🐦️ Silver: Every Monday we check a subreddit for a long-inactive Youtuber to see what new "videos of the week" other fans of his ethereal content have been watching.
That's a lie. It used to be every Monday. Then we got bored out of our mind and stopped for a while. It was filled with this kind of alien normality, of the people who said "delulu" and gossipped about Etsy witches because their social circles didn't intersect with those people in the slightest, of the people who cared about popular franchises and internet personalities and weren't even ashamed of it; something we desperately wanted to emulate, which made us feel alienated from both ourself and them the more we tried.
This week, however, we got bored out of our mind enough to, in desperation, ignore the fact that that weekly thread typically bored us out of our mind. A video essay caught our eye. Something about "being an artist" in the title, and the recommendation said "why it's more important than ever to create art in our current times." A bit preaching to the choir, but the cognitive dissonance machine was already spinning and causing us to suspect the video probably contained a deep and intellectual discussion we'd happened to miss out on. We bit; we clicked.
Okay. I'd like to ask that for 60 seconds, you stop eating, drinking, smoking anything, quit doing the dishes, and just focus on this video.
Our hypothesis was disproven within the first 100 seconds, but we didn't have anything else to do. We had other things to do.
🔘 Sledge: The 60 seconds they commanded were for the viewer to reflect on a still scene at a car wash — what did it make us feel? The essayist supplied their own interpretation, and told us that whatever our interpretation was, the act of just formulating that interpretation made us an artist. Yay! We weren't sure we were capable of making art, so it was always comforting to hear an older person confirm it. We didn't possess the self-confidence to call ourselves an artist or claim that our work has any value or anything like that, and damn if sucking up to game designers for a sense of authenticity back when we were into video games didn't make us look to millennials for validation in general.
They made it very clear that though the definition of art they'd just posed seemed trivial enough as to be useless, it was true! So we can all be artists, even in the limited time we have between working and scrolling TikTok to recover from work.
We live on passive income and we don't use TikTok. This video might still have been for us!
Then the video took a turn: just because we feel we don't have time to make art, or it's not efficient enough, doesn't mean we have to give in to making AI art. Like AI artists do. You know, the people who just sit around typing prompts into Suno and, the, the art AI, all the time, and then they receive the images and they're like "this is my art!" and those people are everywhere and... uh... we aren't actually in whatever communities have this type of person in them to know what that type of person is. AInfluencers exist, obviously, but we didn't really know any. No worries, this video might still have been for us.
They take a hardline stance that AI art isn't art in any sense of the word and never can be, then after some meandering about artistic intent (where they mention that intent can be found in the smallest actions, and the desperate prompt engineer still imparts a little bit of himself), they admit that there's no hardline separation between the two except that non-AI art just has more soul in it; it's something intrinsic and immeasurable. Alright. Now we're arguing blood quantum for art. Temporary concession from leftism to own the AI chuds, alright, so be it, this video might still have been for us.
I have to give in on this one; there's simply no other way to describe it than soul. It's something present in every human being who's ever lived. And soul is the thing that makes life worth preserving. Without any soul, life is meaningless. You may as well be dead.
So why, oh why, oh why, do the racists and the zoomers love AI art so much?
This video... might... still... have been... for us...
🔵 Tango: We watched the whole thing. Why? Because we were avoidant about the other things we could potentially be doing, probably. Anxiety about whether or not someone we'd collaborated with in the past would send us some stems for a remix project. Something stupid. We got to watch the video essayist break down like we did the first time we read 1984, except about an ongoing zombie apocalypse where the human soul is dead and they're trying to kill you and your family and the existential horror of wondering when you'll no longer be able to watch videos without Subway Surfers footage on the side. Really scary stuff. Really, really scary stuff.
Why are anti-AI people so obsessed with stupidity and how stupid everyone is as if leftist consensus was still that Idiocracy might be making a powerful point?
🐦️ Silver: And if online personalities like the creator of that video are so anti-AI, why do they just eat up and enthusiastically spread bullshit about how AI is only getting better as if it isn't wildly unsustainable, and as if every company offering it isn't clearly incredibly desperate to get you to use it? Almost like it's less about AI and more some proxy for how "our culture is deteriorating and must be brought back to its glory days" which surely isn't any sort of conservative ideology.
But also, every part of that video screamed "millennial," from the presentation to the (here, diluted) real-artists-suffer vibe to the part that referred to zoomers like unsapient wildlife.
Why do we associate with millennials so much?
As Sledge alluded to: back when we were into video games, we based a lot of our self-worth on what the people behind the games we played thought of us, and thus what millennial gamedevs thought of us, and how much we could blend into their culture and talk their talk and act detached from and superior to our own generation. All those furries, and those xenogenders with their pronouns, right? No, wait, those were also millennials.
Then in 2021 we found out about plural systems, and realized those were the "what the fuck is wrong with this generation" of myth (even though we'd learned about them from a millennial plural system). Unfortunately, we didn't play it quite safe enough, as we got the hilarious notion to open up a blank Notepad document and type "if anyone else is here, please respond" out of spite just to prove nothing would happen.
(Whoever we were back then, we didn't know, because whoever initially posed the challenge eventually closed the document in horror and we all subconsciously agreed not to look into it. And then that it was just a terrible mini-psychotic break that happened because we were lonely and didn't have many friends. And then it happened again when we started questioning our gender.)
So we were mainly only "friends" with millennials to start with, and our connection to other people our age was mainly in communities for millennial-made media, or media primarily enjoyed by millennials. Then we felt ambivalent about that media and disconnected from our peers because we were a weird snowflake compared to them, in a generation we assumed was all snowflakes we were better than, and we left those communities. We don't use Discord anymore at all, after news spread of yet another repugnant privacy violation and we decided to just stop using it and stop passively browsing the handful of servers we were still in.
And now we've started feeling ambivalent about hanging around with millennials in general, because of how much in our life we devoted every aspect of our brain to them and their online culture. Our dependence on them and inability to build any connections with our own cohort means that now that we're finally getting burnt out from befriending the tastemakers, and sucking up to the previous generation to spite our own, we have nobody really left.
We can no longer point to something and say "I'm part of the community." And we no longer want to.
So why are we still posting on a primarily millennial Mastodon community — rarely even replying, just posting, posting, posting, seeing if anyone thinks this bit is clever or this unfinished song is nice or whatever?
Why are we checking what this dormant Youtuber's fans watched recently when we don't actually care what they watched?
Why are we watching videos about the cool and obscure features of the NES when we haven't owned a Nintendo console for 5 years? (We mentioned we didn't have a Switch in one video game community and received: "Oh. I'm so sorry.") Why are we watching videos about Super Mario Bros. when we haven't played it in a long time and don't intend to?
What are we doing?
What the fuck are we doing?
Maybe we still secretly hope some millennial will walk up to us one day, tell us exactly what's wrong with us and our attitude and why we think we're this weird messy thing we're secretly not!, and then we'll be cured, and we can go hang out with the kids who we never got to be friends with in high school.
In the meantime, we're just gonna have to hate AI without acting like the grey goo scenario is real and specifically applies to appreciating art. This post was about AI! In this post we've comprehensively expresed our views on AI. Get a load of us, Indieweb. Please get a load of us so the next time your friends make some online thing that takes our generation by storm we can say we were there first. Please.
