Interdimensional Cable
If you're familiar with "inter-dimensional cable” from Rick and Morty, you might appreciate the latest AI reels. It's exciting to imagine how I might eventually use this, but it seems like the larger media environment is about to get a macro-dose of absurdity.
The absurd used to be fringe (think of the early surrealists in post-war culture); until Super Bowl commercials realized people react well to non-sense. We’re about to get flooded in it. I feel like there’s something rejuvenating about absurdism in small doses—I enjoy surrealism—, but something feels off when it’s cheap, effortless, and endless, the new vernacular of modern culture. You can't compare low-effort absurdity to high-effort absurdity.
TikTok’s optimizes for novelty: at first it was just people at extreme peaks (best looking, best stunts, best soccer juggling ability); when that got old we had NPCs, weird people in weird social contracts; now short-form AI surrealism is the most potent delivery of the uncanny (wow, I’ve never seen polar bears on a beach screwing mermaids, what a trip, maybe I’ll watch just one more to see something else I’ve never cared to imagined before). Results could be sexual or pedestrian, angelic or demonic, but it feels mostly ironic and campy right now.
There's a whole sub-genre of meta-concepts, where VEO3 characters pretend to be in a crisis by insisting they are real and not prompt-generated: I’m real, don’t you believe me?. There is also a strange of vengeance towards their prompter.
It won't be long until inter-dimensional cable emerges as its own dedicated app type.