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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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Seems to reverse causality. We're not becoming robots or acting like them, we developed polite speech first and then insisted the robots follow it. As they say, it never costs you anything to be kind, and a robot fundamentally doesn't care in the same way we do. You can hurl abuse all you want at it and there is no satisfaction in the possibility that it might go home and cry that day.

There's no conflict between being polite and expressing yourself with creativity and individuality. Nahman isn't complaining that corporate communications require politeness (indeed, an absence of politeness would be a big red flag for an unpleasant work environment), but rather that corporate communications in the Anglosphere tends to be extremely dry and deracinated and heavily reliant on prefab canned phrases ("going forward", "if you could just circle back to me", "per my last email"). In other words, corporate drones are NPCs. Politeness isn't an inherent hallmark of robotic speech (it would be fairly trivial to make a ChatGPT knockoff which swears like a sailor), but speaking in canned phrases absolutely is, because a computer program can only do what it's instructed to.

I'd argue that people just don't care enough to express their creativity in corporate communications. Once you have a phrase that people understand, no one is going to bust their heads in coming up with a better one. Doesn't seem like a case of people being robots as much as it is people being lazy. Or perhaps those two are really the same.