MENTAL SHAVINGS: WHO’S GETTING SCREWED

February, 2023 -Herr Professor Doktor Wasserkopf

Just as “The Crisis” of 2008 -caused by the pointless over expansion of the finance industry (which was rescued, reassured, and rewarded for the piracy they’d engineered and often sunk beneath)- continued to be the excuse for all obstacles in daily life up through the dawn of the Covid outbreak (when the world’s wealthiest 1% miraculously engorged their portion of fresh wealth from 50% to 75%), and just as it wiped out entire national economies in its toxigenic wake, the current pointless orgy of profiteering which has begun to drown all global and personal integrations with the IT vision of our “future,” weeping through blubbering gulps, is now the excuse for the coming decade of all our woes.

That chatter churns around Chat GPT, Artificial Indiligenge and Mixed-Reality virtuousity becoming the sole fruit-bearing stumps left standing. Yet, separate from the telltale storms of gargantuan data hacks, frauds, black holes, consumer violations, and antitrust lawsuits crashing across their decks, the most reported pairing downs in the phantasmagorical fleets have come from such ‘too big to fail’ warships as Twitter, Google, Stripe, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Intel, Amazon, HP, Chime, Salesforce, Coinbase, Zendesk, Snap, Opendoor, Zillow, Better.com, Cameo, Shopify, Klarna, Twilio, Robinhood, Vimeo, TikTok, Patreon, Carvana, Buzzfeed, Nutanix, Oracle, Arrival, and Tesla (a perplexing coincidence). Those, I stress, are only the flagship dreadnoughts, their names yelped across shriveling news channels to cheer helpless villagers fleeing resultant tsunamis.

But I have also been flooded by reports of literary colleagues -who had set pens in teeth and joined this invincible gaggle of new capitalist buccaneers- that their supposedly ‘independent’ informational outlets have also shaved their futuristic machines down to the last screwhead (and I mean that in the most generous way). Now, with the Chat GPT market already valued at $29 billion, writers won’t need to be assassinated -they’ll just be written out of existence. Journalists will find themselves censored for and from life. They might be hauled back aboard when the world learns that its AI runs as terribly as all the other destroyers it’s launched -and how much money it winds up costing- but by then the price of a human scribe will be around 35 cents per annum.

Of course the pretense will bob along as it’s scutttled for a bit; in this perfect smashmouth of manufactured intelligence constructed by people with no human capacities, writing, then sight, then art will be no more tied to homo sapiens than the mechanical world currently crushing the species. For today, these flotillas of freedom, such as even the disguised-venture-capitalist Substack (an additional $65 million from Andreessen Horowitz last year to pay a secret coterie of your favorite ‘independent’ writers to perpetuate the illusion) -admittedly like all other modern, computer age undertakings- have, in order, whittled away: the uncaring technical ghouls who built and were meant to maintain the life-devouring intrasystems; any means of written or spoken communication with help or headquarters (in case some customer, productive person, or national hospital system needed to ascertain what the fuck was going on there); and, in a last, attempt to hide in their swamps by breathing through cane, have destroyed the very ability of anyone to log in -a pre-designed requisite first step to eliminating one’s evidently pointless ‘account.’ All this combined will be especially entertaining when one is hopelessly expecting payment. When these ships sink, they take your belongings with them.

The lucky ones will walk the plank first. Especially with that last deliberate malfunction now in place, be it a bank, a credit-rating scheme, a real estate aggregator, a distributor, bureau, store, social media mafia, or guaranteed DYI career-builder, you have been shoved overboard … locked out. Just as piracy evolved to the golden age of Robber Barons (and eventually this new era), the workers will find themselves locked out, and the erstwhile ‘customers’ find the doors sealed shut. Your data, your dollars, your life and your works have been plundered. In this way, all us screwheads might be sheared off as the ships go down, but our filings remain scattered across the cold and cratered ocean floor.