The Dying Art of Being a Bum

On "Useless Humans" in the Age of AI

There’s a type of laughter so delirious and so extreme it seems to be the audiological equivalent of a witch’s spell. It’s a man’s laughter — a lazy man’s laughter — a bold and hearty chuckle of such pentameter that it seems almost to be electro-mechanically generated and whiskey-fueled; a kind of neverending cackling sound of such a rhythm that those who hear it are only stunned, beside themselves, or caught in a kind of startled paralysis until the madman’s storm of chuckling finally subsides.

And this time, such chuckling came with a bold, hoarse-voiced declaration from a leather-cheeked fellow who bellowed madly in the silence of the early morning gas station:

“I’m so late to work I forgot to get a job to begin with!”

The cashiers laughed out loud as his chuckling began. At first, it was just a couple chuckles, like hiccups — but soon, he was off to the races in proper style, like a diesel engine firing up, until he was red-faced and laughing at full speed and deafening volume and throwing his filthy hair back as if in the throes of passion. The cashiers couldn’t stop laughing either, and a couple old ladies who’d dropped by the station for milk and gas stood on stiffly — seeming stunned, horrified, or even offended by the display instead.

One wondered if the chuckling itself was a kind of mating call, for just as it ended and the man began to catch his breath, he raised his eyebrows and proceeded to make an ad-hoc marriage proposal to the sixty-eight-year-old cashier behind the counter — who, though greatly flattered, had to decline for what was probably the hundredth time. The man paid for his beer — at the early-morning hour of 8AM — and left in a hurry, telling everyone he was “late to work” and that “the boss was gonna kill him!” but of course, the man had nowhere to go but his ramshackle cabin — for the man was his own “boss,” and indeed, his industry was strictly that of a proper bum.

And though he himself might take at least some mild umbrage at being classified as a “bum,” he might rightly refer to himself as a ‘woodchuck’ or as a ‘rennaisance man’. But with his wild mane of curls and the furry mask of beard-hair hanging off his face, he looked more like a muskrat. By all I could tell, he seemed to be living like one, too — waddling back and forth between the town pump and his little burrow out in the woods.

I know where he lives — I’ve seen his yard. The land out in front of his house looks like it forgot to shave; his long-fallow fields are all drunk on floodwater and winterkill. There’s rusty old rakes and harrows lounging around his place like urchins of steel, immovable in their motionless indolence — perhaps a source of inspiration for their owner; who, in pantomiming their inactivity, then in turn ensures these once-useful tools shall remain free of any use or toil. His habits as a layabout are baked into the landscape there; they’re even visible in his home — where tattered sheets of tarpaper and Tyvek flap in the wind like the national flag of the lazy man of the backwoods.

Sans welfare, without internet, living only by what he can pull from the swamps, or the river, or the trash, or (perish the thought) by a little irregular employment; he’s a survivor, and the sole ambition inscribed within his continued survival effort is the hope that he might drink, lounge, and be merry at his lonesome little shack.

But this erstwhile fellow seemed to be a type of bum that’s becoming rarer and rarer these days. For while now we’ve got the “smart” telephones and the welfare cards and certain drugs that seem to have a zombifying effect on the indefinitely unemployed — he’s not into any of that, and in fact, he rebukes all of that sort of thing harshly by the mere fact of his own continued existence. The man was and remains a kind of living human antique — a throwback from a bygone era in the long and lazy history of bumhood.

Seeing the man, I thought to myself: where have the wino, the ‘pintman’, the tinkerer, the jolly town drunk all gone off to? The hooch-swilling hobo — the scrap-metal wisecrackers, the rag-and-bone men, the rambling rovers? All of these long-gone romantical categories of bums, vagrants, tipplers, mumblers, and so on — they all seem to have mostly gone extinct, and their extinction has come on with stealthy suddenness. Just as our towns get gentrified, our country homogenized, and our culture turned into one gigantic blaring, blinking, flashing, globalized techno-culture — we find that even our bums have gotten gentrified, standardized, and busted down into bureaucratized form. Or, where they cannot be induced to play by the myriad rules of the welfare office, we find they lately drift to the extremest margins of psychosis, addiction, and madness of the worst variety.

Many of this latter type are now dying like animals. What AIDS was to the gay community in the 1980’s — it seems that opioids have done something similar to the American “bum community.” Where once the local color sat on the same old bench, or slouched under the same old tree — like Dolphus Raymond in To Kill a Mockingbird — now that color is gone in so many tragic cases. What replaces our jolly old layabouts is rows of crouching creatures slumped over on the street, intermittently shooting up and scrolling on their little glass rectangles. Eventually, a ghastly proportion of these will be dead from overdose — but their miserable fate will not come until they’ve sufficiently raised the local property crime rates by a substantial factor.

So it is that so many of our misfits, dropouts, and vagrants have transformed from the old archetype of the basically harmless (and even vaguely quaint) old fools loitering in our town squares — to walking, slouching, trackmark-ridden human tragedies who elicit only a strange mix of scorn, pity, condescension, hatred, and a near-constant stream of both EMS personnel (who revive them) and beat cops (who chase them off or arrest them).

Or — there is another type, far less often seen in public; often unidentifiable even in public for the fact that they’ve blended in completely. These ‘bums’ dress like normal working people and behave like them too; except where working people work, these others seem to subsist on various social welfare programs as a matter of profession. They are tragic in another kind of way as compared to their strung-out cousins in the wide world of bum-hood — for most often, these layabouts vegetate in their public housing apartments, endlessly scrolling through social media or playing on their Xboxes and iPhones. No longer tinkerers and mumblers; far from the old wisecrackers and town tipplers — they die not the bodily death of overdose but the psychic death imparted on them by a suite of pacifying government programs and digital technologies.

These two burgeoning archetypes of people who evade all manner of participation in the wide world of work now compose the supermajority of America’s ‘bums’. They are either mired in the lifestyle of the dope-fiend and the psychotic — or they are withdrawn into a digitized, bureauractized world of professional poverty. Gone are the genteel old characters; they’ve fled from our towns like the hermit thrush. They’ve disappeared from the country just the minute that the country seems to have lost not only its characters but its character, too. And I rather wonder if we’re in the grim situation we’re in these days in part because they’re gone — for those old drunks and fools and bums occupied a niche in the collective soul that we didn’t know we needed filled.

For what is this country without characters? How dismal is it that our “local color” is now long-dead on fentanyl, or zonked out on pills? How somber to imagine Rip Van Winkle — that useless old bastard — glumly scrolling Instagram in the Department of Social Services waiting-room instead of loafing around smoking his clay pipe in front of Nicholas Vedder’s venerable old inn?

In an era when “nobody wants to work” has become a kind of boomer-coded truism — and it is not without at least some truth! — it seems profoundly strange that the fine old artistry of early American bum-hood would be all but abandoned. In fact, the death of that mode — the mode of our local gas-station cackler — seems to have silently inculcated a kind of identity crisis amongst American derelicts. Where once a fellow who didn’t want to work naturally gravitated toward the practices of both survival and its incumbent activities, and towards character, or some sort of social role as a kind of public jester, clown, prophet, or good-time fella — now, our ‘men of lumpen leisure’ seem to be sorted either into addiction and mental illness, or into welfare bureaucracy. There is no longer much of any in-between.

This is especially strange for, in our time, the ‘pickins’ for old-school bums are supremely good — particularly in Upstate New York. If you want to fart around in the woods, tinkering, mumbling to yourself, wiping your rear with newspaper, tippling a little Genny Lite on the ATV that barely runs, this is heaven. You can come up here and eat the beaver and the carp, buy the half-caved-in old shack, rough it in the old style. Live on saltines, sardines, and liquor. Putz around all afternoon talking to yourself in your crusty bibs and cracked-up shit-kicker boots. It’s possible there may be nowhere better for this kind of living anywhere else in the country.

Yet the few who are still living in this manner are now old. They appear not to have passed the mantle on to subsequent generations of layabouts and terminally unemployed gentlemen. Or — the young fellas just never picked up the mantle to begin with. Perhaps a life of Vicodin, ‘ObamaPhones’, and EBT cards was even easier than the life of a respectable bum. The unholy trinity of the smartphone’s brightly-lit infinite scroll, the soma-like buzz of opioid pills or fentanyl, and the caloric sufficiency of welfare hit all the notes with mechanical precision that cannot be rivaled by the self-starting ne’er-do-well. No amount of regular, natural, organic human effort can produce what they together offer — for while bums of former eras indeed escaped work, they were nevertheless unable to escape reality.

For many have rightly said that the man who won’t work usually winds up “working more at not working” that a man who accepts regular employment labors. This has always been true — until now. Now, the New World Order has come for this country’s bums; they no longer work at not working — they have escaped every measure of effort, and therefore are not edified by the labors of men who have ever toiled toward the avoidance of labor.

In their supreme idleness (which is really an unprecedented idleness the likes of which men through all of history until now have never known), the glimmering smartphone or video game console captures their gaze; and experiments with “better living through chemistry” seem to divert them further, until years pass during which our society’s bums have not interfaced with anything like reality at all. In the phantasmic void our techno-bureaucratic systems have created for them — there’s no more “local color” anymore.

It is this void that seems to have driven the “traditional bum” to near-extinction. Yet where, as with other traditional ways of life that are under threat of disappearing, where certain conscientious souls work to revive them (as with homesteading, etc) — I’m afraid few if any will work to keep the old and frankly literary art of traditional bumhood alive. The incredible void into which the ardently unemployed now slip into by default may eclipse these ways of life forever, and men like our local ‘woodchuck cackler’ may be the last of a dying breed — for they were never innoculated with the dispirited hunger that sends souls hurtling downward into the chasm of digital mental vacancy, nor into the endless mental morass created by potent synthetic drugs.

Those who’ve been paying attention, of course, might’ve seen all of this coming. I think of Yuval Noah Harari who, in 2017, wrote a haunting essay entitled The Rise of the Useless Class for the TED Talk online news outlet. In the piece, he said this:

“The coming technological bonanza will probably make it feasible to feed and support people even without any effort from their side. But what will keep them occupied and content? One answer might be drugs and computer games. Unnecessary people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D virtual-reality worlds that would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside. Yet such a development would deal a mortal blow to the liberal belief in the sacredness of human life and of human experiences. What’s so sacred about useless bums who pass their days devouring artificial experiences?” (emphasis mine)

Harari’s harrowing postulations here get to the heart of a very serious matter that may become more and more important to consider as AI-driven changes in the technosphere make human effort (and even human beings) increasingly redundant: “What’s so sacred about useless bums who pass their days devouring artificial experiences?”

The answer is — nothing. Yet while this answer might seem upsetting within the moral schemas of both Christian and Humanist thinkers, who both share an avowed belief in the value of human life, the operative phrase in Harari’s question here is “devouring artificial experiences.” Indeed — the one who “devours” and does not produce something meaningful really is worthless in at least some dimension; and his worthlessness is not only external in nature, but personal to his own sense of self-worth. To be a ‘devourer’ alone is to arc toward nihilism and ultimately — towards death.

From this point of view, it should not be a great wonder that our “useless humans” now face higher and higher rates of “deaths of despair,” not only from drugs but from suicide, alcoholism, self-destructive behavior, or the slow death of crippling mental illness.

Yet amongst those who, like Harari, make it their ambition to morally tinker with the value of human life after AI — virtually none of them have any personal experience with extreme idleness, chronic indefinite unemployment, homelessness, or addiction. They have not surveyed the landscape of the “useless bum” in any but the most cursory and removed sort of way — and indeed, what one finds from afar is mostly bleak and dispiriting. One can therefore forgive their deriving a few extremely bleak conclusions regarding the value of human life in a potentially “work-free” human future.

This is where, bizarrely, my own expertise as a lifelong vagrant, bum, vagabond, and idler shines. Because I do not write about these topics for lack of extensive knowledge on them — and I do not write of them without ample personal experience. I myself have spent inordinate amounts of time with the homeless, not as a removed observer but as a fellow peer. What the social do-gooders, anthropology students, and missionaries see of the homeless, unemployed, addicted, and self-marginalizing dropouts is often markedly different from what is really true of them — and the reality is, the only ones who seem to have a reasonable expectation of a normal life expectancy are those who have a great and inimitable sense of style as goes their bum-hood.

For style is not an inert and impotent thing; it is a productive thing — a feature of one’s life and personality that exudes something basically literary. The highest tier of American bums all have it in common: they seem to use their own life as a kind of ‘canvas’ for a largely illegible artistry — and in the moments when their ‘art’ can be translated and made legible to the common man, they quickly find that they occupy a very real and genuinely fulfilling social purpose.

Immediately, when striking upon this purpose — however ill-defined or vague or even unconscious — they are no longer mere ‘devourers,’ not at all. They become living paragons of their own highly eccentric literary vision, and if they are able to thread the needle between mere abnegation of the duties of workingmen and the ultimate self-destruction of the addict — they may even become beloved members of a community for many, many years.

That is to say — they become characters. This term is almost an honorific when applied to any vagrant, dropout, or bum; it is an aspirational title, and it is because the role of the “character” is genuinely literary. I say this without a hint of irony, I am completely serious: the more “useless” one is in terms of real physical labor or productive capacity, the more crucial it becomes that a fellow figures out how to alchemize his uselessness into something of durable literary value.

For, in the starkest and most dismal economic terms, literature is actually a useless thing. There is no great need for it to exist, at least insofar as caloric needs, GDP, and human reproduction are concerned. Mythopoeic aura, great tales and stories, and the thoughtful (and delightful) refraction of human experience through the lens of a unique perspective are literally worthless things in purely theoretical material and economic terms — and yet they are indeed the thing that is, to the thinking man, of the very greatest value of them all. A proper reader, an art appreciator, one who feels and dreams and could rightfully be considered to be a complete human being knows for a fact that there are circumstances in which the value of a good story exceeds the value of the material trappings of life.

And so — perplexingly, perhaps — we have struck upon a thing of ultimate value that naturally resides in the ‘least-valuable’ margins of society. Indeed, society’s least-valuable denizens are not only able to access it to begin with — which is a thing of great hope as it is — they naturally possess it in amplitude so long as they are not dispirited and incarcerated in a void of “artifical experiences.” From this perspective, the answer to “human uselessness” is not and cannot be a regimen of “drugs and video games,” as we are now trying out on our society’s least-productive members — to the contrary, the answer is to induce those at the margins to embrace a fundamentally literary disposition about themselves and the value of their own lives.

The natural starting-point for this, then, is not in the currently-downwardly-mobile remnants of the old middle class — they are too harrowed from the steepness of their descent. Indeed, insofar as we have an interest in addressing the problem of “human uselessness” as a feature of a possible dystopian techno-future, we are wisest to begin with those who are already at the bottom. This is because for today’s permanent welfare classes, bums, addicts, and homeless people — the “technologically-induced redundancy of human life” is already current. Were it not for high-tech agricultural machinery and production methods that have granted humanity caloric post-scarcity, these people would have no choice but to engage in useful human labor, likely as farmworkers! But because of the Green Revolution, John Deere, and the US Department of Agriculture’s (frequently bizarre and distressing) advances — they are now redundant in the supply chain, and are consequently on the cutting edge of “human uselessness.”

Yet we find they are mired in an economic, digital, and pharmacological environment that seems to make them almost immune to anything resembling a literary impulse! This may be one of the great — and well-hidden — problems of our time. The present manner in which we think of human uselessness is in terms of dysfunction (a hangover, perhaps, of the increasingly irrelevant Protestant work ethic). As a corollary to this, we also tend to feel an abject and immediate deflation of our self-worth the very moment we feel we have become redundant in the technological process. The moment we descend to the point of economic uselessness, we believe ourselves to be worthless, we become dispirited, and we sink into the chasm of digital technologies, drugs, video games, and whatever barebones caloric sufficiency is granted to us by the government.

This is very likely the worst thing we could establish as a default — for once one enters “the void” that now exists on society’s furthest margins, they nearly become steeled against anything that could increase their morale or situate their own life in a mythologically generative context.

Insofar as AI might well mean the emergence of a larger-and-larger class of so-called “useless humans” — and I must concede that this future does seem readily plausible — the architecture of human uselessness must be altered dramatically from what it is today. Style must come back to the fore; we must draw on the notes of history’s great ‘characters’, bums, dropouts, and rag-and-bone men. We must rise to the task of defending the ineffable and basically literary qualities that make us human; for the default mode by which human life is now viewed and considered by the Powers That Be is basically stripped-down, economized, reductionist — man is viewed first as a “consumer” and second as a stockpile of “human resources” that may become increasingly unnecessary. Insofar as we retain these dark assumptions about the purpose of human life and effort in our era, we seal our fate as a species who will sink into nihilism and spiritual abjection.

I do not think it is hyperbolic to say that such ideas contain the seeds of our own voluntary extinction — and that those who fail to reject them will be the great losers of the next several centuries’ worth of human history.

There is a wider critique here, of course — a defense of “useless man” is only one corollary to a larger struggle between the mechanical and the ensouled. As AI-generated “writing” and “art” proliferate, and the value of human agency in any artistic process continues to be denigrated, minimized, replaced, and excised entirely, we find our last bastion of human purpose now under siege. Indeed, we find that the very question of the existence of the human soul is now being debated and discussed in a hundred-thousand oblique and indirect ways.

Unless I am gravely mistaken about the nature of these technologies, I have to point out that if one makes a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox, ad infinitum — which is, to my mind, essentially what LLM’s do — something will be lost if the fire that formed the first copy goes out. That fire is the human race — the collective and individual souls of the human species; real (though intangible) things at the center of all human action and artistic impulse. It is a thing that is the source of all that AI “creates.” And oddly enough, in what may be the strangest instance of “horseshoe theory” in the history of our species; the essence of man’s artistic impulse seems to thrive most in his periods of “uselessness” — periods that will, if today’s technological commentators are not blowing smoke, become increasingly common to all mankind.

Therefore, we have a fantastic opportunity, and something of that opportunity has already been written and read, albeit indirectly. It is etched on the faces of men like our local ‘gas station cackler’ — or of our Rip Van Winkles, Dolphus Raymonds, Ignatius Reillys, Jeff Lebowskis, and Diogenes of Sinopes. Bums with style; the types who eat baked beans from the can, who crack jokes in front of the gas station, the types who — though they may occasionally stink a little — seem to be living way deep in a story all their own.

Miss this, and our allegedly inevitable descent into life as “useless humans” might be a good bit rougher and emptier that it’d be otherwise. Our bums, vagrants, and layabouts have already trod the path of infinite idleness quite well. There are lessons in their world that, strangely enough, may soon become relevant to the general populous.

But perhaps we’ve already seen this coming. God Almighty Himself said that the “last shall be made first and the first shall be made last.” He told us that the poor are “blessed in spirit.” So far as I can tell, much of that “spirit” is found in the fundamentally Divine realities of life, mythos, literature, and above all — of being a character. For is one’s “character” not synonymous with one’s soul, at least on some level? At the very bottom, and where men are their most “useless,” literature is not a thing that is read so much as it is a thing that is lived; one’s infinity of idleness exposes something of the soul’s true shape, if the idle one allows it. Fail to live it, and descend into darkness — but embrace it, and it is your strength.

So it is that I speak not in judgement nor in scorn for the bum, but I listen to him. Insofar as I’ve walked the path of one who has been variously “useless,” poor, and utterly, indefinitely idle — I’ve found that style matters most. Cackling matters most. If you’re going to be “useless,” you had better be a character — there’s no question about it, and frankly, it’s a matter of life and death.

Though it may be a strange insight, so far as I can tell, it’s a lesson that we’re all going to have to learn, sooner or later. The high-tech dystopia we’re hurtling towards simply demands it. So long as there might be some truth to all of this, to my mind — there’s still a great deal of hope.

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