someone save me from ai i dont wanna live in this cyberpunk dystopia anymore
broke and 2016pilled: saying you’ve “read” a book after reading the “plot synopsis” on wickypeedia
stoke and 2025mode: saying you’ve “read” a book after making an algorithm turn it into a cute little digestable infant formula smoothie
artichoke and 2034感: saying you’ve “read” a book after semi-watching a 20 second video in the upper left of your glasses, where someone recounts the plot at 3x speed, also you’re having nutrient paste dinner and “engaging” with your “office-mate friend-circle” off the clock in meatspace at the same time
someone recounts the plot at 3x speed
chatGPT summarize all the Holy texts and I’ll pick the best religion based on that thanks
Honestly valid. Religious texts tend to be boring af
Pick the religion that makes the best religous films or tv shows
i guess this is a product of over consumption, feeling you need to shorten stories so you can consume more of them faster
…
god that fucking sucks dude
There is this strange attitude towards books, where people overfocus on the number of books they read and what “counts as reading”, as if finishing a book is in itself a form of self-improvement or prayer or something. My theory is that it comes from the education system somehow.
I reckon that you’re right about the education system being at fault, but if you’re going to be “reading” a summary made by the pollution-bot, then you might as well just watch a youtube-video on the subject instead. At the very least you can use the comment section on youtube to ask questions about the subject matter (and get told that whatever issue you’re having is a bolshevik plot made by the Talmudic Demons)
I was going to say it’s like “gamifying” books, but the attitude is even older than that. It reminds me of people who will pick what games to play based purely on reviews, like their optimizing their Aggregated IGN Score Experiential Index.
I had to try to stop myself from doing that, because I would end up forcing myself to finish every single book I picked up, setting page count goals for the day, and not re-reading books because it cut into my goodreads goal for the year. When really… you should just read what you feel like, and for it’s own sake, and not really worry too much about intentionality.
That’d make sense, I remember being rewarded in school for reading the most in my class (just like a sticker or something, but still).
Funnily enough, nowadays I rarely read because of how much and how fast I had to read in University burning me out so bad
I think at least a part of this has to do with neo-liberal “self-betternment” and marketability/self-branding through consumption. Why else would goodreads and other such sites be so popular? People seem to be turning books into these lists of achievements with time limits that they perform to meet some ideal norm of an “educated citizen”.
It kind of kills the idea of reading for myself at least, because it just becomes a performance and a chore.
I can also see how this makes everything very superficial. People who never seem to get anything from the books they read are a mystery to me, but I suspect that many just read and not necessarily digest the reading or reflect on it much. Because it is consumption.
I definitely see how we got here. Even the people I know who most love reading will just buy unreasonable numbers of books well beyond their capability to get through them meaningfully. Like their goal in life isn’t to be fulfilled through literature, it’s owning a large enough home someday to house their personal library.
I used to get ads for a subscription service that takes the endless stream of self-help crap the industry churns out and turns it into short podcasts or whatever. It’s aimed at business folks who are too busy generating value for the economy to sit down and read, but I also wonder if there’s really more than a half-hour’s worth of content in these books anyway. They mostly seem like they’re organized around a pretty simple concept that gets dressed up as hidden knowledge so there’s a product to sell, and then they need to get padded out to book length so that the product seems worth the purchase price. Sure, some books (mainly textbooks) need to be huge because the information density there is actually high, and you can’t condense a novel the same way because reading fiction is supposed to be an aesthetic experience, and aesthetic experiences are not compressible, but I imagine people get taught that a lot of the nonfiction they read is basically fluff and end up with the instinct to strip it out of everything because we’ve collectively lost the ability to understand or enjoy art.
Willfully being this ignorant should be bullied as fuck.
Like holy shit why aren’t these people embarrassed that they’re too fucking ignorant to read a book
I asked ChatGPT to summarize Marx’s Capital in one paragraph or less, it stated
“Capitalism is when money. Communism is when no money. Money turns into linen, and linen turns into a commodity. Labor power.”
Labor power.
I choose to read this in the same voice as “Turtle Power!” from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song.
Workers of the world unite
Workers of the world unite
Workers of the world unite
loosin’ all their chains now!
Labor Power!They’re the world’s most value producing thing! (We’re really hip!)
They’re workers in the factory and they’re mean! (Hey - get a grip!)
When their boss cracks the whip
These laborers try to give’m the slip!Workers of the world unite
Workers of the world unite
Marx taught them the philosophy (He’s a radical rat!)
Lenin reads, and then he does the thing! (That’s a fact, jack!)
Stalin had a big spoon, (Gimmie a break!)
Mao Zedong was a party dude (Party!)Workers of the world unite
Workers of the world unite
Workers of the world unite
loosin’ all their chains now!
Labor Power!Marx taught them the philosophy (He’s a radical rat!)
Somehow I had it playing in my head to the tune of “take the power back”
Linen go up
Linen go down
Cross posting this to cowbee’s capital reading group he’s gunna be so pwned
New tagline.
It will never cease to amaze me how techbros have made FUCKING AI seem lame.
Back in my day we had Cliff’s NotesMan I have got to stop using computer. If I was rich enough to hire someone to transcribe all my writings into text documents I’d still use the computer because I like video games and am hopelessly addicted to doomscrolling, but it’s nice to imagine a world where I no longer had to use it. I really think we’re going to reach a point where personal computering is more bad than good, if we haven’t already passed that point.
We passed it long ago
happened at least 20 years ago
ChatGPT, please summarize Pierre Bayard’s How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
The other day, a lady told me that she asked the “all knowing entity” (her words, not mine) where the winning Mega-millions ticket was purchased. She enthusiastically informed me that the winner was someone in Minnesota.
wasn’t there an unclaimed lottery win worth like a million bucks that expired last year in MN?
Tbf, nobody seems to understand what classical philosophy is about anyway, better not lose too much time on Aristotle
That’s fair, but I feel like the intended experience is everyone being flummoxed by this or that specific passage, to the point that it has gained iconic status. Being flummoxed by your own personally generated weird passage just hasn’t got the community, ya know?
Yeah, I think this is right to some extent. For the vast majority of people, you’re not reading Aristotle for the content (at least not in the sense that’s well-captured by a summary). That is, we don’t generally read Aristotle because he was right about a bunch of things. The value is in following the chain of reasoning and seeing how it gave rise to many, many of the questions we’re still grappling with today. Reading a summary is basically useless, because if you’ve grown up anywhere in
, you’ve already absorbed Aristotle at that level. It’s part of the structure of Angloid thought at a deep level.Absolutely true
Stuff like this legitimately makes me question whether using more basic technological assistants such as calculators has fucked up our brains for the worse, and we just don’t understand what we’ve lost.
Yeah, I also feel like maybe I was too quick in my dismissal of these ideas as an every generation thing. It does feel different with all this generative AI crap, but I’m pretty sure that’s what they all thought back in the day for writing/books/calculators/computers/phones…
i can see a use for this but ive heard some of those “podcast” summary things people make and damn are they ridiculously reductive in a way that actually misrepresents what they are summarizing
Using writing had fucked up our memory ages ago, Socrates was right.
It’s hard since plato writes about it in the Phaedrus about writing specifically (it’s a tool for forgetting!)
So it’s been around for a while, but the scale and stakes are probably new
It makes me want to engage in some activities of pure body and thought, un-meddled with by such technology as writing. Storytelling, singing, dance, sports… these things which can only be taught in-person, and which are intensely self-expressive personal experiences, while simultaneously group activities. They as far as you can get from dead and robotic.
Wait till they design a robot that can throw sick 720 pretzels off a hubba
The pain of reading
I went to criticize but if I had this tool during high school I would not have read a single word of Ethan Frome. That book sucks.
My school version of this was sparknotes i don’t think I read half the books I was given. Still aced all the English exams tho cos I’m built different
I’m exactly the age where teachers caught on to spark notes and all my highschool teachers at least had one spark notes book to show the class that they’re checking your wording or whatever for plagiarism. I wonder how many were just the same ones passed between teachers the first week
Ethan Frome was easily the worst book they made us read in high school, but maybe it was because it was totally unrelatable for a high schooler and maybe if I went back and read it now I would get something out of it that I didn’t then.
But I remember hating it while I enjoyed most of the other books that were assigned like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, etc.
Reading Infinite Jest and Gravity’s Rainbow based on a one line ChatGPT summary.
