January 4, 2025 | 12:00am
The past changes so quickly you have no idea what will happen yesterday.
I saw that from a Putin parody account on Twitter, and it made a lot more sense than the tedious gruel taught by most of my history professors in college. So, allow me to look back on the past years fallaciously and full of bias like an utterly unreliable narrator.
We lived through a pandemic, well, most of us did. There are people among us who’ve been dead for a long time and haven’t even realized it yet: the TikToking dead. The COVID years were brutal. I lost my mother due to complications brought about by the virus. I hope we never experience a plague of that magnitude again. The only tolerable aspect of being locked down or quarantined was that you’re not expected to be anywhere. What? Me, leave my audio cave to go and interact with shadows in an event to discuss the artfulness of art? Or go be in a new mall the same as the old mall? No, thanks.
I truly believe that staying home is the new going out. (Which reminds me about this publicist’s comment about my art, that “Dark is the new black.” Wut?) But to make up for not being a warm corpse in the office is online work. I still remember one of the projects I took on. The project manager held pre-meetings to plan the meetings, post-meetings to discuss what just happened, and of course, the weekly meetings to remind us that we were behind schedule. True story: we were in the middle of one of those infinite Zoom marathons, when I got an email and a Viber message from the project manager… while the same person was staring despotically at the webcam.How? Must be like that tesseract scene in Interstellar where the PM exists in all moments, dimensions and media at all times. That was some time-inverting,Tenet-like feat.
I still have nightmares about the project from time to time. I wake up in a pool of deliverables.
Welcome, free men, to the year 2025. “Free” is a relative term in this age of A.I. and algorithms. Ever wonder why you keep seeing specific types of content on social media? In my case there has been a deluge of dog, stereo, travel, and “If I win the lottery I won’t tell anyone but there will be signs” reels. (Not to mention inexhaustible variants of pole-vaulting or ziplining dwarves.) It’s because algorithms have determined who you are and what type of content you wish to see. In my case, I see little people as well as tons of audio gear I can never afford, such as 100,000-peso speaker or interconnect cables that can conjure zombie Elvis in your own listening room. Money tender, money steal.
As for A.I., on a personal note, I think some of the writing clients have started employing ChatGPT to write articles or advertorials for them, because I keep reading the same phrases all over again: “a kaleidoscope of…” or “a symphony of…” Everything “echoes through time” or is always “harnessing the power of” something. Oh well, good riddance. That makes fewer meetings for me to attend. Makes me wonder how life, indeed, is a tapestry of interconnected moments.
I’ve also noticed some of my artificially intelligent acquaintances who couldn’t write their way out of a paper bag suddenly waxing as florid with the English language as Christopher Hitchens. They can’t fool me. They were riding Donkey from Shrek, and now they are astride Bucephalus straight out of the gates of Macedonia. It’s like that Seinfeld bit about a magician performing tricks for another magician — “Oh, how impressive, Mr. QuillBot.”
You know what A.I. can’t do? Do mukbang videos. Does A.I. feast on algorithmic lobsters? I once sat beside a mukbanger during an event spotlighting Japanese spirits in a BGC restaurant. The guy took videos of himself stuffing insane amounts of sushi in his mouth, pausing only to flash finger hearts. Doing interviews, writing, fact-checking, deferring to our editors… that’s old school, right there. Meanwhile, the mukbang guy monstrously munching is the output. Mouths and 10,000 incisors are the tools of the trade. Living the dream, I tell you.
I understand now what the dinosaurs must have felt while watching the asteroid flit doomily across the night sky.
We might as well get entertained as civilization gets renewed for another “final season.” There is no hope in a galaxy far, far away, though. Despite what apologists tell you, Star Wars is not starry or warlike anymore. What we see are a bunch of lesbian space witches chanting, yet another iteration of The Girl Who Is The Key To Everything girl-bossing, and regurgitated Stranger Things or Goonies kids gooning around. And that is sad for those of us with the vintage C-3PO and R2-D2 lunchboxes and three-fourths sleeve Star Wars shirts. We were present during the glory years, says we old men yelling at a cloud. But for all the Velma, Robyn Hood and The Acolyte swill, there are legions of great TV shows to give balance to the enfeebled Force: The Bear, Shogun, The Penguin, The Last of Us, The Day of the Jackal, etc.
For me, the best movies of the past few years aren’t Marvel sequels, prequels, spin-offs or piss-offs — they’re horror titles. You have Heretic, Longlegs, Smile 2, V/H/S Beyond, and Late Night with the Devil (joining all-time greats such as Hereditary, The Witch, Midsommar, Barbarian, Saint Maud, Talk to Me and The Lighthouse).
But you know what’s scarier? The Year of our Lord 2025. A caricature: me sitting zombified in front of a Mac on the hunt for new items to put in my Shopee or Lazada cart, while new and fresher hells are being unleashed here and elsewhere. It is our way of coping, perhaps. For me, it is purchasing useless items (Chi-fi amps, sorbothane footers!) or being transformed yet again by listening to an old reliable vinyl record. For writers using performance-enhancing A.I., it is seeing the sentence, “What can I help with?”
For us, in this day and age, there are no more comforting words.
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