The great enslurrification of culture

I'm not the person you asked but..

I like the word clanker. I've been using it at work because we have been doing a lot of maintenance lately based on automatic scans of source code. So I'm basically working for an algorithm now. I call it my clanker boss.
The security scans are not what most people consider AI (there is some "AI" done by the scanning) but it's within the same broad group of machine based decisions that are pretty dehumanizing.

I think its somewhat juvenile, like people are enjoying the thrill of saying a "bad" word even if its not real.

It comes across to me like people imitating a bigot for fun, but trying to do so in a way that wont get them in trouble. Like, Im not a racist but I enjoy the aesthetic of pretending to be horrible, so Im going to be racist to rocks or something else innocuous in order to get away with it.

I mean, I dont doubt that there is a lot of negative sentiment around AI, but I feel that this trend is not really a genuine manifestation of that resentment, its just people engaging in ironic humor.

Beyond that, if I was going to describe the "enslurrification" of culture it would be about how I feel public discourse is becoming more hateful and more centered around labelling people with terrible words so they can be disregarded as monsters rather than people. Its emergent from the rapidly increasing polarization that has been going on in society over the past decade or so.

I do think there’s an unwelcome trend towards podcasts and video. Even people who are mostly writers will make podcasts or videos. I assume it’s because it’s relatively cheap marketing.

In a way, this has always been the case; it’s traditional for authors promoting a book to do book tours. Nowadays people will make video trailers promoting a book. Giving talks is also common. For politicians, giving speeches is traditional and if you’re lucky a transcript will be published.

Sometimes it’s done badly.

I think it’s too much to expect people to write articles when they would rather make videos, whether they’re good at it or not. Even though it’s not what I prefer, it seems like that’s up to them?

I guess I have relatively low standards for transcripts: I think that the occasional blooper in a transcript is not that big a deal, as long as you can figure it out from context. Criticizing them as inadequate might discourage people from doing them at all, and that would be a shame.

It sounds to me like this comes from a couple sections. One describes the material conditions leading to the production of "slurry":

An oversaturated attention economy means you also have a lot of pressure for one piece of “content” to do double, or triple, or sextuple duty across platforms, to justify the original investment of labor, with a corresponding squeeze on the thought that goes into each specific form that something takes.

And one describes Rosalind Krauss's "post-medium condition":

the idea that artists had stopped thinking about the specificity of what worked best in one medium and not another

The decision to present a transcript of a video on equal footing with the video itself, the idea that people could come by and read the transcript as a morally equivalent experience to watching the video version, the proposition that everything really important about the work can be, or ought to be able to be, presented independently of the nature of its medium, is, I think, what the article is attacking.

When you try to adapt a story from one medium to another, like a book to a movie, you can end up with a cinematic masterpiece, but only if you give the adaptation sufficient artistic attention on the terms of its new medium, and are willing to sacrifice the aspects of the original that don't translate well and add new aspects to fill spaces the new medium creates. When you're done, if it's any good, you really have made a new, transformative work, no matter what Disney's copyright lawyers might tell you.

When you take a video, and then present its transcript as if it were worth reading as an article, and you also take the audio and publish it in a podcast feed, and you clip out the best bits and crop them to portrait and put them on YouTube Shorts, you end up making a lot of mediocre adaptations that haven't had the attention put into them to make them good. And when the pressures of this process feed back onto the original work---making sure all the action of the original video is in the middle of the frame so it shows up in the short, and that the dialogue is all in paragraphs that scan well in the transcript, and so on---you end up making a mediocre original in the service of producing these adaptations.

I think you're right that this is in tension with "accessibility". In one sense, the relentless drive for making one's work able to be accessed by the largest possible audience, on all possible platforms, whatever they happen to also be doing at the time, while one is merely a single person and not actually skilled in all those media, is a key motivating factor driving the production of low-quality adaptations and excessively adaptable originals. This notion of accessibility is in legitimate tension with artistic intent. It's a defensible artistic statement to produce work that is deliberately hard for people to access: you have to come to the desert to see the sculpture in the cave, no photographs of the light show will really capture what's interesting about it, and so on. It's also the sort of statement only an artist in a position of power can make. A threatened or commodified artist needs to take your preference for reading over watching seriously, and cater to it as much as they can, even if that divides their limited resources.

But in another sense, an artist is arguably wrong to use their power to refuse accessibility, when we're talking about disability accessibility, even when that would feed back into and change the original. The W3C recommendations on alt text prescribe that designers should "avoid text in images", in service of making their web sites accessible to people who need to use screen readers to interact with the web. It's not clear that "but I wanna have text in images, for art reasons" is a valid defense here. It certainly won't argue you into an AAA WCAG rating. And it's also not clear that anyone is really rightly empowered to be making a distinction between, say, people who need a transcript and people who merely want one. Or that the transcript being, by Word of Authorial God, a lesser or wrong way to experience the work, isn't the sin of ableism.