The art of criticising the ways of those younger than us is a well-documented phenomenon that is perhaps inherent to human nature.
I catch myself becoming exactly that kind of detested adult when I teach my class of ten-year-olds, watching their attempts to peek at my phone and refusing to read the large analogue clock at the front of the classroom. Increased reliance on technology such as tablets and laptops in schools has reduced the time and attention dedicated towards developing analogue skills like handwriting or telling the time from a clock face. It seems that the days of tote trays crammed with notebooks and packs of coloured pencils could be reaching their end as we move away from the physical and towards the digital.
With the newfound prominence of Generative AI in our daily lives, and especially the push for it to be used in children’s education in schools, resisting censorship and encouraging eco-consciousness have become difficult tasks. A new, quiet form of censorship emerges through students generating ChatGPT summaries rather than reading the original text. Students are given an easy way out from critically engaging with material that is often meant to be controversial and thought-provoking, leaving their final opinions and criticisms up to a chatbot. Who’s to say AI summaries are incapable of producing biased interpretations and creating strategic gaps in nuance, especially when its criterion chains are often incomprehensible and its sources are drawn from inaccessible language model databases? These gaps and biases trickle into the way people are educated and process the world around them.
Further, a significant proportion of the global population makes use of the same AI models that promise to revolutionise the world while simultaneously destroying it. Generative AI infrastructure consumes immense amounts of water and electricity and releases electronic waste containing hazardous substances like mercury and lead, often disproportionately harming already vulnerable everyday communities .
Poet Michael McClure commented in a 2014 interview that when he was growing up, he felt as though the natural world was so close to him, and that he belonged to a generation of children that were not trained computers. As one of those children who grew up trained on computers since 2014, I felt personally targeted by this comment. McClure was one of five poets who read at the San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955, the event which is thought to have formally established the Beat Generation in the public eye.
The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement that emerged largely from a circle of students studying at Columbia University in the 1940s, with adherents of the movement including writers such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. The Beats had no formal manifesto or set of tenets. Ginsberg instead clarified that a few of the movement’s ‘essential effects’ included abolishing censorship and encouraging eco-consciousness, among other objectives.
Disillusioned with the consumerism, forced conformity and lack of self-satisfaction that manifested through the Cold War, these writers felt that in order to spark individuality among the general public, unconscious instincts needed to be followed over the rationality dictated by social constructs. Their views somewhat overlapped with the Jungian philosophical school of thought and its notion of spirit. Carl Jung described the idea of spirit, which is the human nature or psyche, as split into two parts: the Spirit of Time and the Spirit of the Depths. While the Spirit of Time is the dominant cultural world view that represents reality and strongly ties to science and technology, the Spirit of the Depths is the creative subconscious of the people that has been repressed by the modern Western World.
The Beats hence tried to provide a place in the modern Western World for the Spirit of the Depths by imaginatively writing about everyday themes and objects typically associated with the Spirit of Time. They did this by drawing upon popular media as a form of contemporary mythology, and especially by experimenting with various writing forms. Ginsberg’s cut-up novels, for example, attempted to dismantle either-or binary thought and encourage critical thinking that was imaginative rather than rational. By emphasising individuality and creativity through their writing, the Beats ultimately helped to break down the barriers of censorship in American literature and introduce unconventional forms of literature to mainstream society.
The Beats had to break down this thinking in a confused world, but the intensity of navigating these complex issues has only been magnified with technology.
In our contemporary society, cognitive skill development is being overtaken by early immersion in technology. The internet and AI are overwhelming constants in our lives rather than simply being useful tools. In such times it becomes vital to make a place for the Spirit of the Depths to serve our individuality and personal satisfaction. Especially for those born in the late 2010s and the 2020s, who may be even more caught up in the Spirit of Time than we were as children.
The fact that children today are losing skills in favour of being trained on a computer is not their fault. However, the adults around them consciously using the internet not simply as a means of sharing resources and communicating but also as a misguided, self-serving escape from reality only perpetuates the same ideals the Beats tried to counteract. The narrative of feeling lost in a world that values overconsumption and practicality over self-fulfilment and genuine connection to the natural world is one that creatives and young people have been facing for over eighty years. However, actively trying to understand your sense of self, holding a fascination for the world around you, and consciously cultivating creativity appears to be a proven method of helping to dismantle this world and find yourself.
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