Psychology

We Stopped Caring. We Can Again.

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Am I going to talk about AI? Sort of, yes! But mostly I’m going to talk about caring and people, inspired by Dan Sinker’s blog post “The Who Cares Era” – just go read it.

We live in an era that doesn’t seem like people care. Market-tested perfectly created media is there, completely designed to interest us no matter what its content is. Extended cinematic universes calculated carefully enough enthusiasm has become drudgery. Politics are publicity stunts, religion is a lifestyle brand, nothing is what it is.

Finally we’ve got AI, and you can use AI to generate content for someone else – who might then use AI go get a summary of what you didn’t create.

So many people don’t seem to care. We’ve got all sorts of content, writing, media, but so much of it isn’t made by people who care or even consumed by those who care. AI is a pain in my backside, but its the result of where we were slowly heading.

(And as I note, I don’t consider AI new or always bad, but by now you know that, so let me keep ranting).

What I think we’re missing is that good art, or writing, or media is by someone and for someone. There’s an intimately involved creator who gives a damn and someone who wants that media. Real, meaningful creativity and communication is about people on both ends.

Every now and then people rediscover Ed Wood, a man with many flaws, erratic talents, and an unstoppable desire to make things. There is a reason he had and has fans, because he was doing something – if not well – and that connects with people. I say this as a person who has watched his films without the Rifftrax treatment.

I get zines and the sheer personal feel of them is amazing. I love getting to know people, and the personal nature of zines lets me connect with people who want connection. I have a shelf that includes strange collage art, speculations on podcasts, street photography, and more. There’s people on both ends.

On a very personal level, I had a friend who got inspired to change jobs in part due to my book Fan To Pro. That’s what I’m talking about: a person really wants to say something, another wants to listen, and in some cases a dialogue ensures.

AI in the way it’s often deployed messes it up, creating both generated content without a person and summing up data so people don’t have to connect. But that’s been an issue of mass media for awhile, with calculated marketing, mass efforts, calculated creations, and plenty of imitators. We’ve industrialized our arts too much, and AI just slots in there really well.

If you feel that dissatisfaction, that there is something missing in culture and arts and just talking to people, you get it. We’ve industrialized, and misuse of AI takes it farther.

It’s time to care, to care enough to create – and care enough to pay attention.

Steven Savage

False Geniuses And Not Idiots

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

My friend Serdar had another banger post “Maybe we need fewer not-idiots.” He discusses many things, from how we keep the worst out of power to our weird worship of so-called geniuses. It’s worth reading on it’s own, but I want to zero in on something – America’s worship of supposed “geniuses” and treating them like divinely-appointed rulers. I find this strange because America also has a strongly anti-intellectual streak that you’d think would make people wary about such “geniuses”

Thing is, the worship of “genius” in America isn’t about intelligence.

Let’s take a look at the “lauded genius” of the last few years. Inevitably a “move fast and break things” person. Iconoclastic yet somehow worshipped by those who are supposedly “conservative.” Also, inevitably, kind of an a-hole. Also, sometimes dumb and clueless and even self-destructive, with an unsurprising side of drug abuse. Also on top of that, why do they have a business major yet talk science and so on?

Those following these supposedly superior humans sound suspiciously like the “cult of the auteur,” where someone is a creative genius, supposedly above us all, and thus not bound by our rules. It’s often been applied to artists and writers, excusing bad or even horrific behavior. “What would we do without them,” is what said cult essentially says, while the truth is such people’s destruction destroys more than it creates – if said creation was even worth it.

Yet this praise of geniuses (and thus auteurs) exists alongside anti-intellectualism. We are in an age where science and education is under attack by people who will them praise ketamine-fueled techbros and their supposedly brilliant ideas. Scientists who raise valid concerns on health or the environment are sidelined, while a business major who spends a family’s inheritance to buy a company is considered our intellectual better. The love of the genius and the hatred of intellectualism seem to go hand in hand.

I think this is obvious when you look how the cult of the “genius” and the cult of the auteur are similar – they praise someone for being an asshole. It’s not about brains, it’s about cruelty

These cultists do not want someone civil or functional, but someone brutal and uncaring. They want something “muscular” in the most insulting way, someone who is about force not thought, someone to hurt the other and rally the us. Saying such people are “geniuses” is a way to provide the veneer of intelligence while valorizing behavior that should land someone in therapy, rehab, or jail – or all three.

Such people see actual intelligence as weak, you know all beholden to facts, understanding, and – horrors – empathy that helps them understand how people work. Those worshiping the faux geniuses don’t want actual knowledge or wisdom, but a regressed-adolescent image of strength. Which is why so many lauded geniuses turn out to be both not that smart but remarkably weak as they are performers first and foremost.

We don’t need these “geniuses.” We need real intelligence of all kinds, from the understanding of math to the understanding of people. We also need the maturity to step outside of the games of the emotionally arrested who want a “genius” to worship.

And that, to go back to my good friend Serdar, is why we need less not-idiots.

Steven Savage

Evil, Opposition, and Inscrutability

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

“Hey are these people evil or just stupid?”

“Do they really believe in what they say?”

I’ve heard this for most of my life in some form of political discussion. We see more of this right now because of the politics of 2025. But the question haunts humanity – are the terrible things people do belief or stupidity? It’s as if we want the comfort of knowing someone chose evil, because if they didn’t, then more of us can do evil for other reasons. There’s an absolution in being able to label someone stupid or foolish figuring that will never be you.

This is also something that has bedeviled me in project management, to a lesser ethical degree. One often confronts poor decisions, and as I work in IT where poor decisions accumulate in the form of code and hilarious security breaches, one confronts history as well. There is nothing like a decade of “who the hell made this call?” rattling around your head (worse, when you find the person in question might be you).

I’d like to propose a third option that sometimes people’s bad decisions can be born of opposition.

Among my many interests is why people believe conspiracy theories. A theory I’ve seen pop up a few times is they’re often a form of Oppositional Defiant Disorder – that many (not all) a conspiracy theorist believes in conspiracy theories as a form of opposition. They’re hard to talk out of it as opposition just hardens their beliefs.

We’ve all dealt with people like that (a few times, we may BE that person), where telling someone they’re wrong makes them “wrong harder.” With conspiracy theorists – especially the ones who make a living at it podcasting and writing or being in politics – many will buckle down on their beliefs. If you think about it, that means they have a believe structure that is increasingly and aggressively wrong and they act on it.

Now imagine someone making very bad decisions and choices. But not out of malice or actual believe, but literally because their entire structure is composed of ideas created in opposition to critique. They act in a form of anti-belief.

Go ahead, think over the bad choices not just in today’s politics but in finance, software, and your job. How many people made absolutely the worst decisions that would be explained by the fact that at some point they did the opposite of common sense just due to opposition to advice.

If you get very “oppositional” to good advice, you WILL construct a worldview and policies and plans based on the worst stuff you can do. It might not necessarily be evil, but as it’s a very active form of stupidity, it gets close.

Now, look at the world and ask if certain people got told no so often they literally do the worst choices only to avoid the better choices they were told?

Steven Savage