The Un-Measurable Cost of Bullshit

by

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

As my regular readers are painfully aware, I feel a lot of the world is awash in bullshit, and the technology world triply so. We’re sold products we don’t need, that don’t do what we want, from companies who will then collapse and be sold off for parts. Meanwhile too much of the media celebrates innovations that basically burn money and forests while delivering nothing but stock prices. And if you think you know what I’m talking about, once again don’t be so sure, I have a long list of grievances.

And I wonder how much does this stuff cost us? I’m not just talking money, but time, social damage, environmental damage, and having to clean up after it all falls apart.

I think it’s hard to measure because a lot of the economic bullshit is now a loop.

Investors invest in each other and the people they know to get a return, even if a service won’t provide anything. Media breathlessly starts a hype cycle about nothing, and will do it again weeks or months later having learned little. Bookkeeping flummery keeps the real costs off of the books and out of view. Environmental impact is exported. There’s a giant cycle that occupies a lot of time and resources to keep people from asking what time and resources are being consumed.

And we do it all over again repeatedly and more rapidly.

We can’t measure costs of all this meaninglessness as it moves too fast, doesn’t have enough data, because of made-up data, and because we’ll do it all again anyway. We know there’s bullshit in the economy, but we can’t penetrate the veil of it to figure what it costs us until the bill becomes due the hard way.

It’s enough to make you wish you could yell “stop” and we’d all just stop inventing stuff for ten years so we could pick up the pieces and see how much people were lying. And yes, I thought about how long that freeze should be.

I have the unsettling feeling that an enormous amount of our economy is waste that yields little more than line go up for a tiny amount of people. But I’d like if we could pause and find out.

Pause voluntarily, that is. Judging by the way our climate is changing, we’re gonna get a pretty hard pause involuntarily.

Steven Savage

Marketing Is An Infection

by

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Being a creative person who hangs out with creatives, we often discuss marketing – and it’s a popular subject among us as of late. Our reactions have not been, shall we say, civil towards marketing creative work in 2024. Or probably the past decade. Or three. Or our lifetimes.

Something disturbing that has come to mind from these discussions is how marketing isn’t how we sell writing, but how we THINK of writing. If you at all try to market your work, thoughts of marketing will doubtlessly infect your work as you create it. There’s always that voice in your head that takes the books, seminars, and suggestions you’ve experienced and whispers on how to do your writing or art or whatever.

You’re not writing you’re marketing

That voice is actually a constant drumbeat in our culture and we miss how widespread it is. Personal Branding seminars, amazon marketing lessons, endless books on how to write what sells, etc. are everywhere. There’s also blatant how-to-write-for-market books like “Save The Cat” and so on. I’ve even seen it well argued that the Joseph Campbell’s contrived “momonmyth” has so intertwined in culture that it affects our media and in turn our way of promoting it.

As I’ve changed my writing to be more personal columns (like this), art (under a pen name) and small press (under a pen name, look I have many) I’ve been doing more work for myself. To not think about marketing (as much) is not only liberating, but made me see how it infected way too much of my work (and that’s a wide body of work).

It’s a subtle thing, of course. Write an extra career book to help people in the thoughts it’ll help sell my others. Way With Worlds went through many experiments, including one that made me wonder if it was easier as a promotional – when it became my flagship. I vacillated on the plots of my novels to fit various desires, patterns, etc. (honestly, probably why they weren’t quite what I wanted).

How much of my writing has been me and how much has been marketing thoughts? Marketing is an infection that we’re all suffering from.

The ads you’re sick of in your browser are just the blatant, resource-consuming, questionably-targeted, most visible manifestation of marketing Over Everything. Do so many things seem empty? Well part of that is because they’re meant to be sold not experienced. Does your own work feel like checking boxes to it sells?

Now that I’ve stepped into some more for-me creative works it’s fairly obvious how widespread the Marketing Infection is. It also makes me mourn all the things that could have been and may not be but for someone trying to write/paint by the numbers of a marketing guide.

I don’t cast aspersions on people that want to make money at creative work. In fact, trying to “figure out the system” can be its own fun challenge! But we do have to ask if it’s become too much of a driver that shapes our lives and work. We also have to ask how it shapes our choices of what we consume and do.

Because the infection is widespread.

Steven Savage

But What Does It Mean?

by

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Recently a friend found an AI generated fake trailer for a kind of 1950s-1960’s live Sailor Moon. This, it turned out wasn’t the only fake-retro live Sailor Moon trailer generated by AI. Somehow I feel the infamous failed Saban Sailor Moon has driven people to imagine such things differently (forgetting the rather well done live Sailor Moon from Japan).

Now I find these things amusing, but there was a strange emptiness about them. What, I wondered, was the point? I can imagine these things in my own head, and in fact have – once in the form of a late night discussion of Lucille Ball playing Sailor Moon (I was assuredly sober). Do I need someone to use tetchy AI to illustrate something?

As I contemplated the weird meaninglessness of these things, a friend who’s a talented cosplayer note that there was no point to such creations. What would have been truly amazing would not have been someone tossing prompts to an electricity-devouring toy, but to have rallied cosplayers and shot it live. Suddenly I got why so much of this AI art feels meaningless.

Let us imagine that some cosplayers had gathered to create a Sailor Moon trailer true to the spirit of the 50’s or 60s. They would have done research and studied costume design. They would have sewn, crafted, created, re-created, and perfected their work. Those doing the filming would have figured the angles of the time and how to get the color just right. Voiceovers would have been chosen to fit the period, perhaps finding veteran actors or new talent.

The creation of a few minutes of trailer would have involved people making, learning, researching, bonding. They would have made friendships that lasted a lifetime, spoken at cons, and taken their skills elsewhere. Someone may have used such a creation as a senior thesis, others in a portfolio. One small bit of fun would have impacted many people, echoing through their lives.

Or you can throw things into an AI. Sure there’s some talent in tweaking the prompts, calling the best shots, and so on. The editing of such things definitely requires skill. But so much of it is disconnected or not as connected as it should be. I won’t deny that a person with AI uses talent and inspiration to create a larger creation, but it lacks that big, meaningful picture of an effort without AI.

An artistic creation is a lot more than the time you watch it on screen.

What AI turns out is results with little human connection, history, inspiration, or meaning. It makes “product” in the most empty use of the term – something designed to appeal to someone’s interests, something to sell, a result not a thing with history and meaning. We’ve taken an interesting tool and now people pitch it as a substitute for being human.

This is another reason I’m skeptical on AI creations beyond some more personal and specific uses. Where’s the human connection? The team that learned from making a show? The author you love and get angry at in equal measure? The voice actors to fan over? The choices only a person could make – even if they’re the bad choices of an actual human? Where’s what comes next, with lessons learned and ideas built on?

It’s not there. Just a machine turning out stuff in the rough shape of what we asked. It doesn’t mean anything.

Steven Savage