Slop Means False, New Article by Cybershow
About 20 minutes ago Dr. Andy Farnell published this article about slop. Quoting some portions from it:
Nowadays, just construct whatever fantasy world you want to believe in, and if you get caught out, simply apologise. Or attack the person who called you out. CEOs, politicians and senior leaders now live in a world of "optics", and "perception management" where "defining the narrative" is the whole game. Not the icing atop a cake of otherwise serious competence. Not just "public relations (PR)" to smooth along glitches in a mostly well-oiled and functional machine. No, fantasy is the whole damned show. Appearances have wholly supplanted reality.[...]
...it soon became apparent that information systems provide a shortcut. Instead of reliably gathering data via expensive telemetry, painfully analysing to extract salient facts and truth, processing it with expensive computers, enacting difficult changes and disseminating carefully fact-checked news, why not just tell people what they want to believe is true. This works perfectly alongside a system of money which has ceased to function for social utility to facilitate an "economy" but has disconnected into a land of financial fantasy.
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We are living in a world that is rapidly divesting from reality. Or rather, a world where those who purport to lead, in thought and deed, are moving away from the personal responsibility of living in reality. The signs are everywhere;
Just this week; Google now uses "AI" to replace news headlines with what it "thinks they mean". Not what they say. Three quarters of people claim they would use a fake human as a fantasy friend. Gladiatorial fantasy is on the rise as Moltbook, the "social network for bots" demonstrates a spectacle of "Peak AI theatre". Ryan Cooper's insightful piece on the legacy of Chuck Norris is shrewd in noting the descent of politics into total fantasy.
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Younger readers, please don't think this is a recent phenomenon and wholly the fault of "AI" or gamification of everything. The trajectory started in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was the first fantasy president, a hyper-real film actor "famous for being famous" who played the role of a statesman and joked about nuking Russia. Trump is a comparative amateur on the stage and "AI" simply compounds the reality-break established by social media, and television before it.
Read on at the Cybershow's blog. █