Intro
Last week was quite hectic because of the previously mentioned military service problems and sadly it’s still not over. Since they need to make a final decision about my situation, they decided to make things even harder and asked for the phone numbers of some of the family and friends to further investigate me. It finally happened earlier today and turns out what they were looking for was a private roasting session about me. I’ll learn if their performance was enough tomorrow and hopefully that will be the end of it all.
In other news, I now have to use VPN all the time if I want to see the images on my own blog because Turkish Cyber Security Directorate decided to block WordPress’ CDN domains for some mysterious reason.
Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing well.
Mission Control
Inbox: 320
RSS Reader: 1219
Open Tabs: 81
Upcoming Events/Travel in Next 30 Days: 1
- Tuesday will be mostly bureaucracy, hopefully for the last time.
- Heading to İstanbul for a workshop day trip on Saturday.
- Will record and publish the new episode of Tuhaf Gelecek Podcast, plus maybe a newsletter for it too.
- If it all goes according to the plan, we can do a public announcement for Project Constellation Tracer this week.
- Lost of small and medium size tasks from different projects piled up and needs my attention.
- If I can find some extra time I have a blog post draft I want to publish here too but we’ll see.
Check my Now page if you want to see what I’m up to in a more detailed way.
I’m open to work and collaboration offers and you can reach me via here or through Tuhaf Studio.
Creativity Is Not Compatible With Puritanism
I’m a huge nerd about how people work and which tools they use, especially if they’re someone I admire or find their work inspirational. That’s also why I like to talk about the tools I use and how I work because I know there are people like me out there.
But humans being humans, there is another group of people who are way too obsessed about what people are using or how they’re using their tools in an opposite way. In the old times, it was mostly knows as “OS Wars” and “Console Wars”, people would start meaningless fights against others who doesn’t use the same OS or gaming console they use. We don’t really see them that much anymore but you can still end up being ridiculed for wanting to use your devices in light mode like me or my brother because dark mode doesn’t play well with our astigmatism.
And now with AI, all of this has become something much more toxic and dangerous. Because now it doesn’t even matter if you’re working with AI or how you’re using it. People can simply say “it feels like AI” and you’ll end up with a mob on your doorstep. Your work, your ideas, your motivation, the labour put into it, none of it matters if they think you used a tool while creating your work. Can you see how crazy that sounds? Are we really at a point where we ignore a creative work just because you think it uses a tool you don’t like it? Are we really turning artists and writers into a target for bunch of people online looking for someone to destroy because of this?
The thing that makes all of this even worse is that they’re demanding the creator of the work to convince them. They decide using a tool is a grave sin, they think someone might’ve used it, and want that person to drop everything and please them. I’m sorry but I find it hard to believe most of them actually care about the art of the literature, and even harder to believe they’ve actually spent any time with the works of the artist or the author they’re targeting. Because unless the tools are an integral part of the work itself, I don’t really think or care what tools are used during the creation process. Like, when I’m reading a novel I don’t obsess over whether the author used Microsoft Word or Pages, I don’t think about whether they got help from Word’s thesaurus. I put that energy into understanding what they’re saying and how they’re saying it. And I only think about what tools they’re using if I feel like there’s something new I can learn from their process to improve mine.
When you’re doing a creative work, making art, tools and material you’re using is important — I’m not denying it. An artist can decide to use a certain tool or material for myriad of reasons, and it can say something about the art and the artist. But it should never be a reason to turn artists and writers into targets. When you turn a claim of using a tool into something that can be weaponized, it stops being a productive discussion of art. Because what you’re doing is simply limiting creativity, making experimentation something dangerous and needs to be avoided.
This may sound a little harsh but this is why I’m not buying into all of the anti-AI mob claim that they’re doing it to defend human creativity. How is it protecting human creativity when you try to end people’s careers just because they’re experimenting with something new? Do you even know your art or literary history? This is what creative people always does. When there is a new tool or a material, they need space to play with it and see whether it’s useful for them or it can help them share their ideas in new ways. Some decides to experiment with it, some decides it’s not for them. Then we’ll see new art forms, new ways of people expressing themselves and so on. So it’s hard for me to consider what’s happening as “defending human creativity” when it’s actively attempting to stop people from expressing themselves with a different tool.
I really hope that we’ll not end up in a place where this is normalized. Because none of this is actually about art but it is putting creativity into a group’s purity tests. Once this is normalized, it will only open the door to more purity tests. Why a musician is using this platform or an instrument from that brand? Why an artist is using that material or working with this gallery? Why creative people are not living and working in a way that’s perfectly in line with my worldview and morals?
If you want to defend art and creativity, you need to accept it is going to be messy, weird, disturbing at times, and most certainly not fitting into any one group’s puritanical norms. If your goal is to truly defend artists, you have to make sure they can be any of these things with no fear.
Song of the Week
Reading Log
“Was this the inverse of a subculture? Or its purest form? Punks, beatniks, Marxists, hippies, skaters, goths, define themselves by exclusion. But here was a subculture that was genuinely small, selective, and unique, with the audacity to anticipate ubiquity.”
What Happened at the Peptide Party? — MAMA
“Deep culture always returns to shape a society in a way similar to how a person’s emotional subconscious is forever biting at the heels of rational cognition. Culture is the substructure upon which the superstructure of ideology, politics and economics are built — the opposite of how modern thought would have it.”
The Sediment Of Culture Shapes Political Order – NOEMA
“We should be clear that darkness here is not meant to have any negative connotations, though we can also delight in the affective register of the dark (where sleep happens, where dreams happen, full of risk and intensity and opportunity).”
The Superdark Factory. Toward the Full Automation of Software
Outro
That’s all I have this week. Lately my routine was broken a lot because of the things out of my control, which resulted with skipping these weekly posts here an there. I need to get back on track this week, hopefully this will also mean these posts getting back on their weekly schedule too.
Take care of yourselves and I’ll see you around!
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