Happy New Year, folks. AI is here… I was going to write more on dementia, but the overhyped topic of AI seems apt for Invasion Day. (And besides, the rollout of AI and the rise of dementia are entwined inextricably, like most modern afflictions.) So, yes: Happy Invasion Day. No: just joking. What could be sadder than the sight of sunburnt drunken revellers sporting anachronistic Oz flags (the Stars and Stripes, not the Union Jack, would be more accurate) as they bury local beaches under their trash? Any excuse for a piss-up – that’s our cultural norm. Yet our government trialled cashless welfare in mostly Indigenous communities – as if whites don’t abuse booze. No, we’re not racist. Hearing that two Woolies stores were vandalised last week, I assumed folk resented them cracking down on theft and jacking up prices. But no, they’d opted not to stock Australia Day merch. Seems some folk are so racist, they hate wokeness more than corporate extortion.

But I’m not about to inveigh against invasion of Aboriginal land. The Left has got that covered to the point of absurdity. My support for reconciliation makes me no less weary of hearing I don’t belong on the land of my birth. A misfit all my life, I’ve only ever felt at home in nature. Does that make me entitled? And if I’m tired of this self-righteous virtue-signalling narrative, which summarily dismisses my whole personal history, I’m guessing that folk less simpatico with Indigenous values may feel defensive, fearing they’ll be forced off their farms or out of their houses. (Besides which, what’s the bet that some of the biggest virtue signallers own investment properties leased for steep rents or kept empty for holidays?) And it’s too easy to turn most folk against moral and ethical justice by hitting them over the head with a message until they suffer concussion. So today I want to acknowledge a different kind of invasion: one that affects us all as a species, wherever we happen to be; the incursion too few of us seem inclined to notice, let alone resist, assuming we still have the cognitive ability.

Not long ago, WordPress – the platform where you’re reading this post – sent me an email that began: ‘Say hello to your new writing assistant’. (The fuck I will.) See, WordPress has introduced ‘an all-new tool’ designed to create ‘content’ or at least to ‘polish, proof, and prepare’ it. Woo-hoo! This ‘versatile writing aide’ (note the humanising ‘e’ added to ‘aid’) can generate titles and summaries, check your spelling and grammar, translate your content to other languages, and even create outlines and first drafts. Compelling, effortless, seamless, WordPress tells me repeatedly. Barf!

Compelling, a synonym for coercing, denotes both the Jetpack AI Assistant’s features and what sort of content it can help you create. (Let’s hope Jetpack has a bigger vocab than that.) And effortless? Does WordPress think bloggers don’t value the process of crafting a post or see effort as its own reward: exercising their minds to keep their brains in working order? Not that most have much, if anything, vital to offer – they just crave a following to fill their inner emptiness, the psychic void where soul might once have dwelt before technology swallowed it. And seamless (a perfectionist’s wet dream) speaks to the need to sanitise, correct errors, banish mess, fix asymmetry, and nix the warts and all of uniqueness. Once, perfection in art served to evoke religious awe, to aid the viewer’s focus on the divine. Now, much art strives merely for photorealist effects, while digital manipulation shifts photos still further from the real world, and AI wastes resources contriving tacky hybrid beasts ad infinitum.

Penned in the mid ’80s, Laurie Anderson’s ‘Language is a Virus’ could have been predicting AI. In fact, I just googled the meaning of her lyrics, and the top-ranked result yielded a suspiciously lucid reading. ‘This meaning interpretation was written by AI’, the tiny print below it discloses. ‘Help improve it with your feedback’. That’s right. AI has learned how to sound more or less like a person (albeit a nerd) because our ‘content’ has been used to train it without our consent, and now we’re expected to help tweak it for free. And presumably plenty of docile folk will oblige (not me).

Some years ago, searching for anarchists in the vein of provocateur Hakim Bey, I came across another interesting thinker. John Zerzan’s critique of the imposition of time (an artificial construct) on reality, the reduction of experience via language, the immiseration of civilisation etc. struck me as quite seductive. And bonkers… right? I mean, language (and maybe some acid trips) equipped Zerzan to deduce that humanity has had it all wrong ever since it outgrew hunting and gathering. I resonated with his values; just couldn’t follow his logic. Humans willingly winding back ten or more millennia of technological development? We’d need a catastrophe on par with the giant asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. The ability to diagnose an illness needn’t mean knowing how to treat it. Yet in the two and a half millennia since the invention of medicine (as evinced by Hippocratic texts), its emphasis has shifted from observation to remedy, with the former farmed out to high tech and the latter to Pharma, as the goal of healing gets eclipsed by endless referrals and prescriptions.

Advice, not insight, rules. ‘Blogging is about bringing your voice to the web’, the email from Herdpress WordPress concludes. And yet the average person has gotten worse at listening – exposed to so many voices that sound ever more alike as they cite research from the same sets of sources (whether official or subversive) and, consciously or not, emulate the style of more popular bloggers they follow. No-one dares differ unless others do it first. A recipe for a progressive loss of diversity. And this environment is training AI. It’s the product of statistical thinking. The acme of received wisdom. An unholy wellspring of homogeneous cack.

But hey, not to worry. Our government has a plan to ensure that AI is used safely and responsibly, which includes curbing its use in high-risk settings – say, healthcare, policing and job recruitment; contexts placing lives or future prospects at stake. Our government also had a plan to combat Covid and look how that panned out. Safe and responsible, safe and effective… it’s all just spin; code for safeguarding corporate interests.

In our you-can-have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too society, technology gives even die-hard atheists an afterlife, albeit two-dimensional, online. Images, videos, digital texts: ghostly virtual echoes. But when cultural attributes die, they ascend to the heady realm of words: authenticity, holism, diversity, ecological, science… And we continue to pay them lip service, our words the desiccated husks of what once enriched our lives.

Maybe Zerzan had a point about language? When we talk with others in person, energy, more than words, connects us. Two or more humans breathing in sync. Harmonised auras. Healing laughter. Eye contact. Pheromones. For words to do justice to a message takes a knack or just lots of practice. Yet, deeper connections between beings (and not just of our species) occur through telepathy or attunement to vaster energies: chthonic/cosmic, tellurian/stellar, terrestrial/celestial. And that outgrowth of language, technology gone batshit, disrupts our birthright of belonging to the Earth, buries us in information, deprives us of time, deals out dopamine hits that dull immediacy, substitutes distraction for the ecstasy of instinct, bombards and bamboozles us with links we learn to call ‘connectivity’, compels passivity vs. beneficial effort and promotes mindless busyness (vs. minding its own business), reduces the seamless wildness of direct experience to brain-shredding pixels. Which is why I need to get outside now and go for a sunset swim.