Breaking Down the Bodies

Can you compost people? I don’t compost meat, both to avoid the smell of rotting flesh and to dissuade carrion-seeking vermin. Plus, composting meat can create a feeding ground for pathogens like E. coli which you don’t want inhabiting your garden or digestive tract.

Of course there’s nothing in nature stopping us from composting ourselves, and only a few pesky human laws against it here and there. But there are ways to get it done. Seattle-based Recompose will compost you in a proprietary human bin for twelve weeks and a mere seven thousand dollars. They donate the human compost for environmental restoration rather than raising crops, which I find vaguely disappointing. A farm using human compost to grow squash or whatever would have a cool marketing hook.

A Composting reader told me he’d heard that “coffee grounds are the biomaterial most similar to decomposing human flesh.” I haven’t been able to verify this, either with googling or field tests, but I’ll keep looking into it. Legally.

In the recent Mr. & Mrs. Smith TV reboot, there’s a scene where the Smiths dispose of the murdered John Turturro in a tumbler composter on their New York brownstone roof. I was saddened to learn this composter was a prop constructed for the show, as no commercially available tumbler composter could be found large enough to fit John Turturro. Even if there was, I suspect it would take a lot longer than twelve weeks to break him down, no matter how often you tumbled Turturro.

I had a recurring dream when I was much younger that I wandered a strange landscape of muddy terrain, some surfaces taut and firm, others soft and spongy, strange semi-organic structures poking out of the soil here and there, warm suffusing light, weird sickly sweet smells. At some point my focus shifted out of my own perspective to a place miles high above me while I also continued below, and I realized I was traveling across the surface of my own giant island-size decaying corpse, stretched out and placidly falling to ruin over the eons. The dream would end, and I woke up not with horror or disgust, but a feeling of deep serenity and satisfaction.

What exposes AI imagery as fake is the smoothness, the hyper-arrangement of it all, the perfectly studied imperfections of a bit of flyaway hair or a slightly crooked tooth, flesh blemished or wrinkled or sagging only artfully, how snow falls just so into chaotically pleasing drifts, or lights twinkle in tune like they’re all arranged at the same forced perspective.

Then there’s the smooth motion, so directly intentional and oddly slow, like the AI people and their world are moving underwater, but moving there easily and comfortably. They’re at home there, in place. Before AI video, it never struck me how humans cut through the world in such ungainly jerks and twitches and flinches, even when moving elegantly.

But what’s really starting to bother me about AI imagery, and I mean not just creep me out from uncanny visuals but really bother me spiritually, is how looking at AI imagery feels like I’m being watched. Not watched by the AI people, but watched by the algorithms and models creating these images.

And I don’t feel watched like I’m being surveilled. It’s worse. This is how machines look at humans, how they look at and talk to humans, by showing us what humans look like to them. The machines say: child, bear, truck, night, Coca-Cola. But the machines don’t know what these things are, they only know what we’ve told them they are, and so they repeat what we say back to us by showing us how they guess we think we look.

It feels like looking in a mirror that is somehow both empty and too bright, and behind the mirror we’re being seen, matched against what’s reflected, and found lacking.