There’s all this talk about AI and Google Zero effectively ending the internet as it has been known—creating a sole point-of-contact online to be an all-encompassing AI bot. The people who will profit from this are, of course, touting the possible ‘benefits’ from such a thing, and there are plenty of users out there who can’t live without something like ChatGPT telling them how to raise their children. I am against all of this, but as an example I will use something from internet history I personally detested—the Mommy Blogger.

Mommy Bloggers consisted of predominantly affluent, lonely housewives who shared every minute of their existence on personal journals which revolved around motherhood, housekeeping, and marriage. It was the kind of societal trend that rose to enough prominence to merit its own plotline on House by 2010. I didn’t give it much attention because I was basically the opposite of its target audience.

Now this demographic has moved on to social media or podcasts, but I can’t help but feel something was lost when that happened. The format of the blogs they were writing inherently required a sense of creativity and a forthrightness that, while possibly creating controversy, garnered camaraderie among other mothers. While the results can be similar in the world of podcasts, the off-the-cuff nature of just chatting feels far less heartfelt and more gossip-oriented. The inherent nature of what is being communicated gets reduced from meaningfully inquisitive from an individual perspective to a bland riff.

That’s what the ‘new internet’ and AI truly deliver: less creativity, less meaning, less potential for individuals to discover relationships with themselves and others alike through actually thinking about things. Considering yourself and others can be paths to empathy, social bonds, and overall feeling less lonely in the world. Silicon Valley tech has not only frayed those ends but is promising a world with even less possibility for those things (at least online). The internet will be reduced from a once-mecca of individual expression to a recursive loop of slop. Getting rid of search functions where people can actually discover the independent side of the internet only accelerates all of this.

There are still Mom Blogs out there, and a search over at DuckDuckGo will show as much. Yet it’s only a matter of time before people become unaware that this, or any type of personal expression, ever existed online to begin with. (The great irony being all of this is what fueled the ‘knowledge’ of AI bots to begin with.) There are many, far greater, crimes that AI and its proponents commit, but these sort of existential losses of potential creative outlets feel particularly damning of the road humanity is headed down from a purely meaningful perspective.

I’m not gonna be one of those people who pretended to listen to Dolly Parton all along. She had plenty of fans of her music and I won’t pose as one of them. That being said, I was a huge fan of her.

She’s talked about her father’s illiteracy and in her fame started the Imagination Library as a result—an institution which has given kids worldwide over three hundred million books for free. It’s just a part of her extensive philanthropy—giving away so much money that, though she could have been a billionaire, she never reached that mark.

It’s rare to have a public figure in America almost always walk the walk without talking too much talk—but when she did speak about issues, it was always in a way that expressed a kind of belief in the human spirit and the understanding that we’re all just equal as human beings. Though her works that help people will be recognized and missed, to me it’s that she represented a quality of understanding and respect for all that is largely lost on those with power and influence in media and culture.

In an era of Kardashians, where amassing wealth and dismissing others and focusing on the self is paramount—embracing individualism and greed—Parton represented the polar opposite. She was an example that one could be both accomplished, loved, and rich without holding on to ideas that were exclusionary or discriminatory. If celebrity is an inescapable consequence of the collision of art and commerce, Dolly was an example that the role could be a path to mutual benefit (as much as something like that can be).

I think that’s the reason so many people are fucked up over her death. In a time when nobody agrees on anything, everyone knows that Dolly Parton was an amazing person. A representation of goodness, of what people could be. There’s something in the air now where we can all tell society has sunk so far into greed, selfishness, and sometimes outright evil, that we’re collectively losing the plot—that there aren’t really many people left to consider a role model for the next generation.

She will be missed, and perhaps her legacy will inspire the youth of today to see that society does recognize the good in people, and collectively lifts them up, giving them deserved recognition for being a beacon of what the human heart is capable of. The world will be a worse place without Dolly, but maybe because of her, people will end up a little better.

(Like everyone else, I review the films I see on Letterboxd, but I write about movies as a general idea here.)

Zach Cregger has made a Resident Evil movie and it looks awesome. I’m a big fan of both Barbarian and Weapons and have always enjoyed the games when I’ve played them, so I’m pretty stoked on this. Will it win Best Picture? No. Will it be fun as hell? Probably.

Here’s the kicker, though: I love Resident Evil. I don’t mean the IP or any of the specific games. I mean the original movie from 2002 starring Milla Jovovich. I enjoy all of its 100-minute runtime. I can totally admit it’s 100% a bad movie. It’s a bad script with terrible acting and some really awful special effects. Yet still, I love it. It’s a guilty pleasure.

There’s been online discourse of late saying there’s ‘no such thing‘ as a guilty pleasure, or we need to take away the shame of it. (NPR even took a look at the brain science behind the concept.) I would argue the middle ground is where we should land as a society—yes, there are guilty pleasures, but we should also not fear any kind of public shame for indulging in them.

The innocence of guilt

I think a person should be proud to admit they have a guilty pleasure in art or culture because at least they’re admitting to understanding the idea that there are echelons of these things produced in terms of meaning and substance. If you say a Marvel movie is a guilty pleasure, you’re admitting you understand that it’s corporate franchise slop written at a fifth-grade level designed for nothing more than a dopamine rush, but you just don’t care. And that’s fine. It’s the understanding that matters.

I’m not always watching arthouse films. Hell, Bad Boys II is a piece of capitalist copganda and I love the shit out of it. But I know that Michael Bay wasn’t setting out to ask societal questions when he had Will Smith dodging boats in a Ferrari while speeding across a Miami bridge. He just wanted to throw boats at a car on a freeway.

However, I can say that movie, or Resident Evil, is a guilty pleasure because I know there are arthouse movies out there that Ask Serious Questions About Life, that exist because a filmmaker wanted to make us leave a theater with a new thought or idea about the world around us. I know that, while entertainment can be fun and relaxing, art and the concepts that creatives process during crafting a film or writing a novel is where we actually discover things about our humanity. Any moral quandary posed by a Marvel movie has been vetted by the CIA, while a David Lynch film will leave a person wondering what morality originates from.

Go for it

I have a friend here who is a very good, serious artist. I was at her place once staring at this massive painting of a tree she had splayed out across the floor of her entire apartment. In the corner, her television showed one of her streaming accounts and all of the ‘Recently Played’ section was filled with episodes of one reality show or another. I asked about it and she proudly said she loved it all—she could work with them on in the background, not having to worry about her attention being distracted by something heavy or some plot point she had to pay attention to. Also, they were just entertaining. It made sense.

She and I both know plenty about Serious Art, but also that there’s plenty of reasonable occasions to indulge in whatever bullshit might exist for the sole purpose of vapid entertainment. I tend to think the issue of American culture is that we’re increasingly being pushed in the direction of that void of uncaring, incompetent slop. Stephen Spielberg and John Williams teamed up to create one of the most iconic films ever made in Jurassic Park, which is now just a recurring CGI-fest of absurdity and nonsensical plot lines. Our entertainment is getting dumber, and our society is culturally worse for it.

I think the danger of a guilty pleasure lies in not knowing that it is one, or why it is one. To not understand that the new Avengers movie and Zodiac might both star Robert Downey Jr but the latter is a significantly different type of film is a kind of cultural illiteracy that I think we’ve generally waded into as a society, and instead of trying to right that wrong, we’re trying to take away any stigma about the shame of preference—even though that preference is nothing to be guilty about, but understanding the holistic nature of why culture matters to humanity is an inherently important and valuable part of life experience.

Wilton and Wilshire

For some time now, I’ve used the Adobe Lightroom mobile app to edit photos I take on my phone, such as this one snapped today on my drive home. However, when I went to edit the photo upon getting home, Adobe had an update to promote to me:

On Lightroom Desktop and Mobile, the headline feature is Generative Expand, which Adobe first rolled out in Photoshop in mid-2023. The tool uses generative AI to extend a photo beyond its original borders, filling transparent areas created by perspective adjustments or making room for new aspect ratios without leaving blank edges

The Generative UI in question

There’s plenty of debate about AI ‘art,’ even though most people who are pro-AI have little to no appreciation for creative process or results—however when it comes to photography, using Generative AI is somehow more offensive. Photography, by its fundamental nature, is documentation. Evidence. An account of reality, interpreted through a lens certainly, but otherwise, nothing that exists in a photograph was not in the scene that was shot.

To use Gen AI in any kind of photographic tool is to go against the very nature of photography. While the people who are shoving AI down our throats at every corner have absolutely no appreciation for the nature of the foundations of how we make things, they also disregard why we make them, or how significant these processes and results are to the relationship humanity has to itself and the world.

People promoting AI exist completely within the idea of technologically-driven bubbles that serve purposes of, well, I don’t even know, coordinating meetings better? Client pitches? Coding apps? A projected version of the world that doesn’t exist but serves the idea of selfish indulgence? Certainly nothing honest, nothing dignified, nothing human.

While there are likely ballistic wars coming over resources such as water, wealth, energy, and political domain, there’s this brewing existential, intangible conflict about the fundamental nature of how we relate to one another, how we share reality, how we celebrate it, and what it actually comprises that is becoming an increasingly depressing landscape.

Defector has the right tone when talking about Tom Dundon and his recent acquisition of the Portland Trail Blazers:

Fans of the Portland Trail Blazers should prepare themselves for a very unpleasant time. Tom Dundon, the team’s new owner, is digging in. Arena renovations would improve the value of his property, and so he wants arena renovations. He is simply and resolutely refusing to commit any of his own money to the project. If Portland refuses to pay for stadium renovations, and the stadium thus goes un-renovated, Dundon will have an ironclad pretext for packing the team into a U-Haul and moving it to Las Vegas, or Nashville, or—the monkey’s paw finally directing a shriveled middle finger at the world—Seattle. That’s how investor ownership works, and why it is fucked: The franchise has been in Portland for almost 60 years; Dundon bought it four months ago, and it is entirely and irrevocably his.

…

There’s a handy lesson in class solidarity. Dundon, wielding Hankins like a sock puppet, is putting tax dollars on one side of the scale and private investor wealth on the other, and arguing that because private wealth was previously spent by a member of Dundon’s billionaire class, the class has already contributed its share to the pot. It is now time for the tax-paying public to pitch money back at the billionaires, goes this argument. Dundon will simply collect this payment on behalf of his tribe.

The great irony about the rich is that they demean socialism, or honestly anything to the left of fascism, but expect taxpayers to foot the bill as a collective class for what is owned by private investment. ‘Socialism for me, not for thee,’ is basically the motto of the rich. (See also: Elected officials receiving healthcare benefits that amount to federal subsidies covering 72% of costs.)

Billionaires like Dundon should be driven out of places like Portland with pitchforks and vats of tar and the team reclaimed by the city with force, and given how much Portland loves the Blazers, I could almost imagine something like that happening. John Fisher notoriously moved the beloved Athletics out of Oakland instead of selling the team so they could stay in the East Bay.

The rich care nothing about culture or what things mean to the people who create and support it; they see only numbers, bottom lines, and profit margins in everything. Capitalism is a cancer on humanity—and I mean that in the most literal sense. It destroys what we are able to create with our minds and bodies for the sole purpose of money (another invention) to a select few beneficiaries and will eventually lead to the destruction of the planet. These people are barely human—grotesque obsessives hoarding wealth and we’d all be better for it if they were collectively disposed of.