Monthly Muse: 5/2025
Recapitulation, contemplation, provocation
Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.
Here’s the May 2025 Monthly Muse.
Recapitulation: Published since last month’s Monthly Muse
Contemplation
In my essay this month, “The Humanity of the Typo,” I reflect on the incursions of artificial intelligence into spaces that, even a year ago, seemed (mostly) sheltered from technologies like ChatGPT. Small business reviews are hardly the only example. Since I published this piece a week ago, I found out about people using ChatGPT for meal planning and language translation. Just as cookbooks gave way to last-minute Googling of recipes and physical dictionaries succumbed to the act of pasting text into Google Translate, it appears that ChatGPT is rapidly directing all aspects of life from the purely digital to the artificial.
This reminded me of an essay by
, now over two years old, that is one of his best. In “The Neon God,” written only months after the first launch of ChatGPT, Kingsnorth predicts the all-encompassing penetration of AI into our daily lives. Bringing the question back to personal agency, he presents two archetypes for those who wish to resist an increasingly AI-fueled technocracy: the “cooked ascetic” and the “raw ascetic.”For the cooked ascetic, Kingsnorth writes that
We choose the limits of our engagement and then stick to them. Those limits might involve, for example, a proscription on the time spent engaging with screens, or a rule about the type of technology that will be used. Personally, for example, I have drawn my lines at smartphones, “health passports,” scanning a QR code or using a state-run digital currency. Oh, and implanting a chip in my brain. The lines have to be updated all the time. I have never engaged with an AI, for example, and I never will if I can help it: but the question now is whether I will even know it’s happening. And what new tech lies around the corner that I will soon have to decide about?
On the other hand,
Bombing the data centres: this is the mindset of the raw tech-ascetic. The world of the raw ascetic is one in which you take a hammer to your smartphone, sell your laptop, turn off the Internet forever and find others who think like you. Perhaps you have already found them, through your years online in the cooked world. You band together with them, you build an analogue, real-world community and you never swipe another screen. You bring your children up to understand that the blue light is as dangerous as cocaine, and as delicious. You see the Amish as your lodestones. You make real things with your hands, you pursue nature and truth and beauty. You have all the best jokes, because you have had to fight to tell them, and you know what the real world tastes like.
Two years down the road and several GPT models later, the stakes of Kingnorth’s call to cooked and raw asceticism feel even higher. And his observation that it may become increasingly difficult to engage with the digital world at all without also engaging with AI resonates even more deeply.
For those of us who practice some form of cooked asceticism, taking the time to notice and appreciate the “traces of the imperfect and unfinished business of human thought,” as I suggest in “The Humanity of the Typo,” may be an important practice to maintain our resolve in the face of the escalating AI onslaught.
Provocation
“The raw ascetic understands that he or she is fighting a spiritual war, and never makes the rookie mistake of treating technology as ‘neutral.’ The front line in this war is moving very fast, and much—perhaps everything—is at stake. Raw techno-askesis envisages a world in which creating non-digital spaces is necessary for survival and human sanity. If things go as fast as they might, it could be that many of us currently cooked barbarians will end up with a binary choice: go raw, or be absorbed into the technium wholesale.”
—Paul Kingsnorth, “The Neon God”