justing.net

What's Real Anyway

By Justin G. on 25JUN12THU

A few links to set the stage. They all turned out to be about AIs, directly or indirectly; the chat bots, or ‘gippity’¹ as I heard one person pronounce it today:

• Fake Audio, it’s an AI newsletter; it’s the bit about voice cloning, and it’s scary.
• Fake People, it’s an internet newsletter but is about AI; too many people are talking to fake people via chipity. Or are they? Scary too.
• Fake World, it’s an offline podcast and they mostly talk about social media and stuff. The host got their Twitter (ew) account hacked by phishing emails, and that’s lame. But they’re pretty savvy, so if they can get tricked, well, stay on your guard.

I was reading this morning an analogy for doomscrolling: it’s like being a prey species and knowing the predator species is watching. How does the hare feel, and what does it do, when it knows the fox is out there watching? That’s good, and the next step, in our case with the attention economy, is that the predator never loses focus, never rests, never sleeps, and is relentlessly pursuing us from the shadows. In the “Fake World” (my title) podcast linked above, Jia T. describes it from another angle: it’s like watching a friend drowning, but on the other side of a big plate glass window and you can’t get to them, just watch them unceasingly suffer and endlessly perishing. Yeah, it is like that too. Yet another direction: it can be like a crowd of strangers burning, endlessly.

We do grow numb to it, or we don’t because the algorithm shifts, the world shifts, and a different horror is presented to hold our attention. And now the world is a horror, when you look into that small black window we all keep in our pockets. When we can tear ourselves away from the tiny window and go outside, it doesn’t seem so bad. There are people out there doing ordinary things, living normally, and there are a lot of them. More even than it seems online. Much more. I’ll keep doing my weekends off the internet, it’s been something different, and different is good.

We need better strategies, better reflexes, better gestures for when we recognize that we’re in a situation of inhuman pursuers. Algorithmic feeds, and what isn’t one these days, aren’t aligned with what’s good for me or you. We have to make better decisions about that. Even when they’re tough or maybe even a little drastic. Drastic can be “drastic,” like throwing my phone in a (virtual) lake every weekend.

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