I have attire, you have despair

It is very close to one year under the plague restrictions and I probably should be fluent in Spanish, but instead I am reduced to watching reruns of reality TV. Click bait shows, celebrating schadenfreude and massive fail. Back in my day we called them sitcoms.

This week I realized I am watching reruns of reruns and also the library opened back up so now I have books to read. I am alarmed at how old and stupid I am becoming. 20-30 years ago I'd do 3-4 books every week or two and remember most of the stuff I read. Now, it must be because I don't sleep and dream as much and the short-term to long-term memory just ain't what it used to be. I am inexorably becoming addled. That's a joke because the family history is, thank the Nothing, dementia-free.

The thing I noticed about incompetence porn is it is not in TVtropes. Or maybe it is, as the Armenian Azerbaijan 2020 air war doesn't provide new insight on warfare, just substitute unmanned for manned. There's a category already.

Still, the main thing is that you eventually hate these people, and the only way to change that is put even more awful people on to the show. Eventually, people you used to hate become preferable what's next on the downward treadmill. Until, back to slavery, I guess. Matter of fact, a better title of any piece of fiction is Slaves and Masters.

Here's a fiction for you, flavored by the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war.

It's been done. This story. We'll call it Goldbot vs. Silverbot but it's an old Twilight zone take on the last war survivors, the last remnants of civilization. The robot warriors. There is competence porn. By, the way, Goldie and Silv are in a winter landscape because it took about ten years for the Earth to get back to its Icehouse phase. Don't want no Hothouse. Hothouse, from here on out, ice ape babies, is bad.

It's interesting how competence as a measure for qualities changes through the ages. Now, it means doing something well. But a century ago, when character mattered more than doing, it meant trustworthy, to be a gentleman. The lowly mechanick of two centuries ago, competent by today's standards, was thought of little better than a whore.Like actors. And if we take Modernism to be recent, then the past 5000 years of modern history views competence as simply getting along with other people not like yourself. Which gets us back to hating people on TV.

People talk about well of course there is conspiracy run amok on the Internet because it was designed to be gossipy and conspiratorial in structure. If the Internet is our brain, then I guess TV is our eyes, radio our ears. I've lost the point.

Reading an E.O. Wilson book about, what do you know, ants. The Fermi entertainment, meaning mathematically guessing, for how many ants there are tells us this is the Planet of the Ants (provided you ignore microbes and assume they aren't a superintelligent billions year old subterranean world net).

Around 7.5 billion humans in the terran Petri dish versus a million times as many ants. But! Ants on average are a million times smaller than humans so it works out biomass-wise we about even steven. So! What about infrastructure? Our techno biofilm vs the ants. Let's go one trillion pounds for each pound of human flesh. Ants? Oh. They've had a 99 million year head start. 

Ants win.

But then. ants haven't been to the Moon. Or have they?