I mean, where to start.
Looking at the text he sent me, I think the slice of the ad in the first panel is directly clipped from it. As a dedicated Redditor, they tried and failed to reach him with this because he abhors the written word. Well, he likes to read them I guess but he doesn’t like to write them. Which you’d think would make the product a good fit! Poor bastards. I could have told them: he’s impossible to work with.
I couldn’t help myself, though – I definitely clicked on that shit and used three “tokoids” or whatever they gave me, until it started to harangue me about something. If three square miles of the Amazon was set ablaze a couple days ago, that was probably me and I want to apologize. It wasn’t even for anything good. In my riveting tale, I posited that I had met someone and they had two tickets to the Dance of the Dongs. It kept trying to do, like, a meet-cute thing and I kept trying to make it more and more dong related thematically. It was like playing tug-o-war with a ghost. Despite its unassailable virtues, I wasn’t able to secure buy-in from the device on my potent new IP.
I can sit down and write whatever I want to, “for free.” It takes Kiko three days to write three paragraphs, but he can remove the fuzzy hairs I forgot to shave off my neck from a photo in seconds. It would barely constitute conscious labor. Indeed, I know it wouldn’t, because as he was doing it he texted me the picture and said something – I’m paraphrasing here – said something like shave your fucking neck.
There are aesthetic considerations in turning to machines of this kind. I don’t necessarily mean as it relates to the prose, though I wasn’t especially impressed with that either. No, the “aesthetic” relates to the kind of world I prefer, and that is something we collectively build as we teeter decision upon decision. I know how to do this because I learned how to do it, just like Kiko knows how to digitally shave my cyberhairs. These are things we do for each other. They began as obsessive interests and now they have become cognitive tools. Anything which meaningfully interrupts this process is dangerous. Every time that tool does what I should have done, a little number goes down in the upper-left hand corner. When it reaches zero, that is when you begin renting your own mind.
Because Tiktok is worried that I will put my phone down, it often tries to make me mad with things I don’t like. It showed me a video of Palmer Luckey lamenting that we had entered a Luddite era. He makes the kind of killer robots that we’ve been warned against time and time again, so it’s like, okay man. I don’t know if I am a Luddite in the classic sense, I’m typing this on a computer and you’re reading it on one. My job would have been inconceivable thirty years ago and arguably it was still inconceivable to most even after I began doing it. We’re going to need more granularity, I’m afraid. I’m not a Luddite simply because I want a different future than the one our masters are determined to humiliate us with, one we built with the sweat of our own brow but were denied participation in, and fueled by people who find human beings an incongruous, unwelcome burden.
If being a Luddite is just a term for being against my own dispossession, well, I’m definitely whatever we’re calling that.
(CW)TB out.
