They’re On to Us

“You don’t mean to say that you seriously believe that Life imitates Art, that Life in fact is the mirror, and Art the reality?”—Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”

Art imitates life, said Aristotle, but Oscar Wilde allowed as he’d gotten it backward: life imitates art. These days, we’re worried that machines imitate art uncomfortably well, but that’s not where the real threat to artists comes from. It’s the audience imitating artists that should worry us. The general public has taken to imitating art with such gusto and aplomb that the artists—read storytellers—are getting crowded out.

You may have heard the latest pop psychology buzzword Main Character Syndrome, which lives just a few doors down from the far more serious Narcissism. It’s the idea that you always think you’re the center of the storm, that every situation is about YOU.

Of course, everyone’s always been the hero of their own story, their interior narrative, their running monologue. But now with a good percentage of our relationships transferred to the online world, we can lay out that pimped-out narrative for all to see—instead of the warts-and-all people we actually are. We can substitute the story for the self. We can even pick out our theme music and catch-phrases. We can control the narrative. We can add literary tropes as accessories like handbags and glad rags.

You can even go further and plot your arc, and surround yourself with secondary characters—the problem being that you can’t control all the variables of the plot, and your secondary characters are liable to think they’re the main characters. You might be thinking, hey, I face these same problems writing, and that’s true. But writing is a form of reductionism. You may strive for three-dimensional characters, but n-dimensional characters are beyond the scope of the printed page.

And it doesn’t stop onscreen. How many of you have indulged in cosplay, whether at confabs or in the bedroom? Is Halloween your favorite holiday because you can dunk for apples or because you can roleplay? Or maybe you’re into role-playing games or LARPing. We’ve come a long way from fighting over who gets to be the race car in Monopoly.

Survivor premiered twenty-four years ago. Now 60% of prime-time programming is reality TV. The American dream is to be a reality TV star—to shape your own narrative. And, according to Brad Gorham of Syracuse University, “Reality television has an effect on the behaviors of people in society, as people are easily influenced by reality television and eventually copy the behaviors portrayed on television while using them in real life.”

So what? Surely we can track down a maven who’ll say that plenty of rest and Wheaties for breakfast is bad for you, if that’s all we want. And I’m not at all sure that it is bad. What I’m saying is that the reader over your shoulder is onto your tricks. The grimoire with all the secret tropes is public knowledge. They’re on to us. They don’t need us anymore. Worse, they’ve fed all those tropes into a machine, which can recombine them in a hundred ways and spit them all back at you before you can sharpen your pencils.

So what I’m really saying is this, saying it to put a flea in my ear and maybe one in yours: we’ve got to throw out the rule book, walk out of the comfort zone, and take to the high wire. We’ve got to isolate what it means to be human, the part that AI can’t duplicate. We’ve got to dig deep. We’ve got to go back to ghost stories around the campfire, but maybe the camp is on Alpha Centauri and we’re listening to aliens’ stories about scary humans back on Earth, or listening to cephalopods in the labs planning their jailbreak. Then we can do that “compare and contrast” watusi. We’ve got to zig where we’ve been zagging for so long. Like Bullwinkle, we’ve got to say the magic words and pull from the magic hat not a rabbit, but a lion. And like Van Morrison, we’ve got to listen to the lion.

Of course, you needn’t listen to my advice, or maybe you’d call it my rant. But I’m going to give it a whirl. Go down the rabbit hole. I’ll let you know how it turns out.