INTERNET — Among so-called “content creators” it is no secret that industry leaders in Silicon Valley hate creativity. Unlike traditional media, these wack engineer tycoons have charted a relationship with creators that is genocidal. Their ultimate objective is to entirely eliminate and replace all human creativity in the entertainment industry.
Every moment, algorithms distribute increasing despair as reward for critical acclaim, hard work, or love for humanity. The algorithm hates you.
Meanwhile, the latest algorithms, churning out degenerative rearrangements of paintings, photos, and texts are regarded by industry heads as AI superhumans more worthy of protection than the very people who provide their businesses with the “content” in the first place. When trained on their own outputs, these same superintelligent generators only degenerate into a Gaussian blur, creating nothing at all.
The industry term for culture, creative works, is “content,” a denigrating and vague word that denies there is such thing as meaning. Content only fills up hard drives, it is only so many 1s and 0s. This nihilism has been internalized by so many creators, whose energy is more often directed at navigating these hate algorithms to gain a sliver of visibility, rather than towards creating anything which might be meaningful or entertaining.
Hate algorithms perpetually hide any beauty or insight produced by honest people and rather promote obscenity, shock, and lies. The algorithm hates you. The halfhearted attempt by Twitter to clean up the fascist political landscape engendered by hate algorithms outraged the nihilist billionaire zealot Elon Musk enough that he purchased the company at a profound loss and fired most humans responsible for monitoring “content.” Soon after, the site was flooded with shocking videos of violent death, pedophile mania, and so on. The algorithm hates you, but more accurately, it is the nihilist technocrats who hate you, and they are using their robots to eliminate you.
And still, among creators, there is a widespread internalization of this hatred. Do you feel despair, are you struggling to make ends meet, is your good work rendered invisible for no reason at all? Well obviously it’s your fault. Try juggling your efforts between multiple platforms, grind, grind, grind until the hateful slot machine drops you a viral hit.
But to those who succeed, you must also still trust the same fact: The algorithm hates you. You cannot prove your worth to robots, they will dispose of you just as easily as they pump you up with viral success and without reason or explanation. Your relationship with the algorithm will never improve, because there is no relationship.
The present writers and actors strikes in the more traditional entertainment industry puzzle “content” creators, who are currently asking the question, “Why don’t they hate themselves?” After all, hating yourself is the true secret to success on the internet. Steep yourself in despair and just flow with the algorithm. Fighting back in solidarity and love for your fellow creators is only a sure way to lose.
The vast hubris involved in the absurd technical problem of destroying meaning, of automating creativity, is beginning to show some cracks. The intolerable loathsome career of “content” creators, forever at the mercy of nihilistic robots, is a pressure cooker with almost no relief valve, and what little hope there is out there is far too little too late. Kick.com, an alternative to the popular livestreaming Twitch platform fronted by a slot machine streamer, is only taking 5% of streamers’ tips, as opposed to the 50% demanded by Twitch. However, the platform is a total clone, the very same terrible design subjecting streamers to just the same hateful algorithms, no more than false hope somewhere out on the horizon.
But at this point, we will grasp for any hope at all. The internet just isn’t fun anymore, it has so little to offer. Where once there was an impression of transformation, of sharing thoughts and ideas in a global village, it all now has the distinct smell of some malevolent disposal robot that will crush anything into a foul, fungible paste.
The algorithm hates you.