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In 1986, a fellow by the name of K. Eric Drexler wrote a book called Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. What got a lot of hype at the time was a small section describing the potential for a catastrophic scenario, where tiny self-replicating machines could get out of control and consume all of the world’s biomass. Technically called ecophagy, the media latched onto another term coined by Drexler for the problem: grey goo.

Thirty-eight years later, grey goo is here and it is consuming the world. It’s just not what we thought it would be.

We know it by the horrendous term, “content.”

“Content” is produced by corporations that are mining universes like Star Wars and Marvel and spinning out whole plodding series on the thinnest of premises.

It’s churned out by studios in the form of endless reboots and remakes.

You can find it in music where you have producers heavily “sampling” older riffs, or doing covers and tributes, pushing out remasters or the same pieces stamped into different physical media.

In the book world, it’s the endless “retellings” of old tales.

In video games, it’s the casual gachas, the idle miners, the merge puzzles. Mindless diversions. Tap. Repeat. Tap. Repeat.

And it’s not confined to media.

You can find it in the grocery stores where in one aisle you have Greek-style pizza and in another aisle you have Greek salad with pizza-flavoured pita chips. Or that product category known as “all-dressed” which is another way of saying “we sprayed it with every simulated flavour we had.”

Even our cities, at least in North America, are monotonously same-y. The same franchise restaurants. The same clothing outlets. The half dozen styles of cars in the parking lot, painted in mostly dull colours.

Everything is converging into mushy sameness.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing inherently wrong with remixes, mashups, blends etc. But our reimaginings have been increasingly light on the imagining and heavy on the re for a very long time.

And now we are also awash in AI slop, in which the corporations have hoovered up all the available material — with or without creator permission — and devised programs that allow anyone to use the program crank out more “content.” The AI we’re getting is anything but intelligent. It’s predictive text on steroids, incapable of understanding what its producing: soulless, unoriginal, bland, and extremely hazy on the details. And as the Internet fills up with more of this slop, crowding out anything new, interesting, or original, the content sampling machine will be hoovering up it’s own slop and then producing… well, sloppier slop.

Yet corporations are already laying off their creative staff, turning to AI in the hopes of cranking out even more slop even faster.

The grey goo that eats the world.

And you and I, the consumers, are finding it increasingly hard to escape.

Have you noticed the shrinking importance of search? I know that something like Netflix must have a catalogue of thousands of titles, but I have to hunt for the search function in the interface and I have to know what I am looking for and type it laboriously with my remote. Otherwise, I am served the same twenty or thirty items just reshuffled under different labels like Watch Together or Bingeworthy or the ubiquitous Recommended for You.

Why is it recommended for you? Because every single click, every single pause in the scrolling, accidental or intended, every single reaction emoji … all of it has been an A/B test, designed to learn to serve you more and more of the same mush. Not because it’s good, and especially not because it’s good for you, mentally, emotionally, or intellectually.

It’s about engagement, which is a euphemism for being hooked.

Hooked by reels. Stories. Shorts. Serials. Smaller and smaller slices of content to keep you from noticing how much time is actually passing and to keep you consuming.

This steady diet of grey goo has turned us into rats, mindlessly pressing the lever for a reward. It’s collectively dulling our ability to do much more than spit out hot takes and snark, or slavishly repeat catch phrases we’ve seen elsewhere. It’s got what plants crave.

It has eroded our ability to focus and think which were — when you look at the totality of human history — seriously underdeveloped traits to begin with. And it couldn’t be happening at a worse time, as we collectively face some of our biggest, most complicated problems.

Not only are we suffering from a failure of imagination when it comes to coming up with solutions, some of us are being radicalized — by endless repetition of lies and half-truths into fighting against the very changes that would make life better for all us.

Is there a conspiracy to keep us stupid? Maybe. Bread and circuses has long been a strategy of the ruling class to keep the masses distracted. And certainly the people intent on banning books and muzzling teachers are happy enough with this state of affairs. Or perhaps this is just a natural consequence of a system that’s evolved to optimize for profit over every single possible public good.

It really doesn’t matter. What’s important is that we stop letting it happen.

One Comment

    • Mick Plon

    • 2 weeks ago

    All so true. I fight the Goo everyday.

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