Between A Fat Cheque And Art

With the current economic times? The cheque, any day. As a matter of fact, where do I sign?

I’m certain most of us relate. As it stands, the current average adult is not as lucky as the typical one 100 years ago. Back then, it was easier for someone to get married, start a family, and raise children comfortably. Henry Ford further made it a mission for every home to have a car. One could own a home with their regular wages. Today’s world is different.

Your salary does not guarantee you a chance to get a simple car. Expenses and bills are always knocking on your door. The status treadmill will be tugging at your heartstrings:

Why haven’t I gotten a car yet? And that Instagram model is on their third set of wheels. Why did I go to school? Why is this life different from the one I was promised? When will these struggles end?

From your assessment, it seems like they never will. Nyashinski raps:

Kwao ma-career ni pang’ang’a na deni
Hakuna mtu anasema ukweli, watu wanalipwa mapeni

So when presented with an opportunity between a fat cheque and art, without batting an eye, the cheque would have already been deposited into your bank account.

My interest, however, is in the difference between a fat cheque and art. One addresses the problems now, and another focuses on later, if at all that later will come to pass in the first place.

If we’re to use statistics alone, you will die mid-scroll.

We spend so much time on our phones. The infinite scroll is large enough to fit our finite lives, and more appropriately, our attention. Or, in the words of Nyashinski, “Hii ni msomo free kaa People Daily.”

Swiping up, down, or to the side, we are more interested not in what we see, but in the thrill of what might appear next. It has to be random, because dopamine studies have shown that the surge is bigger when it’s random than if it were predictable. If every scroll brought something interesting, we would never hit the desired highs.

With this instant reward cycle — instant in the sense that a few minutes of scrolling will get you something you deem worth your time — we become wired for now rewards. Later rewards contrast with what we have been experiencing daily. And so, a big fat cheque is more appealing than art.

Art is inefficient. It does not promise reward. It has no means of confirming to the world that you have won or made it big. I can write a beautiful piece and share it with the world, but it may not have buttons to show how many people liked it. It may not have trackable reshares. It may not have a comments section. And yet, I have created art.

But a big fat cheque? It will likely be shared on the news or a gossip channel. Gossip, which travels faster than the news, will reach more audiences. Pretty soon, your phone will be burning up with calls. Like a celebrity, everyone would now want to have a piece of you. This is the point where you know who to cut off, because apparently, they remembered you only after you won big.

Art doesn’t have such promises. It is so inefficient that, statistically speaking, there is no guarantee you will ever see a return. I speak from experience.

I write daily. My work hardly gets reshares. A couple of hearts. And I don’t get enough from my writing to get me a trip to another continent. Furthermore, the rate at which I get subscribers is extremely low compared to those who exit my email list. From an economic point of view, my work is extremely inefficient.

To a writer, a big fat cheque is synonymous with an enormous uptick in subscribers, reshares, and even better, emails from big corporations seeking endorsement. I’m pretty sure no writer would say no to such a deal.

To them, I would ask: Between that and simply writing, which would you choose?

In my country, our precolonial history divides tribes into two: collaborators and resistors. An implicit dislike for collaborators is evident in our history books. The resistors are hailed as heroes.

King Nabongo Mumia sided with the colonialists. Waiyaki wa Hinga resisted colonial rule and led an army against the white man, but lost. He is regarded as a hero. To Kenyans, he’s immortal.

Two leaders were presented with the question that forms the title of this piece, and we can see who is celebrated. Nabongo is remembered, but not in what we would wish to be remembered for. Our loyalties lie more with those who stood for what they believed in. Regardless, I doubt I may be persuasive in convincing most of you to convert from getting the fat cheque.

Dave Chappelle was handed an offer of $50 million, and he turned it down. Fifty million dollars is most definitely a fat cheque. Why did he turn it down?

Chappelle became famous for his stand-up comedy act, The Chappelle Show. His gift to the world was comedy and satire, addressing popular societal problems with humour. However, how the show eventually got interpreted did not align with his values and ideals. So when he was handed a deal worth $50 million, he declined.

An artist can get to this level when they know what they have to offer to the world is bigger than a fat cheque. Usually, such an artist has a vision of their goal that nobody else can see. Nyashinski says it best, “Mi najijua.”

Legacy, for instance, ranks higher than any amount anyone could pitch. Having a say in what your work does and its impact is more important than merely looking at the numbers and sticking with what works. The latter option careens into audience capture.

I have noticed this trend with our societal leaders. At one point, they are at the forefront, fighting for what is understandably, ethically, and popularly right. After a couple of meetings, they side with the very people they were fighting. This rapid shift in allegiances is only explicable through threats or after a fat figure has registered in your account.

Strikes tend to have such an outcome. The leaders will be visible, showing their stance, and then a few days later, they will give the call for the return to normal operations. Money can open doors, and not in the way we would wish for the common good of the people.

Art, as inefficient as it may be, is the salvage of humanity. And we are deferring it to tools which are not making any of it. Here’s one of the issues I have with AI.

Over fifty years ago, the most dangerous weapon on Earth was nuclear warfare. As much as we would not want to see humanity go up in smoke, countries knew the best way to stamp their authority was by producing nuclear weapons; a dick-measuring contest, because if any of the countries launched their nuclear artillery, the world as we know it would be a thing of the past. Cockroaches, plants, and microbes would survive, but humans may not.

This pride, knowing that you can threaten anyone in the world, forms the basis for accumulating the most advanced warfare. Today, it is not nuclear material. We have already established how this can kill everyone. It would be foolish for a leader to amass that many nuclear arsenals, use them, then die as a result, instead of use it to leverage for more of their needs.

A more precise weapon is drones. Like the CRISPR-Cas genome editing tool, drones can be very specific and effective. Drones, once given precise instructions, execute with astonishing accuracy. What better way to do this than with an agent that hardly sleeps? Something like AI?

As Noah Smith has argued, a country that is not investing in drones is a country that has already lost in modern warfare. All non-drone militaries are obsolete.

And while we may make drones to create more efficient armies, where humans hardly step onto the battlefield, the biggest race is in software. Which country has the most advanced AI? These can equip drones to win dogfights with the most experienced jet fighters without close comparison. The race to get to AGI or ASI will eventually lead to this outcome, as the Ukraine War has shown.

Recently, Anthropic was told not to roll out its most recent versions, Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The reasons were tied to security. When the government is interested, this is an opportunity to reap stratospheric profits. In short, a fat cheque.

Admittedly, in some ways, this may be helpful. If these models are deemed capable of crashing economies and ending civilization, isn’t it more important to reinforce guard rails? How relevant would you think a company like Anthropic may be if it unleashes the modern equivalent of nuclear warfare on the public? You don’t create the most dangerous weapon and let it loose. We may be pleased that AI is progressing by conquering all that we previously thought impossible, but a superintelligent version of the same is like giving a lighter to several pyromaniacs all over the world.

AI in and of itself is art. The one who came up with the idea was changed by it. It also changed people who used it. This is the criterion I use to define art — it changes the creator and the audience or user. But what AI creates is not art, because it does not change the creator, although it might change the user or audience. Might. Thus, AI art is not art.

Several authors are already using AI to generate books at a humanly impossible rate. The goal, as you would imagine, is to get as many sales as possible. In other words, a fat cheque. All the while, the art of writing gets sacrificed.

Understandably, every month, bills will keep knocking. With a fat cheque, you will live your life now, and die having lived as you had desired. Regardless, I think what most people dismiss is how problems mutate once they have been solved.

I want to launch a startup. I need funding. Funding is my biggest problem. Once I get it, it’s no longer a problem. I now need to make returns and run an efficient team. Efficiency becomes a problem. Once that is solved, it’s no longer a problem. Now it’s competing startups. How can I create a moat between them and me? At every stage, the problem changes to a new one.

So for most people, the biggest problem is getting the money, the fat cheque. The more pertinent question usually comes after the fat cheque has landed, when suddenly, money is not a problem. And when you ask these people what they think will become their new problems, they have not had enough experience to quote them. Choosing a fat cheque is basic naivete in circulation.

I recall a quote from Gus Fring, in Breaking Bad, that got me thinking. It may have been arrogance, but it had elements of truth in it. Paraphrased, it went something like:

Being poor is easy, but one needs to learn to be rich.

The message hit home. Then it left home. Because more studies were done to debunk a lot of the popularly circulated stories about the poor and the rich. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir have gone to great lengths to show that when constrained for cash, the poor will have limited bandwidth. However, it does not mean they are poor at handling money.

Give me $1 million and watch as I convert it to $2 million faster than you can say “laundering”. By now you should know that I am not the moneyed type.

Daniel Kahneman, in his famous book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, also cited that past a certain threshold, money does not buy happiness. This threshold effect was also challenged by another study.

Indeed, a fat cheque can change your life. If you get the chance to get it, please don’t look back. Don’t even think twice about my article. Let me wallow with my fellow poor people.

It brings me back to the title of this section — the most powerful weapon. In one’s lifetime, I would argue that the most powerful weapon is a fat cheque. It will change your life for the better or worse. That the pendulum swing may go either way is evidence that a lot of money can change you a whole lot. In one’s lifetime.

I believe that the most powerful weapon that transcends one’s lifetime is art. I can give the example of some of the most celebrated artists in human history. They were funded by the rich. These rich families and individuals are not as celebrated today as the artists they funded. We laud Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, not the Medici family.

In modern times, AI, which I have already reiterated is, in and of itself, art. It is funded by taxpayer money and extremely wealthy companies. We know about the leaders of these art forms: Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis. We care less about the funders.

Art demands patronage. The most impactful kind transcends lifetimes. It is AI that will be funded, not the images AI makes. AI is art; what it makes is not.

Most of us will never get access to a family as well-endowed as the Medici, so when that fat cheque comes, don’t hesitate. Just as well, when you have sleepless nights because you’re not doing what you feel will transcend you, don’t think twice.

Okay, you see only what they let you see
Na hii ni advice, si matusi, don’t fuck up juu ya ganji
Don’t act like you’re so holy, judgement yako haikuponyi
Ukiomoka asubuhi, usikuwe ushasota by jioni

I am not in a position to tell you to pick the money. I also don’t have the right to tell you to pick art over money, like Dave Chapelle. I wish you attain fulfilment. If money will do that, then by all means, cash in. If art will do it, chase it.

I would rather that, when you come to this crossroads, you choose the option that will let you look back with no regrets.

This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube