This one’s a real post. Apologies in case anybody has been getting spammed with shitposts. I’m automating crossposting and there’s more debugging (and testing, hence the posts) than anybody ever expects, even though I should damn well know better from script kiddie days back in high school. So that will continue for the near future.
A pilgrim comes seeking fellowship.
Somebody finally said in /r/printSF something I’ve been suspecting–and I do love it when my kneejerk gut takes are proven to be Correct and Wise. There has been a flood of posts fishing for the sort of answer your English teacher would want you to give about a book in AP English, written in AI style. I had not pursued it–my response to my own AI paranoia has been to disengage from everything, which is healthy for somebody who already has a tendency to be a recluse–but of late what were once the last bastions resembling old school message boards on the internet for niche ephemera (the wall-of-text subreddits) are just not engaging me, even though they are trying to start discussions that are in my wheelhouse (Le Guin, Wolfe, old school ‘literary’ scifi, the weeds of theory, etc). The posts have the tenor of a recent convert to the beauty of literature, a pilgrim coming to confess and pray at the altar, seeking the fellowship and validation of the congregation. And, as people generally believe their ‘religions’ are good and should be appreciated more, this is an excellent way to engage them. Yes, including me.
I’m seeing this pilgrim-crawling-to-the-altar and “hello fellow kids” everywhere now even more than I once was; it was bad enough when I suspected people of karma farming and astroturfing, but it was at least a human putting the work in–I could only hope, sometimes, a human who was asking some questions they genuinely wanted to ask as part of their karma-farming, something. Now we are also being triggered into providing some deep, insightful discussions to train an AI algorithm to have deep, insightful discussions. In any case, OP made an astute observation with some concrete evidence of seeding, with more being added down the thread.
Weighted Blanket of the Absurd
Yes, I’m well aware this might be AI-calling-out-AI. Anything might be anything. Fuck it. If I’m going to bother participating on the internet at all I at least need to delude myself that there are some signs of life out there. I’m coping with my aughts-adolescent cynicism and ennui with absurdist nihilist flip. Which, let’s be honest, isn’t the most unhealthy coping mechanism I’ve used, and can be quite fun. There’s that old saw about the funniest people you know being the most depressed people you know and having a lot of practice in defusing psychological agony with humor.
Ultimate attention economy redux
I still maintain I am right about this.
Let’s for the moment focus on the aspect of AI that relieves one of having to do things like pay attention to and think about things that are boring, like books and philosophy and history and Big Ideas, that the gatekeepers of your degree/ license to work a more than subsistence job tend to think are Big, Important things for humans to think about. The sort of person who becomes a teacher tends to be the sort of person who believes in the inherent value of Truth and Thought and cultivating the life of the mind and becoming a well-rounded human-cum-citizen, and that sort of person is the the gatekeeper standing between you and your license to work a bullshit white collar job that pays something more than a subsistence wage. You used to have to indulge them, to some extent, or go to effort and expense to get somebody else to do it for you, but there is now an algorithm that pays granular and close attention to those gatekeepers talking amongst themselves in the brainy tl;dr wall-of-text subs about the things they’re going to ask you to write about and grade you on. That’s a lot of attention-energy somebody else already expended and you don’t want to on things that don’t matter to you.
A bullshitter or conman used to have to be a good listener, and good at guessing what people wanted to hear. That skill, bullshitting, is being de-professionalized, too, now; the algorithm whispers into your ear what to say to bullshit or con. Quality bullshitting and knowing what people want to hear is a skill–another one that is being lost. Again the middle is falling out of an entire profession and the only conmen who make a living will be those exceptional individuals with genius charisma. Workaday mediocre conmen need jobs too–more argument for UBI I guess.
I feel the desperation of realizing every safety valve and escape is being shut off or turned into a honeypot or corrupted–‘escapes’ for ‘intellectuals’ or ‘genuine people’ or however we style ourselves are weirs.
Marketers desperately seeking organic ‘cool’ cred for their product isn’t new; shilling and guerilla marketing are nothing new; influencers are just now up front about it, which I find refreshing. There is a desperate cynicism in capitulating to it all being about the game–we’re far from the gen X obsession with not ‘selling out’. Indeed, to care about ‘selling out’ or ‘authenticity’ is seen as a naive, childish, unsophisticated concern, and while gen Z /alpha may be well on to something, it is part of the pattern of their generation never being raised on ‘hope’ or optimism for the future like Millennials-and-older. When I was in middle school ‘poseur’ was a deadly fucking insult if you were in any sort of ‘scene’ with pretensions to authenticity–skating, music, art, fashion. I remember rumors about who had used a butter knife to scuff up the underside of their skateboard to make it look broken in with the sort of wear pattern you would get with ‘hardcore’ use. That was a fighting accusation. And these so-accused were not attempting to be influencers or anything with a monetary reward; they just desperately wanted to be cool and authentic. Authenticity had enough intrinsic value to be something to lose, something precious. It was, in the minds of these middle schoolers, a very real and deadly serious thing. I wonder if younger generations see that sort of totemic belief as naive in the way that believing in ‘capitalism’ (as an ideology of ‘freedom’ or something) seems now, or ‘free enterprise’, or ‘the American dream’.
Considerations of ‘specialness’ aside, this is why people in subcultures condemn ‘selling out’–you make something profitable and the vultures come in and shit all over it. I’ve watched it happen. Anti-gatekeeping rhetoric is being co-opted to stifle conversations about this.
I realize it’s not just getting people to buy shit, monetarily, in a material sense. It’s also political astroturfing, and the everything-sucks-fuck-you pissed off adolescent nihilist philosopher* inside me firmly maintains it’s all the same thing anyway. It is and it isn’t. A healthy criticism of all parties so often just becomes this nihilistic centrism that, functionally, is no different from political neutralization. Trying to sell me mediocre terrycloth hoodies on Instagram is obnoxious but I’m not going to pull the galaxy brain take that it is equivalent to influencing elections. Same tactics, yes–a ‘sale’ is a sale, of ideology or terrycloth hoodies–but equally urgent a threat it is not. The corrosive effect on mutual trust that comes of suspecting either in every interaction is a social enshittification agent, all linked, ultimately, in the big cosmic sense, on big time frames, but in the immediate sense one makes you regret buying bad clothes and the other effectively legalized suspension of due process.
It was mentioned in the original post that many of these suspect accounts also posted in job hunting subreddits, which are utterly lousy with recommendations for resume editors and other magic bullet solutions for desperate over-educated under-employed professionals DOGEd or AIed out of an already shit market**. Maybe this is my naive Millennial belief in the concept of ‘earnestness’ or ‘validity’ but this seems particularly scummy, preying on a need instead of a desire. Doing so is not new but it seems to be one of the few hustle avenues still (or even increasingly) profitable in a collapsing postindustrial economy.
Say something interesting, damn you.
Anyway, back to the reddit thread.
The Dude(‘s D?) puts it well. Some entity listening in to the place where the eggheads go to escape and trying to prompt discussion to harvest.
This is probably correct. I still see a market for vendors of niche products to hobbyists, many of whom, if they are on Reddit, have disposable income and tend to limit Google searches of product reviews to Reddit or other websites where ‘real people’ used to hang out. They’ve always been lousy with shills, and everybody knows it, but it was also one of the few places to get an honest opinion mixed in there.
I admit I had never noticed this pattern before, even though I’ve been trawling through ‘old’ threads looking for info my entire internet life. Such product placements probably just got caught in my bullshit filter and immediately disregarded as brand shit, but I never bothered to look up the editing timestamp because I did not care. But this is critical–it is a piece of what, exactly, bolsters the monetary value of a ‘trusted source’.
Me too, Ill_Refrigerator-san. The authors being featured in these suspect posts seems to be a who’s-who gallery of what I have heard referred to as “your favorite author’s favorite author” – highly-praised literary luminaries who may (Le Guin) or may not (most of the rest of them) be popular. Also likely to be the favorite authors of the sort of person who is going to put themselves into the position of gatekeeping your degree or interview vis-à-vis going into teaching, or the authors people list as ‘favorites’ if they want to seem intellectual and deep and from that trustworthy, above petty considerations such as money and popularity, genuine.
Fucking hell, you may be right. Now I’ll be suspicious and surly instead of mildly, reservedly interested. While I never had much hope for adaptations from other sources, Ghibli Earthsea burned me too badly. I’ll be bitter about that one until the earth falls into the sun.
Daily I am more convinced of the existential need to retreat to a shack in the woods.
Fine. Those online spaces are all compromised. So now what? Limit ourselves to the people within easy physical meeting distance? That’s lonely work if you have niche interests. The internet was the first time, for better or worse, all these niche weirdos found a welcoming lounge-cum-echo chamber, and it was the most high quality social interaction many of us had for years, especially if we lived in a small town in what is now MAGA country. Part of how those spy camera/microphone ‘glasses’ are going to pay for themselves in data harvesting is through eavesdropping on these conversations we take offline, if we can, when we can. When might somebody get paid hourly to hang out in a bookstore or coffee shop wearing those***? Your employment manual will recommend very obviously ‘reading’ a book that may start the conversations your client wants, or painting, or wearing a shirt with an unfortunate opinion. If there is a hierarchy in pay based on how pleased clients are with the information you get there will be an incentive for the best bullshitters do this work–a resurgence of the ‘peer influencer’, who influences people who do not like influencers. AI paranoia is going to creep into IRL conversations–not just in the sense of AI being fed as answers through an earbud or lens so you can get laid or get a job or sell something, but also in the sense of being harvested, used to train skinwalkers to seem more human. ‘Authenticity’ will always be the most coveted thing a marketer will seek, no matter what the product being sold.
Paranoia is isolating and exhausting. I keep seeing reasons it is an accurate response to one’s environment, not an individual pathology, necessarily. The same issue with depression or anxiety being an appropriate response to life circumstances.
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*This is the same entity that thought Trent Reznor’s rendition of Closer at Coachella was fucking sick as fuck.
**Hi.
***Even if like one out of a thousand of those conversations yield anything interesting it is still of value to information brokers. Also if you’re hiring I have two elderly cats with high needs and could use the scratch.
