The Lumpenproletariat Will Be Digital

I recently read the credible claim that the most viral posts on Facebook were now AI-generated “slop”. To my eye that has some serious implications for Facebook, the World Wide Web, AI, the world, and human cognition itself.

For Facebook, when the dominant content in a major social space is no longer human expression amplified by machines, but machine expression optimized for machines that drastically diminishes its value proposition.

The World Wide Web in its original form consisted of content generated by humans, links, and discoverability. A multi-billion dollar business, Google (now Alphabet) was built on that. Google and its emerging reliance on AI, replacing links with unattributed or pseudo-attributed AI-generated content, is already subverting that. Social media’s replacement of links with feeds had already eroded that. Now the replacement of human-created posts with AI-generated content i.e. “slop” further dilutes the value proposition. Feeds killed navigation; AI is killing authorship.

AI content generation has many advantages for the companies. It is cheap, scalable, easily tested in realtime, and can be quickly tailored for different demographics, moods, and trends. It is not equally advantageous for those who are notionally its customers.

In my earlier discussion of the Digital Revolution I held back from exploring a specific aspect of that revolution that is relevant here. One of the results of the Digital Revolution was the emergence of a large, globally distributed pool of workers who are digitally literate, technically competent, capable of speaking English content creators. Large segments of these roles as transcribers, customer support staff, content moderators, search engine optimizers, and coders are being automated or commoditized. Needing alternative sources of revenue they are turning to prompt farming, clickbait generation, fake personae synthetic virality, and scam-adjacent content to replace that income. It is the application of 19th century urbanization to the 21st century Internet.

Different from Marx’s predictions they are not politically dangerous. They are civilizationally dangerous.

In previous eras writing, printing, and distribution were all expensive. Now with a laptop, electricity, and an Internet connection someone with the knowledge to do it can create practically infinite output. That reduces the marginal cost of persuasion to something approaching zero. Where persuasion once required institutions, reputations, and capital, it now requires only throughput and targeting. The net result is a global factory for cognitive junk food.

These workers are not producing historically grounded argument, culturally embedded nuance, or philosophically coherent positions. They are producing memes, emotional triggers, visual hooks, and slogans.

I have also previously mentioned the weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It is a robust finding among knowledgeable scholars, confirmed by empirical evidence. The cognitive effects of the flood of “slop” with which people are being inundated will be considerable. These are the effects of increasing “visualcy” including a diminishing in abstract reasoning, increasingly emotional expression, and reduced tolerance for ambiguity among others.

This is the cycle. AI displaces workers; displace workers produce AI-assisted junk; platforms reward it; AI trains on it; cognition degrades; demand for nuance collapses; displacement accelerates.