Means of production, means of control

I spent much of July fighting with Apple, by which I mean Apple was one of my biggest problems and I had to struggle with them daily for critical tasks related to my job and my organization, while for the most part Apple had no idea I was there and certainly didn’t have any need to find out. Perhaps, when we try to assign meanings and motivations to the cruel or inexplicable behaviours of gods, we should consider scale. “An ant has no quarrel with a boot.”

The trouble with god-beings of scale (Apple being one of them) is, having created/captured/enthralled us, they no longer owe us a single gall-darned thing. Back to this piece, which I linked last week: having monopolized^* a marketplace, major corporations are free to sell us the baseline product experience we bought into in the first place, now at premium prices — because who is going to stop them? What other choices do we have?

^* these used to be illegal, kids! Look it up!

What on earth is “premium economy,” airlinewise, and why do I care? It turns out that a service level agreement is more theory than practice: if it ain’t written down, who gives a fuck. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, the rest of the (Bezos) bozos have been coasting on this wave for years: “norms” are just something losers used to think were the actual rules of engagement. It’s like filing a complaint at work and presuming HR is going to act on your behalf like a human rights tribunal, when they’re actually going to be your boss’ lawyer.

A few weeks ago, the Masculinity Crisis in Chief decided that he was going to get his personal A.I. (trained on everything you’ve ever tweeted since before the 2008 financial crisis) to build a “historically accurate” film version of The Odyssey. I very much want him to do this — or rather, I want him to do this within the rules-based science-fictional framework in which stories like this usually take place, in which reality still exists and matters, and the query problems Musk would encounter would therefore go something like this:

• There are no “historically accurate” accountings of the appearance and behaviours of gods. How would they be depicted?
• Similarly, there are no monsters in the historical record, and design cues in the source material are scant. What secondary sources should be used?
• The poem takes place in the eastern Mediterranean, multiple millennia ago. What do you mean you need Helen to be a fair-skinned blonde, you fucking moron?

Of course, the Musk of Evil doesn’t actually mean any of these things when he talks about “historical” or “accurateness.” The entire point of his A.I. is not to create an equal-use tool for good, truth, or even creativity; it’s to come up with a way to actualize a version of reality that Musk can’t actually experience in real life. (Look at how many times he’s had to re-train the robot to conform more closely with his point of view. Look how many times Grok has dumped on him, anyway.)

When Musk talks about a “historically accurate” Odyssey he just means “make The Odyssey the way I see it in my (racist, misogynist, transphobic, fascist) head,” which provides a rather adroit skeleton key to the purpose of the entire A.I. project. Having catastrophically failed to live in a world where other people are — well — people, the Stench of Failure and others like him have simply decided that reality itself is a service level agreement: it’s not written down anywhere, so who gives a fuck. They can literally build a better one, one in which the human beings that Elon and his ilk currently like to call “NPCs” are literally NPCs, cyber-phantom video game avatars who adhere to all of their biases, cruelties, and inabilities to imagine — in uncanny, digitally-rendered form.

Perhaps the imagination flaw of The Matrix turns out to be that film’s proposition that we’d all be stuck in one virtual reality simulation together. (This would provide a number of structural problems to the oppressors, not least of which is the ability for the enslaved to collectively organize.) Musk’s skeleton key proposes that the more natural endpoint, instead, will be everyone in their own Matrix, isolated in individual cells, no reality beyond what each individual can invent for their own masturbation.

Right now the power of an A.I.-generated Odyssey is a political one: it is the (yet unproven) potential to create cultural pushback at scale, which is a theoretically collectivist act; but I suspect that this sort of monocultural intention — the desire to, out here in the real world, create a plurality of like-minded racist/misogynist/transphobic fascists as a means of winning the argument — will shortly be discerned to be, itself, a root of the problem. Monocultures create shared meaning, common language, mutual understanding. People are not, generally, douchebags, which must be (amended: clearly is) driving Elon crazy. Musk’s army remains a minority — most people are not thinking about this at all. Personalized art, to a Musk, becomes a divide-and-conquer strategy. We’ve already seen what breaking the agreed-upon boundaries of “fact” vs. “fake news” has done to the real world. Now he’s going after the imaginarium. If none of us are interacting with the same works in the same world, how could we possibly defeat him?

The future is genderfluid (and kinky)

There are two addenda that extend from all this, which I’ve been thinking about:

The first is A.I. porn. Are people talking about, thinking about, and contemplating the potential scale of A.I. porn in the broad A.I. discussion? Leaving aside the table-stakes problems with A.I. (wage theft, copyright infringement, environmental impact, etc.), I can’t help but wonder if porn is a much, much larger percentage of the A.I. use case pie than has been reported (for simple reasons that it is, y’know, porn). The adult industry has always been a hyperscaler — never forget, they figured out how to continue production during COVID before the mainstream film industry — and because of the shame/negation spiral that mainstream America (at least) continues to ensconce itself within, the degree to which porn is propping up the balance sheet doesn’t tend to be something that makes the earnings report.

But I find it endlessly fascinating to consider a world where, all things being equal (which they never are), anyone can generate custom erotica of their choosing, exactly as they desire it. I remember watching Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf two decades ago, with its atrocious rendering of a CGI Angelina Jolie with all of her “physical attributes” heightened and literal stiletto-pumps growing out of her heels, and thinking: this is what digital imagery unlocks. Men — with their fragile grasp on visual fetishization to begin with — are gonna go hog-wild with this shit.

Addendum two: porn isn’t all that our digital fluidity unlocks. It unlocks fluidity itself.

This TikTok post reminds me that there is a threaded-needle future out there in which all of this masculinized hubris hands people the tools to express themselves — specifically around gender, but let’s assume much more widely than that — in ways currently not possible or even imaginable. I won’t be here in 2099, but I agree with the poster: I also don’t believe in a future that doesn’t understand and begin to interpret this. Meaning has begun to fall apart; we are absolutely going to start to put it back together, and resist in the same way we always have: with the tools the oppressors give us.

All this to say, having skipped Blade Runner 2049 for reasons I’ve probably explained elsewhere, I am really looking forward to Blade Runner 2099. (I also really swung for Alien Earth last summer, for which clearly, other peoples’ MMV.) Maybe the future is on television. I’ll tell ya what though:

Going to the movies is pretty exhausting

And I like going to the movies.

Look, I have no problem with the 2-hour commute to the Colossus; seeing The Odyssey out there (loved it) a couple weeks ago was one of the nicer days I had in July. And I saw Brand New Day with my besties over the weekend (loved it), nearer at hand but further from a good experience (3-D AVX at the shithole at Yonge & Dundas, not exactly my vibe), because something happened where Nolan locked up all the good movie screens (good for him!) and lah dee dah.

In a normal year I’d have loved to see both movies again but when the bar for entry is this high (or, in shithole Yonge & Dundas’ case, this low), the desire to put the effort in sure has dropped.

To wit: man, fuck, am I already preemptively tired of Dunesday.

Look: I get it. This is an embarrassment of riches. That “spectacle cinema” has come roaring back with quite such sharp teeth in 2026 is welcome, for theatre owners particularly, and maybe once Canada gets rid of monopolist enshittifier Ellis Jacob, we might have more reason to want our movie theatre sector to succeed, too.

But the fact that I can’t even get a ticket for the IMAX opening weekend of Dune 3 — after all I did to bring Dune 1 to TIFF, yolk yolk yolk!! — and will be stuck downtown (probably at that same shithole Y&D) watching a weaksauce Russo Brothers Avengers movie just points to a series of critical failures along the way that make me more likely, not less, to give up and stay home.

I shall quit griping forthwith and recommend instead that you:

Quit your job

• Loved this episode of Culture Study, and its multi-layered consideration of how, when, and why to give up on something. Caution: I might have made someone cry by sending this to them this week, though. (Culture Study podcast)
• Oh hey, while we're here talking about A.I., this was fun. (The Weekly Show podcast)
• I’ve decided what I want for my 50th birthday. I want Daniel to perform the entire Ian McKellen scene from Extras. For the sake of extra Danielness let us presume he will play both parts. (YouTube)