Authenticity, Kant & Digital Pollution

I've had a strangely large number of conversations in the last two weeks about the nature of authenticity, itself a comment on truth as a whole. 

Because so much of what life has thrown at us in recent years is composed of digital falsehoods pushing nonsense, linguistic labyrinths meant to confound, and a wholesale weaponization of language forcing ideologies to clash against each other...it can be hard to find the authenticity in life sometimes. 

The internet was lauded early on as some great bastion of learning. It was also touted as a way to further connect people of differing backgrounds and ideas. Though presented as a kind of great technological, cosmopolitan symposium like those held in ancient Greece among statesmen and politicians and philosophers, it has become simply another great example of our idealism outshining the reality of what would actually happen. Rather than being a pure way of spreading truth and knowledge, we've basically polluted the digital ocean in the same way we've polluted the real ones surrounding our home continents. 

There are large swaths of industry geared solely toward manipulating the digital ecosystem in order to propagate "engagement" and "sales," and so we as a collective society have bought into this idea that we must fight against others doing the same in order to make sure we are best seen by the most amount of people. And admittedly, I am part of this machine, having worked in digital marketing for the last 10 years in some way, shape, or form. I have learned the backend of websites and how to optimize pages in order to grab your attention more succinctly in order to get you to buy/buy-in/opt-in/choose this product or this lifestyle choice. Hell, even my writing of this blog is meant to grab your attention and hold onto it no matter how well- or ill-informed the piece might be. 

And now we are feeding these polluted waters into a new system as if they are the truth, as if they don't contain all the nonsensical poison we've been dumping into the internet's rivers and tributaries. Yes, there is plenty of truth being fed into the system as well, but there is plenty of gnarled garbage being served up to us in the process because the source is itself full of gnarled garbage. 

So many are happily buying into the mangled ourobouros of AI bullshit and so many (like myself) are actively against its proliferation into the public sphere. I have used it at my previous job. Had to be trained on multiple systems that did multiple things. I have experience with it and I simply don't care for it. I don't find it helpful to me personally or professionally as I never needed it to do my tasks in the past, nor do I feel like I need it now. It's getting exhausting having to wade through the AI-created garbage that is now becoming more ubiquitous as the general public has latched on to it. 

A recent study by MIT's Media Lab concluded that "excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions may contribute to cognitive atrophy." This finding essentially states that the use of AI is diminishing your capacity for thinking for yourself in certain ways, which can't be remotely surprising to anyone. But to be fair, this was a smaller study with a small sample size and has yet to be peer-reviewed, so take the results with a grain of salt. I wouldn't be surprised if more studies like this turn up the same results over the next few years, though. 

It's becoming harder and harder to find the authenticity sometimes and may continue to be so for a good long while. 

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I may not have become a teacher the way I initially thought I would ages ago, but I'm almost always happy to teach other people how to do the things that I know how to do because I enjoy the role of mentor, even in small ways. Sure, I could charge for that information (barter, money, information trade, etc), but I find that kind of transaction for knowledge...awkward. Not tacky, but it makes me uncomfortable in many ways. 

I didn't realize that I'd already been adhering to the concept below, but when I took a whole semester of Kant during undergrad, I was struck by his idea of the categorical imperative (a kind of universal morality): 

"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end."  

To this day, it is difficult for me to approach something like a networking event with any real kind of enthusiasm because of the premise of the thing - here are a bunch of people who can do things for you if you can do things for me. Transactional. Of course there is the complete and true possibility of making genuine connections at something like that, but I think you understand where I come from personally on this. I don't begrudge anyone that attends those types of events, they're just not for me. 

If I have a legitimate connection with someone, and I enjoy their company apropos of nothing else at all, I find that giving up my time or my expertise is far easier and enjoyable than not. There is an authenticity to both the emotional connection and to the professional request. 

And it feels like there's a widening gap between the interpersonal; the important and complex emotional quotient between individuals seems to be ever-growing. The need for physical and emotional human connection will always be there. The problem is that we've seen so much of that degrade as the digital space opens up, taking more of our headspace and our heartspace. And, much like every other invention we've bastardized and ruined, we can see the way we are approached and treated like mindless cattle in dating apps or on social media sites. The phrase "if you're not paying for it, then YOU'RE the product" is an especially cynical, if completely true, viewpoint. 

The worst common denominator in us has figured out how to use great technology for terrible uses, and they'll continue to do so with every new advance. 

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I say all this as a current luddite and former idealist-turned-cynic. There was a long time where I preferred to see the best in people, regardless of the situation. The older I get, however, the less I believe that to be true. I recognize this as a broad overgeneralization, I do, but I think it's important to not only seek out authenticity and truth, but to implement as much of both into one's own life as much as possible, maybe now more than ever. 

The worst versions of my self were the ones where I actively tried to be something I clearly wasn't. 

The worst versions of my creations were the ones where my heart wasn't in it. 

The worst decisions I ever made were always the ones where I lowered my standards or intentionally ignored the ethical and moral pillars of my belief system in order to satisfy a short-term situation. 

Good is rarely easy and easy is rarely good. And while I certainly don't expect anyone to agree with my reasoning or my methodology, I have added a disclaimer to my next two books because I think it will be important for a large part of the population to know what art has been created entirely by human hands and thought versus what's been generated by AI: 

"Not a single stitch of this book utilized AI in any capacity. Not for ideating, not for writing, not for editing, not for creating any of the cover art, not for creating any of the inner art...nothing. This either matters to you or it doesn't, but it absolutely matters to me." 

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