The photographed meal

The plate arrives and, for a moment, nobody touches it.

It is beautiful. The chef intended that. The arrangement matters: the sauce drawn carefully across one side, the vegetables placed rather than dropped, the fish resting at an angle that would be unnecessary if eating were the only purpose. We look at it. Someone reaches for a fork.

“Wait.” A phone appears.

The plate is moved slightly toward the light. A glass is pushed aside. Perhaps the person sitting opposite leans back because a sleeve has entered the frame. One photograph is taken, then another from slightly higher up. The first was better. The phone disappears. Now we can eat.

There is nothing particularly sinister about this. I have done it. Probably you have too. Restaurants know we do it. Some dishes seem almost designed with the camera already somewhere above the table. And a photograph can be part of remembering a good evening just as easily as a photograph of a birthday or a landscape.

But something small has changed in the order of things.

The meal once had a fairly obvious purpose. We were hungry. We wanted something good to eat. Perhaps we wanted to spend an evening with someone. The restaurant provided the room, the table, the food, the service, and for an hour or two we were there.

The photograph adds another destination. The meal is still happening at the table, but part of it is now happening somewhere else, among people who are not present. They will see the plate later. They may know the restaurant. They may recognize the city. They may notice the person across from us, or wonder who is outside the frame.

The experience has acquired an audience. And once an experience acquires an audience, something curious becomes possible. The photograph no longer has to follow the experience. The experience can begin to arrange itself for the photograph.

We choose the table with better light. We wait before eating. We order the dish that photographs well. We travel somewhere partly because we have seen other people photograph themselves there. None of this means the pleasure is false. The food may be excellent. The journey may be wonderful. The person smiling in the photograph may genuinely be happy.

That is what makes the change difficult to see. The representation does not replace the experience. It settles beside it. Then, quietly, it begins asking something of it.

Social media became extraordinarily good at this. Facebook gave us somewhere to announce the events of a life. Instagram refined the arrangement. The ordinary evidence of existence became visual: the beach, the airport, the table, the concert, the hotel room, the body in front of the view. We learned not simply to experience things but to produce small proofs that we had experienced them.

I was here. I ate this. I went there. I know these people. This is what my life looks like.

The strange thing is that the proof can become valuable independently of the thing it proves.

You can enjoy a meal without photographing it. But a photograph of the meal can circulate without carrying any of the meal itself. Nobody looking at it can taste the sauce. They cannot hear the conversation. They do not know whether the evening was warm or awkward, whether the people at the table loved one another or had run out of things to say.

The photograph carries the appearance of the experience much farther than the experience can travel.

For a long time, I thought this belonged mostly to images. Recently I have begun to wonder whether we are doing something similar with thought.

There is another kind of display appearing online, quieter than the holiday photograph and more respectable than the selfie. It does not say: look where I am. It says: look at what I think.

The objects are different. Books instead of beaches. Ideas instead of restaurants. History, artificial intelligence, politics, psychology, philosophy, culture. The person does not photograph himself beside a swimming pool. He publishes two thousand words about civilization.

At first this seems like the opposite of Instagram. Perhaps that is part of its attraction. Here, finally, is the return of writing. Long paragraphs. Difficult subjects. Readers willing to remain with an argument for more than thirty seconds. A person can build a direct relationship with people who care about what he has to say rather than fight for space between advertisements, outrage and dancing videos.

Something valuable returned. But the old human machinery came with us. The desire to be seen did not disappear because the medium became serious. It simply found a more serious object.

The public self can be constructed from ideas just as easily as it can be constructed from photographs. I can show you the restaurant I visited. I can also show you the books I supposedly inhabit, the questions I supposedly wrestle with, the political complexity I supposedly possess, the subjects on which I supposedly have something worth hearing.

One is a portrait of a life. The other can become a portrait of a mind.

And until very recently, producing that second portrait was expensive. A photograph takes a second. An essay did not.

You had to know something, or learn something. You had to sit with the subject long enough for one thought to survive contact with the next. You had to find the structure. You had to discover that the clever sentence you liked did not fit. Sometimes you began with an argument and ended somewhere else. Sometimes you discovered halfway through that you had nothing to say.

Writing imposed friction.

That friction did not guarantee wisdom. People have written nonsense for as long as people have written. But producing the appearance of sustained thought usually required a certain amount of sustained effort from somebody.

That relationship is changing.

We now have machines capable of producing the outward form of thought almost instantly. A coherent argument. A historical analogy. A personal opening. A counterargument. A moment of uncertainty. A beautiful conclusion. Even the appearance of having changed one’s mind.

And that creates a possibility that did not exist at this scale before: the intellectual equivalent of moving the plate toward the light.

The question is no longer merely whether artificial intelligence can write. It plainly can.

The question is what happens when the representation of thought becomes easier to produce than the thinking it once seemed to prove.

Karim Spring