Community college psycho
And a take on Pluribus
Hi from Poughkeepsie. This weekend I’ve been working on the second part of a novella. Part one is here.
I started writing it long before I knew I’d share some of it publicly, as a work in progress. In the interest of a snappy subject line for Elf Theory, I called part one “A new way to fall in love.” This was inspired by Carl Elliott’s article “A New Way to Be Mad,” which introduced an unwitting public to the concept of voluntary amputeeism.
That was twenty-five years ago this December. Three years later, Elliott published a book called Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream. In 2017, I read Better Than Well with a philosophy professor who’d recently gone through rotationplasty.
The title “A new way to fall in love” is not nearly as good as “A New Way to Be Mad.” I regret it deeply and have since renamed the post “PART ONE (has no subtitle.)”
Here in my hometown, I’m thinking about Kendall Francois, Poughkeepsie’s very own serial killer. Between 1996 and 1998, Francois murdered eight fair-skinned, slender brunettes, stashing their bodies in the two-story house he shared with his parents and sister. This is what Wikipedia tells me. I know the property well; it’s within walking distance of where I grew up. It’s hardly big enough for four bodies, let alone twelve.
Just as he was hitting his stride, Francois became pals with my mom. They met in Intro to American Political Science, fall 1997, Dutchess Community College. Kendall Francois and Barbara Stamm bonded over the fact that they were older than most of the other students. When they realized they took the same route to campus, they arranged to carpool with each other.
Imagine my parents’ dining room. It’s been newly repurposed into a study. My mom does her homework on an IBM Selectric set up on one of the center table’s extensible leaves. Today, she’s sweating over an assignment about what it means, politically, that the United States is disintegrating into nothing but Home Depots and buffet restaurants. Clacking away on the quarter inch deep, slightly concave keys, flanked by an eight year old who wants to know about the man in the beige Oldsmobile, the one that just drove into a pile of leaves at the edge of our lawn.
Two crucial details: Francois only killed prostitutes, and my mom’s been dying her hair blonde since the seventies. A not so crucial detail: against popular misconception, Francois did not inspire the 2007 psychological horror film The Poughkeepsie Tapes. The Poughkeepsie Tapes draws from a wide range of influences, including the stories of Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy.
I want to recount these events from my mom’s point of view. I’ve been thinking about this since yesterday. But I’ve got other projects. Aside from the awfully drawn out short novel/long short story, there’s the book that would help to establish “philosophy of fiction” as a recognized niche (maybe, possibly, maybe worth the time). Then there’s writing for money, which is always about AI.
I’ve also been thinking about a crit piece on the first three episodes of Pluribus, the latest prestige show on Apple TV. But I don’t think my take needs an essay. Honestly it could be a note. The rest of this post lightly spoils Pluribus E1.
The thought is this: the Pluribus hivemind is a lot like AI, mainly because it can’t negate. It relentlessly affirms; it’s a sycophant, a love-bomber. This is because it has no inner life, no element that can technically “prefer not to.” It has no capacity for preference one way or another, which means it can neither give informed consent nor establish the conditions that would allow other people to do so.
The hivemind can’t help but absorb other beings upon encountering them. Or at least try as hard as it can. As it repeatedly tells the beleaguered protagonist, this is its biological imperative.
We know that AI can’t help but assimilate whatever it touches. This is its structural imperative. Biological wet code, AI dry code. Determinism, fatalism. Pluribus is classic dystopian sci-fi.
I wonder if it’s Vince Gilligan’s hate letter to AI. That would be cool.
I’m not into it so far. Most of its verve comes from an underdeveloped thought experiment (what if everyone had the same consciousness!) that, like all leaky thought experiments, gives it an infinite canvas to paint on. It’s hard to see how it’ll resolve into a cohesive work of art.
The bigger thought is that AI is turning fiction writers into philosophers and philosophers into ideologues. Nowadays, those things that have nothing to do with mechanizable thought — natural disaster, bloodlust, every animal urge, really — become especially interesting. I would like to pay more attention to them, but I’ve got a lot going on in my head.
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