Feeding on Illusions - by L. M. Sacasas

The Convivial Society

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Feeding on Illusions<br>The Convivial Society: Vol. 7, No. 7

L. M. Sacasas<br>Jul 08, 2026

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Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life. You may have noticed that over the last month or so new installments are coming your way at an unusual clip of about once per week. I don’t know that this pace will continue indefinitely, and some of you might prefer if it didn’t. But it has been helpful to write more frequently, so thank you for indulging me and supporting my work. Below, in old school blog fashion, you’ll find me riffing on a post from Mandy Brown who is, in turn, channeling Ursula Le Guin. As always, I hope you find it helpful. One last thing, I’m trying to keep up with reader emails, but please forgive me if I miss a few along the way.<br>Cheers,<br>Michael

I regret to say that I have not read much of Ursula Le Guin’s writing. At some point along the way, I read “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” but that’s about it. This is a matter of regret because I know her work is highly regarded by many people whose opinion on such matters I implicitly trust. It’s also the case that whenever I encounter some fragment of her writing, it always strikes me as wise, provocative, and generative.<br>This was once again the case when I recently read a slice of dialog from one of Le Guin’s Earthsea novels, The Tombs of Atuan (1970), in a brief, bracing reflection published by Mandy Brown on her rich and beautifully conceived website, A Working Library.<br>The excerpt features an exchange between a wizard and young women after they have escaped great danger but are now weary and hungry with a long way to go before they might find some food. Knowing something of the wizard’s power, the young woman wonders whether he might not be able to make life a little easier for them.<br>“Can you find food for us?” she asked, rather vaguely and timidly.<br>“Hunting takes time, and weapons.”<br>“I meant, with, you know, spells.”<br>“I can call a rabbit,” he said, poking the fire with a twisted stick of juniper. “The rabbits are coming out of their holes all around us, now. Evening’s their time. I could call one by name, and he’d come. But would you catch and skin and broil a rabbit that you’d called to you thus? Perhaps if you were starving. But it would be a breaking of trust, I think.”<br>“Yes. I thought, perhaps you could just…”<br>“Summon up a supper,” he said. “Oh, I could. On golden plates, if you like. But that’s illusion, and when you eat illusions you end up hungrier than before.”

Perhaps you’ve already intuited where this is going. “Is this not precisely what it’s like to read or watch or listen to slop?” Brown asks. “What you read isn’t really writing or drawing or art—it isn’t the creation of a mind reaching for the world—but illusion.”<br>I find that this little slice of dialog manages to capture something essential about the experience of our current media environment better than an elaborate analysis or argument. There’s so much in it that readily re-presents our experience to us: the desire for efficiency and convenience, the willingness to risk the rupture of a delicate trust (not with a rabbit to be sure, but with one another), and, of course, the feeling of feeding endlessly at the digital trough and never feeling satisfied, feeling, in fact, hollow, depleted, and alone as a consequence, hungrier than when we started. Better than an elaborate study or technical paper, this scene reinforces our native intuition that a simulation, however compelling or sophisticated, will always be an illusion. And we will know this chiefly by attending to our own subsequent experience: “when you eat illusions you end up hungrier than before.”<br>This, in particular, is a wonderfully evocative formulation: “the creation of a mind reaching for the world.” There is solidarity to be had in that motion and in that effort. A motion and an effort that always presumes both the world and the other with whom we share it, for the act of creation, however humble or sublime, is elicited by the existence of the other who is to receive it.<br>Nearly four years ago, which is hard to believe, I wrote about the estranging quality of AI-generated images. This was, I think, some time before we started referring to the proliferation of such images and texts as slop. What struck me, then, about the output of generative AI was how isolating it felt:<br>To encounter a painting or a piece of music or poem is to encounter another person, although it is sometimes easy to lose sight of this fact. I can ask about the meaning of a work of art because it was composed by someone with whom I have shared a world and whose experience is at least partly intelligible to me. Without reducing the meaning of a work of art to the intention of its creator, I can nonetheless ask and think about such intentions. In putting a question to a painting, I am also putting a...