(no subject)
I'm pretty happy that long ago I decided I was too broke to ever use photoshop & taught myself all kinds of different weird open-source image manipulation software. Not that I ever developed beyond rudimentary ability - but at least stupid adobe can't just steal. Hilarious.
I try explaining this to people - the company where you work is owned by people who don't care what the business actually does - they want a 10% increase year over year. Eventually they'll make everything much much worse in order to demonstrate that growth. I know cleverer people than me have weighed in on such matters but I'm reading from this type of escalation that the tech co's are finally hitting peak revenues & now must chase down the bad increases. In a lot of ways it seems like the LLMs are really a method for scraping the pennies out of the couch. I personally worry about my sister - the legal profession is paid well but work on publicly available documents that function in a highly structured format. It's got to be a bright target for the AI developers. You wonder if the big publishers & search engines will embrace or denounce such things. Then again the lawyers are all in a position to prevent such developments from being allowed to go through. That's the interesting fight I foresee. It's not for nothing that it went after artists first - there's not a much more disorganized & unprotected sector of the population. Musicians would be overwhelmed by this pretty fast already if it wasn't so lucrative for established businesses - but once there are better tools? For my part I really like Midjourney as a product & if I could demand the thing make music or movies, I'd be doing that already.
Which is genuinely interesting - the cultural fragmentation is going to be profound. In the city the story that's occupied a lot of people is this maniac lady who stabbed a toddler for no real reason. Crazy random style violence. Committed in a pretty grotesque way by a lavishly troubled person. But every time I'm explained the story it just looks to me like the intervention of the justice system is the precipitating event behind all of it. Like, this would not have happened if nobody had called the police. I feel like Never Call the Police is a pretty easily understood lesson but most of the people I talk to are uncomprehending about this. There's no counterprogramming against cable tv right? Well, not accessible to them currently. I just mean when you remove the Dragnet-derived police hagiography that comprises most/all of broadcast TV most people would have to judge the performance of the justice system on the visible results in their vicinity - which is... I mean, I don't blame anyone for not wanting to examine/understand reality.
Anyhow, I think of the mass-culture pied-piping of television has been meaningfully broken in a way that it is no longer a salve for the national psyche. Maybe that's the intuition-driving mechanism for the sense of impending fracture that's so prevalent. It's almost like no-one you talk to really feels like next year will be anything like this year. It seems like everyone is expecting a disaster & we're just waiting to see what it will be. That's what I've observed & that's the sentiment I'm trying to document this year - so this is a part of it. The universal failure of institutions to provide any support in chaotic times joined to a situation in which belief in institutions, support for them, is now a matter of social identity. People will champion the police as a statement of political affiliation completely disconnected from the performance or actions of the police.
Anyhow, the hype is working worse & worse. People will have to interact with one another as individuals rather than members of a clique. Confounding for a lot of people. I've usually held the idea that people are a pack species that dreams of being a solitary species. The win condition of liberalism is to be a unique, totally self-contained person who somehow dominates reality according to one's own preferences. We're wolves that dream of being bears. Ants that want to be spiders. American liberalism was always at the frontline of the possibilities of liberalism & it looks like we've ended up in a situation in which personal devotion to another person is now a currency - where people devise fandoms about individual powerful people. Like praying to the plague god to leave you alone or to curse your enemies. It's kind of interesting, academically but genuinely distressing to live inside. The final victory of the Self is still death. Why doesn't anyone else seem to understand that? I guess the aesthetic means by which you deny death are matters of some personal allegiance.