A caution and a notion for this piece of writing: the things you will read here won't make any difference in your life, nor will they be something that you won't be able to find on the internet.
I do, sometimes, feel like the world I was born into is the end of humanity. Not a reference to Fukuyama, but it does indeed feel like it. The rise of AI is here, and so is the Terminator. Each week feels like a year for everyone living in this contemporary, advanced globe.
I would like to point to three main advancements and just yield my keyboard. The first of them is the internet revolution the commercialization of the internet. The second is the development of fast-consumption content; some refer to it as "Tiktokization," but oldies know that it was Vine and Musical.ly. The third and final one is the advancement in LLMs not specifically AI, but LLMs.
For my first point, I would like to create a dream. Your postcards will arrive instantly, and if the recipient sends their reply directly to you, you will also receive their postcard instantly. Such a revolution! This will create many possibilities, such as the ease of information transfer, commerce (assume that the piano can also travel instantly), globalization, and much more!
But here is the twist: you found your new friend group in New Zealand. Such a great place, only hidden by distance. Would you still allocate your precious time to your nearby friends? Well, am I dumb for asking? You would, right! For the initial phase, maybe you would, yes, but after time, humanity is bound to explore new possibilities; this includes your new curiosity about novel friendships abroad. This will over time create a rupture between your new friends and the old bros. This is what happened with the internet.
You might make it personal and think that this is a real experience of mine, and yes, it happened, but I am not the only one who had this fate. This is a generational improvement that created an opportunity to connect with international people who try to put themselves in an international framework. This does wonders in a globalized world why not explore the world if we also live in it! But it has some caveats: i) globalization and the liberal order are not centuries-old things; ii) what about your geographically proximate friends?
Also inspired by Geoffrey Litt! Read it here
My second point is about the pills that are easy to swallow. Imagine that you enter a restaurant a modern one, please! It's another extravagant restaurant, and you somehow find the funds to visit this place. Like any other, this place "doesn't serve food but an experience." You sit on a chair, blindfold over your eyes, catchy music playing. A mechanical arm provides you with a spoon full of simple yet different tastes. The chef is super talented; with every gesture and swallow, he can understand your preferences. With each spoon, a different product, a different taste. You don't want to walk out the door.
I mean, I am not a great storyteller, but you get the idea it's short-form content! With each swipe, a layout designed to give minimal information with maximal efficiency; wouldn't that be fun to consume endless content? No, this costs us the whole world and will cost us a whole generation. The commercial success of short-form content not only provides us enough intel that we, as the dominant species on the globe, yearn to abandon our eudaimonia (long-term happiness) and trade it for hedonia. Even though the trade-off is that we gain nothing and lose our i) attention span, ii) time, and iii) control, we enjoy it. But how come we find ourselves guilty in a global world like this? After all, the whole week feels like a year, am I not right?
A great video about short-form media designs: Watch on YouTube
The last one is maybe the most popular one; after all, it's the most contemporary Ponzi scheme after the 2008 crisis. Just look at yourself and tell me: when was the last time you didn't feel ashamed for using LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Anthropic)? I always feel embarrassed, I truly do, but my Google One subscription is on a 3-year streak now. They are useful hell, even for this website, I used Gemini to help me! But what if the tools you use are too advanced, yet too complicated at the same time?
What if the "assistant" you use is not designed to be commercialized? We know that the LLM format of using a chatbox is even a design discussion, since it's the most convenient but not the most effective one for the human psyche. It's hard to reveal the path in front of us since we are living in the middle of the development process, but what I would like to highlight is that the usage of LLMs and GenAI has already demolished the bridges between us. Just look at Facebook grannies; they really think that apples can talk and kittens can transmute into parrots. It's simply a mass psychosis.
For all three highlights I made, there is an obvious recession in our tolerance for b#llshit. We evolved to do fabulous things and have the chance to think about unreal stuff, yet we first lost our proxy connection to our surroundings, later lost our connection to time, and finally lost our connection to creativity.
So tell me, do you still have the audacity to talk about how the world is a shareholder-maxing place that we must endure, or is this wet globe shaped to become a place of mental deprivation?
I would be more than happy to share examples of all the internet subcultures. I just didn't have the energy to list them all.