Preachers at the beach

No indie website is complete without bad poetry. I live in a coastal town burdened with seasonal holiday crowds, we have nice beaches, and in summer the demographics shift. A bit old-man-yells-at-cloud, this is a reflection on our current AI summer and crowded beaches.

Everyone’s at the beach this AI summer.

During the cold and dark of winter the beach had a different feel. You would find the ever-present, die-hard ocean swimmers, the most passionate of the AI beach denizens, living for the hard grind of chasing understanding in choppy waters. Mostly it’s a slow game, punctuated by the occasional reflection of insight glimpsed in the deep.

Then you’d find the fishermen, a day-job for some of the swimmers, fishing just off the pier where the effluent pipes flow from industry. They gut what they catch, feeding the fillets to the factories of supply and demand; it becomes the meal-ticket mulch of market liquidity, operational efficiency and clicks-per-impression. Mostly, the fish are small and polluted with practicality.

Occasionally, you’d catch a university boat out there, following the swimmers around. They fish and swim, but mostly they write detailed letters comparing the size of their finds. Sometimes the letters talk about what they’ve seen, some even talk about the daring adventure required to see it, so that others may join their fun.

The big tech boats are out there too, writing letters to boast, all tall tales; they never spill the secrets.

That’s all you’d find in the winter months.

But now it’s summer, and the activity explodes.

Big tech super-yachts dominate the bay, the swimmers recruited to their crews. The fishermen, with suddenly bigger remits and larger reels, cast toward the horizon. The next generation of swimmers finds their fins. The shallows are packed with people having a splash, and it’s a riot.

But after a while, something shifts. I know the winter lot, and the summer crowd are swell, but when the preachers arrive, everything goes to hell.

One preaches a monster beneath the waves that will kill us all should it surface. Another says the Leviathan is our saviour, that serving the beast will bring human heaven, watched over by a singularly spectacular fish of love and grace. Still another swears they saw a reflection of themselves in the deep, one that would obviously need rights should it surface. Others take strange comfort in the uncanny, looking for a bridge between now and their strangest dreams.

Still, something is clear: nobody really knows what swims down there. When the summer is over and the frivolity fades, the hope is that the mystery is different, and deeper, than it is today.

It could be we burn and spend all that we are, serving a God who would swallow a star. Or maybe we find the fish of all fish, beginning the age of post-scarcity bliss. More likely we end up somewhere between, the preachers find their robot slave-wives and campaign for their very specific rights, and we’re all just left to swim as we please. One way or the other, the summer will end soon.