(Be)longing
Being Heard Amongst the Herd
A recent talk with Dr. Zak Stein describes how technology has moved from attention to attachment…
This change in the technology we engage with is a profound attack on the critical bonds we develop as social beings. He uses the rise of the chatbots as an example, but the attachment economy began with social media.
We are social beings and we need to belong to something larger than ourselves. This belonging has devolved into heinous acts against ‘the other’ as our fears or hatred are stoked. I remember the dawning of a connected world, and the hope for a global community wielding social media to break down the barriers between us. It didn’t go as planned.
Scaling up our social life was always an illusion, we just had no idea it was also a virus that was purpose built to replace our attachment to reality. I suppose the AI chatbot companion is the logical conclusion to our deluded social life online. I used Instagram and Twitter knowing a bill would be paid someday, I just never guessed that all human creative output would be part of the bargain.
Each year at this time I am involved in assessing the applicant portfolios for my program. It has been 30 years that I have been doing this and we’ve moved from viewing the physical artwork to an online process. Every year my faith in the future of young people’s attachment to making images is renewed. One of the tasks we set for applicants is to draw from observation, to let the world they live in inhabit their work. For many of them, this is new.
As attention and attachment is derailed and detached we need creatives to be the totem —the spinning top to let us know what is real. Unlike Christopher Nolan’s film Inception’s ending where it no longer matters if the top spins or falls, our future will depend on it, to quote the Talking Heads…
This ain't no party, this ain't no disco
This ain't no fooling around
No time for dancing, or lovey dovey
I ain't got time for that now
Life During Wartime
According to the doctor, hacked attention is like addiction and hacked attachment is like an abusive relationship. We remain addicted by using our truth to avoid our reality. We remain in abusive relationships by using our reality to avoid our truth. A healthy balance requires us to be real and true. The concern is the decoupling of the real and the true and the increasing likelihood that we are discovering that the algorithm has stolen our reality and left us on our own to deal with the truth and the consequences. The treachery of AI is that the impersonation is real but not true. Ceci n’est pas une pipe.