Inverse Law of Bullshit

I recently (within the last month) was on an online meeting that used all the “right” buzzwords about generative, transformative, interactive. It was…

Ah, hell, you know where this is going. It was the most stale top-down format you could “imagine.” (You don’t have to imagine it, you’ve been subjected to it most of your life.) And I knew it would be. For reasons that must do with my unacknowledged longings for

a) punishment

b) hope-y change-y

I attended. And I did not call it like I see it, because I am a coward, and because it really wouldn’t make any difference, so why bother pissing off friends? They’re beyond help.

I just wish they would be a little more honest about what they want, what they are actually doing. But I suspect they can’t bring themselves to admit that the things you would need to do to actually be generative, transformative, interactive would require real innovation, real de-centering, really not getting what you perceive to be your rightful amount of attention etc. Because that would come with a realisation that it’s all just word-salad, actually no more praiseworthy (less praiseworthy, if you think about it) than all of the corporate promises of net-zero emissions that we can easily see through and deride.

The smugosphere, in other words. And it’s so very very strong, so very everywhere, that fighting it is futile.

This species is going down. And the people who are nominally smart enough to do something about it, the ones who have benefitted enormously from the at-the-point-of-guns, at-the-point-of-algorithms extractive, hierarchical systems are capable of what? Doing enough to kid themselves that they are not actively replicating its standard operating systems by throwing around the latest buzzwords (transformative, generative, interactive, whatever) while behaving exactly as they did 30 years ago.

I think there is an inverse law of bullshit here. In that if you are really wanting to be interactive, generative, transformative etc, then you just have to DO IT. You should shut up about praising yourself, about spouting all those nice-sounding but actually empty words, and think about the format of your 90 minute ego-foddering wank-fests. And then do things differently, even if, gasp, it costs you attention-tokens.