I think hope can sometimes be a lie to postpone letting reality change us. Instead, I know many of us will do good stuff amidst all the bad.
Jem Bendell, Breaking Together

As a Religion teacher and ardent student of Religious History, I have to admit that hope appears as fodder for those who see no option for a better life. This is one of the many attractions to cultivate a religious life—a hope for a better tomorrow when all will supposedly be made right.

What “right” looks like is beyond me because I don’t think anyone really knows.

Hope is also what we put our trust in as we face the inevitable end of life either with loved ones or ourselves. It’s an idea to cling onto that death really isn’t the end and despite the claims, narratives and studies of near death experiences, nobody really knows what happens afterwards.

I’m on no pedestal to put the idea of hope beneath my own feet, but I often think back to the words of a friend of mine who built me a financial plan as part of his Masters work in Economics:

“Save hope for your Religion class and put together a plan that’s going to move the needle.”

It’s in this vein that I return to my writing.

Not just for this site, as I still need a space to process and work out my thinking, but in dedication to a new project. Something much different than my previous work, but congruent with what I’ve been doing here.

The thing is, I see a lot of people giving up hope, not only in this world, but in each other. And you know what?

I absolutely understand.

We have been facing our biggest social, political, economic, technological and environmental problems that we’ve ever faced and a little bit of positive thinking, or a few feel good stories, aren’t enough to get us through. However, to give up hope and move immediately to despair is not useful.

My reading of Bendell and reminder of my friend have allowed me to consider an alternative. It’s not something that can be relegated to a blog post or two, and goodness knows I’m sick of diving into books that should have been that, but it is going to take me longer to articulate.

It’s going to be interesting and I will be very excited to share it with you when it’s done.

The devices.

The people.

The traffic.

Industry.

Our television sets.

Earbuds.

Millions of streaming options: music, podcasts, audiobooks.

Billboards.

Advertisements.

Cluttered rooms thanks to cheap items and free shipping.

Endless scrolling.

Pointless online debates: cyclical, never ending.

Massive lineups.

The smells.

The voices in our heads.

Time for bed.

What the world needs right now… is silence.

For all our senses.

And our sanity.

“Did you go full ‘Vito’ on them?”

Against my better judgment, or maybe on the fine outskirts of it, I showed my philosophy class this video about imagining the tenth dimension. Many of my students broke down. 

One got up and had a full on existential crisis, yelling at me that nothing matters anymore. 

It’s a delicate procedure to crack a mind, especially when you tear down a worldview like time doesn’t exist and free will is an illusion. It’s stuff that’s kept me occupied for decades, which is why my wife asked if I went “full Vito” instead of treading carefully. However, I’ve come to understand the beauty of a universe that’s already decided. 

It’s remarkably hard to articulate to myself, so please feel free to disregard if you find it difficult to follow along…

or if you think it’s full of shit. 

Believe me, I’m not attached to my ideas and don’t take offence to those who have issue with them. We’re all broken people navigating unknown landscapes and nobody really has it all figured out.

Without venturing too far into the arguments, let’s run with the assumption that the entire universe is deterministc—everything can be predicted and will happen regardless. Therefore, your entire life has already been decided and the decisions you think you’re making aren’t really yours to make, at all.

If that’s the case, rather than break down over it and throw my hands up in defeat, what if I assumed that at some point, it all works out? What if I can look at the end of my own timeline and smile knowing what’s there? What would I find?

As someone who is incredibly hard on himself, and has never really learned to love who he is, I’d like to think there’s a point where I truly do love everything about who I am; faults and all. So if it happens, then it must’ve started at some point. And why not make that point right now?

At the cost of sounding like someone spouting nonsensical theories like manifesting reality or law of attraction, there’s something we’re all moving towards in our own lives. Something deeper than material possessions as those are simply the by-products of the internal state of mind.

But really, what if it all works out?

What if I end up being exactly where I need to be? How would I look at each day now? How would I look upon all the events that’s been?

I feel like it would be really exciting to move towards it because then it would feel like all of life is pushing me, instead of dragging me down. This way of thinking about it has transformed what could be perceived as a dreadful thought about a deterministic universe into a powerful one. Because regardless if my choices are really mine, it’s good to know I can go where I need to be.

A few nights ago, I decided to watch the film, “Sound of Freedom.” This is supposedly the most controversial film of 2023 and I wanted to understand why people were so up in arms over it, despite my hesitation to watch it. 

Now, to be clear, my hesitation comes from spending time with the people in the PACT (People Against the Crime of Trafficking) chapter of my city, speaking/teaching about this issue in my Ethics class and the many books/articles I’ve read over the years about it. Given what I’ve learned, I find it a very difficult subject, even though it’s so important.

As a movie, we can speak about its artistic dimensions including direction, acting, set design, costumes, etc. It was clear there was a limited budget to put this together, but what they did with those funds worked really well. There were moments when the acting really brought you in, but there were also frustrating points where scenes felt like they were dragging on. From a cinematic standpoint, I found it to be decent.

But we are talking about a movie based on a true story and this is where it all goes off the rails.

The core message of the movie is to put an end to child trafficking. It’s disturbing, it happens and it needs to stop.

I would think that’s a message we could all rally around as even prisoners in maximum security facilities consider crimes against children more heinous than anything they could’ve done. 

But, nope—the Internet lost its mind.

“This movie misrepresents the data as most child trafficking is done by groomers targeting teenagers. It’s way more nuanced than this sensationalized story.”

Okay… but it’s a movie and you need to sensationalize it. Otherwise, it becomes a boring news report that nobody cares about, which was the whole purpose of why this film was made.

“This is QAnon conspiracy nonsense!”

Children are being trafficked. Not sure what the conspiracy part is.

“This is nothing more than conservative propaganda!”

Hmmmm… not a single mention of politics or political ideals other than working against the crime of trafficking children. As someone whose eyes have rolled to the back of his head at political imaging in films, I didn’t see that here.

“This movie preys on the emotions of the audience to get more people to watch it!”

I’m not even going to validate this argument as legitimate. 

“Have you heard the things Caviezel and Ballard have said in interviews?”

This I can understand as I love Woody Allen movies, but can‘t reconcile the allegations. The conversation about separating the art from the artist is a whole other issue.

Anyway, these go on and on and I just can’t wrap my head around it.

Liking or hating the film is one thing, but getting into arguments about child trafficking? Let’s just say as someone who has been online since the mid 90s, I can understand why my generation hates the Internet today.

I came across an observation online that specified we spend the first eighteen years of life growing and learning… then the rest of our lives dealing with those first eighteen years.

It’s an interesting take because, I find, the true measure of adulthood is when you accept the circumstances of your upbringing don’t get to define the life you want. Given that some circumstances are vastly more traumatic than others, getting to this point will vary.

Yet, the real difficulty is every time we look upon our past and consider our lives at that time, we keep it attached to our current selves. If who we are is a narrative of where we’ve been, then creating a new story needs a new beginning, and that involves letting go of the wounds.

Letting go doesn’t mean forgetting, but allowing the wound to scar over instead of keeping that tissue ripped open.

“In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.”

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Written in the late ‘60s, Didion manages to express a sentiment that transcends time and provides more meaning for a world that cares little for personal autonomy. If you consider the leverage tech companies have on the world, building dependency on your data and a refusal to accept boundaries on it, solitude seems out of reach.

A myth from a time long forgotten and an unreasonable way to function today.

As I write this, I consider the time coming when AI built into operating systems will be reading and analyzing every keystroke I make. The algorithms have already been doing this across the board, to the point where Apple emphasizes privacy as one of their selling features. Other companies use superfluous language such as “user experience” and “personalized” in hopes they can divert attention from their clear Orwellian doublespeak of, “we’re logging everything you do.”

We’re a long way from the days of being able to own a product and do with it what we will.

The real problem, however, is we’re meant to believe our participation in the world today involves this tradeoff:

You can’t get away from big tech taking your data, someone has recorded you in some way in public and posted it for the world and then there’s good old-fashioned gossip that is the backbone of human civilization.

Growing up, the running joke was the evening calls my mom made to her family weren’t phone calls, but fodder for the gossip line. I know I’m not alone on that sentiment.

This begs the question of whether privacy is still achievable. Was Hughes really the last private man?

That question can be answered with another one:

Is it possible to retreat from the accepted narratives while still participating in society?

I look at people like Neal Stephenson and think, yes, it’s still possible. There just must be a willingness to commit to it.

Parts 1 and 2

It has taken me a bit of time to think this one through as I’ve rewritten it after my original draft led my thinking in a different direction. The core of my thoughts still remain the same, but I’m still deciding if this will be a detriment for society.

Thus, I will lay it out here and let time figure it out.

There should be no surprise to anyone familiar with the history of Silicon Valley that AI generative models are built on mining (stealing) the data (or work) of everyone else. After all, this is the same place where Apple stole from Xerox, Microsoft stole from Apple and everyone else just followed suit at stealing from each other.

Good artists copy. Great artists steal.

This is just as true for the tech industry as it is for the magic world I spoke about in the previous post. However, at some point, you can only steal so much before it’s time to innovate. The major corporations make it their business to buy up startups (which is a business model in itself) instead of doing anything creative on their own.

The only other step is corporate espionage, which is a sore spot for me as a Canadian considering what happened to our major tech company and biology lab. 

Which leaves us with the question of what our world values more: creative thinking or strategic domination.

The problem with the latter is we’ve equated it with the former. Originally, these trio of posts were about the death of imagination thanks to the advent of generative AI models. While it’s overly simplistic to attack the latest piece of technology as the end of humanity, I think it’s fair to say we now have a piece of technology that seems to be the natural end of what we value as a society.

Why bother putting any cognitive load on the brain when you have a piece of technology that will steal ideas from everyone?

Before someone accuses me of being a tech alarmist, I understand we’re not all trying to be creative artists or innovative thinkers. For menial tasks that need to get done, advances in technology have always been a help and I’m sure some would argue that we can make even greater leaps thanks to freeing up our cognitive load. In fact, we can argue that we can now put things together in ways we’ve never been able to before.

But if this is where we’re heading, is there any intrinsic value to “thinking outside the box?” If all the innovative thinking that we do is just an amalgamation of ideas by others, why bother encouraging creative thought? Perhaps, this is  actually what  it means to be creative.

But, does this bring us down a slippery slope where we hit a stagnation of human thought and hand over our future to our own inventions?

Or will there be a backlash against this technological determinism we’re heading towards?

At the moment, from my standpoint, the world belongs to thieves. I just can’t figure out if it’s always been that way, or always will be.

In continuing with my previous post, I can’t help but think about the magic world I was a part of, loved and still cherish. While not pretending to rise above the criticisms I’m about to lay out, my concern for capturing the imagination of an audience started with what happened in that performance art.

The effectiveness of a magician relies on one crucial component: the method.

The method, or the secret if you will, is everything. When an audience knows the method, or even think they know it, the act is ruined. A polite crowd will still come along for the ride, but the wonder of the moment is lost.

A professional, or one with an attitude of a professional, will either spend countless hours practicing until the method is invisible or spend the same number of hours on finding ways to misdirect the audience so they don’t suspect the method. The very best do both.

Early magicians will imitate the very best, or use the prescribed routines offered to them in their training books or videos. There is nothing inherently wrong with this when you’re learning as I find it akin to a budding musician playing the songs of their favourite artists. However, unlike a musician who plays cover songs and can have a fun career with it, you can’t have this in magic.

At some point, you’re going to need to bring your imagination and ingenuity into it (also a great marketing team—but that’s a whole other topic).

There was a worry that exposure videos on YouTube would bring the end to magic. Logically, if the success of a magician is dependent on the method, then the obvious conclusion is no magician can be successful thanks to the endless videos online that give away the method. However, this hasn’t been the case.

For one, careful and disciplined students of these videos can produce incredible magicians.

Next, magicians have learned to keep their best routines away from video sharing sites.

And finally, the average person doesn’t spend their entire evenings searching for these methods.

What I’m seeing right now is something similar that’s happening in education. There is a widening gap between the incredible magicians who are performing magic at levels that are unbelievably creative and original (very small percentage), those who are doing a decent job imitating them (a slightly larger percentage than above) and the rest who I lump into the categories of competent and horribly amateur.

I am not above reproach here. By the end of my tenure as a magician. I was in the competent category, at best, but always aiming for the top. The ambition was always to be an original.

I’m not seeing that anymore.

Just like the generative AI flood, magic seems to be aiming for that second tier. Let somebody else be original and the rest will imitate.

And just like students who use these tools in a poor and obvious way, the imitators will do the same, which is where the death of magic comes in. Nothing ruins magic like an act done poorly. And having to put in a great effort to make it look good is lost on so many.

Hence, a handful among a deep pool that rise to the top.

It’s just not enough.

That’s why I was so enamoured with Nate Staniforth’s work. He understood that magic was dying.

But maybe I’m wrong.

Actually, I hope I’m wrong.

I hope I’m only seeing a small slice of a much wider world and missing a bigger picture.

The thing is… I might be completely off base and the reality is much worse.

(Continued next post)

It’s hard not to wonder about the implications of generative AI as a theologian, philosopher and observer of culture. While the conversation for its future in education are in full swing, my best guess for that is a complete overhaul of the school system or a reversion to pre-digital methods. It’s hard to say which one would serve society better, but I’m sure some academic researchers completely disconnected from reality will decide its fate. I mean, why change the status quo?

Where my real concern lies in the imagination. Up until now, our tools have enabled us to be more productive and accelerate our thinking, but we’ve never hit a point where the thinking can be done for us. An argument can be made the Internet has already made this happen given the copy/paste that happens and echo chambers of social media, in which I would agree. However, that has more to do with laziness and a real low bar for critical thinking. Not imagination.

The worry is the thought we’ve hit the apex of creativity. Perhaps my slant is toward art, but it feels that we are in a flat line. It’s often said all stories we have are just takes on the same few themes (and Shakespeare supposedly did them best) and all our technological innovations are pale re-inventions of what already works (e.g. music streaming services are just radio channels with more DJs available). 

Are there exceptions?

Sure—every jump in ingenuity starts as the exception.

Where the exception differs is in the way it captures the imagination of the populace. Take, for instance, movies. It’s pretty clear we are running dry on ideas as we’re getting bombarded with remakes, sequels or yet another Marvel Cinematic release. Of course there’s an economic incentive for this, but to take chances on new ideas requires one to capture the imagination of others. 

It will be increasingly difficult to do that when AI models spit out what has been done before in a very predictable pattern.

At the risk of sounding like some Luddite alaramist proclaiming the end of humanity over the next technological development, as I’m not against the tools that make our cognitive processes easier, it’s whether access to these tools should be given without a need for them in the first place. We already have editors burned out from endless AI submissions for stories (to the point they’ve closed new submissions for the  foreseeable future), and readers of indie books getting pissed at AI generated stories (it’s so obvious that it hurts). 

What happens when this bleeds into music? Or movies?

My hope is a renaissance of imagination, similar to what happened in the 60s/70s with music. Artists in their imperfect forms experimenting with sound, voice and heart in their lyrics. It was a generation that still inspires today and a spirit that is desperately needed now because, if I can be so bold, our world has jumped the shark.

There’s a great U2 song that I often come back to at different points in life because it means a little something different each time. While I’m sure the original intention of the lyrics are vastly different than what most take from it (including myself), and this can be a real sticking point for any writer, I find it’s a good foundation to work from.

As a young person, my search for happiness involved the usual criteria of outward signs of success: good career, home, healthy, relationships, etc. All those things that we dream about from what we want in life, which are good things to have. To have otherwise is like playing life on hard mode. It’s possible, but why?

However, in the background of all of this was a seed of discontent; something unsettling.

Is this it?

The question eventually drove me to study mysticism in hopes of finding an answer. That eventually led me to study Theology where the question aggravated me further because the solace of religion was shattered by in learning about its blatant power structures that it doesn’t even try to hide.

The philosophy side served no better. While it’s a wonderful discipline that appealed to my off-centered, obsessive thinking (from which I’m forced to conclude all philosophers throughout history were actually on the spectrum of insanity), the question of meaning was moot. It’s not even discussed.

As life eventually settled in for me and I’ve come to a point where I’m at peace, new questions are festering. While they no longer cause existential dread or months of overthinking, they continue to spring up and keep me mentally off tilt.

They remind me that while I have everything I could want or need, there’s still something I’m seeking and haven’t yet found. Thankfully, I’m surrouded by incredible people who keep me grounded, allowing me to continue this search without losing my way.

But, part of me is beginning to think we never fully find what we’re looking for, no matter our circumstance, and the key is to accept that—to be comfortable with it.

Perhaps happiness is only in the search and not the destination and, more importantly, as Christopher McCandless discovered, is only real when shared with others. We can keep searching, keep seeking, and be comfortable that we may never fully get there, as long as we have others along the way to share in that journey.

So I still haven’t found it… but I also have.