Always down to put in the work, never dimes on a misbehaving colleague, doesn’t take himself too seriously (eg. the junkie fashion show scene). Whatever you do, you always want to work with some Sydnors.
That’s it really. What 5 books (other than the Bible) would you suggest to a recent convert to your church (Roman Catholic, orthodox, Protestant, non-denominational etc) to help that person get a grounded understanding of their new faith?
That’s it really. What 5 books (other than the Bible) would you suggest to a recent convert to your church (Roman Catholic, orthodox, Protestant, non-denominational etc) to help that person get a grounded understanding of their new faith?
As regards the whole smirking parade of machine-made “assistance” services being pumped into public life at low, or no apparent, cost, as though life on the world historic stage were a philanthropic exercise rather than a market operation with the usual, cunty, destructive appetites:
First, flood the zone with “free” intelligence, as though one were passing out bread in a famine rather than baiting a rat trap. Then saturate every profession, classroom, office, and search function with it until refusal begins to look first eccentric; then irresponsible; then impossible.
Fold it into work. Into school. Into the ordinary habits of thought. Let employers quietly conclude that if a machine can do 60% of your job badly, then perhaps you are actually worth 40% less and should count yourself lucky to enjoy subscribed services in a rented flat.
Then comes the hard switch. You do not merely introduce a product. You soften up an ecosystem. You use subsidized abundance to bludgeon prices, expectations, and standards downward until human labor has to compete with a thing that does not sleep, does not unionize, does not raise children, does not bury its parents, and does not ask for dental. And ultimately will not drag you by your wingtips across your marble floors to cudgel you in the street, thereby connecting at long last, cause and effect.
Then comes the final joke. Once enough writers, designers, assistants, coders, researchers, and other inconvenient humans have been disciplined by the new economics of disposability, the meter starts running. Not all at once, of course. That would be vulgar.
First the free tier becomes the useless tier. Then competence migrates behind subscriptions, enterprise contracts, premium access, proprietary integrations, mandatory toolchains. The public, having been methodically stripped of alternatives, is invited to rent back, by the month, some fraction of the dignity and leverage that was taken from it in the first place.
Fuck that. This is not liberation. We’re training our replacements in time for planned obsolescence.
I love her and I think she loves me. But she would totally trade me for a cold French fry two weeks old off the backseat floor of the car.