This gross commercial, which has aired a million times during the Olympics and which everyone totally hates, is actually a decent illustration of what socialists mean by “commodification.” To summarize, in the commercial, a little girl wants to write a letter to the Olympian Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. And since “this has to be just right,” the girl and her dad use some shitty Google product to write the letter.
Obviously the reason everyone hates this commercial — so much so that Google had to turn off comments on the YouTube video — is that little kids writing letters to a superstar athlete is an age-old tradition and the whole point is that the little kid actually writes the letter. If you just get some robot to do it, then all you have is a shitty letter.
Amidst all the criticism of this commercial, many are wondering how Google could have possibly thought this was a good ad. But this is gets at the idea of “commodification”: Something is a commodity if it is produced for exchange, and in that case you want to reduce costs by lowering the amount of labor that goes into it. But for something like a letter to an Olympic medalist, the labor is THE WHOLE POINT. The goal is not the production of a letter as easily as possible — the goal is to be the one to create this letter. Having AI do it for you is like having AI take your vacation for you.
But companies like Google, which are trying to market AI products to consumers without any obvious use-case for it, have to convince people that the goal is the cheap and easy production of a letter, in just the same way that they have to convince people that AI-generated images and videos are as good as real art and movies. This ad was a particularly clunky version of that effort, but the effort will not go away so long as tech behemoths are intent on making AI happen.
Anyway, here’s everything from Undrafted this month:
Podcast Episodes
Episode 47: Socialist Sports TV Review! Clipped!
The Lefty Specialists have returned! Today we’re talking about Clipped, but really we’re talking about the Donald Sterling affair. We spend the first ~15 minutes making fun of the show, and then get into Sterling’s long reign in LA, the 2013-14 Clippers team, and whether Sterling’s ban was a victory or a failure.
This bad show was at least a decent excuse to revisit the Donald Sterling scandal ten years later.
Episode 48: The Olympics Are Here... Yay?
The 2024 Olympics are here and the Lefty Specialists are not that excited! In this episode, James and John break down the history of the Olympics, how they inevitably serve a nationalistic agenda and divide the international working class, and why they’re also kind of boring.
The Lefty Specialists try not to be haters about the Olympics anymore, but we really can’t muster up enthusiasm for them either, so in this episode we discussed our ambivalence about them.
Posts
Some Things Matter More Than Money
Last week, it was announced that Jalen Brunson was signing a contract extension with the New York Knicks, worth $156.5 million over four years — a lot of money, but SIGNIFICANTLY less than he could have signed for if he waited until next year. By most estimates, he gave up ~$113 million, or roughly 40% of his earning potential over the next few seasons,…
Why the Nova Knicks serve as an illustration of what the world can look like when labor rules…
Thoughts on Firing the Coach
Sometimes, you just need to shake up the vibes. Firing a coach in the middle of a season is usually not a recipe for success. Usually, it’s a sign that a team has deep structural problems. This past NBA season, the Milwaukee Bucks fired Adrian Griffin halfway through the season, even though they were 30-13 and in second place in the Eastern Conference. …
So the Democratic Party fired Joe Biden. Whether Kamala Harris will be more like Pat Riley or Doc Rivers only time will tell…
Videos
A new series dropped on the Undrafted YouTube page…