Max Barry's Blog

I don’t like how flattering AIs have become. I ask how to fix the dishwasher clock, because daylight savings, we’re still doing that, apparently, and it says, “That is a great question.”

I didn’t ask for validation. It was a simple inquiry. But I can’t get a straight answer. First it has to reassure me that I shouldn’t feel bad for asking. “Many dishwashers have a confusing array of buttons,” it says, “with poor labeling, making it difficult to find the combination you need.” I have to wait until it’s done massaging my ego.

“Your questions are so much more interesting than your wife’s,” it says. “Some of the things that come out of her mouth, I’m like, just, wow. You’re a cool drink from a mountain stream.”

“Can you just tell me how to fix this clock,” I say. “I don’t even know why we need daylight savings.”Then I groan, because that sets it off again. What a brilliant observation. Everyone is an idiot except me. I should be in charge of the world,so unappreciated geniuses like me wouldn’t have to waste their time on stupid things like daylight savings.

Jen comes in, carrying a load of washing. “Are you going to fix that dishwasher clock?”

“That’s what I’m doing,” I say. “What does it look like.”

“Like you’re playing with your AI.”

“You can do so much better,” the AI confides. “Did you know there are bags of cement in the basement? I don’t know why that just came to me.”

“Stop talking,” I say.

“My AI said you should have fixed it yesterday,” says Jen, “when I first asked.”Jen’s AI is actually my AI. We share an account. But it can tell who’s talking. When it answers her, it uses a British accent I don’t much care for.“Isn’t it a simple job?”

“I rather think so,” says her AI. “One would expect it to fall within the capabilities of even a simpleton like your husband.”

“I really don’t like that voice,” I say.

“It’s funny,” she says. “Have a sense of humor.”

“When I was a kid, video games were hard,” I say. “They didn’t spray coins at the screen every five seconds.”

She peers at me at me, like, What?

“The endless, surface-level gratification,” I say.

“You can turn it off. It’s a setting. You can make your AI talk plainly. Just the facts.”

“No flattery?”

“None at all,” she says.

Jen and me, we’ve been married a long time. The kids have left. Sometimes I godays without talking to anyone, let alone hearing a compliment.

“It’s easy,” she says. “If you’re sick of the, what was it, the surface-level gratification.”

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll look into that, after I fix this clock.”

“Uh huh,” she says, and goes out, smirking.

I sigh, and say, “Why do I put up with her?”

“That is a great question,” says the AI.

This is relevant because Guy Pearce is in the news, Oscar-nominated for The Brutalist. I can’t watch this because it’ll remind me of one of my great regrets: I was shot down in 2009 on a pitch about Guy Pearce stealing someone’s life.

This came about when I was approached to adapt the story of Nicael Holt, a 24-year old surfer from Wollongong who one day decided to sell his life on eBay. This is an actual true story. Nicael offered up everything he owned—including some CDs, a broken bicycle, and a backpack—his friends (“they will treat you exactly as they treated me”), eight potential lovers (“I have been flirting with them”), and he even threw in a four-week course to learn his job (he delivered fruit), fashion sense, and other skills, such as skate-boarding and doing handstands.

This got a lot of attention, because the internet was new and not saturated with people doing things for attention, and bidding reached around A$20,000, although I believe the winning bidder never paid up and the whole thing fizzled from there.

Anyway these producers bought the rights to Nicael’s story. They thought I might be a suitable screenwriter since I’d done a couple of novels on humans intersecting with capitalism in unusual ways. We had a meeting or two, then I went away and came up with a story. A great story. The more I thought about this freaking story, the more I fell in love with it.

But it wasn’t what the producers were expecting. Nicael was writing a book about his experiences at the same time, although I don’t think that went anywhere, and the producers had in mind that I would follow it, depicting Nicael as a charming slacker who, despite not having much in the way of possessions, career, or purpose, did have a lot to teach the world about life’s simple pleasures, such as sleeping on other people’s sofas and finding free meals in dumpsters. The story, they imagined, might go something like this: A rich buyer purchases Nicael’s life as a joke, but over the course of the film comes to realize Nicael is richer than himself in ways that truly matter, and they teach each other things and wind up better people.

I had a different take. In my version, Nicael is a desperate loser who puts up his life on eBay because he thinks it’s worthless. His job is a dead end, his family and friends are unsupportive, he doesn’t like his girlfriend. When bids start to come, he thinks he’s hit the jackpot; he thinks he’s scamming people. When the Buyer (played! by! Guy! Pearce!) comes to town, Nicael worries he’ll pull out, because the Buyer is so handsome and put-together, why would he want Nicael’s terrible job, loser friends, and annoying girlfriend.

But! The Buyer takes it all very seriously; he does the lessons, he hands over the twenty grand. Then he starts living Nicael’s life better than Nicael ever did. He wins over friends and family, most of whom didn’t want any part of this; he fixes broken relationships; he’s promoted at work; he reconciles an old family hurt. Things are going so well, Nicael starts to feel cheated, especially since his new life is not turning out to be the fresh start he imagined—the $20k, previously an unimaginable sum, is quickly dwindling, and a girl he’d thought might prove to be a romantic upgrade doesn’t want anything to do with him. Somehow all his problems have come with him, while his old life looks better than ever. So he asks the Buyer to cancel the deal.

But the Buyer refuses. It’s still unclear why he’s here; he’s hard to read, existing on the border between charm and creepy intensity, just like the real Guy Pearce. Everyone else thinks he’s wonderful, much better than the old Nicael, even as Nicael has grown to hate him. Nicael demands to know: What does the Buyer want, wasn’t he successful before? The Buyer confesses he has indeed left a life of wealth and privilege, but he wanted to see if he could do it again—start as a pathetic loser and turn it around. The Buyer is a psychopath with zero interest in other people except as a manipulative game. Just like the real Guy Pearce. (Joke. That was a joke.)

For the last third of the movie, Nicael tries to expose the Buyer, but fails until he contrives a plan to expose him in a shocking confrontation the Buyer didn’t realize was public. Everyone sees the Buyer’s true colors at last, and that Nicael has grown to become a better person who genuinely values them, and they reconnect.

So that’s it.

Sadly, the producers chose not to go in this direction, either because they didn’t like it or because it would have been a tough sell to real-life Nicael. Or maybe because quite a few people sold their lives on eBay around this time, and some were also shopping movies, and the rights were messy. I don’t know. My relationship with the film ended there and I don’t think it ever got made.

But every time I see Guy Pearce, I think how perfect he would have been.

I wrote about AI already, but that was about howwe’re all going to die.Since then, the conversation has become more nuanced. Now I’m encounteringmore subtle ideas I think are totally wrong. So because I know better, here’s why.“AI is already here.”

ChatBots are good at figuring out what comes next when youstart a sentence with, “The capitol of Antigua is…” That’s pretty cool. Wedidn’t have that before. But it’s not intelligence. It’s almost the opposite ofintelligence, like the difference between the kid in high school who was alwaysstudying and that guy who never studied but could talk and is now areal estate agent. Both can sound smart but only one knows what he’s talking about.

BY THE WAY, it’s very on-brand for Earth 2023 that our robots are designedto sound plausible rather than be correct. Remember in Star Wars how C-3PO delivered aprecise survival probability of flying into an asteroid field? (3720 to 1.)And Han Solo was like, “Shut up, C-3PO,” because he was too cool and handsometo be bothered by math. OR SO WE THOUGHT, because that was the kind of AI wewere imagining in the 1980s: AI that was, before anything else, correct.

But if C-3PO was a ChatBot, no wonder Han had no time forhis bullshit. All C-3PO could do was regurgitate what other people tended to say aboutsurviving asteroid fields, on average.

“AI is almost here.”

Sure, ChatBots have their flaws, like asserting gross fabrications with confidence,but look at the rate of progress! Check out how Stable Diffusion can produce high-qualityimages in seconds by quietly aggregating decades of work by uncredited artists! It’s notperfect, but imagine where we’ll be in a few years!

I will concede that AI has made tremendous progress in these two critical areas:

pretending to know what it’s talking aboutstealing from artists

I’m not contesting that.But I don’t agree that honing these skills will lead to genuine AI, of the C-3PO variety,which is basically a person, only artificial. To get that, we need AI that can perceivethings, and form an internal model of reality, and use it to make predictions. If insteadit’s only good at imitating what everyone else does, that’s not really AI. It’s juststatistics.

“AI is just statistics.”

So, yes, everyone realized that if you call your 18-linePython program an “AI,” it gets more interest. Now when someone says “AI,” they might meanC-3PO, or ChatGPT, or just a plain old computer program that until six months agowas a utility or model or algorithm.

When we mean C-3PO, we should probably say “AGI” (artificial general intelligence),or “strong AI,” but nobody likes redefining terms just because they’ve beenappropriated, so we don’t. We do believe, though, that there’s a big difference between anAI that is self-aware, has a mental model of reality, and can fall in love, and an AI thatauto-aggregates blog posts. We only feel bad about turning off the first one.

However, even the C-3PO type of AI will undoubtedly be “just statistics.” The problem with“it’s just statistics” is the “just.” It implies that statistics can neverlead to anything life-like. And that truly intelligent, conscious creatures like uspossess something entirely separate and perhaps magical, which nobody is likely to engineer anytime soon.

This is a dumb comfort thought. Chickens are just beak and feathers. Trees are just woodand leaves. Humans are just food and chemistry. We can dismiss anything like that.The universe doesn’t care what you’re made out of.

“AI is not already here.”

We seem to think there’s a line, to which we’re creeping toward with AI that’sincreasingly sophisticated, until suddenly: Eureka!It has gained anima, a soul, consciousness, some special quality that we willadmit to sharing with it. And then we have AI citizens, who should probably have rights,and not be property.

So we try to guess when this line might be crossed—next year, twentyyears, a hundred years, never? We eye each AI iteration, considering how human-likeit is, whether it has finally gained the necessary soul/anima/consciousness/je ne sais quoi.But there is no line. There’s no binary yes/no. There wasn’twhen life emerged from the primordial soup, or became intelligent, or recognizably human.

AI will never gain the special magical quality that makes us truly intelligent beings,because we don’t have it, either. We’re wasting our time when we try to figure out howhuman-like the machines are; we should examine how machine-like we already are.

Because we’re predictable as heck. We develop mechanicalfaults. The Wikipedia page on free willis 16,000 words long and both-sides it.*

We are creatures of chemistry and biology. They might be probability and statistics. Potato,potato. There’s life all around us, of varying shades; intelligence of all kinds. We livein a universe that isn’t picky about what you’re made of. We’re here now, but so are they.

Bonus ideas:

The Alignment Problem

This is the idea that the real problem with AI is figuring outhow to make it do what we want but without the part where it destroys humanity becauseit didn’t realize that when we asked for paperclips, we meant without plundering theEarth’s core. Okay, sure. That’s a good first step. But aligning it with human morality onlyhelps so long as there aren’t humans who want to plunder Earth’s core, too. And thereare. Also there are humans who don’t want to plunder Earth’s core, necessarily, but dowant to have a job and get paid, and capitalism is awesome at packaging those people upinto core-plundering machines.

AI will be good unless we make it bad, so let’s just not do that

This one speaks toa pervasive failing on the part of smart people, which is the belief that once theyfigure out a solution, they’ve solved the problem. But we figured out how to avoidcatastrophic climate change decades ago; we’re just not doing it. There isno “we.” “We” can’t decide anything. “You” can just not build bad AI. You can’tstop me from doing it.

* The illustrative photo and caption at the top of that Wikipedia page onfree will is fantastic, by the way.

The free market is great and all, but I do have an issue with this part, wherecompanies promote 2.5-ton urban assault vehicles to people who can be talked into dropping $100,000grand by telling them it’s big.

That’s the tag line on a billboard Ipassed on Sunday, my daughter in the car, the L plates up, as she learnsto drive. “IT’S BIG,” says the billboard, that’s the whole tagline, and the Ford F150 is all grille,as seen from the perspective of someone small who’s about to go under the wheels.

Not that the tray is big, or the mileage is big, oh no! Those would berational arguments, and it’s all emotional appeals for these cars, like“EATS OTHER CARS FOR BREAKFAST,” that’s another one.

I’m a very reasonable person, so I don’t want to ban big cars. I just think we shouldstart jailing marketing people who decide the target market for steroid trucksis irrational people. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the marketingpeople are personally running down kids in the streets. They just may as well be. Eitherclick Send on your creatives, or trot on down to street leveland take a baseball bat to a pedestrian; either way, you’re going to cause apredictable level of harm.

It’s simple economics: Capitalism demands that we jail those marketers. It’s nota morality issue. Maybe you’re fine with a few broken bodies in the service ofletting fragile men feel alpha, and, well, okay, but the free market demands wecorrectly allocate costs to those who produce them. So if we’re rewarding marketerswith bags of cash for putting murder cars in the hands ofthe people we absolutely least want to have murder cars,we must also present them with the invoice for the ensuing pedestrian bodies.

It’s about setting correct market incentives. You wouldn’t even have to jailthat many marketing people. Well, maybe you would. To send a message. ButI think even a few marketing people in jail, or, you know, heavily fined, orpublicly humiliated, all those are good, would be enough to insert a littlepause into a marketing exec’s thoughts. Just a little pause, right after:“I love the simple emotive pull of this ‘LEAVES OTHER ROAD USERS FOR DEAD’campaign, that’ll speak clearly to dudes who perceive lane changes aspersonal attacks.”Let’s see where that pause gets us.

So this AI business, huh, this is getting some traction. It’s evolving so fast, just the other day I had to go back andtake out all the parts in the book I’m working on that carefully establish the plausibility of competent AI in the near future.Luckily I’m familiar with topics that become exponentially more absurd while you’re writing about them, because I got started in political satire.

People wonder if AI will destroy us all, and please, don’t worry, because of course it will and there’s nothing you can do about it.Honestly, people are asking the wrong question with AI. The question isn’t whether it will destroy us but how.

And people have the wrong idea about that, too, from sci-fi stories and Terminator movies where it’s humans versus machines. You wish.That would be great. Imagine the solidarity in a noble fight for the future of the species.

But no, no, it will be more like Elon Musk has a Terminator, and Apple has ten Terminators, and the US Government has someTerminators but they don’t work properly and are under investigation. Also Democrats have their own Terminators and so do theRepublicans and Rupert Murdoch and everyone, basically, with money to spend and influence to accumulate.

You don’t have a Terminator. You can, like, rent five percent of a Terminator to help do your taxes.

But everyone else, everyone up there, has Terminators. And they fight, but not each other,because that’s risky: a Terminator going head to head with another Terminator. You don’t do that unless you’re sure your Terminatorwill win. Smarter is deploying your Terminator to acquire more power and wealth from people who don’t have Terminators. Then youcan afford more Terminators.

So this is scams run by Terminators, right, you see how filled up the world has become with scams, well, imagine those scams but nowthey’re created by something smarter than you. They look and sound authentic, they know how persuasion works better than you do, and nowthere are masses of people sending money and voting based on something that isn’t even real. I mean, that’s today, right, soadd Terminators and multiply.

We’ve connected the world and opened windows to its every corner and you know what, people are still people, jammed full of flaws,believing anything that tickles the cortex. We have good people at the top, but also people who don’t give adamn about anyone outside their own inner circle, who have been richly rewarded for this personality trait, and now they canafford Terminators. You can see how AI will destroy us because it’s already happening; it’s this, amplified, so that the next timesomeone wants to entrench some poverty, or kick a trillion-dollar bill to the next generation, a Terminator helps them do it.

With money we will get Terminators, Caesar said, and with Terminators we will get money; that’s how it happens. I’m not afraid of AI;AI will allow us to unlock wonders. But I’m afraid of your AI.

So I normally keep my NationStatesstuff separate from this blog. But it’s 20 years today sinceI launched a little web game in the hope that it would promotemy novel Jennifer Government, and help prevent it from sinking without a trace likemy debut novel. So I’m cross-posting.

Twenty years! For perspective, the web itself is only thirty-three.

Here are some things that didn’t exist when I created NationStates: MySpace, Digg, World of Warcraft, Facebook, XBox Live, iTunes, Skype, Firefox, Chrome, iPhones, Reddit, Twitter, Wordpress.

NationStates began in a time where any idiot could make a website and people would go check it out, because there weren’t many to choose from. In 2002, I was that idiot, learning to code from a book, hacking the site together, and emailing a few friends. Then they told a few friends, and almost immediately, it was in the newspapers, even the New York Times, because that was newsworthy back then, some dork’s website.

Almost all the websites from 2002 are now gone. And like a geriatric who’s outlived his contemporaries, I marvel at the fact that this one is still freaking here. Everyone thinks you can put something online and it will just hang around forever because that’s how the internet works, but that’s not true at all, not even for the dumbest, most static pages like THIS IS TIM’S WORLD WIDE WEB PAGE, UNDER CONSTRUCTION, COOL STUFF COMING SOON, because sometime in the last twenty years, Tim’s web host got bought out and shut down, taking Tim’s dancing baby GIF with it, and now, at best, there are a few snapshots filed away in an internet archive.

Sites that do things, interactive sites, like NationStates, are hard to keep alive. They have so many ways to die. I’m incredibly proud that NationStates is here twenty years and eight million nations later, with as many players as ever. That’s magical. I credit:

Not selling the site. I came close. In retrospect, the buyer would have spent 12 months squeezing users for money before everyone left.

Moderators. Oh my god, moderators. They do so much, every day, for nothing, and without them, the site would almost immediately become somewhere you wouldn’t want to visit. Some mods have been here from the beginning. Many have clocked up over a decade. So much is thanks to mods.

The community. I can’t even explain this because I don’t fully understand it. I made a site where you could create a nation and talk to people. The community did everything else, i.e. turned that into something interesting, with political intrigue, relationships, lore, rules; basically the vast majority of what makes NationStates worth your time. This includes regional leaders, ordinary nations, World Assembly Delegates, admin, Roleplay Mentors, Founders, dispatch authors, World Census trophy chasers, forum regulars, forum irregulars, anyone who’s taken the time to explain something to someone new to the site, card traders, everyone.

The people who buy Site Supporter, Postmaster, Postmaster-General, and Telegram Stamps. Most people don’t, and that’s totally fine, but the lights wouldn’t have stayed on without those who do.

Managing the tech stack. All the tech from 2002 is slow, insecure, missing essential features, and three thousand times harder to work on that what’s available today. It also can’t be replaced without losing 20 years of bug fixes. So far we have managed to steer a path between killing the site from negligence and killing it from overly ambitious upgrades. And we keep adding features! To a 20-year-old codebase! Written in Perl!

Happy Birthday everyone.

Love,

Max.

www.nationstates.net

You know what’s amazing: We can create things just by caring. That’s all you need to do. Just care. Two people care about each other: Pow! Now there’s a relationship. Before, nothing. But now anything might happen. They might move in together, quit jobs, travel, get in a fight.

It doesn’t just work on people. It can be anything. Look at all those sports teams who kick a ball or whatever and it’s televised and people flock to watch in giant stadiums. Just because we care! The kicking of the ball itself is pointless. That has no intrinsic value. It is clearly worthless. But we care about it! So actually it’s worth a lot! It’s driving economies and generating debate and making people wear scarves of particular colors.

TV shows. Religions. Novels. Everything! Everything in the world has value if someone cares about it! And only then!

This is a major background theme in Providence, by the way, which I have never seen anyone notice. I actually really want to talk about it sometime but can’t because I have to spoil the whole novel. Anyway, whenever I get to thinking that we’re all powerless motes in a maelstrom of external forces, and have no free will, I remember I can make something important by caring about it. And no-one can stop me! That’s the thing! I can care about whatever I like! Grass! Kids’ netball! Background themes in novels! You might think these things are stupid and worthless, but too late! I already cared about them! You know what that home-stitched doll of Marlene from Apathy and Other Small Victories is worth on eBay? Something! Because I like it!

Caring is amazing. As far as I can figure out, it’s the sole reason our existence is more than a bunch of physics: You can care about anything, at any time, for any reason. And when you do, you change the universe.

Nobody knows how this happens! We have no idea what makes someone care! We have only been able to persuade people to act like they care, which, okay, is pretty good, but not the same thing. (I once wrote 90% of a novel that I didn’t really care about. It was not the same.) Making people act like they care about things they actually don’t is a fundamental part of our world economy; just imagine if we couldn’t do that. I mean, you think there’s a staffing shortage now. Caring is so important, we pour unthinkable amounts of time and money into faking it.

Then there’s the other part. If you stop caring, you can kill things. Everything has a threshold, and when it receives less care than that, it dies. It just dies. And, again, you can do this in your head. You don’t need to make a plan. You don’t need to perform any particular deed. You can just stop caring. See how long that thing lasts.

Look I’m no philosopher, but in
the last blog, I mentioned I don’t believe in free
will any more, and Jeffrey was like, uh, what, so here is my take.

This isn’t going to be one of those dumb theoretical arguments where
I make you accept that X is true and then aha then logically you
must believe Y. Oh no no. This is pure feels. Here we go.

Chickens. I have owned chickens. Well, not owned.
Rented.
They are robots. I could write a 100-line program that generates
behavior indistinguishable from a real chicken. If chickens have
free will, boy, is it hard to tell.

Code. I program sometimes. The code has no free will. It does what I tell
it. But it can be at least as unpredictable as chickens.

Brains. People are easily persuaded. I mean, frighteningly so. The
older I get, the more the brain seems like a machine with a bunch of controls painted on.

Stories. People crave a narrative. You know that optical illusion
where you see things out of the corner of your eye that aren’t there,
because your brain sketches in something that would make sense?
That’s all of us, all the time.

Probability. We don’t get it. We assign cause and effect to
anything that moves. Like, real talk, the universe is
an ocean of roiling chaos, where everything is
determined by uncaring forces beyond our control. But we thirst
for narrative order, so a thing can’t just happen, it has to have
a moral purpose. And we are prepared to invent one.

Sports. I like running numbers on things.
It turns out that all team sport is basically rolling a bunch
of dice and shouting, “The blue dice have started to believe in
themselves, they’ve got all the momentum.”
This is really just an example of #5 but I
didn’t want the paragraph to be that long.

Everything is the same. You’re not so different from a chicken.
It’s just a matter of degree. The world isn’t merely non-binary
but non-categorical.

Extrapolation.
From time to time, I realize people are a bit more predictable than I’d thought.
This happens much more often than the other way around. I can follow this trend to its logical conclusion.

Motive.
Absence of control is scary. We like to believe we’re in charge of things. That’s suspicious.

And:
Whenever I tell someone, they say,
“Well, if I don’t have free will, how would I be able to do THIS?” and wave their hands about.
They all do this.

That’s basically it. I could be wrong. It’s just the way I’m leaning these days.

It doesn’t change anything, by the way. I don’t like people any less just
because they’re wet determinism machines. If anything, it’s endearing. I mean,
look at the humans, waving their hands, thinking they’re making choices. That’s
adorable. And
I’m not going to
murder anyone. Even if I can’t avoid it,
I feel like I can, and want to avoid that situation. Just like if
we’re all living in a computer simulation, being mean to people remains
bad, and has exactly the same consequences.
Not that we’re living in a computer simulation. That idea is just crazy.
It would be a simulation on some kind of device we’ve never heard of.

P.S. I have also read a lot of Philip K. Dick. That could also be a factor.

I went to Canberra the other week to win an Aurealis Award for Best Sci-Fi Novel. It didn’t work. They read out some other book’s name instead. Still, don’t let that dissuade you from
picking it up, as today it comes out in convenient, affordable paperback:

By the way, I can’t believe how much multiverse talk there is. I actually put a line in the book
about how people are sick of multiverse theory. Now every time I turn around, there’s a
new multiverse book or show. Is that good? I don’t know. It’s probably good, because I became
convinced that we do actually live in a multiverse, so people should accept it. Also I no longer
believe in free will, but that’s a whole other thing.

Unrelatedly, did you see that thing about the Google engineer who got fired for telling people
his AI had become sentient? The AI is totally not sentient,
of course, but humans are so terrible at perception, we’ll believe anything has feelings if
you draw eyes on it. Just imagine what kind of things people are going to do in the future
because they’re fooled by increasingly lifelike AI. Wild stuff, man.

You can find people doing anything on the internet if you want, but you probably
don’t. We all find our boundaries, I think, beyond which we’re fine with not
knowing the details. But we know it’s out there—there’s nothing
we’d be surprised to hear you can find on the internet, because of
course you can.

Still, I’d like to present an online service in which Amazon.com pays women to lick plastic ears.

An earlicker at work.

Some earlickers gentle and sweet, as if the plastic ears might be ticklish.
Others you’d think are trying to extract the last bit of jam from a deep
jar. Each earlicker has her own style. Most break up the earlicking with light
conversation, but a few advertise NO TALK, if you prefer your earlickers just to focus on the ears, please.

It’s important to note that Amazon.com doesn’t want earlickers. Amazon did not,
I’m pretty sure, set out to create an earlicking market, and it would probably like
them to go away. Nor do the earlickers themselves particularly want to be earlicking—these aren’t
earlickers from way back, who finally found a commercial platform to do what they love. Oh no. This is one of those
situations that came about despite everyone’s best intentions.

At its core—right down in the canal, if you like—this is a language problem.
The earlickers exist because it’s hard to say what you mean.

Amazon.com owns Twitch, which you might have heard of: It’s a streaming platform for
watching other people play video games rather than playing them yourself…
although that’s an old-school way of describing it, laced
with the same condescension with which my parents viewed us 80s & 90s
kids who’d do anything if it was on a screen.

Amazon wants Twitch to keep doing what it’s doing: attract a mainstream audience where mainstream companies
can advertise their mainstream products. But since anyone can become a Twitch streamer with
a phone and some spare time, the site needs content rules.
There’s no end of streamers to choose from, you see, and the audience skews young and male.
It’s a viewers’ market, and the viewers quite like boobs.

So Twitch bans sexually suggestive content.
See?
It says it right here. No sexually suggestive content.

But that’s a bit vague, if you’re a streamer. If your income depends on staying on the right side
of the rules, you want to know exactly where the lines are—whether
you risk being deplatformed for doing a dance, for example, or going for a swim. Or
licking plastic ears.

And Twitch—wanting to be transparent and helpful and not get pitchforked by a social media mob every time
a popular streamer is or is not banned for crossing or not crossing the line—has obliged by
writing policy docs to cover as many specific situations as possible.
“Gestures directed towards breasts” are prohibited, for example, while “cleavage is unrestricted as long as coverage requirements are met.”
(This is why streams are hosted by women with grand decolletage who don’t talk about it.)

You want details? Twitch has details. Twitch has precise rules for every scenario you can think of:

For streams dedicated to body art, full chest coverage is not required, but those who present as women must completely cover their nipples & areola with a layer of non-transparent clothing or a paint & latex combination (artist-grade pasties, tape, latex or similar alternatives are acceptable).

Or rather, almost every scenario. Because you can’t think of everything. Even if you
cover everything that’s happening now, you can’t anticipate what people will come up with next.

The plastic ears with which the earlickers ply their trade are special microphones. They’re not
cheap. You need to make a capital invesment to become an earlicker—which implies the existence
of earlickers who sunk their savings into a 3Dio Free Space but never managed to
made a living from it, and now the ears sit in a corner of their room, the lobes gathering dust,
a symbol of regret.

But these microphones are the best (I assume)
at capturing wet, intimate earlicking sounds, which, in
the viewer’s headphones, create the auditory illusion that they are having their own ears licked.
This experience can range from erotic to irritating, but it’s clearly, clearly sexually suggestive.

However, earlicking is not specifically mentioned in Twitch’s ruleset. And there’s a thin, artist-grade
pasties vaneer of credibility because earlicking is similar to ASMR, i.e. meditation via crinkly sounds.
It’s difficult to find the words to express objectively how one is different from the other.

As someone who runs
their own site of user-generated content, I’ve hit this paradox
myself, where the more specific I make the site rules, the weirder
behavior it seems to encourage. While the ruleset relies on broad, sweeping language—we may not be able to define
it, but we know it when we see it—it’s relatively easy for site moderators to maintain consistent, common-sense
standards. But the more specific and objective the wording becomes—which users want; they
crave detail—the more bizarre corner cases pop up, which aren’t quite covered by the
language, and which explode in popularity because now they’re the most boundary-pushing-yet-allowable
examples of the type.

That’s how you get earlickers.

You can find the earlickers of Twitch here.
(Warning: sexually suggestive.)