Remembering Some Guys
Computers will never beat humans at pointlessness
I just found out about this guy on TikTok who looks for moments in TV shows and movies where there’s a screen in the background of a scene that happens to be showing a sporting event (usually for only a few seconds) and figures out which exact game it was. His final effort, posted a few years ago, involved identifying a college baseball game that appeared on a TV behind a bar in one of the last episodes of The Office, a challenge that his followers believed would be impossible. Starting with the few scraps of information available—the uniform colors, the appearance of the stadium seats, the possible date range—he proceeds to narrow it down further by combing through hundreds if not thousands of teams at the lowest levels of college baseball, a process he describes as “mind numbing,” eventually somehow finding that this is a junior college game between Montgomery College Germantown and Montgomery College Rockville. He then watches the whole game, which was uploaded to YouTube in 2008, and finds the exact frame that appears in the Office episode, a moment that elicits a great frisson. It’s one of the more entertaining examples of a broad genre of internet content, epitomized by GeoGuessr, which makes a game or sport out of grappling with the unfathomable surfeit of information that saturates contemporary life—a pure expression of the desire to merge oneself with the roaring media stream, to play a small role in all the pointless sorting of bits, to do manually and visibly what has become mostly automatic, unseen, and instantaneous.
The aforementioned TikTok exhibits many of the qualities that define life on the internet today: the confrontation with vast troves of data, the crossover between distinct cinematic universes, and above all, a narrowing of perspective—pointlessness taken to the extreme. At a moment when computers are poised to not only perform this kind of task in mere milliseconds, but to take over our day jobs and hobbies as well, it’s somehow even more thrilling to see a human do it. We might expect this ruthless computer logic to eventually pull everything into its grand deterministic machine, but the crooked timber of humanity is poor scaffolding for such a project; for every fully rationalized system that emerges, expect a corresponding increase in nonsense, horseplay, and mysticism. What is prediction market betting if not stubbornly spurning the hive mind’s consensus to assert your own unique but flawed perspective? A pessimistic assessment of this situation is that humans will eventually just be the decorative ornamentation for the digital Stack—a hypothesis that an hour or two watching TikTok certainly supports—but at least that’s something we’re good at. AI might rugpull your productive value to society but will it ever know why it’s amusing to waste hundreds of hours sifting through the warehouses of pop culture detritus to find a single throwaway frame from an ‘00s TV show? That’s the kind of meaning that only humans can create.
I recently rewatched High Fidelity, the 2000 film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel about a guy named Rob who owns a record store and obsessively discusses music and pop culture with everyone he knows. My friend called it the last movie before the internet. In one scene that stood out this time, a TV show comes up in conversation when Rob is on a date, causing him to frantically gesticulate and ultimately interrupt his friends as he tries to remember the actor who starred in the show (McGoohan!). For generations who came of age during the ‘90s and early ‘00s, amassing such encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture and being able to spontaneously retrieve it in social situations was important in a way that seems increasingly absurd (and, let’s be honest, often seemed absurd back then too, something High Fidelity captures). The twilight of the analog fostered a relationship to media that would seemingly become obsolete once everyone had a smartphone and could Google every factoid that no longer needed to reside in their minimally-furnished memory—but that knowledge paradoxically feels even more valuable now, however anachronistic. Remembering Some Guys is great conversation, and hunting down a baseball game from an old Office episode is great content, specifically because of what about them continues to elude technology. Look at what computers are automating now to predict what humans will stubbornly insist on still doing for fun ten years from now.
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Reads:
Robin Sloan on the persistent boundary between the physical and digital, and how each might evolve in the near future. “Software cannot, in fact, eat this world. Software can reflect it; encroach upon it; more than anything, distract us from it. But the real physical world is indigestible.”
Mike Pepi proposes a slop tax to reign in the negative externalities of AI-driven cultural production. “In the future, access to non-AI-slop, authentic human creativity may be a luxury good sold at a premium. The slop tax is an attempt to democratize the access to this creative production before it becomes rarefied and accessible to only the most elite consumers.”
Robert “Tractor” Traylor
"the crooked timber of humanity is poor scaffolding for such a project" is a gorgeous twist of language