Fountain of Filth No. 1

Just before I started writing this, I was scrolling the subreddit r/PeterExplainstheJoke, a subreddit where redditors can post a meme they don’t understand and commenters provide context for the joke in question. I like Reddit. It’s one of those sites that takes me back to an earlier internet that felt more democratic and more free. Every user was a pioneer, exploring a vast web of interconnected pages. Each site’s popularity, measured in upvotes, gave the populi their vox. Scanning the page, I lock eyes with a woman, perhaps in her twenties, smiling and sweaty at a night club. She’s wearing a wine-red silk slip dress and just out of frame a blonde woman in a silver slip dress is reaching towards her. The post simply reads “Why is this all over Twitter?” It isn't obvious what’s funny about this. There’s no photoshop, no caption. The users in the replies are as confused as I am. I decided to bookmark that post and come back to it once someone had come up with a satisfactory answer. 

Fountain of Filth is a column about change. It’s about changes I have experienced firsthand and how they connect to, as well as affect my understanding of changes happening on a societal level. This column is a documentation of me attempting to trace this change. This is a personal project, so it seems pertinent to introduce myself. I am Olive. I am a 26 year old, white, transgender woman from New Jersey. I was raised in a working class family which experienced an unexpected bout of upward mobility in my teenage years. Because of this, I capped off my 12 years of public school with four years of elite liberal arts education. It was a sort of non-sequiter ending to my education. There, I gained the academic basis for my analysis of the world around me. This column is a vulgar application of the theory I was exposed to in college. I was a very online child, although that trait is increasingly fading. I make music, I live in Brooklyn. I see now that there are some more replies to the post I was just looking at: 

The source has been discovered. A link tosses me to X, @Bornakang posted the video of the two women. A community note (Elon Musk’s replacement for dedicated censorship and community guidelines) warns me that the video is AI generated. I really couldn't tell that it was. Some users noticed a hair blurring into the forehead of the woman at the end of the clip. I can’t make out. I’m still not sure why this video is so viral. No joke, no porn, no gore, no hate, just slop. I check to see if any redditors can bolster my understanding. Apparently, the video is supposed to depict a woman dancing high on MDMA in a club. There is a comment chain hundreds of responses long debating AI water usage. Deep in the thread, a user speculates that the video may have been generated using the same engine as their preferred AI porn. They link to an example. At this moment, my cursor hesitates over the blue text of the link. I know that in clicking the link, I would be crossing a threshold out of the sanitized internet and into the underbelly. Video stores used to have a separate room for adult films, sectioned off with a beaded curtain. You’d have to be so fucking horny to cross through that curtain. What if your kid’s 1st grade teacher is in there? Or your neighbor? You’re breaking the law, but you’re certainly getting a strange look from anyone who may know you. Now, the beaded curtain of our past has been replaced with my small glowing machine that provides me enough social privacy to look  at CGI boobs without fear of discovery. I’m here in my apartment, my roommates are at work, and I’m basically not horny at all. It's just some research for my column. 

Filth is all around us. It’s a fluid that coats everything it touches, and is emitted primarily through a family of new technologies that have been touted as innovations. They go by many names; the For You Page, AI, ‘smart’ technologies etc., however, this generally refers to tech that is enhanced via the computation of massive amounts of data in order to predict a future outcome. Unlike innovations of the past, for instance–fire; these developments are usually repackaging of a previous good or service that is somehow smarter.  It’s not a new type of refrigerator that keeps your food fresher for longer, it’s a refrigerator that has a screen on it for your shopping list (and to show you advertisements). Although some examples are benign, there is a concerning trend arising. Out of these technologies a new wave of capitalism has bloomed. If neoliberalism saw the essential functions of the state fed to the whims of the market and mass global colonization for resource extraction, then this wave has turned inward. It takes the human mind and spirit as the next frontier for profit maximization. Many have tried to name this phenomenon–I call it filth.  

A new tab appears at the top of my browser. “AI girlfriends are the new standard now. Everyone should try this app. It has everything ChatGPT has, but in the form of an explicit girlfriend. Plus there’s a game in different styles. Don’t try it if you ever want to watch regular porn again.”