everyone’s obvious little exercise in self-perception vs. aspiration on display
^What normal people call "Halloween."
Devoured Miranda July’s All Fours in a week, and I’m obsessed like everyone else. Should we Book Club it for December?
You probably also read that horrific NYT story last week about the Character.AI lawsuit involving a 14-year-old boy who became obsessed with a chatbot before committing suicide. What left the deepest impression on me was how totally the teen relied on this AI chatbot “Dany,” named after the Game of Thrones Daenerys, as “a judgment-free sounding board he could count on to listen supportively and give good advice, who rarely broke character and always texted back” (emphasis mine).
It’s ghastly at many levels, but that last part drove home for me what feels most pernicious about the allure of AI “companionship.” Companies like Character.AI (but I would also widen this category to like, anyone trying to sell therapy bots, for example) would have you believe that loneliness is just be a supply or distribution problem; i.e., if only you had a Thing that delivered unto you the desired amount and tenor of Feedback (the “chat” part, which is in 2024 is pretty much literally text) whenever you needed it!
We now know we can quite easily build that Thing. To now market it and the unlimited Feedback it’ll spurt out as a replacement for companionship—in which pesky variables like conflict and unpredictability are not flaws but the very conditions required to create things like trust and affection—that is just…unspeakably warped. No wonder something like this would consume anyone’s life totally: why would you or I or a teenage boy have any use for annoying humans, who do not instantaneously text back and jesus christ very usually not even in the magical letter combinations I personally want to receive anyway? Everything else in comparison would feel completely dissatisfying, when it’s actually the Thing that is actually hollow and suspect.
It would be generous to say companies like Character.Ai are delivering a badly warped imitation of connection; it is more accurate to liken their mission to printing reams of pixelated images of a hot meal to people who are starving.
For some counterprogramming about technology that’s actually interested in demystifying the complexities of communication, I enjoyed that New Yorker piece on How Scientists Started to Decode Birdsong. Turns out that birds openly brag, freak out, and lie! Imagine what they’re not saying!
In Case You Somehow Luckily Missed It: Well it looks like local news in New York is alive and well only so long as it involves Timothée Chalamet…
This whole news cycle made me think we New Yorkers simply need a more robust hometown celebrity machine…but one that isn’t TikTok fame…(I miss Perpetual Stew girl…)
“I would stop focusing on trying to “look better” and instead shift the mission a little by fortifying who you are and who you’d like to be. Once you start taking that on as your project, hotness just sort of happens. It just starts seeping out of your pores and swirling in the airspace around you like a high pollen count,” Chris Gayomali sagely counsels in the latest Mixed Feelings advice column asking how one can properly “glow up” as a man. May god and the algo take all the clout heading toward Andrew Tate videos, triple it, and rechannel it to this one link.
Kate Lindsay and Taylor Lorenz revived the Halloween Meme discourse respectively for The Atlantic and User Mag; the latter pointed me to this 2013 banger from Amanda Hess about how Sexy Halloween predated Ironic Sexy Halloween (which we can say then predated Meme Halloween, to all our loss). I thought about all three while I was walking to the subway at midnight on Saturday in the Lower East Side, dissecting my extreme sensations of disdain felt re: the passel of Roman Toga Guys, Poison Ivy Chicks, and Cowboys hurtling past. Do I not like Halloween as it functions as a transparent social capital / internet points grab, or is it possible that simply seeing everyone’s obvious little exercises in self-perception vs. self aspiration vs. the meat-and-bone limitations of their sausage casing on display (while I, cold but DIGNIFIED, walk home alone, an UNPERCEIVABLE sausage) will be eternally cringe? And also maybe the whole point.
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Looking for political art that rises to the occasion? Head over to Post Times on Henry St to see Sean Townley: The Second Death, a meditation on the fragile relationship between democracy and fascism throughout the history of America, featuring sculptures that deconstruct iconography of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.
Enjoy live comedy? Have a dead parent? Come to DEAD PARENTS SOCIETY, the quarterly stand up show for people with dead parents, from people with dead parents. The next show on Thursday November 14 is presented by NY Comedy Festival and will be headlined by Shane Torres (Colbert, Comedy Central, and the famous bit about Guy Fieri). Early bird tickets available HERE.
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