Coming Soon: We Will Not Be Flattened
Developing a Counter-Narrative to Assert Our Tragic Particularity in an AI World
What is at Stake
In this age of AI, marked by an unprecedented surge in AI investments and a narrative of inevitability, we face a technology fundamentally designed to mine and instrumentalize human culture. This binds us to an increasingly reductive, flattened ontological framework. AI seeks not only to reshape our cultural landscape but also to redefine our very existence according to its requirements. For artists, this means a fundamental shift in how they create, distribute, and even conceive their work. The essence of creativity and authorship is under threat, as AI systems churn out imitations that flatten the particularity of human expression, inverting the value proposition, so that decontextualized, de-temporalized mass-produced representations are more valuable rather the authentic original creations. This process does just 'flatten' the artists, it annihilates the socio-cultural contexts which give birth to these cultural expressions, replacing depth, nuance, meaning, and diversity with a homogenized, optimized, and ultimately flat datum of content for passive consumption.
The Need for a Counter-Narrative
Absent from the frothy headlines and endless think pieces is an engagement with the implications of this moment from a philosophical and epi-ontic perspective. We need a language to build a counter-narrative to the endless stream of technology-as-progress stories that dominate the discourse surrounding AI. Without such a counter-narrative, we risk losing sight of what gives our lives meaning and purpose in the face of an increasingly automated world.
Our Mission
This is where "We Will Not Be Flattened" comes in. Our mission is to examine the ontological, epistemological, and ethical implications of AI-generated content and its impact on art, culture, and the human condition. We aim to develop a robust philosophical framework that challenges the reductive, instrumentalized view of humanity promoted by the AI industry. This framework is a work in progress, and I hope it grows into a collaborative project, bringing together artists, thinkers, and anyone concerned about the future of human creativity and expression in the age of AI..
What We Stand For
At its core, this project is dedicated to those who resist the commodification of their essence and seek to affirm their being in all its tragic, flawed, and deliberate dimensions. Crucially, this initiative must exist outside the logics of current algorithmic and instrumentalized AI frameworks, which necessarily means challenging the governing ontology of our time, what Federico Campagna has called The Age of Technic. In order to challenge this ontology, we must construct our own, ensuring that those labeled as 'not the case' in the ontology of Technic will have the space to thrive in the new ontology hopefully being built here.
"We Will Not Be Flattened" is a statement against the prevailing, immanent, and flattened ontological plane that AI fosters. It is a declaration of resistance against the reductive and homogenizing forces that seek to strip away the depth, complexity, and particularity of human existence. By operating beyond the confines of AI-driven systems, we aim to create a space where individuals can explore, express, and embrace their being in all its richness and diversity, without being subsumed by the demands of AI technologies.
Our mission is to celebrate the tragic beauty of the human condition, in all its contradictions, imperfections, and sublime possibilities. We believe that it is precisely in the realm of art and significant creative expression that we can make that which is non-existent in the ontology of Technic, existent, to effectively reinflate the spaces necessary for uncovering our unfolding and counteract the flattening effects of AI.
Join The Discussion
If you're an artist, thinker, technologist, or someone who is looking for a way to put into the words and possible action, the unsettling feelings this rapid rise of AI generated content protends for us, I invite you to join the conversation. My initial plan is to explore these ideas one essay at a time, building on the themes I've begun to examine in my Medium articles which are posted here for exploration. By moving this project to Substack, I hope to broaden the reach of these ideas and find more collaborators, however that may manifest.
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