This weekend, I stepped in some shit.
It was one of the most peaceful weekends I’ve had in a long time.
We were staying at a friend’s farm for a wedding in Rhode Island, and for the first time in a while, I could actually feel my blood pressure drop.
Each night, I got about six hours of sleep splitting a full-sized mattress with my girlfriend. We’d wake up to a literal rooster crowing at 6AM, and get tackled by two wet mud-covered dogs to start the day.
There were chickens. Cats. Goats. Lots of sounds and smells.
It sounds ridiculous, I know. Stepping in shit at a farm in Rhode Island and calling it “healing”. “Touching grass” as the youth say.
But something about it was deeply comforting, like my body remembered how to be human again.
It reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about lately: the real world is always worth living in.
The smell of goat poop. A wet dog. These things are beautiful in their own way but they’re by no means pixel-perfect.
They’re not the result of an optimized prompt like “mAkE mE a FuN VaCaTiOn pIcTuRe wIth mY fAMiLY, gHiBlI sTyLe”
Now I’m not some fuckin’ savant who’s ahead of the curve saying “we need to be more present in the real world!”
I’m certainly late to that party. My parents have been saying this shit for years every time I play video games or am “on the Instagrams and the Googles“.
But the past few months have been packed with wild tech releases that feel…different.
Most notably the launch of Sora 2, OpenAI’s latest video-generation model, and xAI’s anime-style chatbot companion, Ani.
Sora 2 launched with its own TikTok-style platform (also called Sora), where people can manufacture entire fake realities in seconds, including ones starring themselves or their friends.
And to be clear: it’s so fucking impressive.
People are using it to make fake travel videos, cinematic ads, entire music videos.
My group chat was popping off with videos bringing some of our inside jokes to life. It was hilarious.
Annnnd it’s also terrifying!
It’s never been easier to fake a reality. And if we’re not careful, it’ll soon be easier to live in those fake ones than in the imperfect one we’ve got.
And then there’s the xAi companion, Ani!
Elon basically launched an anime waifu (read: hyper-sexualized cartoon girl) for people to chat with (and fetishize) all day.
It’s an extremely addictive retentive product. It’s pretty dystopian when you think about how it replaces developing real relationships with real people.
We have developed technology to replace an imperfect world and imperfect people with manufactured landscapes and relationships.
BUT THOSE IMPERFECTIONS ARE THE GOOD PARTS !!!
Ranting about this brings me back to this famous scene from Good Will Hunting (GOATed movie) when Robin Williams articulates why he loves his wife:
“She used to fart in her sleep. One night, it was so loud it woke the dog up… That’s the good stuff.”
— Robin Williams as Sean Maguire in Good Will Hunting (1997)
Reality, for all its flaws, for the death and heartbreak we endure, all of that shit.
It’s all better than some made up world, some made up companion.
But we’re already seeing that substitution happen in real-time.
We’re already seeing young people party less and less (masterfully covered by Derek Thompson) — meaning the youth are being robbed of their chance to make dumb mistakes and hazy memories.
Kids are spending their time avoiding these imperfect moments, mistakes, and rites of passage en masse and increasingly replacing it with perfectly manufactured memories and interactions.
Pixel perfect memories and perfected partners on their devices they can talk too whenever they want, perfectly agreeable, always with the right thing to say.
You know how much dumb shit I say to my girlfriend EVERY DAY!? And she doesn’t leave me!?!??!?! THAT’S THE GOOD STUFF!! She couldn’t possibly prompt that nonsense into existence.
Right, K? Please do not try to replace me with AI (·•᷄_•᷅ )
These tools, developed by institutions whose objective is to monetize our every second of attention, are going to get more and more powerful.
At the moment, the tech is a fun toy that is generally speaking pretty harmless. But what starts as a toy will grow into something far more powerful and consequential.
Creator CatGPT covers it nicely, and how the proliferation of social media in the last decade or so by these same companies has already showed us how quickly this type of technology can negatively impact our lives as a whole.
But I reflect on this weekend with hope.
Hope for more weddings, more first dances, more drunk bar moments with strangers who feel like family for a few hours, only to never cross paths again.
We’re living in a world where you can conjure entire people or places with just a few sentences.
But you still can’t replicate the smell of shit.
And thank god for that.
Pet a dog. Walk on some gravel.
Go step in some shit.
What I did this week — Day n Night, Post 1 of 29!
This week I posted my first video of my series which doesn’t really have a name but will be me making 29 artworks before turning 29.
The reel did really well! I was so excited to see it come together the way it did and was quite surprised at the performance and reception. It got me a few hundred new followers!
Big shoutout to a lot of my friends who keep encouraging me, and especially
and who gave me some more practical tips on the direction of the video and edits.Many days I want to say I don’t care for these vanity metrics, but I do very much want to share my work with the world, so was quite inspired to see so many folks be inspired by the work and want to follow along the journey.
I also got something very fun in the mail this week…stay tuned for a fun experiment update next week :D
Something Beautiful — Rocks
Painted rocks by Elizabeth Saloka shared by
!What I love about these in particular is that each piece breaths new life into the original designs because of the unique shape of each rock. A really cool idea!My favorite is the MetroCard :D
feeling inspired to step in some shit today 🫡