ChatGPT can code pretty well. I created an extremely useful script this morning: when pasted into the Chrome developer console, it replaces all instances of “up” (a terrible word, one of the worst) with “cattywampus” (a far better word). I do this on every webpage I read, and all of my writing. Truly, the future of the human race is looking cattywampus.

This puts ChatGPT in competition with StackOverflow as a coding resource. When SO admins banned chatbot-generated answers in December, a recurring comment from the peanut gallery was “Well, I don’t need this dumb old site anyway, so there!”

Is it true? Will ChatGPT crush StackOverflow to rubble? It’s certainly faster: you can either ask ChatGPT your question and get a somewhat accurate answer in seconds, or post on StackOverflow and wait six hours for seven smug beardos to post eight contradictory answers, all of them dripping with naked, rancid contempt for your very existence. So there’s that.

But while it seems like ChatGPT could be a StackOverflow-killer, do traffic stats back this cattywampus? I read Developers seem to be ditching StackOverflow since ChatGPT launch, stats show (written by someone who doesn’t appear to know that different months have different numbers of days) and realized I’d have to research it myself.

Here’s SEMrush’s graph for StackOverflow’s organic traffic.

Whoops! I deleted the months.

Can you guess when ChatGPT was released, just from eyeballing the shape of the graph? Are you sure?

Well, it was released here.

No, I don’t know why StackOverflow got a big bump of traffic in mid 2021 and then fell off. I see a similar but smaller pattern for Github and W3Schools, so it may have been some exogenous factor that impacted a range of tech sites. I welcome viewer comments on this.

Here’s the graph again, with other potential inflection points noted. (imagine GPT3 floating in space, three inches from the chart’s left-hand side.)

But ChatGPT took a couple of months to truly gain traction. According to Google Trends, ChatGPT hit the big-time around February. That’s when we see the peak of the bubble.

You’d expect to see a corresponding hole sucked out of StackOverflow’s organic pageviews, but again, that hasn’t happened. If anything, StackOverflow’s traffic has stabilized since December.

Regardless of views, are fewer people actually using StackOverflow?

Good question.

Traffic is a very broad metric. People visit StackOverflow for a lot of reasons: To respond to PMs, to check old answers, to issue death threats to mods, etc. It’s not just people asking questions.

Perhaps total question volume per month would provide a richer signal?

The StackExchange Query Editor allows us to view the monthly total of questions asked on the site. Graphed, that looks like…

Question volume is definitely going down (though note that it’s not quite the 31th of March in the United States and I don’t know how old this data is, so it will undercount the March 2023 questions), but again, this merely continues a trend that began years ago.

Bottom Line?

StackOverflow’s traffic has been in slow decline for over 18 months. If ChatGPT is truly sucking away StackOverflow’s userbase, this is not evident in any way from publically-available data.

Or at least, not yet.

Even if StackOverflow is straight up worse, its sheer institutional mass will keep it above the waterline for a long time to come.

• Some programmers still don’t know about ChatGPT (it’s true!).
• Other programmers mistrust it, and think it hallucinates too much.
• Others use StackOverflow as a learning tool.

Simple inertia holds the old in place – for many, StackOverflow’s where their bookmarks and browser autocompletes go, and where they feel at home. It’s flawed, but it’s not bad enough to drive them to seek out an alternative.

You’d be surprised at how long obsolete things stick around. We still use COBOL, a sixty-year-old language from the days of punched cards. In tech, it can take something half a century to die.

This isn’t a battle royale. There’s room in the world for both ChatGPT and StackOverflow. Let’s ease off on the hype, and be growncattywampuses about this.

Remember that part in Indiana Jones: The Title IX Violation where an Arab character twirls a scimitar around and Harrison Ford just casually shoots him dead? Wizards did that same gag four years earlier, and I want you to know that.

Three million years after a nuclear apocalypse, the Earth has mutated into a kind of high fantasy setting where people use magic (although there are mutants and caches of old weaponry waiting to be discovered). The queen of the fairies falls under a spell and gives birth to twins: the peace-loving Avatar and the malign Blackwolf, who discovers a trove of Nazi propaganda and decides to bring about a second Holocaust.

Wizards is sprawling, louche, animated movie, with no modern counterpart. It’s fundamentally and quintessential a movie by Raph Bakshi: whether this is a compliment, criticism, or neutral observation is your call.

It has little overriding style or aesthetic. It’s just the stuff Bakshi likes piled into one movie: namely British fantasy, a gritty countercultural vibe, big tits, and belabored social commentary. None of the ingredients really mix that well, which is kind of the point. Bakshi seems to be jarring your senses on purpose, playing off the flying sparks as jagged pieces of movie grind together.

This was his first (and most successful) flirtation with a Tolkien-style setting, and it works because it’s filtered through a lot of 70s decadence and doesn’t take itself seriously.

JRR Tolkien had become a mainstream craze in America during the hippie years (to his horror), with kids reading Lord of the Rings as an allegory for their times. The Shire was Woodstock, magic was weed/psychedelia, Gandalf was one of the wise elder “beats” (Ginsburg, Burroughs, Kerouac), Sauron was the Man, Saruman was a sellout to the Man, and so forth.

Bakshi was always more of a hippie observer than a hippie (1972’s Fritz the Cat is full of criticism for the excesses of the 60s counterculture), but he shared their fascination with Tolkien’s world, and the way its mythic setting cuts across cultural lines. Whether you’re an elderly Oxford don or a “turned on” flower power freak, everyone appreciates a well-kept garden, and everyone hates the bulldozer destroying it.

But when you combine hippie and Tolkien sensibilities, the result isn’t that coherent. The main thing you’ll notice about Wizards is how little it gels, and how awkwardly the parts fit together.

The art style is all over the place. Certain characters are drawn in a cheap TV cartoon style. Others (such as Blackwolf) are drawn in a more classicist Disney fashion. There are incredibly detailed backgrounds (and even rotoscoping), which really look odd next to the minimalism of the main cast.

I assume Bakshi wanted the film to look the way it does: like cels from wildly different films composited together. Illustrator Ian Miller and artist Mike Ploog contributed work, but they were deliberately kept separate during productiion. It’s heavily “influenced” by Vaughn Bode, as Bakshi would belatedly recognize. The movie occasionally feels crafted by a committee living on separate continents, communicating via carrier pidgeons.

Sure, the disjointedness make it a charming and personable movie. You come to love the incongruence, the way you enjoy the big, awkward stitching on handmade clothes.

But the tone never settles, and that’s a bigger problem. Wizards is a kids’ movie with bouncing boobs and swastikas. And the pacing is just bizarre. The first part of the movie is turgid: information and story lore gets dumped on the viewer with a tractor, and there’s ultimately little need for any of it.

It does get a lot better as it progresses. The battle scenes are thrilling, and Bakshi’s world is huge and vivid. He communicates sheer immensity better than most directors. You feel space and scale exploding out of the frame. The music is fantastic.

A tighter writing job would have helped focus the movie more, perhaps at risk of losing its unique aspects that make the film memorable. But there are many other directions Bakshi could have explored. What if he’d made a straight childrens’ film? Or doubled down on the political commentary?

As it is Wizards has themes, but no real time for them. The Nazi wizard angle is a fascinating one. The links between the real-life SS and such occultist movements as Ariosophism are fun to blather about (as many people have, ie Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke in his book Black Sun), but that aside…isn’t propaganda a kind of magic? The ability to control minds with images and words? Does it make more sense to regard Leni Riefenstahl as a filmmaker, or as a witch?

But this is pretty inconsequential in the film: Blackwolf inspires his soldiers with grainy old film clips of violence and war and Hitler speeches, and that’s it. Is that the essence of Nazism, according to Bakshi? Sound and fury? An angry, shouting man? Or is there an ideological component to fascism as well? It’s interesting to me that the world Wizards proposes (which is full of degenerate mutants, and an innately evil enemy who cannot be redeemed or saved) is probably more of a fascist one.

Matt Lakeman once wrote:

I have a friend who was a state-level legislator in the US for many years. Though ideologically libertarian, he ran as a Republican. He once told me that 80% of voters in America are actually libertarians. The problem was that 80% of voters are also actually Republicans. And Democrats. And progressives. And communists and fascists and monarchists and anarchists, and every other political ideology imaginable. They all want lower taxes but more social services, and to avoid wars but a strong foreign policy, and personal liberty but a safety camera on every street corner, etc. Thus, the key to my friend’s electability was to inspire their libertarian values while not triggering every other contradictory value they incoherently held.

This is basically Wizards. It’s trying to be everything for everyone, and scarily often, it succeeds. What do you get out of a movie this eclectic? Confusion? A desire for clarity? Or the sense of wandering in a delirious bazaar, overloaded with colors and noises and scents? For me it’s overwhelmingly the third feeling. It’s a flawed but impressive work, and at the top tranche of Bakshi’s work.

Vurt is set a future/alternate Manchester. Society now revolves around consciousness-altering feathers that grant access to “vurts” – alternate realities gelled out of humanity’s collective desires.

Noon doesn’t get bogged down in details on what the vurts actually are. Dreams? Cyberspace? An alternate dimension? For story purposes, it’s just another form of “jacking in”; that tireless cyberpunk workhorse.

Blue feathers might lead to Soapvurts – you get to experience life on your favorite TV show. Pink feathers might lead to Pornovurts – detailed sexual fantasies. Yellow feathers are death vurts – trips to places where there might not be a way back.

The book involves a young crustie called Skribbles, along with his vurt-addicted gang, the “Stash Riders”. They cruise Manchester, seeking out new feathers, and new thrills. Some vurt feathers are legal and can be bought in stores, others must be stolen or fought for.

Naturally, the Stash Riders soon get over their heads. Scribbles’ sister Desdemona (who he has sex with inside a vurt, because why not) swallows a yellow feather, and disappears into a vurt within a vurt. Can Skribbles get her back? And what to make of the disgusting slimy creature that came back from the vurt in Desdemona’s place?

Few things were more hip in 1993 than cyberpunk, but Vurt doesn’t fit next to Gibson and Sterling. It’s older, and odder, and not really about technology so much as drugs. It’s a very British book, written in the years when Manchester was Madchester, and MDMA changed the face of the city. It’s steeped in things like rave and acid (musical and otherwise) and captures some of the throbbing, dark madness of the era.

There are no dry reveries to technology, no “like tears in rain…” navel-gazing. I don’t recall one scene where a character uses a computer. Instead, it’s about psychosis and the way personal madness, multiplied out across a multiple people, warps culture in its image. It’s about body heat on the edge of fever, smiles on the edge of rictus, dancing on the edge of demon-possession.

If you want a good book to compare it to, forget Neuromancer. It’s more like those hundred-year-old works of French décadence like A Rebours and Les Chants de Maldoror. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland would also be appropriate.

And unlike most cyberpunk, it’s an exuberant book. Hopeful. Most cyberpunk novels are set in grim hellscapes. Vurt describes a place you’d really want to live in. Yes, the feathers are wrecking many peoples’ lives. So did large rocks in 10,000BC.

We get some genuinely brilliant ideas, such as Tristan and Suze: two soulmates who are literally tied together by their hair – a six-foot-long tangle of dreadlocks that can only be separated by shaving. Countless weird critters make an appearance: there’s a Morpheus-like figure called the Game Cat who helps “kittlings” navigate (again, shades of another famous literary cat, from a hundred years prior).

Vurt is zany and colorful…to a detriment? The book suffers from Tim Burton Syndrome: the setting is so cartoonishly over-the-top that there’s little sense of wonder/dislocation when a character swallows a feather. Alice is already in Wonderland, so to speak. And that’s bad for the characters, who frequently lose track of whether they’re in a vurt or the real world. This does mean the book’s central conceit is robbed of impact.

British 80s science fiction (V for Vendetta, Max Headroom, certain Judge Dredd stories) tended to be “Thatcher, accelerated”. Vurt is more like “drug culture accelerated”, but with many classicist touches that set it apart from something like Trainspotting. Getting “high” with feathers is the world’s least subtle drug metaphor. But it’s also a reference to Icarus’s wings – particularly since the feathers melt once you’ve used them.

Cyberpunk underwent a mainstream explosion at the start of the 90s. But a lot of those books haven’t aged well, because another explosion happened a few years later (the internet), and few cyberpunk authors actually “got” what online worlds would be like (I except Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash).

Cybernetically-modded lowlives and chrome-hipped android girls now just seem weird in light of the turn society actually took. Pollution and crime went down. Megacorporations now own most things, as predicted, but they are more benign than expected – Chiquita hasn’t staged a third world coup d’état in over seventy years, as far as we know.

Even the technical side of cyberpunk now just feels off. Cybernetic implants do not exist as culture-defining products. We are not trying to improve our cruddy bodies but escape them entirely: vurtlike worlds exist everywhere like bindweed: if want, you can be Naruto, an anime catgirl, or Eric Harris’s girlfriend. Johnny Mnemonic involves a “data runner” with 160 Gb of rentable storage in his head – the movie makes this sound like an incredible amount. In 2022, BackBlaze rents that much cloud storage for $0.80 a month. As in, zero dollars and eighty cents.

The future we’re living in is characterized by conformity. Or rather, by individuality expressed in tightly restrictive ways. You can choose the color that surrounds your profile pic on Twitter. But you can’t really speak your mind: you will either face algorithmic or social repercussions. The social aspect is more visible: if Ice Spice started smearing elephant crap on her face to reduce her pores, a million impressionable teenagers would copy her. But the algorithmic aspect is the reason you know about Ice Spice to begin with.

Maverick hackers seem few and far between. The places on the internet that claim to be devoted to free speech immediately become hellish and radioactive. Cyberpunk, in hindsight, owed more to the past than to the future. William Gibson’s “console cowboys” gives the game away. His stories were actually built out of fairly old tropes. They now have value less as predictions of the future than outright fantasies, something Vurt recognizes and leans into, all the way.