You ever take stock of things and wonder how society functions at this stage? Like say you’re going for a walk downtown and you pass an office building, you look inside and see dozens of employees in corporate casual dress sitting in front of monitors. You ever wonder how much work is actually getting done? How many of those people are just browsing YouTube or Tiktok after finishing their daily tasks in the first hour of their shift? How many of them are totally checked out or even actively working against the company? Things like overstaffing, micromanagment, and pointless meetings have become memes about the corporate world at this point, but CEOs still insist on them anyway.
You hear stories all the time about how office workers automate their tasks or slough off their work on others constantly, I’m to understand that there are even devices that simulate mouse movements to give the illusion of productivity to the manager monitoring your computer activity. We could ask how it’s gotten to the point where leadership at these companies is actively spying on their employees, and whether or not it actually increases efficiency. Regardless of that the objective for said employees seems to be to minimize their workload at all costs. A little while ago we would also ask how corporate justifies these roles when they’re accomplishing so little, but if the recent spate of layoffs in the tech industry are any indication, they don’t.
There was a trend of young women who worked in these fields posting Instagram stories about how they’d code for 3 hours a week while drinking Eucalyptus juice in the company lounge and pull in 6 figures. Of course you don’t see that as much anymore and the reasons why are pretty obvious. Of course beyond wondering why such low effort/high compensation positions were created in the first place one has to ask why the barrier to entry of these jobs is so high. Why bother getting a bachelors or masters degree in a university when it seems any regular person familiar with that type of software could do these jobs just as well if not better? It’s almost as if a college degree is just an unnecessary expense to prove to some HR rep that you could handle tedium and monotony for 3/4 of your life.
Moreover that seems to be the point of education in general, we’re essentially training kids to be office drones, but as we question how efficient workforces are we should also ask how much these kids are really learning. Kids don’t want to be trapped in a cublice making spreadsheets, they want to be content creators like their questionable hero Mr. Beast. They could give a fuck about math or science and likely think those fields are gay or racist anyway. How many kids are mentally ill, or diabetic, or vaping before they hit middle school these days? How can teachers be expected to compete with the screaming chicken nuggets on their students phones? If you think Millennials and Gen Z are useless what’s the generation that’s had smartphone in their face since birth going to be like? Imagine a workforce that’s several deviations lower in IQ than the current one who can’t go 5 minutes without some sort of electronic stimulation. What are we going to have them do? What can they do? If they think they can all become millionaires posting AI slop on Tiktok they’re in for a rude awakening.
And social media is another fun topic, you log onto Twitter or Facebook and are besieged by bots, AI art of shrimp Jesus, and weird lifehack ads telling you to put toothpaste in beer. Of course we see people arguing back and forth about sports or politics, but how many of these people are actually real? How many viral posts are actually botted? Do we know for a fact the videos posted there or anywhere else not just movie clips or AI generated? Are any of them staged or taken out of context to push some culture war narrative? And of course that cute girl holding the AR-15 in her profile pic who heart reacted your tweet about Trump could actually be a Fed, some people meet their spouses on Twitter, you get sent to a FEMA camp. I used to think the dead internet theory was bullshit but not so much anymore.
And on the internet in general, how much information can you actually trust? People have always questioned the authenticity of things they read on the internet but with the onset of AI assisted searches along with other AI powered tools who can say what’s really accurate when either a computer or underpaid Indian guy could be generating it? We used to read articles and blog posts and question if the author was being truthful, but how many of them are being written by ChatGPT now? And for the previously mentioned tech industry, how much coding can be done by this software without human interaction? And as for those young kids in school they’re definitely using ChatGPT to help them with their homework, but can the teacher spot it? For all you know this substack could be written in AI, of course that shouldn’t stop you from subscribing.
There’s a lot of debate on other things AI can create, especially art and whether or not it constitutes a legitimate medium. Artists, real artists, don’t like that their practice has been democratized and now everyone can create seven fingered superheroes or gay anthropomorphic animals within seconds. But what kind of “real” art is being created today outside of bizarre furry commissions? A lot of conservative guys think modern art is basically just a money laundering scheme using fake appraisals and phoned in praise from pretentious critics. You see some paint splattered on a canvas, someone else sees a profound expression of any number of themes and they think it’s worth millions of dollars for some reason. Art is supposed to evoke emotions or be a commentary on society and, according to some people I’ve argued with, it’s not for the viewer of art to determine whether or not it’s actually art. Can a machine not create art? Are the images that take AI seconds to spit out art? Does art take effort? Because some dudes will tape a banana to the wall and call that art…makes you wonder.
Art is associated with culture, and what is culture? And who gets to determine if someone’s culture is valid or not? Can I enjoy music, art, and literature made by my people and claim it as my own or did we steal it from somebody? What culture am I allowed to enjoy? When someone asks me to describe my culture am I allowed to say it involves the opposite of subwoofers blaring and guns firing? I didn’t used to think my culture was better but when I see the cultural staples of other people, at least in a modern context, it makes me wonder why I shouldn’t prefer my culture or take pride in the fact it was my people who created it. I see people acting like pedants over what constitutes a culture but they seem to be unaware that they’re taking part in one, perhaps one even created by people they profess to dislike. Will they ever give up the comfort of this culture? Of course not! In fact they’ll add their own culture in and claim it’s more valid than yours, hope you like Cardi B!
Of course there’s a war for culture, and it’s really important you pick sides, you wouldn’t want to be some normie would you? Can you trust the guy on the mic who’s ranting about some nefarious communist plot to destroy the constitution in between ad reads for white label supplements? It doesn’t matter, you have to trust him, he’s not just some grifter, he has the truth on his side and truth in this context means whatever confirms your biases enough to click on sponsored links. Someone’s always out to get you, something important is always being destroyed, someone somewhere is plotting something evil and only by involving yourself in endless partisan political discussion with fringe shut-ins can you hope to win…whatever. You have to hate who we tell you to hate and love who we tell you to love, they regiment your activity online and any deviation from the orthdox way of thinking gets you unpersoned, and people participate in this process without a second thought because they think it “helps”. God forbid you don’t see the point in engaging with this cult-like mentality, God forbid someone brands you as a fence sitter for not having a nuanced opinion on a niche topic you learned about literally 5 minutes ago. This feels like a simulacrum of how people would discuss these topics normally, like it’s all rehearsed and people just play their parts and recite the same dialouge in a tree or something and the show just keeps getting renewed for season after season forever, like The Simpsons.
I see the way people live online, and how they substituted their real lives with their digital personas to the point that they literally have nothing outside of the internet. People all across the political spectrum do this and I don’t think they even realize it, they just know they have to keep believing in whatever ideology they’ve adhered to. But I don’t even know who the true believers are anymore, republicans all employ illegal immigrants, anti-racists all live in 99% White gated communities, there are millionaires on YouTube that call themselves socialists, and White nationalists are all dating brown women. Does anyone actually believe the shit they spout online? Is social media really a good representation of how people actually feel? Is everyone so attention starved and miserable they have to act in these outlandish ways and drag down everyone in proximity to them?
The truth is, I’m caring less every day, the more of modern society I experience the more inclined I am to disengage with it. It’s getting harder for me to relate to people online or off, and that in itself begs the question, who is the real you? And what I mean by that is referencing the person you are in meatspace compared to your online persona. Lately I’ve felt more distance from my online self and the politics I clung to for so long, I feel they’re getting me nowhere and looking at another decade of impotently raging about events and people I have no control over makes me want to blow my brains out. I think about how hyperware I am over the state of society and it’s various pitfalls and I envy the beer swilling, football watching slob down the street who doesn’t even know what a pronoun is. But at the same time I know there’s no going back, every time I see a mixed race couple or a group of loud ethnics or a transgender person I’m reminded again that this culture is denigrating and I feel I have nowhere to flee to online or off. I wish I had a happier not to end this piece on, but I do take solace in the fact that I was able to predict where this society was headed, even though I couldn’t stop it.