Culture and society – An Echo That's Reversing

The AI

The software industry has become a pretty immoral bunch of assholes, but the software industry married to the new AI revolution has exceeded this baseline immorality.

I’m a Malcolm Gladwell-y maven, or I aspire to be, w/r/t technology and it was a trip to Italy with the family several years back that gave me an opportunity to press to them the importance of what was coming and the importance that they, disregarding their disinterest or disgust, involve themselves with LLMs directly in order to understand how the world was going to change. I knew there was value there but I also understood that there was existential upheaval. Maybe they already knew that; I’m not sure.

For most of the time after that I’ve sworn off ChatGPT (let’s use the Kleenex-ified terms “ChatGPT” for the technical “LLM”). Its harm to the environment and social equality, and the socially inequitable harm that it causes, is horrifying. (Though, admittedly, extreme statements should generally be responded with doubt and verification.)

There’s too much politics to think about

There’s too much politics to think about. And that’s kindof an avoidance because calling waves hands what has just happened and what bleak anniversary just occurred, and the scars almost lining up, politics is not politics. There’s just too much to think about.

Untitled, signed 57/150, from the Grifo Edition of Crepax prints of Valentina

Going through, at an angle

When I discovered Guy Debord and the Situationist International movement–and learned of their subsequent influence on the anti-capitalist French student protests of 1968–I knew it was a philosophy relevant to our days and, as they say, I would like to know more.

Spectacle

But a lie that can no longer be challenged becomes a form of madness.

Over the past six or so months I’ve on and off been reading Guy Debord’s The Society of Spectacle. I had encountered his ideas in an essay which used them to explain much of modern social media, key is applying his observation of how capitalism molds “people” into “consumers” in such a way as to make their primary identities not only what they purchase, but the act of purchasing. See: YouTube videos of product influencers and the post-apocalyptically odd phenomenon of pre-teens making thousands of dollars a week off of unboxing videos. “Apple is better than Windows” has supplanted the identity of ideas with the identity of product.

(as always: my understanding of him may be a bit naive)

The Year of Italy

I started at some point to give years names. This may have/probably has been inspired by the completely unfortunate aspect in the novel Infinite Jest where the US sells years to corporations in order to make money. After corporate purchase years would become: The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, or The Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster, etc. It’s a bleak mirror within a literary conceit of pretty much what we’ve become.

So, less bleakly, I started to give my years themes. This, 2025, is The Year of Italy.