Turning Cranks With No Thanks

I have seen the greatest minds of my generation copied, co-opted, ripped off, written over, memified, stolen, and misapplied whenever they put their best efforts into the work they post on the internet.

I have no illusions that my own work has become grist for the mill. I’ve seen it. Most of my readers are robots. They steal and repost without attribution. They hotlink and use up my bandwidth allowance. They feed my words into their models as training sets, without permission.

It is no wonder that my creative output has stalled. I share, hoping to make connection and find love and appreciation. To increase my own social capital. It’s why I got into making music. It’s why I learned web design. It’s why I write. It’s why I draw.

But I don’t. Not anymore. It’s a zero-sum game now, for me at least. Creativity was my bread and oil. But now it’s an input to the machine. Original art is now available at the push of a button. And I can’t help but feel culpable just by putting my best out there and making it available to all those voracious vacuum cleaners. I can’t control the bots or influence their masters.

Art is now ephemeral and cheap, because the economy of art is in a race to the bottom. Anybody hoping to make a living from it risks starvation. And I can’t help but feel my generation made this happen, one because generative art is an interesting problem to solve, and two that our own works just fed the grinder.

The fully automated future is just fucked.

Mastodon Test, Formatted

So, I changed the ActivityPub plugin format type back to “Note”, have enabled Media federation, and am testing the conveyance of formatting to Mastodon.

  • Here is an unordered list.
  • This is option two of UL. Are you Elle?
  • And I like 3. Three for me. None for you.
    • Boo-hoo. Nested two.
    • And this too.
    • Oooh-wooh-wooo.

This block of text is in bold.

This block is in italics, but not because it’s Italian. In Spanish, that’s called “letras bastardillas“, but that says nothing about its parentage. Don’t get it twisted. There’s also green in the background. Them fatherless kids is wild.

This block is preformatted text.
Hey kid, I'm a computer.
Stop all the downloadin'.
Help computer.

My Heading

Anywho, we’re doing weird things here at Phaysis Dot Com.

Below is an image of something from the media library.

Gettin’ ready for tHANKSGIVING bok bok gobble boggle

@rufus @rufus wrote this, but you know that already.

And so ends our tour.
Please exit through the gift shop.