Those that didn’t make it

I want to talk a little bit about failure.

This is a photo of the wall next to my desk where I’m currently working on the 2026 edition of my ongoing series, Standing Still In A Storm. I’ve been doing this project for close to 15 years now, with each year the guidelines changing a little bit. The basics remain the same: painted freehand parallel lines in black gesso that are not allowed to touch but meant to get as close as possible to one another. The paper size, border measurements, and brush width vary year-to-year, but the general rules are always the same.

So far, this year I’ve finished 18 pieces—including these six failures. For one reason or another, each of these did not meet the standards I have for the work. On some the ink bled under the tape (an issue I did not discover until the work was already complete and otherwise satisfactory). On some the slightest twitch of my hand caused the black lines to meet at some point. On others the proportions weren’t right and by the time I got to the last line it ended up wider than the brush I’m using. Whatever the reason, these are the failures—one-third of the work I’ve done so far.

I feel like artists online only ever show their successes. The ones who post process videos only do so when the final work is suitable for publishing. Content creators and influencers crop frames and set up shots that don’t actually represent what they’re doing. The rule of advertising is that everything has to be positive all of the time, and the internet has become one big advertisement for life. It’s all success stories, and I wonder how many of them are outright lies.

The thing is, everybody fails. The process of taking inspiration to creation is an arduous one. Yet in a society that demands better results faster, standards lessen, quality drops, concepts fade, and the finished product is cheapened. It’s no wonder those obsessed with capital love AI—it removes all the parts that take time from creativity, but in doing so it also removes everything that makes a creation good.

Failure is important to process. It’s a learning experience, much more so than achievement. By having this entire sect of culture that only shows finished products, it becomes akin to something between a gallery and a mall. The human values have been lost, and it’s not because people don’t fail, but because in the public eye, they’re not allowed to.

There’s an interesting parallel between the rise of guys like Elon Musk, the Trump presidency, and the simultaneous adoption of and enthusiasm behind AI—it’s the dawn of a new era of the con.

Whether it was Lee or Bernays who created modern day public relations doesn’t matter so much as the effect they’ve had on the world because of it. Advertising is one thing, but the idea of PR and manipulating social dialogues around everything—as opposed to just products or investments—has brought us all to this era of un-reality in the west.

Taking a look at Musk, for all who laud him, he has not actually built anything. He doesn’t know anything about cars or rockets, he purchased the assets that have built his wealth (or built them on government subsidies while being ‘anti-socialism’). He’s no inventor, shows no capacity for innovation or vision for the future. He’s just a shrewd capitalist (and a pretty big fucking idiot). Trump may have made some real estate dealings in the past but is notorious for fucking over workers (as well as lying about, well, more than I can link to). These are men who keep their heads above water because of how American culture has adopted public relations on the thoroughfare of public debate.

Yet these men are lauded by many for their ‘leadership.’ Wealth supersedes any questions in relation to morality, justice, equality, or even legality. It’s repugnant.

Drawing Lines

Somewhere along the line, the idea of what you make of yourself became less important than how what you make of yourself represents the capitalist ideal. Social intangibles like respect and dignity and honor have long evaporated from the air we now collectively breathe, and everything is about money and power. Being a shitty person has a proportional relationship to how much money you have at your disposal to ride out any negative news cycle that might carry your name with it. Do we really think Mark Zuckerberg will be affected by the fact his superyacht didn’t help a boat in need?

And so a new age of deceit is upon us. It’s no wonder that the people largely associated with these ideas also adopt AI so completely—to them, cutting corners for financial reasons is more important than any natural, human process. Art does not matter to these people—creation is an inconvenient step in the process of financial viability. Existence, and its potential, are secondary concerns to capital gains.

The MBA idea that everything is business has overwhelmed our relationship with inspiration. Labor is no longer about meaning something, it’s about cost-effectiveness. These people have adopted the idea that financial equations are more important than human endeavors, and so aesthetic (or any constructed) results that suit any need of production are more important than creative processes.

Losing It

This is a cancer upon humanity. I’m not saying that every use of AI is bad, or that every statement to the media is a lie, or that every businessman is a crook. But we have entered an era where the potential truth of the internet has been consumed by the dishonest nature of advertising—and along with it, those who profit are becoming shells of human beings who are only icons of wealth, shedding all other traits in regards to empathy, kindness, dignity, respect, or honor. They are the scum of the earth infecting growing swaths of the population with this grotesque self-centered outlook that defeats the purpose of our collective existence.

Capitalism is beyond an economic crime, it is the death knell of what makes people a part of the natural world. With the technological advancements we’re developing now, if it remains as influential as it has been over the past couple centuries, we are certainly doomed to lose a majority of our civilization to completely inhuman ways of being.

The new Polaroid anti-AI, pro-real-life-interactions ad campaign is pretty great. While advertising in general is a menace of a media system, any dialogue we’re having in public about AI—or digital addictions in general—is important to keep front-and-center, as we seem too eager to stray from the idea of our basic humanity being at stake. (It is interesting how some responses to the campaign discuss the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of data centers and how any corporate dialogue against AI is hypocritical, which is understandable but I feel on the wrong side of the subject.)

The AI debate as a whole kind of annoys me, but I do find value in dialogues centered around our collective humanity and what that means, because I think it should be the central focus of all this. The potential impact of AI (or advanced LLMs, whatever you want to call them) could touch on just about every aspect of modern civilization—but there’s no way I’m gonna trust those who could profit from this saying it’ll all be, ‘for the better.’

On the industrial side, it’s not that automation is usually a bad thing in regards to pushing civilization forward, but when it comes to economics, it can create turmoil if the system society exists within doesn’t look out for its people. If computers run the show and we still live under a capitalist system, how do the economics work out as jobs could disappear from media to healthcare to shipping? Silicon Valley openly jokes about a permanent underclass, but that’s a very real possibility if the current economic model remains as all resources are funneled into technological development as opposed to human services.

Creatively speaking the whole thing is a fucking joke. The outright theft of the collective cultural history of humanity in order to create heartless visuals and sounds is criminal—both in the law of the land and the law of nature. Anthropic destroying rare books because it’s the easiest way to scan them to train AI models is so on-the-nose evil it wouldn’t make the script of a blockbuster movie. The things that make us human—the tangled relationships between ideas, labor, production, and objects—are being completely disregarded for this idea of creating a future that embraces a new era of subjugation and control instead of growing into a state of egalitarianism.

I think that’s the most enraging part of all of this. Regardless of what part of the AI debate is being scrutinized, the human benefits are largely abstracted and obfuscated—there are quips about the end of money or a complete reformation on how we work, but no dialogue about how those processes might actually work to benefit people. No one can convince me that those who are fully invested in AI as the future aren’t some of the most evil people to have ever lived, looking out only for their own stake in a hyper-violent, automated future and willing to dispose of not only everything we’ve collectively created since the dawn of time but also a majority of the lives on earth for the sake of a few dollars.