Petro-Ambiguity: Environment, Energy, Culture

The recent AI debate on Bruneian Threads has prompted me to think again about something that’s been at the back of my mind: cultural vacuums.

Let me explain.

If you haven’t yet heard about this particular AI debate – for the record, they come and go on Bruneian Threads with every AI-generated content that goes viral – it’s largely a backlash against an AI-native ad by a Bruneian marketer for an insurance company. Critics have pointed out various issues with AI-generated “artworks”, not least because it completely devalues the hard work that graphic designers, filmmakers, actors, and other artists and creatives do, especially in a country that barely invests in them.

(My personal gripe was that the protagonist didn’t wear his seat belt. In an ad for an insurance company. Oh the irony. Doubt this would have happened if actual actors and directors were hired).

I’m glad to see that the AI discussion is progressing, in that people are pointing out the nuances between generative AI and predictive/analytical AI, for example. But I also find it so disheartening to see that there are still so many supporters of generative AI being used in projects that could be much better executed in the hands of artists who have trained for, and are skilled in, actually producing art. The pro-AI justification usually focuses on cost, efficiency, “AI is the future, we need to accept that and embrace it”, and so on.

The thing that I find myself picking at in this whole discourse is this continued support for gen AI – that it exists at all. I began to study it as a symptom of the larger problem of not investing in culture, in particular the arts and the humanities, including science and technology studies (STS). And perhaps, dare I say it, the lack of independent and critical journalism. All of which, if you’ve been following this blog, I frequently tie back to the fossil fuel industrial complex, inclusive of the petrocultural infrastructure that’s essentially locked us into a carbon-dependent future.

A cultural vacuum – a chasm, if you will – has been created by this pervasive unwillingness to acknowledge the necessity of the arts and humanities, the critical safeguards of the relentless and fast-paced processes of extractivism, capitalism and colonialism in all its contemporary forms.

In a word: greed.

The debates (if we can call them that given that they usually take place on social media platforms that tend to wipe out nuanced, complex, multilayered arguments and favor bold, loud, declarative statements) and the typical ways they devolve signal a nation that has lost a sense of community that is usually built and cultivated through creative media, including critical journalism.

Independent journalism, fiction, art, poetry, films, etc. lets these debates be held in a sustained manner, allowing for the complexities, the grey areas, in-betweens, the interrelations between assumed polarities, to surface. They articulate the grounded, lived realities that so often belie easy assumptions and neat ideas that overcrowd our social media platforms.

This is where genuine community relations can be built and maintained – through the expression and understanding of one another’s points-of-view. The everyday realities that reveal a lot more similarity than difference. Through openness and curiosity towards seeming “hot takes” and realizing that those don’t really exist in the real world because there’s so much more to them than digital short-form narratives (and algorithmic bias) allow.

As a result, we don’t know how to healthily debate or discuss or listen anymore because we’re not given the chance nor the space to do so, much less be encouraged to practice. So we resort to what’s allowed and what’s easy – social media and its offering of anonymity as protection. We get strawman arguments, whataboutism, false binaries, red herrings, that barely move the discursive needle.

The understanding of systemic, structural, social and cultural issues – besides economic, financial, political ones that so frequently dominate – becomes lost in a cultural vacuum. The idea that one seemingly harmless thing can be an important cog in the harmful, extractive practices of an economic and political system that doesn’t care about you, never takes root.

I wrote previously in a LinkedIn post that when cultural vacuums occur, other ideas from elsewhere will rush in to take up space. I think this is what we’re getting as well in the AI debate – propaganda spouted by AI companies’ mouthpieces, uncritical absorption and acceptance of the idea that AI is the way of the future. These Western, capitalist and extractivist narratives of progress that promise one thing but secretly add “only for some of us”.

These issues reflect those in climate communications as well and I’ve been thinking about the two overlap. Recent findings show that communications are not so effective when they only seek to fill in a knowledge “deficit”, i.e. they’ll change when they know this is harming the planet according to science and research. Comms are much more effective when they align with the readers’ values. That, and the messenger is also hugely important – is the person speaking about these things someone that the audience respects and looks up to?

(From observing MLMs in Brunei and the anti-vax movement, these points seem to be spot on.)

Critical platforms, what the arts essentially provide, are necessary here. Cultural vacuums cannot only be filled – taken advantage of – by misinformed, disinformed, and bad actors. We must take up space too.