celechii

known cat petter

  • they/she

genderfluid dumbass full of love amongst other things

i make games at ko_op :)

cat counter: 291 (record: 523)


game makin streams
twitch.tv/celechii
@chocolatinebabe (ffxiv account (fishing))
cohost.org/chocolatinebabe

johnnemann
@johnnemann

The media's credulity w/r/t AI is partially due to seeing the world in severe trouble and hoping desperately for a way out - not even just a solution but something at least to shake up the pattern, reset things so that it doesn't end up where it seems inevitable it will. A belief that someone, any day now, is going to invent something that Changes Everything and saves us from our own poor past choices. I think that would be a very compelling reason, along with all the others, to breathlessly buy into everything a few tech billionaires are trying to sell us.

And this is far more of a stretch but I also was wondering how the prevalence of this kind of narrative in pop culture affects our understanding of the world around us. Everything being ok at the last minute is hardly a new story type - deus ex machina is Greek for a reason - but in the past century of mass storytelling that's become much more of the accepted way a story has to go. Has that reshaped our understanding of actual events to expect that?


vectorpoem
@vectorpoem

Capitalism has left most people, in the media and more generally, ideologically unequipped to imagine positive directions for humanity on their own, futures that aren't products essentially, that the wealthy haven't promised to lead us to on a leash. And so of course those outsourced futures are shams, because "the future" is something they have entrusted to a service industry - tech companies - for the past few decades, and will continue to do so until there's a large enough credibility collapse event (way bigger than 2016, crypto, etc) that they start to look elsewhere (and where, then? part of how these companies operate is to dissolve public trust in acid, undermining belief in any reality other than the ones they're offering).

AI ticks more of the boxes than previous hype moments (wearables, VR/AR, the 2010s "digital assistants" wave, crypto) of the past decade because it creates, via these very public precaritization disasters like layoffs and previously useful services becoming terrible, this broader illusion that Things Really Are Changing, that the social political order is being shaken up (even though it's just the existing horrors being slightly accelerated and magnified). And it's by design less falsifiable than crypto was; LLMs are opaque machines offered with the demand that we constantly look past how rubbish they are, so there's less likely to be a singular collapse moment where everyone can plainly see the emperor has no clothes. So it's a more durable illusion of change, and the hype guys know that and intend to ride it as far as possible, thinking maybe by the time it slows down / falls apart there'll be a new sham to jump onto.

I do think that media fatigue at this cycle, that has repeated several times in the past decade+, builds up slowly and subtly over time, and random people within that system will have a moment of disillusionment where they start thinking more critically (whether or not that can manifest in their coverage and commentary depends a lot on how directly dependent they are on the hype train for their livelihood). But also there's always new hopeful people piling in to that space, and much as in videogames the hypelords benefit greatly from the field's lack of political consciousness or any real collective memory. So unfortunately even though there are liberatory dynamics happening within the space its overall tendency is not towards liberation or any shaking off of these delusions.


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in reply to @johnnemann's post:

It's in part doomerism, but when I'm deep in my feelings about how bad we've fucked the climate and how we simply do not have the political courage to even slow the harm let alone fix it, my response to anyone saying that it'll be fine because new technologies will save us is simply "Why?"