FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: THE GREAT BOT-AND-SCROLL SWINDLE EDITION.

Nothing in this post is to be taken as a knock on Kraftwerk.

Oh boy, have I got Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies for you! Yes, I bring Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies every week, but I’m really trying to sell Roy Edroso Breaks It Down now because I’m such a hard-charging capitalist entrepreneur! 

Ha ha, OK, you all know I’m kidding – what a disagreeable old man I have become. I guess I was reminded of my lack of professional ambition by the subject of today’s REBID Fun Friday issue, which I’m releasing to non-subscribers, in which my prompt (a really shitty job experience) is answered by more-than-usually amusing comments. 

Which reminds me: Not only does Roy Edroso Breaks It Down have Fun Fridays, but also fun subscribers whose responses often outstrip my own efforts. Five days a week, friends, for seven bucks a month. If you don’t subscribe it’s like you’re cheating yourself. 

Also, here’s a freebie about the blood-chilling Meta AI launch in which Snoop Dogg and Jane Austen avatars were greeted with applause and appreciative laughter instead of screams of horror and fleeing as they should have been. I understand most of the concern over current artificial intelligence technologies that reduce creative work to amorphous “content” is that it will cost artists their livelihoods. I do sympathize – especially because the cannibalization and “reverse plagiarism” we saw just a few months ago has advanced to the point where scumbags are using real books to “train” robot authors, arguably a novel form of copyright infringement. 

But my own objection is mainly philosophical. At present almost no one who really wants to experience music, literature, and the visual arts would choose the cruddy simulacra that AI affords over the real thing. But in our hypercapitalist dystopia, increasingly the “real thing” in anything is reserved for high rollers. 

Time was the charm and coziness of bohemian neighborhoods was one of the compensations of not being able to afford anything better – but now gentrifiers have swamped those neighborhoods and raised the rent to the point where even the genteelly-poor can’t live in them. Literally no one believes the replacement of human customer service reps with robots has improved customer service for the customers themselves – yet because big money wants to maximize profits, that’s what we get. 

And we’re increasingly told by libertarian creeps that AI will empower psychotherapy bots that will make therapy affordable – when anyone who knows this rotten society can see it’ll just create shitty fake “therapy” that’ll be fobbed off on the poors as the new “telehealth” while the rich get to talk to human beings.

There are a lot of ways in which technology has improved our lives, God knows. But any sentient being must see that our overlords’ goal is not improvement of our lives – which by now is just an incidental side-effect -- but the expansion of their profit margins by any means necessary. They drool at the prospect of feeding us machine-baked mush instead of art because it’ll be more efficient – and it dovetails nicely with the closing down of all those wasteful humanities in schools. Their ideal state is one where the self-expression that has been part of the human experience since the days of the cave-painters is stamped out of existence.