may we live forever

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

I'm undecided myself.

my favourite piece of "AI art" is something that was not intended to be AI art at all, and was made and posted online as a joke. which is "salmon in the river", from 2023.

this is how the AI apparently understood the above prompt. salmon filets jumping in water.

in this case, not only do i think this is interesting art, but i think it is interesting art only because it was not made by a human. like, this reads to me as art about alienation and commodification, right? obviously we all know that under capitalism products become separated from the labour and processes that created them. you buy a shirt and you don't think about the hands that sewed it, and so on. the commodity form hides its own origins. and food in particular hides not just labour, but life. the animal disappears. like, if you think about how meat reaches you at a western supermarket, typically it arrives on a styrofoam tray, wrapped in plastic, cut into shapes that don't resemble the body they came from. a chicken breast doesn't look like a chicken, and likewise a salmon filet does not look like a salmon. many times people actually find it gross or distasteful to see the animal! the filet is literally the shape that says don't think about it.

so the art, then. the filets are appearing in the river, which is where the living salmon would be. the commodity form is occupying the space of the creature. the erasure itself is swimming upstream. that's sick!!! and the wrongness of it, the visual absurdity, is exactly what reveals how much work the commodity form normally does. We're used to seeing filets in kitchens, on plates, in supermarkets. In those contexts, they look right. they look like what salmon IS! it's only when you put the filet in the context of a living animal that you suddenly see how strange it is and how much has been removed. it's good art!!!

AND YET if human artist had made this image, i don't think it would be very good art. filets swimming upstream as a commentary on commodity food culture is fine but it would feel very on the nose in a banksy, makes-u-think kind of way. this would be a human saying "here's what I think about how we relate to what we eat." like imagine this as a political cartoon, right? immediately the exact same image would make me want to fucking roll my eyes. it would be kind of insufferable!! and to me i think that's because it is making an argument. the artist has to be visibly making a point and the finger is always wagging. we live in a society, bottom text. UGH!

whereas, when an AI produces filets in the river, it's not making a claim. it doesn't think and it doesn't care. it is just outputting based on what it's been trained on and based on the prompt. it's saying "here's what salmon actually means in the aggregate of human visual culture." it says something in and of itself that an AI image generator was asked to create salmon swimming in a river, and it produced filets. boneless, skinless, ready-for-the-pan filets, floating serenely through the rapids. and that's because the AI was trained on us. it was clearly not primarily trained on, e.g Coast Salish art like on carved salmon with eyes and spirits or more generally on cultures that really focus on holding the sustenance and the creature together. instead it was trained on an aggregate blob of the internet, including the very massive and alienated western commercial relationship to food. our images, our photographs, our stock photos and food blogs and recipe sites. and in that corpus, salmon is overwhelmingly a filet. when you throw everything into the pile and ask "what is salmon," the commodity form rose to the top.

thus when the model produces filets in the river, it's not really making an error in the same way we would; it's just accurately reflecting what "salmon" means in the aggregate, and putting it in a context that makes it seem incredibly absurd. it literally works as art because it's not A Guy saying eyy, look what you've done, it's just showing what we've done, without commentary or judgment and without even knowing it's showing anything at all.

but then ALSO. was this really an "error" generated by an AI? or was this a human who prompted it to make a picture of salmon filets in a river and posted it as a glitch for internet points? i don't know!!!

and at first this bothered me, because I've been so hard on arguing that the image only works because it wasn't made intentionally. like, that the lack of human intent is what gives it evidentiary weight and what transforms it from trite political cartoon into Good Art.

but i literally think that's still true. if a human made this, if someone deliberately prompted an AI to produce filets in a river and then framed it as an accident for heckin reddit updoots or even legitimately to make a political point, then what they created is a piece of art about the difference between intentional and unintentional meaning. they used the AI as a medium, but more importantly, they used our expectation of AI failure as a medium. The art isn't just the image; it's the image plus the caption plus our willingness to believe it.

Sorts of Evil

The Dark One: Nihilistic Evil and Chaotic Evil

Machin Shin: Bloodlust Evil

Mashadar: Spiteful Hate Evil

The Foresaken: Selfish, Greedy Evil

The Creator: Apathetic Evil

Seanchan Empire: The Evils of Colonisation and Slavery

The Wheel: The Evil of Neutrality, Removal of Free Will (or is it free will within constraints? The philosophy gets a bit muddy sometimes, and the author change didn't help.)

Compulsion: Removal of Free Will (To write a treatise on free will being the important thing, but to have a mechanism that removes people's free will (The Wheel) is a bit odd.)

Madness from the Taint on Saidin: The evil of....? Chaotic thought + memory loss? Catastrophic mental illness? Not sure what to think about this one.

The fact is, there was no easy solution. Humanity opened the Bore, and there was no getting out of it without humanity paying a price. And the fact was, it was a win, plain and simple. The Breaking and the madness that lingered were a cheap price to pay for deliverance from the Dark One. The world that exists is objectively and definitively better than one where the Dark One conquered.

As for the other issues, I don't think the Dark One is really out to destroy everything, so much as remake the world in his own image. He's the ultimate embodiment of evil, which isn't destruction, it's selfishness and self-gratification to a self-destructive extreme. If he just wants the world to not exist, the sort of games he plays with the Forsaken don't make sense. He has the actual power to destroy the world by everything we can see and if that was his goal, things like belief and order giving strength to the forces restraining him would not make sense. I think it's more that he empowers and feeds on selfishness and other negative mindsets and emotions. The more people act in an evil fashion, the "darker" the Pattern gets and the more power he has over it, and thus has greater ability to influence them toward darkness and evil. And that's why, when human society starts to fail, and the Dark One gets enough of a toe-hold in the world to start that self-reinforcing vicious cycle, the Pattern produces ta'veren to break it up and set things right.

My own theory about the Pattern is that it does not take away free will, but is rather the product of all aggregate free choices. It does not compel, much less Compel you into anything, and neither do ta'veren. The example I like to use is Rand's from his discussion with Loial about how the Pattern works, and how small changes as a result of a choice are worked into the Pattern, but you can't force big ones. Rand's example was that he could decide to live wherever he wanted, but he could not simply choose to be a king. But this is not because the Pattern mandates that he be a commoner, it's because a king only is a king, because thousands, if not millions, of people recognize him as king. Rand can say he is a king, and act like one until the cows come home, but he cannot force others to accept him as such.

That is the limitation the Pattern places on free will and choices - none, but everyone's choices matter, not just yours. It's a small world and everyone has to live in it together. Rand cannot be a king, because other people have the freedom to refuse to accept him. It's also pretty clear if you pay attention to what is really happening, that the ta'veren are neither forced along a path nor force others or cause others to be forced by their existence or choices. Ta'veren exist to make choices possible, to free the world from the shackles imposed by bad choices or good choices whose benefits have expired. e.g. National identities were useful to build a sense of community and loyalty to each other, and create safe and secure civilizations that allowed people better lives and more choices, but the world has clearly reached a point where those concepts no longer move people enough to resist the breakdown of order that is inspired by & enhances the influence of the Dark One, and nations are now differences that separate people when they need to be coming together. And we see that Rand, Mat & Perrin all inspire people to come together in spite of national or cultural differences. That's why all of them lead coalitions of people from many different lands. They are not forcing them to unite, they provide a motivation and a way to unite for those who are so inclined, but are hindered by the baggage of their own loyalties and suspicions of others.

This is also the difference between the ta'veren and their female counterpart protagonists, who work within the system to preserve and make use of the good still left. In book 1, Agelmar states that the monarch of Malkier is the oldest ruling title in the known world, with only the Queen of Andor coming close. And of course, the Amyrlin Seat predates them both by a couple millennia. And by the end of the series, Nynaeve is Queen of Malkier, Elayne is Queen of Andor and Egwene is Amyrlin Seat. They are the peak of the established system, while the boys primarily rely on positions of authority that more or less are invented for them. Dragon Reborn, overlord of Tear, Car'a'carn, Coramoor, founder of the Black Tower, sworn liege of Aes Sedai, conqueror of Cairhien and Caemlyn, Lord of the Two Rivers, liege lord of Ghealdn, Captain-General and founder of the Band of the Red Hand ... we didn't have any people doing these things when the black rider first appeared in Emond's Field. The girls use their powers and administer their offices in a fashion every bit as radical as the institutions the boys create, but they are not ta'veren because they are using & strengthening the walls that humanity erected in the past, while boys knock out new doors in those same walls. Neither wall nor door is inherently good or bad, it depends on the circumstances, but as it is, the walls are poorly defended against humanity's Enemy, and also obstructive to the purpose of taking the fight to the Shadow. Our heroes & heroines utilize both in a complementary fashion to make the fight possible.

So in regard to the point about the Creator being evil in his neglect, that's a misreading of whatever is going on. Depending on which cosmic view is the reality, it can only be the Creator's power and rules that prevent the Dark One from going all out, that makes the choices people make for unity and order matter against him, that constrain him to work through intermediaries like the Forsaken, or else the Creator does not stick his oar in, because to do so would negate the free will of a considerable portion of humanity.

For good or for ill, human choices, freely made with free will, have put the world in its current state, and for the Creator to alter that state is to undo their choices, and to effectively render those choices pointless. If God is going to catch you every time you jump off a cliff, then the choice to jump does not represent free will, because the outcome is the same whether you jump or don't. Rand, Mat & Perrin function as a kind of guiding light shining on the path humanity can take to extricate themselves from their current situation, allowing humanity to be saved, without removing their freedom.

All of this, of course, explains why compulsion is so evil and held as such in the text.

Yes, I am very familiar with the free will vs benevolent creator arguments. I still agree with the sentiment expressed by characters in the text that the Creator had abandoned them. Like, as a parent, I don’t control my children, because they are autonomous beings who make their own decisions. But I also do control my children, because (for example) I use my larger size to prevent them from running into traffic, and I teach them to pay attention to their surroundings so they don’t get hit by a car. I don’t just say, hur dee dur, if the toddler wants to run into the street, no big deal, that’s his choice. (insert clown face here)

Now, we could take the case that the Creator in wot was not akin to the Christian god, as in not omniscient and not all powerful in addition to being the creator. Maybe their creator is a dumbass who got in way over his head, who has no way of understanding or communicating with his creation. Maybe such a being gets a pass for seeming absent. Hard to say.

I think I would update my list, and add the Shaido next to the Seanchan, as colonizing slavers.

The Wheel took away Rand’s self-determination, which is not, I suppose, the same thing as taking away his free will. Still seems a little shitty, though.