Mr. Gibb got hauled back into ARC by his eldest; that last link goes to his full report if you haven't seen it. Today's strip is a "war journal" of the kind of twisted, post-apocalyptic hellscape that you might experience in a food court.
I've actively avoided Twitter's For You tab; they started making it go there at some point and I decided to see who it thought I was - or, at any rate, what the highest bidder might like me to be. It wasn't super good. A lot of it is people asking Grok things, to the extent that I think it must be preferred as a mode of content. There's a lot of people asking weird sex questions, indeed, the same sex questions in different languages if you look long enough. Fake personal stories; incendiary political rhetoric from people with absolutely zero geographical skin in the game. There's a level of AI Boosterism that over the last week became absolutely inescapable. Enough exposure reveals the same fundamental social geometry iterated at various scales. A lot of the people engaging with it aren't people at all, just vectors; it is a self-replicating, algorithmic favela.
TikTok, the app that everyone endeavors to emulate, is a completely different app for everyone in my house. For the others, it's fun shit. For me, it's become a brutal conditioning exercise. Cory Doctorow's enshittification concept describes a downward arc where a company delivers a good product, then they make a product which is only good for the business partners, then they make a product that is only good for them. I have a slight twist on the initial descent.
It used to want me to have fun so I would come back. Eventually it changed the fuel source, like going to diesel, where the combustibles rest in a pressurized chamber: now it wants me to be mad. It worked for a bit, but that's not something I can snack on and I was going to this channel for snacks and also to understand what the eff is going on in my daughter's life. It is now scooting me supine, across the pavement, with an omnichannel firehose of absolutely obscene gender takes.
I've always known more people than the statistical average; I did mobile technology service at something like 57 distinct sites, and then I became a public person. I simply know too many women to be swayed by entreaties about what bitches be like. My mom is a musical florist with a counseling degree. My sister is a gay M1 Abrams draped in flannel who is also a chef. My first real boss was a woman who felt like she had to mindkill herself to be taken seriously, an irreproducible woman. Tech in schools has a gender ratio that looks nothing like the traditional industry - indeed, half my coworkers were women who programmed mainframes and were being reskilled into personal computers. Also, when I was growing up, they were pushing the Free To Be You And Me pretty hard. It's possible that I grew up in a completely alien slice of reality but it did inoculate me from a certain percentage of dogshit takes.
Neofeudalism probably requires conditioning at this scale to muzzle and direct the populace. Such lenses must commingle recognizable fact silhouettes with motivated internecine war templates to drape such a fraudulent system. They'll manufacture mortal enemies for you in your homes if it means rolling our nation's corpse uphill. The world is disintegrating on every axis. I'd like to say I'm as demoralized as I could possibly be, but I'm sure there's still room for more; I've always considered myself an optimist.
(CW)TB out.
