Mork had told me about Facebook or Meta or Whoever The Fuck talking about generating AI users from whole cloth and stuffing their services with them. The quote in the strip is direct, but we have provided a lightly translated option also.
This is Dead Internet Theory shit. Because Facebook, like Google, is an advertising company the exodus of the youthful cadre must be a source of profound horror. Doubly so for Facebook, which essentially runs an Intranet and doesn't have the dominion over the broader web that Google does. But they don't actually need people to maintain their inertia - well, they need one person, but we'll get to that. I don't know if they're cutting a Gordian Knot, or tying one. In any rational universe, an announcement like "We are going to fill our social service with pretend people" wouldn't be a paean to AI hype - it would be like reading your own eulogy. Something something, late stage capitalism. The heat death of the metaverse.
My daughter will never have a Facebook account. She will never have an Instagram account. And not because of paternal Tyranny or something - it's because they are not cool. They are not cool. Nidhoggr has gnawed them clean through; they're cooked, in the parlance. They can try to simulate as many Ronias as they can; they will not find her. The only way for something like Google's YouTube Shorts to beat TikTok would be if they could somehow pressure the government to outright fucking ban the clock app or something. Right? Fat fucking chance, it's crazy to even suggest.
On Wednesday Brenna was trying to find out information about The Panama Canal. Her ideological opponents had said a variety of things, some of which seemed specious, motivated, or at the very least self-serving, and we are people who at least try to imagine that our foes may have some reason for saying the things they do that isn't motivated purely by Satanic influence. She searched for an article about the sale of the canal, and when she opened it up, it was the same three points over and over under different headings, slightly modified. Each refraction of this information was festooned with advertising. Oh! And the three points were just suspended in the paragraphs, like carrots in aspic, and none truly arrived at an informative whole. A person definitely did not write this. I'm not sure a person should read it.
For Google, this doesn't really matter at all. The only participant in this system which is of any merit is the person paying to advertise, and they will continue to see all the metrics they would like to see, because the person selling them the advertising is also the person telling them it worked.
(CW)TB out.
