In Video We Trust, Nvidia May Bust

Information from Gutenberg to Grok

Humankind has been sharing its lore since language developed. Grunts and gestures evolved to words, sentences then songs. Pictures and dance, ever powerful, continue to engage and amaze through millennia. These stories are shared generation to generation, mutating like secret whispers over time, facts becoming mythology.

Books soon allowed authors and sponsors to keep words and concepts alive long after their mortal demise. Books empowered knowledge and dreaming and thinking. Initially, they were for the high born or the clergy – the powerbrokers of the day.

The printing press changed all of that and allowed thoughts, ideas and heresies to propagate through classes, eras and across cultures. Until that major transformation, verbal dissemination had been the main means of passing on information.

For 500 years, the printed word has enabled global information sharing. The modern short-form book is the magazine, a format prematurely written off but struggling for reach.

Why? Because we have video – on every wall of our houses, polluting our cityscapes, and in every pocket. In and of itself, that shouldn’t be a major problem, just a dominant delivery mechanism for ideas. But it is not just the quantity but quality of the content in these ubiquitous mini-movies that has such dangerous implications for the future of humanity.

There is so much awesome short- and long-form video available via the internet and its various platforms. Enlightenment, entertainment and escapism are on tap 24-7. Unfortunately, the good stuff is increasingly drowned out by second-rate copies of anything real, and we are all dumbed down as a result. The platforms all optimise for engagement, and many aggressively push the AI-created rubbish over that produced by us living breathing meat sacks.

AI might be interesting from a nerdy technical point of view, but its application to date has been appalling. We have one of the most powerful toolsets mankind has ever developed and here we are using it to stun the world populace into subservience with brain rot thinly disguised as infotainment.

Don’t worry about learning to communicate with animals, never mind unlocking the mysteries of the biological universe, screw solving world hunger, bugger designing social approaches that will let our species live in lockstep with the systems that sustain us… No, we’d rather produce pointless slop to fill in the few bleak hours between work and sleep.

Our world is about to entrust everything to deranged robots. These bots are enabled, encouraged and mercilessly propagated by a small cohort of fascist bully boys. Worse, AI systems are rapidly being embedded in military applications. The hallucinations that this unholy alliance is producing have been made uncomfortably real of late.

Who is saying what?

I am scared that authoritative (and verifiably factual) information is becoming harder to find. Bad actors have been interfering in the info-stream for years, long before the latest Middle East conflagration. The line between mistruth and propaganda has never been so blurry as right now. Industrial-strength war machines are in full flow, and one of their most powerful weapons is pumping out endless streams of (mis)information designed to support whatever narrative they are peddling.

Meanwhile, the tech billionaires are hoovering up western news outlets and trying to control the flow there. The implications of recent acquisitions, mergers and power plays are broad reaching and chilling. Watch this space closely.

Our local Murdocracy continues unchecked while Aunty – once the last great refuge of journalistic common sense – is gutted from the inside. Sustained governmental meddling over time has led to a culture where every viewpoint must be offset by an opposite one, whether grounded in reality or not. This ‘balance versus bias’ trend promotes culture wars over proper topic-based debate. Again, we are poorer for this shift.

These machinations have simultaneously seen a hollowing out of the reporting class – the very people who have been holding power to account for several centuries. The fourth estate is crumbling as the fifth estate evolves in its wake.

Some of these commentors, both new and old, are excellent. Some are outright garbage. Who you choose to read, to watch, to believe, to trust, is up to you. Making an informed choice is more difficult, but more necessary, than ever. And never stop questioning.

As they evolve, these fountainheads may grow or go on tangents you don’t like. This is natural. The same has happened with legacy media and our relationship with it has changed alongside. Wikipedia was the subject of much scorn over academic veracity a decade past, but it is fast becoming one of the more reliable sources of information.

The spin cycle is so rapid that a hot topic at breakfast can be cold by lunchtime. This ‘flooding the zone’ is entirely by design, courtesy Steve Bannon and the Heritage goons. And with Captain Adderall’s demented brainfarts rage-tweeted at the world multiple times per day, conventional logic is useless, with neither convention nor logic in play.

Trust your inner sceptic

In times of great unrest, it is worth being even more leery than usual about what you read and see. It is increasingly important to ask what information sources do you trust, and why. And keep asking the question of every outlet. What was once authoritative can quickly sour with the wrong influence at the helm or behind the scenes. Remember that ‘doing your research’ extends to checking well beyond Uncle Davo’s outrage page on Facebook! You will find your own line between scepticism and cynicism.

My parents trusted newspapers, I grew up with the sacred nightly news on TV, and now GenZ prefers podcasts and TikTok short-form vertical videos.

Our fixation on video is no accident. A moving image is more instantly compelling than a static one, and more so than a bunch of words on a page. Engagement means eyeballs, which means advertisers. All the major online platforms now have a video component, all seeking to gain your focus. And that attention is easy to gain through addiction-optimised phones.

I fully admit to being no angel here – I watch my fair share of streaming video. YouTube replaced free-to-air TV in our household nearly 20 years ago. But I find it increasingly difficult to use. The algorithms are so obviously pushing slop that finding videos from those I choose to follow and want to watch is getting harder to do without major effort. The trend is similar across other platforms too.

It is hypocritical to suggest you resist the constant urge to satisfy that needy leech in your pocket, lest you become glazed and confused. Chances are, you will consume these words via the omnipresent rectangle of glass. Mine is rarely far from reach.

Like many, I struggle now to pick up a book. It’s even tougher to get all the way through even one, let alone the thousands I devoured before screens conquered the world. But I keep faith in the written word, trusting its permanence more than a fleeting vision. After all, we are only one solar flare and resultant EMP burst away from losing the entirety of humanity’s unprinted data.

Bits and bytes do not feel

In the serenity of watching the stars last night, I heard a wombat munching through a nearby patch of grass. Yet I resisted the urge to get closer and disturb it, content enough knowing that it was there. Further, I imagined a film in my mind’s eye, shot documentary style complete with narration and not one data farm was needed.

That’s the problem with bots – they have no imagination. Electric sheep be damned. Just regurgitation, each iteration one step closer to bland homogenised garbage or twisted hatemongering.

What is particularly egregious beyond this slop having no soul is that this lack of empathy gets transferred back to the very beings – us – that need it the most … just as our society and civilisation does its best to crumble.

The saying, ‘history is written by the victor’ is being rewritten daily. Wouldn’t it be a shame for the future author of a definitive treatise on our current times to be a soulless machine.

The human story needs to remain human. In origin, execution and consumption.

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(No robots were used in the production of this piece. Written entirely with AI – Author Intelligence.)