you would think the communities that form around things that presuppose the absence of trust and encode zero-sum outcomes (crypto, gambling, etc.) would implode; maybe they are just always imploding and reforming and metastasizing

and to see the only way of encountering or acting in the world is to try to influence the processes that predict it (rather than believing we can act on the world directly or have direct experiences)

just as neoliberalism compelled people to "invest in their human capital" and "build their personal brand" etc etc (and some people pretended to enjoy this or were eager to sell how-tos about it), current socioeconomic conditions compel people to think about themselves as a set of probabilities

feel like "suckerification" speaks to the body of theory on the shift from neoliberalism to "portfolio society" and to speculative "investee politics" and the financialization of everyday life and personal identity etc. www.zonebooks.org/books/14-por... www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1356-s...

this names the phenomenon accurately but wonder what the "cultivation process" entails and what plays into how and when it works and on whom

same for text generators and the generated text

sharing generated images can be an act of aggression against anyone who respects effort and craft

AI tools also effective for undermining any communities whose existence may inexplicably threaten you

or rather, you can conceal the sense of your own powerlessness by ruining other people's sense of accomplishment, with an AI tool that has been marketed to trivialize all forms of human achievement

if you are threatened by other people who seem to actually enjoy things, now you can effortlessly undermine their joy while protecting your own ignorance and impotence

However, the problem with these images is not just their genericness. It's the deeply populist idea that politics can be reduced to its immediately visible effects: politics is not judged by how it affects people's concrete daily lives, but rather by its aesthetics—by what image it produces
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Gen AI's threat to "truth" is maybe better framed as its usefulness in generating ideological confirmation, allowing users to save any trouble that might stem from having to imagine for themselves the implications of what they believe

it's not as if we think: "If I can't believe in everything I see, I am just going to stop believing in anything at all"

it's capable of making several different emojis

seeing your face in ads where any other face could appear would make your face feel as arbitrary as a Social Security number — capable of expressing less and less until it just marks pure singularity

the same logic of alienating people from their faces is implicit in every push to make people to use their face to log in to things