Going Full Cube
Hello, friends! Rob here.
Several lifetimes ago, I used to regularly update the blog on our website. It started as weekly "here's what the band has been up to!" reports, and, as I ran out of engaging ways to write about the band and the process of touring, the blog gradually became a repository for all of my intrusive thoughts. And today, the intrusive thought that has me dusting off the old keyboard and pestering management to remind me how to access the back-end publishing tools on our website is the 1997 cult classic Cube.
Cube is a Canadian sci-fi horror film in which six strangers find themselves trapped in a sprawling and ever-shifting labyrinth of identical cube-shaped chambers. The threat of malnourishment spurs the prisoners to press on through lethal traps and the slow drip of claustrophobic madness as they struggle to navigate this deadly maze and solve the mystery of why they have been placed inside it. The movie's most chilling scene comes about a third of the way through the film, when one of the captives, a cynical office worker, realizes that he played a small part in designing the maze:
"I never even left my office. I talked on the phone to some people, other guys like me- specialists working on small details. Nobody knew what it was. Nobody cared . . . This may be hard for you to understand, but there's no conspiracy. Nobody is in charge. It's a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan . . . If this place ever had a purpose, then it got miscommunicated, or lost in the shuffle. This is an accident, a forgotten, perpetual public works project."
"Why put people in it?"
"Because it's here. You have to use it, or you admit it's pointless."
Hot damn, that is bleak. A grand, faceless enigma, built by and for no one, operating on its own, lures people into a featureless industrial complex filled with despair. You know what that reminds me of?
Willy's Chocolate Experience.
If you have an internet connection and a brain half as poisoned as mine, you may have heard about this. Earlier this week, parents, children, and children-at-heart in the greater Glasgow area were promised a day of wonder, whimsy, and all things sweet at "Willy's Chocolate Experience," an immersive homage to Roald Dahl's classic children's novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. What they got in exchange for their £35 tickets (about $44) was a grim warehouse dotted with quarter-assed decorations, a few rudderless local actors* performing such roles as "Willy McDuff" (now with 70% less copyright infringement!) and "spirit halloween sexy Oompa Loompa," and two jelly beans apiece. Kids cried, parents got mad, somebody called the police (yes, really), and everybody had something new to post about for a day or two.
(*: To be clear, the actors are not at fault here- they were lured in under false pretenses, handed cheap costumes and a baffling script written by ChatGPT, and left to their own devices by the event's absentee organizers.)
As others have already pointed out, in retrospect it seems predictable that this would have turned out to be kiddie Fyre Fest. The event's website is full of weird AI art, garbled text, and vague promises of "a heart-pounding experienceyou've [sic] never experienced before!" The website for the production company behind the event, House of Illuminati (who could not have picked a funnier name), is similarly suspect. Not that I'm in much position to talk, but their blog contains exactly six entries, all attributed to a faceless "admin," five of which were posted on the same day last December. The posts contain some extremely Voight-Kampff bullet points, like "a symphony of details" and "the essence of achievement." Nothing about either vacant website suggests the presence of a human intellect behind the curtain.
House of Illuminati is hardly the only manifestation of a Cube-style "headless blunder" in recent memory. A few years ago, Color Star, a nebulous construction-company-turned-metaverse-startup, landed a brief and inexplicable sponsorship deal with the Philadelphia 76ers despite having no identifiable product and a fake CEO. Google search results are now so bloated with AI-authored SEO slop that the site's utility is decaying. A scientific journal published a paper that contained several chaotic diagrams sourced from the AI image generator Midjourney, including a now-infamous illustration of a gargantuan rat penis with helpful labels like “testtomcels” and "dck.’
So what's to stop the business world from going full Cube? The metrics by which we understand the strength of an economy are already long estranged from the quality of human life produced by that economy. C-suite executives are increasingly game to turn away from the conventional model of capitalism- provide something consumers want, compensate your employees well enough to keep them happy and motivated, run a stable, sustainable business- in favor of a single, overriding directive: maximize shareholder profit. It's all just one big arms race to see who can charge the most money for the worst product in the name of endless, year-over-year growth.
Obviously, this is not sustainable. It’s the reason we have extinction-scale layoffs in a thriving industry, and airplanes where the doors fly off at 16,000 feet, and David Zaslav. As the market continues to overestimate the power of generative AI, and as Genius Business Disruptors keep groping blindly for ways to pivot from the old, outdated business paradigm of "people making and doing real things," we're only going to become more and more inundated with vacuous, recursive content masquerading as a good or service. At the bottom of it all, there is nothing left but the Cube: a hollow, self-perpetuating machine that exists simply for the sake of existing, operating without human guidance, employing nobody, creating nothing, and serving no one.
. . .
That was fun! We should do this more often. I’ll leave you with a quick palate cleanser. It’s a fact I encountered a few weeks ago that made me question my entire concept of reality, and I have since been sharing it with anyone who comes within shouting distance:
You know panthers? Like, the big jungle cats with sleek, black fur? Cool as all hell? It turns out they're not a distinct species. The animals we know as "panthers" are actually jaguars or leopards that are born with uncommon pigmentation, sort of like a reverse albinism. Neat! See you next time something kind of depressing and also kind of funny gets stuck in my brain!
