I’m actually generally optimistic. I’ve spent my whole life singing the tune of tech optimism. But it’s starting to seem like we’re passing an inflection point specifically with respect to being able to maintain a grip on the real. Most of the things I put in my rant have to do with losing our grip on the real: the platforms are degrading because search results are now mostly created by people who are in the business of gaming search engines, as opposed to people who are in the business of sharing real information. The social media sites are overrun by bots, and even the real profiles are sharing curated if not fake snapshots of their lives. They’re not sharing their realities. The erosion of the barrier to entry in publishing has made it possible for anyone to “publish” anything, so it’s very hard to figure out what is real reporting on real things happening in reality. AI is going to enable the deepfaking of basically anything. You won’t be able to tell what is real from what is fake in basically any digital media. These days you can’t trust product reviews to be from real people. You can’t trust the people making the products. You can’t even trust branded products you see on the internet because Amazon doesn’t care to gatekeeping truth. You can’t trust ads you see on YouTube because Google doesn’t care to filter out fraud. FaceBook outright shoves completely unreal sponsored crap into everyone’s news feeds because few people post real updates anymore… FaceBook has to create an illusion of activity to fill the feeds.

Everything is becoming like this. If you want to buy a reliable product, good luck! It’s not easy to do that anymore because incentives are so misaligned: you can’t trust the quality of the products, you can’t trust reviews — trust is breaking down so widely that to bypass that fact is foolish. It needs to be considered. Trust is everything.