“If the grand promise of the internet was to be whoever you want, in reality it will make of you whatever it wants,
and beneath every mask is another mask, mistaken for a face.”
– From “Rejection,” Tony Thulathimutte
About a month ago, Werner Herzog joined Instagram. A friend sent me the post, showing what appears to be a lush backyard and Werner proclaiming his presence and announcing a window into his life. I am sad because I do not have Instagram, and therefore cannot participate in the wonderful fandom potential.
In 2021 I went decidedly off social media except a brief revisit about 6 months ago, when I joined TikTok.
Back then I felt as if I was getting left out of conversations – in reality I was just hanging out with my chronically online coworkers too much. One of the national conversations I wanted to take part in was “Love Island USA” (Team Nicolandria!) – a bunch of mainstream-hot 20-somethings with low emotional regulation skills imprisoned in a beachside villa was fun in the handful of episodes I watched. The real fun was on TikTok – a rollercoaster of reaction clips and analysis, all with hundreds of hours of cumulative engagement and views. Team Nicolandria wasn’t just a hashtag, it felt like a community.
After just lurking and giggling for a few months, around June I went from liker to commenter to poster to Content Creator. I figured out a formula of TikTok posts, the comment-and-like game. I think as a TikToker, I “performed decently” for the amount of time, effort, and subject matter I engaged in. I found a niche and a groove, and I replaced my morning journaling with a morning scroll. I looked forward to likes. I considered re-joining Instagram. The flashing lights of “Micro-Influencer” sparkled before me.
But then a monster appeared and chased me off.
Kendra is a white woman, thirty-something, who went exceptionally viral in one day. She posted in a 12-part series of how “I fell in love with my psychologist and he kept me on as a patient.”
I have no comment about Kendra herself, her psych, the action of posting, the AI component, etc. It’s the attention to the matter that got me. Within hours, I – and millions – had watched and swiped past multiple satires, weighing-ins, reaction posts, and multiple TikTok psychiatrists and evenn psychiatrist wives weighing in. It was called by someone “the first AI induced psychosis playing out in real time.” Me and millions just … kept watching. I was fully immersed along with thousands of others who were emotionally investing, clicking, commenting, picking a side, and grifting. Everything else in life slipped past me for the better part of 48 hours. By the end of Day 2, I felt dead inside.
So I turned to something that had been sitting on my Netflix shelf for years: “The Social Dilemma.” Released in early 2020, right before we were all locked down and gradually became locked in online, it features interviews with multiple architects of our current usage: the inventor of infinite scroll, the engineer behind haptic feedback, multiple former Google employees who now run their own companies or nonprofits. The only thing you really need to hear from the film: while all of these people had a hand in designing the addictive little lightbox, none of these people allow their own kids on social media with highly regulated screen time.
“It’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception that is the product,” says Tristan Harris, a former Google engineer. At the cumulative scale – how has our mass behavior changed? It’s easy to see mass apathy as we are neutered as a collective force. Online, being political can feel like a community – so what happens when the community is redirected? What slid off the collective radar that day? In the same few days as the Kendra thing, famine raged in Gaza, the latest humanitarian flotilla was detained, and battles to protect neighbors from ICE were happening all week in Los Angeles. Those are the perceptible shifts – what’s the imperceptible shift? How is our attention being tracked, predicted, and controlled? How is our relation to community influenced and altered by our online-ness, but at a mass scale? When you’re online, you feel immersed. When you keep online interactions at arms length, you see the psychosis more clearly. It’s like being sober at a nightclub.
The Social Dilemma prompted a furious rewatch of Aaron Swartz, “The Internet’s Own Boy” and then Herzog’s “Lo and Behold, Reveries of Our Connected World.”
Aaron Swartz, a prodigy, genius, and activist using his time behind a keyboard championing open internet and free information, had trumped up charges that led to his apparent / alleged suicide while in FBI custody in 2014. Instead of keeping a high salary job with a tech company, something he easily could have done, Swartz was working towards more egalitarian use of the internet, free of corporate control. In the years before his death, he played a key role in stopping SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, which was essentially an act that would enable corporate control over search engine results and criminalize file sharing.
In Lo, Herzog visits the creation of the web, addiction, trolling, medical refugees, and asks existential questions AI. In an interview shortly after making the film, Herzog said “We overlook how vulnerable all this is, and how we are losing the essentials that make us human.” The interview details the origins of the film, which is quite different from much of Herzog’s filmography – this wasn’t his idea, and he was initially resistant. He was approached by an executive producer who is an executive at NetScout, a cybersecurity behemoth Big Tech institution that has built the very world that Aaron Swartz fought against – for example using cyberattacks and hacktivists, with services that are tools against threat actors, sure, but also against collective direct action on the internet.
So, what has happened to our humanity since that time, say, from when SOPA was defeated? TikTok didn’t exist at the time of SOPA, and the COVID-19 pandemic hadn’t happened yet, and people weren’t using ChatGPT to write suicide notes. Being online was decidedly less extreme.
In years previous, you could feel a beam of pride that your online content could be viewed online by anyone anywhere and you could be totally anonymous. Now, your content and views and opinions are equally likely to be viewed by absolutely no one or worse, viewed and completely ignored like too often a person sitting on the sidewalk asking for change. The wall of the screen is no longer the anonymizing force. Expressions online have real life consequences – from the payload salaries of the Influencer industry, to being fired from your regular job. As authenticity has become a popular commodity online, the formerly highly curated persona is now closer to our real selves now more than ever. Our legal identities are easier to track and dox, and tech companies working with law enforcement know exactly who we are. Amid it all, AI is more realistic than ever, so everything is potentially fake now. It’s all quite maddening, and there doesn’t seem to be an escape valve.
Two recent pieces of media take a deeper look, at how the alienating force of being online has distorted our participation in real-life community, and thus how community itself is deformed. (Contains spoilers).
“Rejection,” – Tony Tulathimutte
This is a collection of short stories technically, but it feels quite continuous. It follows several characters who are influenced by the online world to such a high degree that they are stunted and desensitized to authentic human interactions and intimacy. All the characters are connected online or IRL within a few degrees too. It’s been called “the first incel novel” – and it’s amusing, hilarious, entertaining, tragic, maddening, and disgusting. And if you’re NOT an online person, I think Rejection is required reading for digesting the very real psychosocial depths, the layers of agonizing minutiae of online interactions: from the revenge, apology, fakery, sincerity, reaction, obfuscation, misreads, trolling, typos, and consumption that especially Gen Z and Zalpha are absolutely entrenched in.
“Eddington” – Ari Aster
I’m not a huge fan of Ari Aster, I thought Hereditary and Midsommar were both unique but ultimately shock pieces. But Eddington was brilliant in its social observation of local politics and community life being shaped and distorted by online information, interpretations, and interactions. Parallel to the internal psychological warfare shown in Rejection, Eddington shows the consequences scaled to a small town.
Amid the wild cast of personalities, the most important character is one who exists is the real life world in the most real, raw, and vulnerable way: the homeless man. His murder signals the eventual breakdown of society: he is essentially erased in the film, a moment that both signals and results in total psychotic blitz to the social order: the lone gunman tries to enact his agency on the real world, gets impaled in the process, and survives just barely, his brain and reactions barely perceptible inside his very fragile and limp human body. While the others, who gave in to the online world to let it guide their real lives: the mother-in-law who ingested online tales and in turn became a politician, and the false prophet worshipped by the wife who then seemingly started a movement and a family.
The twisted clusterfuck of the plot and characters concludes in a brilliant final frame: the wide shot on the flood lights of the Solid Gold Magikarp Data Center. Amid the relatively petty and smallscale human drama and entire social media fueled chaos – the data center is the most significant entity in the landscape, the alpha species on the planet, and we will en masse be subject (and potentially rendered obsolete) to it’s whims, needs, it’s own interpretations, and mistakes. Like the Magikarp, it will be unexpected, and indifferent, only operating on it’s own logic without regard to ours.
So, what will AI’s whims and needs be? According to the report AI-2027 by the AI Futures Project, the scale and scope of where AI is going is vast, sweeping, and we are already on the train, the frontier is smashed. There is no getting off.
So the question isn’t “what do we want AI to be” but rather “what will AI want us to be?” And how will humanity, in the literal, creative, existential, and physical senses, survive that? What is predictable, and how can we individually and collectively prepare for it?
Is it even possible to opt-out of this? I feel no personal sense of elitism or wisdom from not being on social media. 10 years from now, social media history will probably be like a credit score – and my lack of current “social media credit history” will make me unworthy of jobs and bank loans and like, health insurance, in the grim, bleak, terrible future. In that future scenario, perhaps my only saving grace might be this blog.
To fight it, we must not only opt-out, de-influence, or plead with our governments to regulate! We must RESIST!!! We must destroy the roads paving to the data centers, if we do not, our precious water supplies and energy supplies will be sucked dry, and humans displaced. We must demolish the neo imperialist vampiric Big Tech companies that enslave our children, scar the earth, and create toxic waste that sickens babies and destroys nature. AI and their insatiable data centers are accelerating and we need to stop them NOW!
…Or, maybe the future is chill, and at worst *I* will just be left out of many more “conversations,” and I can go kick rocks complaining while I never again get a date because I refuse to be on Tinder.
Oh well.
So here’s my letter.
Dear Mr. Herzog,
I imagine you will perform quite well on Instagram, your millions of fans are lucky to have you there. I will be so sad to not see this side of you. I’m sure you have a team and are insulated against the evils of social control that the plebs are subject to. I can’t imagine you get up in the morning excitedly looking at your like count, or stress over some oddly placed trolling comment. May all your interactions be quaint and novel and sweet, and your home far, far away from any data center.
-Lovingly tut-tuting, from the dim recesses of the ever-expanding connected world
In 2021, during the precipice of this current age of the internet, Neptune Frost was released, a dreamscape in film by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman. It follows the resistance of a hacker community made up of refugees from coltan mines, against surveillance and authoritarianism. Those in the resistance greet each other with a coded phrase “Unanimous Goldmine,” where exact interpretation feels lost as the entire film’s script is sort of one long poem playing on computing language, but in it’s simplest sense: “love will reconnect us.”
In the film, Memory says “The machine is dependent on the human spirit… Technology is only a reflection of us – the drum is nothing without the drummer.”
There are many who will accept the AI future as inevitable, but outcomes are not endpoints predictable by the fingertips of white men. As Jaron Lanier and Glen Weyl write, AI is an ideology, not a technology. For the technology roadmap in AI-2027 to come to fruition, human ingenuity and cooperation are required and we can decide another way that uses AI for good or let’s the Big Tech companies use us for the sake of AI. Communities all over the world and the US are disrupting Big Tech efforts more concertedly and effectively than I can type these words: from the workers in offices to the communities near planned data centers. Whatever current and future resistance and supporting human flourishing offline, beyond AI and data centers, looks like – it is so much more powerful than the individualist ideology of the opt-out and the lone gunman – it is already proving to be collective, interdependent, and unified. Resistance has to grow to become active, agile, and participatory to keep pace with the power of Big Tech. Already, resistance goes where AI never can – because it is tactile, corporeal, and it contains a soul.
Resources:
Video that helped me digest AI-2027 by AI In Context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KVDDfAkRgc
For more on Data Center Resistance:
https://www.datacenterwatch.org/report
Prince William County, Virginia
History and design of the Internet and Social Media
In Memoriam for Robert McChesney, Democracy Now!, March 2025.
The Secret Military History of the Internet, The Chris Hedges Report, April 2025.
Jaron Lanier’s website
Digital Privacy and Parental Controls Advocacy
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Cyber Warfare
Alex Gibney Zero Days
Herzogian 