killing time, no. 3

I‘m pretty upset that my laptop isn’t here yet. That’s a problem. A sickness. I know deep down that it’s because I’m used to the depravity, hedonism, sinfulness of Amazon shipping, where I can order like a surge protector and it’s at my door in 8 hours and I don’t have to see another human being or sunlight.

My computer should be here by now. It’s been well over 8 hours and I paid way more than I did for that surge protector. But that’s just capitalist conditioning. I shouldn’t be able to get anything from the internet in 8 hours. That’s feeble inbred aristocrat type shit. My computer is currently in the Jiangsu province of China. Do you have any idea how long it would take me to drive to the Jiangsu province of China, even if I beat the traffic in Shanghai?

All this time without tech is good though. It’s given me an excuse to participate in the real world. Learn about supply chains, deal with human workers, contend with my real life bank and remember that it openly hates my guts. Remember that as you strip illusions away, everything comes down to money. I’m an ATM, an obnoxious one that breaks all the time and requires food and water to pay out at all.

It’s nice to have some distance from tech, because I can neutrally observe the cultural impact of specifically AI, the hot new thing where you can be turned down for a job without ever crossing paths with another human being.

In LA, in the media-ish parts where I live, the poisoning is omnipresent. Everybody’s unemployed and worried they’ll be phased out, replaced by machines. It’s everywhere, and so far it just adds friction to the social contract. Takes away our autonomy, makes us less flexible, compromises agency and generally beats down and humiliates us.

I watched a rough cut of some guy’s movie. You don’t know it, it’ll never get distribution, this won’t get back to me. He used AI on everything. Told me it was the future, that we have to adapt or die. Told me it saved him hundreds of thousands of dollars. I didn’t tell him, because it wouldn’t change anything, that each AI element stood out in its coldness, its lack of blood, and made what could have been a cute B-movie a shameful waste of everybody’s time. I wanted to die every time somebody had to say AI-tinged dialogue (usually to get out of scenes, keep the narrative on track), every time I heard music cues that were worse than muzak. God, I would have killed for the luxury of muzak. Even background effects, visual ”fixes” you’re not supposed to notice, looked off.

Ultimately it’s because they weren’t honest. The person that’s supposed to make this stuff, these decisions, had been deleted. The humanity was gone. I had seen a fake movie. Ed Wood’s pornos had more artistic merit, because they had a heartbeat somewhere.

That’s just one anecdote, this is just a thing I wrote on a phone with my huge clammy thumbs, but right now it summarizes the whole AI problem for me. It’s an obvious fad, about to hit an obvious wall that smarter people than me can explain elsewhere. It’s gonna lead to huge mistakes and it’s threatening to ruin parts of our lives we took for granted by whittling away the importance of decision-making. It devalues what makes us interesting.

Let’s bring back the phrase “soul-killing” for a minute because that’s what it does. AI stuff sucks. It’s always going to suck. It can’t make art, it can’t have compassion, it can’t make judgment calls. It can only do math really fast, and we’re about to hit the limit of how fast that is. What a sorrowful thing, how many zealots are behind it, lying about their ultimately financial or fetishistic interest in it. Yeah, I saw the video where Darth Vader and 1999 Darth Vader wave lightsabers at each other like lit up flaccid penises. That’s closer to being the best this stuff can make than anyone wants to admit. This is gonna self-destruct sometime, there’s gonna be precedent cases, VC money will go elsewhere, you can just feel it intuitively if you take one step back and just observe.

Of course it’s worthless at writing, which was a skilled trade you got money for once. I’m not even worried about that. The reasons writing has collapsed as a job are more insidious than tech dystopia, they’re just regular late capitalist dystopia. AI writing is an abomination and the secret is the people perpetuating it are lying and don’t care. That’s fine. I knew where they stood a long time ago. I just want the mask to come off so we can see how we’re actually being degraded and fight that. We won’t win, that’s not how the world works, but it’s not about that. It’s about dignity.