Balance & Wu Wei vs. The Algorithm
How AI, online tribalism, and war propaganda are destroying our ability to think clearly
The death of attention
I was standing about this weekend waiting on people, doing what half the planet now does when trapped in that seemingly eternal liminal space that is the limbo between one obligation and the next, namely, feeding my nervous system into the wood chipper of a social media timeline.
Grok, that electric gobshite, kept shoving three stories under my nose as if the silicon Loom Sisters of destiny had decided I needed a talking to.
First came the row over AI writing and AI art, that whole blazing market of theft, laziness, excuses, and lads talking utter tripe about how the end result is all that matters.
Then there was the literary squabble over American novelist Cormac McCarthy supposedly giving up on Infinite Jest by American novelist David Foster Wallace, which was somehow treated online like a border dispute in the Balkans.
Then, hanging over it all like a black weather front, there was the propaganda slurry around the Iran vs. Israel & America crisis, while much of Europe seemed to be saying, with admirable plainness, ah, here now, lads, leave us the Hell out of your fever dream.
Three topics, three similar moods, three different corners of the feed. But, y’know, at the same time, it struck me that same malady, or melody, pulsed through all of them.
Which is, we’re losing the art of receiving reality.
People don’t meet a thing now in order to understand it. They meet it to sort it, display it, recruit it, weaponize it, monetize it, or fling it into the tribal stewpot for the baying cheering of strangers. The old habits of patience, proportion, and inward judgment are getting the life squeezed out of them by a machine that wants speed, certainty, and noise.
Learn more about this article’s writer, Paddy Murphy, here.
Why AI writing misses the roots of art
Take the Matt Goodwin affair. British political commentator Matt Goodwin, a man who’s made a tidy cottage industry out of saying the unsayable in ways that suspiciously often flatter his own market, has been accused of relying on AI generated material in his book Suicide of a Nation, with critics pointing to fabricated or dubious quotations, weak sourcing, and even references that appear to preserve traces of chatbot generated links.
That is a comical sort of scandal, if, like me, you enjoy the grim comedy of a man being hoist by his own petard. But the bigger issue, well, to me anyway, the bigger issue is metaphysical.
Too many people now seem to think writing is the visible arrangement of sentences on a page. They reckon that art is the bloom and nothing more. They see the flower and forget the root, the stalk, the rain, the darkness under the soil, the whole feckin’ business of growth and rot and hidden struggle that allowed the thing to exist at all.
Art begins well before the daffodil blooms. It begins in bafflement, in memory, in reading, in rhythm, in your very own private store of grief and joy and absurdity.
It begins with all the wee failures no one sees. The old false starts. The wrong tone. The paragraph that sounds like a priest half cut on Cork moonshine Christmas Eve. The sentence that must be broken and remade six times before it carries any trace of what you’re actually trying to get across. That’s where the thing lives.
The AI enthusiasts, Plutus bless their little crypto spreadsheets and subscription courses, keep talking as though the end product were the whole mystery. Aye, sure, by that logic, a plastic shamrock from a pound shop and a field in Connemara are equally botanical because both are green and vaguely leaf-shaped. And you know well enough, lads and lasses, it’s a load of absolute codswallop.
How online discourse turns books into team sports
The same spiritual deformity cropped up in the row about Cormac McCarthy and David Foster Wallace.
An article by Italian writer Vincenzo Barney in UnHerd, discussing why Cormac McCarthy stopped reading new novels and allegedly put down Infinite Jest, became one more excuse for the internet to do what it does best, which is to turn literature into a pub fight between anyone with an opinion.
Now, I like Cormac McCarthy. I like David Foster Wallace, too, though in a somewhat warier fashion, as one might admire a cathedral from the outside, because I rarely thread those thresholds. If McCarthy didn’t enjoy Infinite Jest, fair enough. He is allowed. Nobody is required to approve our favorite books, and nobody is obliged to form a militia over the matter.
The interesting part was never that one writer disliked another’s novel. The interesting part was what vanished from the conversation. Gone was any appetite for asking what Cormac McCarthy valued in prose, or what David Foster Wallace represented in American literature, or how each writer captured a different species of the American soul.
Gone was the leisurely business of reading carefully and judging slowly. In its place came camp making, flag waving, and all the oh-so-utterly boring pageantry of side-taking.
Literary taste has gone the way of politics, football, and dietary cults. Social media would have it that it’s no longer enough to prefer. You have to belong to a tribe.
And, look, that’s horse manure. Disagreement is where the best thoughts begin. A mature mind can say that two writers are both excellent and still wildly unlike one another. A mature mind can also say that a great writer may have had a blind spot, an impatience, or a prejudice in taste. But the algorithm has zero use for maturity.
What Taoist wu wei still knows about our age
The Taoist idea of wu wei gets translated badly all the time by wellness merchants and app developers who want you to feel spiritually upgraded while still checking your phone every thirty seconds. Wu wei means non-forcing. It doesn’t mean doing nothing. And it, sure as Jaysus, doesn’t mean becoming a scented puddle of passivity.
It means not lunging at reality like a fella trying to wrestle a shopping trolley in a gale. It means right action, timed action, proportionate action. It means learning the shape of the thing before trying to impose yourself upon it.
Look at how neatly that fits our current disorder. In art, wu wei tells us that real making cannot be bullied by shortcuts. The thing has to ripen. You can’t command a living sentence into being by extracting a plausible substitute from a machine and calling it a day. That’s decorative taxidermy. It ain’t authorship.
In literary culture, wu wei suggests a calmer way of meeting disagreement. You don’t have to pounce on every difference of taste like a bishop seeing blasphemy in his alphabet soup. Let the judgment sit. Hear it, weigh it, and have a think on it. A rare notion online, I know, it’s almost a medieval attitude.
In geopolitics, the lesson is sterner, and sometimes restraint is the only grown-up left in the room.
Europe, war propaganda, and the case for restraint
That brings us to the darkest of the three strands, the propaganda swamp surrounding the conflict involving Iran, Israel, and the United States. Here, the same sickness reaches its bloodiest form.
Every fresh horror, every strike, every claim, every blurry clip, every statement from some sweating spokesman with the eyes of a strung-out ferret gets shunted through the feed and turned into identity theater. The dead become content. Fear becomes branding. Allegiance becomes performance.
Thankfully, several European leaders have publicly shown reluctance to be pulled into direct military involvement, stressing caution and diplomacy rather than charging headlong into another fine imperial shambles.
Of course, this doesn’t make Europe pure, saintly, or free of cant. Let’s not get carried away.
This maddening continent could put on a masterclass in hypocrisy before a cappuccino, croissant, and cigarette breakfast. But in this instance, hesitation looks a fair deal saner than the manic certainties of those who’re forever eager to let somebody else’s children pay for their small man syndrome.
There’s a vulgar temptation in modern discourse to treat restraint as weakness. It’s not. A refusal to be conned into frenzy ain’t cowardice. A man who declines to jump into a bonfire because everyone else is shouting has actually passed the bravery test.
Before assenting to an impression, the Stoics advised one to examine it. Is it true? Is it partial? Is it bait? The ancient Buddhist sages knew it. Not every mental agitation deserves speech. Not every flash of feeling is insight. Not every outrage is wisdom in steel-toe work boots.
Our age could do with a bit more of that old sobriety. Lord above, it could do with gallons of it.
The balanced people hidden in the noise
Among the foam-flecked maniacs, the engagement farmers, the ideological ballroom dancers, and the permanently online prophets of doom, there were still a few people showing balance. Most of them had no idea that was what they were doing. They were just speaking plainly.
A few people were able to show their opposition to AI slop without sounding like they wanted to burn every circuit board in Christendom. A few were able to express their admiration for both Cormac McCarthy and David Foster Wallace without needing one of them to show up with six shooters and draw at high noon. A few were able to see through the propaganda on more than one side without turning into unpaid press officers for the rival camp. They were practicing the ancient art of not forcing.
That may be the last decent hope in this whole affair. Wisdom is still about. It’s not gone anywhere. It’s just that it mostly gets drowned out by the lads roaring into ring lights from rooms lit like a synthwave interrogation cells.
The great damage of algorithmic culture is not merely that it deforms attention. It trains us to treat output as art, allegiance as thought, reaction as judgment, and performance as moral seriousness.
The algorithms make us spiritually incontinent. Every passing provocation gets to rent a room in the auld noggin and stomp about in its muddy boots, screaming bloody murder.
The remedy is older than the apps and likely to outlive them. Pause before assent. Let ambiguity breathe. Read before roaring. Keep art tied to labor. Keep speech tied to thought. Refuse to hand your nervous system over to every passing racket from the machine.
The feed wants your nerves. Wisdom asks for your attention.
I’m Paddy Murphy. Thanks for reading my article. I’m a writer and mental health counselor. Learn more about me here. Social media links here.
Donations link: https://ko-fi.com/murfowski
As always, you've broken it down perfectly. Although, when I complain this way irl, I'm pegged for a "woman of a certain age"-LOL, which I am! I negotiated a 3-day rule long ago, being detail-oriented, passionate, Italian with a Scorpio rising & hyper-manic. If I hadn't established this cooling period, I can only imagine how much more of a mess I might have made. I do love the way you write. Hopefully, you'll convince those pesky fly-off-the-handle folks.