Match Cuts 3: Beam Me Up, Scotty!

Am I still here, or have I already left? Do I want to stay, or let me beam away? Just in the last few days, I’ve been reading stuff about the genuine reality – stuff that sounds like The Onion on crack or a supervillain jumping straight out of a completely absurd script.

I remember how, decades ago, a renowned non-fiction publisher rejected a manuscript on my European history of oil, saying: ‘Nobody will believe how bad it was! Don’t you have a nicer topic?’ I couldn’t and didn’t want to sugar-coat reality. Back then, we used to play a game among colleagues: make up the craziest story you can think of, as absurd as possible. Then let’s bet which publisher will buy it only because it sounds nice. What innocent times those were!

Of course, the easiest thing was to come up with sci-fi plots and imagine parallel worlds until we felt we could sprinkle a bit more sugar on the knots in our brains. And today? I feel so often empty. I can barely keep up with the day’s news; I’m drowning in the internet, overwhelmed by endless drivel from AI-generated fake websites. Whilst we wade through a president’s quotes as if a deregulated AI bot in a padded cell were spitting fire. How could I come up with another idea that’s worth reading? Should I focus on real, dry reality, and how it would look like? Like a sugar-coated muffin or a musty, unironed shirt with tomato sauce stains?

Elizabeth Goodspeed, designer and writer, says: “As AI and digital tools make polish effortless, analogue imperfection has taken on new cultural weight. But what does “analogue” actually mean when most things are made, shared, and consumed digitally?”

In “The End Of The Analogue (Si apre in una nuova finestra)” she talks about touching attempts to rebel through imperfection right from the design stage. Bleeding ink instead of Insta reels, children’s drawings instead of perfect interiors, distressed digital brushes instead of lips that have been pumped up nearly to their bursting point. Do we reconquer reality with deliberate mistakes?

Goodspeed writes: “What matters isn’t how convincingly something performs imperfection, but whether we can create conditions where imperfection still matters.”

And what would happen if, in the real world, someone were to do or say things that seemed so ridiculous they could only be imagined in a tacky TV game show? Would that be that famous imperfection that saves our reality from AI spitted “halluzinations”?

Unfortunately, times have changed. Nesrin Malik shows us What Evil Looks Like: Absurd, Frightening, Cruel (Si apre in una nuova finestra). She has the same feeelings as I when she thinks of “the evil”: “Some are characters from movies not seen since childhood. Others are snippets from literature or iconic art. What joins them all is an exaggerated, almost kitschy evil.” And then she struggles with the complete casualness of cruelty, the threatening of civilisation with ‘funny’ images of Easter bunnies or Jesus slop in a “squeakily bombastic” staging of a bad video game. Crime is paired with performance. “Evil is composed of frivolity and nonchalance and fragility, as well as relentlessness and insatiability and brutality,” Malik writes and warns:

“The unbridled cruelty and violence that he is unleashing and enabling domestically and abroad draws on all its precedents, and can only be fiercely fought – and with urgency – or it will consume all.”

Let’s take this to the extreme. Let’s imagine there was a whole caste of people on our planet who deliberately set out to pulverize everything humanity has fought so hard to achieve over the centuries. And these people really wouldn’t care about anything at all, except their dream of world domination and profit.

Yes, I too immediately think of the famous tin foil hat. But Noah Hawley has met these people in reality: What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat (Si apre in una nuova finestra). What he and his family experienced, looked like Ted Talks on LSD and a tsunami of money. He can’t believe what he sees and then looks into a tiny moment when Bezos seems to look horrified. The moment, when a human offers … just being a human. Hawley brings it to the point:

“And although today’s billionaires are clearly manipulating society to maximize their own profit, something else is also happening—a disassociation from the reality of cause and effect, from meaning and history. These men no longer feel the need to change the world in order to succeed, because their success is guaranteed, no matter what happens to the rest of us.”

Oh, as we’re having so much fun with this now, let’s keep turning this screw: the bad guys, the supervillains, who want to make tabula rasa for their fascist world of the super-rich. Not just extinct any scapegoats. No, this time, only the ones who get to fly to Mars are the ones who survive. The self-appointed elite.

Is anyone still laughing? We couldn’t possibly mine enough aluminium for hats? For these people are so real that some governments start (too) slowly to think about contracts. Alex Karp of Palantir is such a guy, making money with spy tech and military. “Palantir manifesto described as ‘ramblings of a supervillain’ amid UK contract fears” (Si apre in una nuova finestra) - the story of what such people really think.

And again people need comparisons with films because nobody finds adequate words of what is happening:

“The US spy tech company Palantir published a manifesto extolling the benefits of American power and implying some cultures are inferior to others – in what MPs have called “a parody of a RoboCop film” and “the ramblings of a supervillain”.”

A company that tries to get connected with the UK health system … and also in other countries with your most sensitive data! Will political leaders just laugh or wake up? Karp - he says it loud - tries to fight women, democracy, and all our values.

And he’s not alone, of course. Next idea: An “AI Ministry Of Truth”, that damp, fascist dream of silencing the entire media, of pillorying journalists ... and if you still smile, the system is already in place for every social media user! You only need money. “Can AI judge journalism? A Thiel-backed startup says yes, even if it risks chilling whistleblowers (Si apre in una nuova finestra)” asks Tech Crunch rather soft-washed. Also here the supervillains are well known: Thiel, D’Souza, and Srinivasan, as always obscenely super-rich white men. The platform they invented, a kind of AI pseudo ‘super court’, criminalising every real legal court, follows the same dangerous playbook: Don’t ask about regulations or laws, just start. Put crazy amounts of money into it. And count on that people will be baffled and don’t believe what you really want to achieve.

Critical articles are still rare, at least some voices can be heard like this:

“First Amendment and defamation lawyer Chris Mattei was even more blunt, saying the platform “seems like a high-tech protection racket for the rich and powerful.””

To put it in a nutshell: it is a fascist tactic to cast suspicion on entire professional groups and to incite the public to generalise and intensify their hatred of the media. A public that plays along with the game until it realises it’s their turn. But by then it’s too late.

Perhaps you now feel the same as I do. After so much reality that feels almost unreal, I’m in the mood for a friendly rhinoceros trotting through the streets. Doesn’t exist? It’s all there: ‘They come right past the house’: learning to live with rhinos. (Si apre in una nuova finestra)” With great photos!

Match Cuts will be delivered irregularly. If you want to see all that I share on social media, you can follow me on Mastodon (Si apre in una nuova finestra).

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