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We’re All Buster Keaton Now

December 20, 2025 5 Comments

Chaplin (1992) is an underrated movie. The producers lost their lobster thermidor-stained shirts on it when it bombed. Boo hoo. Robert Downey made a creditable stab at impersonating a person who was familiar to nearly everyone on the planet. Charlie Chaplin moved into that layer of the icon stratosphere where only entertainment sputniks and celebrity telstars whiz by. It must be hard to portray someone rocketing around the Van Allen belt (and suspenders) of celebrity while your name recognition is still flying at 30,000 feet.

Whatever its flaws, the movie was (is) a great encapsulation of a time and place. Movies that accomplish that reward occasional rewatching. I got to thinking the other day about Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (Kevin Kline) opining on the coming of talkies to the cinema, and what it might mean to guys like him and Chaplin. They put on greasepaint with a roller and brush, made big gestures, and relied on intertitles to deliver any dialogue.

In that scene, it’s just dawning on Fairbanks. He fears his party’s over. Chaplin poo-poos the idea. He is marinated in the milieu of the mime, and treated talkies like an internal organ someone was trying to insert in him while he was sleeping. He didn’t think he needed a second appendix full of words, and assumed his body (of work) could simply reject it.

It occurred to me that this kind of societal shift is exactly what’s happening with Chad, i.e.: Artificial Intelligence chatbots. The legions of people who have survived, and sometimes thrived in the nooks and crannies of the online world, are poo-pooing Chad in the same way Chaplin downplayed the coming of talkies. They talk endlessly online about the “slop” that Chad is gonna generate forevermore.

Merriam-Webster names ‘slop’ the word of the year

AI’s impact on our social media feeds has not gone unnoticed by one of America’s top dictionaries. Amidst the onslaught of content that has swept the web over the past 12 months, Merriam-Webster announced Sunday that its word of the year for 2025 is “slop.”

The dictionary defines the term as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”

If you’re a low-level code monkey, or a copywriter, or any number of other textual, image, and moving picture drones, you’re whistling past the graveyard if you think Chad ain’t coming for you. Well, it’s coming for your job, anyway. It doesn’t care about you. It doesn’t care about anything. You’re not being attacked. You’re being displaced. Disappeared. It’s a shame, really. If you were really being assaulted, you could gin up a GoFundMe page and get a few dollars for your troubles. It’s hard to get the same sympathy when you’re being replaced by a Dell Optiplex on steroids. No one cares much, because they’re adapting themselves to the new reality, and you aren’t. It’s easier when it’s not your ox that’s being gored.

You see, it’s a certain type of intellectual that’s getting their ricebowl broken. They know a little javascript, or how to write an SEO-optimized 750-word piece of drivel, or photoshop the background out of a thumbnail image of a cute top for a Shopify store, or maybe look up some arcane webhosting approach on Stack Overflow. It was on their resume for some reason when they got hired, so their boss expected them to fix it, but they didn’t know how. Chad knows how.

Many of them will stamp their feet, and leave drunken Reddit comments at 2 AM about AI slop until their phones run out of charge. It’s hard to charge anything inside a van down by the river. But no matter how they complain, Chad is not going away. There is a fundamental reconfiguration of cultural and technical production going on, and who’s gonna matter from now on. The people complaining about AI slop want you to shed a tear for them, but they didn’t give a shiny shite about all the people they helped wipe out by leveraging the internet and cellphones into a living while the oldsters complained.

I got to wondering if anyone else was getting the same vibe, that a big shift is happening right in front of us, a disquieting, amorphous wave that you can either swim in or drown under, take your pick. I discovered Jean Baudrillard. Never hear of him before. I doubt I’ll hear of him much going forward. Been dead for 18 years. He was a sociologist, or philosopher, or some similar kind of big thinker. He was interested in hyperreality. Really interested in it, I gather, because he made up the term.

Hyperreality is a concept in post-structuralism that refers to the process of the evolution of notions of reality, leading to a cultural state of confusion between signs and symbols invented to stand in for reality, and direct perceptions of consensus reality. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which, because of the compression of perceptions of reality in culture and media, what is generally regarded as real and what is understood as fiction are seamlessly blended together in experiences so that there is no longer any clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.

So instead of droning on and on, like I do, Jean summed it up pithily:

“Intellectuals are doomed to disappear when artificial intelligence bursts on the scene, just as the heroes of silent cinema disappeared with the coming of the talkies. We are all Buster Keatons.”
— Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories II, 1987-1990)

So Jean’s better at it than I am. He understood artificial intelligence before there was such a thing. But I’ve outlasted him, and can check up on his supposition. I’m still desolating the internet and various restaurant menus. I’m in a better position to judge what happens when “…what is generally regarded as real and what is understood as fiction are seamlessly blended together in experiences so that there is no longer any clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.”

Where one ends and where one begins? I look at it the other way around. It begins with slop, and it’s going to end in tears.

Sure, Why Not?

February 29, 2024 3 Comments

A mashup of Spill the Wine by Eric Burdon and War, and the Soviet silent science fiction psychedelic silver screen story Aelita. I dare you to watch it. And I double-dog dare you to say “Soviet silent science fiction psychedelic silver screen story” five times fast without sounding like Daffy Duck.

The Difference Between Sailing and Jail

January 6, 2024 2 Comments

It’s hard to drown in jail.

Yesterday’s trawl brought in an interesting fish. Old friend Charles dropped by and enjoyed our video of the HMS Victory, rendered in animated form. In the comments, he upped the ante. Check out this amazing video of sailing around the horn on a four-masted barque in 1928. It’s narrated by the man who made it. It dwells in a land beyond amazing, really.

Towards the end, the narrator recounts an incident. The captain of the ship saw a sailor swept overboard. He ran to the stern of the ship, grabbed a line, and threw himself into the sea. That sea. As the sailor swept by, he grabbed him by his hair. Then some of the crew pulled them on board, the captain holding the line with one hand, and the guy’s hair in the other. Now get this: he did it twice. And he hushed it up, because he wasn’t supposed to leave the ship for any reason, and didn’t want to get into trouble.

By gahd we’re all nancy boys compared to our grandparents.

Nothing New Under The Sun

June 24, 2023 3 Comments

Holy cow this film is something like 100 years old. Was Edison cranking the handle? I kept expecting Charlie Chaplin to appear.

It starts out with the usual lament. We’re running out of coal, of all things. The only endangered species on display isn’t coal, it’s a man willing to do more than watch football on TV in his basement, and a two-parent family next door. But let’s not quibble. The denizens of ye olde draftopolis are interrogating the cloud people on how they were able to keep ice from forming on the goldfish bowl. The answer, which is not directly mentioned in the video, was asbestos. They covered everything in asbestos.

I’m not an environmentalist, I guess. The word itself contains the word “mentalist.” Now, I can predict the future (it will be worse), but I’m not really a mentalist, or an environmentalist. Environmentalists commute to work on recumbent bicycles and paddle plastic kayaks on the weekends. I commute to work in my socks and have a boat I built entirely from wood in my basement. It’s never been launched.

I simply don’t like wasting things. They don’t have a name for that anymore. I’ve saved more stuff than any ten environmentalists. I’m wary of wonder cures for everyday problems. It’s how you end up with everything in your house, including most of the house itself, made from plastic. It’s how paint and gasoline ended up with copious doses of lead in them. Hell, they used to put mercury into paint to kill spiders who might walk over it.

The video is labeled “Energy conservation in the Home in the 1920s,” but in today’s parlance, conservation just means rationing. This is different. These people are trying to get more bang for the same buck. They didn’t like wasting things, either, or wearing their winter coats to bed in January.

So they insulated the jacket of the furnace, and all the pipes, with asbestos. They got more heat in the right parts of their house for the same amount of money, and the installers all got mesothelioma at no extra charge.

One wonders if in 100 years, an ill-informed internet so-and-so will post a video of the benighted 2020s, and wonder why everyone thought coal was evil, but lithium, cadmium, and a healthy dose of cobalt was peachy.

The Cover Charge to Greatness

August 23, 2015 7 Comments

Bartok played Scarlatti because he could. That’s the cover charge to greatness.

When people complain that X sucks now, but it used to be great, you’re usually listening to nursing home conversation. All that people know is what was popular when they were young. They dream of their salad days and the soundtrack to what they were doing at the time, which is intensely trivial to everyone but them. Al Gore doesn’t care about global warming. He just wants it to be 1976 again, forever. Lots of people are like him. They simply choose different topics to be fuddy-duddies about.

The problem with ignoring all old people who are yelling at clouds is the same problem you have with biker gangs. I have, perhaps, a greater experience with biker gangs than the average person who would be expected to have nothing to do with them. They pose a problem that I may be able to shed some light on. They are 99 percent harmless, if a bit silly, but they all try to look the same. The other 1 percent are the scariest mofos you’ll ever meet, but they look exactly like the chromosexuals, and you can’t tell who’s who until it’s too late.

The people with onions on their belts complaining that music sucks nowadays are more or less the same as the biker gangs. They’re all drooling into the same tapioca and tuned in to Good Sunrise Morning Starter Eyeopener NewsFlash Update with Brian Kouric, but only 99 percent of them are entirely wrong about everything. The one-percenter could tell you why music really does suck now, but no one would ever listen to him because he looks like the rest of them, complaining to no one in particular that Justin Bieber is no Bobby Goldsboro.

If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants is correct as far as it goes, but it gives dullards the wrong idea. Those giants don’t hoist you up there for a piggy back. You have to climb up them like a kitten that hasn’t been fed yet, and the giants swat at you while you make the ascent. Once you’re standing on their shoulders, you realize that the giants are drunk half the time and palsied the rest. They were only giants because you were so short. You can’t see as far as you had hoped.  There’s a lot of work left to do.

Nobody understands that you have to be able to do it first. You can’t deconstruct a goddamned thing until you can do it, and if you could do it, you wouldn’t get the urge to deconstruct it. Frank Gehry can’t design a proper two-holer so he designs giant monstrosities to hide the fact.

Politics is the same. You will never elect anyone to take the government apart. Once you know how to work it well enough to get in charge of it, you don’t want to wreck it. You want to lord over it and add to it. No one wants the bulldozed empty lot where a Post Office once stood to be named after them. Humans don’t work that way.

Incompetent people who know in their hearts that they can’t hack it when they try, feebly, to learn what came before them say everything sucks, let’s break it. Musicians that can’t play Scarlatti say Scarlatti sucks, let’s call Megadeth geniuses. Painters that can’t paint put the nose on the side of the woman’s head and say I meant to do that. It’s easier to be a self-promoter than to learn how to do everything that came before you, and then build on it even a little. That’s why art, and other things, do occasionally run into dead ends. It’s hard to play Scarlatti, so it’s deuced difficult to play any better. That’s the real reason few attempt it, and the one percenters notice no one’s even trying anymore.

Bela Bartok is playing Scarlatti like he’s late for lunch and wants to get out of there. He sounds furious, in the true sense of the word. He’s furious he has to waste his time playing it. He wants to get further than Scarlatti. He paid the cover charge to greatness.

Tag: 1920s

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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