Corporations chasing scams, what could I mean by that … maybe, language learning model, or, non-fungible token?
Nowadays, or, for at least the past five years, the big tech world, i.e., Silicon Valley, Microsoft, Google, and even Apple in some cases, all have a different vision for the internet and technology, incongruent to what consumers actually want. I’m talking about the NFT bubble that came and went as fast as you can fart, and now the AI fad that arose from nothing in a bubble so big … that when it pops, it will be devastating.
Devastating to CEOs and board members, sure (who cares about them, though?), but more importantly, every piece of software and hardware you use in your daily life, because they can’t help but shove an LLM into everything ranging from your social media, to your refrigerator.
And then you have smaller examples of this, such as Apple’s release of the Vision Pro, much to the “Meh” reception it got, because VR is still very much a gimmick that only offers short term gratification. But don’t tell that to tech CEOs who surely think we’ll be living in a virtual world in two years.
The tech moguls of the world have become out-of-touch, as if they’re living in a completely different reality, separate from that of which regular normal people live in. Silicon Valley tech-nerds see a world where an LLM controls your morning routine, tells you how to tie your shoes, drives your car for you, and wipes your ass, and they’ve convinced themselves people want this.
They’ve convinced themselves people want automated girlfriends that are just machines wearing a human mask that spit out plagiarized, regurgitated nonsense that sometimes looks like sentences.
They’ve decided for themselves that, yes, people really do want artists to be replaced by machines that can’t figure out if toes are fingers and if fingers are noses.
These people have absolutely decided that the “dead internet” theory is real, and everyone on social media should be a mindless robot driving pretend-traffic. An endless slog of bots, clicking on links generated by bots, pinging back to other bots, and putting money in the pockets of people who’ve replaced themselves with bots. Bots, bots, bots.
All that aside–the delusions of Silicon Valley–What do people actually want?
As someone who currently utilizes social media across different platforms, including Threads, Mastodon, and even a Tumblr clone named Wafrn, I can plainly see what people actually want.
They want functional search engines that don’t suggest they put rocks and glue in their pizza. They want clean, non-ad ridden websites where they can read articles. Articles that aren’t generated by a plagiarist’s faulty machines that run on forty thousand graphics cards.
They want social media that isn’t lying to them about the actual real people interacting with them, free of bait accounts and completely obvious, desperate engagement farming, that only exists to drive numbers and nothing else.
And despite a lot of things I don’t agree with in having to do with Meta, and their data collection, and their absolutely complicit rush into the AI bubble that is definitely going to pop, they are at least aware of some glimmer of this. Aware just enough, that they know it’s probably a good idea to connect Threads to ActivityPub, where most of the people I’m talking about currently reside.
These people want what we once had, back again. Back in the nineties, when the internet was fun, when it wasn’t overrun with corporate scams and constant ad-vomit. When the net was more just a place to build a page and talk with friends. When you could still call yourself a webmaster.
A time when you could sign on, chat with your pals, play some cooperative games, maybe write a blog post, and that was fuckin’ it.
Sure, you could order some stuff, but that wasn’t the main focus of being online.
This clash of ideas has come to this kind of fever pitch level of ridiculousness where the moneyed oligarchs who control the world, and by extension, technology, and the internet, think they can tell the rest of the world what they want and how they’re going to use their phones, social media, their computers, and the internet. To the point that it’s come down to gaslighting millions of people into believing that, yes, I absolutely want generative slop that was trained on the works of artists who will never be paid.
I absolutely want a robot to write the books I read, because everyone should be in a day-to-day nine to five, not writing books.
Oh.
Oh damn, you mean that’s not what people want? People want to go on social media and have civil, normal conversations with real people? They don’t want an LLM eavesdropping on everything they type so that they can be better sold as a product to Nabisco?
Oh shit, man.
Where do we go from here?
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