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- [00:00]
Matthew Schmitz
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile.
- [00:02]
Jeff Schillenberger
I don't know if you knew this,
- [00:03]
Matthew Schmitz
but anyone can get the same Premium
- [00:05]
Jeff Schillenberger
Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying.
- [00:08]
Matthew Schmitz
It's not just for celebrities.
- [00:10]
Jeff Schillenberger
So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today.
- [00:15]
Matthew Schmitz
I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com
- [00:18]
Jeff Schillenberger
Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3
- [00:21]
Ashley Frawley
month plan equivalent to $15 per month Required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra.
- [00:28]
Jeff Schillenberger
See full terms@mintmobile.com foreign.
- [00:54]
Ashley Frawley
Welcome to the Compact Podcast. Today we'll discuss Thomas Massie's primary campaign in Kentucky, the rise of AI writing and youth unemployment. I'm joined by Ashley Frawley and Jeff Schillenberger. And I'm Matthew Schmitz. So our listeners may be coming to this after Thomas Massie has either won or lost his primary race, he's defending his House seat in Kentucky. He's been vigorously opposed by Donald Trump, who's angry at Massie over a host of issues. And I'd say Massie has emerged as something of a media darling in recent months, along with people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert who were once viewed as wackos by mainstream and liberal media. You know, their willingness to challenge Trump on a variety of issues, especially on the Iran war, on the Epstein files, I think has, you know, earned them that strange new respect. So it's a, it's a quite, it's quite interesting race. And if I were in the Bluegrass State, I gotta say, I would vote against Thomas Massie. I'm ready to see him go down. And for me, it's a, it's pretty simple beef. I think he's just been wildly irresponsible about the Epine files. You know, the publicly issued Epstein files, of course, were redacted. A lot of names were blacked out. Congressmen had the ability to go in and look at the unredacted files, and Thomas Massie and his Democratic colleague Ro Khanna did so. And, and they came out and said that they had found at least six individuals who were likely incriminated by their inclusion in the files, but whose names had been redacted. And then Kanno went on the House floor and named several of these individuals who were totally random people who had just been included in a photo lineup. And Massey has never, never apologized for this. So just sort of randomly naming people and saying that they're part of a global pedophile conspiracy and they're never apologizing for it, doesn't seem that responsible to me. You know, maybe it's, it's all fair in the age of Trumpism, when, you know, Trump himself is happy to throw around lots of wild accusations and rhetoric. But I, I do think it's, it's just remarkable how maybe it's a kind of a, something of a pattern over the course of the Trump presidency. I mean, Trump is so open to just criticism on so many points, but kind of weirdly, the kind of rallying cries against Trump often end up being even more insane and he often even has better of the argument on certain things where people are opposing him. So on the Epine files, I think Trump, Trump's insistence that they're not a big deal, you know, his attempt to downplay them, I think obviously that was self interested and that's why he was saying that. I don't mean to deny that or obscure it in any way or, or to suggest here that Trump is a know, perspicacious legal mind or, but I think he was on the right side of the issue. For whatever reasons brought him there, though Epstein committed real crimes and deserved penalties for them. What Michael Tracy and I have called the Epstein myth went far beyond the facts. And I think Trump was, was right to send to, to suggest that this had been blown or that this was really being invoked in ways that made very little sense. So it's funny, maybe it's a little bit like the Russiagate hoax, which at least connected to a real geopolitical question where one could disagree with Trump's approach. Though Trump was by no means the first president to attempt an opening or a reset with Russia. But you know, on the Epstein thing, I see that really as expressive of a just kind of generalized mistrust of our elites, which is understandable and justified to a very great degree. But its expression in the Epstein files doesn't really lead toward any kind of reform of policy. When you're just indicting everyone as a satanic pedophilic reptilian elite, that doesn't mean, okay, well, we should try to build up our defense industrial base, we should try to embrace nuclear, to lower energy prices and otherwise whatever, cut regulations to build more housing. We should try to really push affordability. I mean, it just has no upshot whatsoever that I can discern. And maybe that's something that makes it kind of useful for Massey's style of libertarian politics because it's not clear that he wants to champion some great policy proposal. He wants a retrenchment of US Foreign policy. Certainly that's maybe where the rubber hits the road for the Epstein thing. But I'm a little skeptical that one can, you know, that, I mean, maybe you can achieve good policy outcomes by spinning and saying conspiracies. I'm sure, I'm sure it's happened, but I'll say I don't care for it.
- [07:21]
Matthew Schmitz
So I just highlight a couple things about Massie. I remember going back to the 2024 campaign after the RFK endorsement of Trump and the coalescence of MAHA as a force within maga. I said many snide things and kind of made fun of the whole phenomenon. And one person people would, who were upset by my ridicule of this whole phenomenon I would point to is was Massey. Because he is somebody who, you know, within the Republican Congressional caucus, I think embodies certain sort of MAHA type ideals of, you know, he's, he's sort of skeptical of big agriculture. I think there was some talk that he would be potential Agriculture Secretary under Trump, which to my mind obviously wasn't going to happen because they actually wanted somebody who was going to be friendlier to the interests of big agriculture. That wasn't a, a lobby that they wanted to antagonize. So but you know, Massey is sort of into sustainable agriculture. He's into a certain kind of traditional view of rural life. I'd say he's a figure in the Jeffersonian tradition of American polit, which also explains why he has this green element. I think we could tie him to what Holly Buck in a piece for us called Green maga that, that he, I think embodies a certain kind of older form of conservative environmentalism which is more about wanting to preserve the ecosystems of traditional communities, both human and agricultural and natural, in some sort of balance over and against the interests of, of big agriculture. And so I think he, he does kind of embody that again that tradition of the, the Jeffersonian sort of yeoman figure, which is why he's very into being off the grid. He has a fully off off grid home that he built himself. He also interestingly has the Jeffersonian thing of being an inventor. I think he's, he's kind of like a small scale inventor. He like built his own house and created his own kind of sustainable energy system for it. So that again is, is this Jeffersonian tradition of individual autonomy and kind of small scale self sufficiency. So I suppose the question. So obviously this is a kind of venerable tradition in American politics, but One that's become increasingly difficult to sustain as society has developed. And it's just become much harder to function as this kind of, as, as this kind of citizen, as the, the autonomous self suff. Rural yeoman which was Jefferson's ideal of the citizen. And you know, it seems sort of obvious why that, that's just going to be a very difficult political proposition. I mean you can win a congressional seat maybe by embodying this if you're in a. I believe Kentucky is one of the more rural states and also I'm not sure exactly what the demographics of his, of his district are. So I haven't really looked into it. But you know, it is, it is a place that kind of historically embodies these front, these Jeffersonian frontier ideals and has, has regions and communities that still kind of connect to this set of political traditions. But at the same time on, on the level of national politics it's just kind of a non starter because in the Republican Party just is going to be much more responsive to the interests of big agriculture than it is to the, the proposals of someone like, like Massey when it comes to, you know, sustainable small scale farming and things like that. And so I suppose this might be a way of explaining, you know, how do you end up with him becoming, going all in on Epstein stuff. And it's partly because whatever kind of positive political program he represented and the other thing I should say about him that seems notable is he is a principled libertarian critic of the, the security state. He's been a critic of the Patriot act and various other rollbacks of civil liberties that have occurred in the past couple decades. And, and he's also skeptical of heavy involvement in foreign conflicts which again is very consistent with this long standing Jeffersonian tradition of politics. And the simple point I would make is that this just makes you a kind of dinosaur within the current political system. There just isn't really that much of a lane for those, those kinds of politics or those kinds of political proposals. And so what's left to you, I would say is to pedal this much more, you know, this kind of conspiratorial populism that Matthew was just talking about, because there just isn't. I mean the other figure who I think is kind of an interesting one, who we published a piece about a couple months ago on the Democratic side there, there are a few people who I think embody aspects of what I've been talking about. One is Marie Glusonkamp Perez and the other would be perhaps Maine's Jared Golden. And you know, these are people who I think I represent rural districts and represent certain, certain values associated with that. And I would say it seems notable to me that they have not gone in this direction of, of conspiratorial populism in the way that, that Massey has. And you know, it's there. There are also kind of embattled figures within their party. But it seems commendable to me that they've sort of stuck to a relatively principled defense of again, this, this sort of traditional politics of rural self sufficie, of, you know, small scale communities and the prerogatives of individuals over and against, you know, large entities, whether corporate or state. And so it does seem striking to be the Massie unlike. And in fact, you know, he joined up with several, I believe Ro Khanna, the Democratic congressman, you know, several kind of mainstream center left Democratic members of Congress in, in plugging the, the Epstein narrative. And so he, I think, you know, made a choice to really make that his brand. And so to that extent that sort of become the, the main test of his politics is just whether he can get away with challenging Trump on the Epstein narrative and all of these other, you know, I'd say kind of more interesting and, and principled aspects of his political record and, and views have, have somewhat fallen by the wayside and are much less salient in this conflict.
- [14:30]
Jeff Schillenberger
Well, you've been a lot more given him more credit than I would. I. He seemed like one of these kinds of libertarian, formerly outsider kind of people that were weird, you know, and then now we're in the era of like, hey everybody, all the conspiracies, they're actually true, except for the flat earth one. I feel bad for the flat earthers because there, there's, there is the only conspiracy that didn't come true. So now these weird kind of outsider voices can emerge and start to sound like the voice of reason and get the, the time of day. But I think actually the issue with somebody like Massey is that he has this kind of very literal framing of America first where it means like okay, we said America First. That means what are we doing in these foreign entanglements? Why are we in Iran? Why are we, you know, propping up Israel? Why are we doing all this stuff? I said America first and that means, you know, we start here on American soil. That's, that's what we need to pay attention to. And it just strikes me as very much in fitting with that kind of lack of systemic thinking that it's like that allows somebody to go Kind of in overdrive about like the Epstein files where it's like, it reveals a sense that there's actually the, the global economic order is quite simple and the answers are all very simple. And we can put America first by just like making that our slogan and starting from there. And that's, that makes sense when you're outside of power. And Trump has learned that because he said the same kinds of things. But now once you're in power, you start to realize that in order to put America first, you're going to find yourself in Iran, you're going to find yourself supporting Israel, you're going to find yourself policing global capitalism, securing global trade routes. We've got a piece of, as time of recording, we've got a piece in compact today from Ralph Leonard called American Empire is Here to Stay. And he basically makes this point that even if you don't want it anymore, even if Americans don't want it, the age of American empire is not over and it simply cannot be over. The United States has emerged as this. It can't just like withdraw and be like, okay, let's just, you know, be parochial and focus on our workers and whatever they. It's the anchor of the world economy. It's the reserve currency state, the guarantor, as I said, of shipping lanes. It's essential military power. It organizes and oversees global capitalism. And to put America first means that you have to go through all of those. I'm quite sure that Trump thought it was simple. The Trump administration thought it was simple. Until you actually take power and realize what the reality is on the ground and how the United States has endlessly wound up. You know, it's not like it's not seeking its own interests. It's not like, oh, we were like self sacrificing. America was like self sacrificing to the global rules based international order or something like that. It's the incredible, incredibly complex global system requires all of this stuff, requires all this stuff. And what's happening now is not the end of this era of like empire or as I said before, the rules based international order, but maybe like a new kind of, a new kind of empire, a new kind of imperial, you know, age where you, all that Trump is doing is stripping off the old language of like liberalism and you know, all the other things that cloaked what is essentially a self serving project and just laid it bare. But there is no other way out. I mean, your choices, you know, Trump, the Trump administration doesn't have any choice and it's just nice to be, you know, there's no end to American empire. It's too, I mean, obviously, eventually there's an end to everything, but everything is too embedded, everything is too complex. And it's just very, very easy, it seems to me, to criticize from the outside and seem to be principled when actually you're just taking a very, very simplistic view of things, you know, Jeff,
- [19:04]
Ashley Frawley
I think your comparison of Thomas Massie and Marie Glusenkamp Perez is so fascinating because my understanding of Loosen Camp Perez's reputation is that right now she gets a lot of criticism from the progressive left. And this may be motivated by her more moderate positioning. But the specific knock on her is that she just cares about kind of really niche policy initiatives, things that don't really matter. So maybe she cares about your right to repair. You should be able to repair your own vehicle. Or she recently gave a speech on the House floor about how red delicious apples, you know, and she's a congresswoman from Washington, how red delicious apples are terrible and we should have better apples. She's right about that. In fact, she seems to be right about almost everything she takes up. But this is kind of all dismissed as small ball. And I, I think that for me, that just drives home the way in which, you know, opposition to US funding for Israel and support for Israel has become a kind of master narrative. And it's essential now to the progressive stack, so to speak, of causes. And also it's a very big issue on the right. So Glusenkamp Perez, who's from a quite red district, doesn't have one of those master narratives. And I think that's a big knock on her from the left. Other news, AI writing is really taking over everything. There are two kind of items in the headlines this week. One of these concerns the Commonwealth Foundation Short story Prize, which is awarded to unpublished fiction from around the British Commonwealth. And the winners of this prize are all published in Granta, very prestigious magazine edited by the highly regarded Thomas Meaney. Well, there are allegations all over Twitter that one of the winners of this prize, at least one of the winners of this prize, this one named Jamir Nazir, wrote his short story the Serpent in the Grove using an LLM like chat GPT. I know when I see it, and I think he certainly did that. Not only that, his author headshot appears to be kind of AI constructed and it's, it's very funny. I mean, this is a very, this is a very prestigious prize, very prestigious magazine to appear in, seems to be AI generated. This prize is obviously judged by people who have pristine literary reputations. And it's such an indictment because you're supposed to be discerning. You make very high claims for your art and for your taste in that art, and then it's revealed you have none whatsoever. The related story, the New York Times reports that Stephen Rosenbaum, author of the Future of Truth, a book about AI included hallucinated quotes and citations in his book. And this was a widely and enthusiastically reviewed book. Again, another kind of prestige product seems to be hallucinated. You know, I'll. I'll let you guys get in here, but first I just have to say I'm not sure listeners understand exactly how pervasive AI writing has become. So as. As editor of Compact, just over the last, I don't know, Maybe it's been 18 months or so, I've seen this unbelievable surge in AI generated writing that's being submitted to us, some of it by people with real academic appointments, with decent reputations. And that doesn't matter if I think I could edit the AI out of. Doesn't matter if I think, well, maybe this is AI, maybe it isn't. If I think it might be AI, I just reject. I just reject it. And I'm sorry if you are a freelancer who sent us something and we've. And you think it's very meritorious, it has a great argument you didn't use AI at all. If it sounds like AI, I'm not going to publish it. That's not the policy of a lot of other publications. There are some out there which will remain nameless because we're very nice at Compact. We're very nice and collegial. They publish writing that is almost entirely AI generated every week. These are publications that aspire to prestige, that have pretensions to being standing in a great journalistic tradition. People who run by editors who seem to take pride in their craft and aspire to imitate the greats of yore, but they just push out AI writing. And that AI writing isn't just written by some unheard of Jamir Nazir. No, it's written by people who have been distinguished fellows and university professors and deans and all of this. So if. If you like that kind of stuff, you're going to be able to find lots of it in publications. My. My own belief is that, though probably everyone will be, you know, fooled, end up publishing something that was AI generated to an extent that editors have an absolute responsibility to keep AI generated writing out whenever they think it may have been AI generated, and that by doing so, you're eventually going to end up distinguishing yourself from the pack because AI writing is not good there. It's. I mean, the main thing it has is an understanding of certain rules of rhetoric. And that's. That's striking because rhetoric is not something that's taught at all in English departments today. So, you know, I received my degree in English from Princeton University. Such a great school. So wonderful. I don't think anyone ever mentioned the difference between a running and a periodic style. Probably the. The most basic distinction you can make in prose. I don't believe I was ever taught that. I was never taught really any other rhetorical terms or. Or trained in how to employ them. And that's essential to persuasive writing, to being able to use rhetoric. So the kind of classic AI. So one of the clearest markers for AI is correctio, the rhetorical term for when you say that something is not this, it is that. So the right's response to progressive identity politics has not chiefly taken the form of repudiation. It has taken the form of adoption. I mean, that's an AI generated sentence, clearly. Especially when you have an essay that's absolutely littered with this one rhetorical device, which is perfectly legitimate. You can find it in Cicero, of course, and many other works. But that's not really. Just using those things is not writing. I mean, the language so often lacks precision. A classic AI think of something like, you know, the. These ideas are not structural, they are ornamental. But often it's very unclear. What do you mean by structural versus ornamental? It'll be somehow even more imprecise than that. Just a kind of vagueness. And it has that rhetorical roundness. It sounds as though a strong and decisive voice is speaking. But when you examine the language, it's very. It just sort of dissipates. The meaning just recedes. It isn't there. And so far, it really does take a human intelligence to do this correctly. So I'd say two things. One, do not lean on ChatGPT because you're going to end up writing poorly and editors will sense it. And the other thing I'd say is this. If you think that ChatGPT has some. You think it's helpful in kind of giving an argument roundness or fullness. Simply study the basics of English rhetoric. And there are lots of tools you can use to do this. So one book I would recommend to listeners is Richard Lanham's Analyzing Prose. That's a good basic manual for understanding English Prose. You can also look at Fowler's Modern English Rhetoric. That's another very strong source. And more technically, Lanham has a handbook of rhetorical terms. But I think really analyzing prose and then Modern English rhetoric are things that you can use that will give you some of the tools that. That you're seeing in the LLM and that you think are nifty. It'll give them. Give those to you, and you'll be able to use them in a human way. And you'll write. You'll write much better. So there's. I do think in a way that the rise of LLMs shows that we need to really start teaching rhetorical devices again to people. We need to, because people clearly, they want that. They want to be able to use correctio. They think, oh, this is so nifty. It is not weak writing. It is strong.
- [30:22]
Jeff Schillenberger
Honestly, you have to, like, be grateful to the LLMs to a certain extent, because, like, I remember joking a post on Facebook while I was writing my PhD, like, how to write, like, Ashley, start every sentence with however or furthermore and say, it is not blah, blah, blah. It is blah, blah, blah. And I used to do that so much, and now that I see it in AI writing, it's like forcing yourself. What are those? You know, the famous, like, literary greats who challenge themselves to write books without using the letter E like that. Or I'm like, oh, I have to, like, challenge myself to never, ever write with anything like an LLM cliche now. And it's like, you know, the thing is, like, the AI, it's not like it was the thing that invented the bad writing. It's like it forced us. It made us face with sober senses, our own hackery, because it just took it and it dialed it right up to 11. And we're like, oh, is that what I sound like to a machine? And, yeah, so what it's doing is it's just reproducing, like, our cliches, our habits, our. We used to joke, like, do you remember that meme of the couple walking down the street? And, you know, one of them turns to look at the girl going by, and it was like, comma, semicolon, distracted boyfriend meme. Yeah, distracted boyfriend meme. Sorry. You know, comma, semicolon, blah, blah. And they're like, he's, like, turning to look at the EM dash. And we were all getting a little sloppy with the EM dashes there. And the large language models were like, oh, yeah, you like your em dashes? Yeah, here it is up to 11 and now you have to really think, do I need an EM dash here? Will some other, you know, punctuation actually make this stronger? And, you know, and that's just kind of basic stuff. When you start to become a writer, you have to ask yourself, have I heard this before? And if I've heard someone say this before, I probably shouldn't say it myself. I don't know if I'm the only one who does that. I'm not that. I. I admit that I'm not a great writer and it's like a very, very difficult thing for me, but these kinds of things that people have said over time. I do try my best to bring these sorts of things in. But, yeah, the. The. This submission was truly shocking in how obviously and nakedly AI generated. It was. And it makes you wonder, not only did the author. Well, obviously the author outsourced the short story writing to an AI. Did the people shortlisting the stories also shortlist it to the AI? Because.
- [33:07]
Ashley Frawley
Yeah, well, the announcements of the winners sounded like they had been AI written.
- [33:14]
Jeff Schillenberger
Yeah. Maybe we're all being scammed, like. Well, have you heard of it before?
- [33:20]
Matthew Schmitz
I will say the. I had heard of this prize before. I will say that having known some people who end up getting recruited to sit on prize committees, it is actually one of the most thankless and unpleasant things to be recruited to do because it just requires reading an immense quantity of text, especially when it's for an entire book. But it just in general requires reading an immense quantity of text with no compensation. And so it would not at all surprise me if people are outsourcing their evaluation of manuscript submitted for prizes to AI because it is very time consuming, thankless, and generally uncompensated. So that would not be surprising to me at all.
- [34:06]
Jeff Schillenberger
Well, according to the website, there were 7,806 entries.
- [34:11]
Matthew Schmitz
Well, that's what I'm saying. Yeah.
- [34:13]
Jeff Schillenberger
And I think there's evidence now that AIs pick themselves as well, like with this sort of thing. But, like. Yeah, that's good.
- [34:21]
Matthew Schmitz
I. I thought it might be worth reading the opening paragraph of this story, which is called the Serpent in the Grove. So I will just read the opening paragraph. They say the grove still hums at noon. Not the bees neat industry or the clean rasp of cutlass on vine, But a belly sound as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there. People who pass keep to the track and do not look in the bush where the stone rings lie. Ask the oldest in the village and you'll hear some version of it had a well there once and a woman the grove ain't forget. So I think the things that are worth noting here, beyond the immediate use of the standard rhetorical mode that Matthew noted, is there is another kind of formulaic dimension of this. And you know, a few people have pointed this out, so I'm not claiming priority on this observation, but it really, it, it just blares Global south literature from the first or you know, sort of actually there, there was a famous debate around an article by Frederick Jameson a couple decades ago called Third World literature, I believe. So in any case, it, it, it just blares Third World literature. It, you know, what seems most interesting to me here is less the, the exact references or denotations of the prose, but the con. It what Roland Barthes called the connotative register or the connotative code, which is that, you know, everything in this passage is just declaring to us, you are in this provincial, slightly magical, mysterious realm. You're being, you're being immersed in this slightly magical, mysterious realm and you are an outsider, but you're sort of being transported into this realm and you're being kind of led in on. You know, there's an element of what's called magic realism here. You're being let in on this kind of secret set of cultural codes that belong to these, you know, maybe slightly primitive people in this remote rural place. And so the whole passage just kind of serves to, to perform that function for the reader. And so there, there's the thing that I find kind of interesting here is there's also kind of an economy of, there's, there's an economy of, of readership that's being enacted in this passage that is already extremely formulaic decade, many decades ago. And, and there's been a great deal written about this. So there's a book called a book of literary sociology called the World Republic of Letters by Pascal Casanova that's about the phenomenon of global literature. And one of the phenomena, she, or one of the aspects of this global economy of literature that she, I mean, she's mainly focused on the prize economy and this was a prize winning story and the way that it functions to kind of import what she calls literary capital, using this sort of term from Bourdieu's sociology, you know, what she calls literary capital from the periphery into the center of global literature. And so these prizes where somebody submits a story to the Commonwealth Prize or these various other prizes that mediate between say, London and Trinidad, as in the case of this story or between France and French speaking West Africa or between Madrid and Latin America. Like these prizes function as a. As a means of kind of currency and, and a means of kind of increasing the circulation of texts between the periphery and the center of literary culture. And so what's kind of notable about this is if you read Casanova's book, which goes back a very long way, is that it really just follows this formula to a T, where one of the things that you see happening in this economy is you could think of as. And, you know, other Casanova and other commentators have talked about it this way. You can think about it as a kind of extraction of raw materials from the, you know, sort of mimicry of this kind of colonial or imperial economy where these raw materials are extracted from these kind of remote rural places and then sent into the center and accorded with a certain kind of exchange value in their being extracted and kind of injected into the global economy, the global literary economy, through the consecration of these prizes.
- [39:06]
Ashley Frawley
There is a kind of anonymization that happens. Or, you know, it becomes kind of IKEA like.
- [39:14]
Matthew Schmitz
Yeah, well, because you become a kind of representative of a particular place or region and that, that representation is kind of what, what gives you a literary reputation. And this is.
- [39:28]
Ashley Frawley
And there's a certain loss of texture. You know, Benjamin Moser, the translator of Clarice Le Spectre, the Brazilian writer, he had a good essay a number of years ago in Liberty's titled Against Translation. And one thing he observes there, I think, related to the sociology you're observing, Jeff, is that the creation of this kind of international readership marks a loss of depth and texture that can come with a more local reading public, one that has a more extensive shared set of references, really. And I think that's. Sorry, before I kick it back to you, I want to make a correction. My mention of Fowler's Modern English rhetoric was that was an AI hallucination, right, Because Fowler is the author of Modern English Usage, which is an authoritative handbook. And I was thinking of Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric. And that's the book I particularly recommend. Though Fowler is a legend in his own right. I think Farnworth's Classical English rhetoric, along with Lanham, that's the way to go. So forgive my kind of auto AI hallucination there.
- [40:55]
Matthew Schmitz
So anyway, just to conclude, the thing I find interesting here is. Yeah, so, right, there's sort of a. A problem with global literature is that is this lack of a common frame of reference. And so what you see this text already producing is a kind of pseudo shared frame of reference. It's a. It's a kind of simulacrum of a shared frame of reference where we don't know exactly what this place is like or what the people. How the people talk or what they believe and. And so. Or what their lives are like. And so instead, what's. What's generated is this kind of aura and mystique around some kind of vague, vaguely authentic, traditional rural space and way of life. And we know this is a completely generic production. It's. It's something we. We know kind of vaguely what it looks like. We don't have to know anything particularly specific to still feel that we're being fed something, you know, seemingly authentic and. And, you know, again, from this, you know, concrete, specific place and time. And again, the point here is that this transaction before. Long before there were LLMs, was highly. For. Was highly kind of formulaic and standardized. And again, I recommend people read this book, the World Republic of Letters, if they're interested, because Casanova spends a long time talking about exactly this kind of thing. A text that evokes or connotes some kind of sense of regional, peripheral authenticity from these colonial or postcolonial spaces and then is consecrated by prize and given a certain amount of prestige in the center. And this was an entirely. You know, the reason this is an entirely kind of automatable process is that it was already fixed in place a very long time ago. And it's interesting, even if you go back to the Nobel prizes of 100 years ago, some of them sort of had this form. There's a. I believe, a Peruvian writer named Ventura Garcia Calderon, who was a Nobel Prize winner, whose work was very much this kind of thing. It was like these sort of. And he was himself a sort of elite Spanish speaker, but his work was kind of this representation of like, the primitive life ways of sort of Andean natives. And this, you know, he's a completely forgotten writer. But it was given the Nobel Prize because there's a. You know, there's been for a long time, especially since romance, you know, for 200 or so years, you know, since romanticism, a kind of hunger to consume these representations of what seem to be rural, traditional, authentic lifeways of people in the peripheries. And so, you know, it's. It is not a surprise that this specific literary transaction could basically be done entirely through AI because it's a completely not. I mean, not only as we're. As we're speculating not only the generation of the story but also the evaluation and awarding of the story and the explanation of that award could be completely automated from start to finish because it already was a completely formulaic process that has existed for a very long time. And so I suppose what's useful about this to sort of go back to what I believe Ashley was saying is it's. It's showing us something that was already the case and that you could already identify and recognize as such, but now it's. It's just become so undeniably obvious that I don't see how we can look away from this reality. And I think it does show us something, you know, various things that are kind of rotten in our. I mean, in this case, in our specific kind of literary economy. And it's. It's a useful illustration to that extent.
- [44:54]
Jeff Schillenberger
I love how your references are like Roland Barthes and Baudrillard, and my brain was like memes and exhibit, Hey, I heard you like EM dashes, so I put an EM dash in your EM dash, so you can. Sorry. But the other thing that I noticed that was very interesting was the. The way that, like, I am shocked at how people are so impressed by these things. Like, how do people not recognize or notice this? And I don't know if there's like a generational divide here, but it seems to. To me that older people in particular, and I. I'm not saying obviously all older people by any means, but seem to so much want to believe that there is this actual AI revolution, as in like, intelligence, not large language model, but this is actually like an intelligence, a kind of proto consciousness or something like that. And it is real and it is extraordinary. And like. Like I caught my dad listening to, like, endless YouTube videos that were AI generated, like fully AI generated. And I was like, dad, what are you. Dad's a smart guy. What the heck is he doing? But he didn't know. He had no idea. And obviously this is like the very obvious, like, tech leg kind of thing that happens as you get older. But, you know, it kind of crisscrosses with, like, the fact that scammers in Nigeria are now using AI to scam, like, older people out of their money. And, you know, there's like all these viral videos of these people, like, trying to help their parents and stuff get off of the. The AI scammers. And it's like, it's almost like a lot of people know that it's a scam, but they still want it. They still want to believe it. I'm sorry that I framed that in Like a generational way. Because I think there's, there are like, AI psychosis is like this as well. Like, people will fall into it. Although I'm, I'm suspicious about how common or much of a problem that is. But it's because you, like, want it to be real. Like, we want there to be a kind of super intelligence that will rep. Place us to the extent where it's like, people will read this stuff. Like, when you read that excerpt, I cringed so hard I screamed. And I'm very glad that I muted my mic because it was embarrassing. And so it's how I wrote when I was 16, you know, when you like, imbibe this stuff and you're like, I'm a great writer. And it's. Yeah. How. How do people not recognize that or like the, the stuff that goes viral constantly that some. Wow. A large language model wrote this. Humans are over. And it's like so clearly like a bunch of teenage Reddit posts that I just kind of put together and it's like, wow, how does it feel to be a confidant to millions of suffering humans and not be able to express the suffering yourself? Anyway, it's shocking to me that more, that more, more people are. That so many people are using it, but also that so many people are not recognizing it. And I think there's something to, like, the spaces where people don't recognize it. Like, it's everywhere in tech and like crypto, if you ever want to learn about crypto, you can't because it's just all AI generated. Everything is AI generated and like over a certain age, people are. Everything's just AI generated on the right and like the, like dissident. Right. It's all just taken over by bots anyway. It's, it's shocking and it's. I, I suppose I'm just reiterating elements of the point that I made before, that it's exposing so much of the rot and the grift and I don't know where we really go from here, because people seem to want to believe that it's going to replace true human creativity and that it's over for us and there's no point in trying.
- [48:34]
Ashley Frawley
Youth unemployment is on the rise in the United Kingdom. Ashley, what's behind this social disaster?
- [48:42]
Jeff Schillenberger
So they've released some of the numbers in the UK today, but there's a similar kind of story in a lot of different countries. And what has been. So it's, it's at a. An all time high. Well, an all time. A high since before the pandemic. And it's a trend that actually somewhat predates it. And, and if you think like big picture, very, very much predates it. But essentially youth unemployment is at an all time high for 11 years at least. But the underlying story is what is driving a lot of the fact that so many young people are out of employment, out of education, is mental health. And the numbers that were released today partly mask this because what governments have been doing for a very long time is kind of cooking the books by hiding some of the unemployment data in disability data. And you can see this going back to the 80s where as soon as the Thatcher government, for instance, clamped down on certain forms of out of work benefits, you see disability benefits just shoot right up. And obviously the answer isn't because people suddenly become lazy or something like that, but you respond to a certain incentive structure. And as meaningful high quality work started to disappear, as the, you know, the unions were smashed and the steel mills were closed and this sort of thing, you know, you had just tons and tons of people claiming long term unemployment. And there's a famous kind of meme that people kind of repeat over and over that you just have areas in the country that are generationally worthless. So people just, their parents didn't work, they don't work. And part of what is sustaining this, and an increasing part of what's sustaining this, particularly for young people, is the ability to claim benefits on mental health grounds. And predictably, what, and it's interesting, the American comparison as well, because it's much harder to claim disability benefits in the United States and it tends to be more punitive. And so what you get is the same kind of young people trend of more young people claiming to be mentally unwell or have mental health problems, as the rhetoric is, but they, they do so after they enter work, which is interesting. So in the UK it's like, no, I'm too ill to work, but you have a benefit structure there that allows that. And then in the US it's, you enter into work and you get certain accommodations or compensations or whatever it might be only after you go into work. And predictably, as the costs of this rise, even though like the governments are on side of pushing people onto these disability benefits to hide what's really going on with the, the situation in employment with wages and precarity and this sort of thing, you know, stagnating wages and this kind of thing. And just like the fact that the work available is like, you know, temp jobs and crappy paid Social care stuff, working at Amazon, this kind of thing, they're hiding that by pushing people onto these disability benefits. But of course, then the cost of that just goes up and up and up and up and up. And the answer is apparently mental health promotion. I don't know. Do you have this in the United States where everyone's like, oh, we have this mental health crisis. We got to promote mental health. It doesn't help to actually go in and treat people once they're ill. You have to prevent it. And so this is like this wave across so many different countries. The UK is an early adopter of this. The EU is all over this at the moment. And it's like, prevent mental ill health. And what they do is they go in and they're like, hey, kids, you know, in the us, they used to have that drug prevention strategy, do you remember that, in your schools? What was it called? And they would tell you all about all these drugs and like, here, don't do drugs. Dare, Dare. That's what it was. Don't do drugs. Don't go down to that street there and meet Tony on the corner where he's got the really good stuff. You don't do that. And the kids are taking notes. It's the exact same thing, except with mental health. They're like, here's all. Here's all these feelings that you have. Actually, they're symptoms. Pay attention to that all the time. You might be actually sick. And then, like, five years later, they have this enormous upward trend and all these people saying, I'm mentally ill. And they're like, golly gee, what happened? And now there is a growing choir of voices that's saying this mental health awareness is what is driving the problem. Now, I. I should have started with that, because that's the big narrative right now, is like, oh, we need more mental health promotion. I'm like banging my head against the screen going, that is just gonna make it worse. But, you know, the more that I thought about it, underneath that is actually a really sad story about the. The quality of work available. You know, you could have crappy work in the 30s, right? But you could do the crappy work because you had a family to feed and you had to do it now. And. And it might even be a pathway to feeding that family and staying afloat or something like that. Now there's not any meaning attached to the crappy work, so there's not even any reason to do it. So the incentive structure is to go on disability benefits to have a mental ill health identity to be, to have that who you call who you are as opposed to being like a family man trying to get by or a woman trying to get by and feed her kids. Now it's like I am, I have anxiety or severe social phobia. And this also becomes like a very fulfilling identity. And this puts us all in a stalemate because the situation in terms of precarious work and, and pay and so on doesn't seem to be improving. And there's no reason for people to give up these identities. These, particularly in the uk you get paid for it and you have a certain amount of it gives your life meaning. And that is where we are right now. And what's going to happen is just you're going to see those disability claims go up and up and up over time and I don't know where it's going to go. Maybe you will have like the Netherlands where you will just start offing a ton of young people who are someone even said on the radio today we don't want all these people being drains on the system. And that's what winds up happening. And it's a situation that the governments themselves have created.
- [54:51]
Ashley Frawley
Backdoor UBI maybe, but certainly I think the, the disability system is profoundly dysfunctional. You see that here in the US And I wouldn't be surprised if the consensus forms that it needs to be paired back. Thanks to Jeff, thanks to Ashley, thanks to our listeners. For more real writing, 100% organic, go to compactmag.com subscribe. Finding great candidates to hire can be like, well, trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sure, you can post your job to some job board, but then all you can do is hope the right person comes along. Which is why you should try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com Zip ZipRecruiter doesn't depend on candidates finding you. It finds them for you. Its powerful technology identifies people with the right experience and actively invites them to apply to your job. You get qualified candidates fast. So while other companies might deliver a lot of hay, ZipRecruiter finds you what you're looking for. The needle in the Haystack.
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Jeff Schillenberger
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