Remember in the olden days for doctor’s visits you had to fill out all of these forms 15 minutes before the appointment and then fill them out again and then repeat them verbally after that? Thanks to technological advances, it now takes 30 minutes to fill out the same forms the same number of times because you also have to download two apps and create two passwords and four identity queries only to have the doctor tell you to lay off the technology because you have carpal tunnel syndrome.

Oh, and then they want you to fill out a survey. The process is demonstrably slower thanks to technology. That’s not precisely true – it is demonstrably slower because of all the ads and popups and other digital demons trying to monetize the technology. And then there is the technology trying to monetize itself by creating unnecessary layers. I get to update this website in WordPress, but with another website I work on, it was constructed in WordPress with another app called Elementor that someone got someone to pay for because it did something that the original app didn’t do and now we are back to 30 minutes for a 15 minute task.

There is so much sludge on the internet now that opening links takes forever – I was trying to register for a conference and by the time the form came up there were three because I must have hit the button three times in my impatience. Here’s my favorite: If you ever try to look at once of these listicles on Ranker or Weird History you better be sure that the list is no more than 12 items long, because otherwise the endless hulking sludge of ads will kill the listicle before you ever get to Number 13, leaving you with a whiteout screen with nothing on it. Only way out of the whiteout is to quit the app and reboot.

I think Odysseus was surfing the web rather than the Aegean and Tyrrhenian because he got whacked by more popups than my YouTube account. He goes from the 15 minute task pre-AI to the 30 minute task post-AI to 10 years getting from Troy to Ithaca without even visiting Saratoga Springs. At least at the movie theater all the ads were before the movie.

And since Odysseus the movie had a minutelong scandal a couple weeks back, here is my take:

As a historian, I am sometimes critical of movies that are replete with anachronisms (Braveheart) but on other occasions (Elizabeth and Marie Antoinette) they aren’t true to historical events but they somehow manage to capture the essence of the historical figure. So, I am not a purist, and I am less likely to be a purist about a lengthy lyric transmitted orally for five hundred years. The tiny fragment from the third century BC currently on display in New York City has three lines that aren’t in the standard text, so we are not dealing with hard evidence here. I do agree that Nolan removed the humor (and most of the sex) from the lyric, but he didn’t pervert or subvert the essence of the story. (also John Leguizamo steals everything he is in.). He also avoided a surprising amount of CGI, like in the Giants scene where he used actual people tall and short.

The Odyssey is set at the beginning of the Bronze Age collapse, caused by the ill-defined “Sea Peoples” referenced in the movie, which leads me to posit: AI are the Sea Peoples of today. AI are doing their best to precipitate our collapse through misinformation and the pandemic of endless mediocrity. Not to mention making everything take longer and go slower.

Now, if this is a parallel to the Bronze Age collapse, we should have first seen the collapse of the palatial economies and ensuing diaspora of craftspersons and landscapers. But the damn McMansions are still there with their armies of workers. Everywhere.

Nowadays we have a very visible ultrarich predator class, which would seem to parallel the Bronze Age rulers on their own private islands throughout the Aegean and Mediterranean, and, indeed, private islands are a thing. But their economic collapse has not happened. Granted, the predator class has seized power and is trying desperately to win a culture war by making everything dumber and gaudier.

And more boring. AI will like totally try to sell you the most popular thing even when you instruct it otherwise, because it is impressed ONLY be quantities of data. Not by quality. Quality can be singular and special and lonely, which is the opposite of a big dataset. So, I asked AI for “museums that only had a few objects.” AI gave me “tiny museums” like the Mmuseumm in New York which is an elevator shaft full of ordinary objects. I corrected its error and AI was very apologetic, acknowledged I was correct and then came up with a couple museums in the UK. So I had to prompt AI for a third time, telling it to look in Japan. It finally came up with the Teshima and Chichu, which is what I was looking for. It also corrected me that the Miho (below) actually has a large collection, even though it only displays a small number of items. So, three for me, one for AI.

Ok that AI adventure was a bit of a slog – hard to get away from the stuff that is highly advertised and thus a bigger dataset. I mean you could fix that, but that is not necessarily in the interest of the predator class – they need you dumb. And they need you to think AI graphics look good. If I was 13, I would think they look good. If I was a gamer, I would think they look like game graphics, which have a cachet. So, a contemporary counterpart of the Bronze Age collapse – a dumbing down of culture – does seem plausible.

Teshima art museum – home to one artwork. The artwork is also made of water. Like AI is. But less water.

Just learned today that AI can manage country and pop songs, but is a complete disaster with Baroque counterpoint. I guess music isn’t math after all…