Freedom

At the leading edge of civilisation.

©Apra Gotla 2025.

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I did not plan on writing this. But forgive me, my overwhelmed whanau, I must convey a strange dynamic that is barging into my consciousness as the year comes to a close.

I’m witnessing an intensifying institutional energy swirling around individuals, blowing their horns and shooting countless arrows, in a renewed vigour to capture and captivate what I also see as a rise in individual agency. And yet every one of these institutional attempts is a misfire. Institutions don’t quite know what they’re aiming for, and assume that somewhere in their line of attack, a target is hiding; that as long as they keep firing, an outline of a goal yet to be identified will form.

One such misfire I recently experienced was from Microsoft, who keep prompting me to ‘Go premium’, get all their updated features, which I keep opting out of. But still, they insist that I’m missing out on their AI-powered capability, which will not only improve my writing but also magically extract from my head what I don’t yet know I want to write.

I’m not the only one who keeps saying ‘No thanks.’ In May this year, Microsoft declared that society is entering the era of AI agents. Only one snag: enterprise customers aren’t buying the new, improved enterprise upgrades, so Microsoft had to halve its sales targets. Their CEO of AI is flummoxed that no one wants AI integrated into every aspect of their lives¹.

A mistake tech bros and gals make is thinking that folk like me willingly opt in to a technologically flooded existence where we wake up to alarms on our phones and a million notifications, get in our cars and drive 2 hours each way to our glass and concrete prisons, only to have a day full of online meetings. Newsflash: many of us in the working class, even if we’re unaware of it, are largely unwilling participants in this technological experiment. To ask us to fork out rent money for something we don’t need and know will be forced down our throats anyway is like asking us to attend an unpaid, mandatory team-building retreat on the weekend and insist that we have fun. We will resist, even if our resistance is futile.

Of course, there are exceptions. And herein lies the rub - the tension between resistance and acceptance.

Many use generative AI to brainstorm, draft, and produce virtually everything. All good if used honestly. But when regurgitation passes for creation, it grinds the gears of a fundamental humanity that stands in stark contrast to the capitalist’s Frankenstein ideal, the latter interested only in being productive and impressive, but not authentic. Even if we can no longer tell the difference, when given an honest choice, most of us would rather pick up a book that took years to create than one churned out by a stochastic model from prompts.

I hold a clichéd, increasingly outdated view, I suppose. But it’s cliché for a reason. Those who use AI regularly to mould their ‘creative’ process have never likely experienced the vividness of the creative act, only the satisfaction of completion. And so they chase after the outcome, ignoring the process. It’s akin to me using boxed brownie mix and calling myself a pâtissier. Of course, I’ve never found anyone unwilling to consume my boxed brownies; they’ve got all the ingredients that make a brownie delicious, and human beings have an insatiable capacity for calorific junk. And if that’s what one wants to create, palatable slop for mass production, more power to them - and I mean this sincerely. After all, I’m as hypocritical as the next person, writing this on a computer while decrying the invasion of technology into human spheres.

But hear me on this:

The gravity of the last five years should not escape us. We are collectively riding a wave of technological singularity, amidst a backdrop of global unrest and anxiety. We are the witnesses at the leading edge of humanity’s longing, which has reached a limit beyond which lies an entirely unknown precipice; that is why we must trust our emotions and record our perspectives in this momentous time through honest-to-goodness art. I want to think that our Palaeolithic ancestors wasted none of their short lives wondering if their rock art was ‘good’; they simply dipped their hands in ochre and stamped their prints on cave walls with a sense within themselves that someday, long after they were gone, someone would find their handprints as evidence of their humanity.

Some of us today desire to do the same; leave evidence of our rough-edged humanity, unprocessed as much as possible, in whatever way speaks to our souls. Not because we expect others to like what we put out. It’s because we seek an intimate understanding of the creative process, and hence Creation itself. We are learning to collaborate with a living, immortal Self, not an electronic hallucination of stolen data, disconnected from the original longing of the individuated human sparks that birthed that information.

Perhaps the only true work that exists for each of us in this post-reality is to uncover our own unique resonance amid the cacophonic distractions of modern institutions. Do this, so that you may piece together the way back to yourself, and in doing so find true freedom - for yourself and everyone else who watches you uncover your human reason for being.

1. https://au.pcmag.com/ai/114305/microsoft-exec-asks-why-arent-more-people-impressed-with-ai