taCity

The internet used to be amazing. It was a bustling agora of human thought and debate, where we could share ideas and ideas free from the mechanisms of the market. But now it’s a discombobulating hall of corporate mirrors, with every reflection slightly warped to the will of an extractive form of surveillance capitalism, and the echoes of the very real, diverse and human creativity that it used to foster sound increasingly like homogenous branding motifs that make you want to wretch. We’re careening head first through a digital uncanny valley without any ethical framework for how it’ll affect not only the cultural zeigeist, but the very fabric of how we collectivise our human experience.

“AI” (as it has come to be erroneously known) with its ever-expanding corporatised capabilities, promised to democratize creation, making writers, artists, and thinkers of us all. But instead of a renaissance of democratic creativity that we were promised by the scifi writers and futurists of the past, we are faced with a proliferation of banal capitalist mediocrity all in the name of the god of CONTENT. Forged in the fires of Sillicon Valley – the fascistic leviathan that requires slaying – the constant proliferation of unregulated AI apps and software is stripping away the essence that makes creation beautiful and meaningful. We are left with an ocean of content so vast, that nothing truly significant can float for long, and drowns without a whimper (e.g. for every Andor, we have an Acolyte, Book of Boba Fett, Mandolorian Season 3, Kenobi, Ashoka and the rest of the utter drivel pumped out by Disney). Moreover, that content has been ‘created’ by stealing work the proper artists and then refusing to acknowledge their toil, and even fighting those that dare to question the extractive power of their capitalist overlords. And don’t even get me started on it’s climate impact…

Moreover, as AI continues to “learn” from our behaviours, it reinforces our biases, creating an echo chamber so odiously resonant that it drowns out dissenting voices. The algorithmic curation of our digital spaces doesn’t reveal new horizons; it walls them off. In a move that would make Deleuze and Guattari squirm, we are fed what we like until we like only what we are fed.

In this brave new world, the gatekeepers of culture are no longer human; like the Architect in The Matrix films, they look human, but are too often modelled on the most inanely white, insufferably verbose and sterotypically male tech bros that think that they own the world. The implications are as disgusting as they are absurd: AI determines literary merit, artistic value, and even historical truth. The question now becomes, not what AI is doing to our collective knowledge, but what it’s doing to our collective wisdom. Are we outsourcing not just our labour, but our judgement as well?

As we stand (or rather sit, slouched over a screen) at this critical juncture, there needs to be a realisation that we are being seduced by the siren songs of convenience and efficiency that these LLM (I’m not going to dignify it by calling it AI) sing, but such efficiency is merely a ruse for the corporate paragons to extract more data, emotion and culture from our very souls. We need to remember – and fight for – the fact that the value of human thought lies in its diversity, its indigeneity, its complexity, and its inefficiency. For in those tangled conflicting, dissenting thoughts and messy, unalgorithmic ideas is where true creativity – and the progress of civilisation – lies.

Let us choose, then, to leave the bamboozling hall of mirrors, to shatter the reflections that flatter, but ultimately deceive and extract. It is time to reclaim the internet as a space of genuine human anti-capitalist interaction and intellectual cultural diversity, lest we forget what a human face truly looks like—or worse, stop caring to know.