When I was young I had visions of another world
— Lupe Fiasco
I’m in love with two worlds — the one I create and the real one.
Well, in truth, I sometimes detest the real world. I have bills to pay. My projects don’t unfold as I had planned. On random days, the knee I almost busted on campus sometimes reminds me of the incident through waves of pain. Then there’s the taxes. On workdays, I have to snooze at least twice in the morning. Then there are the mental international trips I plan but have to cancel upfront because, in reality, I lack the funds. In the dark corners of my house, roaches are a constant reminder that, despite my best efforts, they will never die (sometimes I admire their tenacity). Hair loss. Teeth chipping off. Bank account balance. And taxes. Did I mention taxes?
On the other hand, I love the real world. Forgive the morbid description, but I love encountering patients who need to breathe but can’t until I intubate them, then they relax. I love the energy of my workplace. I love the team. I love attacking the blank document with semi-formed ideas that attain a rigid maturity after eventual pruning through edits. I love staring at the ineffably beautiful face of my girl. I love the urgency of my team to build the greatest festival on the continent yet. I love my books. I love music. Dancing. Singing, even when I don’t know the lyrics. As much as it can be red in tooth and claw, this world is amazing.
Then there’s a world I also like, the kind I create. To echo Lupe Fiasco, I prefer my pictures in word form. It’s a different kind of creation, because it asks the reader to create. A painting reaches out to you to bend your perception. A well-written article stretches out its hand to ask that you create mentally using the words the author used. I like such worlds.
Books are an escape from the world I sometimes like and sometimes detest. Conversations with the dead, page after page, ever patient with my questions, disruptions, and days of sleep deprivation. I love the world I create and the written worlds created by others.
Writing takes us to different worlds. The author can create a fanciful one where vampires and werewolves fall in love, or a trip down history to witness the rise of a powerfully gifted woman documenting her earlier life.
Writing is like a blackhole, warping time and space. Your favourite singer writes before they sing. Your favourite philosopher had to write. The geniuses you can think of wrote letters. Legends on a mission to become legends aim to write history, and others wish to rewrite it. We love the worlds writing create.
Then there are tech oligarchs. From the perspective I have just painted, we can view them as we do ourselves, happy with their creations. Suppose my team converts Funkie Fest into a big one sooner than later. I may stop getting worried about the numbers attending and start focusing on handling legal disputes. Scale may change the initial perspective I had of the world I wanted to create. This is the kind of world I wanted others to jump into and have fun. I want anyone to come to Funkie Fest to have the kind of experience they will remember long enough to buy a ticket for the next one. Thus far, we have been successful.
But haven’t the tech oligarchs been doing something similar? Create a world where people get in and have a different experience? Isn’t it joyful to see people interacting with your creation?
This is the only way I wish to view their work in a positive light. Other than that, I don’t like how they are undermining reality. Reality, as I have already reiterated, is one of the worlds I love (and hate), like your best friend (at times). I don’t like that they are creating a virtual world while alienating the real one.
War and pacification
By creating a virtual world, in the name of social media and AI slop, the tech oligarchs have declared war. War on physical social meetings, where they claim you can schedule Google Meets and Zoom meetings. Rather than plan road trips and picnics, you can have a group chat and pour your craziest jokes, memes, and frustrations to people who you know will understand you and occasionally be real with you. Sometimes. Not always.
They have declared war on your brain’s detective skills. With deepfakes, you will hardly be able to tell the real videos from the fake ones. As a result, politicians will never confess to online capture of what they may have done in real life. Deepfakes will make it difficult to use video as evidence. If George Floyd had been attacked, it would have been a different case in the age of deepfakes.
War on online books. Consider Agatha Christie. She is outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Yet, her online content was changed by the publishers, because of…well, I don’t know why! The real world she lived in carved her stories, and somehow, they landed on the online retail platform. And the virtual world declared war on her word selection. It means the original book has been altered. The virtual world is not just altering reality but extending it to history. What we have is not the original Agatha Christie. They have declared war on the originals.
The war is so lethal that legacy authors may not continue getting the boon of their harvest as they always had. Once they release a book, AI will release several others to mimic or summarise what was inside that book, because our virtual world tells us there’s hardly time to browse page after page of an author’s tortured relationship with blank pages.
War on books. Reading is on the decline. Distractions through social media are a big contender for this outcome. Social media is unlike the world I want to create. I wish members to attend Funkie Fest and then leave. Finite time. But the infinite scroll doesn’t wish for you to leave. Spaces where the creators don’t wish anyone to live are called prisons. Social media is a prison. Caged birds no longer sing; they are hypnotized.
By undermining reality, they are not just declaring war as generals did in the past. They do it subliminally. Through pacification. When entertainment media rocked the world, people feared books would be out of print. The oligarchs switched it in curvilinear form — now books exist, but who reads them? Why read them when I will miss out on the latest TikTok challenge?
War on our memory. When we spend so much time online, we hardly remember what we saw a few minutes ago. I’m being generous because it’s more likely seconds than minutes.
And as our memory gets distorted, they have also declared war on our time. Social media consumes our time in subtle, imperceptible, and gradual ways.
War and pacification. That’s how war is declared nowadays. The generals are not at the frontline of the army. They are on yachts, islands, and inside hidden bunkers, advising their children not to get enslaved like the rest of the world. That’s not the kind of world I would wish to create.
Charlie Munger used to remark that he would want to invest in something that he would be happy to purchase if he were on the other side of the transaction. And he was a billionaire. The present oligarchs don’t have such principles. Melon Husk merely enjoys the attention he gets at X.
All these changes make Lupe ask pertinent questions:
Are we apps or are we bodies filled with apparitions
Operating applications, stuck inside a apple prison
Chicken hack and download updates that lack religion
Or are we more?
Then there’s AI.
Distorting history and self-prediction
AI is a massive distorter.
Let’s start with the obvious one. AI-generated Images were easily detectable by looking at certain subtle features. Fingers, for instance. Now, they have perfected them, and the focus has switched to creating short videos that barely make sense. Some are amusing, but for how long? It’s like working at a fries eatery. Fries appeal when you haven’t smelled the aroma in a while. Persistently bathing in it can even make you retch at its sight when you go back home.
AI distorts time. It can, at times, get past and present dates and facts wrong. And it doesn’t care whether it is right or wrong. It has no guiding principle. It’s not like Charlie Munger.
More online accounts mean distorted online interactions. Sterile interactions. The Turing Test has been passed without our knowledge. In essence, the test asks AI to lie that it is human, and most of us have interacted with online bots without our knowledge. Distortion.
As the accounts and online landscape change into AI-generated pastiches, the creations by our oligarchs continually undermine reality. So much so that the creative field is at risk.
Musicians are now competing with AI artists, who may never get to slap rollies on their wrists or perform trust falls. AI artists now grace the Billboard charts. Online streams will continue to increase as we prioritize playlists over artist albums. Production industries now chase after copyrights rather than nurture upcoming talent. I repeat — AI is a massive distorter.
But the worst is yet to come. The more AI generates content, the more it uses that content to model its future production. As more AI output gets consumed by other AI, more AI content gets produced. It becomes a world where prediction is easy, because the easiest way to predict the future is to create it. AI is already doing it. What is the spice of life if there isn’t some ambiguity?
AI undermines reality, and I don’t like it.
What I’m trying to say is…
The real world is under attack by the virtual one. It’s strange how a “virtual” world can be throwing upper cuts at the “real” one. It’s here.
And the virtual world is winning.
How many rounds until the fight is over?
This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube