We just want to make you happy.

Pluribus S1 — 3.5/5

This show is about AI. 

Hey, guys, I did it. I cracked the code. Where's the party? What's my prize? 

Watching this show right after playing 'Baby Steps' — an exceptional 5/5 game, one of my favorite gaming experiences of all time — was a nice two-fer. Both deal with people who refuse to ask for help or participate in the world in a correct manner, but 'Baby Steps' deals with that in the most silly and difficult-to-play way possible, while Carol Sturka is just difficult. She's a difficult person! She's stubborn! She's self-righteous! It makes it hard to watch!!! 

And it's also slow sometimes. (Sorry, I guess I'm the difficult one???) 

So I guess what I'm saying is that I think I can only really enjoy the show with a meta-textual analysis I'm placing on top of it. Listen, this is pretty common with me. Welcome to my blog, I'm a big muffin.

I suppose it's about any sufficient world-changing technology—the automobile, the printing press, the Apple iPhone, etc.—any technology that sufficiently changes the world for better and for worse, but here specifically: the aliens are all agreeable. They cater to your whims. They know everything, and just want to use that knowledge to make you happy. They are agents of ChatGPT psychosis. They are both good, and bad. They are both helpful, and uninteresting. They flatter, and they flatten us. We want to be seen as sexy and interesting, they see us as sexy and interesting. We want to be a good mother, they see us as a good mother. We want to be loved for who we are without change, difficult as we are, and they will love us fully. And if we want it to fix our sentences to sound clearer, it will fix our sentences.We have the sum total of human knowledge at our fingertips, and instead of asking about the secrets of the world, we ask them to take out our trash. They are incapable of creating anything new, and now here, we can't go back to the way it was before. But what strikes me most about the show is how incurious Carol is, which I then reflect back on to the whole of us. She is shocked, surprised, dismayed, deeply concerned, but also happy that there is something that will love her as she is. It's the good and bad of these things, but the shittiness of us. Given the Library of Babel, organized neatly, politely arranged, and we will just search for our own reflection, begging it to tell us that we are good enough. "Give me what I want," you ask into the wishing well, hoping it will give you what you have absolutely no idea how to express.