Scott Alexander created a Turing Test for AI generated artwork. Begin quote:

I got 88% correct (44/50). Here’s my attempt (or rather my imperfect memory of my attempt), and my justification for the answers I gave.

Concluding Thoughts

You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?

This guitar teacher talks about an amusing, perhaps alarming, trend he’s seen among his students.

In the 90s, they’d be hardcore fans of a particular band. They’d want to learn Metallica’s Master of Puppets in its entirety, or some obscure song buried at the back of an album. They’d display fierce loyalty to a chosen artist or style.

This era of music is summed up by Zebra Man in Jeff Krulik and John Heyn’s infamous gonzo documentary Heavy Metal Parking Lot. “Heavy metal rules! All that punk shit sucks! It belongs on fucking Mars, man!”

Things changed in the Napster/Limewire era (early 2000s). Digital filesharing meant the album slowly started to die. Kids would rock up to him with home-burned CDs and tapes of random songs collaged from various places. This was exciting, as far as it went. Kids were taking control of their music. Albums are ultimately a marketing construct from the 1950s dictated by manufacturing constraints. There’s no God-given reason why music has to be doled out in 40-60 minute blobs, all by the same artist, and with an immutable track order. Other worlds are possible. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio.

But the new generation of listeners had far less loyalty to individual bands/artists. They did not know the “deep tracks”. If they wanted to learn an Offspring song, it would always be one of the same 3-4 songs.

Today, it has shifted again. His students are like “yo, I want to learn $SONG”, he’s like “so you like $SONG_ARTIST?” and he gets a blank stare. They live in a world where endless music drifts algorithmically in front of them, like indistinguishable ocean waves. Sometimes they like it, but this doesn’t provoke any interest in who made the music, where it came from, what its context is, and so forth. Why even learn those things? More and equally good music is coming along soon. There’s no reason to be a fan of anyone. Once the artist vanishes from Spotify playlists, they can safely forget about them.

(Superfans obviously still exist, but now seem to be motivated more by weird parasocial obsessions than actual artistic output. What would the average kpop “sasaeng” desire more—an unreleased song by Jungkook, or a piece of Jungkook’s shirt?)

It makes you wonder….what does it actually mean to be a fan of someone?

I view fandom as a search algorithm. A way of managing the limitless choices of entertainment.

If I want to read a book there are millions of them, but reading random books is a poor use of my time: most are bad/uninteresting/unsuitable for me. I can dramatically increase my odds of finding a good book by reading an author I’ve enjoyed in the past.

This creates an illusion that the author is important. Actually, “author” is just a highly optimal branch on a search tree for book discovery. If my favorite author started writing bad books, I’d eventually stop reading him. The books are what matters.

Which leads to the question: what happens when search algorithms can connect you with good books better than the tried-and-true method of “read books by your favorite author”? Do you still need to have a favorite author? What happens in that world? Does the fan still exist?

Here’s a related thing I recently read: Kat Tenbarge’s Sorry, Bella Poarch, this IS ‘Build a B*tch’

Overnight, a Tiktoker became the third biggest star on the platform because she nodded her head to an electronic beat for a few seconds.

This is literally a fame lottery. There is no reasonable way that talent, perseverance, or “star power” can manifest in a video that’s a few seconds long and where you don’t even talk. (The Tiktok algorithm, by the way, is believed to have a reasonable amount of random noise, to stop people hacking it.) We expect stars to have a degree of personal charisma. Stars produced this way, as Tenbarge notes, tend to be punishingly average and unsuited for fame.

All of it — and this is coming from someone who collects influencer merchandise — is incredibly boring and one-dimensional. This is not by any means an invitation to bash Charli, who I feel great sympathy for given her age and precarious position in multiple overlapping industries. She’s at the epicenter of a new generation’s group of power brokers, with her every move impacting the salaries of grown adults, including her parents and older sister. And I mean this in this kindest way possible — she’s not qualified for any of it. Charli, who I have never personally spoken to, comes off as incredibly sweet, caring, and normal. She reminds me of every high school-aged white girl at my hideously expensive dance studio in suburban Cincinnati. She can definitely perform well, as well as any “Dance Moms-”era teenage competitive dancer from Connecticut. But if you read an interview with Charli and her older sister Dixie, the mediocrity is palpable. They don’t really have anything interesting to say about, well, anything — and if they do, their publicists won’t let them. I’ve seen a handful of their YouTube videos, listened to clips from their podcasts, and scrolled through dozens of Instagram posts, TikTok videos, and tweets. There’s nothing wrong with either of them, they’re just oppressively average. And by the way, so are all their friends in the Hype House and Sway House and whatever new teeny-bopper house went on the market this week.

Bella has attempted to turn her fame into a recording career, with familiar results to anyone familiar with past cases like Kreayshawn or Tila Tequila.

To me, this feels like an area where the past world is meshing incongruously with the new, algorithmic one.

The industry is trying to position Bella Poarch for a lasting career, where her fans continue to buy the songs she puts out for a long time because she’s talented and special. But if her audience cared enough to do that, they probably wouldn’t have found her on Tiktok to begin with. Bella Poarch is the product of a system where the old rules no longer quite apply. She is a nobody who was plucked out of obscurity, through no great merit of her own. She’s not some rising, hot property who will sustain a long career.

And it’s all so meaningless! In 1964, 73 million people watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and it reshaped the face of music. Today, Tiktoks get billions of views and leave no mark on popular culture at all. It’s just noise that gets drowned out by the next day’s noise.

(Hero image: Laura Makabresku | The silent light of God’s Mercy)

In 1969, Norwegian artist Terje Brofos (better known as Hariton Pushwagner) locked himself inside a writer’s friend’s house and hallucinated a man named Mr Soft, who was driving a car. “Was he on LSD?” Rude question. You should shut your whorebag mouth. Yes, he was on LSD.

Three years and several misadventures later (near-homelessness in London, a hotel fire in Paris, and an arrest when trying to board a flight to Madeira walking on his hands and knees), Pushwagner became a parent. This—plus a soup of trauma from his own difficult childhood—inspired him to create a full-length comic about Mr Soft. This book, lost for a quarter of a century, finally saw publication in 2008.

Mr Soft now lives in a bright, endless city. It’s a horrifying arcology of poured steel and concrete. Buildings swallowing the sky like abominable wallpaper, and strangely-eyelike windows peering down at the streets in obsessive contemplation. Even the sun has an eye. Soft City is familiar yet alien: it seems like a place for termites to live, not men.

The comic has no story and no characters. It shows Mr Soft going about his day in this urban insect hive. Like Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (an inspiration, I believe), it cuts out a twenty-four hour slice of time, and forces the reader to interpret it with no past or future. What yesterday could have led up to it? What tomorrow can come after it? Who knows. We can only dream. Pushwagner cuts away context like a cancer, making you stare at what’s in front of you until the eye bleeds.

I’ve long felt that the best setting for any work of dystopic fiction is right now. It’s a well-worn piece of Orwell lore that 1984 wasn’t written about the future but about Orwell’s current times (notably, 1984 is a rearrangement of 1948, the year the book was written). Whether or not that’s true, dystopic fiction loses its edge when it’s set in the future, which can seem very foreign and far away. I used to commute to work through snowdrifts of litter. When I visited rural China, and all the men had cigarettes sticking out of their mouths, like antennas to hell (my own country was the same two generations ago). People don’t care about the inhabitants of the future, not even when those inhabitants are their own future selves. They exist outside our moral circle. Pushwagner knows not alienate his humans by setting them in a far-off fairytale land we can ignore. He makes them alien for other reasons.

The men of Soft City are like clones or robots. They wake up at the same time, take their pills (there’s a “life” pill to wake them up, and with a matching “sleep” pill for the end of the day), have repetitive interactions with their wives and children, and then collectively commute to work in the beating unheart of the city.

Obviously, their jobs are a parody of useless corporate wagecucking (and their boss is like Glengarry Glen Ross’s Alec Baldwin after a frontal lobotomy), but their home lives are equally artificial. There’s no escape from the existential contrivance of life. Pushwagner loves the trick of showing Mr Soft enjoying some touchy-feely personal moment, like kissing his wife or playing with his baby son—then zooming out, so we can see the same thing happening in hundreds of other windows. It’s commodities, all the way down. This is one of those all-purpose satires that could be read as commentary on capitalism or communism. It depicts a failure mode, a Molochian trap. The early bird catches the worm, but not every bird can be early. When you get up early to beat the traffic, you shift the hour of peak traffic a little earlier, and if everyone’s doing that…

Mr Soft becomes impossible to regard as the main character, because he is like everyone else. He drives in a stagnant sea of cars, driven by indentikit humans that look like they rolled off a production line. We lose sight of him—a human sorites’ paradox. Occasionally someone does stand out in Soft City, but it’s always for bad reasons—like that person crying out “HELP!” as a baton-swinging officer pounds him into the asphalt. By the end of the book (which can be read in about an hour), we cannot even conceive that Mr Soft is a human being. He’s more like a molecule, propelled from place to place, but never alone, and never of his own will.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that people can maintain effective social connections with just 150 people: everyone else overflows the bucket and becomes an “outgroup” that our brains regard suspiciously, as if they’re not quite human. (“They always screw the little guy“. In this sentence, “they” are the outgroup.) Who’s “in” or “out” of your Dunbar circle depends on context. Why is the relationship you have with your mother sacred? Because there’s just one of her. If you had 1,000 mothers, you wouldn’t feel any sort of connection to them, would forget their names, and wouldn’t even care enough to try to remember them. Soft City takes us on a similar journey. At first, Mr Soft is a human. One of us. By the end of the book, Dunbar’s Number has prevailed. He has been mashed and puree’d into exactly the black inhuman paste that Soft City thinks he is.

The minimalistic art means all objects look the same. People take pills to get through the day. The pills remind us of the cars. Everything is a hollowness: just a container for something else, lacking its own existence. Pushwagner sometimes uses mirrors to duplicate cars. This reduced his workload (there are literally thousands of cars), while adding to the sense of artificial sterility. In this society, a car is a shell for a driver. A cubical is a shell for a worker. A woman is a shell for a baby. It’s a world of cardboard boxes, which exist to hold other, smaller cardboard boxes.

Judged as a comic, Soft City is bleeding-edge alternative. You could call it outsider art. Pushwagner’s wobbly, fussy linework is easy to understand, challenging to interpret, and harder to love. His shapes don’t close. There are no colors or even shading, and no sense that his world would support them. There’s also a strong impression—and I think this was intended—that the drawings are missing something. Your senses grasp and hunger for something that isn’t there. It’s like an 80s videogame, where lush artwork has been brutally downsampled to 16 EVGA colors: you feel the missing hues. Everything is stripped down and function-based and the baby got thrown out with the bathwater a long time ago.

Pushwagner lived on the wrong side of the world to participate in the San Francisco “comix” scene. Had the cards fallen differently you could imagine Soft City serialized in Spiegelman/Mouty’s RAW anthologies, or Crumb-era Zap Comix. In 2008, it heavily evokes the “ugly on purpose” aesthetic of Adult Swim cartoons such as Superjail! Movies like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, and Jacques Tati’s Playtime draw from the same well, as do many books by JG Ballard. Conformity, corporatism, the bland ineffable horror of packing an image with cubicles and chairs and cars and people until it breaks the viewers mind like an overloaded conveyer belt.

Yes, the social commentary is shallow. Pushwagner isn’t the first person to dislike traffic jams and office cubicles and consumerism. Sometimes it approaches “I’m 14 and this is deep” territory. Like when we see a man dreaming of being a fighter pilot, which is later echoed by scenes of what the Soft City air force actually gets up to. (“Heil Hilton!”)

Other times, the naive “outsiderness” of Pushwagner’s art gives it emotional poignancy. It has something of the realness of a child opening his eyes and noticing the world—truly noticing—for the first time.

Most artists don’t manage social commentary on this level without a sense of smugness and intellectual superiority. I’m smart, unlike these dumb-dumbs. Banksy has never sat well with me: his shtick ultimately feels like a 4chan troll going “thank you for proving my point for me”. But the emotions here seem simple but real and earned.

This is because Soft City is also a mirror held up to the artist’s face. Pushwagner doesn’t exculpate himself from this society. The first living thing we see in the comic is not Mr Soft, but Mr Soft’s young child, who has an innocence that can’t and won’t last long. It’s one thing to live in a place like this. But what does it mean to have a baby in Soft City? Pushwagner had recently become a father, which meant he confronted that choice himself.

This also makes hard to understand. As I piece together fragments of Pushwagner’s life, I feel like I’m reading a half-mythical folklore figure, not a man. Living on the margins. Shredding his mind through drugs and outre experiences. Even the account that Soft City was “lost” for a time is curiously muddled. Pushwagner insists that his portfolio was stolen upon his 1979 return to Oslo, while biographer Petter Mejlaender says it was merely lost. Legal disputes were also involved. If he’d lived in America a few years earlier, we’d have called him a “beat”. As with someone like Robert Crumb, he was a weird man who inflicted deliberate damage upon his brain to become still weirder. Mr Soft lives a life of conformity. From what I know of Pushwagner, his own life was defined by non-conformity. Maybe in Mr Soft, he saw the Devil. Someone who made all the wrong choices in life. But it shows that the reverse of stupidity isn’t necessarily intelligence, Pushwagner was right to fear the horrific legibility of the modern age. But the polar alternative—radical freedom—isn’t so pleasant, either.