After about two months now of using AI very heavily, exploring new coding and agent tools, I am again swinging back towards a very Wendell Berry-esque feeling towards all of it.
At the same time as my usage has been going up, this very interesting nostalgia for the 90s and early 2000s has come into view. The algorithm is pumping this for me, sure, but I am also connecting with a pre-algorithm world where things just felt easier. Easier, or more free, is how I’ve come to express it.
This world right now, seems to me of and for and by the algorithm. It doesn’t have to be that way, but you must work hard to make it very much not that way.
The algorithm can be literally that – what X/Twitter or TikTok is showing you – but it is also just the convenient and expedient things that leave you feeling at the end of the day that you have not done a thing and that you are certainly disconnected or detached from whatever things others around you have done.
What I mean is, in the world of the algorithm something is always happening but you are just observing it. Being fed it.
You aren’t creating it or participating in it.
You have to work so hard to be a full participant in your life. Always have. AND, I the digitally connected world – the super world – makes it even harder.
That’s why my pendulum is swinging back. Because when I use these AIs consistently for days and weeks and months, I don’t know what I really have to show for it.
Meanwhile, I have planted 13 trees in the backyard over recent months and they have started to bloom. I can see the connection I have to them, and I understand the connection they have to the greater environment, and that gives me a greater sense of my connection to God and to land I live on and to my family and community.
I admit this style of writing is very emotional and slapstick, and perhaps confused. I mean to say that I go through these ebbs of thinking that I really need to keep up and understand this stuff, while using it to try and make some money (possible) in a time where that would be quite useful. But I don’t enjoy that process all that much when I come to the end of a month of heavy use of it. I’m not sure it’s worth it.
I do know that planting the tress was worth it. That playing tennis with Sadie and going to Trailhead after was worth it. That riding bikes and scooters with you guys (Greta and Shepherd) was worth it. All real and making me better in this world!
And so my pendulum swings back. Wendell Berry writing about why he’ll never buy a computer comes back around to making great sense.