The Rewind

I’ve been feeling a little overwhelmed as of late. And the biggest culprit is AI.

For the last week, my conversations (online and off) have been filled with doom and gloom about technology and the job market — even more than usual. Meanwhile, friends who normally provide measured pragmatism about technology are showing cracks in the facade, starting to really worry about both the potential of AI to do what it says on the tin, or come close enough to justify mass layoffs in multiple industries.

It’s in my entertainment, too. This week I got a chance to screen Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, which is heralded as both a madcap cautionary tale and a return to form for director Gore Verbinski. But I am also in the final chapters of rekt, a horror novel by writer Alex Gonzalez that centers around a bidding website where people generate AI videos of strangers dying in horrible ways and then do everything in their power to make sure their predicted death is what actually happens.

(Think Fight Club for futures markets — in fact, the influence of Chuck Palahniuk on the book is so undeniable that Gonzalez writes an overt Marla Singer joke into the novel. Bleak, bleak stuff. You should read it!)

That means even my escapism — the stories I disappear into in an attempt to get away from the doom and gloom of technology — are still painting cataclysmic pictures of how mankind will succumb to artificial intelligence. Can’t a guy catch a break?

But if I’ve learned one thing from the era of technofascism, it’s that there’s always the option to unplug. This weekend I’m going to finish my book, take a bus to the movies, and call up a friend to play some board games. I’m going to listen to my records and probably bag and board that pile of comic books that’s been accumulating on my shelf for the last month. All of these are small, grounding actions I can take to remind myself that the future of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die and rekt is not a foregone conclusion.

So I’m saying this as much for me as for you: touch grass. Touch paper. Touch cardboard. Whatever your flavor of physical media is, take a few minutes to enjoy it this weekend. The horrors of the online world can be put on hold for a few days.

No new articles this week, so let’s double dip into our archives. First, in keeping with the theme of evil technology, here’s a piece from Hamish Calvert about Stephen Susco’s Unfriended: Dark Web. I’m not much for screenlife cinema normally — it’s fine, it just isn’t an aesthetic that I want to spend 90 minutes on — but Calvert is spot on which how much Unfriended: Dark Web rips.

Hell, let’s make it a two-for-two day with screenlife horror. Christine Makepeace, consulting editor extraordinaire at Certified Forgotten, often has this habit of being right about movies, and I keep meaning to follow up on her recommendation of Michelle Iannantuono’s Livescreamers. Is it possible to be nostalgic for internet horror stories now that we’ve moved onto AI horror stories?

Quick hits from around the world of horror and indie journalism.

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