Instinct Is Just Data

On point and shoot cameras (and more).

Hello from Greece! I am on the island of Lefkada, taking a class on astrology and tarot. Here is a lemon I picked straight off a tree:

I have been taking a lot of pictures on my point and shoot camera, but I forgot to pack the wire that would let me upload them to my computer, so – a project for another day.

I got a point and shoot camera for myself a few years ago because I am stupidly attached to objects that are not old enough to have nostalgic charm, nor convenient enough to be useful today. For example: LaserDiscs, which are essentially giant DVDs, or mp3 players (like iPods). Like these, a point and shoot camera is the object version of what my Spanish friend calls a ‘chico puente’ – a bridge guy, the one you date between people you actually see a future with. A similar harshness applies here. These tools have a placeholder quality to them, a beta version you tinker with until you can make a better, more optimised product. Or until a product like the smartphone comes along to do all their jobs, better and more efficiently.

While a DSLR camera indicates a level of seriousness about photography, a point and shoot is an amateur’s toy, great for people who want to take nice photos but not put any real effort into the process. Still, it requires a tiny bit more effort than taking a photo of something on your phone. And that gives it a level of detachment that I find very appealing and a bit spooky. Point and shoots are not as cool as Polaroids, or cute as disposable camera photos. They leave no physical imprint. Which is maybe why, to me, they feel more ghostly than nostalgic.

Before coming to Greece, I uploaded all the photos on my point and shoot to my laptop to clear space. The last time I’d used it was December 2022, when I was in India. I totally forgot I had taken these photos. 2023 was such a doozy that this trip felt like it happened in another lifetime. I’m sharing some of these photos here, just because:

Exterior of a Chettinad mansion.

At the the Brihadeeswara temple in Thanjavur.

Up a hill that leads to a cave-like nook where Jain monks would sleep. Because the stone was cold and the nook was high up, it protected them from extreme heat. I didn’t take a photo of the nook, but while we were there, a moustached, gun-wielding man in uniform waited for a group of people to gather, then told us about the history of the caves and principles of Jainism (in Tamil, so I did not understand a word). I thought he was a tour guide, but he told my parents he was just hired to make sure people didn’t sleep there overnight or jump off the cliff (which – according to him, via my parents – several people, usually lovers, had tried to do). But since he was there just hanging about anyway, he had taken it upon himself to read up on the history and tell whomever visited the caves about it, since he’d suspected a lot of ‘youths’ just came there to take selfies.

Inside an antique store in Chettinad.

Inside a Chettinad mansion. When we were there, part of the house had been used for a filming a Telugu drama.

Every year, there is a festival where 1000 classical dancers from around India to dance at the Brihadeeswara temple, and because of that these bobblehead dolls have become a signature souvenir.

View from the Thirumayam Fort, where rebels had planned an attack against the British East India company. Sort of silly but the rocks remind me of electrical sockets (…the UK ones).

I wish I had my copy of Heather McCalden’s The Observable Universe here with me, so I could publish a quote from it. She does an incredible job of describing how photographs capture data in a world stuffed to the brim with data that spreads, mutates, and overwhelms like an actual virus. But alas, I do not. I do, however, have a quote from the book that I emailed to myself with the note ‘put in newsletter’. It goes:

What they do not seem to understand is that the rote toil work is what creates that great insight. They want AI to take over the rote toil work, and just [let humans] have aha moments all the time. So AI progress is based on this false assumption that genius just means creating insights out of the blue. But to actually gain the insights, you need to do the work as well.

This typewriter app is a perfect example of this. You type shit on your phone onto an interface that looks like a typewriter, with the typewriter font and the typewriter sounds, but it’s still a phone. The ink isn’t smudging your fingers; you’re not refilling the cartridge; the keys aren’t getting jammed; you don’t need hyphens between cut-off sentences. You just have the feeling of using a typewriter, except feeling is too strong a word – maybe delusion is better, or performance. The inconvenience of using a typewriter would probably influence how one writes, which is a good thing, because A) words are more carefully chosen, and B) you are interacting more with the material world. Instead of over-relying on sight, you’re using more of the other senses (smell, touch, sound – hopefully not taste) when using an actual typewriter. Maybe it’s that higher level of engagement with the physical word that slowly builds momentum for flashes of genius, the aha moments.

I love this quote because I like to think that all the moments we spend just going about our day – working, taking long walks (10,000 steps perhaps), taking pictures we aren’t sure will end up in any photo album or ever be looked at again – silently feed the eureka moments. If you’re a writer or artist, maybe all the minute data you clock while doing all this will show up in your work and create a particular style that is impossible to replicate. Or, no matter what you do, it builds your instinct. Maybe instinct is just data collected over time, difficult to articulate because you did not foresee a situation where all this minutiae would come in handy. So you never bothered writing it down or committing it to conscious memory. But then situations come up and your instinct – the accumulation of a gazillion memories you aren’t even conscious of having – pitches in to say ‘hmm – I don’t know what it is – but I get a weird feeling…’

By this definition of instinct, AI works in reverse – it is given a prompt, then it pulls from a gazillion bits of data to give a clear answer. An aha moment. And the result is the difference between Ghost Chilli – the title I ultimately chose for my book, after the original title of You Don’t Know Hunger was deemed too depressing – and the following Chat GPT results for ‘Give me a title for a novel that’s serious yet lighthearted and involves food’:

(I bet you didn’t expect this post to be a plug for my upcoming novel, did you?!)

(It wasn’t meant to be.)

(But do check it out!)

See you in a fortnight,

Nikkitha

P.S. Tickets to my talk on 2 July with Lucie Elven, at Burley Fisher, can be found here.