It has been over a month since I wrote about the death of Charlie Kirk, and I’ve been able to think more about what that event really did in the big picture. I compared him to other figures, including those here in the Philippines, and thought of what it all really meant in the grand scheme of things. It was both significant and irrelevant at the same time. It should’ve been more obvious from the start that just like many popular social commentators, all he peddled was slop.
This is not intended as a knock against free speech, but merely a call to make the most of it instead of providing more reasons for its abolishment. You can say the 2020s have shown that we’ve been made soft by our freedoms, that mere discomfort is equivalent to its infringement.
The decade started with whiners who cried about having to wear pieces of fabric in front of their faces. They’ve since brought incompetent people into public office to make a bigger mess out of what had already been made chaotic in the previous decade.
Are there any new solutions to old problems? None.
Everyone is too busy grumbling and nagging at each other. No one has enough time and space to settle down and think about problems from angles previously unexamined and paths yet unexplored. We are becoming technologically stronger, yet intellectually and spiritually weaker.
Every text, every word, every image, and every symbol we have to sense and process is a copy of a copy of a copy. Perhaps it’s true there’s no such thing as a truly ‘original idea’, but we may have lost the ability to create our own original copies.
I’m talking about answers to questions and solutions to problems that are not just derivatives of old, tired ideas. We’ve been spinning our wheels, hoping to bite into the dirt to drive out of the mud we got ourselves stuck in, only to dig in deeper. We have to actually get out of our seats of comfort, use the tools at our disposal, and even improvise new ones if needed.
This is not a smooth road, but a dangerous trail off the beaten path, and we have to get our hands and boots dirty to get out of this mess.
No One Has Original Ideas
There aren’t enough original ideas going around in the world right now. Perhaps the last time anyone had one that significantly moved the needle was the iPhone — not a new invention, but a clever fusion of existing ones. Or maybe it was when Curtis Yarvin was taken seriously for wanting to eventually abolish American democracy. Or when Karl Marx reframed all conflict as class struggle. The rest? Mostly iterations.
The last major innovation came from a University of Toronto research team that figured out artificial neural networks and deep learning, which later catalyzed the AI boom we’re having right now. At first, they played around with object recognition, then AI in games. It was mostly viewed as a novelty — a curious side project with good potential.
Then the dam broke with Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT.
And what do people do with it? They plagiarize with it.
Can we have truly original ideas in this age of stagnation? How can we come up with something new in an increasingly complex world?
Which brings us to the late slop merchant, Charlie Kirk.
Pop a Perc for Charlie Kirk
Charlie Kirk had no original ideas. He merely peddled slop, giving voices to the id of everyone who hadn’t thought about themselves and their place in this world thoroughly enough. Almost no one on this earth right now has any original ideas. The elite are too busy exploiting and corrupting, while everyone else is too busy trying to survive.
We fortunate few who somehow remain self-aware get no reward, only exhaustion.
His audience call him brave, while his detractors call him harmful. He was just thickfaced and enterprising enough to take advantage of a market with a demand for such rhetoric. It grew around 2012 to 2014, and it hit critical mass by 2015-2016 with the rise of Donald Trump to presidency.
Turning Point USA was one of those brands that filled a demand for people who would echo the zeitgeist of an emerging neoconservative movement. Alex Jones and his InfoWars was too off-the-wall for the mainstream, while his protégé Paul Thomas Watson was too wooden and too British. FOX News keeps shedding its best personalities, fewer young people watched traditional television, and social media became the main platform.
The right needed their own Hasan Piker, who they almost had with Ben Shapiro. However, the sizeable antisemitic portion of the right may not fully embrace him since he’s proudly Jewish, as evident with his ever-present yarmulke. But he still does quite well with his ‘facts and logic’, despite now being trapped in his bubble.
They needed a young man with the whitest and loudest voice in the room who was not afraid of working the crowd — or as they would call it, ‘debate’. Charlie Kirk was an outstanding candidate. A promising 19-year-old prodigy with drive and moxie was parroting the talking points everyone else agreed with but didn’t dare to spout out.
Neoliberal thought had overstayed its welcome, centrism was becoming passe, and conservative thought was making a comeback and starting to take root in younger generations through movements like the Red Pill and whatever wacky shit was going on in 4chan at the time. It was being called ‘the new punk’ at one point.
Then there’s the next level in conservatism — neoreactionary, or NRx. We can include Nick Fuentes in this, as well as so-called post-racial fascism. Those who think they’re not in this end of the political spectrum are either indecisive moderates or closeted authoritarians.
Everyone else either calls them bigots or fascists, which turns all discussions into shouting matches that don’t go anywhere. Charlie had a megaphone, and he made good use of it while he could. Now his wife owns everything he built.
Generative AI and the Nature of Human Originality
Generative artificial intelligence may help, but it won’t help that much since it draws and iterates from the collective human knowledge that already exists. There are also strong signs of GenAI cannibalizing information generated by GenAI, thus creating a cycle of regurgitating crap.
Then again, the current development of GenAI is so rapid that I could create a draft about it one day and it’ll be incredibly outdated by the next week or so. Since my rate of writing — which gets as minimal assistance from AI (I use NotebookLM) as possible — is rather slow, the temptation to use AI more to speed it up is pretty damn strong.
But that would also make my writing pointless since this is a lifestyle for me. I write as I breathe, so having AI do all my writing for me is like getting hooked up to a ventilator. I might as well be dead then. And before you point out my prodigious use of em dashes as evidence of AI dependence, I’ve always used them and will never stop using them as I please.
Machines don’t create — they mirror and remix. An infinite recursion of human unoriginality.
The Chinese Room
In philosophy, ‘The Chinese Room‘ is a thought experiment created by American philosopher John Searle (who passed away last month at 93) which looks into the nature of intelligence and consciousness. Imagine a room where a person who is not fluent in Chinese is given the task of translating a Chinese letter by using a book that contains if-then translation notes. That person does the job and comes out with a perfect translation of the letter.
However, can you say that person is actually fluent in Chinese?
What’s the line between mimicry and understanding? Are ‘vibe coders‘ — people who use AI to create software code — actually programmers in their own right or just digital tourists who are too lazy to learn and dependent on machines to bring their ideas to life?
Does artificial intelligence — software in itself — truly ‘know’ software development, art, literature, music, and all the other things that we do and hold dear as human creativity?
When you use AI as your therapist, asking it for advice about your personal problems and emotions, does it really understand you? Does it truly understand how it is to be human?
While John Searle was talking about the computers of his day when he came up with that thought experiment, which worked mostly on if-then algorithms, our computers and artificial intelligence these days are much more complicated. However, the same question remains.
Can large language models and neural networks, as indistinguishable to human intelligence as they may seem, especially with their rapid ongoing development, actually emulate human intelligence and even surpass it?
AI does have tremendous processing speed and power, but can it be sentient? Can it be original? Can it be human? Or even beyond human?
Gods of the Algorithm
At the helm of GenAI, the likes of Sam Altman are putting forth GenAI as a bridge towards a utopian future. By automating everything, people are promised freedom — freedom from work, from effort, from thought. While this seems nice, it’s the global equivalent of handing children iPads to placate them — not true freedom, only pacification.
Meanwhile, Peter Thiel asserts the role of religion in consolidating and accelerating the process of taking over the world by galvanizing the people into pushing back against the revolution against the elite — the people who are supposed to rule over them. The use of AI and surveillance technology by Palantir, the company he founded, is just a part of that initiative.
Both of them promise freedom, but their versions of it end with us tethered to the same leash.
We are handing tech billionaires our agency, as well as our critical thinking and free will by letting them build machines that will think for us. Fanatics who see themselves as either rich people-in-waiting or willing followers of gods among men defend their actions by turning the meritocracy gun on detractors and asking them, “What have YOU done for us?”
A big chunk of humanity doesn’t want to be original. They don’t want to think. They just want to exist in a world that gives them some pleasure before they pass. If the wannabe gods are able to give them what they want, who are they to complain?
The irony of this technological age is while we have countless platforms for expression, we have almost nothing left worth saying. There is no discussion, but merely remixing noise and recycling slop.
We Are Limited by Partisanship
Alas, we are still beset by reactionary partisanship. It’s either you’re for something or against it, never be for both ideas for their good points and against both for their ills. If you’re someone who does their best to see nuance, you just get accused of being a shill for whatever they’re against or just a centrist idiot who flip-flops depending on how the wind blows.
Especially nowadays with the Overton window having been split into two in favor of extremes and away from more centrist positions, nuance and moderation are being seen as a taboo.
A lot of it is from how most other people react to nuance. They can’t see beyond what is obviously right there, so anyone who chooses to try to look beyond choosing a side is seen as insensitive or ingenuine. Regular folks get forced to choose between a tiger and a cobra — either you get torn to shreds or have venom injected into your veins, no in-between.
Donald Trump didn’t offer anything new. He promised tax cuts for the wealthy and manufacturing jobs for the poor, the former being more of a priority while the latter was the carrot on a stick. Perhaps he thought his first term was too tame, so he’s going harder in his second term with tariffs and government restructuring.
And now, as of this writing, the US government remains shut down.
The ‘America First’ isolationism isn’t a new idea — it was a strong movement during World War II prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. While many feel that the US does indeed need to isolate, the global money system can’t afford that with the US Dollar being the world’s reserve currency.
Rodrigo Duterte didn’t offer anything new, but only a promise to kill drug pushers. Despite lacking long-term plans to dismantle drug syndicates, he was elevated with optimism for a crime-free future. Other than spilling blood, attrition did little to dent crime.
And now, with the former alliance between the Marcos and Duterte families coming undone and the patriarch detained in The Hague, his daughter is now the frontrunner to become the next president three years from now. She avoided impeachment and sabotage thus far, while their supporters who yearned for the ‘golden age’ but were too impatient for a Marcos return clung onto Duterte like flies to flypaper.
But the truth is no one truly has the right answer. There can be no true progress without sacrifice, which is the complete overhaul of the system. Such a reconstruction is not possible without total destruction, so perhaps only war or natural disaster can truly set us free, and not all of us may live to see that happen.
Conclusion
Charlie Kirk, his death, the media circus surrounding his public murder, and the whole aftermath are merely symptoms of this disease of social noise brought on by endless slop, resulting in recycled outrage.
The world doesn’t need Charlie Kirk to live on, just another copy. I refuse to become one. Attention fades, but the soul does not.
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