I. In Ballad of the White Horse, G.K. Chesterton describes the Virgin Mary: Her face was like an open word When brave men speak and choose, The very colours of her coat Were better than good news. Why the colors of her coat? The medievals took their dyes very seriously. This was before modern chemistry, so you had to try hard if you wanted good colors. Try hard they did; they famously used literal gold, hammered into ultrathin sheets, to make golden highlights. Blue was another tough one. You could do mediocre, half-faded blues with azurite. But if you wanted perfect blue, the color of the heavens on a clear evening, you needed ultramarine. Here is the process for getting ultramarine. First, go to Afghanistan. Keep in mind, you start in England or France or wherever. Afghanistan is four thousand miles away. Your path takes you through tall mountains, burning deserts, and several dozen Muslim countries that are still pissed about the whole Crusades thing. Still alive? Climb 7,000 feet through the mountains of Kuran Wa Munjan until you reach the mines of Sar-i-Sang. There, in a freezing desert, the wretched of the earth work themselves to an early grave breaking apart the rocks of Badakhshan to produce a few hundred kilograms per year of blue stone - the only lapis lazuli production in the known world. Buy the stone and retrace your path through the burning deserts and vengeful Muslims until you’re back in England or France or wherever. Still alive? That was the easy part. Now you need to go through a chemical extraction process that makes the Philosopher's Stone look like freshman chem lab. "The lengthy process of pulverization, sifting, and washing to produce ultramarine makes the natural pigment … roughly ten times more expensive than the stone it came from." Finally you have ultramarine! How much? I can’t find good numbers, but Claude estimates that the ultramarine production of all of medieval Europe was around the order of 30 kg per year - not enough to paint a medium-sized wall. Ultramarine had to be saved for ultra-high-value applications. In practice, the medievals converged on a single use case - painting the Virgin Mary’s coat. Madonna and Child, by Filippino Lippi To us moderns, this seems bizarrely specific. But the Catholic Church had united Europe in a single symbolic language, with lots of rules like "this style is only used for such-and-such a saint”. Within this context, “ultramarine = Virgin Mary’s coat” was a normal piece of symbolic vocabulary. The Catholic Church did this because it worked. Joe Peasant would go to the festival, and his lord and lady would be wearing lovely blue robes, but the blue would always be very slightly faded. He’d go off to war, and the knights would have beautiful blue banners, but still, not quite right. Then he would go to church, and there would be a painting of the Virgin Mary, and there - and only there! - the perfect Platonic blue of Heaven would be translated down to Earth. And he would think, yeah, okay, this is the true religion. In the 19th century, a German man named Christian Gmelin discovered the process of producing synthetic ultramarine. And in the 1960s, French artist Yves Klein came up with a new synthetic ultramarine that he thought was even bluer. This being the 1960s, Klein leveraged his invention into a bunch of entirely blue paintings - literally, he just painted an entire canvas blue and hung it in a gallery - which caused various scandals and counterscandals and discourse. It’s pretty, but is is art? Klein was a provocateur, and I’m no art historian, so don’t let me tell you what he actually meant by his all-blue paintings. But one thing he could have meant was a callback to all the medieval merchants and monks and miners; everyone who died to get a few drops of ultramarine back to Europe so the Virgin’s robes could be perfectly celestially blue. “Look!” say Klein’s paintings. “Now we’re so rich, so blessed, that I can paint an entire canvas with the perfect blue of the heavens. I can use more blue than the total yearly output of medieval Europe, just so a couple of passers-by can frown and secretly wish that paintings still looked like stuff.” This painting tears me apart. I - confession - am the type of person who, after hearing the story of Afghanistan and Sar-i-Sang and medieval European art economics - would be tempted to buy lapis lazuli and stare at it longingly, trying to recapture the awe that Joe Peasant must have felt staring at the Virgin’s coat. But I’m also the type of person who, if I ran across Klein in a gallery, would frown and secretly wish that paintings still looked like stuff. Should I feel bad about this? A few stanzas later in Ballad Of The White Horse, the Virgin calls out those sophisticates who have lost the ability to innocently enjoy things: The wise men know all evil things Under the twisted trees, Where the perverse in pleasure pine And men are weary of green wine And sick of crimson seas If I can frown and walk past a canvas painted in pure ultramarine, would I also grow weary of green wine and crimson seas? If I went to Heaven, surely the first few days would be pretty great. But would I eventually walk past golden mountains and silver trees and crystal ships on crimson seas with the same nonchalance with which I walk past granite mountains / wooden trees / etc today? I know the neurology behind tolerance and accommodation as well as anyone. We’re not designed to be as delighted by the thousandth sunrise as the first. It’s no sin to be able to live a normal life instead of sitting paralyzed by the dazzling variety of beauty all around me. Still, it feels like there ought to be some virtue of innocence, some sense in which we try not to help along our own cynicism, or at the very least we don’t drag the more-naturally-gifted-with-innocence down with us. I sometimes imagine Heaven as a place of green wine, crimson seas, and golden mountains. Everyone goes there, good and bad alike. And if you still have enough innocence in your soul to enjoy things, then great, you’re in Heaven and presumably you have a good time. And if instead you’re one of those people who constitutionally hates everything, then you spend eternity writing thinkpieces with titles like “Can We As A Society Finally Shut Up About Golden Mountains?” or “Do The Wrong Type Of People Like Crimson Seas Too Much?”, and God and the Devil both agree that this counts as sufficient punishment. II. Erik Hoel has a new post, Can We As A Society Finally Shut Up About Golden Mountains . . . no, sorry! It’s actually called Welcome To The Semantic Apocalypse. Hoel is writing about the new “Ghiblification” trend, where people use OpenAI’s new art model to make photos look like Studio Ghibli anime. Hoel can’t resist Ghiblifying his own (adorable) children: …but he is also deeply worried: That picture of my kids reading together above, which is from a real photo—I exclaimed in delight when it appeared in the chat window like magic. So I totally get it. It’s a softer world when you have Ghibli glasses on. But by the time I made the third picture, it was less fun. A creeping sadness set in [...] While ChatGPT can’t pull off a perfect Miyazaki copy, it doesn’t really matter. The semantic apocalypse doesn’t require AI art to be exactly as good as the best human art. You just need to flood people with close-enough creations such that the originals feel less meaningful ... Many people are reporting that their mental relationship to art is changing; that as fun as it is to Ghibli-fy at will, something fundamental has been cheapened about the original [...] This is what I fear most about AI, at least in the immediate future. Not some superintelligence that eats the world (it can’t even beat Pokémon yet, a game many of us conquered at ten). Rather, a less noticeable apocalypse. Culture following the same collapse as community on the back of a whirring compute surplus of imitative power provided by Silicon Valley. An oversupply that satiates us at a cultural level, until we become divorced from the semantic meaning and see only the cheap bones of its structure. Once exposed, it’s a thing you have no relation to, really. Just pixels. Just syllables. In some order, yes. But who cares? Every weekend, my son gets to pick out one movie to watch with his little sister. It’s always Totoro. The Studio Ghibli classic. Arguably, the studio’s best movie. It’s also their slowest one, more a collection of individual scenes than anything else. Green growth and cicada whines and the specter of death amid life, haunting the movie in a way children can’t possibly understand, because it never appears. No one dies, or even gets close. For my kids, it’s just about a sibling pair, one so similar to themselves, and their fun adventures. But an adult can see the threat of death as the shadow opposite of the verdant Japanese countryside, in the exact same way that, in the movie, only children can see the forest spirit Totoro. The movie’s execution is an age-reversed mirror of its plot. And for this, I love it too . . . This weekend I will watch with them, and feel more distant from it than I did before. Totoro will just be more Ghibli. As I read Hoel’s post, I thought of ultramarine blue. But also, I thought of the first phonographic records. In 1890, hearing Enrico Caruso sing Pagliacci might be the highlight of your life, the crowning glory of a months-long trip to Italy and back. By 1910, you could hear Enrico Caruso without leaving your house. You could hear him twenty times a day if you wanted. The real thing in Naples would just be more Caruso. And I thought of computer monitors. If you wanted to see Lippi’s Madonna and Child when it was first painted in 1490, you would have to go to Florence and convince Lorenzo de Medici to let you in his house. Now you can see a dozen Lippi paintings in a sitting by typing their names into Wikipedia - something you never do. Why would you? They’re just more Lippi. And what about cameras? A whole industry of portraits, landscapes, cityscapes - totally destroyed. If you wanted to know what Paris looked like, no need to choose between Manet’s interpretation or Beraud’s interpretation or anyone else’s - just glance at a photo. A Frenchman with a camera could generate a hundred pictures of Paris a day, each as cold and perspectiveless as mathematical truth. The artists, defeated, retreated into Impressionism, or Cubism, or painting a canvas entirely blue and saying it represented Paris in some deeper sense. You could still draw the city true-to-life if you wanted. But it would just be more Paris. Even the places themselves start to feel cheap, unearned. Medieval pilgrims would brave dangerous sea voyages to reach Jerusalem, then go into such fits of rapture that some of them would have seizures on the spot, or speak in tongues, or run off to a monastery and spend the rest of their life in contemplative prayer. I visited Jerusalem once. As holy cities go, I would describe it as cleaner than Benares but not quite as cool as Bodh Gaya. I stayed three days, then took off to Tel Aviv to see the architecture (which sucked). Are these semantic apocalypses? What if they are? It would be facile to say that, just because technology has threatened our sense of meaning before, we shouldn’t worry when technology threatens our sense of meaning today. Some of the past apocalypses were genuinely bad. The semantic satiation of the previous forms gave us modern art and architecture, hardly known for their broad-based appeal. Do we really want Studio Ghibli anime to go the way of paintings that look like stuff? When I contemplate these questions, I encounter a paradox. I acknowledge that my inability to marvel at a live Caruso opera in Naples has cost me something deep and beautiful. But I cannot wish that the phonograph was never invented. Does the increased variety and quantity of music compensate for the decreased profundity of each musical experience? Surely this is part of it, but I would never accept this excuse in other areas that have not yet been cheapened. A thousand moderately pleasant one-night-stands cannot equal one passionate love affair. Maybe Progress repays us with interest for every medium it takes? Without mass-produced, mass-transmissible images, music, and bright colors, we couldn’t have Studio Ghibli. Dare we hope that, if anime becomes too cheap to appreciate, that very cheapness will open the door to new forms of art? But why should this always be true? If AI is better than all human artists, and you can run 100,000 inference copies at 10x serial speed in a data center, then why should anything be non-cheap ever again? None of these sound fully convincing. Instead, maybe we must admit that we are relocating novelty and adventure from individual engagements with art, to the arc of history itself. Our generation will never know the once-in-a-life pleasure of hearing Caruso sing in Naples. But we will get the once-in-a-life pleasure of speaking to a generative AI for the first time. We could protect the magic of the Jerusalem pilgrimage by banning air travel, but it would be a fake and flimsy sort of magic, a sort of enforced perpetual civilizational childhood. What about the magic of seeing the clouds from above? Or the moon landing? III. We have recontextualized the semantic apocalypse from a one-time problem with GPT-4 to a recurrent historical pattern of technology undermining the uniqueness of art. But maybe we should zoom out further. This isn’t just about art. Technology breeds hedonic adaptation, and hedonic adaptation undermines everything. My lack of appreciation for ultramarine dye is of the same kind as my lack of appreciation for not dying of cholera. Or for coffee - an ordinary latte might blend beans from Ethiopia, Ghana, and Suriname with sugar from Brazil and vanilla from a rare orchid found only in Madagascar; by now, it’s so unbearably boring that you can find dozens of Reddit threads asking how to spruce it up, make it feel new again. We gripe about how LLMs are destroying wonder, never thinking about how we’re speaking to an alien intelligence made by etching strange sigils on a tiny glass wafer on a mountainous jungle island off the coast of China, then converting every book ever written into electricity and blasting them through the sigils at near-light-speed. It’s all amazing, and we’re bored to death of all of it. This has hitherto been slow enough to tolerate, but strong AI will make it all worse. You will see wonders beyond your imagination, nod, think “that’s a cool wonder”, and become inured to it. In the process, everything else that matters will wither away. If you get meaning from your job, the AI will take your job. If you get meaning from helping others, the AI will end poverty and cure cancer without your help. If you get meaning from your community, too bad - your friends are hanging out with AI sexbots now. It’ll all be great, of course. The AI taking your job means you never have to write another PowerPoint slide again; you can sit at the beach all day, sipping tropical cocktails. The AI ending poverty will be the best thing that ever happened. The sexbots . . . do you really need me to keep selling you on these? It’ll all be perfect forever, and you’ll spend the whole time writing Substack articles with titles like “Can We As A Society Finally Shut Up About The Wonders Beyond Our Imagination?” and “Do The Wrong Type Of People Like Cancer Cures Too Much?” Is there any hope? Something bothers me about the whole semantic apocalypse framing. It focuses too much on the social level, denies personal agency. Yes, we as a culture are post- some semantic apocalypse where listening to the great symphonies of the past has become so easy that we never do it. But you, as an individual, could do it right now. You could type “Mozart symphony” into YouTube and see what happens. G.K. Chesterton wrote lots of stuff about how if you were really holy and paying attention, then the thousandth sunset would be just as beautiful as the first. I used to interpret this as some kind of meaningless faux-profound slogan. Then I read his biography of William Blake - which made me ask myself, for the first time - what if William Blake was just describing his experience completely accurately? “When the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea? O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.” I know this sounds crazy, but there’s so much stuff like this, and he’s so consistent; Chesterton sort of suggests that maybe he is actually, literally, seeing the innumerable company of the heavenly host. And the ease with which Chesterton navigates this interpretation - the way he makes it the most natural thing in the world - made me wonder - what if Chesterton is also just describing his experience completely accurately? The thousandth sunset thing is so prominent in his works, and he never expresses any embarrassment about it, never says anything like “a saint would be able to do this, although of course I cannot”. If anything, the mood is one of mild exasperation that nobody listens to him. This sort of thing would make complete neurological sense - it’s just an increase in the precision of sensory evidence relative to top-down priors. Young children do it naturally - as any parent can tell you after having to read their one-year-old the same book for the thousandth time. Any adult can replicate it with five milligrams of psilocybin or a few dozen hours of samatha meditation. Who’s to say you can’t get it through genetics? Or through being very holy? Chesterton’s answer to the semantic apocalypse is to will yourself out of it. If you can’t enjoy My Neighbor Totoro after seeing too many Ghiblified photos, that’s a skill issue. Keep watching sunsets until each one becomes as beautiful as the first (the secret is that the innumerable company of the heavenly host sings in a slightly different key each time). I support Erik Hoel’s crusade to chart some society-level solution to the semantic apocalypse problem. You’re not allowed to say “skill issue” to society-level problems, because some people won’t have the skill; that’s why they invented the word “systemic”. But your personal relationship to the meaning in your life is not a society-level problem. While Erik Hoel works on the systemic issue, you should be thinking of your own individual soul. If you insist that anything too common, anything come by too cheaply, must be boring, then all the wonders of the Singularity cannot save you. You will grow weary of green wine and sick of crimson seas. But if you can bring yourself to really pay attention, to see old things for the first time, then you can combine the limitless variety of modernity with the awe of a peasant seeing an ultramarine mural - or the delight of a 2025er Ghiblifying photos. My group house’s holiday picture. I don’t really have that many kids, but GPT is an lmpressionist - it depicts how things feel from the inside, not how they really are. People say AI art isn’t art because it doesn’t mean anything. But I think it means the same thing as Lippi’s Madonna: unless you become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.