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The Rise of Whatever

was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history.

This is the driving force behind clickbait, behind thumbnails of white guys making 8O faces, behind red arrows, behind video essayists who just read Wikipedia at you three times a week like clockwork, behind suggestion algorithms, behind recipe blogs that all look the same and have a mile of filler fluff, behind video game websites abandoning the idea of articles and instead turning into SEO vultures with inexplicably lengthy articles telling you “the blue key is under a rock by the river” so they have more paragraph breaks to put ads between, behind TikTok’s model of being a constant stream which I have to only guess at because I have never had any interest in TikTok but I assume it’s a worse version of YouTube Shorts and I already find those pretty irritating. My phone’s fucking weather app has an “AI summary” with incredible insights like “it’ll get warmer over the course of the week”, which I could readily see for myself if this block of white noise weren’t pushing the temperature graph off the bottom of the screen. We don’t have enough trouble with, say, the conservative “news” sphere inventing its own alternate reality that millions of people buy into, simply by lying — now we have to give them a machine tailor-made for creating fake photos and videos too?

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