Can You Spell ‘Anomie’ Without AI?

I’ve been listening to Cemetery Skyline’s 2024 debut Nordic Gothic again today because it’s a windy, dreary late afternoon in March. In particular, I’ve been wondering about the title of the ninth track on the album, “Anomalie”. The title feels like a portmanteau of the words ‘anomaly’ and ‘anomie’, though I can’t prove that this is the case — or the songwriters’ intention. And then there are the lyrics:

That definitely sounds like us, doesn’t it? I’ve been thinking about this because of a post by Ava’s Blog called personal accountability in the age of AI, wherein she asks, Why do it if AI can do it for you?

It’s a question that seems to come up now not only because of the current AI hype bubble — and by Crom I hope it’s a hype bubble — but because we seem to be living through a period of anomie.

Anomie, or normlessness, is a term that the OG of sociology, Émile Durkheim, used in his 1987 book Suicide: A Study in Sociology to describe a social condition where all known moral codes and standards are breaking down or being uprooted. It is a time when the only creed with any validity is that of the Assassins — nothing is true and everything is permissible — and do what thou wilt is the whole of the law.

If computers can do everything people can, then what need have any of us for anybody else? Why even exist, if there is no meaning to be made in life by doing anything?

Frankly, we’re asking the wrong questions. The real existential risk behind AI, as I understand it, is not AI itself. It is our widespread philosophical poverty. Stoicism might be the trendy pop philosophy, but my opinion is that people need existentialism instead of being told that instead of trying to change the world they should try to change how they feel about the world.

Frankly?

Or, at least, Prometheus. Something to spark defiance in your hearts and light a fire under your asses.

Why does AI seem inevitable, anyway? Or, rather, why do those who profit from the current AI hype bubble want us to think that AI is inevitable?

Let’s be honest about ourselves: The history of humanity’s technology progress is the history of our laziness and cowardice. We invent ever more advanced weapons so that we need not fight hand-to-hand. Why use your fists when you can use a spear? Why use a spear when you can use a bow and arrows? Why use a bow when you can use a rifle? Why use a rifle when you can use a guided missile?

Nowadays hand-to-hand combat is a bloodsport — and big money — when it isn’t used by excessively wealthy techbros like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to engage in the sort of macho posturing more befitting of fifteen-year-old high school jocks than middle-aged men running multi-billion dollar corporations. But we’ll get to these assholes and their admirers shortly.

I’ve just talked about human cowardice, by which I mean our reluctance to engage in violence unless we can do so without giving the other person a chance to fight back. This isn’t entirely a bad thing. The invention of reliable firearms, for example, means that a woman need no longer be stronger than a man to be strong enough to kill a man if that man has victimized her. If God made men and women, the likes of Sam Colt, John Moses Browning, and Mikhail Kalashnikov made men and women equal.

What of human laziness? Again, we have invented ever more complex machinery to avoid the necessity of human labor. Why walk when you can ride a bicycle? Why ride a bicycle when you can drive a car? Why drive a car when you can fly in an airplane? Why dig a hole with a shovel if you can rent a backhoe? Why lift a steel beam if you can use a crane? Why hammer a nail into place if you can do the job with a nailgun?

Again, this is not entirely a bad thing. As we build machines to amplify human strength, we make it possible for more people to do work that might once have been the reserve of the strongest men.

This argument could also be made for machine learning tools currently on the market, by which I mean “generative AI” products for text like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and even Manus, Father of the Abyss. (I decided to go with a Dark Souls reference instead of pointing out that ‘Manus’ rhymes with ‘anus’ — oh, wait...) Not to mention image generation tools like DALL-E and Midjourney, or video generation tools like Sora.

However, these tools do not amplify innate human capability or make work that was once the reserve of a genetically gifted few to anybody willing to put in the effort. These tools are instead being used to replace human effort and human skill. Why write a shell script, a short story, a poem, a blog post, or a novel if an AI can do it for you? Why learn to play an instrument, sing, or make music if a computer can generate a song for you? Why learn to draw or paint if a computer can generate any image you can describe?

Why write a letter to your girlfriend when you can get an AI to do it for you? Hell, why have a girlfriend at all when there’s PornHub or AI “companions” like Replika?

Why do the hard thing? Why not take the easy way out and let yourself drift through existence, all watched over by machines of loving grace?

Here’s what I think. If your life consists of letting AI spare you the effort of living, you might as well kill yourself. If you willingly allow yourself to become replaceable by a computer because you can‘t be bothered to do anything yourself, then what was the point of your existence?

Then again, I suspect that the reason many people would rather let an AI handle everything is that they don’t actually want to live. They just aren’t ready to die yet, either. Dying is as hard as living; it’s easier to merely exist, to just let things happen to you. That way, when things go to hell you can blame everything and everybody but yourself, because you “didn’t do anything”.

But that makes you no better than somebody who just does what they’re told, without ever asking questions. Why not blindly obey anybody who cares to command you? That way, when everything goes to shit, you can insist that it wasn’t your fault because you were just following orders — as if that was any more valid a defense today than it was at Nuremberg in 1945.

Does the above sound unreasonable? Perhaps it is. However, there is no shortage of people who will tell you that abstaining from the use of AI is virtuous. Well, if virtue were truly its own reward there would be no such thing as vice.

Instead, I’m going to tell you why I don’t use AI to write: My pride forbids it. I will not see my holy name attached to a blog post, a poem, a short story, or a novel I did not write myself.

Consider the scene I wrote over the weekend. Is it a towering work of literature? Is it even part of a heart-breaking work of staggering genius? Will it be part of the next Great American Novel? Of course not.

Why do it, then? I did it for the same reason I swim laps at the YMCA pool or try to lift put more weight on a barbell every time I spend an hour lifting. I do it to prove to myself that I can do it.

Nobody will ever mistake me for one of the greats in any field. However, I am a better writer today than I was thirty years ago, and a better programmer too. I am a stronger swimmer than I was a year ago. I can lift heavier weights than I could a few years ago. I’m a better cook and housekeeper today than I was when I got my first apartment.

I am a better partner to my wife today than I was when we first started courting, and certainly a better partner to my wife than I was to the women I dated before her. I might be a better friend today than I was as a younger man, if I wasn’t so enamored of the freedom solitude affords that I could be bothered to do the work of making and keeping friends.

I am better at most of the things I do today than when I first started doing them. In some cases I reached a ceiling. In others I decided other pursuits were more important.

Regardless, I am proud of my skill. I am proud of my capability. I am proud that I have not spent my entire life taking the easy way out. By not doing so, but instead doing the hard thing, I have made a life that means something to me.

Never mind pride, though. I would counsel against letting a machine do everything for you because letting the machine live on your behalf is what the the humbugs in hoodies who own, operate, and demand rent for the machine want you to do.

Yes, I’m back to techbros like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Not to mention that little weasel running OpenAI, Sam Altman. We should not confuse Sam Altman with Sam Bankman-Fried; the latter has already been tried and convicted for fraud where as the former has not yet been put on trial for his shenanigans. Not to mention all of their sycophants and supporters.

Ava’s Blog calls these people “gods in hoodies”, but I don’t see them as gods. They are no more gods, or wizards, than the con artist who ran the Emerald City until Dorothy came to Oz and ignored the exhortation of Oz the Great and Terrible to “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”. They’re only human; they’re nothing but heartless, soulless little men seeking power so that they can look in a mirror and see their idea of a “real man”. What these mendacious little shits want to be are the priests of the Temples of Syrinx, even if they’ve never heard Rush’s prog epic “2112”.

Or perhaps they want to be the programmers and administrators of Unicomp from Ira Levin’s novel This Perfect Day, a companion to dystopian novels like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Either way, they do not have your best interests in mind.

They do not want you to cultivate your own capabilities. They do not want to see you grow more learned, wiser, stronger, kinder, or exhibit any sort of excellence. They certainly do not want you to be independent of them.

So, why reject AI? If not for yourself and your pride, do it for spite. Why not stick it to these nerds who think entirely of themselves, who would free you of the necessity of effort so that they might more easily enslave you?

Does that sound alarmist? Perhaps. However, it’s not Skynet you should fear. It’s the people who want to build Skynet. AI isn't the enemy here. The real enemy is yet more people who want to set themselves above others so that they might rule over them.

Update for 22 March 2025

The section where I reacted to Sex Without Women by Caitlin Flanagan is now its own blog post.