Two friends of the farm (SC & CS) trained a language model on my recent newsletter about the wretchedness of unassigned seating at work. They added a few editorial comments and some light threats, then sent me the result.
AI GPT-3 output is in this computer font, everything else is written by these two future medical professionals of America.
This is a hostage take over, welcome to:
REALITY FIRM
“As far back as I could remember… I always wanted to be in the firm.”
Sponsored by the Carl Icahn School of Leverages Buyouts
Society has progressed beyond the need for author.lookup.name (“reality farms”)
redacted for opsec reasons
In fact, The Firm is pleased to announce that our proprietary AI has removed the need for ~creatives~ all together
We have your leader in chains, he is being force fed borscht while a recoding of Senator Lindsay Graham reading Anna Karenina blares in the background
[This week’s newsletter, generated fresh for YOU, is optimized to ensure dopamine agonism equivalent to 1.35 Cool Cotton Candy GoGurts. Enjoy (that is an order).]
reality farm original: “Our office doesn’t have assigned seating, you can sit anywhere in a sea of hot desks. On my first day of work, I picked the most anonymous desk possible, a desk without a single positive characteristic to recommend it: mediocre views, mediocre lighting, unreliable HDMI cables. It’s not close to the cafeteria or the bathrooms. It is, in every way, the no man’s land equivalent of a desk. Some twenty minutes later, a pack of software engineers appeared and sat in the eight desks immediately surrounding me. Our office is mostly empty, so this is roughly equivalent to someone stepping onto an empty train car and sitting next to you.”
GPT-3 AI CONTINUATION: They immediately began discussing their weekend. I am not a particularly shy person. I’m also not a particularly friendly person, but I’m not shy. I sat through the discussion of whether or not it’s better to play video games on a PC or a console, without interrupting. I listened to their conversations about the difficulty of getting a car within the city limits, about the beauty of living in a city that wasn’t completely overrun with people. I listened to them talk about their plans for the future, about their hopes, their dreams, their fears. I listened to them talk about their lives for a full forty-five minutes before I realized that I’d been sitting at their table. My computer is a laptop, which means that it picks up the office wifi, which means that it checks my email. My email is full of various automated messages that I’ve signed up for, but I don’t have my email client open. I only noticed one of the messages when the guy sitting next to me said, “Is that your laptop?” I nodded, my face turning red. ‘You have four hundred unread messages!’
How many nights have I lain awake? Staring into the dark and telling myself that the algorithm isn’t funny. Affirming it. Reading the Bible. Conferring with parish priests. Determining if I have ecclesiastical grounds to demand an exorcism of the computer servers wearing my skin like an ill-fitting suit. Parsing eschatological texts to find out how all of this unnaturalness ends. This artificial future that threatens both my career and my identity as a Substack writer with somewhere north of 120 subscribers. Death to the machine. Death to the firm.
Heart’s best,
Murdo
for a small fee I will put menacing linocut prints on your utility bills and mail them back. women want me, electricity companies fear me.
Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named corespondent. If they choose to forego their work—say it is screenwriting—in favor of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne Frank.
proposition 1: we are responsible for our own problems
Though King does not believe in Christian ontology, he sees demons as being evil nonetheless, because they hinder individual will. They exert a nearly constant and entirely negative influence over us. Many really are the gods of antiquity; others are the manifestations of large-scale sociohistorical forces. Think of them like decentralized movements, King said, like changes in the air you feel to be taking place on a vast scale, even as you have no idea where they came from or what they portend. These demons are directors and products both. They are the impetus as well as the sum of all the actions taken by those who’ve sworn allegiance to them in their various forms: financialized capitalism, say, or the politics of resentment.
proposition 2: demons are responsible for our problems
[I]n fact we do have a common and stark expression of what it might feel like to have our past dominate our present. This is exactly what a really, really bad hangover is: our present (our feelings, our thoughts, our worries and fears, and our physical condition) is dominated by our (very recent) past. Even describing a hangover as “the morning after the night before” reinforces this sense that the present is in fact constituted, when being hungover, by the past.
Maybe, then, we should take seriously the possibility that the hangover reflects the basic structure of human experience and consciousness under capitalism.
. . .
But Amis’s more significant contribution is his distinction between the physical hangover (as described above) and the metaphysical hangover, which is defined by a profound feeling of anxiety—that “your family and friends are… leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are”—and the idea that you have now come to see life as it really is. It is this anxiety that constitutes the truly bad (and truly meaningful) hangover, although it is deeply personalized. The hangover foregrounds my feelings about my individual moral failings—I am a shit, I behaved so stupidly—and any deeper structures that got me to that position are absent. It’s an individualizing experience.
proposition 3: the cumulative weight of history crushing down on us is responsible for our problems. also alcohol.
POSTCARDS FROM OUTER SPACE 🎴
UFOs IN THE COW FIELD 🛸
I visited my grandmother’s farm a few weeks ago. She handed me an Annie Dillard book, For the Time Being, which is about any number of things. One of the things it is about is the terra cotta warriors buried around the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China. I’ve never been particularly interested in China, but I was floored to learn that archeologists still haven’t excavated the tomb of the emperor.
A Chinese historian in the first century BC wrote:
In the ninth month, the First Emperor was interred at Mount Li. Digging and preparation work at Mount Li began when the First Emperor first came to the throne. Later, after he had unified his empire, 700,000 men were sent there from all over his empire. They dug through three layers of groundwater, and poured in bronze for the outer coffin. Palaces and scenic towers for a hundred officials were constructed, and the tomb was filled with rare artifacts and wonderful treasure. Craftsmen were ordered to make crossbows and arrows primed to shoot at anyone who enters the tomb. Mercury was used to simulate the hundred rivers, the Yangtze, Yellow River, and the great sea, and set to flow mechanically
We demand to see the mercury rivers. We want to see archeologists dodging arrows and crossbow bolts. We must discover what a scenic tower looks like underground. While the Chinese are diligently not excavating a site of extreme historical significance, other ancient cities are popping up left and right:
I do not know where either of us can turn
Just at first, waking from the sleep of each other.
I do not know how we can bear
The river struck by the gold plummet of the moon,
Or many trees shaken together in the darkness.
We shall wish not to be alone
And that love were not dispersed and set free—
Though you defeat me,
And I be heavy upon you.
But like earth heaped over the heart
Is love grown perfect.
Like a shell over the beat of life
Is love perfect to the last.
So let it be the same
Whether we turn to the dark or to the kiss of another;
Let us know this for leavetaking,
That I may not be heavy upon you,
That you may blind me no more.
—
note: haha fuck
THE RIGHT’S WING 🦇
Here’s how I spot a potential trend: I read two articles about two completely different things. If they both mention something I’ve never heard of, it’s a hot new trend. A potential hot new trend: Philip Reiff’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966 (lol)). I’ve ordered the book. Watch this space.
