ai-and-us
Exploring how AI can power a fair information economy, one grounded in real people - an honest human digital economy.
@db
I’ve been thinking a lot about where the internet is heading as AI and synthetic content explode.
Here’s my attempt to put words to a feeling I’ve had while building @intori. We’re at a fork in the road between synthetic comfort and real human connection.
Would love thoughtful reactions, even disagreement.
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@db
Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri just gave his take on how AI will affect Instagram creators and social media.
tldr: lots of slop coming, authenticity is key
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@db
When thinking about digital technologies that you love most, they are the ones that help you to be in contact with people you have actual relationships with across distances.
We’ve literally had this in recent past, and it’s time we bring these experiences back.
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@db
Our attention is being directed through casino-like mechanisms of platforms.
I think we’ll see increasing growth in technologies and models of consumption that seek to evade the exhausting reality of the endless attention commodification we’re living through today.
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@db
Whether or not it’s the lone cause, life in the attention age is more anxious and more depressed, more isolated and less social.
If attention is the substance of life, then the question of what we pay attention to is the question of what our lives will be.
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@db
If you can’t be heard, it doesn’t matter what you say.
Right now it’s both easier than ever to shout and harder than ever to be heard.
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@db
Mass culture has fractured into repeating subcultures, each dominated by what’s trending and what’s viral.
Our attention is pushed and pulled in every corner of our day, only to be aggregated into something that feels strangely smaller than the parts we gave it.
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@db
Doing things together has been decomposed into a two-part process, each solitary.
I view and then I share.
I view and then I share.
Then we laugh together, but apart.
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@db
One way to define culture is what we pay attention to together.
If all that attention is focused on money, what does that say about our culture?
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@db
You can now reach far more people at a cheaper price than you could a hundred years ago.
The thing being cheapened in a market sense is the thing most precious to us: what our mind rests upon, what it considers and where it goes, how we talk to ourselves, and what objects grasp our consciousness.
Over time the attention market drives the price of this resource down, which is to say it cheapens the very substance of our life.
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@db
Attention is a fictitious commodity.
The alienation we feel online is born from tension between attention as a market commodity and attention as the substance of our lives.
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@db
Human attention has always existed.
But clicks, content, engagement, and eyeballs are creations of attention capitalism.
To be reduced to an eyeball is to find oneself alienated from some part of oneself.
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@db
When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better.
Don’t change you, instead demand that the computer be changed to become more useful.
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