death of reality.
The moon is fake, modern pictures might not be admitted in court due to scaling issues, social media platforms offer so many filters and layers to edit your content people won’t recognize you on the streets and the presidents are sitting on Ventrilo Discord judging Pokémon.
We are entering the prime deep fake era, for any content. Google managed to destroy their search so most of the web is just SEO generated content but wait - it gets worse, just use ChatGPT to copy an article, reword it and voilá. Add more “Black Hat SEO” practices to win traffic.
If you check social media you can already see how everyone is copying each other, with AI powered tools is just going to get more efficient. Any work is going to get more efficient, the bad stuff included.
layers
First we killed god and now we got bored with our reality, so we ended it as well.
We started to add filters, modifying how we look, even enhancing the pictures we take so they look better, adding colours that never existed in the first place. You are going to see a picture of a flower then go out and discover that the flower doesn’t look like the picture at all. But at least we managed to increase engagement.
We wanted to enhance reality but we ended up with a fake version of it.
Let me take a pause and say that of course there are hyper realistic data capturing devices that are working extremely well and technology improved our understanding of what’s around us, however the vast majority of data humans gather/produce/consume will be altered in one way or another - that’s more or less my point.
Of course we are not new to disinformation, fake news, rage bait, etc. The big tech companies have made special “gardens” so certain content doesn’t spread (as easy). Where the users feel secure to reveal they true identity and stay in a place where they consume real content but we all know how that went, right?
Internet went from the wild wild west to a bunch of walled gardens in their own bubbles of misinformation. Even you, me, and anyone using any social media is sucked up in their own world within their own bubbles curated through layers and layers of algorithms to keep us spending time on their platform so they gather more and more data.
We are hamsters running in an ever changing maze to keep ourselves entertained.
“B-but I visit other sites, I read the news” - everything is curated and moderated, is Google or Apple sending you the news feed? Oh, do you get those perhaps from an aggregator like Reddit? Don’t worry they are going to IPO soon so they are tightening the belt as well.
I included Reddit because it’s one of the most famous sites but this extends anywhere.
This isn’t some doomer POV or conspiracy, there’s no conspiracy, companies just want to make money and engagement/time spent on their site is how they generate the data to sell.
A lot of people complain about the EU rule about cookies but if you are ever curious about privacy check all the tracking that’s happening at your favourite recipes site, the content you read/consume needs to make money somehow - if you agree with those practices or not then that’s another matter.
cyber reality
I briefly mentioned the old internet, back when we used to have onion belts and people were wary of revealing their identity online. That’s not the case any more. Mainly because our real identity is tied to the Internet. It’s not the interwebz any more, shit got real.
We are the new cyber humans who have their reality enhanced through the internet. We always had tools to transmit data to one another but right now those transmissions are instant, enhanced and they will allow you to talk to anyone anywhere or get any data you want (from your controlled garden of course).
We carry our phones everywhere to augment ourselves, our digital persona is more and more real every time due to our constant reliance on it.
The digitalization might not be fully complete yet, as you still need to do a lot of bureaucrecy in person and physical money is not going to disappear any time soon but..
The digital world is slowly fusing with reality and for some people their digital persona is much more important.
maybe it’s time to touch grass tho
lol
lmao even