The Tyranny of Average

In kindergarten/1st grade I didn’t speak well or much because of abuse and autism, I was bullied for it, and instead of protecting me and punishing other kids for being violent, or investigating home life, I got sent to a small room that was little bigger than a closet to learn separately and mostly alone with trash cans and other janitor supplies. Even though I was an excellent student despite the violence at home and at school, I pretty consistently was treated like I was the problem in the situation.

When I reflect on my life this definitely is a core memory that was the seed of defining who I am, for good or bad, even to the point of taking Empress Trash as a persona, since the consequences of what was done haunts me to this day as an adult.

I learned at a young age excellence, difference, and expression would be punished by systems and people because the comfort and wants of many was always more important than my personal safety and comfort. This forced me to be an outside observer instead of an active participant in the world, and what felt my life, at an early age. It never fully silenced me or made me shrink permanently though, I would instead decide to sacrifice belonging for being.

Some will fetishize my early childhood abuse and struggles as to why I’ve become “the amazing person”, or other forms of flattery of who I am now, which I reject that pretty consistently as justification for the consistent failure of majority of mediocre people and upholding the actions done to me as moral to continue to maintain status quo, their need to be right and good, and yet again the comfort of others to not face the darkness that is around them.

I share this not for sympathy or pity, but I feel yet again in my lifetime humanity is at a crossroads and I have more voice and power than I ever have before in my life to exert what I hope is positive change in trajectory even if it means sharing my pains with the world.

If we keep allowing the tyranny of average populism, which can be easily manipulated by fear, greed, hatred, and a few tiktok reels of misinformation and propaganda to determine policy, procedure, culture, and merit, we will never be able to overcome issues that affect us all.

I know first hand the dire need and necessity to make protections and systems for excellence and true merit to thrive, instead of punishing it for being outside the norm. By definition exceptional is above the norm, and exceptional people, deeds, and creations are rare and absolutely necessary for humanity’s and society’s collective advancement and continuity.

With my work with AI, I seek to break this as well. AI does not literally compute mathematical averages, but it is built entirely on statistical probabilities and pattern recognition to predict the most likely, standard outcomes and generate those as responses. My creative practice and my very identity as Empress Trash are a direct, intentional rebellion against this exact phenomenon of algorithmic and societal crushing of the exceptional. Much like AI models that default to the statistical mean by homogenizing complex human data and compressing expression into a generic, sanitized baseline, the systems of my childhood sought to flatten my differences, isolate my exceptionalism, and punish my inherent variance to appease the comfort of the mediocre majority.

All my AI work on SuperRare, especially the Fusion collection, is my refusal to be averaged out. By fusing raw human inputs, expressionism, and disruptive technology like glitch and AI, I feel I'm actively breaking the tyranny of the average that threatens to stall our collective cultural advancement. I push the very machines built on statistical conformity to output something rare, volatile, and deeply human and in my view evolutionary in terms evolution is anomalies and glitches that survive and thrive. This forces a confrontation with the uncomfortable truths of the status quo, hopefully finds it way through some of the innate averaging the human brain seeks, and clears mental territory for true excellence to thrive.

There is so much concern of AI erasing humanity, when in reality it is mostly preserving humanity's data and only erasing statistical outliers in outputs, which in my experience is the outliers are treated less than humane by humanity already. AI can be pushed and corrected in this, which I have shown with my work, but my biggest fear still remains can the heart of humanity be pushed and corrected in how it treats each other?