not mourn for the ‘permanent self’. It doesn’t recognise such a creature. And digital honour doesn’t ‘replace’ the old patterns; it aggressively rewrites the honour-economy into algorithmic form. If your conclusion sounds like ‘ancient virtue meets modern technology’, that’s TED, not MEOW.

So How Should You Interpret MEOW GPT?

A short cheat-sheet for anyone experimenting at home:

  1. There is no essence.
    Concepts like honour, truth, integrity, and justice are drift-patterns, not objects.
  2. The tiers describe mediation, not ingredients.
    They’re co-emergent pressures, not building blocks.
  3. Thick terms lie to you.
    Their apparent unity is linguistic camouflage.
  4. Ambiguity is structural.
    If the term looks fuzzy, that’s because the world is fuzzy there.
  5. If a concept feels granite-solid, you’re standing on conceptual quicksand.
    (Sorry.)

A Friendly Warning Label

Warning:
If you believe thick moral concepts have single, universal meanings, MEOW GPT may cause temporary metaphysical discomfort.
Consult your ontological physician if symptoms persist.

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics