In Defense of Humanity, Become an Artist Right Now

The noosphere is under assault. If you haven’t heard the term before, this metaphor (from the Greek root nous, or “mind”) refers to the entirety of human thought, words, and expression. I imagine the noosphere as a nebulous, swirling, collective consciousness enveloping the Earth — the informational “weather” or “climate” that humanity emits, and which we live and breathe.

The concept emerged in the 1920s out of discussions among Russian biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the Parisian mathematician Édouard Le Roy. For them, the noosphere represented the next stage of planetary evolution. Like the geosphere gives rise to the biosphere, they argued, the biosphere gives rise to the noosphere. And, just like the biosphere acts upon and reshapes its host, the noosphere is a potent driver of change and transformation in our biological and material lives.

I think this metaphor helps us to describe one aspect of the meta-crisis we are currently facing. At the time of its first articulation in the 1920s, the idea of the noosphere would have been understood to include all manner of human intellectual and cultural products: everything from classical philosophy to modern science, literature, music, politics, down to the everyday conversations between neighbors. Throughout the remainder of the 20^th century, the emergence and popularization of communication technologies — telephones, radio, and television — both facilitated the spread of these ideas and increased their power to shape our lives.

As the noosphere became a more prominent part of our lives, we found ourselves spending less and less time thinking about the other spheres. Who could bother to engage deeply with the bio or the geo when there was so much news, politics, sports, opinion, drama, and other content to pay attention to!

In the 1990s, the popularization of the internet meant that the noosphere became increasingly digital. It became ever more fluid, ever more alluring, and ever more ubiquitous. But, the explosive shift took place with the invention of the smartphone. In 2007, the year the first iPhone was released, 122.2 million smart phones were sold, but ten years later, that figure was over 1.5 billion. All across the planet, people found themselves inexorably drawn into a digital universe they carried in their pocket. Now digitized and screenified, the noosphere became addictively all-encompassing. We could barely look up from it anymore.

Of course, we all know this history. We don’t need the concept of the noosphere to understand what has happened to us over the last two decades. But I think this metaphor does facilitate an understanding of why what is happening right now — the artificialization of the noosphere — is categorically different and even more concerning.

The noosphere has existed since evolution first gave us the ability to communicate with words, and despite the enormous changes over the many millennia since, it has always emerged from human minds. Of course, printing presses, editing decisions, and market forces have always mediated which ideas circulate. But a monumental historical shift is now taking place. The first factor was the emergence of the so-called “Web 2.0” and the ability of computer-generated algorithms to more comprehensively manipulate the noosphere. Nonhuman algorithms began to directly decide which ideas could rise to prominence, which images could be circulated most widely, which words could have the most influence and power over human lives. The result has been the astonishingly rapid degradation of the noosphere: its polarization, commoditization, memification, and enshittification. The collective consciousness in short order became a zombieland of compulsive dopamine hits.

On Nov. 30, 2022, the second shoe fell. Despite the algorithms’ ability to sculpt the noosphere, until the release of ChatGPT, its inputs had always ultimately been human creations. While you might say that we had handed over the curation of the noosphere, no other creature was ever our co-author. Whatever other beings might exist out there — animals, plants, gods, spirits — the noosphere had always been our reflections on them, our thoughts about them, our artistic rendering of them.

But, now, in the AI era, this is no longer true. Today, already well over half of the ideas, words, images, and other elements of the noosphere have been generated by non-human entities. LLMs and image- and video-generating AIs are frantically churning out more content every day. While these A.I. outputs are always ultimately derivative of human creativity, the day will come — and likely soon — that the noosphere no longer is the weather being emitted by humanity, but rather an entirely artificial climate. Computer-generated slop will become the air we breathe, the language we speak, the thoughts we will think. Immersed in the synthetic, will we have the motivation or even remember how to generate novel ideas, to think for ourselves, or to be creative?

What to do? To be entirely honest, I’m pessimistic. In my estimation, the pollution of the noosphere is probably at this point unstoppable. But, if there is any last stand humanity can take, it may be that all hope rests in art.

In this context, when I say art, I’m not talking about all of us becoming painters, sculptors, dancers, and musicians — although I definitely wouldn’t be opposed to that. What I mean by art is that uniquely human characteristic of turning nearly every activity we engage in into a meaningful and aesthetic act. This is an instinct that A.I. simply does not have. Humans don’t just eat food to gain sustenance: we invent complex cuisines that explore every corner of the gustatory realm. We don’t just cover our bodies to protect from the elements: we test and push the limits of fashion. We don’t just make sounds to communicate: we fabricate worlds inside of worlds through our storytelling, rhetoric, and music.

Not only do we tend to turn every activity into an art form, we humans also can treat life itself as our magnum opus. We can become our art: reinventing, reimagining, recreating, and reembodying over and over again the larger aesthetic and vision we call “me.”

It is this essential drive to author our own soul’s vision that we are now losing — first obscured by our dopamine-addicted infatuation with our screens and soon to be drowned out altogether by a tsunami of artificial and derivative drivel. That is why, if there is to be any hope for humanity, we need everyone to start rediscovering the joy, the meaningfulness, the soulfulness of creative expression. We need everyone to contribute to a flourishing of an authentically human nous.

So, the call is to start creating now. Create anything. Write an essay about something you think is worth saying (in your own words, of course!). Draw a picture of the way you see things. Tell a story about what is meaningful to you. Make up a new song to express your emotions. Experiment with modifying a recipe to make it suit your tastes. Plant a garden that makes you joyful. Redesign a room in your house so that it feels more like you.

Share your art on Instagram if you must. But, do it for yourself. Do it because you are human and expressing yourself authentically feeds you. Do it because you refuse to settle for artificiality. Do it because the only way to fight back is by doing something real. Do it for your soul. Do it for humanity.

Stay tuned for part 2, in which we will explore ideas about how to collectively shape the noosphere in a more human direction….