#oneaday Day 532: Knackered

I'm absolutely exhausted, and I'm not entirely sure why. I guess this week has been a bit of a busy one with a trip to the office, and just before said trip I was ill, so I think I'm probably still feeling the lingering (after)effects of being ill. Or possibly just still being ill. Either way, it's 8pm and I just want to go to bed, so as soon as we've had some dinner, that's what I'm going to do.

Everything just feels so tiring these days — mentally, more than anything. I am beyond tired of the revolting end-stage capitalism hellscape we live in right now, and long for the AI bubble in particular to pop, if only so people can stop posting screenshots of Google's AI summaries and think that doing this, in any way, proves any sort of point. That and it would be super-cool if all the software everyone uses goes back to being functional and useful rather than having fucking chatbots everywhere.

It's frustrating. I was listening to Cory Doctorow and Ed Zitron talking about the whole "enshittification" thing earlier, and their conclusion is that as individual consumers, there unfortunately isn't a whole lot that we can do to stand up to this nonsense, because it's all happening at a corporate or even governmental level so far beyond the scale of one individual, it's impossible to do anything about. They do, however, note that that doesn't mean there's nothing you can do; they cite the example of attending Town Hall meetings and voicing your concerns about financially and environmentally ruinous data centres being constructed. Even so, though, this seems largely like an American thing — I don't even know if "Town Hall meetings" are a thing here — and, again, it's hard not to feel like a little ant about to be crushed by corporate authoritarianism.

I'd ignore all this shit completely if I could, but it's everywhere — and particularly getting its tendrils into things I actually care about, such as the creative sectors and particularly video games. The new Call of Duty is absolutely riddled with AI art, for example; Ubisoft's latest Anno game has "placeholder" AI art loading screens that definitely aren't just being called placeholders because they got caught; and it seems like every day, a new corporation decides that yes, the absolute best thing to do, despite the general public reacting universally negatively to it every time it happens, is to pivot to an "AI-first" approach, inevitably laying off swathes of the workforce in the process.

I thank my lucky stars I have a stable (I hope) job in the middle of all this, and that AI doesn't interfere with my job any more than having to ignore annoying sparkly buttons in social media management tools and occasionally telling people off for getting ChatGPT to "write" minor things when I'm right here and can do that for them in a matter of seconds without burning a fucking lake down.

God. The "future" sucks. It's a cliché to say at this point, but we really have taken the exact opposite lessons from "cyberpunk" and futuristic dystopia literature than were intended by their authors. We have all the negative aspects of a corporate-dominated end-stage capitalism hellscape, and none of the cool stuff like consumer-grade bionic arms and sex robots. (Well, okay. They're almost certainly working on the sex robot thing, though if it ends up being LLM-powered I'm not sure anyone is going to want to fuck ChatGPT.)

Is it any surprise I'm knackered when just existing through all this nonsense is draining the life force and will to live out of all of us? Probably not. So I'm going to enjoy my KFC and then go to bed.

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