We’re already well into the paradigm shift.
CGI, AI, chatbots, app-based education, spyware, compressed audio, and streaming media are all around us, already integrated into the technosystem of modern life.
Making a spectacular adventure film that requires dozens of complex sets but suffer from a phobia of union carpenters? Take heart, the actors can shoot the entire movie in front of a green screen with CGI locales added in post.
Working on a report, email, or social media post but exhausted by the thought of cognitive labor? Like a resurgent undead revenant of Clippy, generative AI is here to comfort you and take away the pain.
Need to keep a full classroom of middle-schoolers occupied from drop-off to pick-up but don’t enjoy public speaking? Hand out the tablets and let the math and reading apps occupy the little darlings.
Want to write a novel or illustrate a children’s book but have neither the creative inspiration nor the patience to learn a skill? No worries, just string a few words together as a prompt, let the magic machine do the creating, and pretend you made it.
The rate at which this stuff has crept into our daily lives, the speed at which it has been adopted and treated as normal, makes the encroachment seem inevitable.
To paraphrase the Marvel Cinematic Universe version of Thor– is it, though?
Robot designed for planned 1937 production of Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by the Federal Theatre Project’s Marionette Theatre [Library of Congress]
Sure, the tech is seductive. Deadlines suck, bosses overdemand, and wouldn’t it be nice to let the replicants do the work while we take just a little bit of a break?
Of course, seduction can be dishonest. Seduction can mask manipulation. Seduction can lead to a host of bad outcomes.
And yet, so many of us have acquiesced to the new tech and accepted it as inevitable and inexorable, simply unstoppable.
Recently, I’ve been thinking more and more about how it actually could be stopped.
Aquaman and the Loudness War
It’s not just tech bros who endlessly trumpet the triumphal forward march of today’s technological developments. A large number of those who used to seem like they knew better are now almost cultishly going with the flow.
I know that I’m out of step when I say that the advances can feel like regressions, that the improvement can seem like devolution.
Movies from major studios are so awash with computer-generated imagery (CGI) that many films are drowning in it. The recent Aquaman sequel managed to be even more visually terrible than its predecessor from five years earlier, doubling and tripling down on its commitment to CGI everything – even the hair and bodies of the main characters.
The lord of Atlantis wasn’t alone in foisting bizarrely awful CGI overloads on audiences. He had help over the past decade from the Flash, Shazam, Black Adam, Justice League, Bilbo Baggins, Cats, and a host of other monstrosities.
The tech will improve, we’re told.
But what if the whole concept is wrong? What if, as Dave Brock suggests, we took the wrong step years ago?
Are today’s Americans, as a whole, capable of reflection? Is it even possible for us to consider the value of the path we’re on, or are we just pitifully holding out our little bowls and asking for whatever bit of porridge the tech world dribbles out to us as they see fit?
For a few years, I’ve been spending some of my late nights watching Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood movies, working my way through their extensive film catalogs. It’s become clear that action films from a half-century ago still look more real than the insanely expensive CGI fandangos that the corporate entertainment industry insists on cranking out for the masses today, because the older movies actually record real explosions, real sets, real stunts, real people.
I’ve also spent years digging into the Steve Hoffman Music Forums and learning from the audiophile members about the Loudness War in music recordings. I used to naïvely think that the latest digital remastering of past albums was always the best-sounding, but they reverse is more often true.
In the quest to make recordings ever louder, modern releases have become so compressed and boosted that they’re now nearly-monophonic bricks of digitally processed sound, uniform bands of volume with most of the dynamics and clarity of the original releases sacrificed on the altar of loudness.
On top of that degradation, most of us get our music via streaming at a quality equivalent to the MP3 – a format that is, by definition, a poorer copy of the CD’s WAV file.
This means that teenagers today are listening to music at an objectively lower level of basic sound quality than they were when I was a teenager myself, back in the days when CDs were still a new and exciting technology. It’s impossible to argue that this is progress.
Folks are now largely dependent on streaming services for music, accessing songs the same way they get movies and what used to be called television programs. Every so often, the corporate owners of the content remove something from all the streaming platforms, and people briefly make some noise when they realize that – unlike physical media – they never actually own any streaming music or video. It can all disappear and become unavailable whenever the CEOs feel like it.
The ephemeral nature of steaming content is really a built-in quality of the online world as a whole. Unless your house burns down, your books, DVDs, and CDs are unlikely to simply vanish off your shelves. On the other hand, there’s no guarantee whatsoever that the web content you read, watch, or listen to today will still be there tomorrow.
I’ve experienced this phenomenon of vanishing over the course of my own time in Ásatrú and Heathenry, new religious movements that seek to revive, reconstruct, and reimagine ancient polytheism of Northern Europe.
Bad actors and fumble-thumbed troglodytes
Several years ago, I found much online evidence tracking the deep and foundational neo-Nazi and white nationalist ties of Heathen organizations in the US, UK, and Europe. Over time, these articles, comments, forum posts, and social media pages slowly disappeared. The web was scrubbed, and the evidence was gone.
I’ve written academic articles and compiled class materials citing some of this evidence, but many of the links are now dead and gone. Bad actors are absolutely benefiting from the amnesiac nature of online life.
Are we better off with vanishing trails of poison within our religious communities than we were when we had the hard evidence of zines, pamphlets, posters, and other physical materials documenting ideological allegiances? May the gods bless the Wayback Machine, but it hasn’t really preserved the entire internet at every point in its existence.
Even as evidence of evil is willfully disappeared, new materials arise from mediocrity.
After the makers of Marvel’s Secret Invasion series bragged about using AI to create the incredibly ugly opening credits, the gate was opened. Just this week, the directors of the new horror film Late Night with the Devil admitted they may have used a teensy bit of AI in creating the movie, but they only did so after viewers of the trailer figured it out. The images aren’t great, and they’ve already been easily topped by actual human artists.
Again, it’s difficult to argue that this is any sort of improvement in the art of film-making.
Robot designed for planned 1937 production of Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by the Federal Theatre Project’s Marionette Theatre [Library of Congress]
Makers of music software are actively pushing AI plugins that will create new music tracks from the barest input regarding style and tempo. What we’ve seen of the insane pride of prompt-writers bragging about the visual images they’ve “created” with AI will soon spread to music, when tone-deaf jackasses who can’t play or bray two notes in a row will be bragging about the music they’ve “composed” and “recorded” with generative AI.
I’ve seen musician friends discussing in musician communities how to incorporate this new tech into their skill sets as, for example, professional bass players for hire. But this new wave of tech is fundamentally different from effects units that change the tone of a bass guitar or synth bass keyboards that electric bass players have learned to play.
When the software is designed so that a fumble-thumbed troglodyte can simply click a stylistic button and get a full bass part artificially generated, the actual goal and the obvious result is the complete obviation of the need for human bass players at all. Ditto for guitarists, drummers, horn players, and even vocalists.
And that’s what much of this is about: removing the need for human employees of any sort.
Every day, I see artists, authors, designers, journalists, educators, administrators, and good people in many other professions telling the world that they’ve lost their jobs to AI and chatbots. This isn’t a theoretical future possibility. It’s already happened to many of us, and the list of casualties is lengthening daily.
Our major local movie theater no longer has ticket sellers. Our local bank has one teller sitting behind a bank of windows originally built for five. How many businesses have you been to this month that used to have employees and now have touch screens only?
Pooh, you say. Those were crappy jobs anyway, and it’s much nicer to chat with an autobot than to try to get a customer service rep in Bangladesh to help you with a billing error.
But people need jobs.
In the dystopian future East Coast Mega-City of the UK’s Judge Dredd comics, 98% of the population is unemployed due to the near-total automation of all aspects of daily life. What was originally a British parody of American ways now seems like prophecy.
As with so much that is happening today, science fiction has long gamed out the disastrous consequences of the choices we continue to so blithely make.
When we all have our time freed up by labor-saving tech, where will our income come from? Who will have the money to buy the products and services made without human employees?
Even the frightening and depressing portrayal of children’s education in the music video for Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” that terrified me as a kid watching videos with my cookies and milk after school in the early 1980s now seems prophetic, as today’s middle schoolers spend huge chunks of their day wearing headphones and staring at individual tablets, each hypnotized into their own little world as they click through the apps that take the place of teaching.
We can pretend that all of this material is carefully vetted for maximum educational value, but that’s simply not so.
I’ve found teachers who pull random playlists from YouTube and ask their students to use apps with shady ownership that are absolutely without connection to or approval from any boards of education. And it’s absolutely true that kids are piddling around the internet on these tablets and consuming materials without direct supervision from their teachers.
Is this an improvement in educational quality?
We accept it, because that’s the way things are. Just as we accept that our devices are constantly collecting information about us for use by unknown entities.
There used to be regular outcries about spyware, but we’ve really accepted that it’s just the cost for all this “free” content that fills our days and nights.
So what if Facebook serves us ads based on spoken conversations we had in the vicinity of our smartphones? So what if there really is Chinese government spyware in our video apps? So what if our own government is tracking our online activities?
Who cares, when the ads show us things we can immediately impulse-buy online with PayPal and there are funny chihuahua videos to watch?
I care.
I know I’m in a tiny minority, but – as a practitioner of a tiny minority religion – I’m used to caring about things that are way outside the mainstream of our cultural discourse.
And as a practitioner of a tiny minority religion, I also wonder what we practitioners can offer during this cultural moment in which the majority of us are passively experiencing a major paradigm shift, in which most of us are just unquestioningly along for the ride.
Heathen resistance
I do think that we are particularly suited to lead the resistance to the tech being forced onto and into every aspect of our lives.
We are people obsessed with history, literature, and scholarship, with pouring over records and studies of the pagan past to find inspiration for our Pagan present.
Now, as history becomes whatever Google chooses to promote in its algorithmically ranked results and whatever corporate CEOs choose to keep live online, we should let our love of historical records animate us to preserve records of our own times, to fight the erasure of inconvenient truths.
Whatever modern Heathens may see as his literary failings, the 13th century Icelandic antiquarian Snorri Sturluson is responsible for much of our knowledge of Norse mythology today. His dedication to preserving the old tales of Iceland for posterity still provides benefits for worldwide practitioners nearly eight centuries after his death.
Eight centuries! As I mentioned above, we can’t even find important online Heathen material that was easily discoverable a mere decade ago.
Who are the Snorris of today? Who is preserving today’s tales?
Robot designed for planned 1937 production of Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by the Federal Theatre Project’s Marionette Theatre [Library of Congress]
We should be strongly supporting authors, scholars, journalists, archivists, librarians, and museum curators covering a wide range of subjects from a plenitude of perspectives. We should be defending the institutions that preserve our living history and fighting back against the book banners, the library attackers, the school board harassers, and all of their ugly ilk.
We are (I hope) people aware of the creeping white nationalism in our communities and the means by which it spreads. We see how the proliferation of free content – of eBooks and PDFs and material posted online via a bewildering array of Heathen blogs, forums, and channels – has and continues to slip gross old racialist occultism (some of it actually spawned by German racialist mystics before and during the era of the Nordic-obsessed Third Reich) into the supposedly “inclusive” Heathenry of today.
When the problematic roots of some modern Heathen concepts that continue to be pushed by online voices are pointed out, we are (I hope) willing and able to reject the poison injected into our discourse by deceptive figures.
In an age when quality content is often hidden behind a paywall (like academic journal articles and investigative reporting) or put out of reach by high prices (like new scholarly books and academic conferences), our awareness that what is freely available is sometimes used to forward manipulative material can serve us in good stead.
Our self-awareness should lead to a willingness to stand up and be counted.
When so many are spending their hard-earned cash on the latest iPhones, tablets, smart TVs, and multiple streaming services, are we willing to instead donate to libraries and archives, to subscribe to quality journals, to buy new books by investigative journalists and peer-reviewed scholars?
If we’re absolutely unwilling to give up even a drop from the digital teat, we can (I hope) volunteer, vote, and speak out on behalf of those who are producing and preserving the publications of today that will be much needed tomorrow.
As people who care so much about preserving and passing on the old tales and old ways to future generations, we should be extremely concerned about public education and extremely qualified to provide it. We should be deeply troubled by rows of students silently staring at screens for hours at a time, and we should be ready to do something meaningful about it.
What percentage of practicing Pagans have chosen the teacher’s path? It is not a well-renumerated one, but it is a deeply necessary one.
Just as the poets known as skálds were needed in the long-ago time to preserve and share the teachings of their age – and as figures such as the West African griot have played similar roles the world over – some among us have chosen to dedicate ourselves to teaching various subjects in sundry forms.
Those of use who can’t teach can still embrace the deep importance of teachers in our shared worldview by electing government officials who support teachers, by donating to teacher unions, by volunteering for local schools, and by running for boards of education.
We obsess over the past. It’s time to take what we’ve learned and apply it to the present.
We celebrate the active gods and heroes of the old myths and sagas. Can we find a way to not simply and passively accept that our lives must now be submerged in a sea of AI, CGI, and all the other supposed technological marvels?
Our times demand deeds, not words. They call for activity, not passivity.
Odin, Thor, and the refusal to accept the inevitable
As a god of inspiration and creativity, of wisdom and the sharing of knowledge, Odin seems a good guiding light in this fight against technological creep that pushes aside human creators and teachers and seeks to replace them with plagiarized pablum.
As the divinity who devotes himself to gathering any and all information, wisdom, and lore that will help stave off the doom of the gods at Ragnarök – a doom that ancient giants and mystic prophetesses alike tell him is inevitable – Odin never gives up the fight to save what is worth saving, to preserve what deserves to be preserved.
He seems a good model for standing up against what the tech bros insist is unstoppable, for fighting the good fight against bad outcomes.
As the god who acts, the god who faces threats head-on, the god who eschews dissembling and deviousness, Thor is another deity whose glow can guide us now.
In the Old Icelandic poem Lokasenna (“Loki’s Quarrel”), after Loki has murdered a servant, slandered the divinities, and refused repeated requests to desist, he finally exits the hall when Thor appears, for – as he acknowledges – Thor alone will strike.
When everyone around us quietly kibitzes and hopelessly hashtags even as their livelihoods vanish like a wizard’s visual illusion, Thor can inspire us to stand up and act out, to be brave and buck the prevailing trends. He has no patience for the machinations of magicians as he brawls his way through their lies. If only we had the strength to follow his lead!
But isn’t a large part of Heathen practice about building strength? Not physical strength, but spiritual strength.
One etymological theory of the Old Norse word blót (used by ancient Norse pagans and modern Heathens for the central religious ritual) is that it originally meant “to strengthen (the god).” Via the reciprocal gifting of the rite, our sacrifices strengthen the gods, and they share their strength with us in return.
We need that strength now, more than ever.
If we are serious about practicing the old way in the modern world, about living Heathen and not just playing at being Vikings, we should have a great reservoir of deep strength into which we can tap in order to shape the times we all live in together.
Let’s not sit idly by and watch the world pass us by. Let’s not just accept that what we are told has to happen really must happen.
Instead, like Odin and Thor, let’s take action.
If a good number of us refuse to go along with the inevitable, if we use our inner strength to convince others to join us against the inexorable, we can shape our era as powerfully as the long-ago pagans shaped theirs.
Think about the things that we should have done before
The way things are going, the end is about to fall
We took the wrong step years agoLook around and see the warning close at hand
Already weeds are writing their scriptures in the sand
We took the wrong step years agoThe morning sun is rising, casting rays across the land
Already nature’s calling, take heed of the warning
We took the wrong step years ago
-“We Took the Wrong Step Years Ago” by Dave Brock (1971)
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