Stage Rage

I was listening to the most recent episode of the Decoder podcast; host Nilay Patel was interviewing Runway CEO Cris Valenzuela.

As far as I was concerned, Mr. Valenzuela was a poor spokesperson for his company and the broader generative automation industry. When asked whether his company used videos from YouTube to train its model, he stonewalled, and when asked whether a ruling that generative automation violated copyright could kill any hopes of profitability, he simply refused to engage with the question. It was, for me, really illustrative of why so many people mistrust "Big Tech" and the companies making generative automation. But it was also more or less what I expected from the CEO of a generative automation company. I understand what they're being graded on, and who is doing the grading, and leveling with the public tends to result in an "F" on that scale.

For some reason, however, I decided to read the comments; I think to see if anyone else had noticed how unwilling Mr. Valenzuela was to take on the questions that Mr. Patel had asked. And found this:

Something about Mario’s brother.

The reference to Luigi Mangione, and thus the implication, was clear. It also struck me as pointlessly over the top.

There are a lot of theories concerning why online discourse can start spawning death threats (or the wish that someone else would do the killing), veiled or otherwise, even over seeming trivialities. My personal conjecture is that it leads to a sense of power on the part of the self-professed keyboard warriors. If Mr. Valenzuela's security detail is noticeably more alert next week, someone chalks that up as a win.

But I also think that there's an impression that for all of the chatter that things like this generate, no-one really cares. In this case, the poster is a subscriber; I'm pretty sure that a good computer forensics technician could find them and have some people show up at their doorstep looking for an explanation. But that would be a game of whack-a-mole that would take ages to pay off, if it ever did.

The transformation of various sorts of threats and ill wishes into a form of performative outrage has desensitized people to them. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever," is now seen as the most rational response to anything that hasn't escalated to the idea that people may actually be on the move to someone's real-world location. Which I understand, but I think is going to wind up biting us sooner or later.

(As an aside, I wonder what Nintendo thinks about one of their most recognizable characters having become a coded way of talking about killing people.)