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Maybe I’m [insert identity]
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A slide I made for a talk I gave at FITC once upon a time
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Years ago when I started interneting, I pretended to be someone I wasn’t. I was a pre-pubescent me, pretending to be a 30 year old surf instructor or a golf enthusiast. I had loads of identities that I experimented with in the infant web. Before search, there were forums and chatrooms. When I was curious about something, I would find an appropriate chatroom to get answers. I would skim a forum. I might ask Jeeves.
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If you knew where to look, you could always find answers. If you knew how to ask, someone would answer. Nowadays the robots have the answers, so you’re likely not chatting with the dude in Kansas with a freezer collection. When you managed to find him, back then in the early days of the web, the freezer expert was a fascinated and faceted being. Plus he knew all the Intuit words for ice alphabetically.
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The robots don’t have the same answers that our ice expert had, and they are certainly not the maddeningly beautiful compilation of complications we humans are . This week, I asked ChatGPT where the funding came from for a military film that featured the age-old trope of lone hero fighting internal corruption at the highest level of government. You know the tale – some shady government folks set someone up to take the fall for their misdoings, but they targeted the wrong person and despite the entire government apparatus being at their whim, the hero proves his innocence and manages to expel highly powerful corruption from the center of democracy.
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Remember last week when I said stories shape our world? Well, stories and propaganda have an interesting confluence.
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I am no smarter about exactly how much funding the United States Department of Defense gives Hollywood production companies each year. Yes, I could do the research. But ChatGPT’s canned, carefully constructed response told me everything I really needed to know.
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Maybe I'm ill-tempered
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I remember standing in front of the Gold Dust Lounge in San Francisco in like 2008 and having a tech bro tell me how stupid I am for not being on Facebook. I explained that I wasn't onboard with the damage Facebook is and would be doing to society. I explained that social media and intentional behavioural manipulation was bad. In 2008. He said I was only hurting myself.
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He was right, you know. Having actual principles that you, like, stand up for is personally painful. It’s often a traumatic experience having virtue, morals or even common sense. I’m definitely hurting myself by being such a curmudgeon about tech bros, corporate tech and capitalism more broadly.
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At the recent WebSummit, the Yes Men stood on stage praising the Nazis, lamenting child labour crackdowns and generally being in-your-face ridiculous in launching a fake Crypto as a way to not pay real money to Adidas workers. It was a protest aimed at Adidas for their history and reality of forced labour AND NO ONE KNEW IT WAS A HOAX FOR 36 HOURS.
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If I’m a curmudgeon, it’s just because the world is such a shitshow (and I didn’t even say anything about the recent elections in Argentina or the Netherlands).
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Maybe I need help?
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Looking for the perfect black Friday buy? Here's a way to dump $1100 on a device that claims to be able to put you “in the zone” while “increasing your productivity 25%” and espousing views like "The more we consistently deny ourselves in the moment, the more time and peace our future self gets to keep."
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