Duck-bananas of our known worlds

I saw a chained bonsai someplace online, I did not really notice it. The miniature tree itself was not chained, it was growing as usual on a rock on a platter, but the platter a floating world was attached to the top of a welded chain. The type of apprentice workshop conceit I remember from my childhood neighbourhoods, where they were used to support a suburban letterbox.

Anyway. The first one of these bonsai holders that I saw was in a garden center with a real plant, and a really welded chain, but why bother with the hassle of watering: And why not make the chain out of plastic too? Make the whole thing plastic…

So I started clicking around, first searching for garden gnomes which were often highly sexualised and I felt there was too much pointy hat there. But then as I browsed like a superior giraffe….

—I thought… —there is so much here to unpack, but then…

— oh, it’s just AI made plastic perfect.

Somewhere, some old-school word-salad generator is spewing out prompts to an image generator which, with or without human interference or curation, renders the flat image into an object for sale. Obviously profits are higher with less human involvement.

Maybe you could set up a stockmarket suite of platforms and applications to buy stuff from the website and ship it directly to your favoured storage facility. The chart of your purchases could be embroidered into the suit you are wearing in real time.

I first met the fictional version of the technological singularity in Ken McLeod novels but it was Charles Stross’ Singularity Sky (2003) with stuff falling out of the heavens for no apparently reason, basically red telephones falling down and asking for prompts to make stuff, that scared the puritan in me. And I thought I did not have an inner sumptuary law-maker mostly concerned with bric-a-brac.

What is worlding with even more too-much-stuff?

First published in March 2024 on substack.com