2025-11-20 04:07:00
I was never that into social media, I forgot constantly to create accounts to all things.
But what was there was distracting me. It made me worse at everything else and stopped me from getting things done.
So, some years ago, I deleted all the accounts I had. It was good, but it wasn't enough.
My problem was, and is, consumption. Unchecked, unfiltered consumption of things.
Because there are so many things! If left unchecked, I feel like I could go on forever if I didn't had things to do. That's not what I want in my life!
As I understand it, there is this thing called the default mode network. It activates when you don't do things. Left to daydream and to wander, the mind build it's sense of self. (Editing to add: this is not completely true. This is the self-construction hypothesis that asserts this, but it's not entirely understood. This is what I was referencing but I did it wrong sorry.)
But my thought is that one establishes one-self in the world when doing things. Origami, drawing, cooking, walking some routes, hanging out - all of these build and establish one self not only to you but to the world around.
Passive unchecked consuming not only makes me distracted and less prone to focus. It makes me less me. Less of the things I like doing and more a statistic.
If only I could tell how to escape this and to be. But I don't know. I know deleting social media is a very good step, and likely the most significant one. But it's not enough. It's important to reduce in general consumption around, and to start doing things. At least for me I think.
2025-11-19 07:06:00
I’ve made YouTube videos for ten years, but I can’t do it anymore. I can no longer tolerate the abhorrent things YouTube and Google have gotten up to in the last year.
They’ve never been great. When I started in 2016 through 2024, they made a lot of terrible decisions. But these were more obnoxious and annoying than anything. But starting in late 2024 and especially in 2025 they’ve upped their game, or lowered it, becoming a truly disgusting organization, a fetid stink of a company on top of a putrid pile of awful tech bros and social media cancers.
There’s a lot to cover, so we’ll go over this in a list, starting when I first noticed them.
In 2023, YouTube declared war on ad blockers. This may sound like a strange thing for a creator to complain about, ads are where I make my money. But YouTube chose not to take prisoners, and they didn’t care about innocents caught in the crossfire. Not only did they disable videos for anyone using any ad blocking program, they also disabled videos for a lot of people who didn’t use any. Suddenly a lot of my viewers couldn’t watch my videos. In a move made to make more money, I certainly lost it, as more people left YouTube or found other ways of blocking ads, emboldened by the site’s terrible behavior.
This is something they continue into late 2025. You may have read stories earlier this year about a loophole that lets Firefox users get around this ad block blocking. Well, YouTube found a way to shut this loophole, which again affected a lot of innocents.
This move to restrict users who use ad blockers coincides with a big push into place more and longer ads into videos. Earlier this year, I got a message from YouTube telling me that they had enabled “Automatic Ad Place” on all of my videos, without my consent.
Let me back up: creators have two ways of putting ads in videos – they can place them manually or automatically. If you choose the automatic option, YouTube will place about two or three ads every minute. Placing them manually meant I could put one or two in the whole video, depending on how long it was. But starting in March 2025, they automatically placed ads on all my videos, newly uploaded ones AND old ones. You are able to turn these ads off, but only individually by editing the videos one by one. I spent hours going through my backlog of videos disabling ads I didn’t place.
But this only affects when the video stops to show ads. I have no say over how long the ads actually are, and very little say over what they show. I turned off political ads, gambling ads, alcohol ads, anything showing crappy mobile games. Whether they honored this, I have no idea.
Around the same time, YouTube started going all-in on AI. Creators saw this through the “Inspiration” tab in the Creator Studio, where we upload and edit videos. This section looks at your videos and gives you suggestions for what videos to make next based on what would be most popular. The recommendations were terrible, always giving me the same clickbait garbage like “10 Hottest Women in Games!” and “These Are The WORST Indie Games EVER!” I feel dirty just for typing those titles here.
But it doesn’t stop there. Not only did they give you titles, this “feature” would also generate an entire script, voice over, and a thumbnail. LGR has an overview of this on his second channel if you’re interested.
Sure, I could just not use it, and I don’t. But this points to three other problems. The first is that YouTube is absolutely taking all of my videos and using them to train their AI without my consent. The second is that other creators have no problem using this. The site is now flooded with these zero effort abominations that take traffic away from those who actually put effort into making a decent video. Others see this crap and they stop watching YouTube entirely.
And third, well, it turns out this genAI isn’t entirely optional. We’ll come back to this.
Throughout 2025, websites, apps, and services across the internet have had age verification schemes forced on them in the name of protecting children. Ironic, considering the current President of the United States is the biggest child molester in human history and the most popular video game in the world is little more than an all-you-can-molest buffet for pedophiles. Most sites require users to upload a photo of their ID. YouTube requires this for creators, something I deeply regret ever doing.
But for users, that’s a harder sell. YouTube’s solution? AI, what else? YouTube will look at what videos you watch, and somehow determine your age based on that. Sounds stupid? That’s because it is. What kinds of videos people watch has little correlation with their age, and sure enough, people are already being blocked from certain videos based on this AI algorithm.
At the same time, YouTube randomly turned on Restricted Mode for thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of users. This meant that countless videos were hidden for them, videos with bad words like ‘poopyhead’ and harmful content like trans people existing. Phew, dodged a bullet there. YouTube didn’t tell anyone that Restricted Mode was turned on, and they were missing videos without even knowing it, including to channels they were subscribed to.
YouTube suspended Donald Trump’s account in January 2021 after his retroactively successful insurrection. This set off a wave of far right-wing accounts getting banned for spreading election lies, which in turn forced YouTube to moderate other conspiracy theory channels, namely those pushing vaccine misinformation. Trump later sued, then got re-elected in 2024. And would you like at that! YouTube agreed to settle! And, purely coincidentally, trust me bro, at the same time they announced they were unbanning election deniers. And anti-vaxxers.
How many creators are allowed to come back we don’t know. But we do know that this applies to every single account previously banned. Every. Single. One. It took years to convince YouTube to do something about these horrible hate- and misinformation-spreading accounts. And with the snap of a finger, they’re all welcome back with open arms.
This was the final straw for me, the moment I read about this I decided I was done. But any doubts I may have developed were put to rest with plenty more horrible things.
Also as part of that settlement, YouTube agreed to pay Trump $24.5 million. $22 million of that is going towards Trump’s unapproved and unsupervised creation of the Epstein Ballroom, which likely saw lead and asbestos clouds choke DC because the construction crew didn’t bother containing it.
The other $2.5 million will be donated to the American Conservative Union and conservative writer Naomi Wolf.
That is a bribe. This is as blatant as it can possibly get. Trump sues YouTube, Trump becomes President, YouTube gives him and his friends millions of dollars and welcomes those same people back on their platform to make it go away. We’re seeing the same thing with CBS, NBC, Target, Amazon, and many other corporations bowing down to Trump threats, giving millions of dollars to him and his friends for approvals of mergers, FCC licenses, and whatever else they want.
It doesn’t get any more blatant than this. I mean, it literally can’t.
In August 2025, two creators discovered YouTube was using AI to alter their videos without their consent, and without telling them. This might be even more horrific and terrifying than the bribe. You can read about it here or watch the video of the creators in question talking about it here.
The short version is that YouTube used AI to “enhance” the videos of Rick Beato and Rhett Shull. YouTube used an AI smoothing filter that made the videos look like they were AI generated, and didn’t tell Beato, Shull, or their viewers that they were doing it. They only admitted to it after the two made videos proving it happened, later claiming it was only a “limited test.”
Their excuses are irrelevant. They’ve opened Pandora’s box; they’ve told the world that they can and will edit videos after they’ve been uploaded, and will not tell creators or viewers. You can’t trust anything you see anymore, even from creators who adamantly do not use AI. Sure, it’s “just” an AI smoother today, but tomorrow they could put an ad straight in the video, or remove something they don’t like. Speaking of...
YouTube channel CyberCPU Tech posted a couple of videos showing how to get around Windows requiring a Microsoft account, and how to get around Windows 11’s hardware requirements. Neither of these things is against Microsoft’s terms of service and they’re completely legal. Yet YouTube removed both videos anyway. The creator of these videos wasn’t told why there were taken down at first, he had to contact YouTube, and only after days of waiting did he get a (clearly AI-generated) response saying that the videos were a violation “of Harmful or Dangerous Content which prohibits content that encourages or promotes behavior that encourages dangerous or illegal activities that risk serious physical harm or death” which barely makes any grammatical sense, much less common sense.
Worse still, journalists Nikita Mazurov and Jonah Valdez reported that YouTube removed over 700 videos documenting Israeli war crimes and human rights violations in Palestine.
YouTube has a long history censoring videos, but this feels more surgical, more insidious than past instances. Usually they demonetize a video. This means that not only does that video not generate ad revenue, but the site’s algorithm also doesn’t promote it or even place it in the subscription feeds of those subscribed to that channel. It’s rare, or at least it was rare, that they’d outright remove a video. It took years of campaigning to get YouTube to take down conspiracy videos and anti-vaxxer misinformation. Yet these videos were removed within days or weeks of being uploaded.
I cannot in good conscious continue to use a platform that is going out of its way to be a Saturday morning cartoon villain.
In a just world, at best, none of this would have ever happened. At worst, creators would unite and sue YouTube, winning easily. But this isn’t a just world, is it? So YouTube gets to do whatever they want, and most creators will accept it because there is no viable alternative.
Not me. From now on, all my new videos will be posted exclusively to Peertube. There are no ads, so I don’t make any money from these videos. I make videos because I like doing it, not because I want to be rich and famous. I’ve uploaded some of my old YouTube videos to my Peertube and removed those from the YouTube account. In the future, I’ll be transferring more of my videos over and when that’s done, the YouTube channel itself will be deleted.
My old channel, Triple Iris, already has many of its videos on Peertube. I’ll be transferring videos over the next couple of months, and that YouTube channel will also be deleted when the process is complete.
I left Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Wordpress and I was fine. Something tells me leaving YouTube won’t be any different.
2025-11-19 05:56:00
My social media feed has been consumed by indie TTRPG insiders processing the emotional impact of Sam Sorenson's Over/Under on their lives.
To those unfamiliar, Sam attempted to create a real-time play-by-post wargame set on Mothership’s best module, but he accidentally created an enormous text-only LARP instead. Ramanan’s summary of the game is the most digestible, as an informed and well-spoken ‘outsider’ to the madness himself. Research freaks should instead dive into Jack Shirai’s intricate daily summary of events.
To me and a handful of others (shoutout to Mondo Terminal, Paige Laux, and "Da Weed Whackerz") this deeply moving roleplay experience was quite familiar. Despite the gaming community’s outpouring of joyful surprise, this was not the first time such a social metagame - which I’m calling “Live Text Roleplay (LTRP)”1 - has grown from another game’s soil.
I wrote this article to ensure it won’t be the last. I will teach you how to grow your own.
LTRP was my primary hobby for the entirety of my late 20s. I’ve watched identical RP cultures emerge out of half a dozen West Marches discord servers running all sorts of TTRPG systems (5e, Lancer, Fabula, Masks). I’ve written 110,448 posts across four such servers - an average of 38 posts per day, every day, since 2017.2
At the end of O/U, folks joked that this game would lead to several marriages. I can say from experience that's correct. I know of four separate households composed of folks who met playing these games, and half a dozen romantic relationships. I have helped these people move cross-country. I send them christmas presents. I have helped paint their walls. LTRP's ability to foster deep human connections is completely unmatched.
Left: A casual O/U scene in the Smoking Room of The Ember bar.
Right: A four year old scene in which my friends made the mistake of giving Hyx a gun.
Live Text Roleplay is an online synchronous real-time text-first roleplaying event with enough participants to simulate the complexity of a real social environment. Traditionally held on Discord, with text channels corresponding to physical locations in the fictional world (ex., #The_Bar, #The_Hospital, #The_Docks).
The sheer volume of participants allows each character to have their own inner life - lives they keep living when you aren't looking. It feels real because it is real, socially speaking. You aren't simulating a relationship with the people you meet in these games, even when the people themselves are simulated. You are literally building relationships, using the same small talk and vulnerability that fosters connections in your real life. The bleed must be experienced to be believed.
My prior LTRP servers fluctuated between 25 and 80 active participants. O/U hovered around 500. While its incredible size added to its appeal, you don’t need a server that big to evoke a similar mystique. All that matters is that your server has enough active RPers to ensure you can’t keep up with every story. Not knowing some crucial information and not knowing a lot of crucial information is subjectively similar. Most GMs go to great lengths to evoke the feeling that their world is larger and more alive than what their players can see. In LTRP, that is literally true.
While LTRP is technically an offshoot of Play-by-Post, that comparison obscures more than it illuminates. The actions you take in LTRP are constrained by social rules and the fiction, unmediated by formal rules and mechanics. There is no rule preventing your character from existing in multiple places simultaneously or from suddenly acquiring super strength and laser vision. O/U has proven to me that such rules are unnecessary - adults understand the appeal of committing to the bit.
Yes - it's just playing pretend. However, I would strongly advise always layering it atop some sort of game system, so the latter can act as a narrative catalyst. Most of your players are not improv trained. It takes a while to get a sense for how you can help make RP scenes entertaining by setting up conflicts, bits, and intrigue. Most players just walk into a situation with few expectations and look forward to the unpredictable ways their character bounces off of those around them. After spending enough time with the same characters, the outcomes become rote.3 Characters just "do their bits" at one another to predictable results.
In LTRP, some outside force needs to exist that repeatedly and massively shakes up the status quo. In O/U that was the wargame - assassinations, espionage, ARG-triggered mass hysteria. In the prior games I played, these shakeups were triggered by traditional TTRPG sessions - character death & advancement, traveling to new exotic locales, an angry dragon suddenly attacking #The_Town_Gates. Part of what gave the Choke Incursion such terrifying verisimilitude was the way it felt completely outside of anyone's control. It was a thing that was happening to us. Dice can simulate the existence of a wider world full of unpredictable events, but they are merely a substitute. The goal, which LTRP uniquely places within reach, is to actually create a system unstable and complicated enough to cause dramatic consequences no single person intended.
"The Dreamcatcher", one of O/U's diegetic newspapers.
As a vet of the genre, Over/Under taught me that LTRP pairs better with PvP games than Co-Op games.
O/U had considerably less OoC drama compared to all of my prior LTRP experiences. Some of that credit goes to the mods, some to “interested in Mothership” being such an amazing filter for cool people, but some of it also comes down to players having no expectation that the other players in the game were obligated to help them in any way. League of Legends gained its reputation as the most toxic game on earth because of its high time commitment and reliance on a team of competent teammates to succeed. Both of those are equally true of a high-lethality trad TTRPG session.
The vast peace conspiracy I engaged in during O/U felt so much more real when I knew that naive idealism alone was holding it all together. The care we expressed for one another was real because it was personally costly. ‘Against Incentive’ validated yet again.
PvP has its own costs too. It’s much harder to ‘respawn’ players as new characters when their OoC knowledge comes back with them. However, I found O/U’s solutions to this problem satisfactory - make death permanent and the game duration short.4 The bugbears of growing LTRP atop a trad game were much harder to manage - inequality in player capabilities, dissatisfaction with character “builds” tempting players to abandon existing relationships to start fresh, and OoC pressures to make opposed PCs ‘get along’ so the planned sessions could happen all plagued us for years.
Beyond “PvP” and “Cataphract-likes”, I’m not sure what sorts of games are the best soil for a LTRP to grow. I invite you all to organize into the largest group you can and start experimenting!
Sam was spending three to twelve hours a day GMing O/U. That’s obviously insane and unsustainable. I suspect Sam’s grind had a lot to do with the ‘catalyst game’ being almost as real-time as the RP, and his personal involvement being necessary for the resolution of so many types of player actions.
So I beg you - make sure neither of those are true of your game! You want to give your players as few reasons as possible to add to the inevitable pile of PMs.
Any less than that, and you run into problems. The most dedicated players will be able to read every chat, and the game loses its magic. Spaces will become more predictable as the same characters monopolize scenes.5 Instead of walking in on living spaces where characters are already talking, players will be forced to “fish” for scenes by posting opening lines and waiting minutes or hours for another player to take the bait.
You also want as many of your players to be ‘creative types’ as possible, though that’s rarely under your control. Even the most amateur art creates the building blocks of culture - there are MS Paint drawings from the server I played on in 2017 that I reference to this day. Songs, talk radio, newspapers, DJ sets... I doubt I need to sell you on the value of cultural ephemera.
A snippet from "d101.6: The Real Dream" a player-created radio show in Over/Under.
At lower player counts, letting players hide threads can give the erroneous impression that the RP culture is dead. This starts a vicious cycle of reduced RP engagement. O/U had an infinite number of players, so their ability to hide themselves didn’t matter.
A lot of folks also treat RP as a stage performance and object to how threads hide them from their audience.6 Private threads are a necessary evil in espionage games, but note that allowing players to create locked doors will inevitably make your game so… so much hornier.7
Once you have the player count to afford threads, they’re useful as a way to crowdsource compelling RP environments. The popular locations literally rise to the top. Speaking of…
You want to pressure characters to interact with each other by forcing them into limited space. If there’s too little space - too many participants in the same channels - scenes can become hard to follow, though. Luckily, it’s easier to add channels than remove them (the latter feels strange in practice). When you do add channels, make it a rare event. Try not to add more than one or two at a time.
Lastly, remember that you cannot force a channel to be popular. Cultural inertia is a powerful force.
Players want an outlet for live commentary on ongoing scenes. It’s fun to be the peanut gallery. It’s also crucial for consent check-ins before, during, and after scenes.
Additionally, it’s useful for RPers to have a space outside of a scene where they can ask for OoC clarification on their partner’s posts. “What does your character look like?”, “Are you pointing the gun at me or Janice?”, etc.
Include information on your game’s setting, constraints on PC backstories and in-game actions8, what themes are on or off the table, the local RP norms, and the server’s rules. If you’re playing a trad game, include all the usual stuff (character creation, house rules) as well.
By ‘RP norms’, I’m referring to the communication customs that inevitably develop meaning, like text formatting and emoji jargon. For example, the formatting of my posts represent the following:
Present these as guidelines, not rules. Players do interesting things with freedom. As for the emoji jargon, in my servers:
📂 = “I am around and want to RP.” When this emoji vanishes from the post, the poster is no longer looking for a scene partner.
👩👩👧👦 = “I want lots of people to stop by this scene.” We referred to these as “group scenes” in contrast to the much more common 1 on 1 scenes. At higher player counts and lower channel counts, group scenes are presumed by default.
🎬 = “I would like to finish the scene with this post.”
An example "Open"; a post implicitly asking another player to RP with you.
LTRP servers are a digital living room that is always - always - filled with a handful of your close friends. Something you deeply care about could be happening at any time. It's the platonic ideal of a social engagement feed. Communicate your hard cutoff times to your RP partners as early as possible, and stick to them! Knowing when your partner needs to end the scene lets you assist in the scene’s pacing, and gives the writing a more natural flow.
If there are particular topics you're worried might come up, communicate with your scene partners early and often. Check in after emotionally intense scenes.
Yes that’s right I buried the lead it’s all improv you’re that kinda freak now it’s too late you already cried when Mr. Moneybags danced at the ball search your feelings you know it to be true.
Alternatively watch Dropout.tv
“Full” does not mean “when there’s a lot of people there”. The fullness of a channel is determined by the amount of attention it demands of all participants. A channel’s attentional demand is determined by the number of “cameras” an audience needs to keep in mind, and how much each participant’s messages change the status quo.
It’s not a problem for 12+ people to participate in the same scene, assuming they’re keeping up with the pace of conversation and reacting to the same events. When reading a channel becomes too confusing (multiple simultaneous reply chains, fast typers changing the fiction faster than you can react) start a scene in a different place, or open a thread in the same channel.
Crowd scenes are a great example of this principle in action. Short, quippy posts that don’t change the status quo. Everyone present is reacting to the same events.
It’s easy to fall into the habit of “Just Talking” - posting words alone, back and forth. Think about where your character is and what they’re doing. Spend a line or two narrating that in every post. Add kinetic energy to the imagined space.
How does your character sit? What are their nervous tics? Are they multi-tasking? What are their hands doing? Where are they looking? What is their expression?
These sorts of details are first on the chopping block in busy channels, but they’re crucial to adding life to 1-on-1 conversations.
I suspect I’m preaching to the choir here, but still. It’s not a coincidence that the most beloved RP threads of O/U were mostly penned by Lin Codega, award-winning journalist and fantasy author.
If every character begins as a drifter, it takes time for relationships to build enough to result in drama. Skip the slow bits by making your PC invested in other PCs from minute one.
Are you their bodyguard? Secretary? Relative? Enemy? Boss? Have feelings about other people. The NPCs in your backstory will never come up in play. Relationships with other players are visible and dynamic.
The story of a LTRP is about what’s happening now, on screen. One of the most memorable characters I’ve ever seen in an LTRP was “Average Joe”, a 13s-down-the-line Human Fighter with healthy parental relationships. Over the course of a year, we watched this comically unimportant boy be molded into an edgy isekai protagonist by the cruel whims of fate. It ruled. It was sick as hell.
As preached by OSR advice of yore, climbing up from mediocrity produces more compelling arcs than starting cool and remaining cool. Make sure the game you’re playing is the most interesting moment of your character’s life.
A 'Height Chart', a cherished LTRP tradition.
It’s been so wonderful to watch hundreds of people experience the magic of Live Text Roleplay for the first time. I have seen so many bluesky takes calling Over/Under magic in a bottle, impossible to replicate, as they come down from the high.
All of those people are wrong. We can keep playing these games whenever we want. Some of us never stopped. If you want to, you can keep going. The wonder, terror, and joy are still out there, within reach.
Just try not to slack off too much at work, okay?
————————————————————————————
In contrast to “Live Action Role Playing.” Not the same thing as this Roll to Doubt article, which is about using chat rooms to conduct traditional small party TTRPG games.↩
I recognize the picture this paints of me, and am happy to assure you all that I do, in fact, do other things. I am in shape, love baking, and dote on my bicycle as if it were a small child.↩
This is another reason O/U's one month time limit played into its success.↩
This comes with the notable upside of allowing your players to, eventually, return to a normal sleep schedule.↩
Imagine if the yuri pit were the only people playing O/U. That’s what low player count LTRPs feel like.↩
This was a big cultural shift for me in O/U. I wanted every scene to be as public as possible, to the detriment of opsec. I was also conditioned to treat emoji reactions as twitter likes - I crave them as a form of validation.↩
“Why do people act so horny in text RP?” is beyond the scope of this guide. Dissertation-tier question, which I suspect would uncover depressing truths.↩
GMs need to communicate up front that extreme character consequences require consent. Nothing is off the table with a RP partner you trust, but trust needs to be earned.↩
2025-11-19 04:43:00
Here's a photo of a tipped-over Bird scooter:
"Please help me up!" it says on the underside of the scooter's main platform.
I've been thinking a lot about the ambiguity of human oversight and control in the "delivery robot" industry in west LA, where a lot of those devices are being tested. Living near delivery robots - or, rather, live human labor that is being marketed as autonomous and robot-like - is new for me. Usually, I deal with objects pretending to be people. They pretend either superficially, like the scooter above, or robustly and insidiously, like voice chat assistants.
Companies depicting their live-ops services as if they are people is, I think, the most harmful form of "pretend person." Voice UIs in particular hijack the human instinct to understand words as thought, and to treat thinking beings with sympathy and trust. After spending a lot of time making a two small Alexa games at a pair of game jams years and years ago, I grew to understand that even a relatively simple human-like voice UI can be extraordinarily manipulative.
Now that people can "speak to" an LLM, I think the issue is a lot more urgent. My strongest crank conviction is that we should regulate the use of software 'personalities' as disruptively as possible. I believe that it should be compulsory to disclose directly to the user - live, during a user session - when a voice assistant or audio UI is not a real person. After the seemingly-endless series of stories we got this past summer and fall about LLM-related deaths, I believe that text personalities like LLM chatbots also deserve extremely disruptive warnings, disclosures, and reminders.
We're very, very unlikely to ever get that kind of regulation. I'll probably always remain convinced that we needed it, though. Anything that can break the social spell of a conversational interface is beneficial to the humans who use it.
The other side of this earnestly-held crank opinion is that I don't have a problem when people are extremely rude to voice assistants. I think that when you have the full context on what they are, who made them, why, and for whom, you must grow to think of them as essentially tech company owners and investor boards wearing a little mask. Alexa is Jeff Bezos wearing a mask. You shouldn't feel the need to be polite to his little mask.
The trick is that I do reserve the right to judge people on the why and how of their rudeness. I don't think you should call the Alexa voice UI a cunt. I do think you should feel free to snap "Shut the fuck up, Jeff," at any Alexa product you're annoyed with. (There are certainly people who are rude to female voice assistants because they fantasize that they are able to berate, control, and demand service from a woman.) It would be self-protective for us all to be more distrustful of, and ruder to, tech company voice UIs. It should feel preposterous to extend Jeff's little mask the same courtesy you extend a real person.
And finally, to return to the delivery "robots" I wrote about yesterday: in a world where we need to protect one another from tech products harmfully pretending to be people, and where aggression and rudeness to voice UIs can be a perfectly good way of training yourself to distrust them... well, in that situation, it's even more insidious for companies to pretend their people are "robots". I believe that we have no hope of government regulation here, and that unions are probably going to be the last line along which human transparency might be defended. If your live human services are being sold to a customer as "autonomous", and if you can organize, I think you should demand that the company make your presence known to its customers.
The difficulty of unionizing teleoperation services at companies with more money than some nations is its own can of worms... but alongside an effort to break these companies up some more, I think it could have an impact. (I gotta keep telling myself that, anyway, because the alternative is extremely depressing!!)
These days, when I watch movies with voice interfaces or "AI" assistants in them, I find myself pretty surprised by how many fictional worlds seem to be full of people who never experience any ambiguity about whether they're talking to a person or to software. Everyone in a sci-fi setting has usually fully internalized the rules about what is or isn't "real" in their conversational world, and they usually all have a social script for how they're "supposed" to treat AI voice assistants.
Characters in modern film and TV are almost never rude or cruel to voice assistants except in scenes where they're being misunderstood by voice recognition. People in stories like these rarely ever get confused about whether something is a human or an AI unless that's, like, the entire point of the story. But in real life, we're constantly forced to interact with an unwanted voice UI, or a phone scammer voice that's pretending to be real. I have found myself really missing moments like these in movies, where humans express any material awareness of the false voices they interact with. Who made their voice assistant? How do they feel about that company or person? Are they ever tricked by a voice that is false when they expected it to be a real, live human?
I've also found myself increasingly frustrated by movies which use AI as a metaphor for real live human marginalization. The future is here, and "AI" is Sam Altman wearing a little mask; it is not a marginalized person. (It's possible that your delivery "robot" is actually a marginalized person, though!)
The reason I wrote this post at all was because I saw the new Running Man movie last week, and it contained a scene where the protagonist behaved toward an AI interface in a shockingly neutral way. It is so neutral that I was surprised, in the moment, that the script hadn't used this interaction to do a little more storytelling about the protagonist or about AI assistants in the world he lives in.
We all learned the forms of our classic stories too well over the last few decades. There is still too much urgency to understand all voice UI as either a person, as a Data or a Pinoochio. Or we understand it as as Mabel Roddenberry's voice on the Enterprise - a voice with no obvious material or social history, just existing to lubricate a scene or a plot.
I still haven't seen much media that reflects the way I actually feel about conversational interfaces in the real world - frustrated, tricked, manipulated, and inconvenienced. And I haven't seen any media at all recently about the equally insidious trend of real human labor being marketed as if it is an autonomous system.
I hope we don't have to wait too long to see some fiction that reflects the future-as-it-actually-arrived!
2025-11-18 12:59:00
Friday I shared a thought re: how I wanted to make stuff going forward.
The gist, if you didn't click through, is that I want to make the daily post a bit more writerly/freeform and push the linksy bits to a newsletter thinger that goes out once a week because the thing I always wanted to do was make a living being a guy who makes nice things for the internet and boy howdy I'm just going to fucking do it.
Anyway I thought about that thought, and the reasons behind it, and the reasons behind why I thought it was important to announce the thought and and and all damn weekend because I have never been guilty of underthinking anything. So, yeah, I am as self-obsessed as the next guy (if not more so) but it's because I actually put a lot of effort into doing these posts. I like them and I like people who read blogs (like you!) and moreover I making stuff for people who like stuff because it seems like no one likes stuff anymore.
I put a lot of effort into everything I love to do, actually. I always have. But because I've always loved to do a lot of things and grew up with that perfectionist mindset, there's always been a pain underneath that love.
For a while I thought the cure was loving things less (because I have a broken brain and thought the lesson was that the world desensitizes us over time, like water smoothing a rock over the course of millennia), but over time I realized it was the inverse —— that the cure is loving as many things as possible but doing fewer things with everything I have, and having more everything to give. As Jerry Maguire might say: "fewer clients, less money."
Anyway, the gist behind the gist is that the list of things I do with 100% of my whatever has gotten smaller as I've gotten older (and soberer, and healthier, and mellower, and happier) and that reducing has helped me understand something elementary and fundamental: love takes a lot out of a mf.
The colour wall at the top is all the colours that the Washington Wizards use in their uniforms, by the way. I was looking through hex codes for certain uniform colours the other day and found that one particularly soothing.
🌲 gonna
🌼 go
🌱 to
🌳 sleep
🌷 now
Be good to yourself.
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