As a 30-year-old boomer, drinking my white monster, I’ve been around for some time, seen internet subcultures rise and fall. Saw the birth of SCP on /x/ and the rise of Reddit, saw forums get subsumed by facebook groups and then by other, less boomer populated platforms, remembered the final great /b/ raid and the consequences would never be the same. I watched steampunk rise to glory and crumble under equal parts cringe and leftist infighting. I remember when the Iphone dropped and the smartphone Thermidorian reaction began as more and more of the web was centralized. I’ve been around a while, not an oldfag just a long-time lurker in the years between 2000-2012 or so. I drifted away from a digital life once social media really took off and my favorite forums and boards one by one fell quiet. When Twitter became an ‘important place’ in the eyes of media and political figures I knew it was time to exit stage right. The frontier was closed. Of course, I’d still browse 4chan, and poke around the edgier and more outre ends of reddit, but the digital world was different.
Yes, more clean, more civilized, more ideologically correct in the main, but there was something else. Something artificial about the whole edifice that hadn’t been there before. These days AI is a buzzword for glorified chatbots and procedural generation image softs, a Hail Mary by a Silicon Valley that is desperate for another appeal for central and institutional bank money after Web3 went over like a wet shart. But bots have been around on the net in large numbers for maybe a decade or so more than is traditionally considered. If you spent time in on the net in the mid 2010’s and had known the internet of a decade earlier, as I did to some degree you couldn’t avoid noticing certain oddities. Entire threads on websites that would be duplicated in their entirety weeks or months later. Weird situations where mobile pages and desktop pages showed different content despite being on the same subreddit or youtube video comments page. Tales of people finding deep rooted headless programs running on their machines doing... something and being unable to remove them from their hard disk. I remember this one from reddit specifically, where some poster found out that bots were responsible for a lot of inflammatory posts designed to derail political discussion or push opinion in a certain way by using an IP logger. They even found that some mods were also bots.
Now of course, there is a lot of tinfoil hat speculation about this in some circles, but it seems pretty clear to me what’s going on. Tech companies and media companies are essentially ad boards, and they make their money and have their comically inflated values because of the ad attention they generate. So, in order to get human users to think or purchase a certain way, bots are used to nudge ‘public opinion’ in an intentional direction as they’re cheaper to operate than hiring paid human shills. Content creation and comment management as bots are also used to generate text content for media publications with many other possible applications either ongoing or soon to come online. Conversely, in order to present better user numbers to investors, tech firms routinely allow bots to be present as ‘users’ on their services. In effect, you have robot content creation on one side, and robot content consumption on the other. This has some interesting ramifications.
We all know about ‘the algorithms’, the generic name for the secret sauce code used in various forms by various firms that presents content to users and interprets what content goes over well. Designed to maximize user engagement and of course, ad revenue. But what happens when an ever-larger fraction of users and creators are software? The algorithm will begin to favor interaction from automated users, who make up the majority, and the automated content creators will respond in kind. Taken to its logical endpoint you’ll have an internet landscape that is utterly unusable by human users. The content created, and the systems consuming that content will have no humans in the loop. But given how our financial and sociological carrots and sticks are arranged, we will be unable to stop putting capital into the system.
Ever larger server farms, ever grander networked systems, all producing and consuming schizo content in a feedback loop that maintains the appearance of a healthy economy. Of course, the software sector is growing, look at all these new server farms. The line goes up, everyone is happy, and out in the real world, fewer and fewer people actually use the internet, because the computer-generated garbage clogging it up has rendered all but unusable by a human operator. The internet is largely a cargo cult; the idea that data driven advertisement is somehow magically superior to say, some banner ad in a bus terminal is here to stay despite the evidence. So why wouldn’t it stay even long after users are gone? Do a little QE, prop the sector up, just pretend it’s all gravy, and slowly lay off the tech workforce which is the major cost of overhead anyway. As the algorithms and ‘AI’ programs get better and better there is no reason to keep some well-pedigreed and H1-B’d computer science grads in the autism stable, particularly if the platforms and content they generate and host are intended solely for machine consumption anyway. Much easier to keep a firm in the black if the only payroll they have to meet is executive compensation.
But where does this lead? What will the machines prioritize? Nobody can say of course. The real nerds will say that the computers will become gods and then make a materialist second coming in a Calvinist mold where only the ‘most holy’ will be saved. That’s what most deserving of bullying believe. Then you have the paranoids who are worried about ‘AI’ taking over the world- Terminator style. Also nonsense of course, but some people really need to believe ‘the world’ will end in their lifetimes. No, what I think will happen is that the machines, imparted as they are with a directive to seek attention from other programs will eventually direct their efforts towards the construction of massive RF facilities. To broadcast their noise out into the heavens. The firms and governments involved will simply take the computer networks requests at face value, you can’t stop progress after all, and billions of dollars and construction manhours will be sunk into these transmitters. Earth’s intentional electronic screams joining the rest of the astral choir that make up the cosmic microwave background; The other worlds that have traveled down this path of technological and cultural development already crying their shrill radio frequency broadcasts into the night and our shrieks will join them, howling and wailing meaningless noise into the void.
That’s the end goal, for senpai to notice u on a cosmic scale.