Evan Davis, in bouncing puppy-dog style, was talking about AI podcasts. These aren’t podcasts about AI, but podcasts made by AI. Sans human. The BBC fed some foul machine a news story about traffic and an AI spewed out a 16 minute podcast.
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What emerged was so convincingly anodyne it could have been one of the current crop of pedestrian podcasts: two chirpy talking-heads – one male, one female – wittering on in a transatlantic smear of an accent. If I hadn’t been told it was fake, all the results of some computer’s dreaming microchips, I would have thought it the Real McCoy.
I wanted to take a hammer to all the technology in my house – to picket the BBC for amplifying this crap. Then Davis started talking about AI documentaries, so I just walked out into the misty night and cried.
I exaggerate my misery, and try to add some humour to the experience. It’s so insufferably depressing you must find a lighter side or go nuts.
But this is what our culture has sunk to: computer-generated news.
Technology is turning society into a horror movie. Recently, footage emerged of a YouTube interview with a young woman called Lily Phillips. She’s a star of the DIY online site OnlyFans.
Phillips appeared broken in the interview. Little wonder. She’d just had sex with 101 men in a day – a feat, we’re told, which ‘catapulted her to TikTok viral stardom’.
Now, I’m as liberal as you can get. Sleep with whoever you want. As long as everyone is adult and it’s all consensual fun I don’t care what anyone does. But there’s something so dehumanising about this collision of sex and technology.
In this instance, the screen robs everyone of their humanity.
Then there’s Winta Zesu. She appeared in the news as an example of ‘rage-bait’. That’s where ‘content creators’ – I want to tear my eyes out just writing those words – make videos with one purpose: to monetise anger. If you piss enough people off, you can get very rich today.
That’s how we entertain ourselves now. This is culture, folks. You don’t need to be a devotee of ballet or Proust to feel that we aren’t just debased as a species, we’re without a functioning culture full stop.
This swamp which passes for what was once called culture is gifted to us by the billionaire tech bros – those husks of humanity who parlayed their social inadequacy and inability to relate to the flesh and blood world into fortunes.
These creatures run our world. They smashed our culture to pieces, destroyed art and entertainment and truth, and now they’re our masters. For they’re all men, right?
Trump is creating a cabinet of tycoons to run America. Elon Musk – the ultimate social inadequate turned modern god – is part of that cabal. Musk wants to shower millions on Nigel Farage. The wealthy Reform leader already has billionaire buddies, like Nick Candy – now the party’s new treasurer.
Remember, these are ordinary guys taking on the elites on behalf of the downtrodden. If you believe that, your damn brains have slipped out your earhole.
So many of our gods are monsters. Barely a day passes without some shining star of TV or music being accused of being a sex offender. Accusations are like confetti.
One day Jay-Z is the toast of the liberal world at the Met Gala, the next he’s facing allegations of child rape. Mr Z denies the claims.
And on it goes. Power and wealth trampling what little the rest of us have; crushing the fabric of our societies until our education and health services are rubble; strip-mining our culture so we’re dependent on their garbage. Soon they’ll own us body and soul.
Protest and you’re locked up; plunder and here’s a knighthood. Politicians are paid lackeys for corporations. Nations commit war crimes with impunity. Leaders of democratic countries now boast criminal – not moral – convictions.
What will this rank age of ours be called by future historians? It’s often suggested we’re living through another version of the 1930s. That’s too crude.
I’ve thought perhaps this is our reprise of the Bronze Age Collapse, when empires across the Mediterranean fell like nine-pins in a perfect storm of drought, famine, war and technological upheaval, ushering in a 500-year Dark Age. Sounds familiar.
But it’s still not quite right as an analogy. Today feels more like the 1890s – the Gilded Age, when the Robber Barons of the industrial revolution led lives of such unimaginable wealth it seemed a new Olympus was on Earth.
Meanwhile, our great-grandparents lived in hovels. The Gilded Age fuelled the First World War. It spawned mass terrorism, and only ended when revolutionary rage compelled politicians to smash the rigged monopolies destroying the lives of millions.
Perhaps we’re living through some perverted amalgam of the Bronze Age Collapse and the Gilded Age. History, as any historian will tell you, never repeats but it does sometimes rhyme. Perhaps, this will be known as the Glittering Dark Age.
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A tiny sliver of the world’s population lives in shimmering opulence. Some have even prepped for armageddon with their own private hideouts to party in while we burn and starve.
As for the rest, our lives – never gilded to begin with – now rust to trash. We’re slipping into darkness politically, socially, economically and morally.
Maybe this explains the admiration so many bestowed on the assassin who shot the CEO in New York.
Here’s the horrible truth I feel in my bones: this won’t get better for decades to come. It will take a great breaking before it is finally fixed. When it is patched and mended, perhaps what emerges will be beautiful. But I have a terrible fear that by then the likes of you and I will be long gone.
Neil Mackay is the Herald’s Writer-at-Large. He’s a multi-award winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics