Each time it appeared that a publication had figured out a repeatable way to attract web traffic, everywhere else would follow suit: jockeying for the top search hit for “what time is the Super Bowl?”; aggregating viral tweets; competing to be the first to post clips from Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (before The Awl went bottoms up, John Herrman facetiously congratulated each week’s winner).
Yet, with Game of Thrones, the attention was sustained for nearly a decade — a crucial one, when a number of digital media properties emerged and the legacy print magazines saw the writing on the wall. No one knew where the industry was going, but everyone agreed Game of Thrones was a good way to garner traffic.
All simulations are ultimately constrained by their creators’ assumptions: They are self-contained universes ticking along to preprogrammed logic. They don't necessarily reflect anything fundamental about the world as it is, much less how we may want it to be. When SimCity players have occasionally stumbled on stable equilibrium states—the closest thing to a “win” in this non-game—they have laid bare the biases hidden in Forrester's equations. An artist named Vincent Ocasla, for instance, created a city with a stable population of 6 million. The only catch? It was a libertarian nightmare world. It had no public services—no schools, hospitals, parks, or fire stations. His dystopia had nothing but citizens and a concentrated police force populating an endless plain of one bleak city block, copied over and over.
These are strange love letters, for sure. And the history behind them is even stranger; examples of the world’s first computer-generated writing, they’re signed by MUC, the acronym for the Manchester University Computer. In 1952, decades before ChatGPT started to write students’ essays, before OpenAI’s computer generated writing was integrated into mainstream media outlets, two gay men—Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey—essentially invented AI writing.
As it turned, it revealed its shell, allowing me to run a palm over its rough surface. Floating there in the deep, I was forced to engage in the world as it was; to simply see and breathe. In this age of constant noise and distraction, it felt like a divine act to be put on mute. We pulled back and the turtle swam on. It faded gently into the infinite blue oblivion.
The tonal and formal variety in the collection is deft and delicate and does not sugarcoat the anxieties and economic pressures of immigration, which also lead to a world full of complexity and vivacity.
As Cue the Sun! reveals, something like reality television has been with us for longer than we might expect—about as long as the TV set has been a mainstay of the American living room. The story of its invention, then, is in part the story of how television workers were making the forerunners of reality TV long before anyone would call it that, and how at every step along the way, innovation was entangled with ambivalence, uncertainty, and, sometimes, exploitation.