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Into The Nothing That’s Everywhere

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I observed a discussion of AI art online, and someone made a chillingly accurate comment. They said people were using AI art to get clicks on message boards. Using a tool to make “art” that you didn’t make, to post to a board of people you don’t know, so they click on the post so you feel good. Nothing actually happens or means anything. It’s just automation wearing the clothes of human interaction.

I began asking just how much of modern interaction, infused by market-driven technology, is just meaningless clicks. How much is nothing.

Not much later, I was listening to a podcast on game and game development, and how some people courted controversy. You could make an utterly crappy game, but get the right people to scream about how great it is, cite culture war B.S. and you’d sell your game. You’d get “reviews” yes, but the reviews wouldn’t be about the game you made, just who you annoyed. The tools to make a game, the social media to discuss it, the ways to distribute it, but the game itself means nothing.

Doing something to get something else to happen over something else, while everyone pretends something meaningful is going on. Human interaction as a Mousetrap-style game to get clicks, sell adds, or just annoy someone you’ll never meet. Meaningless. Nothing.

These experiences helped me get a feel for the profound alienation that seems to have settled on many in our high-tech supposedly connected world. The system of clicks, views, reviews, etc. means something else than it says it is, if it’s about anything else anymore. Yes, some – a great deal – is about ad revenue, but that’s you doing something so someone else pays you to shill an unrelated product. Even then it’s still so abstract from what you say is going on.

The Enshittification of human interaction. People can’t even hate each other properly without worrying about follower count and ad revenue.

The thing is we expected the Internet to connect us – it can and it has. Yes, it lets you build a bubble, but humans always do that. As I look over this phenomena of human abstraction and clicks and numbers, I think a way to look at it is that we’ve added middlemen.

Ad revenue companies, many big tech companies, etc. Even crypto is really a kind of middleman, an unregulated stock market of the imagination that you eventually have to cash in for real money. All of it is inserting yourself into the human experience to charge a toll and getting people to click, maybe paying them in a cut or just giving them a number to watch go up.

And now, nothing means anything except clicks and who’s getting paid. Sometimes no one is getting anything but is hoping to or doing it out of habit. Worse, so much started pretty good.

Now I wonder how sustainable it all is – and I honestly don’t know. We’re in unexplored territory at scale while the climate changes and the world careens forward. But wherever we are now, I don’t think it’s going to solve our problems. You can’t solve anything with nothing, and there’s a whole lot of nothing right now – a complicated nothing.

We need less of this nothing.

Steven Savage

50 Shades Of Resume #28: The Blurbs

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Resume 28

Resumes are both ways to describe ourselves but also advertise ourselves. Briana Higgins ran with this idea to create a resume that “blurbs” her personality and traits while mixing them with her background and job description, with some infographics to boot. It’s a bullet-fast bang-bang of information with specific details when you drill down.

Needless to say it’s also a non-standard resume, though works a lot of standard elements into it. Let’s analyze what we can learn:

  • Mixing the personality traits (“Dependable”, “Versatile”) in with the regular resume background like education is an interesting choice.
  • There’s use of text running in various directions that’s a real change of pace from other resume – and also saves some space.
  • She uses different fonts, colors, and sizes to make the resume more interesting.
  • The use of icons in the left side is a clever idea that drives how what the sections are about before you read them.
  • The skill section is really unique – using the labels as major categories with a “ring” of specific skills around them. That’s a take that saves space and is visually interesting.
  • The resume then goes from the “Skill blurbs” to a linear measure of experience, which actually is a mix of skill and job history display. That’s a fast way to communicate knowledge and experience that’s efficient and easy to understand visually.
  • When you look it all over, the resume says a lot, but each part is different.

Now a few critiques:

  • I like the interleaving of personal traits in with the resume, but sometimes that can be overdone. it might be good to mix the “trait bars” with background elements relevant to said personality traits.
  • I think the “blurb” text may be too large – you could free up more space.
  • References are probably not needed, nor is the quote from a previous manager. Though the quote is clever, it’s usually not needed – it could be replaced with a personal or philosophical quote. However, it does fit the overall “show my personality” trait.
  • I’d have liked to see more job history Since she has a lot of skills, I’d want to see something showing what she’s done.

What I like with this resume is each part is different, so it doesn’t get dull, and there’s some ways to portray backgrounds that are clear, but also different. It also has a friendly, funky look that’s non pretentious.

Steve’s Summary: Hand me this and it definitely tells me we’ve got a person with skill, and I get some fast-and-easy summaries of what she’s capable of on top of the talent that went into the resume. It’s also enjoyably non-standard. I would want some job history though.

[“50 Shades of Resume” is an analysis of various interesting resumes to celebrate the launch of the second edition of my book “Fan To Pro” and to give our readers inspiration for their own unique creations.]

– Steven Savage