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> There are no humans on the Internet. There are, but human spammers & scammers.

• safety1st 4y ago
  There aren't, that's the deeper point. Only cyborgs exist on the Internet, that's all there has been from the start. At best you're interacting with a user agent, software that's animated largely by a human's will. Though most of the time you're interacting with an agent of, say, Meta Platforms. This agent impersonates the human you think you're interacting with, but isn't one, and ultimately just does whatever Meta tells it to. E.g. if Meta wants a post to vanish, then it does. Even right now you're reading a post (mine) which was conceived of by a human, but you're not interacting with a human, you're interacting with a software layer run by YCombinator. I gave it permission to impersonate me, but the interaction is way different from unadulterated human to human contact. The Internet has always been like this. The first user agents were simple so we didn't think about it much, but now these agents are becoming exponentially more complex so it's becoming more obvious that whatever you're dealing with is progressively less human.
  • disqard 4y ago
    I really like how you articulated it! Viewed from this perspective, it's like we're experiencing a man-in-the-middle attack on all of our humanity -- and the interposer isn't even human.