It's good to see you happy.

With the good guys, you can just FEEL being told "this character is flawed but GOOD, this is how you are supposed to think, this is how you are supposed to be, look at them and like them, look at how good and virtuous or cool and badass they are". But they still feel distant and you feel nothing.

Not the case with Syril and Dedra. We met earnest Syril being all lonely and not fitting in, starved for recognition and desperately doing his best, then having an embarrassing failure and having to go back to his emotionally abusive mom. We saw highly intelligent and equally serious and underappreciated Dedra dealing with jerks at work. We saw these awkward, emotionally starved, earnest people finding each other. And that is a thousand times more relatable than badass heroes, who do heists and revolutions.

And heists and revolutions aren't relatable to serious, damaged, lonely people because they don't dream of heists and revolutions. They don't have the need to rebel. They don't fit in a crowd to relate to and fight for their cause. People, who don't fit in, dream of connection, of being recognised, of being seen and understood.

How does any of this help the MAGA voter?

allbirds, the shoe company, is transitioning TO AN AI COMPANY

they have gone from being a sustainable shoe company, to selling off all the shoe side of their brand, to becoming an ai company

and their shares went up at this news so…

ALSO

ai has started co-writing exam mark schemes and textbooks so ai will be teaching your kid and in your kid’s toys and in your kid’s tv shows and movies and

you know what publishers invest most in with kid’s books? celebrity books (I have been told this to my face multiple times, not making this up)! which they don’t write themselves and ai art’s being put into that and into the writing

so ai will raise your kid and teach your kid and comfort your kid and even assess your kid

whilst I have writer friends who are being told their work is ai even when it isn’t, and what’s the justification? “the grammar and punctuation is too good”

oh so writing properly without mistakes makes you ai now!?

my friend’s kid said to me the other day that she doesn’t know why she’s trying so hard to write well on her coursework when mistakes are what’s going to prove on a checker that she’s a human, and that it’s better to make deliberate errors now

A KID SAID THIS

meanwhile I know a writer who got fired for the reasons above and then when she proved she didn’t use ai instead of apologising her boss went

since it can be replicated by ai anyway you see why we’re pivoting to ai writers

But it's not just women. They are targeting everyone who leans even slightly left.

i'm starting to forget your face

your embrace

you

— inspo 🫂

so i work non stop across the top four media capitals in the world, i've done so for a while

i don't want to doxx myself

but i'm aware i'm snapping and i'm tired, i'm so tired

i'm tired of a friend being laid off every other day because they're being replaced by ai

i'm tired of consumers not giving a flying shit and before you say they do - sales numbers say they don't, and that's all these people care about. the people who care aren't spending and i don't blame them because we're all fucking skint rn

layoffs, layoffs, layoffs

you hate how much screenplays are now explaining things? sadly you're in the minority, and the numbers show it, and that's why it keeps happening

i sit in these meetings

i hate them

we have no voice

because we don't have the economic capital to have a voice

anything written or created that's uncynical is considered kiddy and 'worthless to market'

everyone is putting billions into vertical and ai and it makes me sad seeing my friends - friends that have poured years of their lives working on some of the biggest productions in the world - having to accept jobs at less than half the pay because the bottom is falling out of Hollywood

people are crying every day

people are leaving the industry every day

these aren't small creators that are trying to build themselves up for the first time

these are people that have been working their ass off for years that can't take how much it is destroying their mental health

these are people who have realised that there is no money in creating anymore, and that you have to accept you have to do it as a side job for free

so many of my friends have stopped watching media because we all know how much blood and abuse and mistreatment has gone into a project but we're under fucking NDAs that we had to accept because we need to eat

so nobody can say anything and we have to watch as ordinary people lap it up as art, never able to know how much discrimination and dirt has gone into a product that is going to purely line the pockets of billionaires

they aren't making this work because they care about any of us

they aren't making this work because they care about art

that's the minority not the majority

i'm tired of hearing about creative friends committing suici--

every day they're leaving, either alive or not

i don't know what the point of me writing or doing anything creative is anymore

no one fucking cares

the audiences that care are kind people who aren't able to spend money because they're spending their time not sucking people's blood so they don't have much money, so they aren't buying

so to the people keeping us alive, these audiences might as well not exist

it's only the rich

and they're making 'art' in their image

and slowly making audiences as cynical as they are, making the world in their greedy image

art is dying, storytelling is dying

hope doesn’t sell so we’re not allowed to make it

i'm tired

i'm tired

i'm tired

also it's coming for your children. ai is already in kids tv.

there are ‘training ai for kids tv’ conferences happening all the time.

animators are suffering

This is why it's hard to find media that you really enjoy.

This is why disney can get away with churning out underwhelming movies - because no matter how lowest common denominator they are, they are still preferable to the cynical content that is released by the other players.

Sometimes I think that disney lives off the momentum of a handful of masterpieces, and that this is the thing that makes people come back for more. You chase that high. The way you felt when you were a kid and you watched The Lion King, Mulan, The Beauty and The Beast, etc.

I would like to believe that the existence of the hopeful movies that come out now and then means that not all is lost, but then I remember that huge amount of people lapped up House of Cards and Game of Thrones and The Boys, which are basically cynical and nihilistic abuse porn. And it's depressing, that people talk as if there is some higher meaning to these narratives and refuse to see that the abuse is the point.