I’ve been thinking a lot about industrialization and how some of the modern arguments regarding AI and our current generation of change in technology amount to, Humanity has always adjusted to change. I feel like that’s a really stupid line to draw in the sand.

Yes, we’ve always ‘adapted’ and not all change is bad. The development of sewage systems, improvements in architectural engineering, the moon landing. There are so many examples in history of how innovation has spurred the next phase of civilization. But not all of it is great, and our adaptations can also distort our relationships to ourselves, to others, and to the earth.

Sometimes it’s about what we do with invention—and in the United States this is broadly affected by capitalism. Was the invention of the motor vehicle a bad thing? Absolutely not. But the national push for car culture, through the suburban sprawl and dismantling of public transit, sells more automobiles and is not publicly funded (yet it can be publicly bailed out). Cars put us in our own world while a subway brings people together, even if they’re all just reading. Car culture divides people, but it can sell a lot of units.

(This doesn’t even cover the power of the fossil fuel industries and how we’re actively destroying the planet for their economic benefit alone, and how completely fucking insane that is at a fundamental level.)

Thinking at Echo Park

Then there’s the sensory side of things. Take the evolution of how we listen to music—from vinyl records to cassette tapes to CDs to MP3s to streaming services. We lose something with each change. When cassettes hit the market, people could fast-forward through songs, although it was a bit of a pain in the ass. The arrival of the CD made it simple. Once music hit the computer, the idea of collecting albums faded. With streaming services, the idea of listening to music has completely changed since its analog beginnings.

That same ‘progress’ can be traced back with most mediums that now exist mostly on a screen, and with each we’re losing connection to the worlds of creativity, sentiment, and inspiration—and, to a degree, individual thought. Our experiences with the world are predominantly visual now—with people, places, and things. Our fundamental sensory experiences are imbalanced and so our relationship with the world is skewed. You hear it every time a friend gets back from a trip and says something like, You have to go, it’s not what you’d expect at all. Yeah, because just seeing a photograph of something tells you barely anything about it.

I really like writing letters to friends, and it’s such a meaningful act to both send and receive something made by hand. The experience is an understanding that someone took time to do something, and that creates meaning. These digital interactions have no correlation with time, and therefore we lose the sentimental relationship that underlies how people connect to one another through acts of making something.

Innovation and development are part of how we grow as a species. Humanity separated itself from the rest of the natural world with its ability to build tools. Yet for every invention we’ve used for good, there are like ten examples of profiteers pushing a harmful agenda for the sake of their bank accounts. A gun is useful if you’re hunting for food, but what have we brought upon ourselves because of it otherwise? How much have firearms been used to ruin or end lives throughout history just so a couple people could be rich?

This is why I don’t trust anyone who supports AI in the least. Could it help us cure diseases faster? Maybe. But the internet had potential to revolutionize how we run the world and instead a few psychotic narcissistic capitalists turned it into a mall of hate for their individual benefit. All of these Silicon Valley types are the same, and there’s absolutely no reason to believe that this level of development won’t be used against the people more than for them.

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.