Mothers and Daughters, Will You Save Us from AI?
Notes On Imagining The Future #22 by Fabrice Guerrier
Dear Moun fou and fellow imaginitists,
This is going to sound like a rant and perhaps a stream of consciousness again but I promise I’ll have a good story to tell in the next newsletter. But first, I must begin and say that the Male archetype for our world right now, today, is so deeply broken. I hate to say this but it seems that the ‘male gender’ is central to our collective chaos, so much suffering to the planet in terms of this war-like energy, a lack of care and drought to emotional intelligence. I think this a problem that many don’t talk about.
When I co-taught at Esalen last year a futures workshop, one of the participants gave me a book that she had just finished reading called “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It by Richard V. Reeves” it initiates that there’s a crisis to the modern male.
It shows evidence that boys and men are struggling in education, work and even family life. Without going too much on it, one of the aspects it talks about is the decline of fathers involvement and positive male role models, which has had an horrible impact on boys’ development and for the rest of our collective society in the west.
It posits some compelling idea that Masculinity isn’t toxic it’s just underdeveloped and arguing that positive masculine identity is tragically undernourished in today’s culture. And it’s true. I don’t see that positive masculine identity. The book pushes for pro-male policies without being anti-female, which I recognized the same dynamics and tensions in implementation with the Black Lives Matter movement that pushed for change yet because this it didn’t mean it was anti-white but others saw otherwise.
As a futurist, I think without responding to the decay in the Male Archetype in the 21st century where the classical notion of ‘lack of emotions’, ‘rigidity in thinking’ and very staunched unchanging identifies that one must fit into our society, we will have a much harder time welcoming this new episteme that’s trying to be born, this need for ‘Moun Fou’ I talked about in my last newsletter. Even so, I see women who live in this patriarchal world of decay, absorbing and upholding certain values from that Male Archetype as a mean to breath economically and advance in society.
If only we could balance this wretched imagination and myths of singular male superheroes, towards communities and the cosmic feminine. Yet this male archetype pushes a proactiveness that cannibalizes even our own essence, as seen in the deafening competition based hustle and burn out culture. And us beginning and needing to take much more seriously the thought provoking research that has define so much for me the manifestation of this crisis of imagination that the surgeon general during the Biden Administration, Vivek released “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community.” If you haven’t read it, please do and I am pretty sure i’ve referenced it previously in another newsletter. It’s affecting America and the entire soul of the western world.
I often ask myself, how can I live in the most ‘developed’ era of humanity where many people have been lifted out of poverty over the last few decades, new innovations in tech, health and increased life expectancy but I am also living in the most loneliest era of humanity? Something doesn’t add up.
I believe if we don’t address these core fundamental ‘creative and soul-based’ challenges to the very design of humanity we will be swept over and over in these endless cycles. We will continue to blame each other and wonder and forget where this even started. I say that a lonely society, a society lacking meaningful human connection is a society more prone to fascism and fanatical, destructive ways of being, that feels like a drug, sorta like a ‘fatherless’ young man feeling truly alive because the gang he is joining is recognizing his dignity for the very first time in his life, yet he has been unable to engage a profound radical agency and connecting to a deeper sense of his emotional self that was never developed or valued in a capitalist world in the first place.
Well by now, you’re asking, how to we fix this, are we all doomed? how do we address this Fabrice? Obviously I am going say “Imagination will save humanity.” But first, I don’t think this is something that can be fix, honestly. I think we need to decenter humanity in our attempt to address and solve things. Its the externalization of the problem i see as the issue. It’s truly a paradox. Because what I am getting at is something much more primordial, something beyond our humanity that I hinted at in the previous newsletter.
Our attempt to solve things is the very thing what creates and perpetuates the problem in the first place. Yet if this is so, I want to push this even further then with this new concept, I want to claim at a ‘universal subjective primacy' to the creative individual, and give immense weight to ‘the role of the inner lives and our psychology of the future’ like a anchor the size of mount Everest it stands to transforming the world, to access the higher realms and relating to everything else in existence including nature and other humans. It starts really starts with our individual creative posture.
Yes, i am going to the cliche direction of what Ghandi has famously said “Be the change you want to see in the world.” I think this is a challenge of the inner life and one towards the cultivation of the human soul, its fiery flames must rise in our inner skies and we must meet her fiery rays with the greatest courage and then embody it its intuitive voice and calling.
I’ll give you this, one reading I think begins to capture the profound essence and complexity of how one can reach and very slowly begin the journey of shifting, evolving, transmutating, transmogrify the old dying male archetype in all of us is found in a speech that poet Audrey Lorde gave all the way back in 1978! called ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power” I recommend reading this as base to get started and even listening to it thereafter. I think here she is speaking to the Male Archetype as much as women in society to painting I believe a unique futural vision so profound to reaching a more balance, creative and nuanced human living.
Ok, now i’ve primed you with what I am thinking. Now I want to move to AI and technological growth in society that represents so much symbolically where our species is going and how our futures are being shaped blindly. I want to say most of the tech industry are led by men and the very technology we are creating are upholding this semiotically Male archetype that is at the same time in decay. This is troubling for me and should be for you too.
We have a loneliness crisis and now new technologies beyond social media are entering our lives at great immensity and we haven’t had the time to slow down, stop, reflect and see how it’s impacting us nor understand where we are headed or want to be headed! Our human connections is increasingly fragmented so we cannot collectively decide properly anymore it seems.
What I am getting at is that I truly think generational wisdom and feminine values found in mothers and daughters could guide our tech future or the futures we aim to imagine and how we imagine them. They have a central role to place.
It certainly will help us heal the nuclear bombs society has erupted inside our collective psyche and it’s toxic ooze, a healing from this trauma in ways we don’t have the language for today. I love what Nietzche says here “One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.” he speaks on the imagination, the creative and the inner life. And we must repair the separation and descent from this cosmic creative force that most of society has vapidly discarded inside the infinite vastness of themselves.
I saw this generational wisdom, creative and feminine values deeply reflected in the mission and vision of an organization I working with at the moment called the Rithm Project whose mission is “To empower young people to rebuild & evolve human connection in the age of AI.”
I travelled to Denver, Colorado two weeks ago to work with a design team for their upcoming Human Connection + AI Summit on May 13-15. They’re doing really incredible work around the future of AI, education and addressing the crisis of loneliness in young people.
I was brought in to do worldbuilding that supported the design of one of their immersive rooms that will exist during the conference. The room will explore human relationship and AI in the year 2040. Can’t wait to tell you more about it. It was an amazing experience to say the least. We’re working with this incredible immersive theatre company based in New York called Oddknock, to create immersive rooms of experiential futures that allow the participants to engage in a deeply personal and transformative experience on the implication of a possible futures around AI.
We aimed at imagining the complexities to building futures where AI can help us see more, understand more morally and connect to one another as humans. A difficult task indeed but not impossible.
I say all this because as we move more and more towards a state of uncertainty, the old tools are not working to meet the demands of today and tomorrow’s diverse futures.
We need to imagine new worlds that allows us to step into new evolved ways of being.
I personally believe worldbuilding as a craft, as a tool, as an evolving art form, as a collaborative framework helps see more and can be extremely catalytic in transforming the perceptions, values and ideas one might hold internally in that moment in very emergent ways (ok I am preaching now haha). It’s true, its deeply creative and the visionary flows one experiences is expansive and now i’ve deviated from my point.
Ok, ultimately to end this piece on the importance of generational wisdom, feminine values and the erotic vision Audrey Lorde speaks of - I want to first say AI is built on deeply masculine ways with it already and paradoxically being so ‘generative’, it’s built on optimization and deep acceleration, and we too are accelerating because of it and we all know that there is a certain wisdom that comes from presence and slowing down and feeling everything, I often see it in mothers and the cosmic feminine. I see this too in a planted seed slowly emerging its green leaves and tiny roots in the Black dirt. There’s no rush. Nature gives birth like mothers, its creative and emergent. We all must be birthers of this impossible future that has been shrouded in hopelessness, reinventing ourselves outside of categories with care, we must. These values can help us to shift away from control and competition to more connection and collaboration, something that’s clearly becoming more and more difficult for young people and adults to do today especially for males, to make new friends. It could help us embrace more creative and emotionally non-linear thinking that is deeply deeply intuitive, a form of thinking that is gut-base I spoke previously in the last newsletter, a way of being that we all didn’t know we were starving for, to rebalance us in meaningful ways, to allow the soul spirit of collective humanity to rebuild it’s dying atrophying communities and our precious precious human connections.
I ask again, darlingly, to all mothers and daughters - holders of the intergenerational threads of wisdom - I ask you, selfishly: will you save us from AI?
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