Merry Christmas. Unironically

'Tis the season, after all

This will last me until March

For Christmas I bring you the gift of not wading through any of the three posts I laboured on in recent weeks. They were awful. So I abandoned them, despite mounting dread of ‘sunk costs’ and hours wasted.

Writing each one felt like that thing in dreams when you run away from something and it’s like you’re under water. They deserved spiking for the portentous titles alone.

The ideas were ok, but the execution was terrible.

They explored things like realising how my political shift was partly a function of instinctively scorning whatever ‘Establishment’ exists at any given moment. There was one about something Prospero says in The Tempest and the relationship between language and material reality. The ‘best’ (ie least shit) one was about how cringe I find supposedly intellectual catastrophising to be.

But it’s Christmas and there are better things to do than read stuff that’s designed to farm your nervous system for cortisol or dangle more threat signals.

—

I’ve been fascinated lately by how my Substack Notes feed evolved. Notes started out as a way to idly monitor for interesting bits and bobs but my experience has shifted dramatically over recent months. Now it feels like a full-on Twitter clone, running in algorithmic agitation mode, designed for attention capture.

This was probably inevitable. It’s an attention economy and Substack needs to boost engagement, but it’s still unwelcome for those of us who are vulnerable to emotional preloading (the feeling of being agitated even before the conclusion is reached in an article).

Now I have to muster more self-control than I sometimes have historically, in order to avoid the crude, fast and pre-cognitive sympathetic activation from other people’s emotions.

Inevitably it’s mostly (but not exclusively) a certain brand of social justice-oriented posturing that activates my amygdala and I have it all on not to dive straight into trolling mode when I see it.

But the wild thing is what I now react to, compared with ten years ago.

Back then my triggers were all anxiety-based. I was scared that fascists would take over and everything would be horribly misogynistic and racist, no one would ever listen to scientists about anything again, the truth didn’t matter and that we were reverting to a pre-Enlightenment time because that was what lots of big names in my political milieu kept saying was happening and their ‘mooks’ were repeating it, on and offline. I know this because I was a mook, before I ended up with a bunch of my own mooks.

[To understand ‘mooks’ in this context read this forever classic The Internet of Beefs}

Today I react to people catastrophising and having negative feelings about things.

This seems to be because I have a more positive view of the moment we’re in than a lot of people who write and read on Substack.

And the more het up people are about something that doesn’t seem to be worth getting het up about, the more triggered I am.

My current pet cringe is people moaning all the time about agentic AI.

[On a positive note, it makes a change from being irritated by deconstructivist postmodern nonsense about sex & gender, feminism, race and the pursuit of socially and materially engineered utopian ideals. Even if railing at that was best for revenues]

Last week a Note was shunted into my feed, obviously because the algorithm determined that I should see something that thousands of other people had liked, shared and engaged with. It perfectly encapsulated the thing that bothers me most about maximalist moralisers. Which is that they cannot just have an opinion but feel a need to change what other people do when what other people do is of zero consequence to them.

In this case it was a spectacularly popular - nay, viral ! - call on ‘resistance’ and ‘climate’ accounts (ie people who are already dispositionally agitated) to stop using AI-generated images in their headings.

This person wanted people to use professional artists or photographers and if they couldn’t afford that to draw a sketch and upload a photograph of that.

That this was garnering such approving attention stopped me in my tracks. Talk about First World problems. And how the absolute narcissism of wanting other people to conform to his preferences in article presentation didn’t seem to concern anyone who enthusiastically applauded this Note.

The problem now is that reflexive hostility to agentic AI has replaced most actual thinking about it.

I’ve been reading a bit around the similarities of large language models and human brains as primarily prediction systems and beginning to suspect that we are a lot more like ‘next token’ guessers than those people would like to think. This will be a fun one to develop sometime. Even if it won’t be popular.

‘Stop worrying so much’ seems to be too niche to sell all that well.

When Bill Gates had the balls to call out the doomsday tendency in climate policy and activism it went down very badly with a certain coterie, which tells you something about the pleasures of catastrophism. And the incentives to keep it up. The same thing is going on with AI. People loving having something to grizzle and worry about.

The more miserable and anxious people are about everything, the more I want to pose the question which period would you rather be living in right now? This seems to me to be the best question to ponder if you fancy cheering yourself up a bit.

--

I’m always pleasantly surprised that Rarely Certain maintains its subscriber base even as the welter of ‘content’ on Substack seems to have grown exponentially. It’s been 53 months so far and some of you have been here the whole time. The income from paying supporters made the difference between sinking and swimming this year and that, to me, is the most humbling part of maintaining this weird little blog.

The Christmas message from Rarely Certain is one of cheer. Gratitude and optimism are nice feelings to have and I recommend them.