Choices – Once Made Hard to Turn Back by Al Sikes

“You can’t afford a wife!” Dad to me as I told him Marty and I were going to be married.

Me. I had just finished college and had talked to Dad about going to law school.  My trajectory was spending not making. Dad was right.

But then characteristically I got married and Marty went to work at Ellis Fischel State Cancer Hospital in Columbia, Missouri. The script changed, the drain on my parent’s account disappeared.

When I started law school the competition for our self-perception and meager resources were by today’s standards minimal. There was not a state lottery imploring us to buy long shot tickets. Body pictures and piercings were not cool. When watching the occasional football game, I was not encouraged to wager on point spreads. And, marijuana was not being encouraged by the State. Now gambling, booze and marijuana are in our face and they must teach vulgarity at scriptwriting school.

Few would argue that there has not been a generational shift in distraction—some of it toxic. As I write I can hear my phone pinging. I pause, recalling TS Eliot’s line in “Burnt Norton”. Eliot wrote that we moderns are “distracted from distraction by distraction.” Too often, toxic distraction.

I was fortunate. I grew up when America was beginning to soar and today’s global competition was blunted by WW11 and/or authoritarian governments. And political leadership in America was hopeful. The year I entered law school Dwight Eisenhower was President. Tragically, the year I graduated, President John F Kennedy was assassinated. 

I sketch this personal history because it is, in part, my context. It can’t be recreated, but looking back it’s not hard to find values that should be perpetually honored.

Seven years ago, I wrote Culture Leads Leaders Follow. It had a good run but is now out of print. I was reminded of my research for the book while my wife and I were eating at Chipotle recently. There was a family sitting at the table next to ours. They had three children with them. Miraculously one of the children was reading a book. He looked to be about 12; I am betting on him. He is resisting the culture of instantaneous connectivity about nothing or worse. Culture matters. Let me turn to the worst; but you will have to follow me into the weeds for a moment.

Most are familiar with Artificial Intelligence (AI) that works off of “large language models” (LLMs) to quickly respond to inquiries. The work of categorizing and editing the LLMs is, in part, being outsourced to Kenyan workers because they speak English, are well-educated and don’t require large salaries.

 The Wall Street Journal reported that, “OpenAI asked the workers to parse text-based sexual content into four categories of severity…. The worst was descriptions of child sexual-abuse material, or C4. The C3 category included incest, bestiality, rape, sexual trafficking and sexual slavery—sexual content that could be illegal if performed in real life.”

OpenAI is facing pushback as many workers say they have been changed for the worst by parsing through human garbage day in day out.  

The Journal reported that “Mophat Okinyi, a quality analyst, said his work included having to read detailed paragraphs about parents raping their children and children having sex with animals. He worked on a team that reviewed sexual content, which was contracted to handle 15,000 posts a month, according to the documents. His six months on the project tore apart his family, he said, and left him with trauma, anxiety and depression.” The article noted that his wife has left him saying: ‘You’ve changed. You’re not the man I married. I don’t understand you anymore.’

How could it be otherwise? Language and images move people and their culture. And today many creatives believe they need to operate on the edge to get attention. What is the next stage? What happens when mere vulgarity is regularized?

With apologies to those who live in Hollywood’s zip codes, let me return from Kenya.  As 1963 came to an end Marty and I had our first of three daughters. In 1978 she was fifteen. Thankfully Hollywood did not start using the F word as a noun, verb and adjective until a generation later. It is hard to know the effects of vulgarization of our patois but it is hard to believe it will be good. 

Recently the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit said that “playing derogatory music in the workplace could violate laws against sexual discrimination…” Imagine the Hollywood glitterati, having been accused of unwanted sex on the “casting couch”, generations later helping create hostile workplaces.

It will be said that this is just old stuff, briefly updated. That is true. But the failure of scriptwriters and lyricists and their editors to act with more discernment toward our culture bleeds into today’s relationships and politics. Is it possible for the new to be restorative?

So let me end with several questions. How will State promotion of gambling on sports influence the culture? Will soon-to-be promoted marijuana have a positive or negative effect on human well-being? How will media creatives and their editors resist the centripetal force of lowest common denominator language and images? And when we talk about “equity” is it possible to understand the anti-equity of what we call the “popular culture”?  I have a lot of questions, but will spare you. These, in my view, are a good start.

Al Sikes is the former Chair of the Federal Communications Commission under George H.W. Bush. Al writes on themes from his book, Culture Leads Leaders Follow published by Koehler Books.