I think a missing piece of this analysis for the present is the way that hyper-skepticism can come back around and make you just a different type of mark. Sovereign citizens, for example.
> Additive Manufacturing, industrial robotics, the Internet, and the proliferation of computers had already made large portions of manufacturing and low skill white collar jobs redundant by the mid-2010s.
I think a much more realistic explanation than robotics and 3d printing is the outsourcing of the social and environmental costs of industrialization to countries willing to bear it, like China, Vietnam and Mexico.
Containerized shipping, email, and computerized logistics have made globalization efficient, and therefore inevitable.
Even bending over that far backwards to find a useful example comes up empty.
Those kinds of emails are so uncommon they’re absolutely not worth wasting this level of effort on. And if you’re in a sorry enough situation where that’s not the case, what you really need is the outside context the model doesn’t know. The model doesn’t know your office politics.
Okay now I’ve got Matrix on the brain. Going to self-indulgently reply to myself instead of just editing my first post bc this is totally off topic and I just want to spitball about The Matrix.
I think a lot of my problems with The Matrix are rooted in how it (mal-)adapts Campbell’s hero’s journey.
Here’s the basic outline of the hero’s journey:
- There’s a mundane (“real”, we’ll come back to that) world and a magical world. A problem in the magical world threatens the mundane world. (Sauron is rising in the east, Grendel is lurking in the forest, etc)
- A hero is identified in the mundane world who has the power to navigate both. (Luke is both a farm boy and a jedi. Neo is a programmer and the chosen one)
- The hero enters the magical world and resolves the problem.
- The hero (usually) returns to the mundane world, bringing power from the magical world. Even if the hero doesn’t return, the mundane world is brought to a new equilibrium. This is the real point of the story: the hero’s journey isn’t about the magical world, it’s about healing the mundane world.
The twist in The Matrix is that the mundane world turns out to be an illusion. But that’s a trick: the “real” world, unplugged from the matrix, is in a story sense magical. It’s a fantastical sci-fi world, just as far down the rabbit hole as the matrix itself.
So the last, most important step in the hero’s journey falls apart. You can’t heal the mundane world if it doesn’t exist. This helps move the focus of the story back to the first stages, the ego-fulfillment part where the hero is identified. Everyone remembers the red pill and “I know kung-fu”; not so much the incoherent sequels.
We’re actually circling back around to Baudrillard here, but I think maybe not in the way the Wachowskis intended.
I think you could also probably read Total Recall as an anti-Matrix. If The Matrix is about the allure of imagining yourself to be innately a hero, Total Recall is about the danger.
I think the silly Matrix analogy is really telling.
Forget about Plato’s cave and Baudrillard for second, The Matrix is about that stuff the way tic tac toe is about drawing circles and x’s.
The Matrix is about ego. It’s about the fantasy that one day soon your unique magical gifts will finally be recognized. To the untrained eye you might appear to be another TPS report filing schmuck, but deep down you’ve always been a hero. Any day now your circumstances are going to change, and then your real life will begin.
This is not a path that generally leads to happiness or creative accomplishment, and I think its traces are pretty plain in TFA.
Absolutely agreed, but I think part of what distorts this perspective for tech products is often the influence of VC. If you need to convince investors that you’re lined up for explosive growth, something like “we’re Tinder with branding that captures a different market segment” is probably a less compelling story than “we’re Tinder with an AI gimmick that will crush our competitors, burn their villages, and salt their fields”.
Also, totally unrelated tangent, but I hate the way internet discussion makes us go to absurd lengths to qualify statements as a preemptive defense against pedants. Like, for the purposes of this discussion you’re 100% right that all bottled water is functionally identical, but you still have to couch it in “I’ll generalize” and “most” and “pretty much”. I do it all the time too and it drives me nuts.