Silicon Valley Poetry Magnets

THE MAGNET-FESTO

MAGNETS ARE THE O.G. A.I.What is AI? AI is scissors and paste for all the words of the internet. The boys in hoodies slurp up the words and slop them out into a cut-paste house of cards. The business model? More, more, more. More cut-paste code propping up more cut-paste apps. More startup pitches. Slop Begets Slop.The Silicon Valley Poetry Magnets are the original AI: a cut-paste project of buzz-slop words. Except with fewer words. Which means less slop, less global warming per poem. The magnets are certified 100% Microsoft-free financing. The scissors and the paste are my sweat and tears. The magnets are made in America. 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. 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 friend 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 and stars 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 consume light.PALLID LIBERTARIANSThe problem with libertarians is, they are all pale. They feed on algorithms, they have never seen the sun. 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 boring. Nothing special. Maybe it'll disrupt stuff and replace some jobs. Won't cure disease or take us to the moon. We've been there besides, survived worse, and thrived. Your orthodontist doesn't need AI. The antidote? Be a physical being, connect, floss your teeth, leave the bots to chat amongst themselves.Being boring, AI leads only to boring outcomes and abstract riches denominated in dollars. Why not instead: make art, stay weird, incubate microcosms, go to church, light incense, foster abandoned motorbikes, sail to Tahiti, start an all-bassoon band.