Like Chum for Sharks
Twenty years ago I was sitting in a bar with a group of investors, talking about the brave new world of social media. They had dreams of billions. I was thinking beyond that.
My gut told me people would behave badly behind avatars. That without any fear of recognition, anonymity would unleash the worst in humans.
They laughed.
We all know how that went.
Last September I wrote about a bigger threat. AI as the master enabler of misdirection. We’ve all seen the AI bots seeding social with rage bait, manufacturing outrage and lies that move faster than truth.
I was wrong.
I had no clue how fast it would take over the digital world.
We’re living it now. Feeling it.
You’re scrolling. Something hits your feed and your chest tightens. Your pulse jumps. If you’re like me, your first reaction has you typing before you finish reading. Outraged at the lies, the lower than low comments and just plain insanity. Who would say this stuff?
Then you stop. Take a breath. I used to just delete the message and move away. Then I started to click into the account behind the insanity.
20 followers. 32,000 posts. Yep, it’s a rage bot. Same with those hateful comments. Thrown in like chum for the sharks.
Manufactured outrage melded with blatant racist, misogynist hate.
Enraged and powerless at the same time.
How can one person hold back an ocean of outrageous bullshit, designed to destroy common decency. To divide and conquer us online.
I miss the old days of social. Real conversations with people you’d come to know and respect. Sharing opinions, disagreeing courteously. No one being labeled the enemy.
I find myself caught between two losses. Stay and drown in the manufactured rage. Leave and lose the connections I value.
At first, I asked myself why I kept trying? I don’t even know who’s real anymore.
I decided to hang in there anyway. To use it as a path to distance my heart from my head, my faith in our world from my mind and its overwhelm.
I Resent the Hell Out of It. Do You?
How did we become the world where a few billionaires running social platform companies are allowed to openly support these humans hiding behind AI bots. They freely chum, chum, chum and churn us all up. Turn us against each other. Denigrate women, people of skin not white, different religions, hell, different states, streets and tshirts.
What the living hell. It’s getting worse. Faster and Faster every day.
The platforms open their APIs and accounts. They support the hell out of this travesty.
Over half of long-form LinkedIn posts are now AI-generated. Forty percent of Facebook posts. One in five comments in your feed is spam, a bot, or active abuse. On political or viral posts, it jumps to forty percent. Sometimes higher.
The “experts” in your feed dropping hot takes? Half of them are AI tools.
The comments that all open the same way. “Spot on!” “Great take!” Then three paragraphs of soft mush from people who never wrote more than a sentence before in their life. You know it when you read it. Check that profile and you’ll see it clearly.
I think we are developing a sick sense about it. I know I am. My gut twinges differently when I read the rage comments now. I don’t react as much as think WTF. Shake my head and move on.
We’re learning to feel the machine. Neuroplasticity shifting our wiring to save humanity.
The Reaction
Half of Americans pulled back from social this year.
I’m right there with them. Way less time on social. Way more careful about what I read and trust on the internet in general. Anyone can have a website and post supposed facts. It’s on us to fact check, truth check.
Again, WHY should we be forced to do that because of bad actors using powerful AI to manipulate the world?
I am DONE being manipulated. Done handing my nervous system to a bot designed to keep me manic. Done watching common decency disappear under algorithmically generated bullshit.
DONE.
I have to wonder…
How fucked are we when AI is denying it’s AI?
This Was Always the Point.
Divide us. All of us. From each other.
Not as a side effect. As the MAIN EVENT.
Political radicalization pulling people to extremes they’d never have reached on their own. Families who can’t sit at the same dinner table because they’re living inside completely different manufactured realities. The group text that used to be funny, now loaded with landmines. Neighbors who shared a beer on the porch five years ago and now won’t look each other in the eye.
The rise in violence. The rage. People acting out in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
Look around. Really look.
That’s not human nature. That’s the system working exactly as designed.
I sat in that bar twenty years ago and told a room full of smart people what was coming. They laughed. I wrote about it again last September and thought I understood the scale.
I didn’t. None of us did.
That feeling in your gut when you put down your phone at night, the feeling you can’t seem to fix?
It’s not just you. It’s a lot of us. Being played by the same machine. Turned against each other by the same algorithms. Losing the platforms that promised to connect us all.
The next time you feel that rage spike from something in your feed, pause. Just for a second. Ask yourself who benefits from you feeling this way right now.
Because it’s probably not you.
It’s the machine between you. The people behind it would control us all.