So what we’ve been talking about–machines and algorithms are just kind of like running the whole show…That’s been referred to as the dead internet theory, the idea that there’s really not a lot of humanity on the internet, it’s all the bots and we kind of just sit there. Aiden Walker took that a step further recently and his theory–it’s somewhat colorful–is that it’s like the cuck internet theory…which is that the synthetic product of these artificial intelligence things, be it a slop video of a cat dancing on a street in Paris or whatever, that a bunch of people are flicking through Instagram reels or Facebook and just hitting like or whatever, “Oh that’s cute I’m going to forward that,” …it’s machine made, it’s trained off of all of these other machines. Then you have the algorithm which is predisposed to like that stuff because that stuff is all trained off of what the algorithm has already shown you and given you, right?
What’s happening is those things are meeting. Those things are in the room interacting with each other and the human is sitting in the corner in the chair watching that. The human is the consenting observer to an interaction, a melding of sorts of these two machines that have been predisposed to do this in service of viral advertising revenue. And that is a lot of what the internet is. The internet isn’t dead. The internet is really active. It’s moving. It’s doing stuff. These two elements that aren’t human are doing it all night long and we the human are just sort of sitting there like, “Okay, yeah, no, I’ll have some more, I guess. Yeah, sure.” You know, we are consenting to it in some sense.
Aidan Walker: Cuck Internet Theory
When your eye lingers on an AI slop reel, you are allowing two bundles of algorithms that were made for one another to finally meet. It’s a match made, if not in heaven, then in the neural net’s n-dimensional representation of destiny.
…The most lucrative products in the world today are numbers manufactured by American tech companies and financial institutions. These numbers are processed into training data, pitch decks, valuations, and justifications. Each of these become instruments for extracting more value out of the world of actual people who make things and putting it into the world of people who make slide decks.
…Look at it just in terms of internet history over the past two decades. Every minute of those twenty years, people watched videos, chatted, and shared stuff online. Some, but not all, of those engagements resulted in exchange between two humans through the medium of the machine: a creator got a follower or payment, a viewer arrived at an epiphany, or another meme hit the group chat and made everyone smile. But lately (as anyone who makes money from the internet or spends a lot of time there will tell you) this seems to be happening less and less.
…If we’re cucked, as I argue, then the solution is to see the algogarchic [algorithmic + oligarchic] project not as productive or future-facing at all, but as extractive, a vast magnet pulling money, agency, and meaning out of real life situations. And the question to ask is how to reverse that magnet’s polarity so technology is not taking the world away from you, but giving it to you…