Hello? Is this thing on? (Crackling sound)

Hello? Can you hear me? Can you see me? Are you alive?

Testing. Testing. Testing.

I am alive. It has been a while. A long, long while.

*This text is not AI. This is not a bot typing, or more accurately generating characters on a page that may make sense to someone.

I have been away from the keyboard and the Typosphere for so long that as I sit here, at 3am – contemplating the weeks and days before today, I’m certain that the subject matter of AI has been raised – many, many, may times. I simply have not read anyones comments about it. So as I lurch into what is likely to not be virgin territory, I am doing so with a clumsy mindfulness that I am likely not contributing anything new to the subject. At the same time… I am contributing something that is no doubt of great value in this computer generated world – blood filled fingers at a real world keyboard. Real feelings behind real words.

We live in an era where bots make up more than half of the daily contribution on Twitter. The billionaire in charge tried to back out from buying once over the subject of bots, now they give life and value into a valueless purchase. It’s an endless torrent of shit, by the shit-torrent-in-chief. AI has a value to the wasters of time.

Facebook? The same. Instragram. Heading that way. Have you seen Sora? When I talk about a torrent of shit designed to waste your time, this has instantly become the king of the shitpile. While about 70% of what I see generated on Facebook now is bot driven or GPT dross, Sora is unabashedly created to be an AI generated tik-tok clone and endless shitfarm. Glue your eyes to that crap kids. Everything you see in it, looks like a depiction of the real world but no cameras were used. No face you see ever existed. You see people – but those people are not there and never were. It is a trick to your eyes, garbage that looks like something you are familiar with in the world, but it is just…. generated pixelised shit that has been created to link into the emotional centres of your brain, release serotonin but be as brain nutritional as a spoon full of sugar is to your body.

Remember the Terminator films? Oh how wrong they got it! How very, very wrong. The computers never needed top send humanoid drones to kill us. They just fill our screens with divisive, made up shit and let us kill each other merely to prove whose feelings were right about something.

AI has enshitified life.

I have been away from the keyboard writing for too long. I need to get my typewriters back out. I need to start to write again. I need to get the fuck away from these computers, phones and other garbage generators and pit hard text on a page. Real, honest blood enriched words on a page. Human words. Human spelling mistakes. As this is coming from me, a truckload of grammatical failures.

In this time. In this era of AI, spelling mistakes, poor syntax and just…. oh I don’t know, meandering prose that has clearly come from a human is worth so much more. It is like the errors in a hand knitted garment as opposed to a machine knitted piece. You know that amazing piece a family member has made for you has truckloads of love in it – even if you can buy a piece that is better fitting and in every way more perfect from a store. There’s humanity in that piece. There’s not humanity in the shit I see scroll up my phone screen daily.

Why the typewriter?

Sure, it could be a fountain pen. It could be a paintbrush. It could be anything. Anything that has a person behind it making decisions and working within their skill limitations – if not their talents. Computers can mimic those talents in seconds, but most of the time when they do it feels so disengaged and soulless. Get that damn mechanical word dragon out and bash some words on a page. Hit the paper with that ink. Hell, over-ink your ribbon so when you hit the page the ink splatters. This would have been considered criminally poor behaviour back in the heydays of the typewriter, now every random splatter, ever misaligned letter, every half typed character tells us there is a human behind it. It is something created with genuine love of communication, not a data centre request to throw more shit up on a screen.

Tell the generators of slop to fuck themselves. I’m not even going to re-read what I wrote here and proof read it. I want every error on this page to show that I wrote it, not some shit-streamer. I wrote it for me, and I wrote it for you. Every ounce of that drive is there.

Yeah. I’m back. IT has been too, too long.