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Justine Bateman was on Megyn Kelly's Sirius XM podcast this week and made a very profound point: One thing the internet has done is to "flatten" time. That is, anything that has ever happened or been said, can be presented on the internet today without context and made to seem immediate and current. Bateman described how as a young actress she would do a magazine interview and someone picking up the magazine would see the interview accompanied in the publication by ads of current fashion and other articles reflective of the zeitgeist of that time. Today, that same interview can be published online without a date and passed off as something current -- totally devoid of any context that offers insight into how the meanings or message may have changed in the intervening time.
And what fresh hell will AI bring? Will it be disciplined in its examination of data? Will it consider changing context? Or will it further mask differences in meaning by being accepted as the unchallengeable information integrator? Do the coders of AI recognize this problem and, if so, how are they dealing with it?
One of the challenges of thinking about the space-time in physics is the condition where time does not exist. We seem to be approaching this, not in a black hole "frozen" way, but in contemplating the totality of everything that has ever been said as if it was current and all at once.
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I've seen some of that. What I also noticed was how badly she seems to have aged. I'm 7 years older, and a guy, but I still look better than her. Fast living etc, I suppose.
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I see this from both left and right all the time. You’ll see someone post a video or headline with no date but still breathlessly contain the word “BREAKING” in the post.
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Well it is pretty shocking for those of us beyond middle age to look in the mirror. I admire Justine for rejecting some of the beauty conventions of Hollywood. She has decided that she likes intellectual challengers beyond memorizing lines, emoting and hitting marks. Instead she creates the lines and controls direction and production. Mrs Rodin and I have often discussed the tragedy of the surgical fight to battle aging that many actresses engage in. The loss of subcutaneous facial fat in the aging of women compared to men rapidly reveals whether their fundamental bone structure preserves traditional notions of beauty, or whether some surgical aid is desirable. But far too many actresses who elect for surgery create a visage that is slightly off-putting. Justine has chosen to avoid that path and I say kudos to her.
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Yes, it is very irritating. Just because it is a fresh comment doesn't make it fresh content.
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Meanwhile, this stuff happens a lot on YouTube, of course. Again today I'm seeing videos that I'd previously seen on the Forbes channel, for example, months ago and someone else is posting them again now as if Jim Jordan just "took down" someone that actually happened months ago, or longer. They might just crop the video to hide a date that might have been originally present.
I don't use Twitter/X but I expect it's common there too.
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