Cultural Necrophilia and AI

Cultural Necrophilia is the act of digging up dead pieces of our culture, re-animating them as lifeless simulacra of what they once were, then selling them to either the poor nostalgic bastards who gave the originals meaning in the first place, or to those who only ever experienced them as a re-packaged commodity. It is the act of simply redoing what has already been done without adding any value to it. Or, more graphically, the equivalent of digging up a corpse, dressing it up in a pretty new dress, then charging people to take it out for the night. It’s technically a date, but there’s definitely something missing.

VW engaging in some top-notch cultural necrophilia

Cultural necrophilia is definitely not a new phenomenon but it is one that has become increasingly common and begun to dominate modern culture. Most movies are remakes, sequels, or adaptations. Most popular music has been stuck in a repeating loop for 20 years, with the same musicians staying bizarrely relevant for decades. Design trends just keep repeating the same tight loop of variations. In essence, we are getting sucked into a vortex of banal repetition and blandness. There are many reasons for this but for now it is sufficient to say that it is cheaper and easier to sell what has already been done before. Market forces take care of the rest.

Where it starts to get weird though is with the recent advent of LLM-based AI tools. In a very real sense, these have become our greatest cultural necrophiliacs. It is now far easier to dig up and do whatever you like with nearly any facet of our recent culture. Already, imagery and text is proliferating that appears quite good but usually has some eery familiarity, like when you meet a person that looks just like someone else but you can’t quite put your finger on who. Of course, there are many creatives doing brilliantly imaginative work with these tools but they are few and far between. The vast majority of people will just do whatever is easy and flood our information spaces with repetitive sameness, like the early era of stock photography but much cheaper and more pervasive.

The real risk here is that we continue this path and simply stop bringing in new life. We stop being creative because it is so much easier to seem creative while just generating an image of dogs playing poker in the style of Van Gogh. The slipperiest part is that these new cultural artifacts make us feel like we’re being creative so we don’t realize how much our range of expression is narrowing. We get caught up in our pretty new toys and stop doing the harder work of being truly creative. And in this self-limiting, we foreclose on our range of possible futures and remain trapped in an affair with a long-dead, lifeless culture.

Dogs playing poker in the style of Van Gogh

What, then, might any one of us do about this? Do we simply accept it as inevitable that we will continue to rush toward this bland, regurgitated local maximum? I say no. I say each one of us should fight this trend vigorously. We should resist our descent into the recycled vanilla sludge of past culture. Be bold, irreverent, chaotic, and ungovernable. Do not be the predictable next token. Find and express the weirdness within, the truth you carry that makes you different, become an evolution of the culture rather than a rehash. And heed the words of the great American poets Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia:

There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go, no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone