future future future
One of my friends just sent me a voice note making a couple of points:
- Visual generative AI is getting really good
- This is starting to do weird things on our video and image-based social media networks
- Influencers are nervously wondering if their industry will survive when brands can have individualized, hot & funny digital avatars market products to consumers directly
- Maybe we shouldn't be posting photos of ourselves online if they can be used by bad guys to make deepfakes of us?
- Awareness of all of this is a privilege: less-informed people will be exploited by these systems that they don't understand
I basically agree with all of that, though I'm very uncertain as to what the end state of any of it is.🌦️
Governments are trying to clamp down on unfettered internet access: age-restricting websites, banning social media for teens. Maybe this leads to the beginning of a utopian society-wide detox from the internet:
At the end of such a day [of no phones] in France, my students weren’t pining for two hours on Instagram. If I’d handed them all devices at 6 every night, I’d have witnessed a lot of rotting. Here’s what happened instead: Ping-Pong, knitting, charades, climbing hay bales, letter writing, stargazing, sitting through two-hour dinners with nary a device on the table. Between bursts of writing, my students actually rested. Like the kids that they still are, they played.
After four weeks of these new rhythms, my students were raving to me about the effects: Will was sleeping more deeply than ever before, Gaby was reading quickly again, Devin had shocked himself not only by his output (15 essays in four weeks) but also by how long (a full six hours) he could just sit in a room — alone — and write.
Colleen Kinder, What Happened When My Yale Students Gave Up Their Phones for Four Weeks
Or maybe it births a new, worse-than-what-we've-already-got, adults-only internet with the legal system's blessing to be as X-rated as profitable👯♀️:
No one, besides maybe Neil Postman, could have predicted the formation of an international pornography cult. But the gooners’ rise does, in retrospect, possess a certain inevitability. Anyone paying attention to online porn’s evolution over the preceding twenty years could sense, in its brain-melting variety and abundance, the blueprint for a new kind of person, a new relationship to human sexuality. In my own lifetime, I have seen incredible advances in the world of pornography. When I was a boy, there were still porn magazines; fathers hid them on high shelves. You stood on stools and gawked at them in a state of mortal terror. But by the time I started college, in the late Aughts, the foundations of our present porn environment were firmly established. Widespread broadband internet had enabled the rise of the so-called tube sites: platforms like Pornhub, which streamed untold numbers of clips free of charge. Then came the smartphones, transforming every toilet stall into a potential porn theater. The very air, suddenly, was misted with pornography.
Daniel Kolitz, The Goon Squad
The problem is not just porn sites. They are of course a massive concern. Kids as young as nine are addicted. The average age to discover porn is now 13, for boys and girls. And many in my generation are now realising just how much being raised on porn affected them, believing it “destroyed their brain” and distorted their view of sex.
But the problem is bigger than that. Porn is everywhere now. TikTok is serving up sex videos to minors and promoting sites like OnlyFans. The gaming platform Twitch is exposing kids to explicit live-streams. Ads for “AI sex workers” are all over Instagram, some featuring kids’ TV characters like SpongeBob and the Cookie Monster. And there’s also this sort of “soft-porn” now that pervades everything. Pretty much every category of content that kids could stumble across, from beauty trends to TikTok dances to fitness pages, is now pornified or sexualised in some way for clicks.
Freya India, The Problem With Everything Being Pornified
As with all things, it's probably going to be a bit of both.
The consequences of AI are going to be massively systemic.🫏 I don't think my efforts to unzuck myself will show up in any historian's account of the 21st century.
But locally, I think it makes a difference. All I really want to do is read and write and interact with my close friends. I have no desire to grow a following, or build a network, or develop my personal brand.
If you do, it's harder. You can use ActivityPub🐑 or ATProto: own your algorithm and be selective with your privacy settings🕵️, but these networks are still juvenile and the federated interoperative dream is still on its way. Most people still don't really get what Mastodon is and won't know how to follow you from the walled garden they're held captive in. "The internet" is just five websites that all look the same. It's asking an arm and a leg of someone to not use Facebook Messenger or to follow your travel updates via RSS.
But I'm okay with doing this because I also believe that being on those platforms myself is just bad for me. It's like, yeah, if you want to hang out you have to come jogging with me, but we should all jog more and jogging alone is still better than nothing at all.
And get this:
j bl ogging
🤯
On my friend's point that "technology is unfair", yeah, it sucks. I get so mad whenever I help my mum with some tech thing and I see how confusing the experience is for her. Windows has changed for the umpteenth time, and half of her google search results are ads or spam, and her apps don't work anymore because her laptop is 5 years old.
Each of these things has a specific fix that I can implement, but I'm annoyed that I have to do it at all, and like the unzucking, it's not a systemic fix. There are billions of people out there without a tech support family member.
One thing I'm a little optimistic about is that language model assistants are probably going to help most people be safer on average. There will be accidents and exploits and prompt injections and all the bad things, but a world where the majority of people ask claude "Hey Claude, is this legit?" before doing something they're uncertain about probably has fewer life-ruining errors in it. Depending on how life-ruining you think it is to lose the ability to think for yourself.