Cultureware
Turns out you can download culture. Finally.
I am starting a research project about progressive campaigning and online radicalisation. I’m trying to learn as much as possible about the former in order to make a browser game about the latter.
If you want to learn more, work with me on this, or be interviewed feel free to reach out by replying to this email or sharing with someone who you think will be interested. Thank you!
A newly appointed treasury secretary recently said if we don’t adopt AI we are choosing decline. She’s obviously wrong for so many reasons. One of them is that we already chose decline as a society when we adopted consumerism as a culture. We are so obsessed with brands that when the wrong brand moves into a local area, that’s what feels like decline. When they tried to bring a Co-op (the worst supermarket) to Nunhead the outraged middle class residents and independent small businesses circulated a petition against it. It didn’t work and now we have an ugly stupid Co-op sucking all the charm out of everything. Sitting there right next to the William Hill and the chicken shop. Anyway.
Shoreditch is an area of London that’s been in decline for decades. Other people call this gentrification. A hair salon which had operated for maybe twenty years is now a Gail’s, the snooty bakery chain with ties to Israel. The Pret A Manger has also closed down. What does this mean? If you disregard the Israel thing, why is Gail’s, just as a bakery, bad? Shoreditch has been a cultureless void for brands to exploit for so long: on the one hand you have the otherworldly boutiques on Redchurch St that exist exclusively for tourists to gawk at. On the other hand you have the endless empty commercial units that are only ever used for immersive, interactive adverts (’pop-ups’). But Gail’s is a whole other kind of icky; it’s the unimaginative place you go on the weekend if you can’t think of anything else to do. It’s where you buy a sandwich on your commute because the line at Greggs is too long. It really doesn’t match up with the faux creative vibe of Shoreditch; no has even pretended to be creative in a Gail’s.
In issue 16 of Real Review, Martina Rocca and Izzy Farmiloe, two brand strategy experts, decided that brands are like people: they have a voice, they have personalities, they have values, and you can get betrayed by them. It’s also really annoying when they become sycophantic or get stuck in conversations with each other on social media. If brands have become people, it’s really tacky when they actually try and sell to you — which is dumb as hell because selling is the sole purpose of brands. And brands have become people precisely because they no longer straightforwardly convey the importance of useful products. The purpose of a brand is to sell lifestyles and contort your desires, and hide in plain sight within a culture, hopefully for long enough that they are conflated with that culture.
If you take this brand-as-person frame, brands start to look a lot like AI. They were created by humans. They try their best to emulate the behaviour of humans and we laugh at them like they’re dumb little babies when they fail. They seem to act autonomously, even though they are acting on behalf of a company, and what they say and do is infused with the values and opinions of corporates. Just like AI, brands have this fiendish decision-making mechanism within them that that is barely visible even to the people who control the brand. Brands just kind of do things, and if they do something bad, some executive has to explain why, and apologise for the brand acting out of character. The outputs of brands are made to look organic, even though they are totally manufactured. They market their products by aggregating small pieces of ideas from many creative minds, from popular culture, from their own corporate legacy, from literally going out and asking people what they want — and yet they still manage to make adverts depicting a soft drink putting an end state violence or the destruction of absolutely everything that brings you joy.
A bad brand reacts to culture like a hairy old politician trying to appease young voters. A good brand makes culture, and you don’t even realise it. And AI is the cultural output of many brands at once — including and especially the brands that are shaped like men. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Dario Amodei are all in themselves brands with gaping human mouths that won’t stop talking about what it means to live in a world that is about to birth an ungovernable superintelligence. This is such a mind-bending cultural artefact for a brand to produce: please endure economic decline while pretend scientists steward society into a utopian future where everything’s a computer and 100% of energy provided by the solar system — no, the observable universe — is used for compute. This isn’t vaporware, it’s cultureware. You don’t have to buy anything, you just have to believe that this is going to happen, and argue with each other on forums about exactly how it will happen. Many groups have adopted the aesthetics of AI cultureware: transhumanism, effective altruism, acellerationism, rationalism, looks-maxxing, mens rights, etc.
All these groups are vaguely fascist. Or overtly fascist. They hate humanity, they hate that we all have conflicting morals and traumas and hardships. They hate that we have frail bodies that are susceptible to disease, that are gluttonous, that are unathletic, that are anxious, and that eventually fail and rot away. I know that transhumanists and gooning alt-right men are technically different; I know that a looks-maxxer might think an EA is just a tedious nerd but to me all these people are the fucking same. They hate the natural world and they want to destroy it. They are so privileged and yet will never be happy with the status quo. They think that mortality is something you can solve and if we don’t we will become stagnant as a species.
This is a very weird culture indeed. The sole output of this culture is immortality. That can’t be right. I’m aware that all the groups I mentioned above are sort of on the fringe, but also they do have a lot of money and influence. How much are they actually impacting or replacing popular culture? Ezra Klein, a journalist for the NYT, a very mainstream news outlet, has recently used his position to desperately list all of the things we can maybe use AI for one day. Come on guys, you’re not working hard enough to brainstorm uses for this thing currently macerating the economy. The economy now doesn’t matter because it’s about to flourish in unprecedented, euphoric ways, and also money isn’t real.
I will end with sharing a recent piece from one of my favourite writers, Frank Lantz , who recently wrote a piece asking if there is a computer game out there that humans will still be playing in 500 years. Apparently humans have been playing backgammon for five thousand years. Go was also invented about four thousand years ago. This looks really good for games. But there’s a kind of sad understanding that a computer game cannot have this insane level of cultural sticking power, because it’s software — but Frank does mention, “there’s something intriguing about the way DOOM is continuously re-implemented on every possible computing platform.” The thing about games is, people like them. We play them when we’re happy, sad, bored, alone, or in a group. Games are a true cultural artefact, because they make life worth living. Whereas AI, or the cultureware that says AI is real, tells you that life is terrible and there’s only one way to make it better.