Annons
Annons
Annons
You can like House of Cards if you want; for the time being at least, you're still (just about) entitled to your own opinions. But it's not very good. The show is a cretinous and ungodly chimera, full of spiralling, pointless subplots, desperate to impress on the viewer what an unpleasant person its main character is, and bafflingly over-reliant on weird nautical metaphors ("It's how you devour a whale, one bite at a time," or "I love that woman more than sharks love blood"). In recent seasons it's whittled away any of the moral complexity it once feigned, turning itself into something like the West Wing with an even duller opening sequence – presumably at the behest of the machines.The algorithmic novel can only be something similar: a big disjointed mess of genre clichés and patronising bitesize bit-words, where every chapter ends in a cliffhanger and everything is utterly, hideously homogeneous. A book of averages for a reader without qualities.It's not that books written by machines are necessarily bad. In the early 20th century the dada and surrealist movements experimented with automatic writing. They thought that by writing without thinking, as a purely mechanical exercise, the unconscious mind would reveal itself on the page. Gertrude Stein took things further: her experiments in motor autonomism weren't designed to reveal anything, but to produce a pure writing free of meaning. Revolutionary composers following Schoenberg have used mathematical set theory to compose orchestral pieces. They thought they were creating something liberatory and avant-garde. It's not the machines' fault that we prefer worthless pap.The problem lies with us, the humans. The robot poet of the movies first needs to be programmed with an understanding of what a poem is before it can write one, and that understanding is usually based on what filmgoers read. That's why when these fictional machines do create something, it's usually a boring representative watercolour, or music full of the stupid sweeping violins that people think of as being "beautiful". Technology just creates an average; the nature of that average is down to us. The only way anything could be salvaged is if enough people get rid of their e-readers and go back to blind, dumb paper. In other words, we're doomed.@sam_krissxOver on Motherboard: Apple Removed Games Featuring the Confederate Flag Featuring the Confederate Flag from the App Store