Attack Ships on Fire Off the Shoulder of Orion

What a January. It has not been a gentle January sleeping through its days. A week after the new year (or the closing of the old year if you follow the lunisolar calendar) and Los Angeles was nearly razed. The City of Angels has been scarred by a firestorm brought in by the heavens at speeds of 80 miles per hour. The leveled areas have left California with a real problem that will not be rectified easily. The damage to the city is immense and the people whose lives have been upended really do need all the support we can provide them. It will take at least five years, if not longer, to rebuild.

Honestly, I didn’t know what to say or write when I try to grasp this. Watching the fires on TV engulf the Pacific Palisades and Altadena areas reminded me of the March 11, 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that wiped out multiple towns and cities in Japan. The surreal and uncanny nature of it all. How things were calm just the evening before. It started out like any other day. Then, within a matter of minutes or hours, everything was upended. Even the warnings, or previous smaller events, can’t predict the scale of these calamities.

Besides, the warnings from officials are often unheeded or dismissed. How many times do those warnings signify nothing? Sometimes there is nothing a warning can do though. You rarely can save a town under siege by the natural elements. Maybe there is always a level of human error involved, certainly there is blame and anger afterwards, but the force of the wind or the power of water can’t be underestimated. There is usually not much that can be done once the earth unleashes its fury.

It’s something that requires distance and time to be able to comprehend and write about in a way that doesn’t seem trite. But I can’t ignore this because my family lives in LA and it is a city that I often visit.

I’ve gone somewhat silent on this Substack. I needed to hit the pause button. Now, like a little bear waking up a tad early from hibernation, not yet quite ready to re-enter the winter landscape, I’m here poking my little nose around and clawing my way back to a writing cadence.

Winter is not my favorite season. Cold weather isn’t kind to my fingers and toes. I try to avoid living anywhere that snows, having experienced four years of winter in NYC and two in London and hating both during those grueling months. Love visiting those cities, do not love living in them for this reason alone.

I knew January was going to be unsettling for many, due to the political change in the USA. I don’t really enjoy all the political stuff on social media. How many times do I need to see a friend post on Facebook that staying silent is as bad as being a Nazi? It’s a dumb thing to say. It’s truly not comparable. How about we give others some grace. People are well within their rights to remain silent when it comes to writing or posting anything online. They may be silent because they feel helpless. They might not know what to think or how to express themselves.

Besides, anything written on social media can and will be used against you if and when it’s needed. Just remember that when attempting to coerce others to make political statements. Most of us need to keep our jobs.

Maybe social media is one of the worst things to have been created. I don’t know. I take that back. I think AI will prove itself to be the worst thing to have been created by human beings. Probably up there with the Atomic Bomb or Agent Orange. It’s already mucking up most of the social media platforms. Have you not noticed the crazy AI generated videos on Meta, with the ice cream that turns into puppies or the pudgy children walking down the fashion show runway? Extremely mind warping.

I’ve been feeling this pull against the algorithmic tidal waves that lap the shores of our brains. There is a shift happening. It’s a faint shift but it is there nevertheless. It may be the dawning of a new age, a slower era, a new romanticism. Bringing with it perhaps something that will feel vaguely familiar to any of us born prior to the 21st century.

Ted Gioia

recently warned that anything we’ve posted or published openly on the web will be used to train AI systems. DeepSeek, Microsoft and OpenAI will blatantly train off our language and literature. These companies believe it’s their right to use our writing. This will happen (or is probably already happening) without our permission and without payment. Are we not yet entirely fed up with the absolute arrogance of the tech industry?

What can we do? Not to diminish the real suffering of those who have lost everything in the fires, but there is something upon us. The coming era is like the tsunami or the firestorm. Warnings are there but are being unheeded. Someone somewhere is throwing their cigarette butt out of a car window into the wind. Likely, there isn’t much we as individuals can do about any of it. I know though that I want to read and consume writing and art created by humans, not machines.

Our souls are boundless. I know it when I read a book or a play written hundreds of years ago and I sense another person’s soul emoting across space and time. It makes me feel less insignificant when I recognize that particular beauty within humanity. That through language we can achieve immortality, previously something only the gods could.

While AI might become smart enough at some point to recreate great literature or to replicate actors images in films or our dead friends and loved ones voices and even their faces so we can pretend they are still alive, it can’t replace their soul. Without a soul, it’s not the truth. It’s just a hallucination.

Photo by Cedric Letsch on Unsplash