Tip-Off #215 - A Charged Field
"Art is the act of making choices in a charged field." - Dean Young, poet.
"The murderer and the adulterer are alike desirous of privacy," warned an English preacher in the 17th century—a reminder that privacy was once seen with deep suspicion.
Privacy was historically rare, often tinged with guilt. Classical languages register that suspicion: in ancient Greece, public life eclipsed private life, while the Latin root of "privacy" implied a loss of status and civic exclusion. Withdrawal from the polis—the small, self-governing Greek city-state—or from the res publica, Rome's collective "public affair," was less like freedom than furtive retreat.
Only in the 16th and 17th centuries did reformers begin to defend personal autonomy, religious choice, and private property. The Protestant Reformation deepened that shift, challenging the grip of church and state on individual conscience.
By the 19th century, critics of surveillance had begun to push back. Legal thinkers called for a "right to be let alone," warning that new technologies—then the telegraph and camera—threatened a value increasingly seen as essential.
Today's threats feel larger. Social media and AI harvest and monetize our data, often without consent. The result: shrinking control over personal information, heightened risk of identity theft and discrimination, and a widening gap between privacy and the promises of data-driven innovation.
Andrew Niccol's film Anon (2018) dramatizes the danger. Its brutalist cityscape imagines a near future where every memory is recorded and searchable by authorities. Crime plummets—at the price of personal freedom. The protagonist's only "offense" is insisting her mind remain her own.
That premise is no longer far-fetched. AI-powered tracking and facial recognition already rival those on-screen; full deployment is primarily a matter of policy.
Yet the deeper confusion is cultural. We cling to the myth of lone originality—treating art as creation ex nihilo while calling only "artificial" intelligence derivative. This misreads creativity and agency. Human learning is imitative: language, rhythm, and moral judgment all arise from copying, adjusting, and passing ideas along.
Privacy isn't the same as authenticity or originality. It can make space for creative work, but it doesn't guarantee the result will be new or true.
The question isn't whether imitation occurs but how borrowed elements are reshaped into something meaningful. Artifice isn't a threat to our humanity—it's part of it. The challenge isn't to preserve a myth of pure invention but to keep reworking it generously, truthfully, and alive.
Consider a father preparing a wedding toast—a moment full of vulnerability. The temptation to let AI write it is real: a machine can produce something moving in seconds. The risk isn't abstract inauthenticity—it's distancing. He trades the effort and anxiety of expression for the smoothness of a script.
What's lost isn't just originality but the meaning that comes from grappling with the moment—from a trembling voice or imperfect phrase that reveals connection. The danger is self-erasure: the gradual atrophy of our capacity to act, judge, and engage.
Agency has always been mediated—by language, tools, institutions, traditions. The issue isn't mediation but structure: whether our tools invite skill and improvisation or render us passive.
When privacy erodes, so does creative reworking. Association and candid speech depend on spaces shielded from constant scrutiny. Public opinion splits into what people think and what they dare say.
Artistic freedom faces a similar tension. Poet Dean Young calls art "a hunger, a revolt, a tantrum, a grief, a hoax"—acts that thrive only when thought can wander unobserved. Jacques Ellul, in The Technological Society, reminds us that machines are necessary. The danger lies in the "aims and results" we choose. Freedom, he writes, "is not static but dynamic… a prize to be won again and again."
That prize now depends on rules for provenance, consent, and compensation. The same tools that drive creativity can also strip creators and communities of agency if unchecked.
Originality today—as ever—means fusing insight with the tools already at hand, while privacy keeps us answerable. Art is never ex nihilo; it thrives on recasting what exists, jolting the familiar awake. (Postmodern originality: when the simulacrum blushes.)
The question isn't whether tools will shape us but whether we'll shape them. The crisis of modernity lies in allowing reason and science to dominate rather than remaining answerable to human judgment, leaving room for improvisation and real presence.
Notes and reading
René Magritte (1898-1967) - painting, The Empire of Light. - “Everything we see hides another thing; we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.” - A Life (2021).
Dean Young, poet, The Art of Recklessness (2010): "Art is the act of making choices in a charged field."
> I am indebted to my niece, poet Sarah Green, for introducing me to Young. Sarah is the author of an April 2025 release, The Deletions (Editor’s Choice, Akron Poetry Prize), and a previous collection, Earth Science. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Paris Review, New Ohio Review, 32 Poems, FIELD, Copper Nickel, Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. A two-time Pushcart Prize winner, she is an Associate Professor of English at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota.
“Nothing” is alive.
The void in the universe is a charged field. Emptiness sings—a harmony underpinning reality. - Otto von Guericke (German scientist & politician, 1654), quoted in “The Remarkable Emptiness of Existence,” Nautilus (Jan 4, 2023).
Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life - Tiffany Jenkins (2025). Jenkins is a cultural historian whose opinion pieces have appeared in The Guardian, The Observer, The Financial Times, The Scotsman, and The Spectator.
The Anxiety of Influence - Harold Bloom (1973). “Originality” is not ex nihilo invention, but a creative misinterpretation of what came before. The same dynamic now governs how we fashion our lives in an age fixated on authenticity.
Sincerity and Authenticity - Lionel Trilling (1972). How being “authentic” became a moral and aesthetic imperative that underpins modern notions of the self and originality.
The Creativity Code: Art and Innovation in the Age of AI - Marcus du Sautoy (2019). Du Sautoy, an Oxford mathematician, distinguishes between rule-based imitation and genuine innovation.
The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values - Brian Christian (2020). AI isn’t going to end the world. The problem is how to “align” machine behavior with human values, a conundrum we have been trying and mostly failing to solve since the invention of the cotton gin.
“Future Nostalgia” - Lauren Oyler (Harper’s Magazine, April 2022). How nostalgia for “authenticity” can cloud our judgment about new tools. Why the promise of total connection threatens genuine agency. (Oyler frames these themes through her reading of Jennifer Egan’s speculative memory-sharing technology in The Candy House.)
Lastly – “The original tech right power player on A.I., Mars, and immortality.” A critically balanced look at Peter Thiel. I share the sharp concerns many of you raise, yet Thiel’s influence on AI and the future is too significant to ignore. The New York Times’s Ross Douthat, in a newly released transcribed interview, treats him with cross-partisan respect and covers the whole shooting match.
Tip-Off #214 - Divine Comedy, Gloomy Prophet
Tip-Off #213 - Written in Stone: Broken at Birth
Timely indeed! Thank you.