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4Chan's First Feature film is also the first Feature length AI Film.
The Conceit? Aside from a few Joke stills, none of the visual film is AI. It is a "Nature Documentary" Narrated by David Attenborough... It is also maybe the most disturbing film ever made, and possibly the most important/impactful film of the decades so far.
Reality is more terrifying than fiction.
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Notes -
Affluent and educated Indians simply have no retort to the core criticism of many people on the DR about India, which is that it is the only place in the world in which the rich are so permanently content with public squalor.
You cannot simply appeal to ‘socioeconomic development levels’. No. African countries with small fractions of India’s median income have much cleaner capitals. I was in Central Africa again last week. Kinshasa is much cleaner than Mumbai or New Delhi. I work, on occasion, with senior African officials across many sub-Saharan countries. One of the first things they’ll do, even the most corrupt ones, as they increase state capacity and collect more tax money, is beautify public spaces, hire people to clean the park opposite the national parliament, that kind of thing. I have walked through shanty-town level African neighborhoods where the working class is and you will see boys picking up litter, sweeping streets and so on. Of course, sheer poverty means these places are still squalid by first-world standards.
But they are much cleaner than even middle class neighborhoods of Indian cities. Even wealthy ones. If you are a wealthy Indian you have probably been to Soho House in Mumbai (a few years ago at least it was one of the places the wealthy younger people hung out, probably less fashionable now). Even there, the street outside was dirty, garbage everywhere, unswept, sandy. Street cleaning has been solved, we have machines for it now, India can afford them (many other cities with much lower median income than Mumbai manage it). This squalor is a choice.
India fills me with a certain horror that the rest of the developing world does not. You see, I can go to Singapore and see what a Chinese civilization that is rich looks like. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but it is pleasant enough, competently managed and a high-quality place to live. Even the Arabs, when they have money, create a passable or moderately livable society. There are good parts of South and even Central America. Africa is very poor, but as I said, I am encouraged. Only in India are the rich content with public squalor. I cannot understand why. I don’t think even you know, exactly, I’ve engaged on this issue with the many intelligent Indians here and I get the sense that it’s not something they really think about, even though to me it is obviously, by very very far the biggest issue with their country.
I don’t condone the ridiculous racism of the 4chan troll, Indians are by and large decent immigrants to the West. But the question of India’s squalor looms over every stamped visa.
When I get the "oh, you spent a month in India? How was that?" small talk, scenes like this, and a hundred others flash through my mind before I politely lie: "it was fine", and change the subject. The pristine western retail stores with literal rubble half-blocking the entrances.. The designated landfill streets.. The street curs gnawing at their severed paws in the middle of the road.. The absolute state of the power infrastructure (live? wires pulled down to street level and woven into clothesline). The constant smell of rot and pollution and feces. I could go on.
It's not so much the squalor. It's the squalor plus dressing up in shirt and tie, working in an air conditioned office and pretending there's no problem at all.
The truthful* novel set in 1970s India, written by a Midwest US writer who visited Calcutta in 1970s notes that western world used to have pretty horrible slums too before Victorians got disgusted with them and bulldozed them all & built sewers...
*half of the horror is basically just the things noted in this thread ..
We have (very early) photographs and sketches of what rich parts of Victorian London looked like, though. Sure, horse manure on the streets was a fact of life, but even then sidewalks were a lot cleaner and better kept than they are in major Indian cities today. Nobody is complaining that slums are dumps; this is a universal fact of life. The mystery is why the nice parts of Indian cities where average residents make US-middle-class salaries are such.
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We have no way of measuring a person’s aesthetic or (full) ethical value through educational and visa selection processes. This is the problem underlying immigration where immigration looks good on paper. Are Indians smart, hardworking, and nonviolent? Yes. But this is only part of the value of a human being. We must also care that a human has a high ingrained sense of empathy without the threat of punishment, and that a person can sense visual beauty and the invisible value of beauty. These are almost terminal values: an ideal world must consist of empathetic humans who love beauty, because these qualities are necessary for an optimal world according to Western values (love-filled people in a beautiful world).
When I look at videos of India there does appear to be people whose eyes never rest momentarily to notice the ugliness and poverty surrounding them. They do not seem to feel the pain of guilt when they rip off tourists (an eternal complaint about gypsies, whose extraction is Indian). It is as if their inner life is too locked in to the ratrace of personal interest. Cognitive science has begun to understand the role that eye movement plays in a person’s inner life, and the way that some Indians stare at people sets off a threat detection alarm to Westerners.
I do not know the best way to measure the full ethical dimension of a person for the purposes of immigration but looking at how they live is certainty better than ignoring the question altogether. And maybe better then this would be looking at what happens in their brain when confronted with suffering strangers, or scenes of ugliness, and looking at infant behavior for AI-determined signs of empathy.
Indians appreciate public beauty so long as the cost of maintaining such beauty is borne by others. It is the tragedy of the commons writ visibly large on a societal scale.
The irony of course is that indians are actually perfectly happy, and even proud, to live in clean public spaces. The Indian elites in quaint English cottages are hardly violaters of personal space and public cleanliness like travelers or junkies; Indians do not lower property values by their presence.
No, the observable difference is in civic consciousness: Indians make no attempt to clean up their public spaces in India, because such huge costs are immediately wasted when the tide of humanity washes its excreta upon the shores of civilization to bleach in the sun with each passing day. Is it a fundamental moral deficiency, or a total collapse of state structures? A convincing case can be made for both, but when considering how much elite (and frankly non elite as well) Indians are net acretive outside of India, there must be something uniquely terrible about Indias structure that ruins the country so.
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