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If the dead internet theory holds, we are all operating in a kind of cultural afterlife: producing for systems that consume without reading, circulating ideas through networks that route them back before anyone else arrives. What's interesting is not the paranoia but the phenomenology: the low-grade suspicion that engagement is theater, that responses are generated, that the sense of being witnessed has been quietly replaced with its simulation. Art criticism published online now competes not just with noise but with non-experience.
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What lingers for me in your observation is the loneliness of it all...Not the dramatic loneliness of being ignored, but the quieter feeling of speaking into a room that keeps answering back without ever revealing who's there. We leave traces everywhere (posts, images, comments) and receive signals (likes, emjois, sometimes actual words) in return. Yet it's often not clear whether someone paused, reflected, disagreed, felt something...or whether our message kept moving through the network, circulating without ever arriving.
The same is happening with images obviously. Most of them are produced for systems that analyze them without seeing.
Não poderia deixar de declarar minha admiração por você mais uma vez. Isso que você diz aqui permeia toda a dinâmica atual do existir e relacionar-se através dessa estrutura. Estava pensando muito esses dias sobre a questão de falar ou não falar sobre engajamento no X. Essa tua síntese me ilumina: a questão não é dar atenção a isso, mas sim livrar-se cada vez mais de cair nessa simulação.
Ever since I got onto the Internet (actually even via BBSes, before that), I have tried meeting up with the people I met online. It’s always fascinated me, that a bunch of characters on a screen, actually is a truly real person for real, and you can meet them in the flesh :-) :-)
I usually find that most “real people” are in fact the same people whether you talk to them online or in real life.
So I guess I mean conversations with real people, preferably one-on-one conversations, because even “real people” aren’t always “really real” when speaking in groups :)
As for an antidote .. there’s definitely a lot of value in smaller communities like these. Doesn’t even necessarily have to be invite-only, as long as it’s a relatively quiet corner for a small number of “real” people to talk together. But anything that gets people engaged with each other -- which is different than “engagement”, I mean actual real interactions, not commercially motivated (or politically, or otherwise) that happen to be engaging. Of course real life meetups can also work.
But I also don’t have all the answers, times keep changing and that is just what used to work for me :) I too feel demotivated and cornered (or perhaps flailing) with all the talk about AI and LLM-based coding around me ... I can’t get it to work well for me and I feel it misses the point in a similar way that someone who likes playing guitar, didn’t just stop doing that because Suno exists now.
oof @piterpasma "eyeball harvesters" is such a haunting (but accurate) phrase! and I agree, as someone who has spent years sharing work online, hearing that a piece genuinely meant something to another person means way more to me than that piece getting a lot of likes or reposts.
I completely agree, and I love the way you put it. These systems can’t see, can’t truly look or feel.
The “dead Internet theory” sounds like a modern version of Solipsism.
But I’ve always kind of felt this, as soon as I got more than 1000 followers on Instagram ... who are all these people? What does it mean? In that way, I’ve always seen “success” in terms of actual real feedback that came from a human, someone leaving a comment in a way that I know is from a real person (either because it’s insightful, or because it’s someone I know), has always been so much more valuable to me than any “number go up” metric such as likes, reposts or followers.
And I’ve always been aiming for that, for the conversation with real people. It’s how I deal with requests to see/release my code. You don’t get my code, but I will endlessly talk to you about it and/or explain how it works. I don’t wanna be secretive about it, but without the interaction, the conversation, I don’t get anything out of it. I used to get a lot of such requests, very glad that I never published my sources, since it would have been gobbled up to train AIs regardless of its license.
BTW I think you’re being generous when saying “engagement is theater”, I call them “eyeball harvesters” in this context (we’re the crops, their machines harvest our eyeballs/engagement/attention).
I LOVE “eyeball harvesters”!
Completely, I think it can become a highly dehumanising experience. Do you reckon there is some sort of antidote to it? When you mention conversations with real people, do you mean people who you know in real life?