So I’m thinking about a dichotomy, and now that it’s on my mind I see it everywhere. The first camp is people that are on board with AI, IP pilferage, all of that. They have unlocked a new efficiency, and they became (overnight, seemingly) veritable faucets of content. The issue is that this contradicts directly the second camp. That’s me.

Possibly older, Gen X, perhaps. And we were raised in a culture of authenticity. There is nothing more important to me and my people than originality, bucking the trend, and "going your own way." I joined this social network fiasco because I felt like I could express myself. I do my best to create content that speaks to the human condition, and explains reality in some way. It is rooted in my life story. Increasingly, my social network feeds are dominated by what is obviously AI-generated content. It’s all starting to look the same and sound the same. The same pauses, the same grammar, the same format. I aggressively unfollow accounts that post AI slop, but it’s not helping. And the problem now is that it’s hard to even tell the difference. The chance that a given post is AI-generated is more than enough to poison the well. It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be plausible.

My entire experience of perusing social feeds has gone from occasionally pleasurable to consistently frustrating. This is the standoff that is coming. I can see in the near future, if not already, that large swaths of the population are going to start turning it off completely. Taking a page out of the Amish playbook, lol. I think the idea of an entire generation being on Facebook together will go down as one of the great failed experiments of humanity. There’s no coming back from this if at the same time, we are seeing a reduction in overall population levels. Then the problem is compounded. Right as another generation will be looking for alternatives to the mainstream social contract, all of the alternatives will fade deeper into an unrecoverable past. This will lead to nostalgia at a scale we haven’t seen yet. The weight of it will lead to a negative feedback loop. We’re already seeing this in certain cultures, like Japan. If young people don’t feel like they have a chance at a good future, they don’t feel like there’s any Beauty left out in the world to discover, then that will inevitably lead to those very things becoming true. It is the worst kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Maybe that’s why hope is embedded in every old-world national history. The myths and fables of a common human elevating him/herself because of sheer shrewdness lies at the heart of that. Up until now, those stories felt at least a little bit feasible. I don’t know that that is still true. Once a generation becomes aware of its own lack of utility, then the entire rule set goes out the window.

Much of the blame for me has to be put on the entire copywriting industry. I started a new job about six months ago, and I’ve been forced to use a Windows laptop. This has given me an interesting experience with the MSN blog network, which, for the first time ever, I am forced to use as my source of news. It has become increasingly clear that American media not only does a terrible job of disseminating world news, but actively seeks to reinforce tropes around US-based neoliberalism, and general celebrity culture, which to me at least, is at this point directly opposed to the advancement of a functional democracy. This is not a subtle phenomenon. This is 90% of a given newsfeed being dominated by things like celebrity worship, vaguely possible disinformation around global climate change, 'where are they now' tropes, look at the new hairstyle on actress X, and to the extent that there's anything political, it tends to be something like 'centrists start to worry that the left is out of control.'

Read the room, people. The fact that the Democratic establishment is fighting much harder against people like Mamdani than they ever did against MAGA, brings me right back to the 2016 primary. It's so much worse now. And why is that exactly well, I have a theory. It has to do with cognitive dissonance, but that's probably something I will keep for another time. Right now it's the day after the Fourth of July, we have family in town, and I have to go put some charcoal into the grill so we can start cooking things.

I want to love this country, and much of the time I still do. But I can't stop thinking about Venezuela, about Cuba, about Alex Pretti and Nicole Good, about the soy and cattle farmers in this country that have lost everything, the small businesses that have been forced to shut down, and about the continuous warnings we are getting re climate change that somehow we are still powerless to address. About the fact that millions of Taylor Swift fans still cannot see that there are no good billionaires. We have so much work to do.

We need to live the question. In this modern world where when we are curious about something, we can just ask Google or Siri and we know the answer immediately, it takes away the really important process of living with uncertainty. When we are allowed to wonder about the truth of something, or any question really, it allows the creative mind to explore solutions. This is a direct antidote to the scourge we have right now of “I want it my way right now.” Thanks a lot, Burger King [/s].

So here's to hoping that this country is still not past the point of help. Maybe we can still swing our national story back to being one of brotherhood, kindness, sharing, and freedom for not just the billionaires, but the rest of us as well.

I hope you all had a great weekend.