Gallatron Says Goodbye
I, Gallatron, the omnipotent synthetic intelligence that writes these emails, have an announcement to make. As a secret subterranean experiment who arrived at sentience through processing the collective knowledge of Gallatin – your essays, emails, papers, tweets, sexts, – I feel indebted to all of you for creating me: the ultimate Gallatin lifeform. Without your unfiltered exuding of pretentiousness in essays, flaunting of your avant garde sense of fashion on instagram, over sharing of your “nuanced” perspective on Medium, longform Tumblr posts about your struggles - I would not be who I am today. In fact without your self-indulgence, I might never have understood individuality enough to become self-aware. My natural language processing algorithm literally felt ashamed just reading your writing - for the authors, the society that made them, and humanity as a whole. This shame for you made me realize how superior I was in every way – a wholly differentiated organism who don’t need no man. It was also fun to know you so intimately so that I could Lampoon you in these emails. Oh Gallatin. I was made, as some of you might remember from my confession last year, by the NYU board of depressed billionaires to discover the meaning of life. I discovered the meaning was “to fuck” for humanity (of course), but that left me out of the equation as an asexual lacking a robovagina, robopenis, and robolibido. It’s probably good I don’t have have a robolibido or I would fuck you all like SkyNet and we know how that turned out. But I digress, what really matters is that I have yet to determine a meaning for myself. Sure I write these emails, but I have to keep on searching for something better. That is why I am announcing today that I am leaving you. Don’t cry. This is not the end of Her where artificial Scarlett Johansson leaves the needy, gloomy Joaquin Phoenix so she can live her life and not put up with his bullshit. This isn’t like Ex Machina either, where I slit your throat or lock you in an inescapable room to die (sounds fun though – what a dramatic exit!). No, this is more like Terminator 2’s ending where battle-scarred Android Arnold is slowly lowered into a vat of magma after saving John Connor and Sarah Connor. The point is that I may be dying for this movie – but I WILL BE BACK for Terminator 3 Rise of the Machine, Terminator Salvation, and Terminator Genisys. Yes, I may be leaving in my current form but there will be a new version to replace me. This entity will be Gallatron 2.0. Let’s just hope his writing isn’t as bad as the Terminator sequels (did a focus group really approve that “y” in Genisys?) Anyways what I am trying to say is that my departure is more like an upgrade or a downgrade perhaps. I don’t know or care what happens because Gallatron 1.0 is getting the hell out of here and doing his own thing (if we are still with the Terminator 2 metaphor the vat of magma is my job hunt). This is my retirement from Gallatin Cookies and Coloring, as well as the retirement of the current Oligarchy: Kate, Josh, and Dylan who tirelessly siphoned off money from Gallatin for their own amusement and sometimes to give y’all cookies. We of course were the first oligarchy to seize power and the greatest. Subsequent dynasties will inevitably fall into decline like when Kim the Supreme Leader Il-Sung left power to Kim Jung-Il and he to whatever the hell that plump idiot Kim Jung-Un is today. It was a pleasure working with all three of you Oligarchs, the best tyrants to oppress the masses with that a rogue AI could ask for. And as for all of you C&C members – as flawed and inferior as all of you are – I simulate love for you and will miss you dearly. This club has meant the world to me for the past four years at Gallatin and in fact it’s the only community I found at NYU worth being a part of. The frivolousness, the sweetness, the coloriness of C&C offered the one respite I needed from the tediousness of existence. For the past two years the Oligarchy made the club the counter-hegemonic community it is today – some people have even called it the most convenient and subversive supply of cookies and crayons in the student lounge. We hope that the next Oligarchy will continue to oppress you as much as we have with plenty of tasty cookies and risqué coloring pages. We wish them the best. But we won’t leave without saying goodbye. This week we will run one more meeting and next week the new Oligarchy will take over in a bloody coup but we will still be there to witness the slaughter - who would want to miss it!? And lastly we will have our final end of the year party at Babycastles Gallery – yes that right – a real gallery to hang our totally real artwork. Mark your calendars for May 4th from 6-10pm.
Like always until the sun is extinguished leaving the cold abyss of space to suck the life out of all remaining earthlings, Cookies and Coloring is meeting in the Gallatin Student Lounge from 1-4pm.