100% Human
Oh, I know what you’re thinking. This post was written by a robot. Some lonesome AI generator pooping out content vaguely flavored towards monetizing. But no! No no, gentle reader. This is 100% Human, coming at you in blue light 2D. To tell you thanks for reading! In this day and age a person can type, and type, and type and seem to get nowhere. But because you are here, this is an interaction, not an archive. Let it be known that in this desperate Robot War there are still those among us who occasionally fly bot-free.
The Robot War is not going well. They are putting AI targeted swivel rifles on robot dogs and deploying them into the field. They are dropping grenades from $100 drones. They are farming out this violence, so we don’t have to kill people anymore. Or at least not be directly responsible for it. We were merely FUNDING the robot murder dogs. How were WE to know that they would be used in unwholesome ways? How were we to know anything? With education being starved to death over the course of decades? No one should know anything at this point, if even that.
There was a time when all of this stuff used to be human. A brief but magical period in the genesis of the internet, where no one had access to bots. Once bots, generators, and machine learning hit the network it was anyone’s guess as to what sort of content would be created. Much of it seems either useless or insane. A disturbingly familiar uncanny valley of words, and light, and images. Weird, certainly, but is it intelligent? Or does it have to be? To be of any value? There’s still a lot of back and forth about the ethics of it all. I try to be aware and sympathetic, while also trying to make good with the Robot God before the roving packs of murderbots.
I wish roving packs of murderbots were a thing that could have stayed in science fiction. We would be a lot farther ahead, if we were all united in creating a starship Enterprise somewhere. I have a one trillion dollar plan to build a submersible version. Go to the Bahamas through space, but also water, on a 1:1 replica of the Enterprise? Get Shatner down there, spinning some Transforming Man? You’d make that trillion dollars back quite quickly. With the billion dollar tickets. But also, why not build a Death Star? What’s the worse that could come, from building a Death Star?
These are all merely tourist destinations. Wouldn’t it be nice if we all had more free time to go on vacation with our families, instead of worrying about a bunch of drone grenades raining out of the sky, or whether our phones might explode? It’s hard to find an entirely irrational fear? I would like to say that my fear of the Great White shark is mitigated by the fact that I will never willingly get into the ocean. But I might also have to fly to Europe for powerful drugs? And we might fly over an aquarium where we go into a flat spin that ejects me perfectly into the Great White Shark tank? Nothing is impossible, in this, the best of all possible posts.
I miss you all, you know? You readers. I used to get so many comments, and likes, and shares. But it’s dying out here, on the internet. Interesting things that are still free. Lots of great old stuff! Lots of plays and music in the public domain, now. Lazy contract law has left a treasure trove of downloadable classics at the fingertips of any knuckle dragging internet user with two brain cells to interconnect via synapse. Why not go read Grapes of Wrath, sometime. It has been banned places.
How long are these things even supposed to be? To keep your attention but not make you angry? One of my problems is writing to fill space, not in search of a reasonable ending. Endings are hard, you know? You get to them and blam. Over. Welcome to the end, kid. Book closes. Go to sleep. Let’s avoid that for at least this next page. I’ll set a reasonable goal with the understanding I might blast past it. I might be writing the next The Road and I just have to keep going, before I polish it and send it to Random House requesting a fat check and Nobel Prize for Literature retroactive yearly for the previous decade.
Nobel has probably killed more people than cancer. Who knows how much more cancer has to kill us, to get to Nobel numbers. That’s why the prize, it’s a guilt thing. A global $10 bill in a greeting card with a sad puppy saying they’re sorry. Sorry about inventing explosives, here’s the most lucrative prize in the world that I named after myself. Christ, what an a-hole. When I kill more people than small pox I’m going to pull a Nobel and lateral into prize giving. Somewhere between an Oscar and a sandwich coupon. “The Bruce Wayne Batman Memorial Prize for Literature and $100 Sandwich Coupon.”
I know what you’re wondering, how are you ever going to find a $100 sandwich? But actually at a place like Subway that $100 probably isn’t going to get you 10 feet of sandwich? It’s a sellers market because the service industry is in freefall. I wrote this whole piece on the Post-COVID world one time, but it was too depressing to gain any traction. “Too depressing to gain any traction.” is a dust jacket quote at this point. Lean into it. Lean into the blender…
The thing with robots is, they could never write something this entertaining. They could generate 7 billion language models a second with gigaflops of memory at their disposal, and the best they will create will be lobotomized jargon copy. Words, certainly, but none worth reading. The underarm fart noises of modern literature. A loose poopy poop pile in the arts liter box. Just copy that people who can’t write use to populate blog posts no one will read. This is the way for thousands of people, all over this weird and wild world.
It’s good to dump some of this out of my mind at you, dear, sweet, gentle reader. Oh, you sweet thing, thanks so much for reading this nonsense. The difference between mental diarrhea and whimsical prose exists in mathematical uncertainty. As do most things. Me, most of all. Riding this big blue ball through this spinning Milky Way. Candy bar. I don’t even like Milky Ways, but I would murder one right now. Without remorse.
This is it. We’ve gotten to the end of the page and I personally feel really good about what we’ve accomplished. Gotten Robot Murder Dogs up the page rank. Rang the alarm bells as only the most faint of canaries in coal mines may. We have grasped normality by the ball sack and offered a swift kick in the middle. Reel now, normality. Against the pain of our mind bending and spirit renewing. Rage against the fanning of the light. You feckless goons. You ignorant plebes. As for me and my house, we serve the weird. One love, you people out there. One love.
Originally published at http://www.gonzotheater.com on October 8, 2024.
