The Death of the Humanities

Don’t worry, I’m not some sanitized boring asshole.

My true love is the humanities. No woman can compare (the humanities never left me), no sport brings me more joy (including the WNBA). I eat, breathe, and shit the humanities. From the most high-brow painting to scribbled graffiti on the bathroom stall, from my junky writing to the greats who are without comparison. All forms of music. I love the human quality of all forms of expression.

So I sit here and I think: what the hell has happened? When did art and expression get turned into a business? Not just a business for the best of the best, but a business for even the most lowly of artists? Why am I forced to think about SEO, advertisements, or setting up my website in such a way that it maximizes retention?

Are you only an artist if you make money from your work, or are you an artist because you produce something? I think the rise of optimization and this obsession with earning money, even if it’s something small, has killed the humanities.

I will never put advertisements on this website. Perhaps against what the “gurus” say, I actually put out advertisements for my work—for people to read freely without having to pay me. I’m profoundly thankful that people have actually clicked on my work and read it, especially the people who seemingly like what I write. My goal when I decided to start publishing some of my work wasn’t to earn money. It was to have at least one person from outside my circle read my stuff.

I think that’s the “old school” of the internet: weird niche corners where you can find a full play for free. It might not be George F. Walker levels, but people can use it for free if they want. So, how come every website I visit bombards me with advertisements?

It’s a complaint that many people have voiced. I’m certainly not the first. When I went to university, I studied Classics. Most people thought it was dumb because Classics doesn’t really “pay the bills.” They’re right, of course. It’s more marketable and lucrative to study business, computers, science, or anything that is “employable.”

I reject the idea that something isn’t worth anything simply because it’s not the most optimized way to earn money. There is something more worthwhile than money, and that is human value: to explore and debate ideas, show what you’ve made, and allow others to digest it. Canada has long had a rich arts and culture community, albeit one a bit closed off to the average person. It is important that culture is maintained in our society; otherwise, we’ll become a bunch of internet nomads who have no true home, just drifting around chasing the next fifty cents from some advertising company. BORING!

Anyone who sits around running sixty blogs trying to eke out a living is negatively contributing to culture. If it were up to me, I’d throw you in prison on some remote island. You can optimize your survival on that island and stop worrying about SEO bullshit. See how I just swore? Looks like Google won’t index this!

Today, I was shown an actual news article that censored the word “shooting.” It was listed as “sh**ting,” which, hilariously, made me think that some guy was found after “shitting on two people in a restaurant.” We are now changing the way we write in order to placate loser ad-men who should be fired into the sun (in Minecraft). It’s now bleeding into everyday life. People actually say “unalive” when they mean “suicide.”

The next time I hear a person say “unalive” in person, I might “unalive” myself right in front of them with a rifle. The next issue is the RISE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. Imagine if, fifty years ago, you tried to explain that AI would be less like AM or HAL and more like a whiny little corporate guy trying to make everything inoffensive and “clean.” Somehow, I think the AI we have is worse than the murderous AI of past science fiction.

I call this the rise of true corposlop. Corposlop isn’t just the generic junk that corporations put out, but the clean aesthetic, stripped-away language, and dumbing down of all things so people click on products. I hate corposlop the most.

Corposlop isn’t the low-brow culture you see. I myself believe I am low-brow. After all, I call myself the Philistine Review. I don’t smoke cigars and sit around all day thinking about pretentious drivel. Instead, I think about stupid drivel. There is a place for raw, unhinged, disgusting art. For weird stories that don’t have a true home. Even some guy making a fart joke.

Both the low-brow and high-brow are being threatened by the rise of corposlop. So, what can we do? Pull the plug on the internet? No, but we can start recognizing what this corposlop is. It’s like the most annoying HR chick has now been put in charge of all online content, and if you say one thing wrong, you’re pulled into an HR meeting. “You must humiliate yourself in front of us because you said the wrong thing.” Oh great, let me bend over and take it up the ass for you, oh glorious HR AI overlord!

This has culminated in one big thing: the death of your human soul. Crushed by corporations, the state, and your own peers. Everything is sanitized and stripped away until you’re left with a product: YOU. You are the product. You’re less than a slave. You’re nothing more than a number that makes another number go up. Does that feel GOOD?

With the death of the humanities comes the death of you: the person, the individual, the soul. You’ve been stripped of all individualism. Myself included. I’m sure somewhere an algorithm knows exactly who I am, what I am, and why I want the things I want. I’ve been categorized and filed away as whatever they want to call me.

It isn’t a surprise that this has happened. Humanity has long been driven by this stupid fucking need to have some hierarchy—to be categorized and placed into neat boxes. If it isn’t your religion, it’s your “personality type”; if not that, your star sign, or whatever else you subscribe to. Maybe it’s easiest to say, “I’m a Freak Archetype, Wing Six, Social Conservative, Political Rebel, FAGT-1, and here is the list of my ailments and diseases.”

It extends beyond just the individual to the group. The corposlop algorithms want to put you in this box, whatever they want to call you, bombarding you with the most vomitous material. You’re right-wing? Well, here are some targeted ads for “right-wing coffee beans.” You’re left-wing? Here are some targeted ads for a polycule donation campaign.

People become a collective, and the easiest way to sell something to them is to make it sanitized. The internet has become full of people who didn’t even know how to turn a computer on twenty years ago. Now it has to be like the old days of television: compartmentalized, raped to death, and BORING. That might be the worst of all.

What better way to appeal to the masses than to be the most milquetoast, boring waste of data you possibly can be? You might hate what I write, you might love it, or maybe you find it boring. But you definitely can’t say it’s SEO optimized, and that warms my cold, dead heart.