Rapid onset reality detachment

What does Gwenyth Paltrow have to do with Crowdstrike?

I have to read a lot for work and I have severe issues with concentrating on text for long periods of time — a 20min read has to be done in two or three chunks unless I’m feeling particularly energised (maybe I’m dyslexic or something idk). I’ve tried text-to-speech (TTS) things before but they are generally terrible — the tone and intonation is completely robotic which sucks all meaning and context and nuance from the words, thus making it even harder to absorb.

But now, we are in the age of AI and fake voices sound very good all of a sudden so I thought I’d try a proper TTS app. I downloaded Speechify not through some wilful choice on my part, but because they’d clearly paid the most for SEO. I was onboarded fast an hard. They asked me to pick my favourite voice and the choices were Snoop Dogg, Mr Beast, or Gwenyth Paltrow. I’m trying to imagine a universe where someone wouldn’t pick Gwenyth; 90% of the things I do online are done ‘ironically’ but I just couldn’t bring myself to have Snoop Dogg or Mr Beast read me long essays about the modern colonial practices of large tech firms.

Gwenyth Paltrow’s voice is perfect. It’s already monotonic, it already exhumes melancholy, which is great for the kind of reading I’m doing. She sounds bored and fed up by the words. It makes complete conceptual sense that a woman who sells vaginal enhancement products and who is cast as sad and rich in every movie would then immortalise her voice in a consumer TTS app.

The other day I got Gwenyth to read me this piece by

Frank Lantz

(sorry Frank I hope that’s okay). In it, he discusses whether enemies in computer games, blackjack dealers, or even AlphaGo, can be said to be actually playing these games. Frank says that while AlphaGo may be technically good at Go, it has no self-awareness; it is “stuck inside the game”. And, to engage in play, you have to be aware of the world outside the magic circle; you have to know that what you are doing does not take place in reality. While listening to this I thought, wow yes, isn’t it funny that this exact piece about an AI’s lack of awareness is being read to me by a completely unaware, synthesised, disembodied voice.

And then, Gwenyth got to this line: “Maybe consciousness was just evolution’s way of solving the engineering problem of how to prevent intelligence from getting stuck inside of games. I don’t know,” and she added a sigh before saying ‘I don’t know’. There was no sigh indicated in the text. She constructed a fourth wall that I really didn’t need and then cosplayed as an exasperated human. It was so weird and disarming.

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I’m talking about all of this because I, as an overworked knowledge-labourer, phase in and out of deep thinking and the consumption of trashy media content — and now the two things are approaching an overlap. Or perhaps they’ve been thoroughly overlapped since 2014, I don’t know [computer sigh]. But I do think — and I know nearly every commentator has been saying some version of this for ages now — that the way information flows through the web has afflicted many individuals like myself with a severe reality detachment. I have so much information hitting me in the eyes that I barely know what’s going on. And Donald Trump has so many bullets hitting him in the ear that he— wait what’s our consensus on the Trump shooting again?

In a way, everything/everyone is Gwenyth Paltrow’s disembodied voice: no one knows what they’re saying or why they’re saying it — but their words are convincing. We have no idea what to make of the Trump shooter because he’s one of the only people in our tiny universe who wasn’t using social media platforms to lay bare the nuanced minutia of his political idealogical leanings. Why did he do it? Was Trump too extreme for him? Or not extreme enough? Why now? Who knows! All we know is that America is the land of guns, and often the thing with guns is, uh, people get shot.

I am talking about the Trump thing over a WEEK since it happened, which is forever in internet time, so I guess you had probably already forgotten all about it. Now the creator of a coconut tree meme might be the next president (oh also she’s a woman!). So much has changed. I’m typing these words on a Monday and you receive these emails on a Friday, by when it may read like an incomprehensible prehistoric text.

In all this madness we forget the ways in which we’ve allowed the internet seep into our every-day reality (the one that contains actual useful things, not just Twitter). I’m referring to those IRL daytime hours where we have to take trains and planes and get healthcare. As we’ve seen with the Windows and Crowdstrike incident, one bad security patch can really fuck all that stuff up. I honestly think software shouldn’t be this important; one mistake from one software company shouldn’t grind half the world to a halt. According to the WSJ, this effected only less than 1% of Windows machines. I’m really not good with stats but that one seems bad. We need more purpose-built software, rather than a thousand companies and public services taking advantage of the enterprise tier of just one cloud computing provider.

Software shouldn’t be so sexy and all-encompassing; software should be boring and not something that makes business men rich. Going back to Frank Lantz, and back to my point about how we’re all non-player characters: we all seem to be forced into a game that software companies are playing. We as users are just mechanics: a part of the game that is necessary for it to run. Software becomes so large that we have no idea we are inside of it; when it breaks we cannot get from A to B; reality dissolves.

The incentives and funding structures are all wrong here; it should be easier and cheaper for governments, railroads, and airlines to write their own bespoke software and thus have no affiliation or attachment to companies like Microsoft. Software isn’t a game, it’s just a thing we need. If what Microsoft are providing is infrastructure, then infrastructure should have redundancy and security. It’s all so robust until it isn’t. Infrastructure is reality: it’s meant to be permanent (or at least, extremely long term) and flexible — not wafer-thin and hollow.