The show has two meanings. First, I think a lot of the surface level stuff (including specific dialogue lines and acting styles) was more attuned to AI and a growing monoculture, where everyone sounds the same. Like the hive, everyone using ChatGPT to write emails or letters has the same affect, same use of em dashes, same vocabulary (“delve,” “saccharine,” “tapestry,” etc.) The second deeper part of the story is that Carol is a misanthrope who now must realize she’s undervalued humanity. She’s chronically pessimistic about humanity and can’t really connect with others. She sneers at the thousands of fans who like her book. The reason why she utterly fucks up the Air Force One meeting is that she can’t interact with 5 random people without showing her distain or superiority. And now, she has 7 billion slaves but not a single friend or lover. I think the show is going to demonstrate that Carol needs to grow and find a deeper love for humanity, even if that humanity is different than her
"everyone using ChatGPT to write emails or letters has the same affect, same use of em dashes, same vocabulary (“delve,” “saccharine,” “tapestry,” etc.)"
It should be noted that these patterns are transient and are not going to be a features of AI generated writing over the long or even medium term. It's entirely possible that the tendencies have already adjusted themselves within the most commonly used models.
Don't just assume you can spot AI writing, because that is a way to basically guarantee you will fail to spot a lot of it.
"delve" has already been quelled. Not sure about "I hope this email finds you well." The "it's not X--it's Y" antithesis construction is still observable, but I expect it to be quashed soon, now that so many have taken notice.
"Vichy Woke" may be my new favourite term. It sadly describes me and other friends during Trump's first term, liberal minded people who didn't want to be cast as "bad" but also would talk in hushed tones amongst ourselves about how this was actually bullshit until the mental dam finally broke in 2020-2021. Ashamed of how French I was back then. Basically the reason I'm here is Jeff said all the stuff back then I was thinking (but funnier and more incisive) but kept in my own head while smiling and nodding at some girl with a septum piercing telling me parking tickets were a tool of whiteness.
My working theory is that it's an AI allegory. So far, all the "infected" basically act like LLM chatbots. They have all the world's knowledge at their disposal, collapse under scrutiny, and lack any ACTUAL critical thinking skills. They're also all programmed to be polite in the most awkward of ways, and designed to be appealing, but failing almost entirely at NOT being creepy as hell.
In 2013 I went to a conference in Australia and heard my first land acknowledgement and thought “oh that’s interesting and I guess good.” By 2014 suddenly everyone in academic spaces were saying oh we need to do land acknowledgements and I thought “huh where did this come from, did everyone go to Australia last year?”
Yeah, my impression was that it started in Australia, moved through the commonwealth to Canada and then from there to the Pacific Northwest and the tech world and from there boom! was everywhere. Might have come down through the liberal schools in the northeast as well, but that's how I saw it spreading.
Well originally it came from Soviet infiltrators injecting ideologies into Western academia that would be poisonous to the fabric of societies opposed to the USSR. Unfortunately the former KGB are still in charge of Russia today.
What's funny is that in online discourse, land acknowledgements are/were everywhere, but even working and living in DC, I've only known one actual person who has ever done one. So much of the degree to which the weirdest parts of woke were a part of one's life was social self-selection and voluntary media diets.
"That’s just not what Vince Gilligan does — he’s on record about the importance of jettisoning pointy-headed screenwriter bullshit and just telling a good story."
You know, it's interesting, I've kind of drawn the inference, largely from the way Gilligan seems to think about crime, that he leans conservative. An example that stood out to me was on "Better Call Saul" when Jimmy hands out coupons for 50% off legal representation to a bunch of lowlives, and a couple of them go on a crime spree because it's such a great deal. It was a curious depiction, to me, of the "supply and demand" of crime.
But, I don't know. It was also a really funny scene - one of the funniest on a show that starred Bob Odenkirk and Michael McKean, who are both kind of famously funny, and they're not even in the scene. The criminals were a couple of stoner idiots who kept yelling "FIFTY PERCENT OFF!" as they stole cars and destroyed property. So it could have just been, yeah, Gilligan trying to make good TV. And to whatever extent it's what happened, a liberal eye watching non-ideological*** storytelling in the 2008-2021 (span of BB and BCS) timeframe and seeing it as conservative is a representation of a problem you spend a lot of time writing about. Like, in retrospect, the portrayal of meth addicts with long rap sheets as irredeemable pieces of shit should not have bothered me as much as it did.
***(Of course "actual" leftists would claim that there is no such thing as non-ideological storytelling. That's why everybody hates them.)
Another great post, Jeff. I subscribe because you are funny, you know where Canada is, and you know the difference between begging and raising the question.
I mark the symbolic start of the Great Awokening slightly later, the 2015 protests over offensive Halloween costumes at Yale (technically protests over whether the university should have official policies about Halloween costumes as there were no actual costumes being protested).
Wait. Did this get truncated slightly, or were they protesting despite a lack of offensive costumes? Because that sounds like some kind of weird placeholder protester, or perhaps that people went looking for offensive costumes, were disappointed not to find any, and were then like "fuck it, let's just do the protest anyway".
They were protesting a professor who said that Ivy League college students could handle disagreements about offensive costumes themselves without an official university policy. I discuss the 10 year anniversary of it here https://tonybozanich.substack.com/p/trick-or-treat-im-only-writing-a
I’m not sure I see much difference in an allegory of woke versus an allegory of AI. Both seemed to hit us out of nowhere (they didn’t) and with the same blunt insistence that the managerial class always employs: the decision has been made and now you’ll get onboard.
It’s been the chatter with AI from the beginning. It is inevitable and it’s coming whether you want it or not. We’re not going to focus on what “it” is and it will take your jobs and suck up all resources (land, power, water, finances, literacy, probably democracy) but get in, loser.
Regular people are still wondering how we got put on the NetZero bandwagon, like, was that yesterday? I’ve lost track which unceded indigenous land we’re passing through. Should we just learn to let go and let god? Who’s on first?I’m so confused.
The Latest Most Important Things seem, to most normal people, to have materialized out of nowhere before they suck all the air from the room but they’re textbook “gradually then all at once” catastrophes. Much of it bubbling in academia (percolating at my college by the late 80s/90s) and flooding downstream to the rest of the educational system, media, nonprofits, government, business, medicine, tech, etc. We’ve built up decades of it. Of course the elite managerial classes will declare the latest Thing to be the law of the land. It’s what they do. It’s Leadering. Be kind. Why are you not being kind?
We need more critical thinking not less. More dyspeptic, borderline-antisocial protagonists loudly voicing dissenting views. The only choice is not to play. Right? We need to be more Carol.
So, I skipped the article because I want to watch the show. I'll come back to it after I've seen the first three episodes. But your reading, where you say "I know it isn't about X, but it sure feels like it's about X," is perfectly encapsulated by one of my favorite J.R.R. Tolkien quotes:
"I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history—true or feigned—with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author."
To say that wokeness is *applicable* to the show, and that you as the audience have the freedom to analyze the show that way because of your life experience, is correct.
Yes, the Others inability to pick an apple or to defend themselves in any way got me thinking in this direction too. The desire to be "pure." Loving the layers of this show.
My wife and I have watched the first four episodes -- and yes, it is really good.
Early on, I thought "wait a second -- isn't this premise awfully close to something I remember from Theodore Sturgeon?" Sure enough, the idea of an infectious mind-merging virus engineered by an alien race is the core idea of "The Cosmic Rape", also published in a shorter version as "To Marry Medusa".(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cosmic_Rape).
Vince Gilligan does not seem to have been inspired by the Sturgeon story, or at least let on that he was. But many fans have noted the similarity in chats.
The most interesting non-parallel (at least for me) is that, in Sturgeon's version, the scheme backfires on the aliens because each human brain is vastly more powerful than a single alien brain; they are much like individual ants in a colony. So the merged human mind is way more intelligent than the alien mind, and humanity kicks alien ass. Then humanity looks at its new merged self and concludes that the next step in evolution has been taken, and everything is peachy.
Like you, I don't figure that Gilligan had wokeness in mind when crafting the story arc. But, to strain the analogy, it's possible that the spread of wokeness, DEI, whatever, might be seen by many as a continuation of civil rights advocacy and maybe not such an awful thing after all.
The show has two meanings. First, I think a lot of the surface level stuff (including specific dialogue lines and acting styles) was more attuned to AI and a growing monoculture, where everyone sounds the same. Like the hive, everyone using ChatGPT to write emails or letters has the same affect, same use of em dashes, same vocabulary (“delve,” “saccharine,” “tapestry,” etc.) The second deeper part of the story is that Carol is a misanthrope who now must realize she’s undervalued humanity. She’s chronically pessimistic about humanity and can’t really connect with others. She sneers at the thousands of fans who like her book. The reason why she utterly fucks up the Air Force One meeting is that she can’t interact with 5 random people without showing her distain or superiority. And now, she has 7 billion slaves but not a single friend or lover. I think the show is going to demonstrate that Carol needs to grow and find a deeper love for humanity, even if that humanity is different than her
"everyone using ChatGPT to write emails or letters has the same affect, same use of em dashes, same vocabulary (“delve,” “saccharine,” “tapestry,” etc.)"
It should be noted that these patterns are transient and are not going to be a features of AI generated writing over the long or even medium term. It's entirely possible that the tendencies have already adjusted themselves within the most commonly used models.
Don't just assume you can spot AI writing, because that is a way to basically guarantee you will fail to spot a lot of it.
True, AI writing is constantly changing. Per WaPo analysis, https://wapo.st/3LCslgu
"delve" has already been quelled. Not sure about "I hope this email finds you well." The "it's not X--it's Y" antithesis construction is still observable, but I expect it to be quashed soon, now that so many have taken notice.
"Vichy Woke" may be my new favourite term. It sadly describes me and other friends during Trump's first term, liberal minded people who didn't want to be cast as "bad" but also would talk in hushed tones amongst ourselves about how this was actually bullshit until the mental dam finally broke in 2020-2021. Ashamed of how French I was back then. Basically the reason I'm here is Jeff said all the stuff back then I was thinking (but funnier and more incisive) but kept in my own head while smiling and nodding at some girl with a septum piercing telling me parking tickets were a tool of whiteness.
I feel this. Also wanted to stay employed.
I felt like we had to talk in “cells” of common sense.
My working theory is that it's an AI allegory. So far, all the "infected" basically act like LLM chatbots. They have all the world's knowledge at their disposal, collapse under scrutiny, and lack any ACTUAL critical thinking skills. They're also all programmed to be polite in the most awkward of ways, and designed to be appealing, but failing almost entirely at NOT being creepy as hell.
In 2013 I went to a conference in Australia and heard my first land acknowledgement and thought “oh that’s interesting and I guess good.” By 2014 suddenly everyone in academic spaces were saying oh we need to do land acknowledgements and I thought “huh where did this come from, did everyone go to Australia last year?”
I think Canadians are the ones who brought the trend to North America, but I could be wrong about that.
Yeah, my impression was that it started in Australia, moved through the commonwealth to Canada and then from there to the Pacific Northwest and the tech world and from there boom! was everywhere. Might have come down through the liberal schools in the northeast as well, but that's how I saw it spreading.
Went to a very lefty Canadian university in the late aughts, can confirm it was a thing back then.
Well originally it came from Soviet infiltrators injecting ideologies into Western academia that would be poisonous to the fabric of societies opposed to the USSR. Unfortunately the former KGB are still in charge of Russia today.
What's funny is that in online discourse, land acknowledgements are/were everywhere, but even working and living in DC, I've only known one actual person who has ever done one. So much of the degree to which the weirdest parts of woke were a part of one's life was social self-selection and voluntary media diets.
Land acknowledgements are the most ridiculous and pointless of performative acts.
No one saying them would be caught dead giving any land back to anyone.
All they do is remind the displaced that they lost that battle.....
"Privilege Check" LOL!
Jeff, how are you not a millionaire business consultant?
I missed my calling.
"That’s just not what Vince Gilligan does — he’s on record about the importance of jettisoning pointy-headed screenwriter bullshit and just telling a good story."
You know, it's interesting, I've kind of drawn the inference, largely from the way Gilligan seems to think about crime, that he leans conservative. An example that stood out to me was on "Better Call Saul" when Jimmy hands out coupons for 50% off legal representation to a bunch of lowlives, and a couple of them go on a crime spree because it's such a great deal. It was a curious depiction, to me, of the "supply and demand" of crime.
But, I don't know. It was also a really funny scene - one of the funniest on a show that starred Bob Odenkirk and Michael McKean, who are both kind of famously funny, and they're not even in the scene. The criminals were a couple of stoner idiots who kept yelling "FIFTY PERCENT OFF!" as they stole cars and destroyed property. So it could have just been, yeah, Gilligan trying to make good TV. And to whatever extent it's what happened, a liberal eye watching non-ideological*** storytelling in the 2008-2021 (span of BB and BCS) timeframe and seeing it as conservative is a representation of a problem you spend a lot of time writing about. Like, in retrospect, the portrayal of meth addicts with long rap sheets as irredeemable pieces of shit should not have bothered me as much as it did.
***(Of course "actual" leftists would claim that there is no such thing as non-ideological storytelling. That's why everybody hates them.)
"Vichy woke" is a neat turn of phrase.
Another great post, Jeff. I subscribe because you are funny, you know where Canada is, and you know the difference between begging and raising the question.
I mark the symbolic start of the Great Awokening slightly later, the 2015 protests over offensive Halloween costumes at Yale (technically protests over whether the university should have official policies about Halloween costumes as there were no actual costumes being protested).
Wait. Did this get truncated slightly, or were they protesting despite a lack of offensive costumes? Because that sounds like some kind of weird placeholder protester, or perhaps that people went looking for offensive costumes, were disappointed not to find any, and were then like "fuck it, let's just do the protest anyway".
They were protesting a professor who said that Ivy League college students could handle disagreements about offensive costumes themselves without an official university policy. I discuss the 10 year anniversary of it here https://tonybozanich.substack.com/p/trick-or-treat-im-only-writing-a
Ah, now I look at this I think I remember it. I guess the placards read "How Dare You Treat Us Like Adults"?
It was really a watershed moment in wokeness and safetyism. I'm surprised the 10 year anniversary didn't get more coverage.
I’m not sure I see much difference in an allegory of woke versus an allegory of AI. Both seemed to hit us out of nowhere (they didn’t) and with the same blunt insistence that the managerial class always employs: the decision has been made and now you’ll get onboard.
It’s been the chatter with AI from the beginning. It is inevitable and it’s coming whether you want it or not. We’re not going to focus on what “it” is and it will take your jobs and suck up all resources (land, power, water, finances, literacy, probably democracy) but get in, loser.
Regular people are still wondering how we got put on the NetZero bandwagon, like, was that yesterday? I’ve lost track which unceded indigenous land we’re passing through. Should we just learn to let go and let god? Who’s on first?I’m so confused.
The Latest Most Important Things seem, to most normal people, to have materialized out of nowhere before they suck all the air from the room but they’re textbook “gradually then all at once” catastrophes. Much of it bubbling in academia (percolating at my college by the late 80s/90s) and flooding downstream to the rest of the educational system, media, nonprofits, government, business, medicine, tech, etc. We’ve built up decades of it. Of course the elite managerial classes will declare the latest Thing to be the law of the land. It’s what they do. It’s Leadering. Be kind. Why are you not being kind?
We need more critical thinking not less. More dyspeptic, borderline-antisocial protagonists loudly voicing dissenting views. The only choice is not to play. Right? We need to be more Carol.
So, I skipped the article because I want to watch the show. I'll come back to it after I've seen the first three episodes. But your reading, where you say "I know it isn't about X, but it sure feels like it's about X," is perfectly encapsulated by one of my favorite J.R.R. Tolkien quotes:
"I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history—true or feigned—with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author."
To say that wokeness is *applicable* to the show, and that you as the audience have the freedom to analyze the show that way because of your life experience, is correct.
There's always room for a Mount Vesuvius reference!
Yes, the Others inability to pick an apple or to defend themselves in any way got me thinking in this direction too. The desire to be "pure." Loving the layers of this show.
My wife and I have watched the first four episodes -- and yes, it is really good.
Early on, I thought "wait a second -- isn't this premise awfully close to something I remember from Theodore Sturgeon?" Sure enough, the idea of an infectious mind-merging virus engineered by an alien race is the core idea of "The Cosmic Rape", also published in a shorter version as "To Marry Medusa".(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cosmic_Rape).
Vince Gilligan does not seem to have been inspired by the Sturgeon story, or at least let on that he was. But many fans have noted the similarity in chats.
The most interesting non-parallel (at least for me) is that, in Sturgeon's version, the scheme backfires on the aliens because each human brain is vastly more powerful than a single alien brain; they are much like individual ants in a colony. So the merged human mind is way more intelligent than the alien mind, and humanity kicks alien ass. Then humanity looks at its new merged self and concludes that the next step in evolution has been taken, and everything is peachy.
Like you, I don't figure that Gilligan had wokeness in mind when crafting the story arc. But, to strain the analogy, it's possible that the spread of wokeness, DEI, whatever, might be seen by many as a continuation of civil rights advocacy and maybe not such an awful thing after all.
Will you supply one thing you want to do or say that “woke culture” says you shouldn’t?