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The author needn't regret not publishing this two years ago, it's a thought that had occurred to pretty much everyone long before then. It's just not clear tha

The author needn't regret not publishing this two years ago, it's a thought that had occurred to pretty much everyone long before then. It's just not clear that anything can be done to stop the snowball from gathering speed.

trhway 1y ago
We had more than half a century of for example sci-fi literature describing that future, and over all those decades nobody was able to come up with even half-good plausible/feasible idea of how to deal with that. That suggests that it is outside of human intelligence capabilities to stop that snowball. Personally, i read a lot of sci-fi in my youth and i'm prepared to accept such my/our fate, even happily working where i can to speed it up (the faster the changes, the faster the human evolution (or at least adaptation) and what can be more exciting than that). Current humans can't even deal with very simple and obvious issue of global warming. Thus it seems very unreasonable to expect any effective dealing with significantly more complex issues. And thus if not evolution then at least very accelerated adaptation is in order.
roxolotl 1y ago
I think it’s more that there’s no will to do anything about it. As a piece earlier this week pointed out nothing about tech is genuinely inevitable[0]. There are humans making decisions to keep the snowball gathering speed. 0: https://deviantabstraction.com/2025/09/29/against-the-tech-inevitability/ https://deviantabstraction.com/2025/09/29/against-the-tech-i...
- dabockster 1y ago
  > nothing about tech is genuinely inevitable This reminds me of when everyone was saying that "everything on the internet is written in ink" - especially during the height of social media in the 2010s. So imagine my surprise in the first half of the 2020s when tons of content starts getting effectively deleted from the internet - either through actual deletion or things like link rot. Heck, I literally just said "the height of social media" - even that has pulled back. So yeah, remember that tech ultimately serves people. And it only happens so long as people are willing to enable it to happen.
  - rsync 1y ago
    I think you are mistaken. I suspect almost all of that data still exists - it just isn’t readily available. In the desperate end-game of this most recent round of “it’s shit, but what if we collected enough of it?” every last bit of human generated content will be resurrected.
    - nyantaro1 1y ago
      nice username
    - dabockster 1y ago
      That’s a fair point. But I’ve learned from my own life experience to factor in things like Hanlon’s Razor and the Dunning-Kruger Effect when it comes to technology anymore. Especially post-Covid tech. In this case, while it’s totally possible for this sort of data to still exist somewhere, I think the chances of it surfacing again in any accessible format are rare - purely because of the overall stupidity of the system. Keeping data that “alive” for decades is a skill in itself that seems to only happen in a heavily subsidized “perfect” economic times (at least to the outside observer). Once the going gets tough, there isn’t really any business value to saving the data and it likely gets deleted.
dheera 1y ago
Meanwhile, I do a lot of photography and haven't posted anything in the past 2 years on Instagram because the AI garbage and influencer garbage now gets more attention than real photos of places on Earth you can actually go to. It feels not worth my time to post anything, considering how much effort it takes to post, time posts, and find hashtag soup, because if you don't do all of that, the platform doesn't show your images to people anyway.
- socalgal2 1y ago
  switch to another platform? flickr? 500px? Or did you just want the likes? I still post a curated set of my photos to flickr. All CC licensed FWIW. There's no AI/influencer stuff there.
  - dheera 1y ago
    Nobody I know looks at those platforms. 500px is filled with bots, Flickr is unknown to people under 30. If humans don't look at it, it's not worth my time either. I want a platform that real humans, including some sizeable chunk of my social circle, look at, and is filled with real content.
- agent531c 1y ago
  Agreed, once Instagram started favoring reels/video, I stopped posting my photography there. Ive been looking at using Photo.glass, but the subscription cost puts me off a bit emotionally after having been told to believe that 'social media is free' from the tech oligarchs. Logically though, I know that it theoretically attracts a higher bar of photographers who are willing to pay entry/support a new form of ad-free internet through that subscription - Similar to the idea of paid search engines.
  - agent531c 1y ago
    I only just realized that the site is actually https://glass.photo/ https://glass.photo/, not photo.glass. I can't edit the comment now, but the suggested domain in the original comment leads to some spam site. Don't recommend visiting it
CPLX 1y ago
While I agree I do think this way of looking at things is kind of insightful. I hadn't thought of it this way and it really rings true: > I find my fear to be kind of an ironic twist on what the Matrix foresaw—the AI apocalypse we really should be worried about is one in which humans live in the real world, but with thoughts and feelings generated solely by machines. The images we see, the words we read, all generated with the intent to control us. With improved VR, the next step (out of the real world) doesn’t seem very far away, either.
channel_t 1y ago
Yes, as far as I can tell infinite scroll + 2010s era social media recommendation algorithms alone have already decimated the wider human collective's ability to think for themselves, and has subsequently eroded sane discourse and democratic norms in societies all across the globe.

trhway 1y ago

We had more than half a century of for example sci-fi literature describing that future, and over all those decades nobody was able to come up with even half-good plausible/feasible idea of how to deal with that. That suggests that it is outside of human intelligence capabilities to stop that snowball. Personally, i read a lot of sci-fi in my youth and i'm prepared to accept such my/our fate, even happily working where i can to speed it up (the faster the changes, the faster the human evolution (or at least adaptation) and what can be more exciting than that). Current humans can't even deal with very simple and obvious issue of global warming. Thus it seems very unreasonable to expect any effective dealing with significantly more complex issues. And thus if not evolution then at least very accelerated adaptation is in order.

roxolotl 1y ago

I think it’s more that there’s no will to do anything about it. As a piece earlier this week pointed out nothing about tech is genuinely inevitable[0]. There are humans making decisions to keep the snowball gathering speed. 0: https://deviantabstraction.com/2025/09/29/against-the-tech-inevitability/ https://deviantabstraction.com/2025/09/29/against-the-tech-i...

dabockster 1y ago
> nothing about tech is genuinely inevitable This reminds me of when everyone was saying that "everything on the internet is written in ink" - especially during the height of social media in the 2010s. So imagine my surprise in the first half of the 2020s when tons of content starts getting effectively deleted from the internet - either through actual deletion or things like link rot. Heck, I literally just said "the height of social media" - even that has pulled back. So yeah, remember that tech ultimately serves people. And it only happens so long as people are willing to enable it to happen.
- rsync 1y ago
  I think you are mistaken. I suspect almost all of that data still exists - it just isn’t readily available. In the desperate end-game of this most recent round of “it’s shit, but what if we collected enough of it?” every last bit of human generated content will be resurrected.
  - nyantaro1 1y ago
    nice username
  - dabockster 1y ago
    That’s a fair point. But I’ve learned from my own life experience to factor in things like Hanlon’s Razor and the Dunning-Kruger Effect when it comes to technology anymore. Especially post-Covid tech. In this case, while it’s totally possible for this sort of data to still exist somewhere, I think the chances of it surfacing again in any accessible format are rare - purely because of the overall stupidity of the system. Keeping data that “alive” for decades is a skill in itself that seems to only happen in a heavily subsidized “perfect” economic times (at least to the outside observer). Once the going gets tough, there isn’t really any business value to saving the data and it likely gets deleted.

dheera 1y ago

Meanwhile, I do a lot of photography and haven't posted anything in the past 2 years on Instagram because the AI garbage and influencer garbage now gets more attention than real photos of places on Earth you can actually go to. It feels not worth my time to post anything, considering how much effort it takes to post, time posts, and find hashtag soup, because if you don't do all of that, the platform doesn't show your images to people anyway.

socalgal2 1y ago
switch to another platform? flickr? 500px? Or did you just want the likes? I still post a curated set of my photos to flickr. All CC licensed FWIW. There's no AI/influencer stuff there.
- dheera 1y ago
  Nobody I know looks at those platforms. 500px is filled with bots, Flickr is unknown to people under 30. If humans don't look at it, it's not worth my time either. I want a platform that real humans, including some sizeable chunk of my social circle, look at, and is filled with real content.
agent531c 1y ago
Agreed, once Instagram started favoring reels/video, I stopped posting my photography there. Ive been looking at using Photo.glass, but the subscription cost puts me off a bit emotionally after having been told to believe that 'social media is free' from the tech oligarchs. Logically though, I know that it theoretically attracts a higher bar of photographers who are willing to pay entry/support a new form of ad-free internet through that subscription - Similar to the idea of paid search engines.
- agent531c 1y ago
  I only just realized that the site is actually https://glass.photo/ https://glass.photo/, not photo.glass. I can't edit the comment now, but the suggested domain in the original comment leads to some spam site. Don't recommend visiting it

CPLX 1y ago

While I agree I do think this way of looking at things is kind of insightful. I hadn't thought of it this way and it really rings true: > I find my fear to be kind of an ironic twist on what the Matrix foresaw—the AI apocalypse we really should be worried about is one in which humans live in the real world, but with thoughts and feelings generated solely by machines. The images we see, the words we read, all generated with the intent to control us. With improved VR, the next step (out of the real world) doesn’t seem very far away, either.

channel_t 1y ago

Yes, as far as I can tell infinite scroll + 2010s era social media recommendation algorithms alone have already decimated the wider human collective's ability to think for themselves, and has subsequently eroded sane discourse and democratic norms in societies all across the globe.