The Loss of Humanity through Consumerism in WALL-E (2019) [pdf]
aquila.usm.edu
aquila.usm.edu
I can appreciate that some people like to watch movies just for the flashy lights and silly voices, and might have missed the fact that the movie was trying to make some important points about consumerism. I guess I'm having a hard time understanding who this write-up is targeted to, and I feel like I'm missing some key piece of information that would make everything make sense.
I'm all about being elitist but shaming "signposting of basic meaning" doesn't make sense to me. Signposts are great.
Also, audiences are seemingly so emotionally crippled they can't feel emotion without being played music.
That kind of handholding has been around for a long time.
You don't see the climate narrative? The consumerism narrative? It's a literal "off world colony" of degenerated human blobs all watched over by machines of loving grace, who've never seen a live plant let alone looked away from a screen before. It's the most obvious narrative ever. How did you miss it?
It's just straight up hypocrisy.
One wonders if, after all these decades of "fight the evil system" media where it's always the plucky brave underdog individualists against the oppressive corporate/technocrat elite, but often underwritten and funded by those exact types, that they're actually deliberately flaring off those public feelings.
¹: Actually there's probably a gruesome mining multinational that's more similar but they keep their names carefully out of the public consciousness.
It doesn't seem necessary. The USSR didn't flare off public sentiment -the CCP doesn't. In the USSR, the leadership saw that the system was a dead-end and took it upon itself to winddown/transform even before the people were ready. There were "subcultures" but they were no threat to the system.
Now with a 3 billion dollar hole to make up they may or may not continue that magnanimity.
We ignore each other when we're face to face by using our phones. We don't value what other people write because it takes too much time and effort to read. Now we're generating content for each person's tastes. I could go on and on about this, but it's horrible how devalued being a person who wants to contribute to society has become.
We are just dealing with an individualist Tower of Babel accelerated by technology, consumerism and mass media. It's come to its inevitable conclusion.
> "personal" and "communal" seem opposed.
Sure. They always will be to some extent. I need to think of a better word. A healthy society is made from people being personal, as in expressing themselves, even if it is somewhat awkward or unattractive at times, because it leads to curiosity and life. Now it's all too easy to be a passive consumer, which is not really personal at all.
> Society functions better when "norms" are held across enough of the population, when there's shared experience.
I think it's even stronger than that - how can you have a society without norms? The role of older people is to maintain them, but now everyone has surrogate parents and grandparents.
I'm not really sure why you would think this. Hackers use tools to amplify their intent/will. Hackers are also human beings, who generally are interested in cutting the drudgery out of their lives. The fascination seems obvious.
> We're pretty much fucked
This opinion strikes me as the classic case of "I don't like how other people are (or are going to be) living their lives. How dare they!". If mostly everyone is comfortable, happy and (within reason) has access to all the things they want, why is this so offensive to you?
As we (hopefully) approach a post-scarcity, AI-supported society, I totally agree that the average level of insularity will increase dramatically. So many of our day-to-day interactions are solely due to us needing to (begrudgingly) cooperate to live our lives, and people will just opt-out of those interactions. But that frees up so much time to spend with the ones we actually want to socialize with.
In such a future, there's nothing stopping you from "maintaining your humanity" with other like-minded individuals. Inflicting hardship on others is not a requirement for that.
> A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.
Why do many smart humans use so much of their time devising ways to have more sex? Because fulfilling the instinctive urge is pleasurable on a different level than intellectual work. Maybe for the AI, pursuit of its core directive is similarly pleasurable in an axiomatic way.
I see what you did there
"Properly designing" the AI is still an open problem however, which is known as the "alignment problem".
honestly i'll be happy when we collectively get over this lame hype