Technologically Skwair ▢ blog
|
Print by Marian Hardey. We Are All Squares. March 2020.
Print, Dead Flat Tractor, Mariann Hardey, 2026.
There is a specific taste in the mouth these days. Have you felt it? I read a thread over the weekend that described the psychological after-effects of working deeply with AI not as fatigue, but as a "hangover of the uncanny." The author described it as feeling "like I ate plastic." He struggled to name the sensation. It wasn't just that the machine was wrong; it was a "new kind of wrong." It was a "betrayal of the language," where things are mostly understood, but "pervasively slightly misunderstood in alien ways." He compared it to using a tool that becomes an extension of your body, like a car or a camera, but suddenly, that extension glitches. It feels, he wrote, "like your mecha suit had a mini stroke." Reading this, I was reminded of the Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. In her masterpiece, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, the protagonist, Janina Duszejko, lives on a remote, snowy plateau where the lines between the human and the non-human are dangerously porous. She speaks, but she is constantly "pervasively slightly misunderstood" by the police, by the church, by the men in power who view her logic as madness. Tokarczuk often speaks of the 'Tender Narrator', a consciousness that sees the profound, fragile web connecting all things. She calls this 'Ognosia.' AI mimics this. It maps the connections between billions of words; it simulates a universal understanding. But this is Ognosia without the tenderness. It is a network of correlation, not connection. It is the uncanny difference between a map of the stars and the night sky itself. Janina Duszejko uses astrology to make sense of a chaotic world and is called mad. The modern technologist uses a black-box algorithm to do the same and is called a visionary, until the day the stars start rearranging themselves in 'alien ways,' and suddenly, he realises his telescope is broken. And this is where I find myself pausing. Because the unease these tech thinkers are reporting is fascinating. It is fascinating because, for so many of us, that feeling isn't a hangover. It is our baseline reality. We live like this every single damn day. The Plastic Taste of Exclusion The discomfort described in that thread is rooted in a betrayal of expectation. The author expects the language to work. He expects the "mecha suit" to respond to his intent with seamless fluidity. When it fails, when it mirrors back a distorted, alien version of his thought, it feels like a violation. But consider this: Who usually gets to feel fully understood by the machine of society? For the neurotypical, male, native-English speaker, the world is a suit that fits perfectly. The doors open when you approach. The syntax of the boardroom matches the syntax of your brain. The operating system of culture executes your commands without throwing an error code. So, when the AI suddenly introduces friction, when it forces you to stare into a gap of "unnatural failures of communication," it feels like a slow, unreliable narrative. It feels like eating plastic. But for the rest of us, who are variations of the neurodivergent, the women in male-dominated fields, the immigrants, the "Janina Duszejkos" of the world, we have been eating plastic for years. In Tokarczuk’s novel, Janina is plagued by her 'Ailments', the physical manifestations of the world's cruelty that torment her body and trap her in pain. She views them not as sickness, but as insight. Perhaps this 'hangover' is the tech industry’s first true Ailment. That taste of plastic? That isn't just fatigue. It is somatic rejection. It is the biological creature inside the 'mecha suit' revolting against the synthetic. It is the body recognising before the brain does that the 'intelligence' it is speaking to has no pulse. The "Mecha Suit" Glitch is My Tuesday That feeling of saying something clearly, only to have it received and processed in a slightly distorted way? That is the daily experience of a woman explaining her technical expertise to a room that assumes she is the admin. Or married to the CEO, or COO. (Oh, that story is for another day.) That feeling of your mecha suit having a mini-stroke? That is the visceral experience of masking for a neurodivergent person. It is the exhausting, manual labor of translating your alien internal thoughts into the standardised language of the majority, knowing that something vital will be lost in the compression. Tokarczuk writes about characters who exist in the "borderlands," where the maps don't quite match the territory. The AI is currently turning the entire internet into a borderland. It is filling our screens with "thwarted fables." These are stories that look like stories but have no soul, logic that looks like logic but rings hollow. Let us not forget the title of Tokarczuk’s masterpiece: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. What is an LLM, if not a plow driven relentlessly over the bones of our digital past? It churns up our old emails, our forgotten blog posts, our art, and our arguments, grinding them into a fine, statistical mulch. When these engineers feel that "betrayal of language," perhaps they are simply tasting the soil. They are realising that you cannot build a living consciousness solely out of the bones of the dead. Eventually, the ghosts start to glitch. Welcome to the Margins I do not dismiss the discomfort of the "AI Hangover." I feel it too. That sense of "uncanny valley" exhaustion is real. But I find a grim, literary irony in seeing the architects of our digital world suddenly grappling with the sensation of interpretive violence. They are discovering what it feels like to speak into a system that does not actually know you. They are discovering what it feels like to be parsed by a logic that is indifferent to your humanity. To the Dans, Jays, Seths, Toms, and Teds of the world, feeling this betrayal of language is a new, unsettling nightmare. It is a psychological aftereffect. To the Janinas? To the Technologically Skwair? It’s just another snowy Tuesday on the plateau. We have been trying to tell you that the machinery was broken for a long time. We have been trying to tell you that you cannot drive your plow over the bones of the dead and expect to grow a living future. Perhaps now that you can taste the plastic in your own mouths, you will finally believe us. Links and References:
Comments are closed.
|