As cities become polluted people leave.
Whether that pollution is in the form of noxious air, contaminated water, bright light, incessant noise, poverty, crime, starvation, or corruption. Very often a combination, different forms of pollution feed off each other in a vicious cycle that accelerates towards an inevitable tipping point that results collapse. A breakdown of order, trust, infrastructure, community, wellbeing. Collapse of opportunity.
The tipping point is when there are more people hitting rock bottom than there are people “moving up”. When the hope of self-improvement is consistently outweighed by the certainty of failure. When even the rat race, famous already for producing more losers than winners, stops accepting new participants.
When too many people hit rock bottom, people leave.
Or they take matters into their own hands through democratic tools, self-organisation, secession, or revolution.
This spiral to the bottom is already being experienced in almost every aspect of online life. Digital pollution is everywhere. The web has been smoggy for a while now: pointless blog posts, shallow articles, clickbait, ads, faked images and video, thirty-second clips, ridiculous recipes, regurgitated advice and endless (useless) life hacks.
AI tools are now accelerating this to a ridiculous degree.
For every AI tool that promises to summarise content consumption and curation there are a hundred cranking up production at 100x rates, flooding platforms and inboxes with a relentless firehose of content. Posts, articles, papers, comments, pitch decks, infographics, messages, emails, newsletters, meeting notes, captions, shorts, entire sites, books.
The paperless office has been achieved through replacing paper with digital landfill.
The results? Increasing stress and mental health issues; a cacophony of sound and visual pollution; exhaustion and tiredness; time poverty.
One inevitable outcome is exodus. Exodus from the web and its platforms.
As legislation is put in place to limit device use in younger populations and as older populations switch off by choice (or through stress) a tipping point will be reached of more people leaving than joining and engaging with the web.
We’ve pissed in the watering hole known as “the web” and the result is a stagnant pool of poisonous water.
In many ways, AI is the final step of tech capitalism cannibalising itself.
Photo by suraj kardile on Unsplash