Tech and Society

The current problem, in short, is not a lack of content, nor an inability to sift through it. The problem is finding ways to care about the things we encounter in our digitally mediated environment, or at least alleviating the overwhelming sense of that environment being flooded with garbage.

Parasocial media, however unsophisticated and shallow much of it may be, at least reflects a theory of how we might navigate this digital landscape. It at least attempts, imperfectly, to answer the question: Why should I care about any of this? (Plenty of content thinks it answers this question but doesn’t.)

Returning to the topic of AI, its prospective applications for content creation seem to mostly get this wrong, doubling down on the fallacy embodied in recommendation algorithms: that humans are not the original source of meaning but passive receptacles waiting to be filled with it. The situation I’ve just described will grow increasingly urgent, thrusting the internet into an entropic state, as AI-generated content proliferates without better mechanisms for making it matter—for making us care about what’s being produced. Or maybe most of it will dump straight into digital landfills, unseen, and it won’t even matter that it doesn’t matter.