Button Drawer #2

The Button Drawer saves birthday candles in plastic baggies under a pile of “loosie” AA batteries. Also, stray links, bits n’ bobs, etc. from the last few posts on Desire Paths. First, to paraphrase Steve Martin, let’s get flat… 

Open the Drawer: Flatware!

• Ted “Honest Broker” Gioia’s State of the Culture address for ‘25 focuses on flatness — flat is what makes the big bucks these days! From flattening products to flattening humans. The world is not longer flat, it’s flattened. (Meaning the more humans are dull, dreary, identical scrollbots, the better for the owners of the social platforms upon which we spend our one beautiful life.)

• Human flattening in AI representation can’t be done without also being racist, sexist, and ableist. OpenAI’s Sora “movie generator” (and other generative AI) has a default protagonist problem. After “training” on biased images, GenA.I. amplifies those biases and, naturally, “favors young, hot, skinny people.”

• Another way to talk about the flattening of culture, spaces, and humans is to call it “mid” (an adjective describing a person or thing as aggressively average). Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottam dubs bland A.I. “mid-tech” in a typically insightful opinion column. GenA.I. is the ultimate “mid” generator.

• “A.I.” technology is a social technology with an aim of social engineering. The engineering, perhaps inadvertently, focuses on turning us into shallow scrollers who live without context or human interaction. “Large AI models are cultural and social technologies” ends with the following three questions that A.I. developers should (but I think never will) ask themselves:

Rummage in the Drawer: Are these old nail clippers “technology”?

I wrote about Haiku and the Blues and argued that they cannot be flattened. They exist within a context of past and future (and inspiration and experience) that a large language model cannot be “trained” upon. Our esteemed editorial staff asked the obvious question: How is haiku technology?

It occurred to me that I had better, at least for myself, define technology. To me technology is anything created that mediates our relationship to the world. In other words, a very broad definition that can include everything from a hammer to capitalism.

By way of illustration: when I was in Humanities PhD school at Salve Regina University in Rhode Island, a lot of my classmates and some profs came from the Naval War College down the street. They were always going on about battles and how innovations in weaponry changed this or that trajectory of history. (Yawn.) I argued with them that haiku, for example, actually had a more profound impact on society than gunpowder. That’s because people could see the world with haiku-eyes. What a profound, and wonderful, change! I was right in the middle of one of these prolonged and interesting debates when my prof suddenly dropped dead over spring break… so I never really finished the argument satisfactorily.

What’s this under the half-used erasers? A problematic philosopher?

I have avoided mentioning the elephant in the closet of all this thinking about technology: the philosopher Martin Heidegger. His short (but thick!) essay “The Question Concerning Technology” is the text from which most of my ideas (such as they are) spring. The same is true for pretty much any post-WWII thinker you can name who has written about technology. The problem is: Heidegger was definitely a Nazi.

Imagine it is 1933 and you just got your dream job as Rector at the University of Freiberg. The job that seemed impossible to achieve (that’s why it’s a dream!) but you got it! You are successful beyond your wildest imagination. Then, ten days after you accept this post, you are presented with a choice: to remain in your position you must join the Nazi party.

Heidegger did not make the right choice. He did resign his post a year later rather than change the curriculum, so that’s good. On the other hand he remained a member of the Nazi party until the end of WWII, so that’s bad. On yet another hand, Hannah Arendt gave him a pass and remained friends with him. Good! Also, on the flipside, he never explained himself nor apologized. Bad!

I thought of Heidegger when I read that the president of Columbia University resigned after capitulating to Trump’s demands. Dr. Katrina Armstrong may do a lot of important and interesting things in her life, but she will always be the person who caved under pressure to an authoritarian government.

So basically, the best we can say for Heidegger is that he stayed a member of the Nazi party in order to keep his faculty job (he had only resigned as rector). He wasn’t like, an active Nazi. He didn’t go to the meetings. He followed the same logic as law firms who think “well, I’ll just agree to this one thing Trump wants and THEN everything will be fine and be just like before…” But once you do that “one thing” you are forever stained, if only to yourself.

Close the drawer

Desire Paths wafts gently into your inbox every two-weeks, except for the occasional Button Drawer post, which wafts occasionally. All words are hand-typed on a click-y analog /digital hybrid keyboard called the “Razer Huntsman” (not a sponsor) — I crave that analog “authenticity” as well as programmable LED lights for each key. My keyboard pulsates moodily when I play S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2: Heart of Chornobyl, a Ukrainian game that was the target of a Russian disinformation campaign.