He is risen indeed! I don't have any insight into the true ethical machinery of the universe, but if the things I read as a child were true then they're at once timeless and ineffable but also authored to our precise moment. I remember learning in church that God was a 27 Dimensional Entity, which gave the Sundays thereafter a potent, hard sci-fi kick. If He exists at a remove from causality, well, that explains a lot. I mean, it's no Kolob, but we lowly snake-handlers had to make due with what we had.
Because we are who we are, and because we do what we do, the generative AI stuff is the thing we typically find distasteful. I mean, you know what I mean because I've been forced to say it a million times. Borne of heinous pacts, and also "taking my stuff," machines designed to calculate precisely what middle management thinks is cool - slop of every sort is my abhorrence. But that's a single, reaching tendril and it issues from a subterranean bulb bristling with them.
These people have essentially detonated a sequence of nuclear weapons in our society, and we're buffeted by pressure waves that seem to strike at random intervals. I started watching TikTok ironically awhile ago, then graduated to watching it ronically as a kind of social detritus connoisseur, so I have a pretty robust case study. Enshittification comes for all, and ever since TikTok "went down" and then "came immediately back" the ratio of spam to ham has gone in the shitter purely as a function of the ad ratio. Beyond that, though: it's been colonized by AI. Whole channels reproduced video for video without attribution, grisly erotic lures that probably work on somebody, fake podcasts that feature pretend men telling real women precisely what they want to hear and vice versa, falsified world events, AI slop operas, it's fucked. I'm still doing Twitter on the off chance I can tell somebody about what we're doing, even though content suppression is the default - but the kudzu reaches all the way through that thing, top to bottom. Imaginary posts. Responses nobody wrote. Those are the two places I know of, I don't know if it's like that on Shorts, or Insta, but Facebook has been frying Boomer minds for a minute and that was before the advent of photorealistic puppy videos.
The priesthood that summons and coaxes these tools are constantly talking about the fact that they will draw a scythe through the global workforce, which barely constitutes prophecy - that's basically happening all the time. A human being in a seat with decades of industry-leading experience is being assessed fungibly with kilowatt-hours or token spend and they are losing.
Anthropic is currently playing the game best, with a combination of aw-shucks pseudohumility and public ethical performances, and their newest salvo is a corporate supergroup called Project Glasswing that leverages a new frontier model they claim can hack the fuck out of anything. I'm getting increasingly tired of living through history, but even if you take what these outfits say at face value, I don't know how these things - the hardware, the software, all of it - don't get nationalized. You get in more trouble running a hooch still than you do manufacturing doomsday weapons. It's the most American thing I can imagine.
(CW)TB out.
