average dead average

by Michael Templeton

To weigh in on the subject of AI is inherently difficult for a long list of reasons. The technology itself is complex, but I would venture that even more complex is the fact that we are talking about a technology that insinuates itself into the deepest reaches of our most essential being, assuming we have such a thing as an essential being. In any case, a technological system that appears to have the capacity to perform tasks in ways that are indistinguishable from things that only human are capable is by definition an extremely dangerous prospect. At the same time, to not weigh in on AI cannot be seen as just cautious and careful. It is quietism since this technology does exist, and its reach and capacities grow with every passing day. Every image, every word, every click and share—everything that is entered into the digital realms, which is now our entire lives—all all watched and studied by technological systems that learn from these things. With everything they learn, the become better at what they do, and they become better at learning. We are already seeing AI content online that we cannot tell from human content. What is more, AI is already ubiquitous. We cannot get away from it. The masters of the digital have insinuated AI into things we already use so that all our online tasks are now plugged into AI in some way. I do the most innocuous Google search, and I do not even notice in the course of getting an answer to my embarrassingly simply question that the answer comes from an AI bot. There it at the top of the page: the AI answer to when the Wright Brothers first flew a powered airplane at Kitty Hawk (it was 1903). Once upon a time, I would have looked this up in my World Book Encyclopedia.

There are, of course, deep philosophical questions that come with AI. What are we to make of a non-human entity that is purported to think, that is alleged to think just like a human being thinks? This then leads us to start asking what we mean by thinking. In asking this question, we are inevitably led to Martin Heidegger who tells us a great many things in his essay “What Calls for Thinking” in which he first re-frames the question. For Heidegger, in order to answer the question, what is called thinking, we need to ask what calls for thinking? The answer is that “what calls us wants itself to be thought about according to its essence. What calls on us to think demands for itself that it be tended, cared for, husbanded in its own essential being, by thought” (Heidegger. 2008). Notice the very human language of care and nurturing in relation to the most complex analysis of thinking. What calls on us to think, to be thought in its essence, was, for Heidegger, something within the human. Even if we allow for the possibility that the essential being that calls on us to think has its origin in a divinity, in God, we must still maintain the humanity in this since God has always addressed himself to humanity. The problem, and all the questions, are in essence, human problems and human questions. With the emergence of AI, this is no longer the case, which means we must now ask another question: Why would we create/invent a technological system that does what only we can do? What purpose does this serve? I understand that we wanted machines to do our dirty work, to do the boring shit no one wants to do. A fully automated drive-through is understandable. A digital dishwasher makes sense. But why would we want an electronic system to generate ideas, poems, paintings, music, dances... What possible good does this do for anyone? I thought we liked to do these things. This, then, becomes the real question, it seems to me. Why do we want AI to do things that people like to do, and the answer is not a happy prospect.

Giorgio Agamben points out that AI places intelligence into the hands of the stupid. This is part of our answer. AI makes it possible for the unintelligent to do intelligent things. The stupid are now capable of performing tasks that once demanded an intelligent and creative person. The way things always worked is that people needed the talents of others to accomplish certain things that few of us could do. People want houses and other buildings therefore they needed architects. Architects are, technically speaking, artists (they throw off the average when the government works out the average wage for artists. Look it up. It ends up being about 40 grand, but that is because they include architects). If you wanted a magnificent painting, you had to hire an artist. To get great writing, you needed a writer. Now, with AI, you do not need any of these people. Just plug in the correct terms into your generative AI system, and shazam! Houses, paintings, texts! It’s all just content anymore anyway. Thinking, intelligence, has always been fundamentally human. The only reason to produce artificial thinking and intelligence is to remove the human, and that is just exactly what they are doing, and by “they” I mean the great oligarchs of the Twenty-first Century who demand everything to be the way they want it to be.

Millions upon millions of us say over and over again that we do not want AI, but it is now everywhere. No matter how much we say we do not want it, we still get it. It is like unwanted dick pics. No one should have to explain to some creep that they do not want to see a photo of his dick. In the same way, no one should need to take complicated steps with all of our technological devices to disable systems we never asked for in the first place. This leads us ask another question: Why are the money gods so adamant about ramming AI down our throats? Don’t they have enough money and enough ways of getting more money? The answer here is even more disturbing. Long ago Karl Marx wrote, in an almost tangential way, about something called the general intellect. In the Grundrisse, Marx takes on the issue of automation for the factory worker. In this section he explains that “the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect,” and these conditions and this process consists primarily of “the power of knowledge” (Marx. 1972). The conditions and processes of intelligence, creativity, and knowledge all lie in the hands of people—human beings, and as long as this remains the case, the money gods, no matter how much money they have, will always need us. With the rise of AI, they have finally found a way to cut us out entirely. Well... almost entirely.

AI has already found its way into education at both ends. A recent essay in Current Affairs reveals the ways AI has taken over the work of students as they are the first to master ChatGPT to generate all their term papers and other work, while the university itself has been anxious to hand over the entirety of the teaching system to AI systems that can allow them to cut faculty and even entire departments (Purser. 2025). The justifications from places like the University of California system, one of the nation’s largest, is that the university system needs to “optimize” itself for the times. In other words, the university has come under the neoliberal control of contemporary corporate thought. Purser explains further: “Inside the institution, the corporate idiom trickles down through administrative memos and patronizing emails. Under the guise of ‘fiscal sustainability’ (a friendlier way of saying ‘cuts’), administrators sharpen their scalpels to restructure the university in accordance with efficiency metrics instead of educational purpose” (Current Affairs. 2025). The university, which one can easily argue is the very repository of knowledge in our world, now functions in the manner of the corporate gods who gave us AI in the first place. The system has captured the system of knowledge production and transmission, yoked this to its intelligence machines, and transformed it into the thing that captured it in the first place. All of this is precisely the way AI functions in the world. Absorb the modes of the general intellect, learn the way the general intellect functions, and remove the system that holds the general intellect. In the final analysis, the system that holds the general intellect is the human being who thinks.

 In all this, we need to never lose sight of Agamben’s observation from the beginning. AI puts intelligence into the hands of the stupid. Even if we are not necessarily talking about the stupid, we are at least talking about a kind of bare minimum intelligence necessary to attain the desired goal, which is to guide AI to the point at which it can perform the basic functions of the general intellect without the human wherein the general intellect resides. To do this, they do not need Michelangelo, or Shakespeare, or Frank Lloyd Wright; all they need are images that sell, stories that sell, and buildings that sell. This has always been the process, and the tendency toward the mediocre and banal has always been the case. Our movies are all franchise crap. Our music is all computerized sound images. Houses all look completely identical, and few people notice because expectations and the capacity to discern is numbed right along with the dead average that comes with every step toward mass production. AI will only further this project of rendering everything a function of a dead average. The information superhighway is creating for the mind the same thing the automobile superhighway created for life itself. The interstate system led to the creation of a vast sprawl of nothingness that is modern American suburban sprawl; a world in which everything is exactly the same in every direction and everything exists for the sole purpose of consumption.

The similarities between the internet an AI and the interstate system as astounding. Both were developed not for the betterment of human life but for a more effective military and a more effective capacity for war. The modern interstate system was developed after World War II as a way of transporting military equipment in preparation for World War III. After seeing the ways Nazi Germany made such effective use of the Autobahn, American generals pushed for a system in which the entire nation could be transformed into a weapon of war. Thus, the federal Highway Act of 1956, an initiative of the Eisenhower Administration, was born after the great military minds explained: “The national military establishment considers a relatively small ‘connected system of highways interstate in character,’ constructed to the highest practical uniform design standards, essential to the national defense. Because of the time required, and cost, such a system must be planned for and constructed during peacetime” (Curtiss. 1955). In an analogous fashion, the internet came about after military strategists came to understand that the most crucial mode of understanding toward victory in war was complete understanding of the enemy and all of its movements. To completely anticipate all possible contingencies was to take control of the future itself, and cybernetics emerged to capture the unknowable itself in loops of digital capture and control which would substitute known outcomes for unknown outcomes. To control everyone, everywhere at all times is the great dream of those who plot total war, consequently cybernetics, the foundation that creates the conditions of possibility for the internet and, by extension AI, “is warfare directed against all that lives for a time” (Tiqqun. 2020). The only thing left for both the interstate system and the information super highway was to create a world that would tether all of life to the dreams of the men of war. Suburban sprawl and endless consumption are the inevitable outcomes of both systems. We now live in a world of vacuousness wherein a new system, AI, is being deployed to make everything even more vacuous. Above I said, “With the rise of AI, they have finally found a way to cut us out entirely. Well... almost entirely.” They still need us. They, the money gods or the oligarchs still need us to consume and to keep consuming, they need us to keep generating the debt system on which consumption turns and on which the financial capital which swells their fortunes can continue to flourish.

More than half the population of the United States lives in areas that are characterized by suburban sprawl. These are regions that exist entirely for and because of consumption, and they can only exist because of the modern interstate system that forms the void through which individuals move for the sole purpose of overcoming the void itself. Modern suburban sprawl grows endlessly because it is not a single geographical space but a vast set of regions around the nation that exxpands with each passing day. There is an older understanding of the term “suburb” that denotes areas adjacent to the urban but distinct in their economic, social, and geographical identity, thus the term: “sub (under or adjacent to) urb (the urban core). What I am talking about are those enormous, sweeping geographical spaces that generally begin several miles out from an urban area, usually beginning with beltway interstate by-basses, and extend out for miles in every direction. These are the spaces that are swallowing the countryside like one continuous machine that denudes the land, removes all features and remnants of the life that once existed, and converts everything into a vast sea of sameness and homogeneity. Lewis Mumford showed us that the decision to focus on the development of sprawling geographical spaces that depend entirely on the massive superhighway system was a deadly dangerous problem from the very start. All the way back in 1961, Mumford explained:

Instead of creating the Regional City, the forces that automatically pumped highways and motor cars and real estate developments into the open country have produced the formless urban exudation. Those who are using verbal magic to turn this conglomeration into an organic entity are only fooling themselves. To call the resulting mass Megalopolis, or to suggest that the change in spatial scale, with swift transportation, in itself is sufficient to produce a new and better urban form, is to overlook the complex nature of the city. The actual coalescence of urban tissue that is now taken by many sociologists to be a final stage in city development, is not in fact a new sort of city, but an anti-city. As in the concept of anti-matter, the anti-city annihilates the city whenever it collides with it. (The City in History. 1989).

Suburban sprawl is the anti-city as in anti-matter. It destroys what comes in contact with it, converting it into the same non-space or non-being that is suburban sprawl. It is a form of geographical and social evil, as in the anti-Christ. Like the devil himself, it divides the world, and it divides people from the world and from each other. Mumford is quite deliberate in showing us that this whole set of phenomena is a function of the highways and the motor cars which travel the highways. The American interstate system, contrary to what contemporary politicians will tell you, was a not something “the people” wanted. It was something forced onto the people, and it was not even a civilian project. The entirety of this project has created a world of mind-numbing mediocrity; a dead average that eliminates anything of distinction because distinction is a bug in the system. It cannot be predicted and must therefore be eliminated. To be distinct, to be unique and exceptional is to be unexpected and therefore intolerable. AI furthers the project of creating a world of unexceptional dead average life wherein no one asks questions, no one stands out, no one does anything other than endlessly reproduce exactly what is. Just like the interstate system, AI will colonize all of life and the billionaires will turn around and swear this I exactly what we wanted.

The dead average of American life, then, begins and ends with a system of modern war that comes complete with a long list of war dead, and it all progresses from there. That this fact is completely mystified in our everyday lives is a symptom of contemporary schizophrenia. The physical arrangement of physical existence in the sprawling suburb is another feature of this schizophrenia. The isolation and alienation of suburban sprawl is not simply a feature of modern loneliness or even just simple ignorance. This empty world fosters something that is at the core of contemporary American decay. The entire cultural existence and life of the contemporary subdivision is one of total mediocrity. As space that exists in the middle of things, it generates a middle ground, a dead average of all things, and another word for dead average is mediocrity. This is a world of mediocre expectations, mediocre thought, mediocre existence. While one can perhaps take some measure of solace in the idea of the average, one needs to understand that the average is actually a really low bar. It includes the very best, it is true, but it also includes the very worst. The problem in the great American suburban sprawl is that everything about life in this world has been tethered to and transformed into the culture of consumption, and this means the elemental definitions of what it means to be human are derived from the logic of consumer capital. There is no life in suburban sprawl. There is only the spectacular image of life, and everyone and everything is measured and evaluated according to this logic. In the world of middle-class suburban sprawl, “the power to decide and the leisure to consume are the alpha and the omega of a process that is never questioned” (Debord. 1995). Now that AI is taking hold of the general intellect and the human capacity to think and create, the homogenization of all life will be complete. All will be a form of mediocrity and there will be no one around who is capable of recognizing mediocrity as mediocrity. As suburban sprawl has created an indiscernible and endlessly sprawling space of sameness, so AI will offer an indiscernible and endlessly sprawling idea of sameness. Agamben leaves us with the final question, at least for now: “how can a stupid person—that is, a non-thinker—enter into a relationship with an intelligence that claims to think outside of him?” (Agamben. 2025). The answer is the stupid person does not think at all because there is nothing within the stupid person to call them to think. Those who come after AI will be those who misrecognize their staggering ignorance as a natural fact of life in which “natural ignorance has given way to the organized spectacle of error” wherein “the ‘new towns’ of the technological pseudo-peasantry are the clearest indications, inscribed in the land, of the break with historical time on which they are founded; their motto might as well be: ‘On this spot nothing will ever happen—and nothing ever has” (1994). Those who still create and think will become as intolerable to the people as they are to the systems that control the world in which they live and consume. All will be average, dead average.

Works Cited:

Agamben, Giorgio. “On artificial intelligence and natural stupidity.” Autonomies. 2025. https://autonomies.org/2025/10/giorgio-agamben-on-artificial-intelligence-and-natural-stupidity/.

Curtiss, C.D. “The National System of Interstate Highways.” The Military Engineer 47, no. 318 (1955): 274–77.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1995.

Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. London: Harper Perennial, 2008.

Marx, Karl. The Marx-Engels Reader. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1978.

Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. Harcourt Brace & Company, 1989).

Purser, Ronald. “AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself.” Current Affairs: A Magazine of Politics and Culture. December 1, 2025.

Tiqqun. The Cybernetic Hypothesis. Translated by Robert Hurley. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e) Intervention Series 28, 2020.

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