This comment reminds me of "Infinite Jest," one of my favorite books from the 90s. The story goes all over the place, but the plot centers on a band of renegade Quebecois terrorists hell-bent on bringing the unified government of North America - The Organization of North American Nations, or "ONAN" for short - down by taking a video so entertaining that anyone who watched it would lose all desire to eat, bathe, or do anything but sit on the couch and watch it over and over again onto the "Interlace" network and various elements of a profoundly dysfunctional society got involved in efforts to thwart the plot. Not everyone's cup of tea for various reasons, but it has seemed more and more prophetic as the years have gone by.
Foster-Wallace's stuff is often outstanding. Agree that a lot of Infinite Jest was absolutely prescient, some of it laugh-out-loud funny, other parts
hideous men cringeworthy. His breadth of understanding neurological and psychological states- despite having no formal training in those fields- was particularly striking. Plus the meat of the ideas, his visualizing issues before the rest of us even thought something was odd, he really was phenomenal at that. I lived in Allston-Brighton in the exact era DFW was writing about it, so a lot of that 1990's neighborhood is immortalized. What a slog of a read though, probably coulda heard some advice to cut down the length, footnote digressions that seemed cool back then seem pompous now. DFW would almost certainly have gone through a me-to reckoning had he not committed suicide. I've wondered if his suicide, independent of the brutal depression, was in part because he also saw that coming....
back to AI though, good lord it is sickening to see the people firing up and posting AI bullshit on social media of destruction porn re this week's WA state floods.
In the hands of horrible people, AI content easily manipulates people....
Case in point, was watching some BBC show called Ice Age Planet, which is basically an AI nature documentary that looks, feels and sounds like a very real and wonderfully filmed
planet earth style docu, but it isn't. I had to keep reminding myself of that. I mean my emotions were being manipulated by what in essence was a fancy cartoon with some paleontological and climate based ideas... Damn you Jon Favreau (producer) for making me give a crap about whether or not the Cave Lion cubs would get eaten by the Cave Bears (or was it the other way around)....
mynorthwest.com
reclaimthenet.org
