The point of all of this
This piece appears in my recent collection We Had It Coming.
The most illiterate fascists alive were gassing themselves up because the computer had gotten some small degree better at producing dog shit that had the general production values of a circa 2004 video game cutscene. Delighting in the approach of a spiritually and culturally dead future devoid of art and meaning.
You do have to admit that a new Narcos season starring Brad Pitt and Mr. Beast and Jason Kelce sounds pretty sick though.
There's only one flaw I can see in this supposed AI-generated future of seven fingered bikini babes with death behind their eyes and photorealistic Family Guy pornos: I don’t understand where they think their personalized sense of aesthetics they plan to input into the computer is going to come from down the line when all human artists have been driven out of business. If you want something perfectly tailored 1:1 to your own taste meant solely for you to experience alone you can already do that just by sitting there and thinking about it buddy. Skip the middleman step of the computer. It's just going to put it back in your brain anyway.
It’s like puking food up just to eat it again.
Imagine a dog.
Fewer paws than that. A real dog.
Like my books or don't not my problem but I cannot tell you how many hours every day for a year or more I spend for example moving the word "that" around in a sentence over and over again trying to land the perfect percussion of it. Is this inefficient? Yes! It is also the whole point of it.
The drums have to be tuned
This probably applies to all of you. People in possession of human souls who have at least on occasion felt the divine in a work of art. Everything I write myself and everything I love to read or listen to or watch has one bedrock component to it which is this:
Jesus Christ I am alive right now and you are alive right now and someday we will not be but for the duration of this we are both stupidly and beautifully alive.
Please bear witness to my humanity and take some small portion of it for yourself. Return the favor to someone else later when you can.
