This will be the fourth chapter (maybe not in that order) of my current book project. I could come up with a more playful title like “pAInic in the French disko.” La resistance!

Anyway, this one has something of a Stiegler focus I suppose, or at least this is where I am bringing him into the existing mix. Stiegler adopts negentropy from Schrödinger’s assertion that life feeds on negative entropy, on the re-creation of localized order. This is accomplished through the externalization of waste. Shit happens. As a wise author once wrote, “everybody poops.” Communities, institutions, nations: everyone is doing it. It’s non-optional.

Personally I like storing my externalities in a place I call the future. One of William Gibson’s famous lines is that the future is here but unevenly distributed. Where do you think that future is located currently? In Silicon Valley? Or the middle of the Sahara? Of course externalities haunt the future. We might think of that haunting as a way of defining the cultural condition of the Anthropocene. With the totalizing financialization of our neoliberal lives, it is apt to say we have written a cheque the human community can’t cash.

Oh well.

It is part of the role of cynicism to observe the bankrupt character of our being–individually and collectively. However the minor phylogenesis of cynicism continues into the transversal, transmutation of our bankrupt condition through negotiation and relation with companion species. Originally, the cynics were for the dogs after all, and perhaps have always had a “bit(e) of the dog” within them.

To turn back to Stiegler. His pseudo-Derridean pharmakon describes relationships. As he says in this interview, which is excerpted from The Politics of Digital Pharmacology (Open Access): “everything can be a pharmakon. Everything. Your wife, husband or partner can be a pharmakon. Even a theory can be a pharmakon. If for example, you are Marxist and you use the theory of Marx in order to navigate through the world, it becomes a pharmakon. And this pharmakon can become toxic, if it becomes an ideology. In this case you change your relationship to the words, although the theory stays the same.” So that gives you some idea.

We already participate in media-pharmacological relationships with AI and the other nonhumans of digital media ecologies. Basically Stiegler’s analysis interests me in the following way. He argues that the predictive, projective calculatory operation of AI produces entropy among humans by reducing differences in our ordered thinking. In short, through our toxic pharmacological relationship with AI slop we are basically being shit upon. Put more academically, we are suffering from the externalities of AI’s negentropic function as it reduces difference and hence negentropy across human thought and the broader cognitive ecology in the same way that dumping toxic chemical in your yard kills all the things that were living there. Wait! didn’t I just say that AI produces entropy two sentences ago. I did. It produces entropy for us as an externality of its own negentropic, autopoiesis. Our brains are the AIs septic tank.

But this isn’t the fault of AI. This is the pharmacological quality of all relationships. Generally we would avoid toxic situations for ourselves in pursuit of homeostasis, even though this means externalizing the shit we encounter and produce through our unavoidable encounters with others. As we become taken up by larger social assemblages we encounter their efforts to manage our homeostasis and enforce an agreement with us. Through material history we became allopoeitic servants of communities: we became part of a community as a necessary relationship for our own survival. One of the bargains in this relationship is that our own externalities get folded into the community’s.

Who deals with the external shit a human community produces? Historically, other human communities for the most part, but also the entire planet, as we deal with the planet’s shit. But what happens when the totalizing logic of calculation from physical science to capitalism to political/social science to the engineered, built, computerized digital world… sorry had to catch my breath. What happens? What happens when AI captures everything in the sense that what remains incalculable only exists as shit?

Which will be worse? To be the predictably captured allopoeitic servant of the machine? Or to be viewed by it as shit? Is there a none of the above option? Of course. We need to treat AIs like the little shits they are. Think of AI output as the guy who wants to sell you an attachment to turn your hair dryer into an air fryer. Ok, maybe they don’t need to be that guy, but just more folk, more kin, more companions.

As the old Borscht belt line goes, “with friends like that who needs enemies?”

O my friends, there is no friend.

BTW, I meant to finish, but I just saw that AI generated image for this post. What does that make you feel? What does it evoke for you? Revulsion at the scent of AI slop? Eye-rolling at the cliche? A critical eye for what it reveals of cultural symptom? I’m thinking it’s some kind of camouflage or interface. I don’t know. I do know that I have to remember that I don’t know.