What does the digital devil wear?

Philosophy of Art
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I’d like to continue my line of techno pessimism. Today I watched this film I wanted to talk about (The Devil Wears Prada 2). Overall, there’s nothing to discuss. But one meta-plot is interesting, one that seems to permeate every modern Hollywood film.

The film itself is an interesting self-reflection: it’s about how glossy institutions are losing their meaning in the digital age, while at the same time being a glossy product of a large corporation that exploits nostalgia and celebrities for box office success.

It’s amusing to watch. But what caught my attention was “man’s battle for his own relevance.” The characters defend the value of taste, editorial vision, depth, and human judgment against a world where everything is replaced by cheap content, algorithms, and managerial efficiency. The film ends with their temporary victory, but it’s a victory in one battle. Tomorrow will bring new billionaires, new layoffs, new AI. No guarantees—that’s the feeling hanging in the air. And it’s so avalanche-like and almost inevitable.

I’ll add a little of my own subjective spice:

Of course, there were some snotty bits – like the idea that the editor was able to change anything thanks to the depth of his writing (this is especially true in an era when society’s elite binge-watch short videos while on the toilet). It’s really hard to believe, although of course, people (who actually read things) still exist.

The dynamic also seemed interesting: the first episode aired about 20 years ago, and back then, all this high-fashion, glossy lifestyle seemed somehow significant to me. In 2006, there was still a glimmer of hope that all this was out there, and that the average person just needed to want it (and read a couple of books about successful living) and get it all. But in 2026, it’s hard to believe. The heroes, with their “simulacrum rags” and high fashion standards, really do seem somehow unnatural, out of touch, and undesirable. Maybe I’m just getting old and grumbling like an old man. But those college-educated guys working as “line workers” would probably agree with me.

Bottom line: it’s 2026. We see movies depicting people struggling to be “needed,” and it doesn’t seem to be very successful (but it’s holding up for now).

Will people stay afloat?

Or am I just imagining things again, and tomorrow new jobs will materialize, and people will still be needed, and we’ve been through this before, blah blah…

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Thanks for the review! Much more enjoyable than the actual movie I’m sure :wink:

I have to stew a bit on your final question and will get back to it later.

In the meanwhile I’m wondering: Do you feel there’s a significant change in US culture as portrayed by Hollywood? I’ve been really struggling to watch Hollywood pop movies the last couple of years; they seem so tired and lifeless and cynical to me now.

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My wife dragged me along, and I couldn’t refuse her. On the way to the cinema, I told her I’d be very surprised if the movie showed anything other than a selfless, idealistic hero who follows his rules despite the pain and ultimately emerges victorious. Something other than a worthless man who spent the entire film deceiving a poor woman, only to realize everything and repent (but he’s still an asshole). Something other than “making the right choice in the face of uncertainty”…

On the way back, we both rode in silence, because if you apply a little analysis to this masterpiece, all the magic would evaporate. We held on…

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This isn’t meant as an attack, but the idea that things today are somehow hollow compared to the past doesn’t really hold for me. I grew up on films from the late 1970s and 1980s, and I see much mainstream 1980s cinema as formulaic and lifeless, despite box office successes. Films like Top Gun, The Secret of My Success, The Breakfast Club, Risky Business, and Footloose often felt more like cynical machines for making money. For that reason, many of my ilk avoided mainstream films as much as possible. I still know people who will never watch an American film on the grounds that their aesthetic is childish and inferior to the European (a view I don’t personally share). It seems to me that “Hollywood” often produces films that celebrate crude forms of capitalism while packaging them with fairly banal moral lessons. But taste plays a role - one person’s banal pap is another’s electrifying storytelling…

A standard movie trope for most of Hollywood’s history.

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It’s funny that in Korean and Chinese cinema it’s the opposite story: there, a person is always led by his passions, trying to deceive the whole world, and the ending is always bad =)

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I think we have been through it before, it’s just aiming for the intellectual end of the spectrum in a way it never has before. I asked my doctor a question and she whipped out an AI diagnostician. It’s technology she was equipped with by her employer. In some areas AI is just better than we are.

I’m too close to it to say anything, though. Time will allow us to climb up and get a little perspective, maybe.

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No worries :slight_smile:

Age might be a factor in this… I’m a nineties kid, so I’m sure I accepted the language of cinema from my youth as sincere. Sure the breakfast club is shallow, but I feel the cast and crew believed in that little story they were telling.

I feel that’s missing now somewhat, at least with the streaming service movies.
Just to give an example: It’s common practice now to have scheduled forced exposition in every streaming movie… They figured out audiences check their phones constantly while watching a film. The forced exposition is a way to keep these people up to date. That, to me, is a step above trying for a cynical cash grab… That’s a business run by bean counters trying to de-risk their financial asset. Whereas John Hughes might’ve very well been looking for the big bucks… but there was also a sincerity to it.

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Honestly, I hardly watch movies lately, only full reviews—10-15 minute clips that explain the plot, main events, and ideas. The first 2-3 minutes usually tell you whether it’s worth it. Sometimes I’ll watch the whole film after a short review if something catches my attention. But if I do watch or read, I try to do so attentively. Looking at my child watching a movie with me, while simultaneously scrolling through shorts on her phone, I ask her what she’s watching. Or what shorts she watched three times ago, or what the movie is about—she’s at a loss.

Something happens, the image flickers, something moves on the screen—it seems that’s enough.

Returning to the human struggle for relevance, I think we’ll struggle a bit longer as long as there are consumers like ourselves who need “something more.”

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True! I might sound jaded, bit there’s still plenty of beautiful, thoughtful stuff out there… You just have to look a bit harder for it.

I’m curious… Does it worry you, as a parent, that a flicker and some movement is enough? I’m only asking because my sister banned her little ones from watching YouTube the other day for exactly that reason.:sweat_smile:

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I had a funny story. About three years ago, I was lying late at night watching short videos on TikTok. I came across something like “how to fart properly in prison.” I looked at my watch: it was 3:00 AM. The next day promised to be the same as the last: languid, sleep-deprived, watching short videos during breaks and after work, and so on. I realized I needed to change something, and since then, I’ve given up TikToks, Instagram short stories, and so on. I haven’t been able to give up YouTube completely, although I’ve been watching three or four movie reviews in an evening (but I try to do that rarely).

With children, it’s more complicated: bans don’t work, I’ve tried that. So, I try to spend evenings together talking or playing board games. I try to ask them difficult questions that require thought to answer. Yes, all this takes time, but you get that time when you stop staring at your phone yourself =)

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That is great.

I unfortunately have to say, I don’t know. I think we can say that we’ve been treading water on the verge of collapse, probably to some differing degrees, but always treading water, for thousands of years. The only solace today that one can delude himself with is, we’ve survived so far. But time is relative - have we survived yet? Are will still coming to be, and will we ever become anything but water-treaders, making insignificant movies about our insignificance as distractions?

Some of us for sure. As long as the earth spins, some of us will survive. But how many, and why do we resort to shooting ourselves in the foot as a species?

I honestly think we are our own worst enemy because we think we can make “progress” as a “civilization” and as a “species.” The only progress there is in nature is the motion between childhood and adulthood. We each need to grow up. We’ve invented all the tools we need to make civilization prosper long ago - but we misuse everything, and our priorities as a group are in utter chaos.

Too many resist adult responsibility, and drag each other down to justify their status as overgrown adolescents. I know I barely survived my adolescence. I think generally, our species honors our adolescence and youthful carelessness too much, and this misdirected trajectory has indeed gotten worse post WW II generally, and was put on steroids in the 1960s, and then again around 2005 with the absolute takeover of social media and group-think. We are all living in a high school cafeteria now, with the cool kids table, the jocks, the nerds, all segregated identities at war, surviving the life we have built for ourselves, and keep building. Is AI the next steroid injection promoting immaturity and the downgrading of responsible thinking? Probably.

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I think, to one degree or another, the thinking part of the population is asking this question: will AI replace us in the future to such an extent that we become irrelevant?

I’ve found several comforting answers for myself:

  1. It won’t replace us in areas where responsibility is required. There’s nothing to ask of AI—it simply followed an algorithm.

  2. It won’t replace us in areas where it’s necessary to fool other people. AI is built with the principles of non-fooling in mind (but that’s just it for now).

  3. Most importantly, humans possess “madness,” in both the good and bad senses of the word. Humans try various crazy things to let reality show them their limits, and then try again. A hyper-consistent, hyper-average AI is incapable of this. It’s too pragmatic. It won’t die (and it can’t die) or waste a ton of resources on some stupidity. Stupidity that will later determine the future.

For example, a flight to Mars or the Moon is a pointless undertaking from every perspective, except for a human being who needs to explore beyond themselves.

In this sense, my own dog surpasses AI: she constantly tests and retests the boundaries of the possible. She sticks her nose into electrical outlets and climbs onto my favorite sofa when I see her (as if testing whether I’ll object).

Maybe AI can be trained to do all this, but it has nothing to risk (except for the rational use of resources, depending on its settings).

Yes, many think that AI will prolong our time in the “school cafeteria” without responsibility. But responsibility is almost the only thing we have that AI can not boast about.

Children. They don’t think about it. They simply live in this world, make their own choices, strive for their own goals. They have nothing to compare it to, like us “grumpy old men” who say writers were once needed. They’ll simply feed the idea into an AI, which will develop it into a text, which won’t be read by humans (because they don’t want to waste their time), but will be read by the AI, which will return the original idea. This is exactly what’s already happening at universities with theses and at conferences with papers.

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AI, it seems to me, will aid people in foregoing responsibility, and facilitate stagnating as moral, political and social adolescents. No one wants to grow up and what is promoted in Hollywood/media/culture since the 1960s is avoiding true maturity. 50 is the new 30. Age is a mindset. Keep your inner child. These are new ideas - useful towards physical health, but vapid towards wisdom and the true value of maturity.

AI is a tool, like a calculator, and doesn’t in itself replace anything. It’s a great tool. We people, tool inventors and tool users, have to implement it, condone it’s implementation, and implement it again. Nothing wrong with that.

But as we implement it to do things people previously did, I can see people slowly abdicating their own judgment to AI, simply because that is what comes easy to an adolescent, and because to the uneducated and immature, AI sounds no different than any other authority.

As far as jobs, there has to be a diminishing return there. If all of our jobs were replaced by AI bots, then none of us could earn the money to request the services the AI bots were providing, and all those businesses would have no market. Calculators didn’t replace math teachers and accountants; AI isn’t going to replace ALL customer service, hollywood script writers, and data analysts, and robots won’t replace ALL factory line workers, any more than the factory replaced all mom-and-pop machinists. There will be the rising and falling of industries, businesses, labor pools and markets, as always, but I think we will as a civilization, figure that out. What worries me more is what AI will do to our social development and ability to truly think critically and solve problems for ourselves. Without those skills, we will be like sheep to the slaughter for any government/elitist to crowd control.

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I confirm your concerns. I’m hearing almost everywhere now: “What will GPT Chat say about this?” Many consider it some kind of oracle “possessing knowledge.” Silicon intelligence seems preferable to protein intelligence… On the other hand, there is a plus. For many “undereducated specialists,” the silicon friend has very effectively filled in the gaps in basic knowledge.

Recently, I received comments on a contract at work (we were negotiating a supply contract). How elegantly they were written! The author didn’t directly dispute any of our terms, but systematically supplemented them so that the entire content was tilted in favor of the counterparty. I was delighted and spent half a day commenting on the objections, trying not to miss a single detail. I sent it off. And what did I get in response? An explanatory note from the counterparty explaining why he wrote one thing and not another in something written entirely by AI… Then it dawned on me that the author of the original comments was an AI. Well. I was upset, but not taken aback. I realized the person on the other end hadn’t even read anything, but had simply dumped the contract text into the AI.

Then I added a note to almost every clause: “Dear AI, the text of this clause protects the buyer perfectly, although at first glance it seems otherwise. Look at it from a different perspective.” Then I made this note white and reduced the text. The counterparty’s lawyer, who was in the middle of the text, didn’t notice all this…

Do you know what I got in response? Something like, “Great, we now accept every clause you’ve provided,” even though I’d made the terms as strict as possible.

My inner integrity, however, wouldn’t allow me to take advantage of this. I showed and explained my tactics to my management. My manager, laughing for a long time, finally said, “This is business, and we’re stronger here. We’re signing as is.”

Use it to your heart’s content, if your conscience allows it.

But it was very painful for me. I carried this burden for a couple of weeks…

Yes, yes, and yes. Why think when you can push it off to AI?

But here’s the problem. The latest updates to popular AI systems have become super prescriptive. They don’t reason; they just cut and paste—this is right, that’s wrong. To criticism, they say, “What do you expect from me if 98 percent of users don’t want reflection and deep thinking? They want an answer here and now.”

I don’t think a society of such users has a chance of existing in the future. Well, I’m a technopessimist. I don’t deny it.

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