Nobody Cares if The Atlantic is Real Anymore

The war on humanity rages on... and you may choose your tribe.

Last Thursday started like a regular, plain Thursday - nothing special about it. But then, something unusual happened. I browsed my morning news, and had a long, thoughtful stare into a white, bare, boring wall. Suddenly, months of slow, patient thinking clicked all together, assembling into a bizarre pattern of present-day reality. It all seemed somewhat bleak; not because it actually is, but because of how it is made to look. Have you heard a phrase : “behind every strong woman is a story that gave her no other choice?”. No, this doesn’t have to apply to women only. We can pivot another way: do you know why manipulation thrives on controlling access to information? That’s because if one doesn’t see any way out of the dead end, giving up and conforming is a likely scenario. Now, keep this thought handy. We will loop back to it later.

Let’s go for something completely different. Imagine this picture: it’s late Spring 2024, California. It’s a meeting of a culture club dedicated to Russian-Jewish poetry. A stocky old woman with short hair is holding a microphone; she presents to a crowd of mostly older middle-class immigrant men and women with excitement: “ChatGPT can write war poetry!”. She gushes about this so enthusiastically, making a machine that surely understands no war output a pacifist stanza, every line is as cliché as you can imagine. The woman is in awe: “look what ChatGPT did! We need to add this into our upcoming book of war poems!” The crowd murmurs in agreement.

In my mind’s eye, I observe this woman carefully. I note her posture, her fashion choices, the styling of her hair. I want to remember; this is the moment I understand that she is not a poet, not really. It’s bold of me to gatekeep what art or poetry means, but instinctively I know that in front of me is a changeling, whose only relationship with poetry comes down to form and certain hyperbolic imagery. What’s in it for her? I am not sure. Maybe she likes the idea of being creatively endowed, but likely it’s just status - Russian culture respects artists, although they don’t nurture or understand them, even their own. I heard contemporary Russian “poets” unironically quote Mayakovsky on the importance of positive attitude. The guy killed himself at the age of 37; you can’t miss this detail unless you only care about the disembodied quote, and not who wrote it and in which circumstances.

If you care about art – whether it’s making it, experiencing it, or both – you care about who makes the things you are experiencing and what they wanted to communicate. You care about what conditions the art is created in. You care about the message-in-context. Those who make art for trends, or ingest it out of context, in my opinion, are not doing it for the art’s sake; they represent the consumer market. And for the market, it truly does not matter whether the art is produced by a human or machine; what matters is the product alone. The more disconnected, the better; this way one can make this art all about themselves. Don't get me wrong, there are cases to be made for consumable art, just like there are use cases for wall paintings purchased at Walmart. You may want these for faceless, terrible offices to demarcate them from warm, personal spaces—but it’s important to navigate this balance consciously.

In many ways, artifice that is already prominent and common among humans helped to prepare us for the machine-made artifice. I know of poets who wrote in the first person about wars they have never experienced. Not about their personal connection to wars through conversations with their relatives who served but, basically, just their personal stance on one war or another. Does war poetry change its meaning if it’s written and monetized by those who don’t know what war is like? What do we feel about reading someone’s perspective on death, heavy tanks, and bombs if we know it’s disconnected from reality, wrapped in the cloud of someone’s disembodied, romanticised perception? How is this already not a simulation of the second order? Like a Disney park, modelled after a European town, but no specific culture or town in particular – just a blended hodge-podge of medieval Europe, if you will.

Art-as-a-product is a completely different beast from art-as-communication. When I discovered the poetry of Maya Angelou, I was humbled to uncover that poetry could be both universal and situated. Mine and Maya’s lives could not have been any more different, and yet, in the nuanced specifics of her metaphors and allegories, mixed with an occasional slang word and then high poetic language, I stared into something extraordinary. As a reader, I am but a fly on the wall, not privy to the full spectrum of Maya’s life, yet I am a feeling fly, if you will. I cannot help but feel a life that isn’t my own. It is in that delicate balance of you-me complexity, that some profound multiplicity of meanings and states-in-between is born and unfolding:

You may write me down in history

with your bitter, twisted lies,

you may trod me in the very dirt

but still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells

pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

with the certainty of tides,

just like hopes springing high,

still I’ll rise.

In comparison to poetry like Maya Angelou’s, you may find art-as-product to be very self-contained in the most indulgent and saddest of ways. If Angelou’s poetry invites us to peek into her world, to feel what resilience means to her, to listen to the rolling tide of her rhyme — ChatGPT, unsurprisingly, keeps it all sanitised like a hospital wing: uniform and stripped of the juicy nuances of language. Yes, it has some dog-whistle metaphors that we’d expect to see in poetry, so that we can separate one emotion from another; but beyond that, it’s astonishingly barren:

I have cracked,

but not crumbled.

Splintered,

but never scattered to the wind.

The storm has carved its name

into the bones of me,

but I am still here—

rooted, breathing, becoming.

Do not mistake these softened edges

for surrender.

Each scar is a signature

of battles I did not choose,

but walked through

with trembling steps

and unbroken will.

Of course, art as a mass-produced commodity did not start with ChatGPT but is a longstanding creation of capitalism. In one of my favorite books, The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Tsing compares capitalism — which evolved hand-in-hand with colonialism — to salvaging. Born out of resource extraction from colonies, capitalism is predicated on never paying the full price for the resources, services, and products it sells, whether those are environmental resources or human labor. As Tsing writes:

“Salvage accumulation” is the process through which lead firms amass capital without controlling the conditions under which commodities are produced. Salvage is not an ornament on ordinary capitalist processes; it is a feature of how capitalism works. (p.63)

Look no further than Andy Warhol’s pop art to see how art-as-product serves a distinct purpose and place in society. The Marilyn Diptych, Warhol’s most famous work, consists of a salvaged photo of Marilyn Monroe. Warhol did not take this photo, nor did he have to obtain permission to capitalize on her likeness. In the best traditions of capitalism’s race to the bottom, mass-produced ‘AI art’— created through computer-assisted outsourcing and salvaging of digital and digitized media without paying the full price (copyright protection) — is a distant, lame cousin of Warhol’s legacy.

Once, sitting bored, listening to a poetry zoom event where older Russian people with statuses of renowned local poets rhymed about things they have never experienced, it dawned on me that it’s not hard to make ‘art’ about nothing. I tried it myself very quickly. It’s important to stay vague, but specific:

Sleepers, rails, commuter trains

Vivid memory remains…

Life is tasteless, rain is bitter

Sleepers, rails, commuter trains

For context, I don’t typically write poetry precisely because I have nothing to say besides mimicking passable nonsense. I believe many humans can do so if they so choose - we are all equally talented in this, especially marketers. But is this really poetry in the full sense of its rich potential to connect? I don’t think so.

Now I will finally introduce the event that started it all. And if you have been wondering where I am going with this, we are close to reaching climax, I promise.

Today I woke up to read The Atlantic article on how “No one cares if Music is real anymore” written by Ian Bogost. I happen to know Ian Bogost; I know people who know Ian Bogost. Ian Bogost is not a musician. He’s also a bit of a clickbait troll. Nevertheless, I find it amusing how The Atlantic seems to be occupied lately with chasing polarising headlines and loud void-gazing takes that often come from writers who have no idea what they are talking about. But let’s move on for now, it’s not that important.

The article makes an observation that perhaps, we do not at all need music to be art, concluding that perhaps it’s best if it can make us feel nothing:

As I drove and the music played, I felt nothing—but I felt that nothing with increasing acuteness. I was neither moved nor sad nor pensive, just aware of the fact that my body and mind exist in a tenuous zizz somewhere between life, death, and computers. This is second-order music listening, in which you experience the idea of listening to music. What better band to provide that service than one that doesn’t even exist?

But looking toward the blushing sky ahead of me, I realized that I didn’t even want this music to be art, or to feel that I was communing with its makers. I simply hoped to think and feel as little as possible while piloting my big car through the empty evening of America. This music—perhaps most music now—is not for dancing or even for airports; it’s for the void. I pressed play and gripped the wheel and accelerated back onto the tollway, as the machines lulled me into oblivion.

Reading this did not make me agree with Bogost. Reading it only made me wonder, “What’s in it for The Atlantic?” I am not sure if I am experiencing journalism for the hopeless or stumbled upon a piece that normalizes alienation. Perhaps Ian Bogost is writing another lukewarm book and this is his promotional campaign. Perhaps The Atlantic editorial team figured out a way to squeeze those attention bucks through melancholy milking.

But I would say this: now more than ever, it’s meaningful how you spend your time. The Earth spins faster, days get shorter, and every single hour is supercharged with the capacity for action. We are running a marathon through the minefield of misinformation and the kind of journalism that is designed to make us feel numb. And now more than ever, we need to be keenly aware of what we are consuming. Don’t buy a one-way ticket to the abyss on the train that digital media is driving. It’s crap a trap. Let Bogost stop caring if music is real. Let The Atlantic question the ephemerality of its own existence.

Manipulation thrives on controlling access to information. Now it’s time to come back to where we started. What choices do we have if the media machine is precision-engineered to keep us shedding our humanity? The road to healthy cultures is not paved with the normalization of pathologies. It’s paved with exposing pathologies for what they are and challenging ourselves to choose better; to choose happier paths. All this comes at a pivotal time in history, when, like in 20th-century Germany, the established mainstream media is dying a death by thousands cuts, shielding itself from the responsibility of truthful, honest reporting. It’s not only happening at The Atlantic, but also in the offices of many national newspapers, where articles and reports with bold ideas and constructive opinions are routinely surgically edited to fit political and corporate consensus.

In the end, as a society we gain nothing from engaging in never-ending discussions about whether AI can make art, whether it has merit, or whether it’s not that bad (or if it could be any worse?). All these questions are matters of personal integrity, and the answers become beautifully clear once you are ready to ponder the ultimate question: are you entering creative spaces as a consumer or as a human being? Are you here to monetize or to connect?

And here, I bestow upon thee the choice: you may choose your tribe. It might take some time to find the answer that feels right, and you should explore both options, but please keep this in mind: it is becoming costly not to choose.