I’ve spent the past few days thinking about how to respond to one subscriber’s comment on last week’s newsletter saying: “Sad thing is, I can’t tell if Rachel or some AI wrote this article.”
After a brief moment of indignation, I begrudgingly accepted that they were correct. There was no humanist identifier in the piece. In fact, it was written in what is probably going to become the obsolete tradition of impersonal dictums. This is the craft I was taught at university and the one I have tried to leave behind since. It creeps into my writing on first drafts, either when I’m not sure of what to say, how to say it, or even if I have anything to say. It is a linguistic opacity which shields me from expression, whilst maximising linguistic performance. It is easily aped by a.i.
And no wonder! As long as the written word is most lauded for its objectivity, distance, rationality and cleverness, we will be easily replaced by machines, who are far more capable than we of objectivity and distance, values we hold dear but can never reach given the fundamental stickiness of being human. That which is alive is entangled; we can only be far from that which we reject. And how, then, can we know it at all?
We will never beat the machines at their own game; it is not they who are the imitators, but us. They are forcing us to reckon with whatever it is that makes us human in the hope we can identify one another when we need each other most. As Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, that engaging in violent resistance helps a colonised people create a collective political identity that they can instantly recognise in each other, so we, too, can use our bodies to help us find one another in a world of machines.
Humanity is not something we convince ourselves of. It is something we feel. The only way I can write which proves I put pen to paper and not prompt to algorithm is by offering memory, experience and emotion. The linguistic tradition which passes the reverse Turing test to define who is human will be that which expresses our vulnerability. And it may help us connect with each other better than ever.
I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to grasp this. While I’ve been heedlessly hammering out a newsletter which has, some weeks, been indistinguishable to a.i.-generated content, I’ve been writing a book in an entirely different tradition. HER BODY, OUR CHOICE is written through my body, women’s bodies, and our collective earth body, intimately intertwining the violences of the flesh and extrapolating that out to the biggest possible picture. It was a very deliberate choice to write it like that, long before I landed a publishing deal. To me, it seemed a violation in itself to write of violence and pain without giving voice also to our bodies. We cannot be removed from reality, so why pretend distance affords us objectivity, and that objectivity is the only route to truth?
I want you all to be able to tell I wrote this, beyond having faith that I have (which I cherish). The only way I can imagine achieving this is by threading the past of my lived experiences through each topic I investigate, and the felt sensation of living in a body through a time of crisis. I do not presume that any of you are interested in me as a person, but I know that everyone subscribed here is interested in how we navigate this particular moment in human history as a collective. I want to write from the trenches, not from on high.
On that note, what I have felt recently is the inexhaustible tug towards, even amidst all the coming apart. A sense of that thread, our collective tap root, which reaches towards complexity and possibility and aliveness. Even from the depths of horrors is some fundamental drive towards being, a stubborn refusal to let go. It is music and dance and creativity and the squall of newborns. I have felt it in my own body, an aliveness which has prevented me from getting a decent night’s sleep in almost a week. A certainty which has set my jaw at the future.
No matter what happens, life will continue to happen. No matter what happens, we are all part of the greatest wonder in the universe, those of us with bodies that can hold and squeeze and dance and keep us up at night. No matter what happens, no matter the amount of death and destruction, something else pulls us along, throwing this entire world into being, into a dance of relationships which shines the brightest line in the known universe.
I feel in my body a belonging to a universal principle of creation, which dares throw us all against the dissipative certainty of entropy. It is this tension of opposites that allows us to live and die, which allows us to exist and marvel at that existence. It is upon this very knife edge that Earth thrives; She has made a garden out of a guillotine.
If metaphors like these are the only way to truth, as Iain McGilchrist argues on this week's upcoming episode, then expressing truth is the human agency we can strive for in a world dominated by machines.
I suppose... the thing would be NOT to publish one's writing on line, then it can't be harvested by AI bots. Would only apply to books though. Or you could pepper everything with swear words and spelling mistakes 😁
Of course we are interested in you and, I hope, you in us! You are not just your ideas but a living breathing person with passions and prejudices, strengths and vulnerabilities and thirst to communicate. I have come to see this forum as more of a joint enterprise in the search for meaning in these tumultuous times with you leading the charge. It would not be the same without the sense of connection created by the trading of lows as well as highs, regrets and triumphs and the honesty of personal reflection.
I avoid AI where ever possible as it represents an addiction to power that will never be satisfied so it never occurred to me that your writing could be anything other than your own hand at work. Also, while the internet is a wonderful way to discover like and unlike minds nothing can replace the patient work of building trust - not a blue tick or any other shortcut that may be in use. For those of us who have followed you for a while that trust has been built and there is no question of the authenticity of your work.
It is, though, an example of dualism that Iain McGilchrist would recognise as without mistrust you cannot have trust and your acceptance of the criticism is akin to the resolution of that duality subsuming both into something greater.
So glad you have managed to get Iain on the show. He has done so much to champion the importance of perception, connectedness and in general a world that is full of wonder and possibility set in universe that no machine could never come anywhere near creating. Look forward to hearing your episode with him.