Hello reader: this blog is for you! I hope you are a human being with two eyes, two ears, and a brain in between.
Ever since the release of OpenAI’s chatGPT3.5 in November 2022, the internet turned into a pit of machine-generated blurb. Even LinkedIn – home of the professional – turned into house of spam with more than half of LinkedIn content coming from AI in 2024. It has a main purpose: to capture time-on-screen, and cash it in.
The great enshittification
What happened to the internet? It was never a sunny, happy place, but netizens used to write, mock each other, and share stuff. Then we renamed “stuff” into “content” and “characters” into “influencers”: it became a monetized version of the internet, where capturing an audience means money. It rewards “high engagement” and being on the news. It happens less with original content and more with brainrot AI-slob. It is also useless.
Cory Doctorow – the brilliant author of science fiction and unlikely Financial Times columnist – called it “enshittification”. It refers to the degradation of the user experience on web platforms. These platforms use our data (i.e. who we are, what we like, who our closest friends are) to online ads services: they care little about the user experience so long that we keep on clicking. In summary, the internet used to be less consolidated, more open to entrants, and more conducive to innovations in the 2000s and 2010s, benefitting the user. It is now a very different place.
The medium is the message
“The medium is the message” captures McLuhan’s 1964 theory of communication. In short, how we communicate determines also what we communicate. With platform-based interactions getting shorter and shorter we spend hours watching 30 seconds video re-uploads peppered with AI generated art. As these platforms police language that may turn users away we resort to “algospeak” (e.g. with “unalived” instead of “killed”). We toss as jetsam all information that is not engaging, such as sources, logic, or depth of analysis.
This is not new. The trend is to be less topic-specific and reach out to everybody. In the last 200 years magazines moved from being very topic-specific (the latest literature digest for the Victorian gentleman) to discussing everything in the same issue (travel, career, and movies). The trend picks up strength: clothing stores where you can have coffee; fashion experts influencers talking about recent policy changes; a university to meet new people, develop business ideas, and explore the arts (how about learning?); and even job interviews are less about the job and more about hobbies and personal taste (“cultural fit”).
No wonder we use the latest developments in language models to polish information while the AI is taking over the internet with pictures of shrimp-Jesus. I suspect we are witnessing a new development in post-modernist surrealism: online nothing is original, nothing makes sense.
Own the medium, own the message
Poor content on bad platforms results in a horrible user experience. This is why changing the medium helps users getting a better experience. I decided to carve out a space on the internet where content can be published in posts and discussed in comments. Paying for WordPress is a small price to guarantee a garbage-free experience.
What I will do: write down my personal takes, (un)common sense, and unsolicited advice.
What I will not do: mix topics up, confuse, and spillover. And no ads.
Thank you for reading this far. Now look around and have a beautiful day, my dear reader.
