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Irrational gadgeteering

For reasons too dumb to reveal here, soi-disant AI has been coming up in my proximity. Yes, sure, we’re all hearing about it and maybe you are even using it – whatever you think that means. And yet when feeding [whatever it is] into an computer model to get some version of [wii] back is proffered as an acceptable work solution, it opens up to a much broader question: What is even work?

If parts or all of what you think you do can be so ‘taskicized’, what ever was work to begin with – to you?

And here I’ll yield the floor to Theodor Adorno:

Labor-saving devices … are invested with a halo of their own. This may be indicative of a fixation to a phase of adolescent activities in which people try to adapt themselves to modern technology by making it, as it were, their own cause… It seems that the kind of retrogression highly characteristic of persons who do not any longer feel they are the self-determining subjects of their fate, is concomitant with a fetishistic attitude towards the very same conditions which tend to be dehumanizing them. The more they are gradually being transformed into things, the more they invest things with a human aura. At the same time, the libidinization of gadgets is indirectly narcissistic in as much as it feeds on the ego’s control of nature: gadgets provide the subject with some memories of early feelings of omnipotence.

From the essay Work and Pleasure in THE STARS DOWN TO EARTH

Image: Anselm Kiefer, Aurora, 2015–17, oil, emulsion, acrylic, shellac, and sediment of an electrolysis on canvas, 110¼ × 149⅝ × 3⅝ inches.

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raising eyebrows

… but not in a good way. I saw this commercial a couple of times during what turned out to be the final Pistons-Magic playoff game last night. At first, I thought “they’ve got to be kidding.” On second viewing, I spotted all the serious green placement in the ad, and knew they weren’t.

The guy talking has a green corduroy sport coat; big potted plants are conspicuously placed among the vehicles and the simulated browsing – plants, at a car dealership? And then there’s the color of one or two models, the sign, the whole motif seamlessly jammed against the point of the campaign – a guarantee of $2.99 per gallon gas for two years, for the first 12K miles each year – as if they obviously make sense together and one simply is the other.

But they don’t and they are not. Guaranteeing a lower-than-actual, set gas price is not ecological. It begs no further investigation. Just an example of the acumen of the marketing geniuses pointing their best at our stupid. That’s what you’re always up against if you’re going to wade into TV land. The only legitimate space in the creative imagination of advertisers is that reserved for further convincing of how stupid we can be. It seems to be the only place where they believe there lies any potential at all.

Now, here is someone who thought much more highly of us, who could use green like it was just a color or something. Rest in Peaceful Collage, Sir.