Adam Mastroianni wrote a sequel examining some potential objections to his October post "The Decline of Deviance” which argued that, as he summarizes it: “many forms of risk-taking and rule-breaking have declined since the 1990s… because prosperity has increased—people have more to lose, and they’re acting like it.” In 2 Decline, 2 Deviance he considers and rejects the ideas that The Internet Did It, or that We’re Just Old Now. He also mentions 2018 puzzle game Return of the Obra Dinn, and if I had a nickel for every time I’ve seen 2018 puzzle game Return of the Obra Dinn mentioned today I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.

In May, Henry Fudge wrote “Degeneracy is a Symptom,” which I think is the other side of the same coin, or the same side of two different coins as it were,² about a countervailing social tendency toward “lying flat” and gambling among a segment of the world’s younger population who share “the recognition that the productive game no longer pays.” He describes this as something like the flip side of Veblen Goods but somehow fails to correctly name it “Veblen Bads,” an oversight I am here to rectify. All three of these posts are fairly long and well worth your time—I promise that if you’re reading Tabs they’re about stuff you’re interested in.

Today in Other Veblen Bads: The discovery of a new NineLoko, distinct from the previous version which was FourLoko + Five Hour Energy, seems to have definitively narrowed the set of potential Lokos to only the squares of either integers greater than one or primes greater than one. Whether the next Loko is SixteenLoko or TwentyFiveLoko should finally settle this longstanding dispute among Loko Scientists.¹ Here’s a white chocolate dill pickle cookie, from the otherwise disappointingly normal and delicious looking Minnesota State Fair New Foods list. Some of these paper hedgehogs for children “appear to have been made from Nicholson Baker’s 1994 erotic novel The Fermata.” Screwworms vs. feral hogs in Texas—whoever wins, we lose. Drew Magary: “Dana White Stars In History’s Worst Truck Ad.” And Amanda Palmer created “a ritualistic bonfire fueled by hundreds of deeply personal objects mailed to [her] by members of her 25,000-strong Patreon community.” No one has ever gone wrong trusting Amanda Palmer, right?

There are many Veblen Bads but the Veblen Worst is A.I., and just days before Microsoft laid off 4,800 employees, Microsoft CEO and one-man human centipede Satya Nadella announced some new A.I. bullshit with a post on Twitter that said: “The future of the firm is a learning loop in which human capital and token capital compound.” More like a loop in which head and ass compound. AdWeek’s Mark Stenberg reported that Google has so badly crippled its own core search business that publishers are starting to opt out of Google’s crawlers entirely, rather than allow them to train A.I. as well as index pages for search. Can you imagine how dominant any company that launched Circa 2015 Google Search would be today? Bona Books accidentally bought an A.I. story for their upcoming Wrath Month anthology, and almost had to scrap the entire project because of it. On the other hand, even after all the discourse the Commonwealth Foundation picked the almost surely A.I.-generated Caribbean regional winner “The Serpent in the Garden” as its overall short story prize winner this year. Writers who did their own work, fuck you I guess. The “author” Jamir Nazir took an If I Did It victory lap in an interview with Will Oremus, insisting that he didn’t use A.I. but if he had that would be awesome and actually everyone should. He also couldn’t name a single work by his alleged favorite writer, Derek Walcott. Nazir argues:

We’re so cooked, gang. We’re going to look back on this as the last time any writer felt like they had to hide their A.I. use, and it won’t be long before we’re all supposed to celebrate it as a great equalizing force, bringing fresh creativity forth from anyone who can pay Sam Altman for tokens. Good thing there’s already a lifetime’s worth of human books to read.

But maybe I shouldn’t be so negative. Miles Klee reports that pickup artist Mystery has an A.I. girlfriend now. Saving any woman from having to interact with pickup artist Mystery is the best imaginable use for A.I. And yes, the people pushing A.I. and the externalities it imposes on us are both terrible, but the technology itself remains a hilarious post-structuralist minefield for everyone who didn’t study their Derrida carefully enough. A new research paper from Charles Ye, Jasmine Cui, and Dylan Hadfield-Menell found that A.I. systems apply different levels of trust to different types of text, for example distinguishing user input, tool output, and internal reasoning. But they judge what type of text it is, and therefore how much to trust it, purely based on intrinsic features of the text itself. So if you want an A.I. to give you a recipe for cocaine you can Jedi Mind Trick it by just…

Finally: Cool robot swims and flies.

Today’s Song: The Mountain Goats, “Shallow Grave”

Today in Tabs is a useful and interesting roundup of the things that will one day be included in Wikipedia’s “List of Reasons It All Collapsed.” We can be found at your local newsagent’s shop or any fine bespoke magazine stand. Registered at the post office as “hilarious wee fluffy ribbons.”