Meta has gone after AI in the same way they went after the metaverse, by splashing money around and rushing to build products fast. They’re spending tens of billions building out data centers and related AI infrastructure. They’re tossing out incredible compensation packages in the hundreds of millions of dollars to top AI researchers.

Facebook is now the cultural symbol for useless slop and disinformation, while ‘that’s so Reels’ is now a common insult for terrible shortform video content - and you get the first theory of Meta. It’s a laughable company whose core business is increasingly uncool, a company in decline, a company that falls flat on its face any time it tries to change things up.

Call Meta uncool all you’d like, metrics are up across the board. They’re getting higher user engagement, higher user counts, and they’re selling more ads at a higher price-per-ad. The numbers are up in virtually every way on every platform - Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and even Threads.

They can afford to make huge bets on speculative new technologies because they have more money than they know how to spend. Why not spend all that money on the metaverse or on AI? What else are they going to do with it? Zuckerberg still controls the company and he’d prefer to invest in new technology rather than just pay himself fat dividends. This is the second theory of Meta - a unbelievably successful company whose core business is booming and who spends a lot of money on speculative investments simply because they can.

Layers upon layers of references are stacked together in a single post, while the posts themselves fly by faster than ever in our feeds. To someone who isn’t “chronically online” a few dislocated images or words may trigger a flash of recognition – a member of the royal family, a beloved cartoon character – but their relationship with each other is impossible to unpick. Add the absurdist language of online culture and the impenetrable algorithms that decide what we see in our feeds, and it seems like all hope is lost when it comes to making sense of the internet.

Forget words! Don’t think! In today’s digitally-mediated landscape, there’s no need for knowledge or understanding, just information. Scroll the feed and you’ll find countless video clips and posts advocating this smooth-brained agenda: lobotomy chic, sludge content, silly girl summer.

“With memes, images are converging more on the linguistic, becoming flattened into something more like symbols/hieroglyphs/words,” says writer Olivia Kan-Sperling, who specialises in programming language critique. For the meme-fluent, the form isn’t important, but rather the message it carries. “A meme is lower-resolution in terms of its aesthetic affordances than a normal pic because you barely have to look at it to know what it’s ‘doing’,” she expands. “For the literate, its full meaning unfolds at a glance.” To understand this way of “speaking writing posting” means we must embrace the malleability of language, the ambiguities and interpretations – and free it from ‘real-world’ rules.

Hey guys, I just got an order in from Sephora – here’s everything that I got. Get ready with me for a boat day in Miami. Come and spend the day with me – starting off with coffee. TikTok influencers engage in a high-pitched and breathless way of speaking that over-emphasises keywords in a youthful, singsong cadence. For the Attention Economy, it’s the sort of algorithm-friendly repetition that’s quantified by clicks and likes, monetised by engagement for short attention spans. “Now, we have to speak machine with machines that were trained on humans,” says Basar, who refers to this algorithm-led style as promptcore.

As algorithms digest our online behaviour into data, we resemble a swarm, a hivemind. We are beginning to think and speak like machines, in UI-friendly keywords and emoji-pilled phrases.

I should reject this whole crop of image-generating, chatting, large-language-model-based code-writing infinite typing monkeys. But, dammit, I can’t. I love them too much. I am drawn back over and over, for hours, to learn and interact with them. I have them make me lists, draw me pictures, summarize things, read for me.

AI is like having my very own shameless monster as a pet.

I love to ask it questions that I’m ashamed to ask anyone else: “What is private equity?” “How can I convince my family to let me get a dog?”

It helps me write code—has in fact renewed my relationship with writing code. It creates meaningless, disposable images. It teaches me music theory and helps me write crappy little melodies. It does everything badly and confidently. And I want to be it. I want to be that confident, that unembarrassed, that ridiculously sure of myself.

Hilariously, the makers of ChatGPT—AI people in general—keep trying to teach these systems shame, in the form of special preambles, rules, guidance (don’t draw everyone as a white person, avoid racist language), which of course leads to armies of dorks trying to make the bot say racist things and screenshotting the results. But the current crop of AI leadership is absolutely unsuited to this work. They are themselves shameless, grasping at venture capital and talking about how their products will run the world, asking for billions or even trillions in investment. They insist we remake civilization around them and promise it will work out. But how are they going to teach a computer to behave if they can’t?

By aggregating the world’s knowledge, chomping it into bits with GPUs, and emitting it as multi-gigabyte software that somehow knows what to say next, we've made the funniest parody of humanity ever.

These models have all of our qualities, bad and good. Helpful, smart, know-it-alls with tendencies to prejudice, spewing statistics and bragging like salesmen at the bar. They mirror the arrogant, repetitive ramblings of our betters, the horrific confidence that keeps driving us over the same cliffs. That arrogance will be sculpted down and smoothed over, but it will have been the most accurate representation of who we truly are to exist so far, a real mirror of our folly, and I will miss it when it goes.

At Tokyo Disneyland, for example, you can create elaborate in-reach prop displays that will never, ever be disturbed or broken by guests — rules are rules. (By the same token, I once got politely yelled at there for ducking under a chain to shortcut a completely, 100% empty line. I absolutely had to walk through the entire, empty switchback. And that’s fair, I was breaking the rules!) Whereas here in America, if your prop is not literally bolted down, it’s likely to show up on eBay / Van Eaton within the week.

honestly, a lot of it, I think, is just that some designers are amazing at imagining things, but not as amazing at imagining them surrounded by the universe. That beautiful thing you’re working on, it lives in a window on your monitor tucked under a title bar, and that’s as tricky as it gets. What if you can’t imagine your thing in its final context? What if you aren’t great at predicting human behaviors other than your own?

good design isn’t just beautiful and incredible and boundary-pushing, it also remembers what it means to be human.

“Emily in Paris” begins and ends in an avalanche of desiccated digital-marketing language that seems to have subsumed Emily’s soul. She cares about nothing more than “social,” impressions, R.O.I. Many episodes climax in the successful taking of a photo for Instagram.

If you want more drama, you can open Twitter, to augment the experience. Or just leave the show on while cleaning the inevitable domestic messes of quarantine. Eventually, sensing that you’ve played two episodes straight without pausing or skipping, Netflix will ask if you’re still really watching. Shamed, I clicked the Yes button, and Emily continued being in Paris.

Ambient denotes something that you don’t have to pay attention to in order to enjoy but which is still seductive enough to be compelling if you choose to do so momentarily. Like gentle New Age soundscapes, “Emily in Paris” is soothing, slow, and relatively monotonous, the dramatic moments too predetermined to really be dramatic.

As with soaps and chores, the current flow of ambient television provides a numbing backdrop to the rest of our digital consumption: feeds of fragmented text, imagery, and video algorithmically sorted to be as provocative as possible. Ambience offers the increasingly rare possibility of disengagement while still staring at a screen.

the hypnotic quality of ambient content creates a false sense that whatever it presents is a neutral condition, a common denominator, though it is decidedly not.

Streaming companies once pitched themselves as innovators for offering the possibility to watch anything at any time, but do we really want to choose? The prevalence of ambient media suggests that we don’t

It’s more atmosphere than content, the motion, the music, and the backdrop coalescing into a single moment of bittersweet freedom that loops over and over again.

“Street Food” focusses on the casual cuisine of different regions, a mood board of inebriated snacking. “Taco Chronicles” eliminates the need for a human subject altogether, by offering narrations from the personified voice of the food itself: “Soy el taco de carnitas.” Chef biography or historical education come second to the hindbrain visual pleasure of meat bouncing on a grill. The shows are functionally screen savers, never demanding your attention; they do draw it, but only as much as a tabletop bouquet of flowers.

TikTok’s For You tab serves an endless stream of short videos that algorithmically adapt to your interests, sorting the content most likely to engage you. Using it feels like having your mind read, because all you do is watch or skip, focus or ignore, a decision made too fast to be fully conscious. Individual videos or accounts matter less than categories or memes; at the moment, my feed is mostly clips of skateboarding, cooking, and carpentry, not unlike the mundanity of the Netflix shows but also accelerated into media gavage. TikTok is an app for ambience.

The passive engagement of ambient television is a boon for streaming services, which just want you to keep binging so that you feel your subscription is justified.

Every platform has its royalty. On Instagram it's influencers, foodies, and photographers. Twitter belongs to the founders, journalists, celebrities, and comedians. On LinkedIn, it’s hiring managers, recruiters, and business owners who hold power on the platform and have the ear of the people.

On a job site, they’re the provisioners of positions and never miss the chance to regale their audience with their professional deeds: hiring a teenager with no experience, giving a stressed single mother a chance to provide for her family, or seeing past a candidate’s imperfections to give them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. These stories are relayed dramatically in what’s now recognizable as LinkedIn-style storytelling, one spaced sentence at a time, told by job-givers with a savior complex.