When Politicians Paint

When Politicians Paint

The tech bros are girls. At least the ones I know personally happen to be women. They fit the stereotype in other ways: they are on the hype train, and they work for two of the companies at the forefront of training and deploying the most capable systems on the planet. One helped write early neural net code in the 1990s. Her work is still heavily cited. Two are engineers—one works on alignment, another on product. None are naïve. All are, in their own way, skeptical. They hedge in public but speak more freely among friends.

For what it is worth, I was early-ish to the party and late to the game. I watched from the sidelines. I am an artist and an educator, not an engineer. I have science envy, though—always have—and I compulsively skim papers I have no business reading. The kind with multi-author bylines, long strings of Greek, and plots that say more than the prose. Biologists and physicists understand them. I treat them like puzzles: graphic clues wrapped in obscure syntax. If I squint, flex the tabs, and ignore my better judgment, I can sometimes get the gist. I do not pretend to mastery, but I understand enough to see the shape of the thing. Occasionally, even to use it.

Somewhere in the mid-2010s, I stumbled into GANs and particle systems—early image experiments that leaned toward visual chaos. Limited compute kept me at the margins, but I toyed with caching, procedural rendering, anything I could wedge into my workflow. Everyone was playing with the same stuff—there were only so many knobs to turn. I muddled through.

Then came the transformer paper, and the wind picked up.

It took a steady stream of private demos, internal forecasts, and missed predictions on my part to do what I should have done from the beginning: trust the trajectory. The friends I had made through strange detours and marginal interests—people I initially knew from side conversations and art-adjacent play—turned out to be closer to the flames than I realized. They had already flipped the switch.

I experimented lightly. The models felt clever, but peripheral. By 2020, though, the advances began creeping into my lane. I played with diffusion. I built a mental map.

I assumed, foolishly, that the language models might become usable chatbots by 2030. That the warped, blobby images might evolve into prompt-loyal picture generators by 2035. Maybe, I imagined, video and simulated game environments would arrive by 2040. Robotics? Off the table entirely. That field was cursed—too slow, too brittle, too physical.

My friends disagreed. They said it was coming fast.

I cited history. Cell phones, electric vehicles, the internet. Good technologies—objectively better—still take decades to reach full adoption. People are scared, petty, tired. They resist change even when it benefits them. Bureaucracy smothers agility. Culture crawls. I believed these were constants. I was wrong.

By 2023, ChatGPT rolled out. It worked, mostly. Claude and others followed fast. Midjourney accelerated visual fidelity. Image tools I had dismissed as novelties became ubiquitous. The playground became a toolbelt. I had misread the slope.

So when these same insiders tell me that routine scarcity may dissolve within a generation, I no longer dismiss them. I know the harms—bias, surveillance, centralization. I know the hype and the market incentives. But I also know their record. I trust their forecast. For the sake of this argument, I accept the premise.

We may be heading, in some fashion and on some timeline, toward a world in which food, shelter, medical care, and basic services are—at least for some—on demand. Not evenly. Not ethically. But increasingly available. If that becomes true, the logic that once underwrote daily life will begin to break.

Competition will lose relevance. Scarcity will lose force. Survival will no longer structure the day.

And when that happens, the question will shift. It will no longer be how to live, but how to live with nothing to prove.

Imagine a cul-de-sac at dusk. A neighbor spins wool into cables. A mother tends docile bees. A daughter engages in recreational geometry. You read that right: recreational. No clock, no curriculum. Just an interest in precision, shape, and time.

In that future—whatever year you prefer—automated systems remove friction. Meals, transit, climate control: tuned, continuous, banal. Governance hums in sealed racks. No press conferences. No campaigns. Outputs meet benchmarks. There is no one to applaud.

The human question remains: how to pass the time without outsourcing the self.

By that point, much will have been outsourced. Drudgery, certainly. But also intuition, composition, curiosity. The same way that, today, large language models clean up my syntax and source my quotes. Three years earlier, Google—bless its corporate soul—was doing the same, though more noisily, with greater risk of commercial thickets and lamely optimized results.

Augmentation will not be new. Offloading will not be new. But it will be total. Our brains already walk with crutches: phones, reminders, lenses, search. The merger is underway. It will proceed unevenly, but it will proceed.

Some will find no problem in this. Some will protest. Others will panic once the novelty wears thin.

They will try the obvious routes. Dopaminergic gum. Calibrated companions. Curated dreams. But novelty buys a season. Then restlessness returns. Habits built on rivalry will lose force. Incentives will become simulated. Productivity will lose its moral sheen. Something else will need to fill the hours.

There is a stereotype that haunts many artists: the disapproving parent, the lifelong vendetta to prove them wrong. I had the opposite. My parents were supportive. Which makes the guilt worse. Cosmic, not personal. I am not dodging a family curse. I am dodging a species-wide censure.

The internal voice goes like this: You are preposterously unlikely. The product of unbroken lineage, evolutionary fluke, genealogical luck. Do you know how many strands die out? How many disappear without a trace? And while your neighbor builds carbon capture systems and your in-law edits the human genome, you are… tickling canvases?

You can understand why artists are a skittish sort.

But I have a secret. A cheat code.

It is not what most people imagine.

Techno-optimists wave off the meaning crisis. When confronted with fears about this imagined post-scarcity future in which people find themselves bereft of purpose, stripped of utility, they reply: “We’ll figure it out. Children and retirees are not suffering. They nibble and play with crayons. They are plenty content.” If we had endless time, maybe we would all play piccolo. Or “learn to paint,” they add, half-joking—like it is the most extreme form of leisure.

But here’s the secret. They are closer to the mark than they realize.

Certain practices ferry a mind into flow with reliable speed. Painting—perceptual painting, in particular, from direct observation or deep immersion—offers immediate feedback, risk, consequence. These are the up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right to the zone. I will spare you the woo-woo about dissolving awareness, but suffice it to say: I have always known that when I need a fix, all I have to do is grab my brushes, squat near a creek, and it is ten seconds to liftoff.

There are many paths to flow, but painting is unusually well-tuned. Even the most distracted, analytical, or perfectionist mind will eventually dissolve into the work. I have seen it. Business students. Biologists. They emerge from their paintings dazed, not from beauty, but from being submerged. It has something to do with pace, stakes, maybe old notions of gestalt. The failure is real. But the volition remains. Unlike 5-MeO-DMT or a sensory pod, the painter stays present. Boundaries blur. Agency endures. Thought travels through the muscle instead of hovering above it.

Practice deepens the spell. Choices of color and texture are a kind of data compression—material arguments rendered at eye-level speed. A brush lifts, meets linen, leaves a ridge or a skip. It records hesitation, correction, intent—lived knowledge in mineral form. Process becomes thought. Material, meaning.

Pigment resists. Linseed lingers. Shapes respond. Sensation teaches judgment before language can catch up.

It is a sensual epistemology. The body knows before it declares.

Now picture a former legislator. Her muscles for rhetoric atrophied, her podium long silent. Her constituents receive seamless services from code. There are no hearings. No bills. Nothing left to manage. Boredom sharpens memory. She recalls this essay. She dismissed it at the time. Something about “flow states” and “post-scarcity painting.” Nonsense, she thought. But something lodged.

She finds the studio. The canvas. The pigment. The impulse. Hours slip. Talking points fizzle. Arguments dissipate. Debates dissolve into atmosphere. The palette replaces the podium.

Engineers, brokers, minor royals—they come calling. They need the same thing.

And I know the code.

Some braid hair. Others build custom instruments, throw pots, or chart improvised dance steps. But many return to pigment. Dirt, oil, linen, heartbeat—this quartet binds intellect to sensation with minimal delay.

Flow is not mystery. It is learnable. Transferable. A perceptual instructor says: “Stand here. Hold this. Follow that edge. Trust your eyes. Leave your mind out of it.” The student revises. Senses gaps. Slips into absorption.

Generative models copy style, perfect distribution. But they do not cross the threshold of embodied experience. They produce artifacts. Humans navigate process. That distinction will become clear when production no longer props up identity or worth. People will seek guides who remember what it means to move, to risk, to touch.

They will arrive out of boredom. They will stay out of need. Palettes will stack in towers. Clothes will be spattered. The air will smell of oil and dust and effort. There will be few masterpieces. But all will be masters, in a way.

Art will be aftermath. Attention, well spent.