Silicon Valley Poetry Magnets

THE MAGNET*FESTO

MAGNETS ARE THE O.G. A.I.What is AI? AI is a cut and paste project with all the words of the internet. The little boys in hoodies slice up the words and paste them back together and in-so-doing build up their pasted word house of bullshit. The business model? More bullshit content. More bullshit code behind more bullshit apps. More bullshit startup pitches. Bullshit Begets Bullshit.The Silicon Valley Poetry Magnets are the original AI: a cut and paste project of bullshit words. Except with a lot fewer words. Which means a lot less bullshit, and a lot less global warming per poem. The magnets are certified 100% Microsoft-free financing. The scissors and the paste are my sweat and tears. I try not to run with scissors and I don't eat paste.ORIGIN STORYIn the beginning there was ether and darkness and then Steve or Bill said let there be light and circa 1997 the webby world was birthed from darkness into being. And the men in turtlenecks brushed away the cobwebby archives and then there was light and there were aeron chairs and graphic designers. And yet there were men who searched and remained lost, until from the entrails of the Garage, Sergey and Larry brought forth the Algorithm, and the Algorithm was good. It could do no evil. And the people believed in the Algorithm.Many generations passed and Sergey begat Mark who begat Sam, and WhatsApp went unto the land of Facebook in Meta. The men in turtlenecks begat boys in hoodies. And Sam the son of Peter built a tower of pure air, and this tower touched the sky, until one morning the men from Wall Street looked at the tower and saw that it was made of air and when the sun set on that day, the airy tower collapsed. But the boys rose up again and mined oil from the earth and heat from the sun to power their calculations. And so the boys ruled over the kingdom, where we must now live in darkness, so that the Algorithm may over and over and over again see the light.PALLID LIBERTARIANSThe problem with libertarians is, they are all pale. Look at your favorite libertarian's skin. It is translucent. These people look like they've never had a single ray of sunlight on their faces. The rubber of their theories had never met the road, they persist in their fantastical realms of new societies aboard offshore tankers, where nothing grows and everything is optimized.AI IS NEITHER DOOM nor BOOM but MEH.AI is overhyped. Nothing about this technology is special. Yes, it'll disrupt stuff and replace some jobs, mostly what David Graeber called bullshit jobs. The whole economy might shift, but we've survived worse, and thrived. Your orthodontist doesn't need a human to write blog posts Come down to earth. Be physical, connect, do normal stuff, floss your teeth, leave the bots to chat amongst themselves.AI is fundamentally boring. It's boring because it's discoverable, and because it's regurgitating the nonsense we've thrown up onto the web. How about instead: be interesting. Make art. Do it offline, in secret, in the flesh, with wild brilliant offline people.AI is homogenizing.This follows from AI being boring. Being boring, it leads us to boring outcomes, lifting only its makers into the outer orbit of abstraction, and abstract riches. Why not: Know what true riches are. Stay weird. Incubate microcosms, live in a bubble, go to church, light incense, foster abandoned motorbikes, sail to Tahiti, start an all-bassoon band.