What is the deal with Diet Coke?
And is it the brain fuel for genius?
Elon Musk tweets (posts?) with an unhealthy profligacy. One of his more bizarre posts was of a photo of his bedside table. The photo contained guns, Washington crossing the Delaware, a Buddhist amulet, and...four caffeine-free Diet Coke cans. Of course, he wanted us to breathlessly catalog the items on his bedside table, to speculate about their meaning, and to (above all) engage with his tweet directly and indirectly. Reader, I have waited almost a year to take the bait, but take it I have.
Like Diet Coke, this post tastes artificially sweetened. It's probable that this photo was staged, another attempt for Musk to paint himself as a kind of cyberpunk monarch, a based cyborg man-of-the-people with inscrutable but compelling tastes. But it recalls to mind an observation I have heard made about Diet Coke, and the people who drink it. Bill Gates, Donald Trump, and the autodidact computer programming godfather John Carmack are all fantastically prolific Diet Coke drinkers themselves. Lest you think Musk has staged not only his bedside table but also affected his love for Diet Coke to get in good with the Carmack, Trump, or Gates fans, his love for the beverage was actually cataloged as far back as 2007. What is unique about this group?
Of course, they are all quite famous. By any standard, they are successful and rich, sometimes fantastically so. And all of them, despite all of the intelligence, resources, and good dietary advice in the world, persist in drinking truly copious quantities of Diet Coke on a daily basis. Why?
On some level, they are all cranks. Any of them may be more disposed to drink Diet Coke just because some diet-conscious scold told them it is bad for them. But they share another key feature in common: they see things just a bit differently from the rest of us. If we could look through their eyes, things might look different: a little off-color, out of place, dissonant. That invisible tic, that crankery, that grit in the craw, that makes everything around them different, that makes some of their choices inscrutable, has also made each of them as successful as they are. And maybe it changes how they see their diet, and how they see Diet Coke.
Bill Gates, famously the nerd's nerd, distinguished Microsoft in its early days not because of the sheer quality of the software he produced, but because he saw business opportunities where others only saw technical problems. Donald Trump ascended to the helm of the Republican Party because he saw levers of popular grievance latent within the party's loose coalition at a time when it had weak and feckless leadership, something few others saw, even when armed with vastly more data. John Carmack found hidden possibilities embedded within early computer architecture that would allow him to create breathtaking and immersive digital game worlds that always managed to break new ground.
None of these people attained this perspective because Diet Coke is some magical elixir. Perhaps a stubborn love for Diet Coke is only one random outworking of the personalities that drove them to such heights. But two things certainly did make them successful: first, they looked at their surroundings with different eyes than most; and second, they had the resources and personal ability to act upon what they saw. The second feature is obvious: if we were all smart and wealthy, we'd do alright, too. But the first is less straightforward, although you will find people talking about vision, intuition, or insight. And when it comes up, it is not really analyzed. Anyone can say "Bill Gates had remarkable insight", or "Donald Trump had an intuition for what would motivate the Republican base" or "John Carmack had the vision and tenacity to trailblaze computer graphics", but what does any of that mean? I want to interrogate at least one element of this intuition, to understand what crankery makes visible. The answer, curiously enough, lies in art history.
In 1917, in a Russia wracked by revolution, a young literary theorist named Viktor Shklovsky wrote an essay called "Art as Technique", in which he described how most of us don't even really see or understand the things around us, once we’re familiar with them:
This characteristic of thought not only suggests the method of algebra, but even prompts the choice of symbols (letters, especially initial letters). By this "algebraic" method of thought we apprehend objects only as shapes with imprecise extensions; we do not see them in their entirety but rather recognize them by their main characteristics. We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack. We know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette. The object, perceived thus in the manner of prose perception, fades and does not leave even a first impression; ultimately even the essence of what it was is forgotten. Such perception explains why we fail to hear the prose word in its entirety (see Leo Jakubinsky's article [2]) and, hence, why (along with other slips of the tongue) we fail to pronounce it. The process of "algebrization," the over-automatization of an object, permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort.
He continued to describe how, in his view, the purpose of art was to help us "recover the sensation of life", to see familiar objects in an unfamiliar way, to "increase the difficulty and length of perception." Therefore, the technique of art, in Shklovsky's view, is defamiliarization. While he writes on the cusp of modern art, Dada, and postmodernism, he claims that this technique is common to art more generally. While he did give voice, name, and practical method to the experiments of would-be artists in the remainder of the 20th and 21st centuries, one can see this technique present in many of the great works of art through history. To confine our gaze to Western art, we might see in sacred Renaissance art the sharp, detailed, and agonistic rendering of stories from the Bible made familiar to viewers by oral repetition, but unfamiliar by their fantastic, lifelike, and emotionally dynamic portrayals. Monet forces us to see water lilies once again; Picasso wants us to dwell upon the features of the face with new eyes; Leonardo da Vinci has had us wondering about a single mercurial smile for well over half a millennium.
Once you see this technique somewhere, you will see it everywhere. Certainly, you will find defamiliarization in art, literature, poetry, and film. But embedded in Apple's "think different" ad campaign, the advice to "try doing the opposite," and admonitions to consider a situation from different points of view, are everyday encouragements to use the techniques of defamiliarization to gain new insight.
At least one commonality among Carmack or Musk or one of these crank-adjacent geniuses is that, as seems obvious from reading biographical accounts, they felt or feel a mild kind of alienation in this world. That in part, they saw things differently because, when they looked at the world around them, it was unfamiliar or bizarre or incomprehensible to them in some way. Something was wrong; they were looking at the world as through a lens at a slight angle, and everything was coming out distorted. And because it was unfamiliar, every time they saw something we take for granted, it was like they were looking at it for the first time.
Basically, there may be some people for whom the world will always feel a little alien. For whatever reason, intrinsic or extrinsic, some people cannot stop seeing. It's estimated that most of what our brain processes is done unconsciously. We relegate almost everything our mind does to the unconscious simply for convenience's sake. Part of the genius of defamiliarization is that it short-circuits that relegation. We are well-adapted to pass over familiar information and pay attention to the new, novel, and unfamiliar in our day-to-day life. How better to induce aesthetic contemplation than by forcing us to look at something with all of our conscious faculties?
This is absolutely by necessity. It is estimated that our brains process something on the order of eleven million unconscious pieces of information per second for every forty pieces per second we consciously process. That is an absurd ratio. But perhaps, for some people, that ratio is slightly different. They can't just ignore as much as most people can. Can you imagine how terrible that would be?
Dostoyevsky's invented diary of a disaffected civil servant, Notes From The Underground, hints that the narrator may have this unwanted condition:
I want now to tell you, gentlemen, whether you care to hear it or not, why I could not even become an insect. I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness—a real thorough-going illness. For man’s everyday needs, it would have been quite enough to have the ordinary human consciousness, that is, half or a quarter of the amount which falls to the lot of a cultivated man of our unhappy nineteenth century [...]
For all of the benefits to us from defamiliarization—creativity, innovation, insight, empathy, the aesthetic emotion—there are clearly concomitant downsides. We even have tropes to describe this affect: the 'tortured artist' or 'tormented genius' is renowned for the illness that seems to give rise to their unique artistic or creative insights, so much so that some pretenders to artistry or genius affect mental illness in order to act the part.
So, why Diet Coke? It is an eccentricity, to be sure, and a counter-cultural one. There are broadly two 'rational' nutritional camps, when it comes to soda. The first abstains from the drink, as the data leads them to the quite reasonable conclusion that it isn't good for you. The second reads the data and comes to the same conclusion, but advocates moderation instead of total abstention. As long as you aren't mainlining the stuff, it probably won't have that big of an effect.
Then, enter Gates and crew. They practice an odd combination of irrational health consciousness (how much better is Diet Coke for you than Coca-Cola, really?) and total intemperance. Notably, what distinguishes these Diet Coke drinkers is not that they drink it, but they drink it with an insane abandon: 3, 4, 8, 10, or 12 cans a day of the stuff. Whatever leads them to these behaviors, perhaps the same kind of mild, reality-adjacent alienation they may feel that has given them such insight in business and technology might also make their nutritional reasoning, well, reality-adjacent.
As a technique, defamiliarization may be useful. But it is not fun. To live consciously is to live slowly and painfully. But think of your attempts to walk a mile in alien shoes every once in awhile in search of new insight the way you do visiting a museum to have your settled thoughts unsettled for you: you ought to go regularly, but please don't bring a sleeping bag.