There isn't an audience for intelligence

Friday 8/21/26

There isn't an audience for intelligence.

There's an audience for mediocrity. For stupidity. For crassness. For childishness. For shrillness. For unoriginality. For done-to-death.

But there isn't an audience for intelligence.

People see that word "intelligence" and they associate it with "hard to understand" and "That will require effort" and "That thing is necessarily boring."

But whether a thing is stupid or intelligent, they don't understand anyway. People don't understand anything. They can't tell what anything is. They are incapable of discernment, save for the biggest shapes, if you will. The out-in-the-world version of what I'll call primary shapes. A giant circle, a big triangle. They can't differentiate between a square and a rectangle in this metaphor. They can't grasp the concept.

Something intelligent can be perfectly clear. It can be as accessible in its design and execution as anything could be. It can be as entertaining, in and of itself, in its "thingness," as something could be.

It won't matter. That it is intelligent is the problem for people. When they sense this however they manage to. Whether that's like some barely perceived memory that they're not even sure they're experiencing--as though it were this fragment, a wispy strand of a dream come back to them in the recesses of their mind--it's like a sensor goes off saying, "Reject, reject, reject" and "Get away, get away, get away," and "Block out, block out, block out" and "Avert, avert, avert." Neurotransmitters fire. You know how when people see that they got a "like" on social media that there's a hit of dopamine? Here, the opposite happens. The recoil is chemical as well. Not just psychological, mental, and emotional.

Taylor Swift, Stephen A. Smith, Marvel movies, etc., etc., etc., this is why those things are the things they are in our world. Because they don't trigger that "flight at all costs" response of "Look out, here's something intelligent." See paragraph number two above. It isn't because anyone actually likes those things as what they are for what they are. It's more like on account of what they aren't. This is pacifying. We are pacified by that which stultifies us. And this is what we want. We want to be rocked in the cradle to sleep. To death, really. Rocked until the end when we die. We don't want to be roused to life.

The paradox is that though people can't discern in any meaningful way, they can recognize what we can think of as colors, sounds, shapes. Your dog doesn't speak English, but he knows what sounds indicate that he'll be getting a treat. Most of us are this way now as humans, or, we should say, post-humans. Something smart is like something hot that can burn them. Something mediocre is like something at room temperature. Intelligence raises hackles. But hackle-raising isn't some conscious, cognitively vetted process with a cognitively vetted result. This is how we can both fail to be able to discern and to make a hard left when we come upon intelligence. It's conditioning as well. Practice, you could say.

You practice something long enough, and what happens? It becomes automatic. You're not thinking, "Time to make this move" as you play basketball. You've drilled the move. It's now just a part of your game. That's good in basketball, but it's not good in life as we destroy ourselves at the level of the individual and the overall human level of a society, a culture, a world, a species.

Let's look at this another way. You can have bad things happen to you (low ground), nothing happen to you (middle ground), or good things happen to you (high ground). In order to have good things happen for you, you need to get out there. Take some chances. Can't be risk adverse. You win some, you lose some. But those good things can be so wonderful. They're why you live. Those things, and the pursuit of them. The journey and what you learn as you go. What you give as you go. What you get back as you give and go.

But internally, and mentally (and often out in life itself), people select, consciously and then automatically subconsciously, because of how they've in effect "been trained," that middle option of nothing. They live as if consistent nothing is what's best, because there's no negative or chance, or lesser chance, of anything negative. They don't venture, they don't gain.

That person isn't going to look for anything outstanding and they won't be open to it. They will gravitate towards pablum and mediocrity. That which could be anything, really. If we're talking works--things that other humans have created--they will want the most prosaic works, the blandest works, works interchangeable with other works, because they won't feel threatened on account that they couldn't do it themselves and that it could only be done by someone more gifted than they are, or threatened by the idea of being challenged; that is, that they'll "fail" to get it, which will feel to them like a sharp criticism and indictment of their failings. A rebuke. Their self-esteem--which is founded on very little as it is--will take a blow.

Do people really not get why Taylor Swift is as big as she is? Do people really think it's because she makes amazing music? And, of course, the people who need to be this way, or think they do, aren't going to be open to the truth. They're doing something else, which is a form of getting by. They would pick that middle answer, the nothing good, nothing bad, just this flat middle.

That's what sells. That's what's "commercial."

Now, other things need to be in place. Who you know, then there's matters of race, gender, what the latest social cause is that insincere, horrible people are pretending to care about on social media. The money you come from, the money you have. Who your family is. How odious you're willing to be. In publishing, you need to be terrible at writing and a terrible person in order for the people of the publishing system to advance you. There are lots of people who fit these bills, so it's not like you're assured of being advanced by the people of the system. There can only be so many who are picked to sit at the lunch table.

But these two things give you a chance, and without them, you have no chance, right now, in that publishing system. And for whom are you advanced anyway? The system doesn't really export to the world at large. No. You're advanced by the people of that system simply for the people of that system. Think of it like a convention over at Hynes for inbreeders. That convention isn't spilling over onto Boylston Street. It's staying in the convention space where there's a brother and a sister fucking on the floor. The brother cums on her face and they both get awards. Here, have a MacArthur genius grant, a Guggenheim, a Booker Prize.

But there's no crossover with what's happening out on Boylston. The people out on Boylston don't know what's going on in that convention center. They aren't meant to, for starters. And they're off rotting their brains with their own things, which aren't going to have anything to do with writing, because they don't read, and they couldn't read if they wanted to, because they don't possess the ability. They normally don't possess what was once expected to be the the baseline reading standards of a third grader. So the convention rages on, and these clueless, simple, unctuous, petty, sexist, racist, hypocritical, talentless people tell each other how important they are with no intrusion, no voiced objections, because they make it so that they're the only ones there.

Some people are going to buy a book because it's marketed so hard and that person wants to think of themselves a certain way. They may by the book, but there's little chance they're going to read the book, and there's next to no chance they're truly going to have had a worthwhile life experience because of the book. This is how some sales will happen. And the people having the incest convention can point to some numbers, but they aren't even real numbers. They aren't numbers indicative of reading. Or that they put out anything worth reading. Reading has nothing to do with it.

When I see a hyphen used correctly, I almost always know it was because of AI. A human wouldn't be able to do that now.

People have AI write everything for them. They have it be them. They respond to a comment with AI, for instance. They answer a question about them, human, with AI. They text with AI.

I don't receive many texts. When I do receive a text and go to respond to it, AI autofills a prospective response. Before I can write a single word, there is AI's proposed response staring back at me. There's no way for me not to see this. I am made to see it without my consent. I am thought-raped. I have no choice in the matter. If even for a split second, this became part of my day, part of my life, part of my experience, part of my thoughts.

The AI's response is always generic, corporate, insincere. It is concluded with an exclamation point in most instances. Someone could tell you that their child died, and AI has it's one-size-fits-all broad corporate-ism ready to go for you. None of its proposed suggestions are appropriate as to human to human interaction as humans. They're akin to things you'd say to someone you were trying to give the brush off to by being as bland and general as possible, if you're someone who operates that way. I'm not. I would be honest.

When given the option, people will always do less rather than more, no matter if this makes their lives worse. If it makes them less well, less happy, less healthy. Less able to give and receive love, and more alone. They will almost all cede themselves over to the machine. They will trade what little remains of their voice as a human--a voice that has next to no individuality to it, like they are barely an individual--to the machine. It will speak for them, it will be them. They won't even know what happened.

People use words to communicate, but they're not using words as words. Let me explain. Words aren't words in our world. They aren't these units of meaning comprised of letters. They're indicators of something else that's separate from their actual meaning. We're never parsing the meaning of words. We don't use words because of their intrinsic meaning. Call it their definitions if you like to make this easier. When we comment or respond, we don't look for the right words with the right meanings. It's more like looking for a shape than a word. These shapes are the modules that everyone uses to communicate. Hill to die on, end of the day, give him his flowers, fixed it for you, you spelled "x" wrong, etc. How many of these are there? Let's call it a few hundred.

These aren't words as words. They're these other things now. We don't have our own words. We don't have the ability to speak cogently. Never mind write cogently. We don't even know enough words to get through a skimpy conversation. We aren't selecting words when we speak; we're selecting a module from the pile that just happens to have word shapes. We have to outsource our side of things--our side of a conversation--to this module pile. We aren't even looking at or for words as words. They've essentially been stripped of their meaning because their meaning is lost on us in our ignorance and wilful ignorance that becomes automatic via practice as I was discussing above. Then it's just who you are and who you can't be.

Your dog recognizes cadences. He doesn't know the words. But he knows based on that cadence, the sounds that those letters in that given assortment and order make when you say them aloud, that a treat is forthcoming, so he hustles after you to where you're going to procure one for him. This is how we are with language now. When you see someone saying "literally," what they're telling you is, "I am too stupid to be able to say things. I can't express myself." It's like hammering away at the elevator button in frustration and/or impatience like that's going to make the elevator get to you faster. It's someone who doesn't have control--because they don't have the ability to say what they want to say--acting out after a fashion. Fuming, sputtering. A guy futilely tugging at his limp dick unable to get himself hard. He can be there for days, and it's just limp, limp, limp. That's what "literally" is.

And if that AI voice--like the one I'm talking about in this example with texting--doesn't seem to sound like them at first--to them, I mean--they will soon come to see it as sounding exactly like them as they have come to think of themselves, like the AI got it perfect, and isn't really this separate thing, but a faster way for them to be themselves. But that person is gone. That human is gone.

This is how it happens. In this fashion, and dozens, hundreds, thousands of others like it. The end of humanness is in the accrual. People don't even know what's happening, and they don't have the mental tools to recognize what is happening. Eventually there will be no one in the world capable of having a thought. Living will be torture for the few that remain, like they can't wait for their pain to end. It kind of already is.