The author needn't regret not publishing this two years ago, it's a thought that had occurred to pretty much everyone long before then. It's just not clear that anything can be done to stop the snowball from gathering speed.
I want a platform that real humans, including some sizeable chunk of my social circle, look at, and is filled with real content.
Ive been looking at using Photo.glass, but the subscription cost puts me off a bit emotionally after having been told to believe that 'social media is free' from the tech oligarchs. Logically though, I know that it theoretically attracts a higher bar of photographers who are willing to pay entry/support a new form of ad-free internet through that subscription - Similar to the idea of paid search engines.
0: https://deviantabstraction.com/2025/09/29/against-the-tech-i...
This reminds me of when everyone was saying that "everything on the internet is written in ink" - especially during the height of social media in the 2010s. So imagine my surprise in the first half of the 2020s when tons of content starts getting effectively deleted from the internet - either through actual deletion or things like link rot. Heck, I literally just said "the height of social media" - even that has pulled back.
So yeah, remember that tech ultimately serves people. And it only happens so long as people are willing to enable it to happen.
I suspect almost all of that data still exists - it just isn’t readily available.
In the desperate end-game of this most recent round of “it’s shit, but what if we collected enough of it?” every last bit of human generated content will be resurrected.
In this case, while it’s totally possible for this sort of data to still exist somewhere, I think the chances of it surfacing again in any accessible format are rare - purely because of the overall stupidity of the system. Keeping data that “alive” for decades is a skill in itself that seems to only happen in a heavily subsidized “perfect” economic times (at least to the outside observer). Once the going gets tough, there isn’t really any business value to saving the data and it likely gets deleted.
Current humans can't even deal with very simple and obvious issue of global warming. Thus it seems very unreasonable to expect any effective dealing with significantly more complex issues. And thus if not evolution then at least very accelerated adaptation is in order.
> I find my fear to be kind of an ironic twist on what the Matrix foresaw—the AI apocalypse we really should be worried about is one in which humans live in the real world, but with thoughts and feelings generated solely by machines. The images we see, the words we read, all generated with the intent to control us. With improved VR, the next step (out of the real world) doesn’t seem very far away, either.