In a recent interview, the journalist and writer, Nicholas Carr was attempting to paraphrase a statement made by Marc Andreessen about experience privilege—wealthy people have better homes, cars, food, and sex and the plebes can get simulated abundance online. Here is the actual statement about ‘reality privilege’….
'A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. [...] Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege-their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world!
Only a billionaire tech overlord would actually say ‘quote-unquote real world’—-yes the place you were born squaling into and will leave when your hard-drive fails. I love how tech ‘geniuses’ can spout all these ideas of the future, but none of them include any reality that doesn’t see them at the top of the pyramid, our future is just a return engagement of the privileged elite and serfs.
It’s a brilliant strategy to offer us distraction abundance, fill us up so that we can’t see that we are starving. Is this what technology and our advanced culture offers us? The majority of people will escape squalor through fantasy so that the small layer at the top can enjoy the fruits of this world? I think what is most chilling about Andreessen’s statement is how glibly he offers a vision that is soul destroying and anti-human as a net positive. Have we actually thrown in the towel on the real world and are the majority of us ready to live in a simulation?
We need to touch some grass and stop watching dystopian movies like they are documentaries. The future is now and the chaos we are experiencing and will be further experiencing especially in North America is a direct result of how media has incentivized our worst hardwiring. This will only increase as A.I.seeps into every crevice of our culture. How are you liking the new A.I. Google search? It reminds me of a new highway in Northern Ontario, it’s pristine, uninterrupted lanes cutting through the woods and around the lakes of the region with glimpses of the former 2 lane highway that wove through small towns, feeding gas stations, restaurants, and shops—-now abandoned and hollowed out.
We need a Plan B, for illustrators and artists in North America there is a renewed threat that government policy and the courts won’t save us from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Grok shredding copyright. We need to poison the well, or stop feeding the beast. Everyone of us should be using Glaze if we post art to social media. If you have a WordPress site check out Kudurru from the German group Spawning that offered the haveibeentrained website, you can search to see if your images were used for training and can have them removed from future training. Kudurru blocks web scrapers from accessing your website. Spawning is focused on ethical A.I. based on consent, we need them to build out more capability as I have found my images were scraped from my Squarespace website. Canadians have their elbows up because of an existential threat, artists are facing a coming storm that we need to do more than get our elbows involved.