The Directions Don't Matter If You Don't Have A Compass

About fifteen years ago, when my cousin Andre was still alive, we were sitting in an East Village restaurant when Ryan Gosling walked in, disguised in sunglasses and a baseball hat, and sat down at a table next to three high school girls, who didn’t recognize the famous actor.

“Andre,” I whispered, “how long do you think before they figure out it’s him?”

But Andre started talking loudly, in his provocative Parisian way: “Who is zis Ryan Gooselink? No one. I have been in ze presence of Marlon Brando. Brando could make you tremble from a block away. Fame used to make you feel something!”

Ryan Gosling overheard and started cracking up. The girls figured it out and started screaming. Andre and I made a quick exit.

Andre had his own brushes with fame, which left him unimpressed by what the media tells us to pay attention to. He cared about what he could actually feel. And more and more, he saw, our society is losing track of what we actually feel.

I wonder what Andre would have thought about the AI-generated country song I heard the other day. It was well done: the lyrics were clever, the arrangement was solid, and it had a million plays on Spotify. But it left me feeling nothing.

As I write this, I catch myself trying to craft an argument for why so much of modern culture lacks the charisma Andre was nostalgic for. But it occurs to me that trying to objectively debate AI or the digital world misses the point.

The point is actually a very subjective one: no matter what good or bad our machines do, we will continue to be human — limited by our bodies, nervous systems, and hearts, fragile, dependent on these instruments to know what's important in the first place.

The directions don’t matter if you don’t have a compass. No matter how much information passes through our brains, it will always be what we can feel in our bodies that makes any of it "for us." Without that felt sensitivity, it’s all for someone — or something — else: an algorithm, a system, a depthless pool in which we no longer see our reflection.