Agency
Rediscover it. Reclaim it.
Friction
The smoother, the better. Fewer steps, higher conversion rate. Every point of friction between impulse and action introduces risk.
The obstacle used to be geographical. Trips to the store, waiting for the weekend to purchase. Checking the mailbox for correspondence. These were inefficiencies to be solved, but it comes at a price. We’ve few spaces left where we could change our minds, reconsider, grow within these periods.
No friction, no heat, no transformation. The age of impulse winks at you and you haven’t learned a thing.
Fuck impulse. Be more deliberate. Intentional. Take the journey, the scenic route. Use your imagination. Rub it out.
Calcification
Algorithms don’t expand your taste, it confirms it.
Platform algorithms use collaborative filtering (user + item) to identify patterns in user behavior and predict future behavior based on statistical clustering. The result is that your preferences calcify. You stop happening upon ideas, culture, viewpoints that are outside your established patterns. You’re shown variations of what you already like, eventually forgetting you could like other things.
FUN FACT: “51%. That’s the percentage of internet traffic that was generated by bots, as opposed to humans, in 2024”. Sweeet!
Petrichor (wink Max wink), the smell of rain on dry earth. You might have encountered the word once in a game of DnD. These chance discoveries won’t happen when every recommendation is optimized for engagement probability, monety, or you explicitly fucking ask for archaic & obsolete words (RIP Luciferous Logolepsy), which is a cognitive burden.
Fuck that, officer, I have something to say and you might even like it, but prob not.
Anonymity
“Way back” online users were anonymous by default. You could have a dozen identities across a dozen forums, chat rooms, etc. You were a creative, weird as hell, and brave little artist. You could be because there was so little risk!
Anonymity correlates with experimental behavior. Identity, persistence, attribution precipitates homogeneity. When everything you say is attached to you and archived forever, you may more spare yourself exposure or risk of criticism.
Anonymity was a baby. You could have many, expendable personas. Blinks. The Internet is different now. It’s still young, but unrecognizable. You could still be anonymous within an immediate, online audience, but lots are still being logged. Your litany on a ledger. An enrichment machine with guilty knowledge incapacitating you.
FUN FACT: “In 2024 Meta discloses that the total “inauthentic” duplicate and false accounts for 14% of their monthly active users, roughly 430 million accounts”! Rock on!
Fuck something. Someone.
Censorship
Panopticon (WINK), a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single prison officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched [Wikipedia].
Scribble scribble, type type. Pause. Review. Revise. Delete. Soon you stop writing at all. The system is working. The system has crippled you, your voice. It shouldn’t. It should go fuck itself.
Employers (current and prospective), algorithms, the rabid mob, your family, friends, lover. The probability of exposure is never zero, but it weighs a ton!
“I have nothing to say.” Bullsh--t. You’re burning with commentary, but you know the Internet doesn’t forget. And more! The Internet reminds you.
F--k the Internet.
Grrr Angry
Metrics aren’t “good” or “evil”, but they do tell you what’s good and what’s bad: Good interaction? Pump it up. Bad interaction? Dump it off.
Outrage, disgust, fear, contempt are high-arousal states. High-arousal? More interactions. More interaction means more algorithmic promotion.
“The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” a burning house captures more attention than an opulent house. You are thence informed, appalled, engaged. It’s harder for good people to do good than it is for malicious people to do malice. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not hard to do good, but it is hard to do so much good that it bubbles up above atrocities.
Glacier
Abstraction: protocols, CDNs, HA, load balancers, (v)LLMs, hyperscalers, moderation pipelines, PIPELINES, advertising auctions, data brokers, agreements, model training, automated workflows, everything as a service, each layer representing decisions made by others about what you can see and do.
And this infrastructure moves. You don’t feel it, but when you wake up, the service is… different. Something new to acknowledge, something new to, skim. Opt-in.
The layers are shaping our choices. Your options fade as the system learns more of what you want, what you need, because we’re all in its wake.
Enrich
Your behavior is represented by data points, yummy model training food. You’re laboring for an entity that will sell the product of your labor to third parties who will use it to influence your future behavior. Isn’t that fucked up?
This is not a metaphor, but the business model. You clicked agree. The asymmetry between what you assumed (because you didn’t read) and what you consented to is not a flaw.
YoU aRe ThE pRoDuCt. Sure, sure. It’s lost it’s meaning to you, but it’s still true. You’re not without compensation, though. You’re still allowed to participate for free!
Self Defeat
If all users stopped contributing, the system would collapse. No individual user can collapse the system by withdrawing. Individual withdrawal carries social costs: disconnection, irrelevance, loss of access to network effects.
This is nothing new.
We are being overgrazed. We cannot fence ourselves off without coordination and coordination requires communication and communication requires the platforms you are trying to fence yourself from!
So when/where/how to share the sacrifice? You can start whenever, dude. There have been SOOO many opportunities to tell [service A] and [service B] to fuck off. So many injustices to not tolerate. Giving up a minor conveniences one at a time can be liberating.
Volunteering
Anytime we share, the model ingests. Then, from offered talent, the model creates. Still no compensation. No recognition. No attribution.
The better the work, the richer the data. The richer the data, the closer we are to parity with our likenesses. Our acolytes. Our replacements. How do we stop? The sensors are ubiquitous, omnipresent, persistent, pervasive. But convenience is instant! I was unhappy, but these new whateverthefucks made me happy again. Future me can wait.
FUN FACT: “74% of New Webpages Include AI Content“
Just Watch
What if we only consumed? Read-only. Take take take. That’s pretty safe.
Nash equilibrium (no winks). A situation where no player could gain more by changing their own strategy (holding all other players' strategies fixed) in a game. [Wikipedia].
Silence protects. You can’t (mis)quote what’s not published.
The forum keeps on, the blogs continue, but they’re uncanny. We migrate to private accounts, then no accounts, then physical media only and local markets. Threat modeling against the information economy that drove us underground.
Dead Internet
A theory. The Internet will be marshaled by bots, apparent users simulations; real humans the online minority. Like a mall, void of humans, billboards and kiosks still clamouring for customers.
It’s being observed. Deviation is a-gen-tic-al-ly suppressed. Conformity is trending.
It died when we became indistinguishable from bots. It died because we avoided friction.
Fuck you, I hope this message finds you.
. . .
A little more fun, in incrementally more fun format:
More articles are now created by AI than humans.
Artificial Intelligence fuels rise of hard-to-detect bots that now make up more than half of global internet traffic.
AI Content Is the New Default.
GPT-4.5 Has Passed The Turing Test.
Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion.
Your points on friction and calcification are so clever! It's totally true how algorithms calcifie our world. Just makes me think if AI could ever really encourage fresh perspectives instead.
Relevant: https://www.moltbook.com/