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The Cold Song – A CEO Is Fine With Ushering in Dystopia. Is He Right?
I have a lousy habit of reading the news in the morning. It’s not the habit itself that’s the problem, I guess, but the manner I go about it. “People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath,” wrote Marshall McLuhan, and that’s what I do. Just why it’s so pleasant to numbly scan stories of war and scandal I’m not sure. Maybe it’s like watching a blizzard through a window–the cold world vis-à-vis the hot bath. And once in a while you get that outrageous jolt of the unexpected. I was giggling in my car the morning I heard about Chris Rock getting slapped by Will Smith at the Oscars. What a wonderful morning for news!
“SF tech CEO’s billboards are ‘dystopian.’ That’s how he wants it” is today’s headline. I jog through the paragraphs. The CEO of AI software company Artisan.co is posting billboards throughout San Francisco that say, “Stop Hiring Humans.” The message is unironic, and the CEO correctly believes the bluntness will earn the company more attention. “[The billboards] are somewhat dystopian, but so is AI,” the CEO reportedly commented. “The way the world works is changing.”
In other words, get with the program–literally.
I disagree, but I get it. I’ve known a lot of successful people who think this way. I recently spoke to an old boss of mine and told him about our magazine and its whole AI-free premise. He’s a multimillionaire, and his company now uses AI for all of its emails, etc. He responded with the sympathetic admiration common in exchanges between the pragmatically rich and the romantically poor. I imagine it’s the same kind of admiration a lion has for a gazelle. I admire what you are. I admire what you do. Keep running.
My old boss and a lot of people like him (maybe even the CEO quoted in that story) aren’t evil. They’re just more attuned to nature. And they don’t think that a resistance to nature constitutes a meaningful use of time. This is where we disagree.
But is our disagreement rooted more in our philosophy or in the disparity of our essential character? For instance, resistors and malcontents are often compared to losers who want to flip the board because they’ve got no chance at winning. You were born to lose. I was born to win. You wouldn’t resist if you were born to win.
It’s a hard proposition to grapple with. The easy retort is to say something like You’re only a winner because the system favors you. You wouldn’t defend the system if the system didn’t favor you. But this is just the same bias working in the opposite direction.
Cutting to it, the real question before us–and before me as a fledgling businessman–is this: The world is cold, so shouldn’t we be cold too?
Certainly, I’ve gotten colder over the years. An old girlfriend, upon hearing about my career history–an MFA poetry grad, an adjunct professor, a writer, a magazine editor, a high school teacher, a salesman, and so on–put it very succinctly (and her Chinese idiom made the sentence more profound somehow): “Oh, interesting,” she said. “You learn… meaninglessness of life…in very small stages.”
However, if I’m as cold as that pithy line conveys, why didn’t I just surrender and do B2B sales and make a bundle? I had plenty of opportunities. Hell, I could do it now. Toss this local arts mag aside, don my monkey suit, and start slinging product. Three years ago, I got hired by this big corporation to sell cardboard (no kidding) to local companies. Scoff all you want, but there’s big money in cardboard. Everybody uses cardboard. I had to do eight interviews and take an IQ test to get the job, and I was expected to make $250,000 my first year. One of the guys at their headquarters in Aurora was making $650,000 a year. But I quit after three days as soon as I got the offer from my current employer (for a lot less money). I can do sales–I’m very good at it when I want to be–but it’s just not me. As the Greeks liked to say, Know thyself.
But is the self a mistake? And is the romantic impulse a fatal form of self-indulgence? Moreover, when we say “fatal,” or when we say “losing,” what is the fatality and what is the loss? What are the losers losing? I guess I’m talking about capital. Resources and freedom of choice. It’s much harder for poor people to start a businesses, go to the schools they want to, or even go to the doctor.
So some of us grow colder to live well. The stereotype of the late-blooming real estate huckster. Think Anette Bening in American Beauty. Or, better yet, think about that person you know, that family member, or yourself even. That’s another kind of loss, another kind of fatality, and we all know it. What I wouldn’t give to have the same dumb glowbug soul of my early twenties. What I wouldn’t give, now that my nose is pressed against the glass and the drifts are piling up. The winners, they’ll write their stories, and the losers, they’ll write theirs, but everyone holds their own deficit in secret. The secret is the problem, and that’s why art and free expression are so important, not just for artists, but for everyone.
I’ll say this for my willfully cold friends though. To acknowledge the way things are takes guts. A lot of people don’t want to do it, especially artistic types. But to pretend like you’re okay with the way things are and then to use your knowledge against others is a terrible dishonesty. This is my qualm with the cold. I don’t think the AI CEO who says, “This is just the way the world works,” has had a sincere reckoning with his humanity. I think he is trying to win at something public while losing at something private. I think he is uncomplicating his life by believing in a zero sum game. I think he is just a different kind of romantic, spinning a myth where he is a god of the cold, a titan marching over barren tundra, while the rest of us sit inside, watching behind a screen of glass, before we get back to work.
Inkfully,
Paul M. French
Local Music Spotlight
“11/20” by Team Nonexistent
Local punk band Team Nonexistent has really made an impression on us. Half-gritty, half-mellifluous vocals and middle-finger energy that feels emotionally earned. “11/20” is fun earworm, but we’d recommend checking out the entire album.
STOCKING STUFFER ALERT
Did you know that you can now gift a subscription to Denverse Magazine? Just check “This is a gift” while you’re making your purchase. If you don’t know the recipient’s address, just provide an email, and we’ll take care of the rest!