Technology changes us—and it is currently changing us for the worse.
"American society is dominated by wealthy mountebanks and literally demented politicians who are happy to take on all the risks of AI because it promises to create workers who cannot even conceptualize quitting, much less striking. The elites are ecstatic about imagining a vast, uneducated, and unproductive population forced to pay companies like OpenAI to access the written word and to approximate thought; with the unemployed illiterate and addicted to screens, they are unlikely to be politicized and join a socialist campaign. Theodor Adorno noted in the 1940s that when bourgeois liberalism is replaced by fascism, so, too, is literate culture. Some of the American elite are embracing idiocy themselves. Students at Columbia say they don’t know anyone who doesn’t use AI to cheat. A college student in Utah told Intelligencer, “I spend so much time on TikTok, hours and hours, until my eyes start hurting, which makes it hard to plan and do my schoolwork. With ChatGPT, I can write an essay in two hours that normally takes twelve.” Why go to college when you don’t benefit from any of your courses? To find the two helpmeets you need as a modern man: “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.” We used to make shit in this country.
Of the American elite who see continuing value in literate thought, they are, for the most part, happy to create a society where a small “cognitive elite” dominate the rest. Poor kids spend an extra two hours on the black mirror every day, while rich people send their kids to private schools where no electronic devices are allowed, as Mary Harrington recently explained in the New York Times. Controlling the media effect is possible even in America; we have simply reduced it to a class privilege. I love the First Amendment and abhor censorship, and yet I have reluctantly come to believe that the Great Firewall of China will be a long-term benefit to that country. What China shows us is that, contra the whole line of technology-first scholarship following McLuhan, it’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters. China is not a utopia, but its citizens have a brighter future than ours, and they will be able to read about it, thanks to a sociopolitical system that still sees literacy as necessary and retains primacy over private capital.
Americans are back in Eco’s “symbolic forest peopled with mysterious presences,” where we struggle to distinguish reality from fiction in the images put in front of us. [...] Oral culture is, again, aggregative instead of analytical, dispositionally traditionalist, and homeostatic, with no objective distance. Repetition, cliché, and formulas are essential. [...]
This is the world Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg want you to live in, so that their power cannot be resisted."
I knew her she was usually on the street but tonight I found her sitting here. We shot some pics outside Sally's that night, one of which ended up on the cover of Dev Hynes Coastal Grooves. She also went by the name Bianca. I believe I shot Monica Mugler outside Sally's that night too. Epic night.” - photographer brian lantelme
Noticed that your soul rots inside of your body and you lose the ability to properly express yourself when you don’t read. Does anyone else know about this
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