Two Kinds of Knowing

on political despair and not being a computer

From my journal, Saturday night 6/21:

Please, I’m begging you, don’t go on the internet tonight. 
What more information do you need, really? 
You saw the New York Times headline and you saw the desperate and angry posts from two prominent Iranian writers. You saw the words: bomb, nuclear, United States, threat, Israel, war. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. What else do you need to see? 

That was two weeks ago. It seems much much longer, knowing as we do now that the US did not end up in a broader war with Iran, and buried, as this moment is, under two weeks of other upsetting headlines, other moments of acute worry. I have to shuffle back through the stack of events that have accumulated since then to even locate how I felt that evening. But the journal entry, and the feeling I’m sifting for, is not even about the bombing itself. The entry continues:

If I were a large language model, the only option I would have for processing a horrible event would be to consume as much information as possible about it and aggregate that data. Because I am a human, I have other options. I can scrub the stain in the bathroom sink. I can eat grapes while I think about the Iraq war, which began when I was 17. I can feel a glut of helplessness in my chest while I look for a pen that has ink in it; I can scribble ink circles as I flip through my mental rolodex of activist groups, local and national, trying to imagine what the response to this event could possibly be. I can sit in front of my notebook and not know what to write.There’s a feeling in me right now that to put down my phone is to turn away, to disengage. That if I am not physically looking at it, on the screen, then I am not holding what is happening, and am choosing instead the soft safety of my personal world. I’m beginning to feel this is not just a false equivalency, but a dangerous one.

I’ve been thinking a lot, recently, about the ways we act as though we are computers, or aspire to be. We wring our hands about AI usurping our humanness, even though, if observed from a distance, you might think computers were our cool older cousins we’re seeking to emulate — deferring to them not just on facts but on things far outside their possible knowing, and trying to deep throat information at the pace they do.

We know that too much dependence on these machines is bad, but we like to think that we have a handle on what the negative effects might be. We like to think we are managing our addiction. When it comes to political action and the internet, for example, we have been talking for years about the pitfalls of social media: people posting and reposting and feeling, falsely, that they’ve done something. This is a problem, sure, but it’s a problem that feels measurable, easy to articulate. This type of concern feels fundamentally surface-level to me. The thing I was concerned with that night of the bombing, the thing I continue to be concerned with, is another layer down. It has to do with getting mixed up between different kinds of knowing.

There’s not knowing what’s going on, and there’s not knowing what to do about it. Anyone who has, like me, struggled with decision making will know the evasion tactic of trying to solve the latter with the former. Maybe if I just get a little more information… Information-gathering becomes a comfort mechanism, a hole you dig deeper and deeper. In the case of our overwhelming political landscape, needing a comfort mechanism is understandable. Sometimes watching an event unfold through your phone screen, article after article after article, does feel like some kind of bearing witness, and sometimes bearing witness seems like the only thing we can do.

But, as a country, it seems we are trying to figure out how to do something more than bear witness. This is where the confusion between types of knowing, and the confusion between what it means to be human and to be a large language model, begins to get dangerous.

I think of writing as a constant teacher about the path from knowing to not knowing. In the rare instances that I am in need of a fact while writing, it takes me just a few seconds to look it up. In what year was James Baldwin born. Which came first, the Triassic or Jurassic period. What is the population of Iran. In one google search I can go from not knowing to knowing. The rest of writing, though, is the act of charting a path towards an answer I will only know when I arrive at it. I’m after something, but I don’t quite know what.

When my brain grows fatigued of writing, I’ll get up to take a short break. I’m always fighting with myself about what I’m allowed to do during breaks. Sometimes I go against the rules and check my phone — because that’s the whole point of treating this like a job, right? You’re focused when you clock in, you’re free when you clock out. (If I were behind the restaurant, on an overturned milk crate, eating a scone and staring at my coworker’s pile of cigarette butts, I would be allowed to check my phone. After an hour or so of focused writing, I feel I deserve a similar reward.) Other days I know better, and I leave my phone in its time-out spot. On those days my little break passes in ways that are more aimless and random. I go downstairs and have a drink of juice. I stare at crumbs under the kitchen table and decide, without really thinking, to sweep the floor.

I don’t always come back to my desk after sweeping the floor knowing what the next sentence is. But often I do. I never — I mean never, absolutely never — come back to my desk after ten minutes on instagram knowing what the next sentence is. I know you’re not surprised to hear this, but it’s worth saying. Because we forget, or behave like we forget, that so much of the way our brains work depends on a wandering semi-conscious interiority that can’t be corralled or precisely controlled. Creativity is way-finding, from not knowing to knowing. It is a fundamentally different process than arriving at an answer by aggregating data, and it cannot function in a constant-input environment. I’m not just talking about the creativity of writing an essay. I’m also talking about the creativity of finding a way forward in a seemingly hopeless political environment.

We act as though, no matter how long we neglect it, our interiority will be there, waiting for us. I’m not sure this is true. I fear the more we emulate computers — input, output — the less this wandering, way-finding resource will be available to us, partially because we won’t know how to make enough space for it to happen. If you give yourself 23 hours to research a topic and one hour to write a play about it, the result is going to be unsurprising. A quick synthesis of what you’ve learned, nothing more. Our thinking, collectively, is starting to feel a bit like this.

Sometimes more information (more opinions, more perspectives) provides clarity. More often, it provides a way for us not to be with our own helplessness. Being with your own helplessness is not “productive” in a simple, measurable, A-to-B kind of way. I didn’t go back on the internet the night the US bombed Iran. I also didn’t come up with a radical plan for war resistance. (In other words, I didn’t have an output I could point to that night, to say see? that’s what I was doing.) What I did was stay with this thought, which is now this little essay, a seed of something that feels important.

One of the surest ways to lose our power, to become easily governable — by fascism, by AI — is to stop up every crack in our waking life with more input. I know this is true; I know it absolutely. Our power does not come from endless content synthesis. Our power is not efficient, not predictable. It depends on breathing room, dull moments, cracks for the wind to blow through. In this way, the slide towards constant content consumption is directly anti-revolutionary. It doesn’t matter what kind of content it is. It doesn’t matter how well-informed you are becoming. Every time you put your mouth to the fire hose of information, there are other processes that have to be paused.

I know this, but I don’t entirely know what to do about it. I’ve not found my way to my next thought, next step. return to the journal entry. there’s something there. try to talk about it. try to say it in a way that will make sense to other people. say the thing that feels electric in its truth and a little crazy. does it sound crazy? i don’t know. i hope so. all new thoughts sound a little crazy. try to say it in a way where people will hear the thing that feels new. hit send. go sweep the floor. go scrub the sink. at some point — minutes or hours or days later — you will know what comes next.