I was struck with this post by Penny Arcade’s Tyco, AKA Jerry Holkins.
I don’t understand why I thought that more information would be better. I think it’s just because I like information. To be fair, though, I couldn’t have imagined what it would actually look like. Coming from a religious environment of High Control I imagined that shattering that status would necessarily have a liberatory payload, as it had for me. I try not to feel too bad. In the prescient Neuromancer, William Gibson could imagine a digital world parallel to our own, one in which you could be functionally embodied, live, and die, but couldn’t imagine that something could be wireless. And he’s way smarter than me.
Because I’ve been sick, and spending an inordinate time in fever spikes until the Advil kicks in, I’ve had the “opportunity” to spend a lot of time in bed on TikTok. I don’t think it’s possible to understand your children at all if you don’t have some knowledge of it. Cultural shift is in some ways a function of baud rate, which has never been higher, if you’re wondering why you feel old at twenty-eight. Noone has ever lived like this and it’s not clear that they should.
TikTok is a litter box of misinformation; even the clean litter is made questionable simply as a fact of its adjacency. Here are just a few of the notions I’ve been presented with the last couple days, and not just once, but multiple times:
– There is conclusive proof that interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is a spacecraft
– There are modern instances of human parthenogenesis, or “virgin birth”
– Pranks where young women generate photorealistic images of men entering their dorms and houses and send them to their parents asking “what should I do”
– It is safe for orangutans and other wilderness beasts to jump on backyard trampolines, and they do so frequently
– Model-generated content of virtually every stripe that would would fool a hundred percent of anyone even five seconds older than me
The amount of AI material on TikTok broadly is just insane, the most obvious examples of which are Jesus Christ bedeviled by… well, the Devil, coupled with a suggestion to like and subscribe to help “our savior.” I’m not a hundred percent sure it works like that. But AI is often just grabbing other people’s videos and altering them slightly and then posting them to accounts whose names look like the kind of password a password manager would automagically generate. The idea I think is that you simply have to be more human to stand out and defeat these machines, like John Henry. Maybe that would make sense in a world not governed by algorithmic feeds, where people chose what they were watching, but we often don’t. Also, John Henry dies at the end of that story.
Gen X is the equivalent of pre-war steel. I’m not implying a particular moral valence, or establishing a hierarchy of moral purity; the thing that largely defines my cadre is that we’ve always resisted the term anyway. We are as subject to propaganda as any human being; we take plus two from flank attacks like everybody else. But having a formed identity prior to the ambient radiation of social media is like having been administered a vaccine they don’t make anymore. Because they can’t.
Bold added.
All worth thinking about, but it’s the last that hits hardest. In the first huge burst of the Internet in the mid-1990s, early adopters talked about “drinking from the firehose” as the torrent of information and connectivity it provided. And that was mostly text-based information.
Today’s Gen Alpha kids live in that firehose.
Every generation changes based on the most powerful information and communication mediums of their day, as Baby Boomers weened on TV, telephones and rock and roll can attest. But it’s not just the content, it’s the speed with which this unstoppable Mississippi of information is being poured into youthful heads. A few years ago, back when I could occasionally afford having a maid come over to clean my house before July 4th or New Year’s Eve, one of them brought their young daughter with them. While their mother cleaned, she sat there endlessly scrolling Tik-Tok videos, one after another in quick succession.
I remember when someone wrote it was impossible to completely scan cable TV stations for something to watch, and started out by saying “Assuming you spend 4 seconds on each channel,” and I went “Who the hell spends that much time? I can do that in a second or less per station.” I suspect saying kids doom-scrolling Tik-Tok videos spend a second or less on each one probably dramatically understates how quickly they scroll past anything that fails to engage their mayfly gaze. Remember when critics said MTV would destroy attention spans? Today’s kids probably regard four minutes to wait for the next video as an excruciating, Masterpiece Theater level of slowness.
If you dropped today’s teenagers into the wilderness with maps and compasses, could they find their way out or would they be helpless without their smart phones to guide them? Can they apply critical thinking skills, or is the first answer ChatGPT hands them always the “right” answer in their minds?
Of course I also remember when some evangelicals claimed Dungeons & Dragons would turn you into Satan worshipers. Didn’t seem to happen to my generation, but now there are actual Satanic tranny death cults, so maybe somebody owes the shade of Jack Chick an apology.
And all this rewiring of children’s brains was already happening before the arrival of widespread commercial AI. And that Pandora’s Box is bringing with a whole host of unforeseen problems, including chatbots allegedly pushing teens to commit suicide.
In science fiction of the 1980s and 90s, AIs were a key component of a theorized technological singularity. Simply put, the singularity is the point in human history in which technological innovation goes vertical, beyond which the outcome is impossible to predict. World Wars I and II were both singularity events, in which human history would be forever altered and for which no one could foresee the new shape of the world before the event.
I’m pretty sure we’re in the midst of such a singularity right now.
We thought AI was going to do things like achieve engineering breakthroughs and create more nutritious crops with which to feed the world. Instead AI hallucinations seem to be creating new ways to lie to people, with more weirdly elaborate lies than ever before, like the guy who ChatGPT convinced had discovered a new breakthrough in physics, but it was all delusional crap.
The joke is a company announcing “We can finally create the Torment Nexus from the classic science fiction novel Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.”
But it seems that the combination of social media plus AI is creating vast warrens of individual Torment Nexi rabbit holes. And AI coming of age at the same time that the woke mind virus was was running rampant made everything immeasurably worse.
No one set out to create the Torment Nexus, it just popped out as an emergent property of cramming all human knowledge into Tessier-Ashpool’s white hot data cores. It used to be that the road to Hell was paved with good intentions, but now we’re told that the road to Heaven just naturally passes through the Torment Nexus. Just ignore the stinging radioactive flames as you make your way to paradise.
It just turns out that the Torment Nexus is the singularity’s default setting.