copy, paste?
should we, can we, intervene?
Iterating and iteration has been on my mind.
Specifically how machine learning iterates by guessing what thing was said before and betting on it again exponentially in a self-referential way. It makes me think of a never-ending hall of mirrors, but as they iterate they become more and more like fun-house mirrors. By the time you travel all the way through the hallway, they are still technically mirrors, but the farther out from the source, the more warped, distorted and “off” they are.
Which is where the slop comes from.
Copying and pasting in and of itself I don’t think is the problem, it does seem to be a human thing.
Even before printing press, we “copy and pasted” information through oral tradition, gossip, the troubadour or theater troop going town to town.
From the time of the printing press until the internet things became somewhat formalized. Books and printed material everywhere, we copy and pasted because someone got an idea, wrote it down and then we all copy pasted his idea; adding it to the constellation of ideas in the collective. Same process for photographers and visual artists, movie makers and musicians - you made a movie that resonated, part of that film exists somehow inside all who were affected by it.
Since the internet prowled onto the scene our copy and pasting became faster, easier and less honorable. You could actually take someone’s creative work, intellectual property - their song, their image, their art - and just copy and paste it into your own timeline if you wanted.
Now, with machine learning, the copy pasting happens exponentially - mis and dis information fly fast and errors in thinking get bigger and bigger within the collective.
While, I, ordinary human that I am, may not be able to save the world from the machine level of copy pasting, I do feel able to investigate my own relationship to copy pasting and be disruptive to it when necessary.
For instance, imagine yourself as machine learning program that uses mirroring feedback loops to refine your abilities. Now, imagine one of the pieces of information you have when you start out is misogynistic and you iterate the heck out of it. Now, you’ve exponentially increased misogyny in the world. You, as machine learning, will now “look” out onto the misogynistic world and feed evidence from it back into your programming that loops back on its self. Now we have a self-perpetuating misogyny machine.
Or, imagine yourself as a machine learning program that started out with “good info.” but something happens in your feedback loop that causes you to hallucinate and you iterate that. Now your hallucinations are exponentially multiplying and spreading around until they too, are fed back into your loop.
We humans do this too - it is just SO MUCH EASIER to see it in machine learning.
I do not know what to do about machine learning. In my fantasy, it is never trained by corporations or even governments, it is not gender-biased, racist, etc., it loves and supports all life, nature and the earth, it is “raised to maturity” by people with a moral center and it is open source.
Doesn’t seem too likely from our current vantage point.
But, we can use this phenomena as a focal point for our own evolution. This is a good time for all of us to gently become aware of what “short-cuts” we are copy pasting to make things “easier” - but that really are keeping us mired in quicksand; where every time we make a move we sink a little deeper.
Sometimes others - advertisers, family, friends, colleagues, peers or the overculture - “program” us by feeding us things to copy and paste that trap us. Sometimes we trap ourselves.
I’ll share one example of how I trapped myself.
You all know that I loved teaching in person. Many of you know the last time I had a room to teach in here in L.A. was Spring 2023.
A thought that I copy and pasted since then (until recently) was:
“I like teaching in person the best so since I can’t do that, I won’t teach at all.”
The genesis of this thought was a kind of sour grapes hurt that I was feeling. I was taking my toys and going home. I was bummed to not get to teach in person and so, I copy and pasted a thought that kept me from teaching at all - even online. This copy pasted thought came up all the time when I was talking to people about my career, or even when I was planning work stuff in my mind. This copy pasted thought separated me from you in many ways and from opportunities I never saw because I had copy-pasted blinders on.
Recently, I found that errant copy and pasted thought, examined it in contemplation, pulled it out by its root and replaced it with a new copy-paste:
“Teaching online is a delightfully effective magical action, and… paradoxically, teaching online may sooner or later support teaching in person.”
Since this re-working of my copying and pasting I have taught three excellent online classes and already set up more for early 2026. I have LOVED being with you in that internet space and we really have made magic already. It has done my heart so good to see you all and I also adapted what I didn’t like about online teaching before, making it into something I am really proud of.
The old thought was wrong - and I copy pasted it unconsciously for about a year and a half.
The new thought is better - and I’m going to copy and paste it until I find an EVEN BETTER thought to replace it with.
I share this in the hopes that you can see how reviewing (on the individual AND collective levels) your go-to copy-pastes might lead to some necessary updates.
Until next time,
Jess
p.s. my favorite place to review my copy pastes is in meditation.
“Meditation is akin to dancing or playing music.”
- Alan Watts
“As I read the Book of Genesis, God didn’t give Adam and Eve a whole planet.
He gave them a manageable piece of property, for the sake of discussion let’s say 200 acres.
I suggest to you Adams and Eves that you set as your goals the putting of some small part of the planet into something like safe and sane and decent order.
There’s a lot of cleaning up to do.
There’s a lot of rebuilding to do, both spiritual and physical.
And, again, there’s going to be a lot of happiness. Don’t forget to notice!
What painters and sculptors and writers do, incidentally, is put very small properties indeed into good order, as best they can.
A painter thinks, “I can’t fix the whole planet, but I can at least make this square of canvas what it ought to be.’‘ And a sculptor thinks the same about a lump of clay or marble. A writer thinks the same about a piece of paper, conventionally eleven inches long and eight and a half inches wide.
We’re talking about something less than 200 acres, aren’t we?”
- Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
“An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world can tell, what it is like to be alive. All I’ve ever wanted to do is tell that, I’m not trying to solve anybody’s problems, not even my own. I’m just trying to outline what the problems are.
I want to be stretched, shook up, to overreach myself, and to make you feel that way too.”
- James Baldwin
“Your imagination is able to do all that you ask in proportion to the degree of your attention.
All progress, all fulfillment of desire depend upon the control and concentration of your attention.
Attention may be either attracted from without or directed from within.
Attention is attracted from without when you are consciously occupied with the external impression of the immediate present.
Your attention is directed from within when you deliberately choose what you will be preoccupied with mentally.
This very day, start your new life. Approach every experience in a new frame of mind – with a new state of consciousness. Assume the noblest and best for yourself in every respect and continue therein.
Make believe, great wonders are possible.”
- Neville Goddard
“At 19, I read a sentence that re-terraformed my head: “The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang.”
In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing - not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over.
Each baby, then, is a unique collision - a cocktail, a remix - of all that has come before: made from molecules of Napoleon and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Cleopatra’s breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms.
When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of the bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a starburst constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like galaxies colliding. We are all peculiar, unrepeatable, perambulating micro-universes - we have never been before and we will never be again. Oh God, the sheer exuberant, unlikely fact of our existences. The honour of being alive. They will never be able to make you again.”
– Caitlin Moran
“Our consciousness is programmed. We see things a certain way from a young age - we’re programmed to keep doing them that way. Then you have to spend adulthood learning how to overcome it, to read out the programs. Try to create. I want to tell people to create. Just start by creating your day. Then create your life.”
― Prince
“The in between is where it happens.
It’s less the meeting and more how am I getting to and from each of those meetings? And what am I thinking about in between? You know, it’s like the ticks of the clock.
The computer understands the ticks, but human beings live in the moments between those ticks, in the duration that’s not even acknowledged by the metrics.
And that’s where it’s at.
That’s where human beings actually live.
This secret place that computers don’t even know and AIs can’t see. They can only see the ticks. They’re quantized. But we’re breathing in that space. And that’s where, if there is some spiritual thing, that’s where it is.”
- Douglas Rushkoff, Program or be Programmed
“Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize. Of course it does. The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shallows to entrance the bluegills. Not unless you do your part. You must choose to meet her halfway. And when you do, you may find that magic isn’t a dismissal of what is real. It’s a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.”
Jarod Anderson
“To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable.”
- Rebecca Solnit
“…magic is and always has been a strategy and tactic for living. It is a form of creative resistance, a way of understanding the universe and navigating it, a deeply relational way of being and collaborating with human, non-human and extradimensional entities and even machines.”
- Amy Hale