Good post by David Golumbia on ChatGPT and how miserable it all is :rat-salute-2:
Y’all really hate the idea that there might be anything in life that can’t be discussed in the language of heavy industry, don’t you? Like someone starts talking about feels and it’s like “No! YOu fool! You moron! The only things worth caring about are production throughput in tractor factories! How could you possibly care about anything else at all?!?!?!”
A) why are you worried about these things? they live in the deepest and most unsettling parts of the uncanny valley. From an artistic perspective, they’re a joke.
B) Material conditions change. You can’t pretend them away or waste your time trying to stuff cats back in bags. That way lies the failure of Luddism: it had no answer to the looms beyond their destruction, which meant it was doomed to failure. You have to find a way to use the thing in a just manner, not smash it and expect it to just go away. Luddism’s problem isn’t that it doesn’t identify a real and significant harm, it is that the answer it presents to that problem is the political-economic equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting “I can’t hear you!”
C) You can feel however you like about a thing. Feeling that way is ultimately unrelated to the conditions and technologies that led to its creation, however, and it isn’t cause to pursue a quixotic task.
