Self-critique and demystification of a weird short story about chess.
November 8th, 2024
Afew months back, I wrote this thing. The idea of it came to me by surprise one night while I was fussing in the kitchen, watering plants, like a message beamed into my brain from outer space: “They asked the machine that’s killing the world about chess, and it said Black has a forced win in ▒▒▒,▒▒▒,▒▒▒,▒▒▒.”
If you’re very-online, you may be familiar with this phenomenon in relation to microblogging. You spend so much time cooking up weird little zingers (perhaps this is a condition that mainly affects people who were really into twitter between 2010‒2016) that they start creating themselves, unbidden, out of the background chatter of the restless subconscious. This time, though, I could immediately tell there was more to it than the one-liner, absurdist antichess joke that had popped into my head. A fabulist claim so huge, so preposterous, and so ultimate has surely bound up in it an entire world of questions. All I had to do was follow through on channeling it into writing, to start unraveling and see where the thread took me.
For me, the excitement of writing this story was in trying to share the experience of that moment in the kitchen and the writing process that followed―the experience of hitting on a little koan, so clear and insistently definite in its literal meaning, yet the more you think about it, the further it takes you away to somewhere else completely. The inciting incident in the story is a reflection of that moment when I received the same surprising piece of strange information. Then, to go ahead and follow through on writing it, to go to such exhaustive lengths in querying and speculating over this absurdity with earnestness, we are taken (as the writer or as a reader) down the same inquisitive path as the scientists, but from our side of the page, such that the claim becomes a sort of focal point that bridges fiction and reality. I was thrilled with the modest response I got after sharing the story on Cohost; it felt like we were all playing the scientists in the station, crowded around the computer, debating, doubting and speculating, refreshing the screen. At the time, no one even pointed this out. The spell was unbroken. It was like “Dogs Playing Poker” hanging on the wall in a parlor where dogs are playing poker.
One thing I can’t help but note, not quite in disappointment, but with a critical honesty, is how heavily the commentary focused on the story’s obvious parody of machine learning and its very real and current unsustainable power requirements. To be fair, I did write this into the story in a pretty heavy-handed way. The reason I am not so interested in digging into that aspect is that I find the reality of it to be so mind-blowingly boring. There is some malice, I admit, in using it as a fulcrum for this piece of writing; I found the most extreme, most awe-inspiring, supercharged, unthinkably powerful form of the thing that annoys me, granting it the position of a god, and made a picture of it nevertheless driving itself straight into a black hole of nothingness. And inside that black hole is where the actual point lies.
But I digress. This wasn’t supposed to be a review of my readers and their commentary. This was supposed to be a review of my own story.
IN GENERAL:
The rhythm of the writing is so-so at times, but ain’t that just the work. My excuses: I was writing about numbers, and I was very eager to slam this thing out and share it.
The reward for the reader is somewhat elusive. Perhaps worse(?), towards the ending I’m basically pointing straight at it and yelling “It’s elusive! It’s right here, and damn if it isn’t elusive!!!” and it is, and yet it isn’t. You look at like, yep, I get it, there it is, and the more you stare, you start to think “well, what the hell is that anyway?” Maybe this was unavoidable. It’s kind of the point.
I spent about three days writing and editing this thing (not including work on the illustration). Rereading it now, I have no idea how I did this. I do not normally write like this. This is a LOT of numbers and techno-jargon. There are exponents in this thing. Is it enjoyable at all for people who aren’t into chess? I have no idea. Probably not. I feel like in order to enjoy this, you’ll need, in some measure of each, to be 1. Interested in chess, but with a skeptical posture, 2. Interested in ideas of unknowability from at least one of many traditions dealing with unknowability, 3. Able to accept bullshit math. It is no longer surprising to me that virtually no one I know had anything to say to me about this thing I wrote. They know me, after all, not whatever this is. What’s going to happen the next time the spirit moves me? What is the human mind? Is it just tubes for coffee? I am so grateful and so pleased that this story happened to me in this way, I can only hope to be the vessel for that spark of nature again someday. In the meantime, everything I write is by an entirely different process of grinding away at vague shapes.
Less magically, the title and subtitle were the subject of much agonizing. The number and whether to call it “the machine” or “the computer” were the main issues. The number has to be ridiculous, and it has to be big, but how big? Should it just be “N?” Should it be an abbreviated 10XYZ? I decided to stop thinking and spew out a long number, and it felt right. As for the “computer” / “machine” word choice, there is the obvious comparison between the machine of the story and machine learning, which we all understand to be done by a computer. But it’s not just computers. It’s the Machine. So I went with “machine,” even though that required the reader to question vastly more than just the current “AI” thing and thus made the whole thing more obscure.
In the ending, there’s something I have not really reckoned with. In spite of the weirdly comforting hand offered by the strange guide in the dark forest, the actual, non-metaphysical setting of the story remains extremely dark and without any kind of superior guidance. It’s an elephant in the room for pretty much everyone, I know. I tried to make it a bit funny. I don’t know. This probably isn’t the place to get into that.
Each time I read the end of this story, there is a voice screaming inside me “Yes, it really is that simple.” “Blow up the damn thing.” “Take another pawn. Take another pawn.” And then I lose the game.
ABOUT JONATHAN ROWSON:
The whole thing is indebted to this guy, Jonathan Rowson, a chess grandmaster and philosopher who I feel an enormous respect for. I had watched some video interviews with him in the days prior to the message from outer space hitting my brain.
This video is where he expresses, I think, the core of the thing that stuck in my brain and germinated into the most useful part of my story. He describes an approach to chess-playing and doing-not-doing, in life, of not trying to actively enact change from a position of advantage but rather to “manage the change that’s already happening on the board,” to steward the pieces under your care. I get a piecture of the pieces doing what they do as the handles on something too big for humans to actually grasp.
...the first 14 minutes are generally relevant.
...at the 7:00 mark, he has some more to say about the illusion of control, about imposing your will on the world around you.
...then there’s a brief bit at 24:00ish about trying and not trying, seriousness vs fun, which is not very TMTKTW but in the same sort of moral direction.
This is also a good video. It’s extremely overproduced, in my opinion, and honestly looks like it's trying to get you to join a cult, but what he’s saying is important and very much related to themes of TMTKTW.
...up to and culminating at 05:25 ― Rowson defines the “metacrisis” in contrast to the “crisis” framing of our situation.
...08:30 ― About “normalcy” and “fixing things” (whoever divided this video into chapters has inscrutably labeled this part “Make Do in Men,” but what he actually says is “make do and mend.”)
...26:15 ― Getting beyond the crisis mentality, the machine we live in as perpetual creation and solving of crises.
A couple other good ones, specifically about Rowson’s “Seven Deadly Sins of Chess”...
What’s ever so slightly frustrating to me about Rowson, stick in the mud that I am, is that he seems to be naturalized into the TED-talk, think-tank, thought-leader, big NPO money world which (I believe) is inherently cemented in its ways in stolid opposition to the modalities he endorses so passionately and lucidly. But I can’t fault him for trying. What he describes always hits me so right. He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever heard speak (haven’t actually read his books), and I’m just bothered that his way of thinking seems totally illegible to the world that he’s speaking to. I guess this frustrates me because I also often feel like that.
PARTICULAR WRITING CRITIQUE:
In the first sentences, I hope it’s obvious that I was really impatient to get past the technical details of the machine behind-the-scenes in the most rudimentary terms possible and just move on. I hope it doesn’t sound like I haven’t a clue what I’m talking about, but, in a way, I also don’t care at all.
The image of the technician swigging lukewarm coffee at the computer was kind of cheesy, but I still like it. I needed something to immediately bring you in to this unwelcoming world on a human level before we got into all the long-winded ontological hooey.
The next paragraph, concerning the view outside, is both very freaking cool to me and quite clunky. The construction of the run-on description was intended to be a bit breathless and overwhelming, but, you know, it ended up a bit breathless and overwhelming. Then there’s this foreshadowing reference to the concluding lines of the story which I actually crammed in at the last minute. Maybe feels a bit forced. But the way that it sneaks out of the subjective woodwork like a passing fancy of one or all of the scientists, I think it’s neat, and I thnk it’s okay that it’s a bit obtrusive.
There is some fuzziness here around the purpose of the machine, the side-effects of its power usage vs. its intended effects, the side-effects-now-intended, the allocation of power having this or that effect on the effects ... This all comes into view (if you squint) during the part where asking the machine for commentary on the perfect game causes it to allocate too much power to chess and not enough to its usual duties, thus killing the world less. It doesn’t totally make sense. If the killing of the world was a side-effect of its power usage (as with real LLMs, etc.), this wouldn’t happen. Instead, thinking about chess too would use the same amount or a greater amount of power, and thus do greater harm. If the killing of the world was the direct and intended function of the machine, it would lessen, but a lot of other stuff I wrote goes out the window. Ignoring the light debate that arose here about potentially righteous use of the machine via a Watsonian reading of its mechanics‒which isn’t, in my opinion, in the spirit of the thing‒it’s obvious that I wrote the joke sort of wrong. I guess I never really said that it’s literally the energy demands of the machine that is killing the world so hard... It could be something else entirely, which is distracted from by thinking about chess, which, yes, makes the joke work. Or, we can ignore this problem completely by wrapping the mystery of the machine’s terrible internal ecosystem into a tight knot and accepting that it now has a power over the world beyond our understanding. It depends how much you want this story to be about the energy demands of accelerating machine learning and how much you want it to be about the impossibility and futility of doing things, anything, to the world. As I have already said, for me, it’s the latter.
THE THING ABOUT THE SUBTITLE AND INTRODUCTORY PARAGRAPHS
Recently, I was talking to my partner about the way the story introduces itself, and they accidentally brought to my attention some potential vagueness of timing and causality between, on the one hand, my attempt to firmly fix it in the subtitle, the message from outer space I got in my brain (“they asked the machine that’s killing the world...”) and on the other, understanding of the early events being reliant on the dual premise that there’s firstly a machine that’s already killing the world and secondly that the effects of the machine apparently get a little crazier, or at least more noteworthy, upon asking the machine about chess.
Having the ambiguity of the subtitle pointed out to me really struck a chord, because I had thought it was totally clear: “They asked the machine that’s killing the world [that has been killing...][that’s already killing the world] about chess, and [the events of the story begin].” However, after we went over it a dozen times, something eventually clicked, and I could finally hear it the right way (the wrong way) as more like “Whoa, the ocean’s crazy and the climate is super hot, what’s going on? Oh, it’s the [normal] machine. It’s killing the world! But why? Well, [they asked the machine that’s killing the world about chess]” There is a troublesome mushiness of the English language, and probably most languages, in the way you can say the same thing and mean something slightly different in different contexts. Fiction, even worse, is temporally strange in relation to our present, and imagining/envisioning it is slightly temporally different than discussing it.
More importantly, it’s potentially a little confusing that when we first see “the world” (the ocean and the concrete outside the station) we are supposed to understand that its immediate state both A. is markedly different due to the machine thinking about chess (what with the oscillatory waves and loud thrumming), but also B. was already in a very bad state prior to the start of the narrative (steaming hot and patrolled by gunships, a condition that inhabitants of the story might call “normal”). They’re introduced at the same time and not explicitly differentiated. This could be fixed.
The reason it bothers me is that it’s possible for a reader to miss the snappy intro that I’d hoped would settle everyone in to the scene and bring you in, like I was brought in, by the message from outer space.
So, for a minute yesterday I considered officially changing the machine’s name to “The Machine That Kills the World” ...but even this could be read wrong; one might read it as “The Machine that [ultimately] kills the world [at the end of this story, later, due to the chess stuff],” like “the horse that wins the race.” I don’t want to settle for writing something like “The machine that has already been killing the world” or “The machine that was killing the world prior to the start of the story and continues during and after.” Woof.
Anyway, this could be cleared up by immediately explaining what’s going on and then making the differentiation described three paragraphs above. Perhaps the data “from a rediscovered population” could be elaborated on or changed to “a reabsorbed colony” or something, like implying war or conquest or some human cost literally killing the world as usual prior to the chess question.
THE ILLUSTRATION:
The collage illustration was put up originally in a state of compromise, as I was impatient to share the story and simply couldn’t afford to spend any more time working on it. I had taken a lot of shortcuts, blanked out the guys’ faces with white circles and left in a lot that I wished wasn’t there. Some digital techniques made no sense from a traditional collage or engraving perspective (in terms of mark-making, inversions, use of gradations of gray). These are mostly improved for the updated version I did for Neocities.
I had some discomfort about using an illustration (by one Henry Holiday) that came from some edition of “The Hunting of the Snark,” by Lewis Carroll. I’ve skimmed the Wikipedia section on his dubious doings, and I don’t know what I think anymore. Aside from that, I’m beyond tired of creative spins on Carroll. Anyway, the only real point of the thing was the visual texture, even though it’s perhaps worth noting that the text of the poem is relevant to my story, and on neither side of that coin does the image do anything to glorify the man in question. I guess it doesn’t really matter. It looks good.
READER DISCUSSION:
I received a lot of wonderful comments on the story. However, and not to be a troll, I must admit that the most interesting commentary I got was a kind of frustrated confusion&8210;a lament over why, even in controlled fiction, if the machine was really killing the world, why would it not simply be turned off? And where is the conclusion? And what is really to be done? Etc. When others presented, in return to these concerns, observations about the wildly unsustainable and continually surging energy demands of the “AI” boom (with the obvious implication that such energy demands are in fact accelerating the killing of the world, and no one’s turning it off), the hopeful reader insisted that this only spoke to their own point, that LLMs are “living on borrowed time and grant money,” and wondered if its creators wouldn’t simply run out soon.
Firstly, yeah, I really, really hope so. But secondly, as it pertains to the fiction of this story, this critique points out that the story only works―indeed, the story only even begins at all―if we allow the real abomination in our world now to continue to grow past all reason until it is very clearly killing the world, acutely and totally. This is where you can see how wrong something is. Not that it wastes money, or doesn’t make sense, or isn’t supported by reasonable people or reasonable economic systems. We see that it’s wrong insofar as we can see that it kills the world. That’s the end of the valuation. And it apparently does not deter the funders.
But that’s only what can be said of the superficial read of the story as being about machine learning, which again and again I insist is not the point. I say, in reply to both sides of this debate, that the obvious wrongness of the machine and the urgency of the need to stop it is intended in part as a maximally absurd stand-in for living and thinking and doing; it’s an easy way to force the premise and highlight those paradoxes more accessibly played-around-with via chess. The machine is not just its AI [as our “real” AI] or the machine of the real world [the world economy], it’s the machine of our collective seeking and our collective actions. It is inconclusive, because if there was a conclusion there would be no game.
