/lit/ - Literature

i want to share a weird anecdote. i just got Netflx, and as you're browsing through the films some of them have trailers and some do not, but there's clearly a button you can use there to press if you want to watch the movie or the trailer. there also appears to be a new feature: if you just leave the screen on, the movie begins to play itself anyways. i didn't press 'watch trailer,' and i didn't press 'watch movie.' somebody basically just decided - hey, well, why don't we just start the film for you? and i watched probably half an hour just kind of amazed that this happensed at all.

so now, play along with me a little. imagine if advertisements worked like this. you look at it, it responds. the ad knows you are watching, you can signal with your hands, your eyes, whatever. a ghostly little AI just senses that you are looking at a thing, and reveals wonders to you. go a step further: your credit card is always-already wired into the mediadrome in which you live, such that to look at the add is to be billed a few microcoins: after all, there's no such thing as a free lunch in this world. you look at, it moves, you're already buying, you're already a part of the thing. no difference between ads and products in this sense, if we're talking about what is essentially hypno-manipulation. is this a movie, or is it an ad for Givenchy? maybe you're not really sure, and maybe that's just fine. enter the New World Sensorium in this way.

to look is to consume, and to look is to be looked at. i can't fucking wait until the AI learns to hack my browser history and subtly load these ads with all of the cues picked up from my Pornhub links, exactly as in Ex Machina. why not? i'm ready for this seduction. it's like Cypher's steak.

the idea of hovering over a movie screen and debating whether or not i want to watch it or not just gets subtly solved by an algorithm that says, 'fuck it, let's just start the movie anyways and you can decide later.' how fucking smart was that idea? the choice to watch or not to watch was really an illusion, the thing plays itself while you're waiting to make up your mind. what happens when ads themselves just learn to use this to bait your curiosity, when you don't know if what you're seeing is an ad or not, because you don't know what the ad is for, and if you want to find out, you have to keep watching, and the more you keep watching, the more you are quietly billed - again, in the subtlest possible ways.

literary theory was nice and all but the 21C is going to take us on a fucking adventure and then some.