Pretty much immediately after the 2016 election, I blocked Facebook. I didn't delete my account. I disabled the newsfeed with a browser plugin, making the platform an almost write-only medium. Something just felt wrong about it. Like it was too needy, as it slid into and then well beyond tabloid territory. Too engaging, but in a draining, physically sickening way before finally falling asleep to the pale blue glow. It felt strained. Frenzied. Fried. I half-joked that there was a dangerous adversarial AI on the back end and it didn't seem like a good idea to connect to it.
I hadn't been able to bring myself to really connect to the election itself either. I felt bad about it, like I should have been engaged and working on it somehow, but it seemed so weird and extra meaningless. How could this nutty thing actually be important? I knew it was wrong, but I did it anyway (partly because we were fighting to keep our cooperative homes and that was tiring in its own way). I turned off the US election because it felt like a reality show. And I don't watch reality shows.
Now we know that there really was an adversarial AI on the other side. It was shepherded or cultivated or mined* by some humans, who were building a giant "vote crazy" knob and cranking it up to 11.
The AI on the other sides is still evolving. What's it learning now? Can it study quietly at its desk without disturbing others? What is it watching and listening to? What does it see and hear? What's it reading these days? What is it preparing for? Is it a seasonal elections worker? Does it get tired? Do we get tired of it?
