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[00:01]
Decoder Host/Announcer
Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI is moving fast across the enterprise, but without visibility, it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. ServiceNow turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place, what it's doing, what it's done, and what it's about to do. So you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com, support for the show comes from MongoDB. AI assisted and agentic coding is helping you build faster than ever. But if your data layer is still a bottleneck, what's the point? Instead of wrestling with rigid schemas or translating data formats, MongoDB's native data model mirrors the language LLMs already speak. It ships at the speed of AI, is ACID compliant, and scales to handle massive Fortune 500 workloads. Developers have a word for that kind of reliability. Actually five words. It's a great freaking database. Start building@mongodb.com AI support for the show comes from Attio, the AICRM. What if all that annoying prep work was just finished the moment you walked into the office? Whether it's Claude Slack or with any other agent you build, you can access your customer data wherever you work. Through atio's MCP and API, everything you'd normally miss gets flagged, and overnight ATTIO reads your whole pipeline and tells you what needs your attention in the morning. Tomorrow is just a click away. You can go to atio.comdecoder and you'll get 15% off your first year. That's attio.comdecoder.
[02:00]
Charlie Warzel
Hey everyone, this is Nick Stat, senior producer on Decoder. Nilay's out for vacation this week and we'll be back next week with new episodes. We're very excited for what we have on the schedule. In the meantime, we wanted to share an episode from the excellent podcast the Gray Area with host Sean Illing. Sean sat down with the Atlantic journalist Charlie Warzel to talk about the state of the Internet in 2026 and what it means that it feels increasingly overrun by non actors. Sean and Charlie dig into some classic web culture concepts, including the dead Internet theory, and they connect that idea that most of the Internet is now just bots in disguise to algorithmic recommendation AI slop and why it feels like the Internet you grew up with is now gone, replaced by something more manipulative, deceptive, and in many cases, outright fake. Okay, the Gray Area was Sean Iling interviewing the Atlantic's Charlie Warzell about the increasingly inhuman Internet. Enjoy.
[02:54]
Sean Illing
This is a gray area. I am Sean Illing. My guest today is Charlie Warzel. He's a staff writer at the Atlantic and the author of their newsletter, Galaxy Brain. Charlie wrote a piece about AI and what he calls a crisis of agency, which is this feeling that so much of our lives online are being shaped and distorted by bots, algorithms and various AI generated content. Everything feels a little fake, a little manipulated. If you spend any time at all online, you know what I'm talking about. So we get into why the Internet feels so strange right now and whether it's still possible to build spaces online that feel genuinely human. Hope you enjoy. Charlie Warzel, welcome back to the show.
[03:41]
Charlie Warzel
Thank you for having me.
[03:42]
Sean Illing
Yeah, man, it's been a while. Let's talk about your recent piece in the Atlantic. Right. There is a, a lot of AI discourse right now, but this piece is sort of getting at a part of it that seems a little under discussed, which is the increasingly weird bot haunted Internet we all live inside now. So let's just start there. What is the feeling you are describing in this piece?
[04:10]
Charlie Warzel
The feeling that I'm describing is one of disorientation, but also paranoia, I think. I think what I feel a lot on the Internet right now is this, is this paranoia. And I started the piece with a callback to a piece by the Internet tech writer Max Reid, who wrote New York magazine back in 2018 about what he called the inversion, which is this tipping point where he know the bot and fake content, content made synthetically instead of just by, you know, you or me. Human beings may like surpass some of, some of, you know, the content that we all make and that the Internet would sort of be just a majority fake to some degree or majority, you know, automated. And that at the time I remember, was a real revelation for a lot of people. This, this feeling that, oh, whoa, like you're telling me there's all these people using these sock puppet, sock puppet accounts on Twitter or Facebook or wherever that, you know, there's, there's these fake bots trying to sell me stuff that a lot of websites are populated with, with, you know, automated comments or whatever it is. And now that's honestly a pretty quaint idea that someone wouldn't be as aware of that because in the generative AI age or whatever we're going to call it, or whatever we're in basically since, you know, the arrival of ChatGPT. But even before it, you have an Internet now that is Jammed full of synthetic content in all sorts of ways. So you have synthetic text, you know, all the, all the things that we would call AI slop, right? And now you just have people generating whole sites with the click of a button, right? To promote something that either isn't real or that is, you know, a scam or, you know, like, pretty awful. You have that happening on this vast scale, so much so that Google search, most of what you see is going to be garbage, right? Then you have synthetic music, AI slopped videos and things, you know, clogging these feeds. And you have organizations that are doing a new style of content marketing, of viral marketing, in which they spin up fake accounts to seed algorithms with information that is befitting their client, right? So if you're an artist, you can have these viral marketing firms that will spam TikTok with your song so that it becomes. The algorithm thinks, oh, this is a popular song. And then when other people start posting it, it gets priority inside the feeds. So it's this idea that, like, what people are really doing now is they're not marketing to human beings, they're marketing to these algorithms. The end result of all of that, right, this idea that everything around you might be fake, it creates this sense of paranoia. It's not just that there's not one thing that people are talking or thinking about, it's that you can make a convincing case that anything you don't like or that you think is suspect or that is weird in some way is a psyop. It's fake. Somebody has ceded that, right? And that to me is. Is a change. It is a dramatic change in the way that people behave online. And it really affects everything from our politics to our culture. Because you walk around with this feeling, there's this, this great term, the liar's dividend, right? Which is the idea that you can. When there's so much garbage out there, people can cast aspersions on things that are real, right? And say, oh, I think it's fake. I think it's. I think it's a lie, right? You can sort of completely blur and reality. And I think that that's the way that culture works now.
[08:24]
Sean Illing
So not that we can know this really with any precision, but if you just had to guess, if you just had a big giant pie chart of all the shit on the Internet, like roughly what percentage of that pie chart do you think would be synthetic stuff?
[08:40]
Charlie Warzel
It's such a good question. You can't take the temperature of the entire Internet, right? But you're Seeing this play out in, in music with I. I interviewed on my podcast this guy who is the, the front man of a. Of a very beloved progressive rock band, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. And they took their music off Spotify in protest of Spotify funding their founder funding a defense company. And when they left, they had domain squatters, basically, King Gizzard squatters who came in and took their page essentially by creating AI slop music that sounded similar to their stuff and was making money off their streams and all that, and had to, you know, fight Spotify to get it taken down, which they did. You have, you have so many different playlists on Spotify that are. I've done some reporting into this. You go into especially like, like jazz or just instrumental type music, classical music, and you start clicking around on some of those artists and you don't see anything, any human beings there. Right. Like, you don't. You go to these, these, you know, their YouTube page. And then the YouTube page is just, you know, like, like the, when you don't. When you don't put a profile picture on it, right. And it only directs you back to the Spotify link. There's no, you know, manager page or anything like that or label. And you start to realize, oh, well, then I guess, I guess that's. I guess that's fake. Right. And so you have. So I'm listening to jazz music that I think is made by another human being, and it's not. And again, that sense of paranoia creeps in when you start to recognize some of, some of these things. I think a lot of us want to walk through the world and say, listen, I've got reasonably good taste. I've got reasonably good judgment. I'm not sitting around listening to fake jazz music. And you might be right. We all might be. It's not a question anymore of taste because there's so much volume.
[10:52]
Sean Illing
It's just so strange. I know what you mean, but it's very hard to name. Somehow the Internet feels fake and real and dead and alive all at the same time. People are clearly still there, but you're never really sure, like, who or what is speaking. You're never sure who made the thing you're looking at or why it appeared in front of you. It seems like we should definitely take a step back, maybe, and just think about how bizarre this situation is for our primate brains.
[11:19]
Charlie Warzel
Yeah. And that, you know, was kind of coming off the backs of a lot of the early social media backlash to the election of Donald Trump and people starting to look into, well, what is happening? How is Facebook changing this? Right? And then you had the Cambridge Analytica scandal that same year, 2018, where there was what turned out to be, honestly, a bit of an overreaction to what is known as psychographic profiling.
[11:51]
Sean Illing
I was part of that overreaction.
[11:53]
Charlie Warzel
I think I was too. Because we were all figuring out. And this speaks to some of these platforms and their prominence in our lives, right? It makes a lot of sense to want to assign them an extreme amount of power. You know, they're connecting billions of people, they have all this money, they're building these tools of surveillance to track our every move. There's reason to be paranoid. You know, Cambridge Analytica was in the business of selling you the idea that they were, they were changing people's minds left and right all the time, that they could come into a place and affect an election, because it's a great tactic. And not coincidentally, that's what the artificial intelligence companies have done for the last four years or so. Right? They started with the doomer marketing. They started with the we're going to build something so powerful, it's a Manhattan Project for words, et cetera.
[12:55]
Sean Illing
And so, yeah, we're going to blow up the world. But subscribe wherever you get your AI.
[12:59]
Decoder Host/Announcer
Right.
[13:00]
Sean Illing
Okay, cool. Interesting choice.
[13:02]
Charlie Warzel
I think we used to think of the Internet as an engine of connection, right? Of sharing information of a real, like a human to human thing. But it was still deception and fakery. Fakery of all kinds is obviously a volume game. And artificial intelligence, degenerative artificial intelligence, boom. That we've seen. It's, it's a tool of scale. You push a button, you, you get a Moby Dick, you know, sized tome of words if you want, right? You can make the same video. And a lot of creators do this 200 ways in 15 minutes. Me talking, doing my thing. Okay, now make that, put me in 200 locations. Let's spam the Internet with it, see what the algorithm likes, see what people like, and then use that. It is a tool for volume and that volume is synthetic.
[14:08]
Sean Illing
I mean, maybe if the question back in 2018, 2019 was, is this a bot or not? I mean, now it just seems like more fundamentally, what the hell kind of environment even is this, right? And we don't even have a name for it yet. It's just weird and different. It's not the old Internet, it's something else. And in the same way, I don't really think we have a real name for this period of history yet. I Don't think we really have a name for whatever this new Internet is, but it's fundamentally different. It's a different thing altogether.
[14:43]
Charlie Warzel
It is, and it's. What is fascinating to me is the way in which it functions in the. What's interesting to me is the way that it is a outgrowth in some ways of the post truth moment. We've had this environment where we're all given access to so much information that we can rationalize it any way we want. It's one of my hobby horses that nobody knows what anyone is doing online. And that is a problem. Right. If I say something as a, you know, a columnist at the Atlantic and put something out, the main beef that I get is you're living in some stupid bubble that's not real. That's not representative of the information experience. Right. You're seeing all this. Get off Twitter, man. It's a bubble. You're just seeing this. That's totally valid and totally true. But there's also a lot of people who are dismissing certain things that are real because they don't want to see them and also because it doesn't reflect their algorithmic experience of the Internet. And I think it's really difficult when you don't know what anyone else's experience is like. Right. You walk around a little bit feeling kind of insane. I feel this sometimes when I plug into whatever discourse or conversation and I write about the Internet. I'm not terminally online in my real life. I go there for the purpose of understanding it, reporting on it, studying, seeing things that bubble up. I like to be outside in my other times. People constantly will say, like, dude, you gotta get off the Internet. And I think that that is, in some ways a response to what you're saying makes me uncomfortable. Not only because I maybe disagree with the information, but because your experience is clearly so different than mine that it's awkward for me to imagine that we are existing inside the same culture or that we have to interact with each other and talk about these.
[17:10]
Sean Illing
Yeah, I mean, it's not really post truth at this point. It's post real or post human. How much of the Internet at this point is basically just machines performing humanity back at us under the guise of being people. Right.
[17:29]
Charlie Warzel
For the piece I referenced this researcher named Aiden Walker. He's a Gen Z online researcher. He is extremely smart about memes. And, you know, it's a great example of someone who takes something that's like, kind of silly in concept and actually gets to like the philosophical human understandings. Of all this, and he came up with this theory. So what we've been talking about with the, you know, there's machines and algorithms are just kind of like running the whole show, right? 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.
[18:25]
Sean Illing
Say more.
[18:26]
Charlie Warzel
Yes, we'll have to say more. Which is that the product, the synthetic product of these artificial intelligence things, be it like, you know, a slop video of a cat dancing on a street in Paris or whatever, right? That a bunch of people are flicking through, you know, Instagram reels or Facebook and just, you know, hitting like. Or whatever or. Oh, that's cute. I'm gonna forward that to whatever you have that which is synthetic. It's machines, 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? You have this when you. 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. We are consenting to it in some sense. Other people would argue that, or being coerced.
[20:13]
Sean Illing
You know, on the old Internet, you had the capacity to explore truly, right? You would stumble and click around and kind of get lost. And now so much of it is just a giant, sprawling machine designed to mainline into your veins as much content as possible, content optimized for engagement. So you're not really exploring or participating in that way. You were just a passive product. I mean, as you put it into peace, right? We basically now exist humans to feed data into the machinery. That is what we are doing. And it is keeping us stupefied and entertained along the way. But that's fundamentally what our, what we have been reduced to.
[20:51]
Charlie Warzel
Yeah, I don't know that all is, is lost yet, but I think that what I described this moment as is, as a, as a crisis of agency. Not that it's, it's over but, but we are all really concerned about our future agency. Like I don't think these tools are powerful enough yet. Like I think it's giving these tools in Silicon Valley, it's buying too much into the narrative to say we're all automatons. Like, you know, I think from a culture standpoint of consuming, you know, endless scroll vibe, like the best example of this is you go on a social media app or something like that, or you're just wasting time on your phone and you look up and you go, man, what? Like that was not how I wanted to use those 20 minutes. Right. But that's like that feeling of regret that you might have. That's an example of that consuming part of the agency. But on the side of jobs and you know, and jobs, AI, job loss, things like that, I don't think these tools yet. I mean maybe if you're, if you're, you know, a programmer or someone in this highly technical space where these agentic coding platforms are doing such a good job of cranking out inhuman amounts of code so quickly, I can understand that there's fears, but it's more the anxiety of what is coming. We are in this crisis of like no generative AI is making us ask these this really weird question which is what is a human for? Right. And that's the question that's a wild thing to have, you know, publicly traded companies asking you, right, what is the human for? And I think that is what we are feeling right now as a society. Whether you are a booster who is worried and has a little bit of the doomerism stuff in it, or you're somebody who's out protesting data centers in your town. A lot of it is centered around this idea of like, what is a human for?
[23:21]
Decoder Host/Announcer
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[26:50]
Sean Illing
I wanted to go back to the idea of psyops, right? Maybe the, maybe the answer really is just the paranoia. But that word psyop has broken containment. What exactly does that mean? And also, why has it become so prevalent now? Is it just everyone's paranoid of everything?
[27:11]
Charlie Warzel
Well, psyop is like a, you know, it's kind of like a military grade, you know, it's, it's a, it's an operation that is, that is meant to, you know, trick you psychologically. I don't have the definition, you know, in front of me.
[27:25]
Sean Illing
Like a clandestine manipulation campaign.
[27:28]
Charlie Warzel
Yes, basically. Great way to put it. And I think that again, when we talk about anything that's happened in a technological, cultural sense, it all builds off of the stuff that came before it, right? So that's why the Cambridge Analytica history, I think, is really important here, right? It primes people to see these things as experiments. These tech companies made news because they did experiments. They're not. They were experiments in service of like, you know, trying to tweak their platforms to be better at advertising. Like, they weren't nefarious backroom, you know, horrible experiments in brainwashing and mind control. But again, I think we get to this situation, we're seeing it so much right now in AI, where all these people in Silicon Valley are like, why does every person in the, like in the country who's not, you know, deeply involved in this, these niche discourses or working at these places, why is everyone just reflexively hate artificial intelligence? Like, why does it poll worse than Donald Trump? Like, I, this stuff is so cool. I'm racking my brain. Why doesn't this. It's like, well, you spent a lot of time talking about how dangerous it is, how civilizationally perilous it could be in the wrong hands, right? How if we don't put the exact right guardrails up, awful things can happen. We could destroy our economy overnight. Right? One of these things could take over and manipulate the stock market and crash everything. You hear all of this stuff. And the thing is, when you repeat a lot of ominous crap over time, people start to internalize it. And that is to go back to the psyops that is part of it, right? We hear that these companies are so powerful, they're so able to manipulate consumer sentiment, they're so able to drive people to make purchases. They're so useful to drive people to go out to campaign rallies, and then they get hooked on whatever and then they start getting in these groups, you know, QAnon was this fringe message board thing that was kind of silly and stupid. And Facebook groups became this gathering place during the pandemic for otherwise pretty average Joe normal type people to engage with this thing. And it became this cultural, tribal, community based ideology that broke, contain and radicalized a whole bunch of people. When you see and you have all of these past examples of how this technology can like, get away from us and change us, people start to internalize that. And it's now people reach for this idea of the psyop in the same way that people reach for QAnon. Right? It's a way to explain something that you don't want to grapple with or that is uncomfortable or that you don't understand or that you can't easily assign something to. Right. The most recent psyop thing controversy is over this band Geese, this indie band who are very popular. They've been around for a little bit, but they're. They got very popular the last year with this album. They were everywhere. They are as a band using some of these viral, apparently viral marketing firms or whatever. That is its own thing. The core issue with the band Geese is that they're polarizing. Their singer has this like, warbly kind of sometimes atonal voice. They're like a little bit hard to listen to for some people. And other people think that they're the Velvet Underground, right? It's this super polarizing thing where someone listens to it and has two completely diametrically opposed opinions. And instead of trying to grapple with that, it's so much easier to just say, if you hate Geese. Yeah, man, it's a freaking psyop.
[32:03]
Sean Illing
Well, the problem with paranoia, it kind of becomes its own trap, right? I mean, like, if you think everything is manipulated, then you just become manipulable in a totally different way. Right? Like, but where is that line between healthy skepticism and losing your damn mind online? Because I think a lot of us are living uncomfortably right on that border all the time.
[32:26]
Charlie Warzel
It also doesn't help that we, like, live in an era of great corruption, of great conspiracy theorizing, right? You look at what has happened with Donald Trump and cryptocurrencies and things like that, and you see an unbelievable amount of corruption just happening in plain sight, like rug polls from the President of the United States and his family and no real accountability for that, such that society just goes, ah, well, nevertheless. And after a while, again, people are going to internalize these lessons and say, well, if this is what I can see, if this is what I am allowed Access to, then I'm pretty sure this is just how the world works. And so the things that I don't have the tools to explain, that's, you know, it's, it's a. In some ways it's a rational response to some of these things that are, that are happening, even if they tend to be, you know, irrational theories.
[33:34]
Sean Illing
What makes something slop? Is it just bad AI content really
[33:41]
Charlie Warzel
feels like slop is broken. Contain. In terms of, you know, nomenclature, I'm inclined to say that it follows that pornography standard of, you know, when you see it, right?
[33:54]
Sean Illing
Know it when you see it.
[33:55]
Charlie Warzel
You know it when you see it. I think what. For me, the way that I think about slop. What a sentence, the way that I deem something as slop would be having a kind of contempt for its audience, right?
[34:16]
Sean Illing
Like
[34:18]
Charlie Warzel
you're an idiot, you don't care. You're just scroll like I'm gonna. Yeah, here's shrimp. Jesus. You know, dummy, like when you feel that thing from someone who's like, I'm doing click volume ad arbitrage from the Philippines, from this, you know, center building, as many different Facebook pages to spam, you know, unsuspecting older people without this media literacy to just, you know, oh yeah, like, you know, did, did you see that Garth Brooks spoke out about the Supreme Court case, you know, at this sold out concert in South Africa, you know, like something totally random that didn't happen and just like shoving it down people's faces because. Not because they have any particular political ideology, but they're just trying to make a quick buck. That is what I consider to be slop. You know, I think when you look at very recently there's been a spate of either sanctioned or non sanctioned campaign videos that have come out. Like for Spencer Pratt in Los Angeles is one of him like as Batman, totally AI generated. Would have taken millions of dollars to make. Now somebody can just make it on the outside, the campaign can promote it for itself, goes viral. I don't see that like it is slop technically, but I see it slightly different, right? Like that's like almost just propaganda or all that stuff. Those Lego videos of Donald Trump coming out of Iran to sort of, you know, knock on the US military response there. I don't see that as slop as much as propaganda as a tool for, for me, slop is, has to have contempt for its audience in this sense of it's just like really low rent. I'm wasting your time and energy in order to make some money.
[36:16]
Sean Illing
Well, you may have just answered this, but people seem to get hung up on whether AI can make good art. Do you have a strong take on that? Whether something vaguely sloppish can count as good art?
[36:33]
Charlie Warzel
You know, I just read this new book coming out by Cory Doctorow, the activist writer, science fiction writer who coined the term insidification. And he notes in the book, and I think this is a pretty incisive observation, that AI art is supposed to be. It's not good, but it's like, it's good enough to be offensive. And that AI art, I may be slightly butchering his understanding here, but it's a proof of concept. It's supposed to make people, a certain group of people really mad. It's supposed to have someone see it and go, oh, man, they're going to put everyone who can draw out of business. It's going to change all this art. Because that's really useful marketing for these companies. It's a really useful narrative. It's, oh, look how powerful this stuff is. Right? And I think what's interesting about that is that a lot of this isn't. Is it good or is it bad? Is it. It's. Is it powerful? Is it. Does it have the ability to disrupt livelihoods?
[37:56]
Sean Illing
For me, it's still like, the deeper, probably slightly nerdy question is, you know, like, is art still art if you don't experience it as an encounter with another person?
[38:06]
Charlie Warzel
Right.
[38:06]
Sean Illing
Like, I don't really think it is, but I also can't really explain to you why it isn't. I just know a piece of art that didn't come from a human mind, that wasn't rooted in human experience. It doesn't mean anything to me. It is literally meaningless. But again, I don't really know why that is. I just feel it.
[38:23]
Charlie Warzel
And isn't this part of what's so exhausting about this moment that's been foisted on so many of us who enjoy the human stuff? Like, you're describing why that conversation is really so, so hard. And it's that there's, like, something ineffable about human contact, right? And, like, that's why we're all here. We're all here on Earth. Like, I think so much nowadays of that. Again, I'm butchering it. But the Kurt Vonnegut quote that, like, we're put on the earth to fart around, right? Yes. I can go have somebody mail the letter for me, or I can send an email, or I can go down to the post office and interact with some weird people and see some stuff and then get a sandwich and then watch the birds, you know, and do all. And it's like, and then I get a flat tire and then I have to call someone and then they help me, you know, on and on. It's like, that's why we're all here, right? To do that, to have those, those weird, unexpected interactions. And this, this machine's like, what if I told you you don't have to do any of that ever again? And then you go, what is a human for?
[39:47]
Decoder Host/Announcer
Support for the show comes from Even Realities. For a long time, the reality of smart glasses was that they were these bulky, inelegant pieces of tech that were much cooler in concept than in practice. A far cry from the sleek, stylish accessory of our sci fi dreams that actually provides real functionality. Well, even Realities has that fixed. Even G2 are productivity smart glasses designed to keep real time support right in view with teleprompting, conversation support, real time translation, AI assistance, and more. They help you stay on top of work and daily life. And unlike most smart glasses, they're designed to look and feel like premium eyewear with no camera and a lightweight 36 gram design you're you can wear all day. The more context you give them, the smarter they get. Adapting to how you work and what you need. To learn more about even G2, go to evenrealities.com and see how everyday smart glasses keep helpful information in sight so you can stay productive and hands free throughout the day. And for our listeners, use promo code decoder@evenrealities.com to get 10% off even ring one and or even clip when you add them to your even G2 order. That's even realities.com promo code decoder support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI was supposed to handle the parts of the job you hate. Instead it just describes them, suggests what to do about them, and then leaves you to do it. That's not help, that's homework. ServiceNow's AI specialists are different. They're not a tool. Think of them as digital teammates who actually do the work from start to finish. Cases get resolved, requests get processed, loops get closed, and most importantly, no extra work for you. Because when you can truly delegate to AI, you can get back to the work. Only you can do the work. That requires a person with ideas and judgment and, you know, a pulse. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com Support for the show comes from MongoDB. AI assisted and agentic coding can Help you build faster than ever. But if your data layer is a bottleneck, what's the point? MongoDB actually gets out of your way. MongoDB is a unified AI ready data platform that empowers you to build scalable, generative AI applications. It eliminates the need for separate specialized vector databases by combining a flexible document model natively with semantic vector search, full text search, and real time operational data. Instead of wrestling with rigid schemas or translating data formats, MongoDB's native data model mirrors the language LLMs already speak. Plus, MongoDB gives you the flexibility to ship at the speed of AI. The ACID compliance lets you sleep soundly at night and scales to handle massive Fortune 500 workloads. Developers have a word for that kind of reliability. Actually five words. It's a great freaking database. Start building@mongodb.com AI.
[43:11]
Sean Illing
What's your favorite part of the Internet now? I mean like pods, newsletters, Reddit boards? I mean, is there like, where's like the little pocket of like the old Internet on the new Internet that you retreat to?
[43:24]
Charlie Warzel
Well, I will. Okay, I have, I've, I have a couple things I'm not like, clearly given all this stuff. I'm very skeptical of all the AI stuff in the sense of the future that's being pushed on us, the people who are in charge of it, who in many ways are a lot of the same people who brought us social media web2 and then it's like, oh, we're not going to deal with the consequences of that. We're moving on. That said, I have some real delight using the coding agents sometimes to build little things. I live, I live on an island. I can frequently see from across the road and down there's a little window and I can see container ships as they pass sometimes. And I love that. So I coded this thing, I'm not a coder. I coded this little thing that was basically like, go to vesselfinder.com get the API code and then here's my physical location. Made a little app to put on my desktop that just gives me a little like notification. Just it's quiet, doesn't ping, doesn't do anything, just shows and it says what the ship is. And then I can click the link and see where it came from, where it's going. I love that. I think that's so fun. And it does it as it's supposed to pop by my, my, my thing. And that really actually feels in a way like it evokes the spirit of like the early Internet. Which is like, I want access to something. I want to try to do something a little bit creative. And you just gave me. You gave me some tools with which I can do that. It didn't harm anyone. It's not taking anything. It's just for me, I'm not foisting it on anyone. So that is a little piece of Internet that I love.
[45:20]
Sean Illing
Let's leave it right there. Charlie, what is your newsletter and what is your podcast called? And where can people check those out?
[45:28]
Charlie Warzel
Both are called Galaxy Brain. You can find it on the Atlantic. You can subscribe to it on the Atlantic. You should subscribe to the publication. But it's also. We're on YouTube or Apple, Spotify, wherever, wherever you get them. And yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate this. This is a great conversation.
[45:48]
Sean Illing
All right, check it out, people. Charlie does great work. He has for a long time and he will be back. I have an unreasonably good authority. So awesome. All right, man. Thanks for coming in, dude.
[45:57]
Charlie Warzel
Thanks for having me.
[46:04]
Sean Illing
All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Charlie has always been one of my favorite people to talk to about anything involving tech and culture. So I hope you enjoyed that. As always. We do want to know what you think, so drop us a line atthegray areaox.com or you can leave us a message on our voicemail line at 1-800-214-45749. Please also rate review. Subscribe to the podcast. It helps us grow our show. This episode was produced by Thor Neuer and Beth Morrissey, who also runs the show, engineered by Shannon Mahoney and Christian Ayala. Fact Checked by Melissa Hirsch and Emma Munger wrote our theme music. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. A Gray Area comes out on Mondays and and Fridays. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts. If you watch podcasts while you listen, you can do that too. Go to YouTube.com Vox for video versions of the Gray Area. The show is part of vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.com members to sign up and if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.

Summary7 min read

Podcast Summary: “The End of the Human Internet”

Decoder with Nilay Patel
Episode Date: July 30, 2026
Guest: Charlie Warzel (The Atlantic), interviewed by Sean Illing (The Gray Area/Vox)

Episode Overview

This episode, guest hosted by Sean Illing (on The Gray Area), features journalist Charlie Warzel discussing his Atlantic piece on the state of the internet in 2026. The conversation interrogates why the digital world has begun to feel so disorienting, paranoid, and “bot-haunted”—with so much online now generated by algorithms and AI, and increasingly little that feels authentically human. Classic web concepts like the “dead internet theory” are explored alongside new questions about agency, reality, and manipulation in an era of search “slop,” viral marketing by algorithm, and pervasive synthetic content.

Main Theme:
How rampant AI, bot activity, and algorithmic manipulation have made the internet feel less human, more paranoid, and frequently indistinguishable from “slop”—and what this means for culture, agency, and truth online.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Feeling of a "Fake" Internet

Paranoia and Disorientation: The dominant experience online is now a kind of suspicion—nothing feels reliably real or rooted in human input.
- “What I feel a lot on the Internet right now is this paranoia.” (Charlie Warzel, 04:10)
Max Read’s “The Inversion” (2018) is cited as an early wake-up call—bots and synthetically generated content might overwhelm real human interaction. “Now that's honestly a pretty quaint idea.” (CW, 04:10)

2. Explosion of Synthetic (AI-Generated) Content

Entire websites, music tracks, and even influencer accounts are produced via AI—often solely to trick algorithms, not to reach people.
AI “slop”: Low-quality, mass-produced content pollutes search results (Google, YouTube, Spotify), feeds, and recommendations.
- Example: Domain squatters created “King Gizzard” music with AI and monetized it on Spotify after the real band pulled their catalog. (CW, 08:39)
Reality is clouded: “You might be listening to jazz music you think is made by a person, but it’s not.” (CW, 08:39)
“It's not a question anymore of taste because there's so much volume.” (CW, 08:39)

3. The Shift from “Post-Truth” to “Post-Real”

Not just misinformation, but an environment where everything—even genuine human work—is suspect.
- “There’s this great term, the liar’s dividend...When there’s so much garbage out there, people can cast aspersions on things that are real, right? ...You can completely blur reality. And I think that’s the way culture works now.” (CW, 08:39)
We now question the very nature of the internet environment itself. “What the hell kind of environment even is this, right?” (SI, 14:07)

4. The Algorithm & The "Cuck Internet Theory"

“Dead Internet Theory”: Few humans, mostly bots/algorithms interacting (CW, 17:29)
Aiden Walker’s “Cuck Internet” concept:
- The internet is now machines and algorithms performing “humanity” for each other, while real users are passive bystanders:
  - “The human is the consenting observer to an interaction…of these two machines…the internet isn't dead. The internet is really active…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.'” (CW, 18:25)
Sean: “We basically now exist as humans to feed data into the machinery. That is what we are doing. And it is keeping us stupefied and entertained along the way.” (SI, 20:13)

5. Crisis of Agency and What Humans Are “For”

The real anxiety is not that we’re already reduced to passive data points, but that we don’t know what our future role is.
- “What I describe this moment as is a crisis of agency. Not that it’s over, but we are all really concerned about our future agency. …What is a human for? And that is what we are feeling right now as a society.” (CW, 20:50; 22:40)

6. Paranoia, Psyops, and the Memeification of Distrust

“Psyop” has become a catch-all label: “The word psyop has broken containment.” (SI, 26:50)
It’s a way to explain anything weird, unpopular, or unfortunate online—paranoia spirals and is “in some ways, a rational response to some of these things that are happening,” even though the theories themselves are not rational. (CW, 32:26)

7. “Slop” vs. Art

“Slop” is idiomatic for contemptuous, low-value, en masse AI-generated content. “The way that I deem something as slop would be having a kind of contempt for its audience, right?” (CW, 33:54)
Can AI make art? Cory Doctorow’s line: AI art is “not good, but it's good enough to be offensive. …That’s really useful marketing for these companies…It's, oh, look how powerful this stuff is. …It’s about disrupting livelihoods.” (CW, 36:32)
Does non-human art mean anything? “A piece of art that didn't come from a human mind…It is literally meaningless. But again, I don't really know why that is. I just feel it.” (SI, 38:06)
The “ineffable” quality of human connection: “That's why we're all here…to have those weird, unexpected interactions…And this machine's like, what if I told you you don't have to do any of that ever again? And then you go, what is a human for?” (CW, 38:22)

8. Pockets of the “Old Internet”

Despite skepticism, Charlie finds some joy in using AI tools for playful, harmless purposes—like coding a desktop app to track ships passing his window. “That really actually feels in a way like it evokes the spirit of like the early Internet…You gave me some tools with which I can do that. It didn't harm anyone…” (CW, 43:24)

Notable Quotes & Moments

On Paranoia:

“Everything around you might be fake, it creates this sense of paranoia. …You can make a convincing case that anything you don’t like or that you think is suspect or that is weird in some way is a psyop. It’s fake.”
— Charlie Warzel (04:10)
On Synthetic Content:

“I think a lot of us want to walk through the world and say, listen, I’ve got reasonably good taste...I'm not sitting around listening to fake jazz music. And you might be right. …It's not a question anymore of taste because there's so much volume.”
— Charlie Warzel (08:39)
On “Post-Human” Internet:

“How much of the Internet at this point is basically just machines performing humanity back at us under the guise of being people?”
— Sean Illing (17:09)

“The human is the consenting observer to an interaction, a melding of sorts, of these two machines...And we, the human, are just sort of sitting there like, okay, yeah, no, I'll have some more, I guess.”
— Charlie Warzel (18:25)
On Agency:

“Generative AI is making us ask these really weird questions, which is, what is a human for? Right. …That is what we are feeling right now as a society.”
— Charlie Warzel (22:40)
On Slop:

“For me…the way that I deem something as slop would be having a kind of contempt for its audience, right? …I'm wasting your time and energy in order to make some money.”
— Charlie Warzel (33:54—34:17)
On Human Connection vs. Machine Efficiency:

“There’s something ineffable about human contact, right? And like, that's why we're all here. ...And this, this machine's like, what if I told you you don't have to do any of that ever again? And then you go, what is a human for?”
— Charlie Warzel (38:22)
A Pocket of Joy:

“That really actually feels in a way like it evokes the spirit of the early Internet. …I want to try to do something a little bit creative. And you just gave me some tools with which I can do that. It didn't harm anyone. …So that is a little piece of Internet that I love.”
— Charlie Warzel (43:24)

Timestamps for Key Segments

Paranoia & Synthetic Content: 04:10 – 08:39
Dead Internet Theory & "Cuck Internet": 17:29 – 20:13
Crisis of Agency: 20:50 – 23:21
Paranoia & Psyops: 26:50 – 32:26
Slop vs. Propaganda: 33:34 – 34:17
AI Art and the Meaning of Art: 36:32 – 38:22
Joyful Use of the “New Internet”: 43:24 – 45:19

Takeaway

The internet of 2026 feels profoundly less human—not just automated, but actively out of our hands, “post-real,” with truth and authenticity harder than ever to find or trust. Synthetic content, algorithmic manipulation, and mass-produced “slop” make genuine connection rare and foster widespread paranoia. But, for now, small enclaves of creativity and meaningful human experience remain—sometimes with the help of the very AI tools we both fear and deploy. The central question: if machines increasingly generate, curate, and gatekeep all content, what is left for humans to do, feel, or be online? And is there still hope to reclaim the agency and authenticity that made the old internet so vital?

For more from Charlie Warzel, check out the “Galaxy Brain” newsletter and podcast via The Atlantic.

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Transcript51 lines

[00:01]
Decoder Host/Announcer
Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI is moving fast across the enterprise, but without visibility, it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. ServiceNow turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place, what it's doing, what it's done, and what it's about to do. So you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com, support for the show comes from MongoDB. AI assisted and agentic coding is helping you build faster than ever. But if your data layer is still a bottleneck, what's the point? Instead of wrestling with rigid schemas or translating data formats, MongoDB's native data model mirrors the language LLMs already speak. It ships at the speed of AI, is ACID compliant, and scales to handle massive Fortune 500 workloads. Developers have a word for that kind of reliability. Actually five words. It's a great freaking database. Start building@mongodb.com AI support for the show comes from Attio, the AICRM. What if all that annoying prep work was just finished the moment you walked into the office? Whether it's Claude Slack or with any other agent you build, you can access your customer data wherever you work. Through atio's MCP and API, everything you'd normally miss gets flagged, and overnight ATTIO reads your whole pipeline and tells you what needs your attention in the morning. Tomorrow is just a click away. You can go to atio.comdecoder and you'll get 15% off your first year. That's attio.comdecoder.
[02:00]
Charlie Warzel
Hey everyone, this is Nick Stat, senior producer on Decoder. Nilay's out for vacation this week and we'll be back next week with new episodes. We're very excited for what we have on the schedule. In the meantime, we wanted to share an episode from the excellent podcast the Gray Area with host Sean Illing. Sean sat down with the Atlantic journalist Charlie Warzel to talk about the state of the Internet in 2026 and what it means that it feels increasingly overrun by non actors. Sean and Charlie dig into some classic web culture concepts, including the dead Internet theory, and they connect that idea that most of the Internet is now just bots in disguise to algorithmic recommendation AI slop and why it feels like the Internet you grew up with is now gone, replaced by something more manipulative, deceptive, and in many cases, outright fake. Okay, the Gray Area was Sean Iling interviewing the Atlantic's Charlie Warzell about the increasingly inhuman Internet. Enjoy.
[02:54]
Sean Illing
This is a gray area. I am Sean Illing. My guest today is Charlie Warzel. He's a staff writer at the Atlantic and the author of their newsletter, Galaxy Brain. Charlie wrote a piece about AI and what he calls a crisis of agency, which is this feeling that so much of our lives online are being shaped and distorted by bots, algorithms and various AI generated content. Everything feels a little fake, a little manipulated. If you spend any time at all online, you know what I'm talking about. So we get into why the Internet feels so strange right now and whether it's still possible to build spaces online that feel genuinely human. Hope you enjoy. Charlie Warzel, welcome back to the show.
[03:41]
Charlie Warzel
Thank you for having me.
[03:42]
Sean Illing
Yeah, man, it's been a while. Let's talk about your recent piece in the Atlantic. Right. There is a, a lot of AI discourse right now, but this piece is sort of getting at a part of it that seems a little under discussed, which is the increasingly weird bot haunted Internet we all live inside now. So let's just start there. What is the feeling you are describing in this piece?
[04:10]
Charlie Warzel
The feeling that I'm describing is one of disorientation, but also paranoia, I think. I think what I feel a lot on the Internet right now is this, is this paranoia. And I started the piece with a callback to a piece by the Internet tech writer Max Reid, who wrote New York magazine back in 2018 about what he called the inversion, which is this tipping point where he know the bot and fake content, content made synthetically instead of just by, you know, you or me. Human beings may like surpass some of, some of, you know, the content that we all make and that the Internet would sort of be just a majority fake to some degree or majority, you know, automated. And that at the time I remember, was a real revelation for a lot of people. This, this feeling that, oh, whoa, like you're telling me there's all these people using these sock puppet, sock puppet accounts on Twitter or Facebook or wherever that, you know, there's, there's these fake bots trying to sell me stuff that a lot of websites are populated with, with, you know, automated comments or whatever it is. And now that's honestly a pretty quaint idea that someone wouldn't be as aware of that because in the generative AI age or whatever we're going to call it, or whatever we're in basically since, you know, the arrival of ChatGPT. But even before it, you have an Internet now that is Jammed full of synthetic content in all sorts of ways. So you have synthetic text, you know, all the, all the things that we would call AI slop, right? And now you just have people generating whole sites with the click of a button, right? To promote something that either isn't real or that is, you know, a scam or, you know, like, pretty awful. You have that happening on this vast scale, so much so that Google search, most of what you see is going to be garbage, right? Then you have synthetic music, AI slopped videos and things, you know, clogging these feeds. And you have organizations that are doing a new style of content marketing, of viral marketing, in which they spin up fake accounts to seed algorithms with information that is befitting their client, right? So if you're an artist, you can have these viral marketing firms that will spam TikTok with your song so that it becomes. The algorithm thinks, oh, this is a popular song. And then when other people start posting it, it gets priority inside the feeds. So it's this idea that, like, what people are really doing now is they're not marketing to human beings, they're marketing to these algorithms. The end result of all of that, right, this idea that everything around you might be fake, it creates this sense of paranoia. It's not just that there's not one thing that people are talking or thinking about, it's that you can make a convincing case that anything you don't like or that you think is suspect or that is weird in some way is a psyop. It's fake. Somebody has ceded that, right? And that to me is. Is a change. It is a dramatic change in the way that people behave online. And it really affects everything from our politics to our culture. Because you walk around with this feeling, there's this, this great term, the liar's dividend, right? Which is the idea that you can. When there's so much garbage out there, people can cast aspersions on things that are real, right? And say, oh, I think it's fake. I think it's. I think it's a lie, right? You can sort of completely blur and reality. And I think that that's the way that culture works now.
[08:24]
Sean Illing
So not that we can know this really with any precision, but if you just had to guess, if you just had a big giant pie chart of all the shit on the Internet, like roughly what percentage of that pie chart do you think would be synthetic stuff?
[08:40]
Charlie Warzel
It's such a good question. You can't take the temperature of the entire Internet, right? But you're Seeing this play out in, in music with I. I interviewed on my podcast this guy who is the, the front man of a. Of a very beloved progressive rock band, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. And they took their music off Spotify in protest of Spotify funding their founder funding a defense company. And when they left, they had domain squatters, basically, King Gizzard squatters who came in and took their page essentially by creating AI slop music that sounded similar to their stuff and was making money off their streams and all that, and had to, you know, fight Spotify to get it taken down, which they did. You have, you have so many different playlists on Spotify that are. I've done some reporting into this. You go into especially like, like jazz or just instrumental type music, classical music, and you start clicking around on some of those artists and you don't see anything, any human beings there. Right. Like, you don't. You go to these, these, you know, their YouTube page. And then the YouTube page is just, you know, like, like the, when you don't. When you don't put a profile picture on it, right. And it only directs you back to the Spotify link. There's no, you know, manager page or anything like that or label. And you start to realize, oh, well, then I guess, I guess that's. I guess that's fake. Right. And so you have. So I'm listening to jazz music that I think is made by another human being, and it's not. And again, that sense of paranoia creeps in when you start to recognize some of, some of these things. I think a lot of us want to walk through the world and say, listen, I've got reasonably good taste. I've got reasonably good judgment. I'm not sitting around listening to fake jazz music. And you might be right. We all might be. It's not a question anymore of taste because there's so much volume.
[10:52]
Sean Illing
It's just so strange. I know what you mean, but it's very hard to name. Somehow the Internet feels fake and real and dead and alive all at the same time. People are clearly still there, but you're never really sure, like, who or what is speaking. You're never sure who made the thing you're looking at or why it appeared in front of you. It seems like we should definitely take a step back, maybe, and just think about how bizarre this situation is for our primate brains.
[11:19]
Charlie Warzel
Yeah. And that, you know, was kind of coming off the backs of a lot of the early social media backlash to the election of Donald Trump and people starting to look into, well, what is happening? How is Facebook changing this? Right? And then you had the Cambridge Analytica scandal that same year, 2018, where there was what turned out to be, honestly, a bit of an overreaction to what is known as psychographic profiling.
[11:51]
Sean Illing
I was part of that overreaction.
[11:53]
Charlie Warzel
I think I was too. Because we were all figuring out. And this speaks to some of these platforms and their prominence in our lives, right? It makes a lot of sense to want to assign them an extreme amount of power. You know, they're connecting billions of people, they have all this money, they're building these tools of surveillance to track our every move. There's reason to be paranoid. You know, Cambridge Analytica was in the business of selling you the idea that they were, they were changing people's minds left and right all the time, that they could come into a place and affect an election, because it's a great tactic. And not coincidentally, that's what the artificial intelligence companies have done for the last four years or so. Right? They started with the doomer marketing. They started with the we're going to build something so powerful, it's a Manhattan Project for words, et cetera.
[12:55]
Sean Illing
And so, yeah, we're going to blow up the world. But subscribe wherever you get your AI.
[12:59]
Decoder Host/Announcer
Right.
[13:00]
Sean Illing
Okay, cool. Interesting choice.
[13:02]
Charlie Warzel
I think we used to think of the Internet as an engine of connection, right? Of sharing information of a real, like a human to human thing. But it was still deception and fakery. Fakery of all kinds is obviously a volume game. And artificial intelligence, degenerative artificial intelligence, boom. That we've seen. It's, it's a tool of scale. You push a button, you, you get a Moby Dick, you know, sized tome of words if you want, right? You can make the same video. And a lot of creators do this 200 ways in 15 minutes. Me talking, doing my thing. Okay, now make that, put me in 200 locations. Let's spam the Internet with it, see what the algorithm likes, see what people like, and then use that. It is a tool for volume and that volume is synthetic.
[14:08]
Sean Illing
I mean, maybe if the question back in 2018, 2019 was, is this a bot or not? I mean, now it just seems like more fundamentally, what the hell kind of environment even is this, right? And we don't even have a name for it yet. It's just weird and different. It's not the old Internet, it's something else. And in the same way, I don't really think we have a real name for this period of history yet. I Don't think we really have a name for whatever this new Internet is, but it's fundamentally different. It's a different thing altogether.
[14:43]
Charlie Warzel
It is, and it's. What is fascinating to me is the way in which it functions in the. What's interesting to me is the way that it is a outgrowth in some ways of the post truth moment. We've had this environment where we're all given access to so much information that we can rationalize it any way we want. It's one of my hobby horses that nobody knows what anyone is doing online. And that is a problem. Right. If I say something as a, you know, a columnist at the Atlantic and put something out, the main beef that I get is you're living in some stupid bubble that's not real. That's not representative of the information experience. Right. You're seeing all this. Get off Twitter, man. It's a bubble. You're just seeing this. That's totally valid and totally true. But there's also a lot of people who are dismissing certain things that are real because they don't want to see them and also because it doesn't reflect their algorithmic experience of the Internet. And I think it's really difficult when you don't know what anyone else's experience is like. Right. You walk around a little bit feeling kind of insane. I feel this sometimes when I plug into whatever discourse or conversation and I write about the Internet. I'm not terminally online in my real life. I go there for the purpose of understanding it, reporting on it, studying, seeing things that bubble up. I like to be outside in my other times. People constantly will say, like, dude, you gotta get off the Internet. And I think that that is, in some ways a response to what you're saying makes me uncomfortable. Not only because I maybe disagree with the information, but because your experience is clearly so different than mine that it's awkward for me to imagine that we are existing inside the same culture or that we have to interact with each other and talk about these.
[17:10]
Sean Illing
Yeah, I mean, it's not really post truth at this point. It's post real or post human. How much of the Internet at this point is basically just machines performing humanity back at us under the guise of being people. Right.
[17:29]
Charlie Warzel
For the piece I referenced this researcher named Aiden Walker. He's a Gen Z online researcher. He is extremely smart about memes. And, you know, it's a great example of someone who takes something that's like, kind of silly in concept and actually gets to like the philosophical human understandings. Of all this, and he came up with this theory. So what we've been talking about with the, you know, there's machines and algorithms are just kind of like running the whole show, right? 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.
[18:25]
Sean Illing
Say more.
[18:26]
Charlie Warzel
Yes, we'll have to say more. Which is that the product, the synthetic product of these artificial intelligence things, be it like, you know, a slop video of a cat dancing on a street in Paris or whatever, right? That a bunch of people are flicking through, you know, Instagram reels or Facebook and just, you know, hitting like. Or whatever or. Oh, that's cute. I'm gonna forward that to whatever you have that which is synthetic. It's machines, 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? You have this when you. 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. We are consenting to it in some sense. Other people would argue that, or being coerced.
[20:13]
Sean Illing
You know, on the old Internet, you had the capacity to explore truly, right? You would stumble and click around and kind of get lost. And now so much of it is just a giant, sprawling machine designed to mainline into your veins as much content as possible, content optimized for engagement. So you're not really exploring or participating in that way. You were just a passive product. I mean, as you put it into peace, right? We basically now exist humans to feed data into the machinery. That is what we are doing. And it is keeping us stupefied and entertained along the way. But that's fundamentally what our, what we have been reduced to.
[20:51]
Charlie Warzel
Yeah, I don't know that all is, is lost yet, but I think that what I described this moment as is, as a, as a crisis of agency. Not that it's, it's over but, but we are all really concerned about our future agency. Like I don't think these tools are powerful enough yet. Like I think it's giving these tools in Silicon Valley, it's buying too much into the narrative to say we're all automatons. Like, you know, I think from a culture standpoint of consuming, you know, endless scroll vibe, like the best example of this is you go on a social media app or something like that, or you're just wasting time on your phone and you look up and you go, man, what? Like that was not how I wanted to use those 20 minutes. Right. But that's like that feeling of regret that you might have. That's an example of that consuming part of the agency. But on the side of jobs and you know, and jobs, AI, job loss, things like that, I don't think these tools yet. I mean maybe if you're, if you're, you know, a programmer or someone in this highly technical space where these agentic coding platforms are doing such a good job of cranking out inhuman amounts of code so quickly, I can understand that there's fears, but it's more the anxiety of what is coming. We are in this crisis of like no generative AI is making us ask these this really weird question which is what is a human for? Right. And that's the question that's a wild thing to have, you know, publicly traded companies asking you, right, what is the human for? And I think that is what we are feeling right now as a society. Whether you are a booster who is worried and has a little bit of the doomerism stuff in it, or you're somebody who's out protesting data centers in your town. A lot of it is centered around this idea of like, what is a human for?
[23:21]
Decoder Host/Announcer
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[26:50]
Sean Illing
I wanted to go back to the idea of psyops, right? Maybe the, maybe the answer really is just the paranoia. But that word psyop has broken containment. What exactly does that mean? And also, why has it become so prevalent now? Is it just everyone's paranoid of everything?
[27:11]
Charlie Warzel
Well, psyop is like a, you know, it's kind of like a military grade, you know, it's, it's a, it's an operation that is, that is meant to, you know, trick you psychologically. I don't have the definition, you know, in front of me.
[27:25]
Sean Illing
Like a clandestine manipulation campaign.
[27:28]
Charlie Warzel
Yes, basically. Great way to put it. And I think that again, when we talk about anything that's happened in a technological, cultural sense, it all builds off of the stuff that came before it, right? So that's why the Cambridge Analytica history, I think, is really important here, right? It primes people to see these things as experiments. These tech companies made news because they did experiments. They're not. They were experiments in service of like, you know, trying to tweak their platforms to be better at advertising. Like, they weren't nefarious backroom, you know, horrible experiments in brainwashing and mind control. But again, I think we get to this situation, we're seeing it so much right now in AI, where all these people in Silicon Valley are like, why does every person in the, like in the country who's not, you know, deeply involved in this, these niche discourses or working at these places, why is everyone just reflexively hate artificial intelligence? Like, why does it poll worse than Donald Trump? Like, I, this stuff is so cool. I'm racking my brain. Why doesn't this. It's like, well, you spent a lot of time talking about how dangerous it is, how civilizationally perilous it could be in the wrong hands, right? How if we don't put the exact right guardrails up, awful things can happen. We could destroy our economy overnight. Right? One of these things could take over and manipulate the stock market and crash everything. You hear all of this stuff. And the thing is, when you repeat a lot of ominous crap over time, people start to internalize it. And that is to go back to the psyops that is part of it, right? We hear that these companies are so powerful, they're so able to manipulate consumer sentiment, they're so able to drive people to make purchases. They're so useful to drive people to go out to campaign rallies, and then they get hooked on whatever and then they start getting in these groups, you know, QAnon was this fringe message board thing that was kind of silly and stupid. And Facebook groups became this gathering place during the pandemic for otherwise pretty average Joe normal type people to engage with this thing. And it became this cultural, tribal, community based ideology that broke, contain and radicalized a whole bunch of people. When you see and you have all of these past examples of how this technology can like, get away from us and change us, people start to internalize that. And it's now people reach for this idea of the psyop in the same way that people reach for QAnon. Right? It's a way to explain something that you don't want to grapple with or that is uncomfortable or that you don't understand or that you can't easily assign something to. Right. The most recent psyop thing controversy is over this band Geese, this indie band who are very popular. They've been around for a little bit, but they're. They got very popular the last year with this album. They were everywhere. They are as a band using some of these viral, apparently viral marketing firms or whatever. That is its own thing. The core issue with the band Geese is that they're polarizing. Their singer has this like, warbly kind of sometimes atonal voice. They're like a little bit hard to listen to for some people. And other people think that they're the Velvet Underground, right? It's this super polarizing thing where someone listens to it and has two completely diametrically opposed opinions. And instead of trying to grapple with that, it's so much easier to just say, if you hate Geese. Yeah, man, it's a freaking psyop.
[32:03]
Sean Illing
Well, the problem with paranoia, it kind of becomes its own trap, right? I mean, like, if you think everything is manipulated, then you just become manipulable in a totally different way. Right? Like, but where is that line between healthy skepticism and losing your damn mind online? Because I think a lot of us are living uncomfortably right on that border all the time.
[32:26]
Charlie Warzel
It also doesn't help that we, like, live in an era of great corruption, of great conspiracy theorizing, right? You look at what has happened with Donald Trump and cryptocurrencies and things like that, and you see an unbelievable amount of corruption just happening in plain sight, like rug polls from the President of the United States and his family and no real accountability for that, such that society just goes, ah, well, nevertheless. And after a while, again, people are going to internalize these lessons and say, well, if this is what I can see, if this is what I am allowed Access to, then I'm pretty sure this is just how the world works. And so the things that I don't have the tools to explain, that's, you know, it's, it's a. In some ways it's a rational response to some of these things that are, that are happening, even if they tend to be, you know, irrational theories.
[33:34]
Sean Illing
What makes something slop? Is it just bad AI content really
[33:41]
Charlie Warzel
feels like slop is broken. Contain. In terms of, you know, nomenclature, I'm inclined to say that it follows that pornography standard of, you know, when you see it, right?
[33:54]
Sean Illing
Know it when you see it.
[33:55]
Charlie Warzel
You know it when you see it. I think what. For me, the way that I think about slop. What a sentence, the way that I deem something as slop would be having a kind of contempt for its audience, right?
[34:16]
Sean Illing
Like
[34:18]
Charlie Warzel
you're an idiot, you don't care. You're just scroll like I'm gonna. Yeah, here's shrimp. Jesus. You know, dummy, like when you feel that thing from someone who's like, I'm doing click volume ad arbitrage from the Philippines, from this, you know, center building, as many different Facebook pages to spam, you know, unsuspecting older people without this media literacy to just, you know, oh yeah, like, you know, did, did you see that Garth Brooks spoke out about the Supreme Court case, you know, at this sold out concert in South Africa, you know, like something totally random that didn't happen and just like shoving it down people's faces because. Not because they have any particular political ideology, but they're just trying to make a quick buck. That is what I consider to be slop. You know, I think when you look at very recently there's been a spate of either sanctioned or non sanctioned campaign videos that have come out. Like for Spencer Pratt in Los Angeles is one of him like as Batman, totally AI generated. Would have taken millions of dollars to make. Now somebody can just make it on the outside, the campaign can promote it for itself, goes viral. I don't see that like it is slop technically, but I see it slightly different, right? Like that's like almost just propaganda or all that stuff. Those Lego videos of Donald Trump coming out of Iran to sort of, you know, knock on the US military response there. I don't see that as slop as much as propaganda as a tool for, for me, slop is, has to have contempt for its audience in this sense of it's just like really low rent. I'm wasting your time and energy in order to make some money.
[36:16]
Sean Illing
Well, you may have just answered this, but people seem to get hung up on whether AI can make good art. Do you have a strong take on that? Whether something vaguely sloppish can count as good art?
[36:33]
Charlie Warzel
You know, I just read this new book coming out by Cory Doctorow, the activist writer, science fiction writer who coined the term insidification. And he notes in the book, and I think this is a pretty incisive observation, that AI art is supposed to be. It's not good, but it's like, it's good enough to be offensive. And that AI art, I may be slightly butchering his understanding here, but it's a proof of concept. It's supposed to make people, a certain group of people really mad. It's supposed to have someone see it and go, oh, man, they're going to put everyone who can draw out of business. It's going to change all this art. Because that's really useful marketing for these companies. It's a really useful narrative. It's, oh, look how powerful this stuff is. Right? And I think what's interesting about that is that a lot of this isn't. Is it good or is it bad? Is it. It's. Is it powerful? Is it. Does it have the ability to disrupt livelihoods?
[37:56]
Sean Illing
For me, it's still like, the deeper, probably slightly nerdy question is, you know, like, is art still art if you don't experience it as an encounter with another person?
[38:06]
Charlie Warzel
Right.
[38:06]
Sean Illing
Like, I don't really think it is, but I also can't really explain to you why it isn't. I just know a piece of art that didn't come from a human mind, that wasn't rooted in human experience. It doesn't mean anything to me. It is literally meaningless. But again, I don't really know why that is. I just feel it.
[38:23]
Charlie Warzel
And isn't this part of what's so exhausting about this moment that's been foisted on so many of us who enjoy the human stuff? Like, you're describing why that conversation is really so, so hard. And it's that there's, like, something ineffable about human contact, right? And, like, that's why we're all here. We're all here on Earth. Like, I think so much nowadays of that. Again, I'm butchering it. But the Kurt Vonnegut quote that, like, we're put on the earth to fart around, right? Yes. I can go have somebody mail the letter for me, or I can send an email, or I can go down to the post office and interact with some weird people and see some stuff and then get a sandwich and then watch the birds, you know, and do all. And it's like, and then I get a flat tire and then I have to call someone and then they help me, you know, on and on. It's like, that's why we're all here, right? To do that, to have those, those weird, unexpected interactions. And this, this machine's like, what if I told you you don't have to do any of that ever again? And then you go, what is a human for?
[39:47]
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[43:11]
Sean Illing
What's your favorite part of the Internet now? I mean like pods, newsletters, Reddit boards? I mean, is there like, where's like the little pocket of like the old Internet on the new Internet that you retreat to?
[43:24]
Charlie Warzel
Well, I will. Okay, I have, I've, I have a couple things I'm not like, clearly given all this stuff. I'm very skeptical of all the AI stuff in the sense of the future that's being pushed on us, the people who are in charge of it, who in many ways are a lot of the same people who brought us social media web2 and then it's like, oh, we're not going to deal with the consequences of that. We're moving on. That said, I have some real delight using the coding agents sometimes to build little things. I live, I live on an island. I can frequently see from across the road and down there's a little window and I can see container ships as they pass sometimes. And I love that. So I coded this thing, I'm not a coder. I coded this little thing that was basically like, go to vesselfinder.com get the API code and then here's my physical location. Made a little app to put on my desktop that just gives me a little like notification. Just it's quiet, doesn't ping, doesn't do anything, just shows and it says what the ship is. And then I can click the link and see where it came from, where it's going. I love that. I think that's so fun. And it does it as it's supposed to pop by my, my, my thing. And that really actually feels in a way like it evokes the spirit of like the early Internet. Which is like, I want access to something. I want to try to do something a little bit creative. And you just gave me. You gave me some tools with which I can do that. It didn't harm anyone. It's not taking anything. It's just for me, I'm not foisting it on anyone. So that is a little piece of Internet that I love.
[45:20]
Sean Illing
Let's leave it right there. Charlie, what is your newsletter and what is your podcast called? And where can people check those out?
[45:28]
Charlie Warzel
Both are called Galaxy Brain. You can find it on the Atlantic. You can subscribe to it on the Atlantic. You should subscribe to the publication. But it's also. We're on YouTube or Apple, Spotify, wherever, wherever you get them. And yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate this. This is a great conversation.
[45:48]
Sean Illing
All right, check it out, people. Charlie does great work. He has for a long time and he will be back. I have an unreasonably good authority. So awesome. All right, man. Thanks for coming in, dude.
[45:57]
Charlie Warzel
Thanks for having me.
[46:04]
Sean Illing
All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Charlie has always been one of my favorite people to talk to about anything involving tech and culture. So I hope you enjoyed that. As always. We do want to know what you think, so drop us a line atthegray areaox.com or you can leave us a message on our voicemail line at 1-800-214-45749. Please also rate review. Subscribe to the podcast. It helps us grow our show. This episode was produced by Thor Neuer and Beth Morrissey, who also runs the show, engineered by Shannon Mahoney and Christian Ayala. Fact Checked by Melissa Hirsch and Emma Munger wrote our theme music. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. A Gray Area comes out on Mondays and and Fridays. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts. If you watch podcasts while you listen, you can do that too. Go to YouTube.com Vox for video versions of the Gray Area. The show is part of vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.com members to sign up and if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.

The end of the human internet

The end of the human internet

Podcast Summary: “The End of the Human Internet”

Episode Overview

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Feeling of a "Fake" Internet

2. Explosion of Synthetic (AI-Generated) Content

3. The Shift from “Post-Truth” to “Post-Real”

4. The Algorithm & The "Cuck Internet Theory"

5. Crisis of Agency and What Humans Are “For”

6. Paranoia, Psyops, and the Memeification of Distrust

7. “Slop” vs. Art

8. Pockets of the “Old Internet”

Notable Quotes & Moments

Timestamps for Key Segments

Takeaway

Podcast Summary: “The End of the Human Internet”

Episode Overview

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Feeling of a "Fake" Internet

2. Explosion of Synthetic (AI-Generated) Content

3. The Shift from “Post-Truth” to “Post-Real”

4. The Algorithm & The "Cuck Internet Theory"

5. Crisis of Agency and What Humans Are “For”

6. Paranoia, Psyops, and the Memeification of Distrust

7. “Slop” vs. Art

8. Pockets of the “Old Internet”

Notable Quotes & Moments

Timestamps for Key Segments

Takeaway