Four-Star Thoughts

Remember 2012? In some circles, there was talk of a galactic alignment, a rare formation when our solar system crossed into the "galactic plane" and was at the center of our galaxy. There, in the "photon belt," we received a massive infusion of light, opening channels to higher realms of awareness.

I don't know if that happened, but I remember that when I heard it, I decided to keep track of my awareness to see if I shifted. Cute, I know.

I started to write everything down. Okay, I mean type everything, every thought that came to me that felt significant. Feeling significant was the only criterion, and it generated about a thousand pages of text (single-spaced, Times New Roman, 10-pt font).

Nestled within these words is about ten pages worth of content that is flagged with an asterisk, sometimes two, three, or four. These bits represent when my skin shivered as the thought processed through my physical body, as if metabolizing the innermost truths of my unfurling consciousness.

The file is my master repository. A collection of personal reflections, story premises, philosophical observations, and academic notes exploring the interconnected nature of human experience, belief, and creativity. These words have since turned into research papers, manuscripts, birthday cards, and lesson plans. They're about faith and doubt, the evolution of belief, personal relationships with divinity, consciousness, living, learning, and loving. They thread together a collection of mentally disparate ideas, binding them.

They are the primordial soup of my creative, intellectual, and spiritual evolution. My origin story.

For years, I've Ctrl+F-ed my way through the file, searching terms, cutting and pasting into a new document full of every bit I could find on whatever I was writing about. Gravity or WJ (shorthand for William James) or LIFAI (good luck untangling that). The problem is that they're written in a dialect that is hard to decipher, sometimes in other languages.

Just look at this first asterisk:

story p*Corp Affair* Just when u had >> u dec. don’t need it. Lens=What false B was I holding? (=I need any/them). Let go rocks.

At some point, I started to codify myself, and it did help. “Story p," short for premise, I how I tagged an idea that was meant to become a story, or the tell version of what I'd later show in writing. Corporate Affairs is a book I wrote during NaNoWriMo (remember NaNoWriMo?). The story is a commentary on corrupt corporate structures and the hierarchical nature of sexual harassment, where the protagonist is held emotionally hostage and creates a vast alternate reality to escape to. The protagonist “has so much” in the sense that they justify that their career is advancing, they’re earning their worth, but they don’t need it because it is devouring the moral fiber of their being. I noted to show this through the lens of false beliefs, which I was studying in grad school, researching the Cognitive Science of Religion. Spoiler alert: they didn't need any of them, whoever they were. And “Let go of the rocks” is a reference to a motivational talk during high school. The speaker told the story of an ape that was trapped with its arm in a heavy clay pot. The pot had rocks inside of it, and the ape reached its slim-fingered hand and slender wrist in, grabbed the rocks, and would not let them go. It was captured.

One man’s rocks are another ape’s treasure.

Another example:

*stmt. fusion sci.art. wrtg. What I mean is, in ref. to the res. and held in context by a creative rendition…how wrtr tranx the res. into something crtv

You see the issue now.

What the hell was I talking about?

Okay, it’s a statement. I’d have to read the preceding text to fully understand its value, and not just the entry above it, oh no, that is not how my brain works. I can leave an idea for pages at a time and then come back to it with just these small references that I was completely tuned into at the time but that I’ve since lost the trail. Looking at it, I know it’s gold, but it would take a lot of time to procure its secrets.

But I want to. I want to source its code. To map the file’s contents into recurring metaphors and working hypotheses. Not just to possess them but to make them useful without all of the work of recontextualizing and editing. I want to reissue what was once a fever, this blueprint. To "tranx the res.” into something creative, map out this intangible constellation of ideas.

This was 2012. Remember 2012? Before all of this.

You know what I mean. This digital era. This AI hype. This collective fear of machine-cannibalized creativity and an automated rethreading of the social fabric.

The quality of pre-AI thoughts is pure. Ironically, their purity is also what deemed them as good data to feed the machine.

So what did I do in my online Humanities in the AI Age class? The one I'm taking to advance my knowledge and skillset? To survive the job market? The one where I'm learning to work with AI, create data, and do research on AI to avoid succumbing to the gendered gap in viable post-AI careers? The one that empowers me to skew this beast toward my needs to help create the goddamn equity myself?

I used the machine to build a small language model and organize my file.

It's local. Private. Contained.

It's not a beastly model, scraping your data all the livelong day, reinforcing systemic racism. Not a large-scale version that promotes gender bias or upholds surveillance capitalism. It's not at billions of fingertips. It's not positioned for profit. It's for the user. It's not to monetize our emotions in the name of tech advancement or feed us the illusion of neutrality while invisibly amplifying misogyny and privatized creativity, cloaked in false claims of democracy that only flatten the human spirit into data and then sell it back to us in a freemium subscription plan.

It's not that guy.

Every class, we learn how to survive this period of great uncertainty. How to work with the tools that threaten our economic existence. How to reap what small harvest we may from the fields of forced adaptation in a field we never thought we'd be in. How to inspire ourselves and others to resist erasure in systems designed to forget us and reclaim authorship in an age of automation. How to keep our quills at the forefront of our vulnerable industries.

We can take back what was mined without consent and take advantage of what helps without hurting. Small language models process text locally, so your data isn’t shared with to massive servers. They let you play with creative augmentation without feeding big corporations or reinforcing large-scale biases. They can be tools without being exploitative. Their knowledge is small and narrow, with an appetite only for what you feed it. You are the chef, the human user who decides what it consumes and why and how.

But what do I know? I’m just a writer, standing in front of a reader, asking them to love what I’ve made from my words.

I know that during week 13 of class, I knew enough to create a free repository to communicate with an agentic coding program that transformed my nonsensical notes into textual existence and grouped them by their theme. I know this is one of a thousand ideas I could've tried that week.

Consider yourself implored. It's time for your 13-year booster shot to reinvigorate that 2012 love beam injection. Embrace the era; it's here to stay. Invest in your human skills, for these, too, are pure, grown before all of this. Put your tech where your art is and get creating. Gain confidence in the tools that scare you, and hold tight to your intrinsic value.

The galactic plane people might say, it's time to stand in the light of your creative force. At one point, I said it's time to:

"Ven the cav w/ the fats & put ur tools2use. What ru+@? What pt. of being + if ur not gonna?"

That small, local model I built read my files, extended my shorthand, corrected my mechanical errors, and contextualized my references. Now, my words are ready to be deployed into works of pure art.

"Come out of the cave with the Fates and put your tools to use. What are you good at? What's the point of being good at it if you're not going to do it?"

*Reskilling is my starred rebellion.