The Divine Drudgery of Chores and Art

Something many people who are creators of some kind can agree on is that AI should not be taking over the jobs of artists, writers and musicians. Yet Fantasy and SciFi author Joanna Maciejewska claims she wants “AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

I want to do my own laundry and dishes so I have a reason to make art. Cleaning out the cat box and changing the litter will never be the job of a robot. I do not fantasize about a fully automated luxury capitalism communism replete with unlimited resources to cater to my whims so I can focus on the art life. While washing the dishes I find the key that solves a problem in an essay, story or poem. Cleaning up my dog poop and going to the grocery store on my own, instead of having other people delivery my food to me, are when I get captivated by an idea that I might work into a music mix for Imaginary Stations or a future sit-in on Trash Flow Radio. At my library day job, I started off as a shelver and I still don’t mind filing books on the shelves, or more often in the catalog department, unpacking the boxes of books and taking the cardboard outside to throw into our recycling dumpster. That’s when I’m dreaming of the next thing I am going to write and share. The work of my hands in so-called drudgery gives freedom to my mind.

I don’t need robots or any kind of AI to do this work for me. It is when I am doing this work that I am connected to the same or similar grinds as my fellow humans. My creative work is not so special that I have to waste valuable electrical energy having some machine, that will probably break down and need to be fixed by a specialist, to do my chores for me. I’d rather stay connected to the rhythms of the household and the rhythms of life, to the rhythms of my spouse, and our pets, and our plants than have it all taken care of for me as if I lived in some space station bubble like George Jetson, disconnected from physical reality and the biology of life.

No flying cars for me, they don’t exist anyway. No self-driving cars either. Put me in the drivers seat. I don’t want the machine to the do the driving. If someone else is going to be driving, maybe its because I’m going somewhere with family or friends, or sitting next to another citizen of the city I call my home and taking public transport. Riding the bus to work as I did for two decades until my department moved into the post-industrial hellscape sector of the city. Riding the bus, I got a lot of reading done, and time to think, jot notes down in my notebook, and write drafts. That’s a far cry from a self-contained isolated self-driving car, with no hope of interaction between the different mixes of people you get to meet on the bus. Free from distraction, free from the cares of an actually lived life.

The poet Gary Snyder reminded us in his Zen wisdom to “chop wood and carry water.” Those basic chores were part of poetry. Stephen King reminded us that “Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.”

This is a useful reminder to give myself, because when I put art before life, my relationships suffer. Our microcosmic relations are the basis for the world relations in the macrocosm, and we can all see how well they are going. We aren’t so special as creators that we need to make someone else take care of things for us, whether its another human or a robot. Interdependence is good, and then we all have a chance to support each other and allow our unique gifts to flourish in community.

AI in the arts is in itself dead end direction. Some of the specific tools, such as speech synthesis, or image generation, have the potential to be used artistically, have even more potential for application in détournement and culture jamming. Meanwhile they are getting used by the corporate state to jam human culture with their sloppy seconds. The best way to detox from the overstimulation of the simulated spectacle remains to go offline and get away from the machines. This is where direct engagement with our own home economies becomes so vital. The machines have made us alienated from our own labor. Labor itself is not alienating, no matter how much Marx you’ve read. When done in the spirt of vocation, calling, and in presence, labor is as vital as the viriditas of the evergreen world. We aren’t owed a living by machines whose tendency towards entropy and rust is quicker than our own tendency to arthritis and blindness.

In the words of a meme I am a soul “driving a meat coated skeleton made from stardust.” While I grant that all of nature is animated by sparks divine, there is a difference between the LLM residing in a case of silicon coated metal. Do robo dolls have souls? No AI disempowered dishwasher will ever wash the silverware I inherited from my grandparents with the same care and memory of their lives. No AI disempowered washing machine will ever make a record like Sonic Youth’s Washing Machine. Nor will it do the same work of the sun when I hang the clothes I bought from the thrift store out on the line, and never for free. All of these machines are predicated on the burning up of ancient stored sunlight that requires the continued pillage of our mother to gain what? A few idle hours, whose leisure may be wasted on video games and television. Downtime further immersed in the spectacle is no break. Real work, the repair of our homes, the repair of our earth house hold, requires we use our hands.  

Gary Snyder reminds us again of the duty of a poet. “As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.” So lets get dirty.

Common work holds us all in common bonds and can help renew and restitch a world unraveling. Without the worn work of caring hands putting needle to thread and patching up those threadbare places, we risk losing the very weave that holds households and communities together. Let me do the common work while I share my dreams. Let me plant the seeds. There will be time to sit on the front porch with a notebook and pen in hand to also do the work of the scribe. They are not separate.   

Maciejewska emphasized in her viral X post that, “just to clarify… this post isn't about wanting an actual laundry robot. It's about wishing that AI focused on taking away those tasks we hate.”

But why should we hate those chore which we alone can infuse with the poetry of daily life?

Analog Intelligence begins at home, in doing the things that the index of influencers and the industrial-entertainment complex bemoans as beneath them. Essential skills are gathered by doing unpleasant things. Sometimes making art can be drudgery. Keeping our homes clean, our water carried to do the cooking, the wood chopped for the stove, all are ways to keep the hearth fire burning. And doing them even when we don’t feel like it gives us the grit to push through artistic obstacles when those get tough.

​And after the floor has been swept, and while the socks are being darned, and the stew is bubbling on the stove, we gather round to share our dreams and stories together. No robots required.

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