free 2 think
free 2 think is a podcast hosted by Cody Davis and Jacob Cady, exploring faith, culture, politics, and the ideas shaping our world. Through thoughtful conversation, respectful disagreement, and a commitment to curiosity, we tackle hard topics without the outrage. Think deeply. Listen carefully. Stay free to think.
free 2 think
Ep. 13 | Dead Internet Theory: Are We Losing Our Humanity?
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What if the internet isn't really people talking to people anymore?
In this episode, we dive into the Dead Internet Theory—the idea that much of what we see online is increasingly created, promoted, and interacted with by bots and artificial intelligence rather than actual humans.
Is the internet really becoming dominated by AI-generated content? How much of what we see is authentic? And maybe the bigger question: what happens to us when we can no longer tell the difference?
And here at Free to Think we are taking in politics, culture, faith, and whatever else is worth talking about. Without the outrage, without the talking points, and hopefully with a little common sense.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Sometimes we point with fingers. Finger points.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we do. We like to wag fingers sometimes, but we like to wag fingers at ourselves, too.
SPEAKER_00I don't. You gotta. I don't like it.
SPEAKER_02Self-improvement.
SPEAKER_00I mean that's fine, but I don't like it.
SPEAKER_02Nobody likes self-improvement. It never feels good to improve yourself.
SPEAKER_00In the time being.
SPEAKER_02In the time being. In the future. But in the future, it yields, as the Bible says, Hebrews 12, 11, I think it is, it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So or just the peaceful fruit of knowing you've you're better than you previously were.
SPEAKER_02Or that you did something tough. You did something hard. Pushed into it.
SPEAKER_00You did the hard thing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. It's good.
SPEAKER_00Hey, what do you call a fish with no legs? Just a fish. They don't they don't have legs.
SPEAKER_02Well, those little fish with the legs on the back of the cars. The evolutionary fish, they have legs.
SPEAKER_00Those aren't real fish. That's a talking point. Oh, yeah. And you said no talking points. Oh, good point.
SPEAKER_02All right. We'll get rid of that talking point.
SPEAKER_00Good point. That's funny. So what are we talking about today?
SPEAKER_02I don't know. You picked the topic for today, and I have no idea what it is. I didn't even look into it.
SPEAKER_00You didn't even look it up? I didn't. Alright. Dead internet theory. Hit me with it. Um the dead internet theory is basically says that the majority of the activity on the internet is non-human. It's all AI and bots doing stuff, making stuff, interacting with stuff and people just for the sake of itself. It's the self-perpetuating artificial internet activity that has nothing to do with humanity.
SPEAKER_02There's no aim, there's no rules.
SPEAKER_00Well, it's just it's just basically anything that you interact with on the internet, or the majority of people you interact with on the internet are just computer algorithms doing stuff for other computer algorithms.
SPEAKER_02So this nasty email that I just got was a computer bot?
SPEAKER_00I said the majority. No, that seemed uh that seemed I mean if you have AI right next to you like that, then it would be like, oh man, we need to shut this thing down. I better rethink my life. Yeah, you better that's Skynet happening. So which I think that the CCP named their surveillance. I know that was last week. They named it Skynet. It's like that's like the worst thing you could name. Like, you know, with Terminator and everything. Yeah, yeah. It's like they named their surveillance state Skynet. Oh my god. I think they did that on purpose. Maybe they're just trolling people.
SPEAKER_02They're trying to be a trope. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00We we know what we did. We know.
SPEAKER_02We know exactly who we are, what we're doing, and you know exactly what we are, and we're doing it, and we ain't hiding nothing.
SPEAKER_00Yep. So if you look, I and I don't remember this, but if you look a little bit of the internet, right, after Al Gore invented it.
SPEAKER_02Good old Al Gore.
SPEAKER_00Um there was a time when the internet had a physical directory, like a paper book directory. Interesting. Yeah. So you would look up a company. Oh, okay. Not their phone number, but their website. Ace Construction Services in Des Moines, Iowa. And it would give you, it would probably give you their phone number too, but it would also give you their website. Yeah. So you could, you know, send them whatever, you know. So there was a time when and you could actually fit it all in a book at one point.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. All the way.
SPEAKER_00The internet was so small that it was like a phone book.
SPEAKER_02Had to be the nineties.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Or like late 80s or something like that. Okay. Yep.
SPEAKER_02Wait, I thought the internet was created in the 90s.
SPEAKER_00Uh well, when was Al Gorborn? Because it was just this it was his birthday. Simultaneously. Yeah. Okay. It was just uh technogenesis as I just coined that phrase. Actually, that's interesting. It seems like what it is is technogenesis.
unknownWhew.
SPEAKER_00Okay. So I mean, it seems like the internet was mostly people putting stuff on the internet up into what 2005, 2010. Okay. You know, because it originally YouTube, right? You you you record a video, you post it on YouTube, your friends go look at it. You know, even MySpace was just people making their own little like MySpace sites. Sure. Yeah, pages and stuff, and Facebook is people posting stuff. But then, and I don't know the all the history on it, you know, but eventually people determined that you can just make computer programs that interact, produce, and post stuff online, you know.
SPEAKER_02But you can you can tell the difference between AI produced, like videos, yeah, versus real videos.
SPEAKER_00Maybe. Now the the the sort of uncounting valley window is is rapidly shrinking. It sure is, yeah. Because it was like five years ago, it was like or three years ago, two years ago. Oh my gosh. And a lot of it today, you can still tell. It's like, oh, for crane aloud, this custom made handbag that's being advertised on Facebook. Sure. Like the person is obviously AI, and the store's been closing for two years. So obviously something else is going on.
SPEAKER_02But I think humanity has this sense of what real is. And they may not be able to plug it. I was playing an AI song with my kids the other day, and I didn't tell them. They're like, this is AI. And I and it's a really good song. It's catchy. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But because they know all the catchy like chord progressions and everything. But they could just tell.
SPEAKER_02There's they they couldn't put their finger on it, they couldn't tell you exactly why they thought it was AI. They just they had this guttural sense that this isn't real. Yeah, like there's it's too perfect, it's too too well done, it's too manicured, it's yeah, um, something about it, this is AI. And they pulled it up right away, and I was like, Yeah, you're right, it's AI.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. But I think where that kind of gets a little dubious is in the realm of like young children's programming. Sure. There's just a massive amount of just like icky, and the young children, they're not gonna know the difference. They don't know what AI is. So if you look up young children's videos on or on YouTube, it's like you can fall into the Alice's wonderland of just dystopia because that's literally what it is is AI is generating, you know, and there's a human probably at the very kernel of it, you know, making a channel or something, but then they have an AI program that's just making the same sort of content. Yeah, and so what you'll see is channels that post like 10 videos every day, you know, and if they don't get enough viewership, then they just like the channel ceases, and then they just produce a new channel and they just start, you know, yeah, and it replicates stuff that people like to engage with. And if you're talking about a kid just sitting there scrolling on YouTube, kids on their phone, right? And the algorithm just has this infinite capability of like non-human produced slop that your kids are just constantly imbibing. Yeah, and you know, it could probably influence the way they think, it influences their brain, it shortens their attention span and all this stuff, and it's not even any humans trying to do it, it's just the internet as this sort of super organism acting on its own volition to create more of itself, right? And in the end, the child becomes the product, right? So that's the dead internet theory is that like if you take the internet as a whole, there's a very large chunk of it that is totally self-replicating and just there by itself for itself, and it's only tangentially there for humanity.
SPEAKER_02I guess I can only speak anecdotally, but most of the stuff I consume I can't see being randomly created. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I mean maybe I think maybe you're you're thinking like videos and stuff, right? Or yeah, the biggest part of it is probably large social media, text-based social media. Okay, which I'm not in. A bot can just post a phrase, you know, the account has like random characters for its tag, and it just makes a phrase. And it, you know, what you find is that if you have a certain Reddit forum, you know, bots are posting stuff on there, okay, bots are responding to what those bots posted. Bots are having an argument with each other, yeah, and just stuff like that. But the the humans are like a small or non-existent part of the picture.
SPEAKER_02And how do you verify humanity in those types of scenarios?
SPEAKER_00I don't know. You have to kind of do your humanistic interpretation, like you said, oh, I can tell it's AI. I don't know why I can tell exactly, but I can tell it's AI. And there's just, but that's why I say it's kind of scary that that window is kind of decreasing, and so you just have to, and maybe that's my point today of just saying eventually we won't be able to tell. So, in my mind, and maybe you can comment on this, I have a strong urge to like de-internet my life. Yeah, and it's like say, define exactly what the internet does for me and where it provides the true benefit, and cut everything else out. And I see this in other places in my life because we talk about movies, we did the Odyssey review, and I've just lost interest in any sort of movies these days because A, I have all the movies that I had growing up, you know. Maybe not all of them, but a lot of them I can just put in a DVD if I want. And physical media is very scary for the what's a DVD? It's this disc that stores digitally information. Uh another thing that'll blow your mind is the laser disc technology, which is like a record-sized analog video disc that uses lasers. Don't know, don't do it.
SPEAKER_02Hey, you start, I won't say it, but you started it. Anyways, go ahead.
SPEAKER_00I didn't start nothing. You just keep yourself, keep your distance. Anyways, where was I? Um something about a boot and a radiator. Something about a boot and a radiator. So we're totally derailed. No, you have to finish my thought.
SPEAKER_02Go ahead. Do you want to finish it or I can you were pitching a question to me?
SPEAKER_00No, I'm just saying I have this urge to de-internet my life. So what I would do is I would identify the true benefits of the internet, right? And then I would get rid of everything else. And I was saying my my point being is like the reason that I'm disinterested in movies these days is because kind of like there's nothing new under the sun, and I can go back and watch the ones that made me feel good when I watched them back when I was a kid. In addition to that, there are so many, like if I want an adventure story, I'll go read a novel. Sure. There's literally hundreds of years of novels that have been produced, and they're really good. I can use my imagination, I can see it in my mind's eye. I can go read a physical book. Heaven forbid, right? So there's just nothing, there's nothing on the internet that is like so deeply tantalizing to my cognition that it makes me want to run to the internet. What attracts me to the internet, you know, the cat videos and it and stuff like that, right? It's it's the sugary candy of the brain. And it's like as you get older, you know, it's like that sugary candy does doesn't do it for me anymore. I want a deep, thought-provoking thing, and I find that elsewhere.
SPEAKER_02You also recognize what that sugary candy does to you. Like when you're young, you can just consume all this candy and you're like, oh, life is free, I'm wonderful, everything's cool.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But when you get into your 40s, which you and I are in our well, you're 39 still.
SPEAKER_00No, I'm not. Yep. I'm not the 40s yet.
SPEAKER_02Anyway, well, when you get into your 40s, you start eating things and you start feeling it. Yeah. And you get this guttural sense, literally, yeah, that something's wrong, that I probably shouldn't eat this as much. So man, I think that's what it is.
SPEAKER_00The the internet gives you diabetes of the brain.
SPEAKER_02It does, and I think we feel it. Like, have you ever gotten kids every once in a while would like to turn on YouTube and just consume some shorts. They're fun. The cat videos.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, because they're just rapid-fire dopamine.
SPEAKER_02But after about 20 or 30 minutes of that, you can do that in the microphone.
SPEAKER_00ASMR.
SPEAKER_02But after about 20, 30 minutes of consuming those videos, you just feel sick.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Not to your stomach, but you feel like your brain is starting to rot.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And you go, wow, what a complete waste. Um but, anyways, so to answer your question, uh, according to Google, um, the internet started in 1969 with ARPANET. Have you ever heard of ARPANET?
SPEAKER_00Uh yeah, because that's the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Yeah, it's like a defense organization.
SPEAKER_02That's where they say that's like the ancestor of the internet. But the first message was sent between UCLA and the Stanford Resear Research Institute in 1969.
SPEAKER_00Oh, okay. There's also this story of like the first webcam was for uh, you know, someone at a terminal could check on the check on the coffee pot in the break room. Yeah. So they put a webcam in there and it communicated over Ethernet or something. That's awesome.
SPEAKER_02And then it says the modern worldwide web, 1989 to 1991, Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, including URLs, hyperlinks, etc. The verse website went public in 1991.
SPEAKER_00Gotcha. So that directory that I was talking about was probably mid-90s.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, browsers like Mosaic and Netscape helped bring the internet into ordinary homes and businesses.
SPEAKER_00I remember Netscape because that was like at Fruit of Middle School. That was the one that we learned on. Remember Netscape? Yeah. Miss Webb. Miss Greb. Miss Greb, that's right. Miss Webb, that's funny. But I opened the browser twice, and oh man, because I used up the RAM. She was like, I remember she she leaned over me because she seemed like a giant, right? Yeah. And she's like, look before you leap. And I was like, what have I done? She's like, you opened the browser twice. I was like, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to.
SPEAKER_02Have you heard of this trend these days? It's uh raising your kids like it's 1996.
SPEAKER_00Uh no. Please tell me about it.
SPEAKER_02It's kind of a new trendy thing for people to start doing. But like you go back to 1996, what did we have?
SPEAKER_00Tamagotchis.
SPEAKER_02I don't even know what that is.
SPEAKER_00That's those little digital pets that you had to keep up with.
SPEAKER_02Okay, there you go. Um, but 1996, did we have cell phones?
SPEAKER_00I didn't, but mom had like this huge like Motorola brick that's correct.
SPEAKER_02Most people didn't have cell phones. Few people had the big bricks or the big car phones or something like that.
SPEAKER_00I remember your dad had the car phone.
SPEAKER_02He had the car phone, and it was like it was the coolest thing, and your parent was super cool if they had a cell phone.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and it had like the suitcase lid, you'd open it up.
SPEAKER_02But it's like, for the most part, most people did not have cell phones, cellular devices. Um, they didn't have the internet at at the tip of their fingers. And so it was what entertainment was board games, reading books, popping in um a VHS um that you had to go down to City Market to I remember early on.
SPEAKER_00You had to rewind it afterwards.
SPEAKER_02I remember early on, we didn't even have a VHS player um in our house. And we you could rent a VHS player from the video library store at City Market. The grocery store. I remember those days. So we rented the VHS.
SPEAKER_00Huge racks of VHSs, and you'd go into the little room.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so we'd rewrite both the VHS and the VHS player, take it home, and always the stickers on it say please be kind, rewind, you know, and so you make sure you rewind it all the way.
SPEAKER_00I don't know what city market you the one I remember was rewind or die. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was not poster market. That's what you got me there.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. Anyways, so raising kids like it's 1996, you know, just unplug. I mean, you're never gonna unplug. I mean, your kids go to school and they're teaching them how to use the internet and right and all that stuff.
SPEAKER_00And I'm not proposing some sort of Luddite approach where it's like, I'm just gonna ignore this technology, I don't want anything to do with it. I'm saying be very diligent about saying, what does this tool do for me that's of benefit? I'm gonna keep that. What does this thing do for me that's just absolutely abhorrent? Well, that seems like the dead internet is rife with that, right? So separate the two. Okay, I don't want to have to go to the bank every time I want to get cash out, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm gonna have my banking app on my phone. Great, that uses the internet. Yeah, can't get away from that. But I don't need to be on Facebook to see what, you know, my 5,000 friends, you know, are posting as far as what they ate for dinner. It's like, I don't care. Yeah, and that does nothing for me. What does something for me? I'm gonna cook dinner and I'm gonna get my family around the table, and we're just gonna be a family, you know. That's good. So it's not necessarily the Luddite approach of technology is bad, but it's the discerning approach of how does technology benefit you? Use it in that manner, sure, and don't fall into the traps of the sugary, saccharin coded, dead internet, doom scrolling, you know, rabbit trail.
SPEAKER_02Let me list the the main components of raising your kids like it's 1996. Because I think it actually it's not anti-technology, but maybe we can use technology to enhance those those uh activities that are good for us. Yeah. Um, first one is delay smartphone and social media, at least until they're 16, is one of the ideas. Done. More uh more unsupervised free play, less parental tracking and intervention. I think that's a big deal today because, like even me, I have all my kids on GPS. So at any given point, I can be like, okay, they were right here, they've been here for 16 minutes, they were traveling at 47 miles an hour for this many minutes. And I it's it's literally this almost creates a paranoia. Yeah. Why haven't they left this place yet? Have are they are they sitting in their car dead right now? What happened?
SPEAKER_00So you're tracking them? I'm definitely tracking them.
SPEAKER_02But it's like we used to just hey, be home at three o'clock. Okay, deal. Be home at three o'clock. Where they went from here to there, you don't know.
SPEAKER_00Like curfew is 11 p.m.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So there's a lot more freedom there, right? Yeah. There's no dragnet. We're not uh we're not creating a profile of our kids.
SPEAKER_00So I had this the other day with my son because we were actually driving home and we were at the corner of 21 and L Road, which is uh not close to where I live. Anyways, and he's like, Dad, can I walk home? And first of all, that's a couple miles from where we live. Yeah. So it's like, well, we live in the middle of the country. And it, you know, there's this like decision point where you're like, okay, and I don't really want him just walking out. He's you know, he's well, he's 14, but he's still he's only 14, right? Yeah, yeah. But in the end, it was like, yeah, that's fine. Walk home. And lo and behold, in like 45 minutes, I saw him at home, right? Here he is, and it's like, okay, he figured it out. So I like that, and we talked about this the other day of just that was like the little clip at the beginning. It's like the the safest place is the playground because all the pedophiles are online, yeah. As you can tell, I probably have a very low opinion of the internet, yeah. But I think it's true of just get kids, and Jonathan Haidt talks about this at length in his book, The Anxious Gen Anxious Generation, right? So get kids in a social situation where they have to learn, they have to adapt, they have to actually like grow in their cognitive abilities to understand social situations. Yeah, and it teaches them so much about life because lo and behold, there's still a real world out there. Yep. And I see that, you know, as much as I don't want to become the old curmudgeon, you know, at work, you know, hiring some younger people, and they just have this different social behavior about them. And it's just off, you know. And if you go to the mall, right, it's like everybody's on their phone, everybody's looking down, nobody'll look in the eye. They can't shake your hand. It's like all this weird stuff that it's like, okay, this makes me sound like a boomer. But I like it when somebody shakes my hand with a nice firm grip and looks me in the eye, you know? Yeah, that's a great thing. There's this like weird connection that you have that's part of this little social atom or social molecule. And if you're just on the internet all day, it doesn't it doesn't replicate that in the least, you know? Not at all. And with Facebook especially, you know, everybody's like, Well, I got 300 friends, I got 500 friends, uh, whatever. It's like, yeah, you have 500 like paper thin surface level friends, and maybe a few of them are the actual friends that you have, and then you have all these other ones that they're not friends, and totally ghosts to you.
SPEAKER_02They're uh they're they're mutual voyeurists, is what they are. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_00It's like they're followers, they're followers, they they want to see what you're posting, what you're doing, which is so ironic in talking about surveillance, is because in some way, shape, or form, people love to be observed. They do, and in another way, shape, or form, people hate to be observed. Yeah, so there's no like consistent social discourse on just the fact that we're observing, and then now there's like influencers, there's an influencer degree at Arizona State University that you can get. And it's like these people don't actually want to influence people. What they want is attention. It's like all these things that feed into the the just the worst of human nature.
SPEAKER_02They make you take a personality test to get into that degree. You have to be so narcissistic and histrionic. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um, to a certain level before you be like the cluster B of whatever the DSM says or something. It's like you you fall into these uh psychological categories, so you can be an influencer.
SPEAKER_02You're not you're not as much you're not enough of a narcissist or histrionic to be in this program. Go get an economic degree or something. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So if If you want to not be a narcissist, you just go out there on the actual like football field, get knocked around, get yelled at, get made fun of, and uh then you can actually grow as a person and show some humility. Yeah, but it seems like with with maybe I'm just using the dead internet theory as another way of saying I want to be as tangentially associated with this internet as I possibly can. Because like I said, if I want an adventure, I'll go read a book. Yeah, if I want music, I'll pop in a CD, right? If I want to listen to Bach or Rachmaninoff, I'll just got the CD, right? And all these things that I have literally hundreds, almost thousands of years of Western civilization and culture to study history, art, music, all the finest things of actual civilization. Yeah. And they're not on the internet. So what does the internet get me? It gets me convenience when it comes to banking or buying Chinese garbage, right?
SPEAKER_02I don't buy Chinese garbage.
SPEAKER_00Have you bought anything off Amazon? Where's a cup made?
SPEAKER_02That's a good question. You keep talking, I'll see if I can find it without spilling my coffee.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, don't do that. I can't see. I heard that there was this Timu like teething glove that you, you know, you give it to your kids, but it had like five times the levels of acceptable like contaminants and formaldehyde and stuff on it.
SPEAKER_02Sick. So um Ember temperature control coffee mucks are made in China.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Cheers. There you go. Cheers. That's probably where this cup was made. So that's what the internet does. It is, it allows Americans to buy Chinese garbage. It does. Which is not saying that that's garbage, but there is a lot of stuff out there that's just absolute garbage. Yeah. It's like you, and that's what these like AI um advertisements are, you know. It's like you see the have you seen these where it's like a stained glass dog, and it's like, the store is closing. Get the last of these beautiful handcrafted stained glass dog lamps. Yeah. And then you actually buy one and it's just cheap, like the cheapest imaginable Chinese garbage. And then you've been scammed, right? But are you gonna try to get your $25 back? Like, no, it's not even worth it to track down a company in China for $25. Sure. So it's totally a scam. They spent two cents making this thing, they netted $24.98, and then it's like, oh, I'm not even gonna try because I'm just so exhausted. And plus, there's 10 more products that I want to buy.
SPEAKER_02So let me make the argument against your cantankerous curmudgity boomer stance on technology. Have you have you seen the remarkable The Remarkable Life? It's an Netflix documentary. Um, it's actually called The Remarkable Life of E. Bellin or whatever. He is a parablegic, I think he's fully paralyzed, quadriplegic. And he um he's in a wheelchair, can barely move his hands, and he gets involved in this online submive world and he becomes this character, um, a caricature of who he sees himself as being if he wasn't you know in a wheelchair. Okay, and he creates this community, um, and this community is quite vibrant online, and he never talks, he only texts because he he doesn't want people to know who he is. But uh he builds this like for like I don't remember exactly how long, but for years and years, he builds this like really deep connected community in this submersive world. Um and he even has a romantic fling um in in this world um with another person, and uh anyways, he ends up dying and this community kind of surrounds him, comes in for the funeral and stuff like this, and they actually meet each other for the first time, and it's a very heartwarming, emotional um documentary on Netflix, and it almost paints that kind of world in a different light, as in like these people wouldn't have any other way to connect but for kind of a submersive world like this. Yeah, it was heartwarming. I mean, I think that's few and far between where you have such a good experience like that. Sure. I think probably most of those submersive worlds probably ain't good for you. Um, they don't do you any value. Yeah, but in this context, it allowed him, he wouldn't be able to go to a party and connect with anybody. Yeah, because people are just gonna stare at him. He can't really talk. You know, who's gonna want to come talk to him? Yeah. So in this world, they people uh related to him as his as his avatar, uh looked on screen, big, strong, buff guy who can walk, all these things. Um, and they related to him as a normal human being and stuff like that. And so it allowed him to experience at some level something that life didn't afford him.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So I and I think that's a little bit of a Mott and Bailey argument. It is because I think that it's pretty evident that the overwhelmingly majority of stuff on the internet is just completely useless, meaningless, garbage. There's a huge amount of the internet that's actually very evil. Human trafficking, you know, all sorts of stuff. Like the worst, I mean, just the absolute worst of human nature is just breeds on the internet.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And then, of course, the internet, and and you'll notice in my argument, I said find out what the internet does, internet does for you that's truly good, right? Yeah, in that case, it seems like he found something that was truly good, you know. Absolutely. If he goes to a party, people are gonna see him as the in that state, and they're not gonna they're gonna want to avoid, they're just gonna want to be voyeuristic, they're just gonna want to observe, you know, and they don't want to engage with the human because in that state, he's still human, he has value. I think what you just described is more of an indictment on human nature to say that why couldn't he find that community where he was amongst real people instead of amongst the avatars? Yeah, you know, but hey, good for him for finding a spot in the internet that was truly good. And he's the human, and there's other humans at the other end. It seems like if there's humans at both ends of the internet, that's when it's fine. But when there's a human here and the internet just, oops, sorry, goes on and just self-replicates, that's totally disgusting, right? Yeah, yeah. But so that's why I say be discerning in the amount of technology. I'm not anti-technology, I'm not anti-AI, as you have probably noticed, right? I'm anti-social media, but I'm not anti-AI. But that is to say, and okay, now I'm gonna, you know, I got my boomer hat on, now I'm gonna put on my Christian hat to say that I truly believe that God can be help us discern the good and the bad of our technological advancements. If we go back to the Garden of Eden, I don't think it was God's intention for us to stay as just primitive garden dwellers, right? I think all of this technology, it was baked into the cake of reality. So we would have made all these discoveries, but then God would have been there at the center to help us discern the good and the evil of all these things that we create. But right now, what we have is we can't really do that. Human nature is what it is, so the good, you know, gets emphasized, even though it's a small chunk of stuff, and the bad gets ignored and pushed down underneath into the dark web. And so we don't, as a human race, we don't have the ability to look at a certain technology and agree broadly on its good uses and it's it's basically acceptable uses and its unacceptable uses. We don't have that discernment, but I think each individual person has that discernment on some level. Yeah, and like we said at the very beginning, it's it's ironic how all this stuff ties together, right? It's painful to put away the candy, it's painful to eat the broccoli, right? But that's the good, you know. So I'm not saying don't have candy. I love candy, it's delicious. Yeah, don't eat candy for every meal every day. You need a steak, you need the broccoli, you need the okra. And so when it comes to technology, it's the same thing. If I rely on a piece of technology so much that I lose the ability to do something else, that's not a good thing. Yeah, use the technology to augment what is good about you and just drop the rest because it's not worth it, you know. It's like if I if I literally had a car that was uh a bed and a toilet, and it was a small thing that like docked into my house as a pod. I'm just like inventing a sci-fi dystopia, and I just drove it's basically the fat people from Wally, right? Yeah, yeah, those little chairs did everything for them, and they lost the ability to walk. So, what good was that chair? You know, we'll say, Well, grandma can run around ride around in it because she's disabled. Okay, well, then everybody starts using it, and suddenly everybody's disabled. So it's just, I'm not saying get rid of technology, get rid of the internet, this is just evil. I the Lud Eye approach, I don't think is valid. Sure. What I'm saying is, and it's the same with the flock cameras, it's the same with anything else. Use your brain to discern what is good in any situation and try to get rid of the bad. Yeah, you know. So in Facebook, if you if you truly use Facebook to truly connect with friends that have moved away and but you keep in close contact through Facebook, fantastic. Do that. Don't use Facebook to sit there and doom scroll through shorts and reels and all this stuff so that you drain your soul out for two hours, you know. So that's all I'm saying. And it that's why I say I have the urge to de-internet my life because I see so much that is just worthless, and I want to focus more on the worthwhile.
SPEAKER_02I agree 100%. There was an op-ed in the newspaper last week, and I'll I'll link to it in our in our notes here. But hyperlink through the internet. Yeah, that's right. But it talked about AI, and I can't remember the title, but it was something like Don't Use AI. And in the an article, he makes the argument for not using AI to draft your homework or your emails or your responses or anything like that. He says, put the work in to building those sentence structures, the ideas, the outlet yourself. It takes time, it takes effort, but there's absolute benefit and value to you developing this yourself. Like we're gonna forget how to write unless we continue to write. And I I took that to heart because the way since AI, and just being fully transparent, the way I draft an email is I I draft it, but it's quick. And I just say, polish it up for me. I don't use good grammar, I don't use words I would normally use. I just try to get the concept across, and then it's like dress it up for me in codeies, you know, Cody-esque type language. It makes it quicker, I can get emails out quicker, it's a tool, things like that. But I've realized that what I am losing is the art of writing, the art of communicating. And I don't want to lose that. It's worth the extra time to just do it yourself. Check my grammar, sure. Um, you know, do I have a run-on sentence? Am I ending in a preposition or the past tense or whatever? Yeah, you need to change this, edit that, modify that, whatever. But like write it yourself with the intent of sending it. And uh because we're losing it. Yeah. And continue to read books.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. Because there's so much just processing power available in your brain. Yeah. And reading is like a huge because not only are you looking at symbols, and then you're combining those symbols, you know, you're looking at the symbols, then you see the sort of phonetics of how they sound and what symbols they are. So you have to do the symbol recognition, and then you put those together into word recognition, and then those have a denotation and a connotation, and then next to other words, they mean different things. So there's just so many processing levels that's all inside your brain. Yeah. And so if you just get fed that every day, you know, through visual audio, AI slop, you know, you you're really doing yourself a disservice. And it's the same with your body, right? If you eat candy every day, there's no protein in candy. So your body cannot build and fix itself. Yep. So it's the same with the brain. If you just have brain candy all day long, yeah, first of all, you're gonna get mental diabetes, and then your brain is just gonna stop functioning.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So we should probably wrap this up. Well, you know, so use technology, but make sure you're using it for the long game benefit. Sure. You know, that's that's all I'm saying.
SPEAKER_02As a tool, every every generation sees new tools, use them as tools, but not to replace the fundamental operations of humanity. Yeah, you know, reading, thinking, um, debating, I mean, relationship, physical human relationship with people, sitting around a fire. One of the most ancient communal type things is sitting around a good old campfire and having a debate, talking. Yeah. I mean, there's there's nothing better in this life than that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, or sitting around the dinner table.
SPEAKER_02Sitting around the dinner table, which you can do on a daily basis. And there's value to it.
SPEAKER_00Because while you're eating, you're thinking, and then put the phones on eating, you're talking, and ideas, yeah. You get to know each other.
SPEAKER_02What a novel idea.
SPEAKER_00And then suddenly, okay, let's let's let's bring it all back. Suddenly the the need for flock cameras goes down because the the nuclear family starts burgeoning back into existence. And that's utopia, right? Just families.
SPEAKER_02I was gonna call that utopic, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Where everybody's at, you know, and I okay, so I'm ignoring human nature a little bit. But yeah, we can get back to that, right? The nuclear family that direction, yeah, and we can start working towards that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I don't think we'll ever get there. Yeah. Um, I think it's just reality, but yeah, we can start working towards that and make this life a little bit better.
SPEAKER_00But we can change the direction, right? We can change the direction.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, all you need is one degree change sometimes to make a massive difference in the future. But cool. I mean, that went quicker than I thought, but it always does. Does so well that as we always say as we always say.