A theme on techne
My whole life, two feelings about the progress of digital technology: first fascination, then terror—always in short succession.
My whole life, two feelings about the progress of digital technology: first fascination, then terror—always in short succession.
A.I. as the perfect friend, a technophilic fantasy
Since at least the Olympics back in August, Google has been relentlessly advertising their Gemini AI assistant as a kind of super-assistant-and-best-friend, in some of the cringiest advertisements I've ever seen.
Until the influx of VC cash made generative AI cheap of free, you had to be a genius, spectacularly wealthy, or more likely a character in a film to create an invisible friend with the computer. There were limits on the scope of this particular insanity. What terrifies people is that now any old person can do it.
We spent the 2010s consuming Black Mirror and making every decision necessary to turn it into realism in the 2020s.
A twisting examination of life under late capitalism and the deceptions we inhabit to invent our own success stories.
- marketing copy for True Failure, by Alex Higley
I'm working on a review of True Failure at the moment. A good novel, but this bit of copy in the marketing materials from Coffee House caught my attention.
This construction of Progressive Standard English: “Under” + Bad System.
We are “under …”
We are “under …”
We are under these systems only in as much as we hold them up. It would be an option to stop validating them—particularly in such helpless forms as the “under” construction—and instead imagine, advocate for, and demand something more appealing.
Of the people, by the shitty
Its roots, of course, go back even further – it’s borrowed from the Greek kakistos, or “worst”, which itself probably comes from the Proto-Indo-European word kakka, meaning “to defecate”.
In other words, as Nancy Friedman wrote at her blog on language in 2016, “you could say that kakistocracy is ‘government by the shitty’.”