Illustrations – Stephen Bobbett

You Can’t Fight the Void Alone

Martin Scorsese once described Marvel films as less than cinema and more like roller coasters. Even though I’m a fan of them, I tend to agree. Since the beginning with Iron Man, I’ve taken the time to watch them in theaters. When I do, I’m not looking for the complexity and depth of a Dostoevsky novel. I’m looking to sedate my brain for a couple of hours, popcorn and soda in hand, ready to just enjoy the ride.

But every once in a while, a Marvel property hits an emotional note with such earnest simplicity that it has to be more than just a theme park attraction. WandaVision gave us a portrait of mourning with a slice of poetry—“What is grief if not love persevering?”—that stayed etched on my heart years later. I refused to watch Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in public, knowing the story of a cyborg raccoon (of all things) confronting his core trauma was going to send me into a sobbing fit.

Who would’ve thought the next Marvel tearjerker would be Thunderbolts.

In truth, this movie was always going to be a sucker punch for me. I love ensemble stories that center on secondary or throwaway characters. And I love superhero movies with lower stakes than universe-ending catastrophes. This movie has the added juice of Florence Pugh and David Harbour reprising Yelena and the Red Guardian, whose debut shined in the otherwise unremarkable Black Widow movie.

But what this movie did better than almost any other Marvel property is pick a theme and knock it out of the park. From the start with Yelena practically sleepwalking off a building and bemusedly ambling through an adrenaline-fueled solo heist, this movie wants you to think about loneliness. The color palates are desaturated and monotone. The characters endure flashbacks to their most sequestered moments. The lead-up to the climax of the film has the Thunderbolts literally breaking through walls of their psychological torment to save each other.

But nowhere is this theme driven home harder than in Bob’s story. Him being absorbed by his alter ego the Void the more he tries to beat it senseless—and it receding only when Yelena and the others embrace him—caught my emotions off guard. I’m a sucker for an unconventional superhero climax in general, but this one really anchored itself in my head.

Melodramatic as it was, it’s the kind of blunt instrument I need sometimes, that community is the only remedy to isolation. Believe it or not, you can’t fight loneliness alone. It’s such an obvious statement to most people. But for me, it takes a superhero blockbuster to remember. I’ll take it.

No Web Left to Conquer

A few years before the pandemic, the chamber of commerce for my quaint New England city sent its bohemian enclaves into an uproar. They were proposing a promo campaign to draw more businesses from out of state. The main image was a cloud of cute, lineal drawings of laptops, kayaks, and to-go coffee cups—the digital nomad lifestyle craved by the tech workers of the late 2010’s. The slogan read something like “Tiny Big City,” the promise of urban amenities without the overstimulation of Boston or New York.

The vibe of the campaign was sterile and innocuous. But anyone with a keen cultural nose knew, this was the beginning of the end. The gentrification cycle was nearing completion: an old port city whose original industry had dried up was now a target of conquest by the wealthy, thanks in part to the artists and tastemakers who had made it an appealing place to live for the last couple of decades. Slowly but surely they would be muscled out by soaring rents as luxury condos devoured the market. The same would be true of many independent pubs and shops, clearing the way for familiar franchises awash in out-of-state capital.

The day I knew there was no going back was when I was sitting in a coffee shop, eavesdropping on an older couple from Connecticut, talking about buying a home in town so they could summer there. When you hear a newly inducted local use the word “summer” as a verb, you know it’s game over.

I wrote yesterday that it might be game over for the internet, too, at least when it comes to its major platforms. Thanks to things like Google Veo 3, generative AI has reached a threshold where it requires a lot more scrutiny to discern than most algorithms give us time for—let alone what most modern attention spans are equipped for. GenAI has absorbed enough of humanity’s collective endeavors that it can effectively walk around in our skin, with only the most anal-retentive sleuths able to call its bluff.

What makes Google Veo 3 truly foreboding, though, is not just its uncanny facsimile of human-born imagery, but also its $250-a-month price tag. Like an old port town renovated by the creative class, tools like Google Veo 3 are trained on untold billions of hours of human ingenuity, only to be gated and sold for the wealthy’s unfettered use—gentrification in its most resource-hungry and accelerated form.

I don’t have high hopes for the future of this new, gentrified internet. At best, corporations and content creators will succumb to the siren’s song of cheap, predictable labor, and culture will begin to stagnate. At worst, propaganda will become more virulent and convincing than it’s ever been, as the forces of oligarchy drip poison in the well of political discourse.

The real mystery is, what happens when genAI has nothing left to consume? Already it runs the risk of becoming a self-diminishing ouroboros, devouring its own outputs. The disingenuous push of the Technocrats against IP laws is a testament to this fear, as they look for the last remaining scraps to put in the belly of their beast. What frontiers are left, when even the settled places have been recolonized?

Sooner than later, genAI will have no web left to conquer. Maybe then the internet will weep, longing for the grit of originality again.

Is the Internet Over?

When I was a kid, there was a saying: don’t believe everything you see on TV. “Everything” was the operative word there. With TV, you could be reasonably certain that at least some of it was true. On the internet, I’m not sure anymore.

I used to be confident in my ability to discern generative AI content. The output of Google Veo 3 has me taking a knee. I’m not convinced that if I swiped through it on a scrolling video platform, I would distinguish it as artificial. We might be swiftly reaching the generative AI endgame.

I don’t think the world is ready for it. I think people still approach the internet with a level tacit credibility. But those days must by necessity be over. Without scrutiny and context, and with the indiscriminate faucet of algorithms spewing content at our eyes faster than we can process, we are in a golden age of lies.