Rachel Haywire: the edge of the avant-garde

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

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On this episode of "Unsupervised Learning," Razib talks to Rachel Haywire, who writes at Cultural Futurist. Haywire is the author of Acidexia and began her career in futurism as an event planner for the Singularity Institute. She got her start as part of the "right-brain" faction around the Bay Area transhumanist and futurist scene circa 2010. Currently, she is working on starting an art gallery in New York City that serves as an event space for avant-garde creators who are not encumbered by mainstream or "woke" cultural sensibilities.

Haywire recounts her experience as a creator in the early 2010s in the Bay Area and the transition from a socially libertarian milieu where diverse groups mixed freely to one more defined by a progressive cultural script, with the threat of cancel culture beginning to be noticeable. She points to the 2013 cancellation of Pax Dickinson for edgy tweets as a turning point. Razib and Haywire also allude to the role that the reclusive accelerationist philosopher Nick Land played in seeding certain ideas and influencing movements like the Dark Enlightenment.

Jumping to the present, Haywire now lives in New York City, and she addresses the Dimes Square scene centered around the neighborhood in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Haywire points out that the actual artistic production from Dimes Square luminaries is quite low, with an almost total lack of music and a focus on online personas. Her goal with her salons and soon-to-open gallery is to put the emphasis on art above politics or e-celebrity culture.

Finally, Razib discusses the impact of AI on creativity and whether it will abolish the artist. Haywire believes that AI is just another tool and has had mixed success leveraging it for her own artistic works in areas like industrial music. She believes that the real use of AI will be to create drafts and prototypes that artists will have to polish and reshape so that they reflect human creativity rather than just some averaged algorithm.

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