dystopia Archives - I'm Not Doctor Who

Back in October of 2024, I wrote a post entitled "Are we fucked?" in which I was concerned about the direction the world appeared to be going. At the time, my main concern was with the growth of the AI space, and its seeming lack of any benefits whatsoever to humankind, while demonstrating its clear potential to cause very serious problems for both society and the environment.

That hasn't gone away. And neither has the other fear I expressed in that post: that, if Donald Trump would somehow, inexplicably, find himself in the White House once again, that America would become an unpleasant, unsafe place to be. In fact, things have ended up in that regard far worse than I think anyone could have imagined: a lawless "police" (and I use the term loosely) force gunning down innocent people in the streets; people being forced into utterly inhumane conditions having not committed a crime; the systematic revocation of a system of human rights we spent the best part of the last century putting in place, and which still had quite a bit of work to do.

Every day I look around at what the world has become and I am, honestly, scared. I feel like significant portions of the world have just gone completely insane.

Take the AI thing. AI is fucking everywhere now, despite it being abundantly clear that everyone except shareholders and C-Suite tossers hates it. It's making things worse. It's causing people's skills to atrophy at a frightening rate. It's destroying the environment. It's crashing the economy. It's making the Internet near-unusable in certain areas. And all for what? I couldn't tell you. All I can tell you is that the whole thing is a terrifying waste of money and resources, and I hope beyond hope that it will not be long until everyone wakes up and realises "what the fuck have we been doing?"

Except, at this point, with such a significant portion of the world's economy being propped up by this odious, utterly useless "industry", things coming crashing down are going to affect everyone — including those who have always been against this garbage. It's a financial disaster waiting to happen — and all the people who have spent the last few years completely discarding any practical skills in favour of "prompting" are going to be utterly screwed.

As many have pointed out, it's a symptom of a larger problem. The AI industry's dominance of things like the RAM and storage market are part of corporations' attempts to take away ownership of "The Computer" from individuals and force us all into "the cloud". Because if all we're using are dumb terminals to log on to the corporate cloud, that means the corporations can absolutely completely and utterly control what we can do. And everything that is wrong with politics and society right now can be laid at the feet of the few rich, corporate billionaires. Not coincidentally, pretty much all of them appear to have ties to legendary nonce Jeffrey Epstein.

I dunno man. I don't know how to deal with this any more. I'm scared for my future, and I'm scared for the world in general. I don't like it. This is not what "The Future" was supposed to be like. We had lots of cautionary tales telling us not to do all this shit — and yet we appear to have just gone and done it anyway.

The human beings with all the power absolutely suck, and they don't give a shit what all this is doing to regular-ass people, so long as it continues to make them more money than they will ever be able to spend in their lifetimes — money which will never, ever be spent on anything even vaguely approaching "the common good".

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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I'm not entirely sure when exactly "influencer" became a widely accepted job title, but I do vividly remember when I first heard it that I felt "…we probably shouldn't make that a thing". And in 2024, I stand by that. I find it horrifyingly dystopian that we live in a world where people are unironically referred to as "influencers" — and, perhaps even worse, there are people out there who see "influencers" as somehow inherently more trustworthy than traditional media.

The traditional media has its problems, of course, and it always has done. But there has always been a certain separation between editorial and commercial content — and when there isn't, it is clearly demarcated. There are no such demarcations when it comes to "influencer marketing" — and, from where I'm sitting, there appears to be absolutely zero scrutiny or oversight of how "influencers" are doing business, with minimal obligations for them to share the fact that they're being paid to say things.

The scourge of "influencers" is a universal one, but obviously my most direct experience with it is in the world of gaming. One of the most common criticisms thrown at old-school games journalists is that they've been "paid off" by publishers to do things a certain way — either to inflate a product's review scores above what it is perceived to "deserve", or perhaps to disparage rival products.

Having spent several years in the industry, I don't doubt that there have been occasions where that goes on. And there have been plenty of related incidents, too, with probably the most famous being "Gerstmanngate", where a writer was let go from Gamespot for giving a bad review to a game whose publisher had spent a considerable amount on advertising said game.

Most people would agree that a games journalist being in the pocket of a publisher is a bad thing. I don't believe it goes on nearly as often as the most insufferable people on the Internet think it does, but I think we can all agree that if money changes hands in this way, the "journalism" on the thing in question is compromised.

And yet the same people who would take a games journalist to task for accepting money from a publisher to cover a game are all over the world of "influencers", believing that having your face on YouTube makes you inherently more "real" and "trustworthy" than those people who hid behind all those pesky written words. And "influencers" (no, I'm not going to stop with the scare quotes, I fucking hate the term) are openly accepting paid promotional deals, then covering the products in question. Some of them remember to disclose this; not all do. But regardless of whether or not any disclosure is going on, how is that any fucking different?

I find it absolutely unfathomable that "influencers" accepting money for coverage of things is apparently just tickity-boo, whereas the exact same thing was one of the worst accusations you could throw at a games journalist. How does that make any sense whatsoever?

I feel mostly immune to influencer marketing, but it's very clear that the younger generation in particular are very susceptible to it. And it's dystopian. It's horrible. And it's one of those things that we can't just "walk back" any more, because the influencer "industry" has become so massive over the course of the last decade or so.

I saw someone argue earlier that we're probably overdue for a brand new "segment" of the Internet, like how we once had stuff like Telnet and Gopher alongside the World Wide Web. If the Web has become this utterly devastated late-stage capitalism wasteland, perhaps it's time for people to move on to something else? And no, not the fucking Metaverse. Honestly, at this point, I'd welcome the ability to engage with a fully text-based Internet that wasn't 99% controlled by advertisers. Then we can leave all the "influencers" and their mindless zombie followers to it, and build something better elsewhere.

And then wait for that to be ruined. Still, it might be fun for a few years at least, before the Brands find it.

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Tag: dystopia

#oneaday Day 622: Are we fucked? Revisited