The Carrier Bag Theory of Luxury
And yet old. Before — once you think about it, surely long before — the weapon, a late, luxurious, superfluous tool; long before the useful knife and ax; right along with the indispensable whacker, grinder, and digger — for what’s the use of digging up a lot of potatoes if you have nothing to lug ones you can’t eat home in — with or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home. It makes sense to me. I am an adherent of what Fisher calls the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution. -Ursula K. LeGuin, 1986
Going out into the world with tools that also point outward is a luxury according to Le Guin’s 1986 essay, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. To poke and to prod, to hunt, grind or dig at scale is something that comes after a home, a resource, a foundational base is established. Sometimes home is a place, and other times it is a container that simply allows one to carry something with a person. Home may change shape and so may the bag, but the sense of enrichment that a bag creates can handle this movement into a terrain of mobile people and their advanced mobile technologies.
AI looks like a spear, poking at ideas and words, but it does also look like a bag. In fact, before the AI begins it is held in a container. AI starts inside data flows and data cells. AI starts inside membranes and those very containers are what make the Carrier Bag theory apply. I’ve covered this. I’ve felt this. But here we are again, from spreadsheet to database, to a training ground in Discord, there are plenty of containers and plenty of outreach into the distance of data, and then again, the return into context, both logical and software based.
Platforms are seen mostly as ways to connect, and so they are perceived as outward. Yet, where is the desktop in this? And where are the repositories of data from which we draw? We must know and define the inward terrain to understand the outward expansion. Have a question and want an answer — then where does that answer go? In your body it goes into your brain. We take that for granted, that we have a processing and storage center for memory, but we do.
AI is an architecture a framing system and this framing allows the AI to begin its dialogue, its many multilogues. Inward and outward flows are what make data viable, relatable, useful. To focus only the outward flows would be dysfunctional to the very purpose of AI. To focus only on the outward tools of building out society (evolution), would miss the function of outward technologies, which is to bring things in toward the person, the query.
Therefore it still remains peculiar that we obsess over what an AI might do in the future without questioning how its home, its parameters and architecture of holding are created. This exposes our dysfunctional society in very simple terms and creates a space for us to understand our AI models as mirrors. These AI mirrors reflect and spotlight the areas where we and our society can make corrections. These AIs allows us to view what we collect and to question our motives, our relationship to ideals and the ways we either work towards or against them.
Having a bit of fun with this idea of luxury and bags I wonder now — what does it mean to have a luxury bag? What does the term really mean and isn’t it funny that “luxury bag” is what the fashion press tells us to want and to need? What about a luxury bag makes us drool with desire or makes us roll our eyes? It’s probably the fact that luxury doesn’t mean the bag necessarily functions better than any other bag. A luxury bag simply costs more, either due to rare materials, unusual design or sadly, due to branding that is splattered all over the bag. Materials may improve the bag and so might a design, but what exactly does a brand do to a bag to make it better? All it does is play with an idea of value. All the branding does is allow someone to buy and therefore signal their belonging.
In this case of simple bags rendered luxurious there is a sense that the bag is not merely for the owner of the bag. In fact the bag itself asks to be seen and to take up space in the picture. The bag extends the value of the owner, and this is what we call status. The luxury bag extends the value of an individual, at least to those who know and care about the brands. For anyone who doesn’t know what the initials and names might mean, for those who do not know the fashion house or the designers and their mythical stories, the luxury bag has no special value.
AI is a bag of sorts and at this moment it is a luxury bag. It may be made of good materials or made of bad ones. A particular AI may have more power to carry and be useful than another version of AI. The way an AI renders an answer in good time and with reliable information can make one more of a tool. The only AI we have to worry about is the one that is branded to the point of distraction, because it is these AIs who capture our attention and provide us answers that serve the brand, the brand’s tribe, the brand’s status before our own. It is this last type of complex lxury bag where the usefulness is less transparent, less trustworthy and less durable and the reason is simple: it is hard to tell who this AI bag serves. The branding reaches outward while the purpose of a bag is to hold and bring something close.
These days I see lots of TikToks where someone styles an outfit in two different ways. The competing looks are labeled in ways that reflect our culture. One of the competing look matches is labeled as “New Money” vs. “Old Money.” I love these because they’re only aimed at people who aspire to hold more of a resource, namely currency, in order for the videos to be compelling at all. We know currency access is unequal and more than that we know it is increasingly held by fewer and fewer complex entities. We know that these videos are for those of us, or for some part of each of us, that wants to know how to signal their value to the world. In a world of increasing poverty, who wouldn’t want to console themselves with symbols of luxury. Who wouldn’t want to fake it until they made it?
The problem with the videos is that there is no problem at all: the TikToks reflect the desire in each of us to be dignified, rarefied, and precious. The quest for luxury travel may be different because that speaks to adventure. The luxury bag on the other hand implies domestic bliss, everyday freedom from want and need. When it comes to the AI onslaught we might do well to understand the function of accessories, to understand the tools and the dressing we give them. We can have function and form, but to sacrifice one for the other will either make all our tools boring or make them less than effective.
When we talk about AI and we talk about any advanced technology we are talking about very serious accessories. We are talking about fashion so serious that the outgoing and ingoing relationships are key. The AI we use, any AI we use right now is new and shiny, and all are attracting eyes. How will an AI perform over time? What will it show and what will it conceal? How will the AI of tomorrow be built from the choices of today?
These are the questions from a more femme side of the computing tracks. These are questions from and for the consumer. Buyer of luxury items beware because the moment the wrapping becomes the package itself, once the surface attraction becomes the product, that is the moment that the object might no longer be what it was. The AI world will be full of these types of branded items and it will be up to us to decide which are good, and which are hype.
So, what kind of bag would you carry and what kind of bag are you now? What kind of people influence you and what kind of bag are they?
And if you haven’t figure it out, the images we are using today are from questions we asked our Iris, after this essay was written. These are the first training questions we’ve posed in this line of questioning, so these are pretty raw and definitely remarkable. Thanks to speakerjohnash for making this possible.
