Who says AI doesn’t have a sense of humor? I have to credit this one to ChatGPT 4o. We’d been talking seriocomically about sales pitches for the humanities and with the notion that being an Argonaut might be appealing but [SPOILER ALERT].

Now you could fairly call this a hallucination and say the Argonauts don’t so much have a tragic backstory as a tragic end, at least for Jason. For the rest of them it’s mixed, so I don’t know if it’s the kind of job placement data you’d really want to share with prospective students.

So why call it a backstory, is that a mistake? I don’t know, how do you understand the relationship of time as represented in a narrative with various versions compared to the time in which the prospective student hears the pitch. Is the tragedy before or after? Why not both?

Maybe its future anteriority what will have been. The argonauts will have been a tragic backstory for you when you are done with the program. But aren’t everyone’s backstories tragic? Isn’t that part of the romantic appeal of having a backstory? “I can laugh at it now but at the time it was terrible.” Hey! Maybe we’re teaching resiliency or something.

Look, sheeple shearer or Argonaut, you still end up surrounded by crazy assholes who are in it for themselves and worse. So the point might be to look for the n-1 option.