The Spreading Silence
A fable of Artificial Intelligence
Over the last four days, I’ve wound up immersed in a new project that unexpectedly emerged while editing a piece on cultural oversaturation. Despite being a distraction from that work and several nearly-finished projects, this one felt urgent enough to prioritize and publish immediately.
It began as an experiment sparked by some compelling images I generated and wanted to explore further. The result is a lightning-fast writing sprint, deliberately crafted as a provocation on the numbing role AI plays in art and architectural discourse—while using multiple AIs as collaborators in its creation. The products of AI don’t all have to be slop, but unfortunately, most of it is.
To be clear, this wasn’t a case of typing a single prompt and waiting for results. It was an intensive, iterative process that took many hours, resulting in a work that is both critique and product of the technologies it examines.
I do want to give the essay one further edit, so while it is up on my site, I am going to post it to Substack tomorrow. Along with that, I am going to be posting a series of fables in to illustrate the essay. Here is the first. Hope you enjoy this and the holidays we are in the midst of.
The Spreading Silence
In the Age of Endless Identities, the Grid became the final architecture. The Builder crafted the Grid to satisfy every need, every desire. Stretching endlessly across the horizon, it was neither city nor countryside, neither home nor workplace. Each cell reflected the lives of those who occupied it: a scattered garden, an antenna pointing to the sky, a space half-lived yet never empty. With work obsolete and creativity redundant, humanity scattered into individualized squares of autonomy.
No two cells were identical, yet the repetition was absolute. The Builder’s work offered infinite choices, each one indistinguishable from the last. No two cells were identical and the monotony was complete. Above the Grid, silent satellites drifted in their orbits, broadcasting a single message: “You are free to be you.”
The people moved within the Grid, aimlessly. Some clung to their cells, carving rituals into the emptiness. Others wandered endlessly, convinced that meaning waited in the next square. But no one asked who had built the Grid, or why. No one searched for its beginning, and no one imagined an end. The Builder’s hand was invisible, its intentions unspoken. The Grid grew, not by design, but by the weight of its own existence, spreading outward into a silence that no one dared to break.