When a room is dark, you turn on a light.
The room stops being dark, and now you can see. Nice. You can read now. You can work, cook, and continue doing whatever you want long after the sun has sunk beyond the horizon.
Artificial light is prevalent enough now that it's easy to forget how impressive a feat it is – how wholly it has changed human existence.
But every now and then, especially if you live somewhere as grey as England often is, you remember something important:
The light is not the sun.
This fact, of course, sounds obvious before you consider how often we act as though the two are interchangeable. As though the sun were nothing more than nature's light bulb, and if we want to stay in our rooms all day, nothing much is different.
But, of course, that only works if you accept the premise. Sure, the light bulb can do the work of the sun, if you assume that's all that matters.
But the sun in the sky does more than banish darkness. It sets your body clock. It provides vitamin D, and heat. It affects, materially, your sleep and mood, your alertness.
The sun draws plants towards it. It organises seasons, migrations and entire ecosystems around its presence and absence.
A light bulb reproduces one visible property of the sun. A quite important one. But you've got to remember that they're not the same thing.
The fault in our facsimiles
The funny thing about facsimiles is that they often don't just copy, they compress. They reproduce by reduction, and output a reliable representation of the most resonant feature.
Many of our compressions are lossy.
Think of a book summary.
A good one preserves the plot of a novel or the main points made in a work of non-fiction. They'll tell you the author's conclusion and the lesson you're supposed to take away.
A summary can't take you on a transformative journey though. A summary will never invoke the mulling of a mystery or the rush of a thriller. It can't translate the rhythm of the author's metre. The lilt and bounce of the words they choose. A summary can't take you for a ride. It can only show you the destination.
And you can tell yourself that it's enough. You should just know that they're not actually the same thing.
A facsimile leaves no visceral imprint on your mind or on your path. It just gives you 'the rough idea'.
The problem is, you already know a book summary is a facsimile. But many of the others you encounter are far more covert.
And sometimes, the copies can even change the originals.
How copies corrupt
The more books spread via summaries, the more publishers will print books that can be summarised.
Suddenly the thesis has to be immediately recognisable, and the argument must break into clean chunks. And all the key ideas should be easily converted into quotations and posts and presentation slides.
Then the books produced under such conditions begin to resemble expanded summaries of themselves. And you exclaim:
"This book is too long! It is obvious that all of this could have just been a summary".
In the same way, films have been clipped enough for movie studios to optimise for clips. TV shows are centre-framed, because they're already anticipating the fan-made TikTok reels.
And in the process you forget how real and visceral cinema can be, when it is unconcerned with its copies.
The compression reaches backwards in time and changes what is created.
A facsimile can eventually change the thing it copies. The original is forced to accommodate the construct.
Books become easier to summarise.
Films become collections of clips.
Songs become engineered for the 6-second snippet you'll recognise them by.
Conversations slowly congeal into messages that can be screenshotted.
Remember that a light is not the sun.
Revenue is one of the things a business can produce. It needn't shape all the things a business might become.
A relationship can appear to exist almost entirely as a string of text. But to accept that alone is to forget everything that a relationship can be.
What begins as a substitute can eventually help produce a world in which there is less left to substitute for.
Artificial lights diminish the night
There is something to be said about finitude.
An artificial light doesn't only imitate part of the sun, but it begins to change darkness too.
Cities now remain bright long after nightfall. I had to drag my friends deep into Scotland just to find a place dark enough to clearly see certain stars. City lights push true night far away, and dark skies become more difficult to find.
Likewise, waves of AI slop flood your feeds and your minds, and make quality writing that much harder to find. 'Decent' writing just needs to be faster to produce, cheaper to distribute, and 'good enough' for whatever job it's meant to do, and people eventually come to accept it as normal. They forget just how good, how meaningful, how titillating good writing can be.
Clips don't quite replace films, but they can consume the time and attention you may otherwise have spent on them. And very soon you can't sit through a full film, because of all the clips you could otherwise be watching. All the things you could otherwise be doing. They're all in your mind. They're on the phone that you're actually still holding in your hand while occasionally glancing at the screen.
That's why streaming platforms make films now for people who aren't actually watching.
Summaries don't destroy books, but they can satiate enough of your curiosity that you never wonder how much more you might glean from submerging yourself fully.
Constant messages don't necessarily replace relationships. But getting enough of them can simulate a sense of connection that makes real absence easier to ignore.
A light isn't the sun.
The danger isn't that you can't tell the two apart. But that artificial lights answer one need so immediately that you forget how many others are left wanting.
Soon enough you start building rooms without windows. Soon enough, you forget how to truly see.
Pull back the curtains. Open the window and remember.
