Why doesn’t Social Distortion, the legendary punk band shaped by deep rockabilly nostalgia, have a memoir?
That thought has been stuck in my mind in a loop since Social Distortion canceled their concert at the Masonic Center, which was to take place on my birthday. Every time I go to a bookstore, I ask for a Social Distortion or Mike Ness book. They deserve a memoir with the same respect as “Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs” by John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon about the Sex Pistols or “Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotten Vegetables, The Early Years” by Alex Ogg.
The last time I went to Bound Together, the anarchist bookstore in Lower Haight here in San Francisco, I asked again for a Social Distortion book. Since they didn’t have one, I picked up “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” by Philip K. Dick, the father of the capitalist dystopia and the real Nostradamus. Going back to the cyberpunk classics should be an obligatory diet, especially these days.
Later, the Amazon algorithm’s synthetic magic recommended a book called “Social Distortion: Biography.” However, the reviews are terrible, just one star. In the comments, users describe the book as “shit generated by AI,” and one particular comment says the book repeatedly refers to the lead singer as a “her,” even though fans know Mike Ness is a man, or at least is recognized as a man, and should be referred to with “him.”
According to the article “How A.I. Books Sneak Their Way Into Stores” by Alexandra Alter, published in The New York Times last June, self-published books on Amazon with software Pangram to detect whether the content was created by AI. Apparently, it is the most accurate and reliable technology linked to the progressive idea of comfort produces laziness and lack of humanity.
Dick was probably the most visionary science fiction writer of his time. He understood the risks in the evolution of technology, including developments in AI and the consequences of addiction to it. This includes addiction to creating whatever type of content or art using pre-standardized patterns, as well as the search for truth. That’s the reason people ask large language models like ChatGPT for everything, from math problems and historical dates to book analyses and interpersonal conflicts, and are satisfied with the first answer.
According to Dick, that could be the field for distorting reality, where humans ask AI whether, for instance, a novel was written by AI.
Does that mean we now need to prove our human vulnerability and sensibility, our curiosity, frustration, sweat, desire, sadness or hope in front of AI software, with all its programming errors? Can AI describe the orgasmic experience of seeing Social Distortion live on stage, with the riffs destroying our ears, in the middle of the ecstasy of the moshpit, sweat and tears?
In the final pages of the novel, the human and AI realities collide. The only way to survive is through pleasure, and fewer humans can feel it.
