Read a Book, Save Humanity

What good is AI? What's it for? Is it to learn that pepperoni is the capital of Vermont? That Harriet Tubman was the fifth governor of Ohio? That helium is a liquid? Or is it to generate videos of women being shot?

Every time I think we've hit bottom, the floor opens up and we drop another couple of stories. Why do we put up with this? When do we reach our limit?

As best I can tell, AI is being foisted on us because companies have sunk untold billions into it and need to start showing a return. So we're putting up with it because we can't avoid it, even if we've reached our limit. OK. But again: What's it for?

Its promise, as its boosters like to tell us, is that it will make living easier. But its true purpose seems to be to make living less like living and to make us more pliable in the process, to further degrade our already materially degraded ability to obtain quality information and process it. Living ain’t easy, some country musician somewhere probably sang at some point with a pedal steel crying in the background, but it’s all we got.

I am but a simple country lawyer from Darke County, which obviously means that I am a Luddite and a fool, but I’d posit that erasing the difficult bits of being human doesn’t improve humanity, but rather compromises those things that make us who we are: agency, free will, happy accidents, unhappy accidents, random detours, the terror of staring at a blank page, the disgust of staring at a page full of sentences you don’t like, the simple discomfort of moving through the day while trying to do the next right thing without knowing at all what that thing is. 

Also, shouldn’t we ponder more deeply that this technology is being imposed on a species that was already doing pretty badly at educating itself and acting accordingly? That the highest and best uses for this technology seem to be operating in the service of students cheating on their homework, employees too lazy to draft their own emails, and freaks creating videos of disgusting acts of violence? Also: does anyone care that the lords of this industry regularly gather in Washington, D.C., to engage in bizarre humiliation and bribery rituals with the most corrupt president in the nation’s history, or that the data centers that generate all of this slop drink all of our water, eat all of our energy and create no jobs in the process?

It can feel like a little miracle when you find something cool that wasn't shoved in front of your eyeballs by AI or an algorithm. Something I found was the Ohioana Library. I found it by going on a walk in the neighborhood around my office. For the uninitiated, going for a walk entails going outside and then walking. You don't even need to have a destination in mind.

Home - Ohioana Library

Connecting Readers and Ohio Writers

Ohioana Library - Connecting Readers and Ohio Writers

The library is in a nondescript building in a nondescript pocket of Italian Village in Columbus. It's the kind of place you're not going to find unless you stumble upon it by accident. But inside is a commendably vibrant organization. According to its website:

The Ohioana Library Association was founded in 1929 by Ohio First Lady Martha Kinney Cooper to collect, preserve, and promote the works of Ohio authors, artists, and musicians. By the early 1930s the Library had outgrown its space in the Governor’s Mansion and moved into the new State Office Building at 65 S. Front Street, where it remained until 2001. Ohioana and the State Library of Ohio then moved to the renovated Jeffrey Mining Corporate Center near downtown Columbus. Today the Library’s holdings include more than 80,000 books by or about Ohioans; 10,000 pieces of sheet music; biographical files on notable Ohioans; personal papers of Ohio authors and artists; and numerous scrapbooks created by Ohio civic and cultural organizations. The collection does not circulate, but is available for in-library use.

As the library notes, Ohio has a rich literary tradition that includes Sherwood Anderson, Zane Grey, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rita Dove, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Robert McCloskey. Beyond its collection, the library, among other things, hosts book awards and a book festival, sponsors writer clinics and maintains a guide to an Ohio literary trail, all in the service of honoring and carrying forward that tradition.

The library needs help. It had to put its Ohioana Quarterly on hiatus this summer due to grant cuts and declining memberships and sponsorships. You could engage in a radical act of humanity by donating a few dollars to the library and then going to your local library and checking out Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. You could then bask in the satisfaction of knowing that while you're reading a real, physical book, you are not being spoon-fed by the oligarchy's favorite software, you are not being tracked, your attention is not being monetized and there is no algorithm preparing to feed you the next thing you didn't ask for.