The Scholar-Gipsy and the stolen machine
Arnold's dropout who learns secret arts and never comes back is the patron saint of every coder who ran with the tools before anyone could charge for them.
On Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka » Blog Archive » AI Psychosis, AI Apotheosis
But once, years after, in the country lanes, Two scholars, whom at college erst he knew, Met him, and of his way of life inquired. Whereat he answer’d that the Gipsy crew, His mates, had arts to rule as they desired The workings of men’s brains; And they can bind them to what thoughts they will: ‘And I,’ he said, ‘the secret of their art, When fully learn’d, will to the world impart: But it needs Heaven-sent moments for this skill!’Matthew Arnold, “The Scholar-Gipsy”
The Scholar-Gipsy leaves Oxford to learn arts to rule as they desired / The workings of men’s brains from the Romani, and promises he will to the world impart the secret when fully learn’d. But the poem’s entire structure is organised around the fact that he never comes back to impart it.
Byron is harder on the scene than Arnold.
Man's a strange animal, and makes strange use
Of his own nature, and the various arts,
And likes particularly to produce
Some new experiment to show his parts
— this is the Don Juan narrator watching exactly the scene O'Brien describes, the tinkerer with the new synthesiser, the coder with the new tool, and finding it simultaneously charming and damning. Byron's couplet closure is lethal: You'd best begin with truth, and when you've lost your / Labour, there's a sure market for imposture. The rhyme of lost your with imposture is itself a kind of theft — Byron steals the natural line break to force an unnatural rhyme, and the violence of the enjambment enacts what it describes. The market for imposture is not a separate market from the market for truth; it is what the truth-market becomes when the labour fails. O'Brien is aware of this — his parenthetical spits on floor when mentioning productivity, his acknowledgment that AI psychosis is a real diagnostic category — but his essay wants to hold the giggling feeling separate from the imposture market. Byron would say you cannot. The ottava rima stanza does not let you. Every flight of enthusiasm in Don Juan ends in a deflating couplet, not because Byron is a cynic but because the form itself insists that the energy of the experiment and the collapse into imposture are metrically identical. They scan the same way. And Jonson, from further back, offers the clinical version:
too much
Settling, and fixing, and (as't were) subsiding
Vpon one obiect
is what Assassinates our knowledge — the verb is Plato's but the diagnosis is Jonson's, and it describes with uncomfortable precision the state of someone deep in a coding vibe, incorporating outward things into the mental part until the faeces stop the organs. Jonson's metaphor is digestive. You can eat the tool. You cannot always pass it.
What O'Brien sees that Arnold and Byron do not — and this is genuine — is the collective dimension of the theft. Arnold's Scholar-Gipsy is alone. Byron's experimenter is a type, not a community. But O'Brien is describing a generation that stole the machine together, lost faith together, and is now being offered the machine back in a shinier box. Whether you can steal something you are paying for is not a question the canon has language for, because the canon's thieves — Prometheus, the Scholar-Gipsy, even Milton's Satan — steal from above. O'Brien is describing something more like finding that the thing you stole twenty years ago is now being sold back to you at a markup, and buying it anyway, because the feeling of the first theft is still in your fingers. Arnold and Byron know about the feeling. They know about the danger. They do not know about the subscription model.