Gaia in the Anthropocene
The Scroll
My morning ritual has become three pages in cursive, to steady my brain before the world gets shows up. This Monday I tapped Instagram first, and the slush got in.
The feed served me a stream of claims I hadn't verified: Trump buying gas from Putin, a Nobel Peace Prize he didn't get (again!), a Ukrainian strike on a Russian data center rumored to house a bot farm. I pictured its accounts, @patriot0034 or @trumpwon4547_0831, run by someone living their best life in the Philippines ;-). That last one caught my hope and my attention.
If attention is my morning's currency, I spent it like a zombified slots player, pulling the lever of rage bait over and over, waiting for a payout that never comes.
Being Played
When I built Being Played at the World Chess Hall of Fame, I was designing a room about attention or lack therof. I put the fashion at the center, sparkling and made from deadstock, so we would gather around it like magpies. Around the perimeter of that same room, the walls were darkly lit in red. You noticed them last.
I carried a delusional prayer into that show: that we might come together the way we briefly did after 9/11. Then COVID closed the exhibition early, and for a moment we did come together, apart, through our screens. And then, eventually, conspiracies, misinformation, our leadership and fear tore us apart once more.
"...Nf4," imaginary spacesuits I imagined an AI had designed for humans to escape Earth. In 2019, it was science fiction. Photo: Alise O'BrienThe Lungs of the Earth
The one thing I hoped could finally unite us was the planet itself. Even as kids, we were screaming about the damage to it. I grew up with a rap about the tropical rainforest and all of its beauty, and I couldn't understand how anyone would want to destroy a place that holy. The lungs of the earth. Going back further, before I was born, Joni Mitchell was singing a similar warning in "Big Yellow Taxi," and surely others did before her.
Rain Forest Rap
Then, on September 2, 2019, I sat down to write the essay for Being Played. Parts of the Brazilian rainforest had been burning for four weeks. Many of those fires were set to clear land for cattle and farming, and people blamed President Jair Bolsonaro for pushing deforestation and turning a blind eye to the loggers, ranchers and miners lighting them. Bolsonaro called it fake news. The place from that childhood song, the lungs of the earth, was on fire while I wrote.
Years later, Bolsonaro was convicted and sentenced to 27 years, not for the forest, but for plotting a coup. Accountability arrived by a strange route, but it arrived. Maybe that's a little foreshadowing: even the most powerful players on the board can eventually be caught.
Has anything changed? Or has it only gotten worse? This fall, landslides and floods have torn through Nepal, Pacific hurricanes have sent storms and deadly surf to California, and wildfires keep burning across North America. Maybe we were being played even still.
The Egregore
The crux of Being Played was a superpower, something bigger than us, and I left it for the viewer to name. A supercomputer? God? Time? The planet turning on its axis toward yet another climate evolution?
While making the work, I learned about the egregore and secretly gave that name to the exhibition’s perimeter. An egregore is an old occult idea: an entity born from the collective attention of a group, which takes on a life of its own and starts shaping the people who feed it.
Image from Being Played at The World Chess Hall of Fame and Galleries. Photo: Attilio D'AgostinoI didn't fully understand what I had named until now, and maybe I still have more to discover. The Egregore is our attention, harvested. The bots, the rage bait, the data centers drinking our water all exist to capture where we look, and the machines have done exactly what they were built to do. Divide and conquer.
While we stare at the sparkle, the grab happens in the red space along the walls, with those in the highest positions of power twisting the narrative. That is predatory delay, and it only works because our eyes are elsewhere.
In 2019, I wrote that the color red stood for or was inspired by HAL 9000, the machine. I didn't know how literal that would become. ChatGPT didn't even exist until November 2022.
The irony of using an AI agent to help me edit my thoughts and spelling (undiagnosed dyslexia anyone?) on this post is not lost on me.
Anthropocene Gaia
The hope of becoming climate secure, of holding corporations accountable, feels diminished today. But finally seeing the force for what it is feels like a rally call.
No one but those in power wants a data center. Is it our water they want? Our intelligence? Our attention? More power and influence? All of it? Why are we letting tech billionaires be the architects of what we see and feel? When is enough enough? I think about a righteous and inspiring line all the time from the band Austra in the song “Future Politics," Katie Stelmanis beautifully shrieks “I’m not a coward like them, I don’t need more money”.
The Egregore lives only on what we feed it. Gaia, the living planet, keeps breathing for us whether we look or not. Every morning I get to choose: three pages in cursive, or the lever. Where will I put my attention? Where will we put our attention?