Twenty Seconds of Drivel Forever

 I keep saying I'm going to stop posting on social media. And then I post on social media, and I'm disappointed by the social media. And myself. 

I used to post four or five times a day. Now it's more like four or five times a week. But it's still too often. 

There's NOTHING to see. It's just sponsored ads, reels, AI slop shared by people who really should know better, the endless AI composed bore-fests. (why is AI so prolix, so logorrhoeac? It's sprung from the grinding mechanical loins of editing software, after all. It should know its way round a scalpel) 

And Donald Trump. I had to unfollow a friend the other day as she was posting about Donald Trump forty times a day. She hates Donald Trump, of course, but she posts so often that the only person I see when I log onto this shithole is that egregious, brain-addled, poisonous, philistine warmonger. So she's doing Mark Zuckerman's bidding far more than she thinks she is. 

I wake in the morning to ten notifications. But they're notifying me someone has "shared" something, or they've "added to their stories". None of it's for me at all. No one is contacting me. Not interested. Because the fact is, no one is out there any more. Everyone's bored with this shit. Who is adding to their stories? Because they're not their stories, it's something lifted from the internet designed to reflect well on them. It's like slipping on a "No Kings" tee shirt, or getting a tattoo of Donald Trump with "I hate Donald Trump" written beneath it. Sure, you hate Donald Trump, but now you have a tattoo...of Donald Trump. Maybe Josh Homme will age eccentrically, and you can claim it's him. 

I can't complain about that. Every post I post is, on some level, saying: "Hey! Interesting and multifaceted person here! Look at the cool shit I think and like." I'm no better. But at least I'm not flooding the zone with AI generated scripts which always include the line "let that sink in". He's been King for a year, so I've been advised 365 times to let it sink in that Donald Trump is a bad man. 

No, not quite getting it. We're close, though. I can feel it. We'll try again tomorrow. 

Facebook feels increasingly like Insta, Snap Chat, like You Tube shorts. It's short videos of people you don't know doing things the algorithm thinks you'll like. Or maybe the algorithm doesn't think you'll like. Maybe the algorithm couldn't give a shit. It's just sending you twenty second videos of literally anything, and maybe we're all getting the same shit. It doesn't matter. Facebook is increasingly non-participatory. It wants you to passively scroll, but it doesn't care if you write anything and it won't tell anyone you've done it. It just wants short videos, twenty seconds of drivel forever. 

I've just notice that there are two AI options available on my Facebook page. Meta AI which you might expect, but also "Manus AI", which I've never notice before. Manus is an Irish name, and a portmanteau word: "Man" meaning "man", because it's a boy's name, and "anus" because, unless you're really unlucky, every one has one. 

I haven't used either of these options. I haven't used any AI. I'm not entirely against it. It's a tool. It can probably be applied in multifarious positive ways. But it often isn't. In my industry, it's used by people who want to write a book but can't be arsed to write a book that they then won't be arsed to read. It's used to steal everyone's artwork and spaff out something superficially impressive but which looks exactly alike every other AI book cover. The makers of AI don't care. They don't give a shit about literature - no one does. They have cast their trawler-net far and wide, so their machines sound plausible and businesslike. And boring. And longwinded. And courteous. And boring. And that's what these rambling, discursive books are like. Boring. 

As the machines follow them, people follow the machines into this literary landfill, an eager yomp into a cultural no man's land. I honestly don't know where all this is leading, but these days Idiocracy is looking like a far more accurate prediction of the future than Brave New World. Passively watching twenty second videos of strangely proportioned AI women, or picking up a book with a strangely proportioned AI woman on the AI cover that someone wrote to your six prompt specifications on ChatGPT, while you sit on the toilet, wiping your arse with one hand and scrolling with the other. How have we done this to ourselves, this cultural xenomelia, this societal Mar-a-Lago face? How are people who are continually churning out new, old wars, this passive?

Social media was an experiment and, like everything, it has been co opted by wealthy evil people who want to disfigure humanity, for reasons that are approaching the abstract. Does anyone really want to live in a castle made of human skulls, sitting on a golden throne in a golden room with a gold bath full of human blood, just because they can? No grass, no blue skies, no sun on your back, no conversation with people who actually like you, just scorched earth and the lamentation of women, the gnashing of teeth, and zirconia can really take a lot of gnashing. I suppose that's the endgame: everyone I don't like is dead, I own all the money, all the resources, all the water and air. I can relax. I've beaten Thanos. By a factor of two. 

I've had enough. 

I'm going to go out and get some air, while there's still some air. 

I'll leave my phone at home.