(no subject)
The stupid picture making ai has too many censorious restrictions. I thought it was hilarious to make a picture of Joe Don Baker baking don trump & joe biden. Evidently that is violence. Eh, computers - fuck 'em right? I guess I know some people who've been displaced by the LLMs but not many so ar. I'm anticipating a lot more to come. A lot more. For me, I think it's very handy & useful for a lot of things. It almost, almost makes the internet single-player. That's ultimately the thing I wanted. Synchronizing up instantaneous feeds & obsessive refreshing... I mean. I'm thinking back & can remember my dark apartment hideout above the hardware store. A favorite amongst my lairs & I can remember being up way too late to go anywhere or meet anyone but also mashing refresh on fukkin Netscape or whatever. Just kinda hoping someone on here, Livejournal I mean, would be on & available. ready to interact. I remember it as a mostly frustrating experience that felt, at the time, shameful. It's interesting to know that what once made me feel like a lonesome asshole is the actual job of people in the world. Partly I wonder how focused in on the internet I've become what with the smartphone & constant news feed to care about. I've been told by late adopters that the behavioral change in people once smartphoned up was noticeable & intense. 'Course nowadays I'm captured. I mean - my bus pass, my insurance card, my bank, my whole everything is in that ecosystem. It's hard to imagine what attrition would look like. I've gone without the thing for long stretches since '12-13 when I started up & really that's the watershed of the decade's stylistic formation but it still doesn't look that stark, from this perspective. So maybe the phone is just leading you down the path & whatnot. But I can't see a better time for people if they go without. I can see a better time for large groups of people, but not individuals. I speculate often that the terminal goal of liberalism is to attain divinity, personally, and that one does so by breaking the chains of interdependency. The one who doesn't need anything from anyone else & the one who fears no others - that's the god, the aspirational goal of liberality. Could be wrong but I like working from the supposition.
Maybe there's a story of the god losing its divinity to suffer in the dirt? The messianic aspects of Jesus aren't, well, they're not like that in contemporary canon. I guess maybe the Arian heresies might have had to address it. But the attainment of personal agency by breaking out of interdependence - I should think more about the spiritualist references that might address this phenomenon. Then again, maybe it's not a matter of concern - maybe the whole internet will persist. I don't think that's the case - but I'm trying to see it as a good thing.
I mean the search engines & web pages barely work anymore so chatgpt etc... are almost mandatory tools for parsing requests. I mean. Wikipedia still. I always give them $ when they ask, but... yeah. I think the thing is falling down in a useful way that isn't just market corrections revaluing the bot-laden social media networks. I wonder if the broader trend will simply die off. A lot of stuff anymore looks like a LAN anyway. How will it be when the broader internet is even more bot-spammed? I think about it.
When I walk all around. Weather's been better. Is good today. I'm working usefully in the global supply chain to automate the production of vital infrastructure. Which is a weird but true(ish) thing I can say about my day-to-day.
When you walk around: A lot of dog people who seem like they're fishing for connection/attention. Mainly it's pitbulls where I live. A lot of frustrated looking broke-asses who you can see planning to buy/have a car. Antagonized people who are not in the mood to make conversation. A lot of old people out exercising. A small minority of dedicated pedestrians. I see these guys around & none of us have anything to say to each other. But I feel like we'd be a functional constituency. Then again, maybe the impulse to go-without the old automobile comes from that independent streak, the vanity of apotheosis. "I ain't need none of you!"
I can't say enough good things about picking something & then refusing to ever buy it. So much advertising $ is wasted on me, so much legal peril & social pressure is lost on me. I guess I'm thinking about going without the old smartphone. Not that I can, mind you - my job demands it just as much as any other aspect of life does, but it's still a whole ecosystem of advertising & accessories & service agreements that I'd be happy if I could just opt out of. I think I put this all together when I finally went bald. "Oh, I guess I don't need to get haircuts anymore. Or buy shampoo." Liberation seems to come from not having to buy things. I don't think this is an idea that I'll hear very often but I'm thinking of it today.