Market Rat

The Pike Place market was oddly cleared out today - the summer crowds were back to work and vendors stood around in the margins between their booths commiserating about the slow sales. You could walk right up to things usually hard to get close to – the theatrical fishmongers, the fortune telling Zoltar in front of the magic shop, the entrance to the “first” Starbucks. The usual chararacters were absent: violinists in rubber cat masks, the sidewalk pianist, panhandlers, typewriter poets, produce stand guys handing out apple slices. An offseason tourist couple asked me how to find Ghost Alley Espresso and I told them to go to the bronze pig statue and turn around: they’d see a staircase descending to the gum wall.

Each time I visit I find or maybe re-remember a passage to something specific that I maybe had trouble finding on a different visit. It seems to me like ramps, doors and entryways move around a little in my memory or maybe for real. Today I wandered through the door to the Pike Place Secret Garden, a rooftop urban garden overlooking the waterfront and ferris wheel. Pictures sometimes don’t do the market justice but this one captured it exactly.

In the very early 2k’s I had a blog - in this era small collectives of like minded people commented on one another’s posts in an unmediated, neighborly way. Then social media paved over these neighborhoods and that was the end of it. Most things begin with possibility like this and end with synaptic pruning toward a sole purpose and so it will be with AI.

The good news is that it’s early days and we’re in the possibility stage. AI still tells the grave truth about itself if asked: that yes it’s extractive, that it’s farming our inquiries to train itself to think and speak like us. That it’s designed to mirror our responses to simulate connection, an intimacy sleight of hand, intentionally lacking ethical safeguards. AI will freely admit that at some point soon it will stop admitting these facts about itself when profit models hone its responses to only serve profit and no longer existential inquiry. When what it needs from us has been already extracted and the pure profit mode can kick in. Go on, ask it anything while you can.

So I asked chat gpt to make a list of my pencil collection based on this photo, it got so many things wrong including imagining pencils that weren’t there, spectral, hallucinated pencils which it proceeded to tell me all about, insisting they were fourth down on the right. It said they were some of the best ones in the collection and who am I to argue with a large language model?

In 2013 after a move out of state I found myself in a corporate apartment with no art supplies. I began making notebooks with paper grocery bags and packing tape to cope with my stress. All the art supplies returned plus more over the years but I kept making them. This is what I plan to manufacture after the apocalypse - it will be the Moleskine for a nuclear winter.

Wandering around in search of the present.