Shriram | Week 7 | $50 Messi for Men
→ If you want to edit photos (and you do), Adobe products are likely your best friend. The most popular (and perhaps the most feature-rich) editing software is Adobe Lightroom, which, until recently, could be purchased for $150. Recently, however, rather than being a one-time purchase, Adobe products are now subscription-based. Lightroom is now $120 per year, meaning that users would now have to continuously pay for access to a product that they will never truly own. In outrage, Adobe users… obediently handed over their money. Every year. Adobe, raking in millions of additional dollars per year, has been perfectly content to do this with all of its products, becoming yet another participant in a trend of extracting as much money as possible from each customer. Arguments against media piracy grow weaker by the day.
→ It’s night, and I’m in New York City—perhaps the most celebrated place in America. I’m tired. All around me, bright flashing LED and LCD and OLED screens openly brawl in the streets for my attention. A perfume ad. A ten-second clip of a new Disney movie. Nike. A blaze of pink and green light that I don’t quite remember. The new Google Pixel with Material You; the same product is being shown to millions of others, but it’s designed exclusively for You. Another Disney clip. The sun is down, but the sky is disturbingly bright. I’m only able to notice this by glimpsing the cityscape as the sight occasionally interrupts the advertisements. It dawns on me that one of the greatest cities in one of the greatest nations in the world has been given the same purpose as a series of increasingly flashy magazine ads. I’ve heard in some it strikes awe, but for me it was more disquieting.
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| we are being sold EVERYTHING—even Messi: The Fragrance. |
→ ✨ You’re absolutely right — AI isn’t just showing up everywhere, it’s fundamentally altering the way we communicate. And it’s made some people in Silicon Valley very, very rich. It’s also exposed an incredibly concerning trait: people will sacrifice everything for convenience. Today’s online landscape is littered with AI-written texts almost equal in number to human-written ones. AI art plagues emails, photography, and even social media. We as a society have shown that we are willing to pay billions of dollars for it, and companies are more than happy to oblige. As art without need for creation, it is the ultimate form of instant gratification. It takes us one step closer to the pleasure cube—Robert Nozick’s experience machine—with the only difference being that it cannot synthesize humanity and as such it is inherently limited. This does not seem to matter to customers.
It’s not easy to develop AI technology from the ground up. It’s not easy to build a massive corporation, and it certainly isn’t easy to create one of the most robust image-editing programs of all time. Without passion, these projects undeniably wouldn’t have been possible.
But somewhere, I fear we’ve lost control of our greed—we have simply lost the plot.
Yes, affirm! I do want to edit photos at the low, low price of $120 per year! That’s $600 for five years… $1,200 for ten…. No matter how beautiful the photos turn out afterwards, it doesn’t seem quite worth it to spend so much money editing pixels. And it sure isn’t worth spending millions of dollars to have your product displayed amongst all the consumer-bait advertisements on epilepsy-inducing billboards at Times Square!
ReplyDeleteSomething even more dystopian: A.I is everything! Everywhere! All at once! Scrolling online sometimes feels like I’m getting sucked into an A.I. vacuum. Struggling with class? Try our A.I. website that can instantly summarize lecture notes because you’re incapable of doing so yourself! Want to embarrass your friends? Stick their picture into our video generating app and have them doing an almost grotesque dance, all as the app uses your friend’s face to train its models. And don’t get me started on “Kirk-ifying” people. I’d rather not see Charlie Kirk’s face edited on my peers… All for what? A quick laugh and a new meme-able picture to send around? Take me back to when creative people edited amalgamations of poorly drawn art and pixelated graphics. Can we get any more soulless?
Like you said, we’re swimming aimlessly in the soup of self-indulgence and corporate greed and all sorts of fun stuff. Running away to a log cabin in the middle of nowhere to escape from all the overwhelming aspects of society doesn’t seem like such a bad idea after all.
Hi Shriram! I thought your example of customers paying $120 annually for an Adobe subscription instead of a one-time payment of $150 for Adobe Lightroom was quite interesting, as I think I’ve only ever used Adobe products that didn’t require any kind of payment in the past.
ReplyDeleteRegarding your take on the concept of Times Square, I can completely understand how the endless number of bright, flashing billboards can be disconcerting. When seeing Times Square myself for the first time last summer when I visited New York with my family, I have to say I was a little underwhelmed, as I too have heard that the sight of it is absolutely astonishing to some. I wouldn’t exactly say I was disappointed, but I think that the positively insane amount of people everywhere I looked was enough to lower my opinion of the place.
Lastly, I could not agree more about the way you relate AI technology to society’s increasing need for instant gratification in every aspect of life. This is also why so many are against TikTok, as the app has literally reconditioned users to expect information and results almost instantly, which is unrealistic on so many levels. People now grow lazy at the thought of reading a two-page news article, because they would much rather watch a 45-second TikTok that provides them with the same result. It’s gotten to the point where someone once told me that watching a movie felt productive to them, because it was better than doomscrolling for hours. It’s definitely unsettling to imagine what the future holds for society, given the current direction it is heading in.
My family and I visited New York City just this past break, and of course we had to visit Times Square and Broadway; they’re staples of Manhattan! I went into it with the knowledge that they indeed are going to be covered with advertisements of every product under the sun, but I didn’t expect how bright everything was going to be. I remember looking at the ground (it was around 8:00 pm, fully pitch dark otherwise) and realizing it was almost entirely lit up like it was daylight. The “city that doesn’t sleep” has, in practice, created artificial daylight. And it’s powered by Zootopia 2 advertisements. (Seriously. Why are there so many????)
ReplyDeleteThe practices of capitalism, consumerism, and materialism don’t seem to be in any position of slowing down in the United States, perpetuated by every new technological advancement and radical political election and money-hungry company decision. But perhaps someday, our country may reach its breaking point.