Surreality is the New Reality
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“We are living in the weirdest time.”
I say it like a catch phrase, an unwitting mantra, just this repeated order of words that arises like green shoots by some memetic process deep within the loamy soil of my subconscious mind. Over and over again, the words arise in some almost-exact-order version of this configuration, and yet each time they issue forth it feels like a revelation.
I’m eating 2-day-old leftovers of stroganoff-analog hamburger helper from one of those cheap rectangular boxes of paper-thin polymer; black bottom, clear top, the microplastics going straight to my endocrine system like synthetic anti-micronutrients. The Sprite Zero in my pint glass is nearly flat, giving it an unpleasant, cloying texture. Paper plates are piling up around my desk, begging to be disposed of in one of those bi-weekly frenzied moments where I break free of the Matrix and clean.
I’ve spent days hunched over my keyboard, doing a show about AI, then promoting clips of the show about AI, then writing about what’s going on with this whole AI thing, and arguing with almost everybody who reads any of it. The main topic has boiled down now to whether an AI and Robot-fueled utopia of material abundance is even possible, and what that might look like if it comes to pass. I’m not an evangelist for this, but the handwriting is on the wall, and you can’t figure out anything unless you can agree to what you’re collectively talking about. Instead I get called a “communist” approximately 847,000 times. I’ve never seen so many people argue purely from their priors.
We don’t have a conceptual framework for what’s coming.
The way I see it, there are three options:
