So, the machines took over, and you’re left to slowly waste away in the dark room lit only by the flickering rectangle god hung neatly above your dresser. The few pulsing sinews of youth you used to admire in the mirror have atrophied into a lumpy texture somewhere between a liquid and a solid; your mind descends into madness; you eat from a super-sized bowl of newly designed genetically modified popcorn that gives you all the nutrition you need for the day; you spit flecks of its slurried puss as you scream at the screen to make you feel something again. It’s not quite what you imagined the future to be, but still, the sci-fi movies were right: the machines took over. In just a couple blurry years, AI achieved what us mortals always strived to do: to create a kind of television that would entertain ourselves to death.
Now what do the sci-fi movies say the future’s future will be like? This is peak modernity, but didn’t you think things would be a little more—I don’t know—fun? At least for television’s sake, everything seems so cruelly unremarkable, so ham-fisted, so demonically pedestrian that the dull edges of the self-inflected sword aren’t enough to excite you anymore.
When the Writers Guild of America went on strike, most of their grievances were ones you’d expect. They wanted to be paid more in residuals than the single, fixed payments they received from streaming platforms. When a show is handed off to another streaming platform in this randomized exchange of shuffling trading cards with your friends, the writer’s don’t receive additional payments. The streaming platforms that you regularly use help define you. You make a point of this in most of your conversations. Are you a Hulu guy, or an HBO Max—now just Max—guy? Or do you keep it sensible for the family and remain close to Disney Plus, and then Paramount Plus when the kids are off to bed? Or are you one of those people of sophisticated superiority who only subscribes to the Criterion Collection, and you make sure you mention that fact whenever at a social gathering? Netflix is more and more becoming the Myspace of streaming services—an exploitation of its own cringe affairs, a hurricane of ephemera, stupid, and pulpy, and forgettable. They want to release a movie every single day. This is who we’ve become, formless and thoughtless automatons wasting away in front of five screens at once, because you’re not actually watching the shows, you’re putting them on in the background as you slide your oily fingers around your other screens. It’s not even entirely your fault. The entertainment dollies that they serve us to consume are dominantly awful. I don’t mean they’re bad when compared to Tarkovsky, or Klimov, or Kurosawa. They’re bad when compared to the generic wrath of content that you’re used to seeing as periphery, the stuff you put on so you don’t have to be alone. You already know this. But you watch because you are imprisoned somewhere in the dull amalgam of addiction, boredom, some vague lust for meaning, some residue of our ancestors’ storytelling in order to make sense of the world, some unadulterated curiosity of its artless horror.
More and more, writers of shows aren’t experiencing any part of the shows they’re writing about. They’re not experiencing the production process, and therefore unable to understand what actually goes into making a show, unable to eventually become the showrunners themselves, exhausting the reservoir of creative fortune from capable writers. In GQ’s article on the WGA strikes, they state that “The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) offered lottery-based ‘unpaid internship’ opportunities for writers to visit the sets of the series they worked on. This seems impossible, it’s almost too stupid. The company seduces a writer with a chance for a little amusement park ride-like visit to the show that they’re writing about. Writers are being hired essentially as gig-workers—fewer writers with shorter contracts thrown into what’s known as mini-rooms, together forced to urgently hack up some familiarly enticing phlegm-of-desire, only the vague resemblance of drama—the true simulacra of entertainment. This is obviously not a nefarious feature solely of AMPTP, but of the machine of capitalism as a whole—it’s short-circuited to siphon as much profit out of as little input as possible. It’s why all the new apartment buildings and housing is utter trash, teetering lean-tos rotting into disarray from the sun’s rays. It’s why fast fashion has dominated the clothing industry, why waterways are polluted with dyes and chemicals to get that cute H&M skirt fitted around your ass for one night until it unravels into a shredded tapestry, an objet trouvé you pull from the gutter like a handkerchief of demons.
I got married a few days ago, and shamefully, I had great difficulty writing my own wedding vows. These should be the easiest thing in the world to write. There is no lack of beauty and romance and gratitude to glean a few sincere and vulnerable sentences from. I love my wife immensely, and I consider myself a writer; I don’t normally have a problem with writer’s block or knowing what I want to say. But, like David Foster Wallace said of the dangers of institutionalized irony, I realize I’ve become vaguely dependent on an attitude within my own writing. Many of us writers reinforce the tonal veneer of a dominant cultural snark and irony. Wallace said that “anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig.” You become lazy and incapable of having unfeigned thoughts. Like everyone else, you don’t know anything, and you are uncomfortable with your own ignorance, so you mask it under the illusion of confidence and the grotesquely sanguine and sardonic allure of your own ego, endlessly scoffing with your nose in the air about the buck-toothed rodents that populate the world around you.
As the wedding approached, and I still had nothing but a handful of clichés and bland devoirs, I started to panic. So I looked online for examples of the “best wedding vows ever written”, and they all read the same—cruelly prosaic, meaningless testaments, barely literate stammerings of what love should look like, speeches from people whose marriages will clearly end in failure, the sort of fortune-cookie kind of wisdom that make you wonder who actually writes these? The first website that I clicked on gave me things like, “When you need a friend, I will be your best friend. When you need help, I will be there for you. When you need care, I will support you. When you want to try something new, I will encourage you. And when you do the same for me, I will appreciate you. But if you don’t…I will forgive you.” These things had thousands of upvotes, weird displays of mass approval that make you suspect many people must have thought these were just perfect and printed them out and read them aloud in front of hundreds of people and I can only assume made people cry sincere tears. The vows that our officiant gave us were a bit better than these, but still the broad meaningless testaments. And it makes me suspect that the common plateau we as a single collective audience derive meaning from is a fairly insipid one. Theodor Adorno’s essay How to Look at Television, in his book Culture Industry, describes television as a media that is accessible to all, an intentionally dull avenue of clichés and stereotypical characters dealing with trifling affairs so that the majority of viewers can believe are somehow relating to their own lives.
So, I tried another approach. I went onto ChatGBT for the first time, after seeing endless hoards of you posting your most epic examples of how a computer program could write a high school essay on the Revolutionary War, or how Donald Trump would give a speech about eating his own turds. After a few attempts of varying specificity, I grew bored of it, understanding the larger aim of its tonal copy-and-paste narrative that it can achieve. They sounded largely the same as the ones I found through a simple Google search. So I tried other inputs for fun. I typed “write wedding vows in the writing style of William Faulkner,” “write wedding vows in the writing style of Thomas Pynchon,” “write wedding vows in the writing style of Blood Meridian”.
This one was better. It began by warning me that McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is a “dark and violent novel that explores the brutality of the American West, and as such, the following wedding vows may not be suitable for all audiences.” Then it continues with my vows:
“Before God and man, I stand with you in this place of desolation. The sun beats down on the barren earth, and the wind carries the stench of death and decay. We stand here, in this godforsaken land, to pledge our lives together.
“I offer you no promises of comfort or ease, for we live in a world of violence and bloodshed. But I offer you my heart, my strength, and my courage, to stand beside you through the trials and tribulations that lie ahead.”
It continues for a couple more paragraphs of the same. I quite like these actually. They seem philosophically honest and sensitive. But they do not sound like McCarthy or Blood Meridian. They sound like a mixture of very mediocre vows and the themes of Blood Meridian, like if someone read his book and then did their best attempt of its literary attitude. McCarthy would never write with such banal misfortune, but they are amusing nevertheless. Yes, I know that ChatGPT will continue to improve to degrees that make even its most impressive prose seem like early hieroglyphs. This is the first blocky cellphone version of its capabilities. And, as it advances, this is how an AI program would write a television show. You would get the finessed veneer of a drama or a comedy or superhero or whatever, you would get these strangely familiar quiescent phantom characters that you feel invested in. And you will be moved by them in the same way. But it’ll be a simulation of real feeling. Because movies already are simulations of real feelings. I cry at the movies all the time. I suspect there is a part of me that goes o the movies to cry because I usually can’t cry in real life. This is a truly disturbed act if you think enough about the logistics that go into crying at make-believe characters perfected by thousands of impatient crew members. I might even cry at AI movies if they’re good enough in my lifetime. Still, in today’s world, crying at the movies is about simulating real feeling that we don’t get just outside the doors of the cinema. We crave heartbreak and heroism and valor and vengeance because in the world around us we get paralyzing tedium—we have modernized and fumigated our way out of any ancestral prestige drama, soft echoed whimperings of our past, moonlit gauzey memories of a time more thrilling than now. Now, our little thrills of feeling is we get to call people a piece of shit if they cut us off on the freeway—brave heroes only inside our steel cocoons.
But what I’m concerned about most is that less and less people are going into rooms alone to read and write. The great literary critic Harold Bloom said “Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing pleasures.” I suppose I agree to an extent about the personal pleasures of reading—I love reading and I love writing, they fill me with immeasurable quantities of awe and beauty—but I don’t think you should advocate for reading because it’s pleasurable. Everything is pleasurable. And the pleasure you gain from reading an Anna Karenina is so vague and distant as compared to the pleasure you receive from sex or drugs or movies or music, and those things will always dominate because they are easy to consume. I think on a collective level, reading and writing is much more serious than pleasure. There’s an abstract vaguely measurable effect of people removing themselves from the deafening strata of our social seduction, and contemplating through those quiet lulls of loneliness. I feel I am better when I read and when I write. And I don’t think that’s just me. I think everyone would be better for it. You have a better command of your own thoughts, a humility and intention of what you then nefariously belch into the ears of others.
You used to read books like The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck, Everything Is Fucked: A Book About Hope, You Are A Badass, I Used to Be A Miserable Fuck, Unfuck Your Brain, Unfuck Yourself. Edgy philosophically hip self-help books. Your understanding of science derived exclusively from Instagram pages like “I Fucking Love Science,” “Nature Is Metal,” fifteen second clips of Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about why the stars in the movie Titanic weren’t actually situated that way, annoying little queefs of pointless information that are designed for you to regurgitate in your next conversation in order to sound smart.
The fears that parents and teachers have about their children typing some essay prompt into ChatGBT and the program shitting out some moderately intelligible B+ essay is real. But nothing’s going to stop the machine careening towards an illiterate future. When I was a student, teachers were concerned that we would plagiarize from the Internet, copy and paste something from Wikipedia that they would never have the time or gumption to do the due diligence to see if each of the thirty essays from six periods were actually our original words. But the concerns of today feel different somehow. I learned recently that students aren’t being taught to write cursive anymore. I guess that’s fine. I quite like writing in cursive in my journals, but things change, and we can’t be bitter nostalgics clinging onto the past. And with film, you can shutter yourself from the schizophrenia of modernity and only watch Tarkovsky and keep your mind clean from the poisons of the world, but the rest of world isn’t doing this, and you will soon die and be replaced by the infinite others with a clamoring appetite for ephemera. Because there will never be another Tarkovsky. There will never be another Melville, or Pynchon or McCarthy for that matter. No one will ever be able to remove themselves from all this outlandish barbarity and live in the spiritual landscapes of the mind that they did. My point isn’t how sad it is that the grandiloquent Luddites of the elevated intellectual delights are dying off—rather, what will our minds turn into when there is nothing spiritually decent to fill them with?
AI isn’t going to necessarily change anything. It’s only going to speed up the inevitable. The shows you consume with the same dull frenzy of a rat eating from the dumpster—they are written by teams of illiterate junkies, the muffled clatter of factory workers, angry cretins who want to subtly push their political views onto you. But these strange nerdish denizens of storytelling will soon be obsolete, and will eventually be seen as the annoying pissants that they are, screaming about their importance to society, saying that a computer could never replace the creativity and complexity of their brilliant minds. When the computer program AlphaGo beat a Go world champion, it was seen as a milestone for the creativity of its genius, that it wasn’t just a brilliant calculating machine in the way Deep Blue was for chess, but that it could be spontaneous and imaginative to degrees that the best of us could never achieve.
In Adorno’s essay “How To Look At Television,” he classifies the high and low art of culture no longer existing with television. Media’s “output has increased to such an extent that it is almost impossible for anyone to dodge it; and even those formerly aloof from popular culture—the rural population on one hand and the highly educated on the other—are somehow affected.” The socio-psychological implications of television are diminishing a life experience in exchange for a more yielding shell of impressions, one that confirms Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology in his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Under an AI directed culture industry, ideological inputs can be more easily and effectively geared toward the masses, the great soma intoxicant of the present, while at the same time obliterating what the current WGA strikes are about, effectively ridding itself of the formerly necessary relations of production, allowing itself to no longer pay even a negligible minimum wage to crew members, siphoning the lot of profits for what few executives corralled momentary protection for their own jobs. How we look at television is less and less up to us.
Look at the movies and television shows based on video games for example: The Last of Us, Super Mario Brothers, Resident Evil, Mortal Kombat, Sonic the Hedgehog, Assassin’s Creed, Street Fighter, and endless others. We’ve run out of material to entertain ourselves with. All the live-action remakes of the Disney classics. A hundred thousand installments of Fast and the Furious. It’s a manifestation from a culture that is already a bloated carcass of desire—there’s nothing left to do but try to kick it back to life with our big budget attempts for meaning. It makes me think of the eery montage in Adam Curtis’s Hypernormalisation, with all of the films made just before September 11th, 2001, in which apocalyptic destruction came from above, destroying skyscrapers and cities, in the form of natural disaster or alien invasion or nuclear annihilation. It’s as if we almost willed the horror from above, that our culture industry had churned out what it knew, that the nineties had a weird end-of-history attitude and there was nothing to believe in but the most epic scales of our death. The superhero movies we have today are a hallmark of our collective despondency, our despair toward the political system, since the 2008 financial collapse, when Iron Man was also released and launched the mania for superhero movies, we sacrificed all other ideology in exchange for men and women in capes who come to save the world.
An artificially intelligent program would only streamline the process that we are already neck deep in. What Adorno warned of media’s “repetitive and self-same” nature of it churning out material like an assembly line would only be magnified for a time by AI, where it uses previous material that the human collective has made until now, as it regurgitates and rearranges until it’s advanced enough to create entirely new ideas on its own. When all of television is written by AI, when our favorite shows are massive BINGEWORTHY super-seasons that you’ll need the Elon Musk neuralink implant to consume twenty shows at the same time, and you’ll watch a nature series narrated by an AI generated David Attenborough voice, about the extinct axolotl or the pangolin, and you’ll croak to your spouse with their eyelids half-shut and a bilious drool hanging from their chin something about how amazing it is we’ve advanced this far, but how you bet the future will be even crazier. We’re so lucky, you’ll whisper, as you drift off to sleep under a ceiling and blaring screens.