Those Seconds Belong to You, and They Are Trying to Take Them
I have walked past, rolled my eyes at, or simply not given a shit about the majority of the visual art I’ve ever seen. Not ashamed of this. I appreciate beauty, I am an artist myself, I simply don’t have the knowledge or the eye to really get painting and sculpture so hard that I, like, go to museums for fun. I don’t know the history of art or artists, or the political context of it, or what good composition is.
All I know is that I am physically incapable of walking past a Jackson Pollock painting without stopping. Certainly not in a museum, even if I’m speedrunning that museum to make sure I don’t miss the happy hour at the nearby bar, because I’m probably visiting a foreign city if I am in a museum and I did not come to this place for the art. I can’t not take a long look in any context. I wouldn’t skip a moment with a Pollock poster in a souvenir store, or on a television screen showing the movie Ex Machina.
I don’t know the first thing about Jackson Pollock. I don’t know what he was trying to say with his art. I don’t know what kind of person he was. I know Ed Harris played him in a movie, and I know that I never saw that movie.
And yet, when I look at that mess of paint, time stops for a moment or two, and those moments are mine. I own them. They are a gift from Jackson Pollock to me, no one else, and they cannot be taken from me. It’s my experience and I don’t have to explain it. I don’t even have to think about the painting. I can do whatever I want with those seconds, because they are mine.
I can’t possibly be the only person who experiences art this way, as just a few seconds when the thing occupies your whole soul and you feel like nothing else matters. When art really knocks your socks off, you get lots of these seconds, it sticks with you for a long time. Time spent to just sort of bask in it. I’m not interested in an academic description of what I’m talking about. Because I think this thing we feel at these moments is truth. Pure truth, truth as an elemental force, not just a statement backed up by fact. It is TRUE that the Dodgers won the last World Series. But that is not what I’m talking about.
I think truth, in this sense, is one of those things we haven’t evolved a sense to measure yet. We just know it’s there. To know more would be to have a… sixth sense, if you will.
Put another way, if the constant rush of information and experience in life is a river, and it’s sometimes calm and sometimes rapid, but always, always flowing, impossible to control or predict, then truth is a big old rock in the middle of the water. It is certain and fixed. We may not all see the rocks, but we float past them all the same. When we catch one, the rock gives us a place to stop and catch our breath for a moment, re-orient our senses. And when you think of all the rocks at once, they are what gives the river its shape.
Maybe one day we’ll be able to understand elemental truth as well as we do verbal facts, but I don’t want to see that day. I like it this way. I think there should always be a few things beyond our comprehension. Things like awe, and love, and maybe a craving for a specific taco we once had which may or may not have existed.
Because I like looking at a painting or reading a book or seeing a really great tree and just… having those seconds to myself. I don’t share them. They are tiny little branches in the space-time continuum, little side paths made for just me for one moment, while everyone else goes on with their lives. And when this side path deposits me back in the primary timeline, I am little bit different. A little bit new. And though the change is often quite subtle, the rest of my life will not be precisely the same because of the experience of a few seconds.
Anyway, this is about AI. Generative AI, broadly, seeks to take your seconds away from you. Whether to sell them to someone else or to sell them back to you, it’s trying to take the one thing that is so utterly yours that you don’t even know exactly what it is. It’s trying to keep you on the main timeline, all the time, no tiny little branch-offs. Why, I don’t know, but if I had that power I would use it to control you. Whether or not we can stop AI is not really what’s on my mind at this time, only that when it comes to me personally, the machines can take my seconds from my cold dead fingers.