Land of the living

When I first moved to New York, I lived by a Ridgewood cemetery on the very periphery of the vast cemetery belt that runs along the edge of Brooklyn and Queens. It’s so big that there are twice as many dead people as there are living people in Queens. The cemetery belt is so big that you can see it from space. In 1847, when the city of New York passed the Rural Cemetery Act, Queens was distant farmland. The Cemetery of the Evergreens, where I used to go for walks when I lived in Ridgewood, was incorporated in 1849. 

I was obsessed with the cemeteries, partly because I was convinced that the house I was living in was haunted. In reality, it had a terrible mouse infestation. It was also because when I wandered out east towards the cemeteries and away from Bushwick, it felt like I was barely in New York City anymore. Everyone lived in low houses, I would walk by people washing their cars on the weekend. I used to run around the Ridgewood Reservoir sometimes, which is startlingly lush in the summer and calm in the winter. More often, I would just walk or loiter there. The sky seemed so wide, the way it is in California, which I found incredibly comforting. I would do breathing exercises, trying to release something into the air, and for once it felt like it worked.

The logic behind the Rural Cemetery Act was to make more space for Manhattan’s swelling population. Growing awareness about public hygiene also led to a trend for more remote burial grounds outside of churchyards. But as the Rural Cemetery Act outsourced and privatized the funeral industry for the final resting places of the wealthy, New York’s expanding populations of poor immigrants, people of color, and otherwise marginalized communities, would often be shipped off for mass burial on Hart Island instead, a small piece of land in Pelham Bay. In 2020, The Intercept reported that inmates in the notoriously brutal jails on Rikers Island were offered $6 an hour and PPE to dig graves on Hart Island for those had died of covid, which at the time was reportedly rampant on Rikers Island.

Hart Island has been a cemetery for the poor and anonymous for a long time and inmates have been digging mass graves there for pennies on the dollar for a long time. It was the site of a prison for Confederate soldiers and of an infamous workhouse in the early 20th century. There is a macabre fascination to this history. In 1878, The New York Times reported the strange story of a “poor man named John Rooney,” whose wife died of tuberculosis at the TB ward on Hart Island. The story goes like this:

Mr. Rooney is told on Christmas Day that his wife has died and that her body will be brought back to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. He is then given a duplicate copy of her death certificate. This is where the story devolves into bizarre and familiarly horrifying bureaucracy. Mr. Rooney goes to Bellevue Hospital but his wife’s body is not there. He asks a Health official for help and is assured the city will intervene. However, the warden on Hart Island is not satisfied by the duplicate death certificate that Mr. Rooney has been given and refuses to send his wife’s body back to the mainland without an original death certificate, even though the warden on Hart Island has the original death certificate himself.

Finally, a Health official intervenes for Rooney and has his wife’s body brought to the Bellevue Morgue. But when the time comes for the funeral, the morgue also refuses to give up the body, because Mr. Rooney doesn’t have the right paperwork. He has to cancel the funeral and “dismiss the hearse and coaches.” A complex web of officials in the network of 19th century New York afterlife arrangements go back and forth for a while, negotiating, and finally on December 31st, Mr. Rooney learns that his wife’s body has finally been transferred to the Calvary Cemetery (in Queens), where it was hopefully left in peace. 

It is notable perhaps that the New York Times simply describes Mr. Rooney as “a poor man.” All his troubles seem to stem from that. No one will accept his paperwork or give him any dignity. It is a kind of Dickensian story of injustice. He lives in the East Village, at an address that is now E. 12th Street and Avenue C. He has to transfer his wife to Bellevue Hospital because “his means become exhausted” and he can no longer afford to care for her at home. At the time, Bellevue Hospital is the cheaper option, although now medical bills would probably bankrupt him. She is then sent to the terminal ward on Hart Island, which was described in 1917 by a grand jury as “unsuitable” for medical care, where predictably she dies and nearly disappears into the maze of the anonymous dead.

It is hard, at first, to imagine the city that this strange anecdote reveals. A city with a prison-like ward for terminal tuberculosis patients (which was then endemic in New York City and is now a rising public health risk). A city where someone has no knowledge or consent or power over their spouse’s final moments and the disposal of their remains. A city where an island half a mile off the coast of the Bronx is as inaccessible as a foreign country. And yet, this is the city that we still live in, in many ways. The unclaimed dead of New York City are buried in unmarked trenches on Hart Island to this day. At the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s, and at the peak of fear and stigma around the illness, hospital wards sent their dead patients en masse to Hart Island for anonymous burial. Rachel Humphreys, Lou Reed’s partner, who died of HIV, was buried there. And Rikers, after all, is just off the coast of the Bronx, but its thousands of inmates are cut off from the public life of the city and from its notions of justice, sanitation, the right to medical care, or freedom of movement.

A long New York Times expose in 2016 revealed that unwieldy bureaucracy and inflexible city officials could lead to bodies being carted off for mass burial against the wishes of loved ones or even when other funeral arrangements had been made. Unclaimed bodies have also historically been subject to dissection, probing a deep history of racism, poverty, and a predatory funeral industry that runs end-of-life costs into the thousands of dollars. In an essay for The New York Review of Books, Mona Chalabi estimates that funeral costs average $7,360, leaving mourners in the position of making difficult financial decisions. Part of the reason for this, according to Chalabi, is that funeral homes, like everything else now, are owned by corporations that functionally operate like hedge funds.

I was listening recently to my brother, who is a software engineer, try to explain his job to someone else. He was talking about the internet as a series of containers, all enclosed within each other. They bridge distances, essentially teach different kinds of technical functions to communicate with each other. I didn’t really understand it, but I was stupidly impressed by the idea of the internet as a physical space containing data. We talk so much about the internet as abstract, floating, our bodies disembodied and recaptured on it. The existential fear of AI, which has become increasingly prevalent, isn’t just a fear about the capacities of AI to do things that seem unnatural (like creating fake pornography), but also about its apparent potential to surpass us.

It’s the same anxiety you get in old science fiction stories, like Space Odyssey 2001 (1968), where they imagine computers taking over the world. In more recent incarnations, such as Her (2013), the danger warps slightly. In Her, humanity isn’t exactly at risk. Instead, one person’s attachment to the world, and by extension, all of our attachments to the world, is. If you haven’t watched Her, it’s basically about a depressed middle-aged man, Theodore, undergoing a divorce, who falls in love with his AI assistant, Samantha. Samantha appears to have fallen in love with him too, although it turns out that across her operating system, she is talking to many other people and claims to have fallen in love with many of them. She insists this doesn’t detract from her love for Theodore, which seems obviously true. Unlike a person, Samantha has limitless attention. Or at least, at limitless as her data capacity. She can operate in different dimensions all at once, talking to as many lonely hearts as she can find.

What is funny about revisiting the film ten years later is that Theodore’s job is hiring professional writers to write personal letters for people who find themselves inarticulate. A kind of Cyrano de Bergerac. He hires Samantha as a virtual assistant and discount therapist, but in a contemporary version, her primary function would be to phase out all the writers. What is most unrealistic about Her isn’t that Theodore morphs into his screen, preferring a system totally adapted to his needs to the complexities of dealing with a real person. Rather it’s that AI ultimately makes Theodore more emotionally intelligent. It is able to anticipate and to challenge his desires until he becomes self-sufficient.

In her book Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, Kate Crawford argues that what we get wrong about AI is believing that its widespread use will improve our lives and systems. Instead, poorly adapted to the strengths and weaknesses of humans, it will make our world more impoverished. Incorporating AI into the workplace, she points out, is a regression “to older practices of industrial labor exploitation that were well established in the 1890s and the early twentieth century. That was a time when factory labor was already seen in relation to machines and work tasks were increasingly subdivided into smaller actions requiring minimal skill but maximum exertion.”

Atlas of AI was published early in 2022 (so written substantially earlier), and a lot of what Crawford says about AI feels more familiar now with the sudden explosion of Chat GPT and other online AI systems. She goes through the inherent bias in language sets, in analyzing mugshots, in harvesting massive amounts of data. These processes are crude. They simplify the variable and diverse things they are given and introduce errors. Crawford also describes the mass collection of data by private corporations as a form of theft from the public commons, extracting value from what appears to be communal space. Social media is often rightly described this way. But I always think about how after my youngest brother died, over 20 years ago, as a baby and barely a legal person, we would periodically get junk mail addressed to him. It was an error of data collection, unable to distinguish between the dead and the living. It has morphed since into the kind of horror show described in a viral Wired essay, succinctly titled, “I Called Off My Wedding: The Internet Will Never Forget.”

Perhaps AI is not so different from humans in this sense, but it inarguably encourages our most antisocial tendencies. A 2022 Verge article about using AI for creative writing profiles Darby Rollins, the founder of the AI Author Workshop, who teaches his students to write the “minimum viable book” in order to lend their Google search results a sense of expertise. The books are mostly self-help and business books, but other kinds of writers have also started to pick up AI tools. In the Verge piece, Rollins wonders if using AI to write is really “so different from what humans do? […] There’s arguments that no one’s ever thought of an original new thought in a century.”

So if it is difficult to have a creative or original thought or one that is worth reading, as any writer knows, does that mean we should give up entirely on the attempt? A lot of the defenses around AI writing, particularly of the more literary kind, are around its use as a time saver. “Measuring fungible time,” writes Jenny Odell in her book Saving Time, “is like envisioning standardized containers that can potentially be filled with work; in fact, there is a strong incentive to fill these units of time with as much work as possible.”

Part of my resistance to understanding writing purely as labor, although it obviously is labor, is in how it contains it within these depersonalized units, reduces it to methods of efficiency and standardization. This is evidently a problem with how we talk about labor altogether. But the problem with AI writing is not simply if it is clumsy or error-prone or uncreative. It is also how it reduces a process that is elusive and unpredictable into something flat and contained. If you ask an AI tool to generate a passage for you, say about the history of cemeteries in New York, it will do exactly what it is asked to do and nothing more. It cannot inflect the personal, the kinds of connections that emerge randomly in the retelling of stories, and turn them eventually into something totally different, or even unrecognizable.

Looking for comp titles at a publishing internship years ago, I once thought I had found a book called “15 Ways to Stay in Love Forever.” The book was probably about $15 which isn’t a bad deal for the rest of your life. I named a playlist full of sad warehouse dance music after it and I still think about it sometimes. But when I looked the book up again, I couldn’t find it. It’s a ghost book; I must have changed the name beyond recognition.

At the bookstore where I work now, we constantly misplace books. Our automated systems are full of stock errors, but books also simply move around. People take them off the shelves and put them back somewhere different. They end up in a backroom for no reason at all. It can be hard to explain to customers why a book is missing when it is scanned into the system. Barcodes seem reliable, a form of tracking that should be able to locate a missing item. But books exist in the world apart from our antiquated computer system. There is no real relationship between the physical object, which could be anywhere or nowhere, and the apparent neat infallibility of the metadata.

Rereading the story of Poor Mr. Rooney, which I first read in 2020, when I was reading about Hart Island, I wondered what that process would be like now. Perhaps similar in many ways. It is tempting to think that it would harder to misplace or miscategorize a human body in an era of intensive data collection, but the kind of bureaucratic maze that the article describes feels strangely timely. Our systems, in the end, are only as good as we are. No better, no worse.