You ever have one of those cognitive dissonant days where one part of you exhorts in intense affect and the conscious mind responds with. “We are experiencing especially high call volume at this time, but your call… It’s like that. A kind of enshitified executive function platform maybe, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

So two terms to work with today. I figure AI^tm is fairly self-explanatory as the development of proprietary AI but also as the setting of the boundaries of what AI might be as also being among the things that might be property. [[In the future maybe AITM could become a new Reddit where users as if they are the machine. Eventually this is going to become unclear.]]

Enshitified hemlock is esoteric. So, you know, hemlock isn’t a great option, but at least Socrates had it. It was part of the philosophy menu, part of the platform, if you like. From our perspective the hemlock is symbolic of taking a particular moral-philosophical stand that sets an important precedent for academic inquiry. It is a platform. Enshitified hemlock turns to AI Kool-Aid.

It has to do with parrhēsia, especially as Foucault brought the concept into the 20th century. It’s “speaking truth to power” or at least that’s not a bad contemporary idiomatic analogy. At the core is the concept that you “say everything.” That’s the etymology of parrhēsia. Of course humans cannot literally say everything.

But guess what? The information bomb… tick… tick.. tick. whimper.

Suddenly it can’t be “tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Who knows what the truth is anyway? We’ll just say everything and let _____ sort it out.

Another part of parrhēsia that gets enshitified is risk. You can really speak truth to power without taking a risk. It was bad enough with the anonymous assholes on the other side of the world. Now we have “say everything” AI machine that has nothing to risk. Without taking a risk you aren’t creating an opportunity for trust or community, which is built on those things.

Meanwhile talking to ChatGPT about these things is like being in a classic stand up duo where you’re never quite sure who is being the straight man.

Well that’s another fine mess…