Tech-human-tech…..human?
Trust me, I don’t want to keep talking about AI either, but, in light of the recent iPad Pro commercial, and with continuous advancements in ChatGPT-4, I think it’s also time to recognize the opportunities that we would be stupid not to seize.
My LinkedIn and Instagram feeds are absolutely blowing up with comments, shakes of the heads, and backlash quips at the iPad Pro commercial that just came out.
For good reason.
Now we see Apple execs backtracking on the original commercial release, apologizing again for “misguided steps” taken.
It’s ironic, as many have pointed out, that one company built on the principle of human creativity and flourishing now assembles a visual commercial akin to the trampling of that same human creativity and flourishing.
We’re having similar conversations and insights in all areas where the human mind is concerned, not only because the impetus of AI is opening the door to many tool-type creations that render videos, visual art, real-time translations, and written craft, but also because in the digital throes we find ourselves in now, enmeshed in a circular relationship with tech-human-tech, the future can seem bleak, but only if you give into the type of fear maxims and loose dogma that has come from tech-pessimists.
I think the advent of technology that challenges our creativity will actually be a good thing, in the long run.
Because when we’re challenged in our creativity, we might find new ways to express ideas, create art, and go above and beyond the same type of didactic art experience that has come to fill every avenue of “content” consumption.
Remember that article that was floating around on TikTok and Medium a while ago that explained the very limitations our creativity has suffered as a result of a capitalist ecosystem we can’t seem to find the definitive exit to and from? It’s called “capitalist realism”, termed by Mark Fisher.
At it’s core, capitalist realism attempts to explain why all content and/or material feels, essentially, the same as it did 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. Why are tropes the same? Why are storytelling techniques the same? Why do we cast the same? Why do we look the same? Why do our structures revolve around the same design patterns?
All of these are pressing questions to the subject of creativity.
What capitalist realism does is that it says, “Virtually everything you imagine can’t be imagined outside of the realm of capitalism”. It’s like having no free zone from the influence of capitalism; like everything otherwise is toggled or muted in our brains.
Is capitalism really the only thing we can imagine?
Based on the iPad Pro commercial, it seems like the answer is yes. Actually, the iPad Pro commercial took its first innovation in 1984, with the belief that the computer was going to liberate workers from an office monoculture, and totally reversed the idea and hope behind it. With that image of all the wonderful instruments and creative pieces crushed into a seismic sameness vis-a-vis the thinnest iPad ever made, what Apple did was demonstrate instead that this is actually the monoculture. The era of “sameness” and crushing replication.
Further, the Apple commercial reinforces how capitalist realism revolves around the idea of human overachievement, progress and technological development as delineating an ever-repeating sameness because our values are only directed towards consumption and capital.
Powered by progress and innovation; automation and technology. What revolves around the human is machine and accelerated growth, expanded profits and horizons, and an endless expanse that warps one’s mind towards thinking in profit-gain sums, risk assessment, and tired taboos, tropes, and storytelling lineages. Capital is at the center of our world, not some other ideal or moral structure that may have been true in past centuries.
AHHHH.
And the problem with this is that art essentially needs the capitalist structure. Anything that survives in the art world is postured by funds, beneficiaries, opportunities that come in small, gilded cages. And that art doesn’t necessarily challenge the material relationships that we depend on in capitalism, simply because it exists in capitalism’s own choice-for-broadcast.
It’s also why some people, like the New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka, have found that there really is no sense of “taste” anymore. Every type of procured sense of culture or hobbies, likes and dislikes, comes in a stylized, crunched format where everything is filled with the same muted onslaught of characteristics. Our feeds rotate around plumping and producing this material, and our tastes are further controlled by algorithms that push more and more of the same content.
To be honest, I was going to title this article “surplus” to refer to the word’s etymological roots as “going over and beyond” as a good way to encapsulate what I think art needs to do as the flurry of AI-generation comes into being. And then I thought what an idiot I am! To try and clip “surplus” to the movement that art needs to make now would mean doing exactly what capitalist realism describes: I’ve used capitalist terms, aka “surplus”, to describe art’s process and development. It goes to show you how entangled we are, or at least how entangled I am, in the terms of capitalism; that even a “new” idea that might express what I want to say is attached to a whole capitalist history I was not even aware of at first.
So what are we to do if we think that our creativity and imagination is somewhat curtailed and restricted by the very systems we exist in? How could we possibly tap into the whole, true power of our wild imaginations and create something that goes beyond what is limiting us?
It’s a problem that has no answer, and probably will never have an answer.
If the iPad Pro commercial showed us anything, it’s that technology will try and replace artistic endeavours by claiming “progress” or “driven efficiencies”. But, in the twofold nature of this claim, it also offers a glimpse of backlash that might disclose some breadcrumbs for what’s really out there in the wants and desires of us humans who need creative art to fuel our lives.
People want creativity and imagination; they want new things and are tired of the bland, old, recycled material that comes and comes and keeps coming.
And that’s why AI might present us with our best opportunity to reclaim some of our creativity and imagination, wherever it exists outside the capitalist realm. Because all of that cheap, trope-filled, repeated material is the only thing that AI can actually do.
But in terms of creating new, imagination-dependent art that goes beyond capitalist realism? That’s what will truly serve as our defining resistance against AI automation and implementation.
We will need to recognize this inventive, strange moment for what it is: an opening for all thinkers, intellectuals, artists, movers and shakers, to go over and beyond the expectations we have of ourselves and of each other; going over and beyond the capacities of our imaginations that seem fixed to capitalism’s influence.
We will come to think in different ways, make no mistake, but we will also be tasked with thinking beyond our fixed notions of what art is and what it means to our lives.
What might seem challenging will also present us with an incredible opportunity to flip what art has come to be; to make human flourishing as distinct and separate from the thin, flimsy, sameness that is reproduced over and over again.
Time to birth something new.
