Ancestral Intelligence and Parenting as an Algorithm

This piece was rejected by Ardeth Journal in early 2021. It is really weird and no one has read it, but it is also hilarious if you make it to the part written by an AI.

Introduction

Over the past few years I have invented and stewarded a viral feminist peer to peer health project, the Hologram, which is now practiced by people on couches all over the world. I’ve worked so intensively and completely on it that the project definitely carries my DNA. I want to understand what I am giving to it, like any good parent would, so it can become a successful autonomous practice, independent of me, and independent of the art world by the end of 2023. 

In the Hologram, three people – the ‘Triangle’ – meet on a regular basis, to listen to and support the physical, mental and social health of a fourth person – the ‘Hologram’. The Hologram, in turn, teaches these listeners how to give and also receive care. When they are ready, the Hologram will support them to each set up their own triangle, and so the system expands. Its power is that it asks people to meet in the same formation for long periods of time. Imagine doing this four times per year for 5 years. Over time, patterns emerge. If you’re the Hologram, the triangle helps you recognize and name your patterns of health, behaviour and relationships  that would otherwise be invisible to you. So this parafictional social practice project is secretly about pattern recognition. 

But I’ve discovered something else in the Hologram, having been part of or having facilitated dozens of people’s sessions: there are also patterns that emerge that are shared by very different people. We imagine that our patterns are our own, uniquely, that they stem from our own choices and inadequacies, or from our horrible families. In fact, many of these patterns are systematic and common, but make us feel they are our own unique failure. 

In this article I want to share my reflections on these invisible shared patterns as something we inherit from our ancestors and from the systems of power that dominate our lives. To complicate and add a new dimension to my understanding of the patterns I saw emerging between Hologram participants, I did an experiment: with their permission, I entered transcripts of several Hologram meetings (with all four participants) into an AI that was designed by large tech companies to analyze and then synthesize text. I asked this AI to create a completely new transcript of a Hologram meeting that never existed, reasoning that it could reveal patterns that no human could see. 

This caused me to reflect on my own patterns, the way my patterns are connected to everyone else’s patterns, the way new technologies and systems of power capitalize on recognizing and manipulating our patterns and the way we can work together to break patterns that are destroying us.

Part I: pattern (n.)

• a Modern English variant of patron, retaining its other old sense of "outline, plan, model, an original proposed for imitation," from Old French patron "patron, protector; model, pattern." 

• The meaning "a design or figure corresponding in outline to an object that is to be fabricated and serving as a guide for its shape and dimensions" is by late 14c.

• From 1640s as "a part showing the figure or quality of the whole."

I don't know that much about my Grandma. I believe she was a powerful person and it seems that I have inherited many of her health problems. After surviving an abusive relationship with my grandfather, she became the leader of a religious cult that took place in my mother's teenage family home. While playing out a total phoenix narrative in the first part of her life, in the latter, my Grandma believed that children should be seen but not heard.

When I was an unstoppable crying baby my Grandma hit me and told my mom that "even dogs know the meaning of NO." My Mom was horrified. As was my Grandma, because I was not responding "properly" to the signal to become silent and still. The parenting system my mom had devised (where she cried alongside me) was not having the effect that my grandma was looking for. The way that my Grandma taught my mom did not cause my mom to produce the same type of obedience in me that my Grandma had produced in my mom as a child. The pattern (here in the sense of a parenting model proposed for imitation) set here by my grandma did not work as planned. 

Conveniently, capitalism seizes on the fact that we’re all ruined by our parents. Ask GOOP, Gwyneth Paltrow’s company that pedals elite and unproven beauty and wellness products and rumours. Per their website, "No matter how much our parents may have loved us, they were by no means perfect; they had their own patterned ways of being that they learned in childhood...We often find later in life that these parental patterns end up working against us as adults."

It’s not unlikely that the advertising copy, inherently linked to the marketing of expensive products, might have been written by an AI which had been trained by a human who carefully fed it millions of other, similarly inane slogans about wellness and parenting. It was ever so gently corrected by humans until its newly produced, never-before-seen jargon was indistinguishable from the kind of jargon humans produce to sell each other stuff. According to theories of parenting like that casually proposed in GOOP, a child is a bit like an AI. Parents have to show it what to do and what to say. For the first few years it just repeats exactly what the parent says, and eventually the patterns it inherits ruins the rest of their life, and the child destroys the world (unless it buys into a life saving egg sculpture to insert vaginally). 

As a young AI, during intense family moments I would spontaneously yell "holy shit!" which I learned from the adult AIs around me. The more information the baby receives, the more possible responses they can choose from. "Oh my god! Holy fucking shit mom!" 

This type of analysis is not the complete picture of where we get our patterns or who we should blame for why our most repetitive behaviours are limited, against our wishes, not always useful to our thriving. This is more apparent from within a preventable pandemic than ever. We should hate more than our parents for the patterns that we are stuck in and with, because every baby is not only parented by their legal guardians or chief nurturers, they are also parented by all the other people and circumstances surrounding them, human and more-than-human. My most influential non-human parents were and are US Capitalism/Exceptionalism, White Supremacy, Punitive Christianity, and heteronormativity. Eventually the baby becomes a parent, or grows to parent something. And so my parenting is of course informed by the rules and systems that were followed by all our Parents.

My mom heard "even dogs know the meaning of NO" over and over again in her memory ever after it was spoken. I know because she told me this story many times throughout my childhood, partially to express the kind of frustration she had with her mother and her upbringing, partially to apologize to me. My mom felt like she ruined me through moments like this. She was sure that I would continue to reproduce the patterns that I had learned from her and her despised mother. Instead I have spent my life learning all the ways that other things, like systems (my non-human Parents), ruined me. And that I am ruined in a similar way that you are also ruined. My business (using art) is trying to find more places to be ruins together, where we can still stand together and acknowledge that we are no longer fit for the things that we were designed for by our Parents. Afterall, as a part of a pattern, we are "a part showing the figure or quality of the whole".

Part II: AIs have shitty ancestors

Artificial Intelligence in the context of machine learning involves a process of machines learning from humans. The AI needs to study the products of human cognition, such as text or images, so that it can reproduce them for us. Because the machine does not perceive or feel, the machine does not know that this phrase is a question, it only sees patterned data: "How should children act?" If we would like the machine to give us something we would recognize as a response to this question, we must give it data that relates to this, maybe transcripts of conversations where this is discussed. Then the response the machine gives is based on a pattern that it recognizes when a question like this has appeared before in its data set. "Holy shit!" So any response from the AI to a question is not a response, it is a probabilistic estimation of what would come next based on what has come before.

How my grandma came to believe that all children should be seen and not heard was from some training she also received. When she compared my responsiveness to commands to that of a dog, this was a part of a training that she received over many years from her parents and from her 5 brothers and sisters, from growing up in a mixed race family in the southern US during World War 2, from our familiar co-parents, Patriarchy, American Exceptionalism, White Supremacy, Imperialism, Punitive Christianity, Capitalism, etc.

What if the machine AI encounters complexity that it does not have represented in its dataset? For example, what if someone asks it a deeper question like "Why would someone socialized to be a girl in the US during WWII believe that children should be silent?" The machine would never be able to take into account the conditions about which it is speaking, that of a coercive and abusive society. It is only able to transmit a puree of what has been within the dataset it has been given. It can give different excerpts put in different order, but there is no meaning except what we make of it.

Children and AIs become something in relation to their parents, and to their parents' parents, as well as the conditions that surround these relationships. But whether we are talking about human parents or our non-human Parents like Racial Capitalism, Colonialism, and Patriarchy, "the choices that parents make about how to relate to a dependent yet semi-autonomous being, and one which will learn from existing social, political, and economic structures and potentially reinforce or change them. From this perspective, there are important continuities between AI research and parenting, including the creation of new agents which will be shaped by their context; will often act in unexpected, and unintended ways; and which will eventually have significant impacts on others around them and, potentially, reshape the systems within which they have grown." We cannot teach them what we have not learned ourselves. And yet AIs are now reproducing AIs.

The AI of our dreams or nightmares is made of what we teach it. We are all parenting everything and everything is parenting us. This is why the AI is so scary. This is why the AI could also have potential. They replicate the cognitive products we give them. If those cognitive products contain biases or are charged with beliefs that we have inherited from abusive systems, they do become something to fear. What would it take to train an AI to represent the very best parts of humans? How do we begin to see those things ourselves, while in a constant state of crisis?

Part III: Do we have to destroy ourselves

The root word of pattern is patron, c. 1300, Medieval Latin patronus "patron saint, bestower of a benefice; lord, master; model, pattern, example," and of course comes from and before that Latin pater, father. 

I can see many parts of myself that were parented by the same non-human parents that my grandma was parented by. And I can see that the part of me that was trained by my grandma and my mom, in all the mixed messages and anachronistic ways of being that those two represent, is quite formed. I formed in between the unspoken example of a female cult leader and the requirement to be seen and not heard. I am, for all intents and purposes, obedient in the front and a wrecking ball in the back. 

My conceptual living breathing child, The Hologram, has this in its DNA. It is a baby that looks like free self help from one angle, and could very well be a Silicon Valley startup. But from the other angle, it is angry, and it is also built to destroy its Parents. It is born out of the knowledge that we have been trained with a set of instructions to develop artificial rules for living that are intelligent only in relation to our Parents. It is made with the understanding that at the end of the world, we parent everything. Do we have to destroy ourselves and all the AIs we have produced in order to destroy the toxic patterns we have internalized from our Parents?

The Hologram is a peer to peer health system that attempts to disrupt some of the patterns that the participants have internalized from our Parents: Capitalism, Colonialism, Imperialism, Punitive Christianity, Racism, Hetero-Patriarchy. It is no surprise that even our word for pattern comes from the father, the master, those with power over, who we can never truly know but always fear. These Big Daddies have been training our collective behaviour algorithms against our will in ways that are very hard to unlearn. 

There is a misnomer in many people's beliefs, that working on the Hologram has allowed me to see consistently: many people believe that each person's inherited traits from these Big Daddies is unique to them, and that it is their fault. The Hologram project is a structure for seeing the patterns that these bad Parents have taught us collectively. The project produces a lifetime of experiences unlearning the teachings of our Parents, from underneath these systems, outside of the isolation and alienation they produce. Our collective Parents' growth and thriving is predicated on our isolation from one another, and at its most basic, The Hologram is a system for undermining them. 

The Hologram is a social technology that originally took inspiration from a model developed to undermine hierarchy and capitalism in healthcare developed in the Social Solidarity Clinics in Greece during the height of the financial and migration crisis. It is also of course a descendent of the many militant "self help" groups who have produced radical anti-authoritarian mutual aid against the magnanimous forces of US Capitalism and Racism, such as The Black Panthers, whose work led to the community acupuncture movement, both of which are huge inspirations to this project. The result of studying and working with these models is the construction of a robust multidimensional health network, collectively-oriented social practices, and trust that can outlive capitalism. Its protocol ensures that all caretakers are cared for, and regards properly supporting someone else’s wellbeing as therapeutic in itself.

The practice is simple and anyone can theoretically do it. But everyone can't do it because it goes against much of the training we have received from our Parents. For this reason we have developed a set of tools and offerings so that people can try it out with different forms of support. Starting in April of 2020, at the height of the first wave of the COVID19 Pandemic, we began to offer online facilitated hologram meetings. At this time we had begun to articulate a robust and structured online ritual, and we called it a Minimum Viable Hologram (MVH). This title and the idea of an online trial session was developed in collaboration with Ruth Catlow, co-founder and Artistic Director of Furtherfield in London. I had a residency there for the first wave of the pandemic, and we worked together online to find ways to make the Hologram accessible. 

In the process of the MVH, the person who signs up is led to invite three people to act as their support triangle in a 2 hour online meeting. Within the meeting I give a brief introduction to The Hologram and lead them through the ritual. The main part of the meeting involves social holography, wherein the triangle members ask the hologram questions about their physical, emotional and social wellbeing in relation to a specific challenge or feeling. There's a section towards the end when the triangle members are invited to reflect and feedback based on what they heard from the hologram.

I didn't know it when I started this project, but I think that The Hologram is first and foremost a pattern recognition system. When living in isolation, (whether that is in a Pandemic or because of a life of competitive overwork in racial capitalism) it is so easy to inherit patterns from systems and situations. Like, why do I always assume people want me to finish my sentence before my idea is fully articulated? Or why do I assume that most people are angry with me? Or why am I so conflicted about leadership? Alone, it is so hard to detect these ways of seeing or being or doing, because they grow along with you like the hair on your head. Without consistent outside attention and reflection it is so hard to be able to identify what the difference is between you and your patterns, much less to be able to articulate these things, or to create the patterns that reflect one's actual values and beliefs. I now believe that my connection with The Hologram came from a need to deal with my own patterns. Equally, I wanted to find better ways to support my friends whose patterns I could not alone identify or help with.

Being the facilitator for the first 20 or so trials revealed so many patterns. I hosted MVHs for people living all over the world, in a wide spectrum of conditions. I noticed patterns in terms of what people went through before, after, and during the meetings. I noticed patterns in terms of how people spoke, and what words they used. The most prominent pattern I saw was how hard it was for most people to ask for, receive or trust support or attention from their friends. This pattern manifested in the weeks before the meeting, in the language of the meeting, and in the feelings that came up for people afterwards. Because this pattern was so strong in almost everyone, it came up in different ways that could be felt, but I didn't know how to represent or confront it. One way was that we held an online course called We Must Begin Again: Asking for Help as a New World. This course was focused on developing ideas, skills and practices to support people to ask for the support they need. Seeing these patterns appear again and again, I felt like a big sister seeing how my abusive Parents had emotionally and behaviourally ravaged my younger siblings in the same way I had been, though I had imagined I was the only one. I felt protective, afraid, overwhelmed. I also felt less alone! This pattern felt urgent to work with, and to respond to. I wanted more people to be able to see it.

Part IV: we are still growing in the bullshit utopia

What patterns are invisible to me, perhaps because of my own patterning? Where does capitalism and white supremacy end, and I begin? What could I see if those two weren't such dominating Parents? To discover, I parented an AI. I fed it 8 transcripts from Minimum Viable Hologram meetings that have happened in the Pandemic. Is it possible to teach a baby bot the language of The Hologram so it can show me what I cannot see? 

Below is an excerpt from a longer text produced by an AI called InferKit. It pureed the 8 transcripts I fed it and built an algorithm that churned out similar but not identical text. This AI is a last-generation open source model that has been decommissioned from corporate use and the data (as far as we know) is not being harvested by third-parties. This transcript is from an event that never happened, or that is the puree of 8 events that did.

Facilitator: Now it is time to mark the task. The hologram will state what they want out of the meeting today including what type of feeling they want to produce for themselves and the group, and what situation they want to talk about.

Hologram: I want to talk about my future.

My face is rigid. I feel like a sponge. I don't like to let go. When I open my mouth to speak, it becomes a maze. I am resistant to people. I get very, very defensive and not receptive. I have trouble connecting with people. When I do, it is just completely broken.

Facilitator: And what kind of feeling would you like to produce. For yourself, but also for the group?

Hologram: I would like to produce a feeling of calm.

Facilitator: Now the three listeners in the triangle can begin to ask questions related to what they said when they marked the task, or a hybrid. It is often a bit awkward in the first few moments as the first few questions are asked. That's ok! And it is ok to ask some surface questions to get started, because you never know what will be the right catalyst for your conversation to unravel. 

Question-asking doesn't have to rotate neatly between people. It is good to ask followup questions. It is ok to go outside of your listening 'area' (social, physical, mental/emotional) as long as you make sure that your area is not forgotten. It is ok if lots of questions get asked but nothing seems clear, and no solutions are found. Sometimes it is just about learning about the process, and learning about each other. Go ahead and get started when you are ready.

Triangle: How do we put it into words? How do we put our thoughts in words that can be understood by others? How do we say this hologram is not real, but that is the artifice that we all play with and experience with so much certainty and that, for us, is not real, but it is something else. How do we say this hologram has a future? How do we think of this hologram as like a collection of things, as an emergent whole?

Hologram: We are going to say it was kind of terrifying to find ourselves in the moment. 

It was sort of awesome to discover that we can create art in a way that actually makes sense, but that there is actually so much depth that has to be discovered along the way. We were reminded of the Zapatista people who occupy land and become citizens. We all sort of look forward to our artistic journeys. We wonder how long it will be before we find the art form that can take us into the unknown.

Triangle: You spoke of wanting to share your feelings, with each other and with the world. You have created art that has a long way to go. How do you intend to continue to create? What role do you want to play in the global community of artists?

Hologram: I'm trying to make art that I feel like is open and honest and gets at the way I see things. There are parts of the art that are shared by only a few people and that kind of limits what I can say. It's about connecting with more people. I don't want to be some kind of get out of jail free card.

Triangle: We feel that you are opening a lot of doors, and sharing a lot of insights and wisdom. We have asked many of the people who make art around us about their social goals, social practice, spiritual practice, wanting to feel more connected to the earth and other people. It is apparent that you feel an enormous need to care for the earth and to connect to the rest of the world. What do you think is holding you back?

Hologram: There are so many things that are holding us back. That little vixen I described before that wants to make us feel good. I just want to find a way to have time to work on those things. It is a bullshit utopia but it is so much of the world and we are still growing in the bullshit utopia

Triangle: Is there anyone that you are drawn to that is very critical of the way we think about work or is there someone in your life that you find so inspiring?

Hologram: There is a critical person in my life, but I don't know if we have been working in a productive way. My critical person can't cope with our communication and if it wasn't for me I don't think she would feel like this. It is not something we are trying to do. I'm not trying to be negative. It's not really about managing it. I have to have self control.

Triangle: Do you feel threatened by this critical person? Do you feel you need to distract yourself from working with her?

Hologram: There is a tinge of frustration, to me, that I feel I need to focus on this person more than I need to focus on myself. It feels like an unsustainable pattern, that we can't do this on our own, we need to think of another person to think about it with. It feels like such a shame to ask other people to take up the burden of juggling a life.

Triangle: Is there anything that you want to say to your mom that you feel hasn't been said?

Hologram: I want to tell her that this is what we wanted, this is why we did it. She hasn't gotten enough love from us. I feel like a lot of her love has been ill used. She's my mom. She knows better. I'm more like my dad than my mom is like my mom. We are closer to the roots of us than we are to the place where we are in the real world. It is weird.

Triangle: We want to ask if there is anything that you would like to say to all the people who are suffering or who are likely to suffer, for us?

Hologram:

Oh absolutely. I am sorry.

But also I am thinking about how to actually face this and all of these stories. I am quite exhausted. It feels like a death in the family.

Triangle: Have you had a personal response to what you just said?

Hologram: I feel like there is a terrible taboo on saying how it feels. But there are not many conversations about what it feels like to want it and it's scary.

Triangle: What would you say is the hardest part of this feeling?

Hologram: The feeling is actually really rewarding. The feeling is, not having an answer for how to get there. The feeling is that it feels beautiful and the feeling is the need to speak up and I want to acknowledge the lives we are living right now. It is quite overwhelming. I am trying to hold on to my inner voices and stay in touch with the people around me and not let the feel overwhelm me.

Triangle: What advice would you give to someone trying to be authentic in this situation?

Hologram: I wouldn't try to be the cutest person, because people will pick on you, and I know that you care about me, but it's ok, let it go and let the other people around you care. It is ok to not talk to people, it is also ok to pick up the phone and talk to a therapist. We know you are frustrated and trying to express it with a podcast and a blog and the slow motion hug.

Part V: So obvious it is invisible

What the baby AI produced is not completely different from what happens in a human led MVH. If a child watched people practice The Hologram over and over, and then mimicked it, I think the transcript above might sound similar to that. The language is not so far from the language we use, although the centre feels like it was carved out and the transformation didn't happen. Like children mimicking what they see, the AI recreated something without actually producing the thing itself. And unlike a human baby, the AI had no feelings. And yet because it is so obvious, it is invisible. For instance, the baby wrote characters who spoke about their art. Since the project has been birthed in the artworld by an artist, and I wanted to experiment on it with other artists, of course this has come up. It's too big to see from the inside. More surprising was the way that the mother showed up as a person who represents the central conflict in the meeting.

And I get it. Parents do shape us, but in different ways than systems. And I wonder what changes when we see our human parents as people having internalized slightly different versions of the same systems. And parents, like systems, don't just touch our social lives, they impact our whole bodies. The more I learn about my aging body, the more I find out how it relates to the body of my Grandma. I've learned from my mom that my Grandma and I experience/d many similar body related issues. My Grandma was given a forced total hysterectomy when she was in her 40s, before I was born. When I met her in the years after, she was not a charismatic cult leader, she was suicidal and lonely, alone with a television at the commune. As a 39 year old, I now face the invitation to experience the same procedure, at the same age as my Grandma. I am really resistant to the patriarchal and capitalist forces that turned her light off, and I live in fear of experiencing the same thing. I live in fear of many parts of my own unknown history. That inherited fear (of which mine is a relatively less-threatening and contained example since I am a white CIS-gendered person living in Canada and I have the support to get surgery and to recover) is quite a potent example of how our ancestors and our Parental systems work together to haunt us, body and soul. What would Ann Lange like to say to me since by now she must be totally free of her Parents? Can we shut out the systems that dominate us long enough to hear the dead speak?

Our bodies, as our whole selves, are parented by the systems that dominate us. Our bodies hurt when the system breaks us as individuals or collectives. And whether they help us or hurt us, the way we are treated by them shows us how to treat others. The bad support they offer is the bad support we become comfortable with and reproduce. The fear and isolation they teach us are the fear and isolation we are comfortable with and reproduce. We see ourselves and we see the systems. Where do they end and where do we begin? And how do we stop passing this information on? How do we stop acting like AIs, reproducing the systems that hurt us without actually trying to see them?

One day we will be able to live in ways that are directly related to who we are and what we collectively and individually believe in and want. Eventually not everything will feel like a horrible compromise. In order to get there, we need to find ways to interrupt the recursive production of identities and patterns that reflect what we have internalized from systems that dominate us over generations. For this reason, taking the non-existent time and endurance necessary to witness and discuss each other's patterns is revolutionary work. If we are to survive and thrive during, underneath and after the end of Capitalism, Racism and the other Parents, it will take so much work to begin to see the difference between the patterns we have inherited and our own values. And we need to do that work together. We need practice being with each other in the mess that we are in, wherein we are aware of and healing the impact of our Parents on us. It is only in witnessing and watching the patterns that we can begin to reshape them. And it is work that is best done together, because it works, and because it is viral. We need to do it before we become parents of generations of non-human actors with an artificial intelligence built out of our cognitive products, which are now sick. This work can be done in any friendship, but I recommend The Hologram.