I wish you had a blog.
Yes, you.
Specifically you.
And not this (gestures wildly) circle of hell where you have to fracture yourself across an undulating number of spaces all vying to extract as much return on investments for stakeholders on the asset that is your fleeting attention.
This torment where you’re forced to be a pitiful piece of their product, lest you be anything at all.
Praying on the social aspect that defines our species, they’ve tricked us all into thinking that without them we would get no attention, and without attention, well, we might as well not exist.
Don’t worry though, very soon you might as well not, because they won’t need you at all.
What was once carefully and carelessly created by you, lumpy, hairy meat sacks, will instead be created, consumed, and regurgitated ad nauseam by what they mistake for artificial intelligence.
An unaccountable system trained on our ill-begotten life stories which are now reduced to “content”.
Generative content for generative bots that provide generative impressions and interactions to generate more content. Rinse, exploit, repeat, profit.
Where that one Facebook comment from your racist uncle will live forever as it takes on an entire persona of its own but cannot age or grow or unlearn its racist bullshit. #ForeverConservative
A fully automated attention economy without the need for anyone to actually pay any attention any more.
But here’s the thing—well, one of the many things—there is no intelligence in the artificial. No magic. Unless you’re a child at a birthday party dazzled by the magic thumb trick—if that’s the case, I can’t help you.
Instead, we watch as primates argue with each other on Hacker News as if their latest brand of snake oil is a new god.
It isn’t.
It isn’t even intelligence by any way we measure it—setting aside the eugenic notion of IQ for a moment and focusing instead simply on the concept of an agent with a will of its own. Mammals, including ourselves, fall into this definition.
Instead, what it really is, was and ever will be, is a probabilistic generator for letterformesque from a relational tokenization across 12,000 dimensions.
We interpret these to have meaning, purpose and intelligence but it doesn’t. It’s a spicy autocomplete at best. At worst, it’s not even spicy but here we are, discussing whether to let it be in charge of our justice system.
And idiots such as Samuel Harris Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and Elon Reeve Musk would very like us to believe in the magical possibilities of artificial intelligence.
I’m calling them idiots here as a gesture of good faith by assuming incompetence where malice is probably the more likely reality.
No, Skynet isn’t coming to any kind of sentience.
What we instead have is an erosion of society by tech bros who ascribe godhood to a badly formed collection of basic maths.
And now that your attention isn’t needed anymore, you might be fooled into thinking that life will be better.
No.
It won’t.
You thought life was bad when capitalism sought to extract you for the £1.17 it deemed you to be worth, imagine what capitalism will do when your worth is zero.
Infinite content straight from the dead primate’s mouth. Where you and I the primates.
It was never about, “Better connecting you with the pages and groups you care about.”, “Blaze your glory!”, “Make every second count”, or, “Capture, Create & Share What You Love.”
No.
“Make number bigger,” was always the real goal.
Like a virus, contemporary social media platforms cannot grow without replicating and spreading from host to host.
And if there’s one thing we’ve learned from viruses lately it’s that—at least if you’re in the UK—Traditionalist conservatism was quite happy to sacrifice those of us whose extraction of value got too close to zero.
The film Idiocrazy was only satire until it became just another Tuesday.
Whether it’s users, impressions, attentions, or revenue, “make number bigger” reigns supreme-acist.
And idiot tech bros were eager to invent new fucking ways of making that fucking number fucking bigger.
Never mind the casualties. Never mind the erosion of democracy. Never mind the damage to the ecosystem we inhabit.
So I wish you had a blog.
A place you could truly call yours—as much as any of us can own anything anymore.
If boomers were the last generation to own houses, perhaps millennials were the last to rent domains.
Because of course, we don’t own a domain, and perhaps we shouldn’t.
There should definitely be a best-before on the artefacts of my ignorance.
There should probably be a best-before on the artefacts of your ignorance too.
So perhaps, renting domains is a way for us to not live forever.
But whilst you’re here, I really wish you had a blog.
I would read it.
I would give you that attention.
If you allowed for comments—I know I don’t at the moment—I would engage with you.
You exist, despite it all.
I would nurture your expression of the multitudes that is all the parts of you that don’t have a place on curated platforms where women’s nipples are not allowed but men’s are fine.
So yeah, I wish you had a blog.