Comment by api
5 hours ago
I listened to a podcast a while back (human authored I'm pretty sure) about low-quality gutter level streamer content and how popular it is, speaking of personalities like asmongold and a vast number of even worse imitators.
This content is made by humans but is pointless grindingly stupid filler spiced with a dash of obviously performative offensiveness. You're basically listening to a complete loser (or someone LARPing as one) telling you about their boogers and then being racist and then playing video games for 6 hours.
But it's wildly popular. Millions of people stream this kind of shit for hours every day.
There's a lot of people out there who just want to numb their brains, and there seems to be no floor. You can just keep making it dumber. The stuff people stream (and doom scroll) on the Internet makes 1980s daytime soaps look like high art from a lost golden age.
So it's not at all surprising that millions of people listen to low-quality un-curated AI slop podcasts.
I actually unsubbed from the podcast I heard. Meta discussion of crap like this isn't much better than the content itself. Keep driving. Do not look at the car accident.
I had kind of an epiphany like that in the last year. The Information Age means information is free. It costs $0 and is produced to infinity. That means you are not missing anything. Your attention is actually 100% yours, and if you choose to ignore the car wreck that's fine. There are infinity car wrecks. There are infinity everything. Keep driving.
The problem is I want to live in the "correct information age" - that qualifier is hard to find. I suspect that correct will cost money. Unfortunately I don't know how to pay for it. Many of the major publishers are also using AI with questionable fact checking. Where I most need correct information is my local small town news, and there isn't even a newspaper anymore. (there is the nearby big city newspaper, but they don't cover my local issues well)
"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."
--H. L. Mencken (or at least attributed so.)
One of the real costs of the end game attention economy is that when your "car" crashes, noone is going to stop to help. When the market you engage in gets swallowed up, everyone will buy the swill that outcompetes you on perceived surface level value. Communities get fractured. Organizations that used to be community pillars (church) become self serving. All these things create a positive feedback loop of intellectual degradation.