I think you've categorized it wrong. Social Media isn't very much like TV. Web 1.0 is
akin to TV. Web 2.0 and social media lean into parasocial relationships. Web 3.0 may
horseshoe around and whittle away at the para- part. In that space, I'd stick with the
opiate(s). LLMs seem to belong there in Web 3.0 - sycophant-sovereignty. Instead of
hangin' out with one's bros watching NFL, you hang out with your bros co-owncasting
roblox. But the ones like ChatGPT and Claude still feel like Web 2.0, where *you* are the
product for the most part. We have a ways to go to decentralize that kind of
"intelligence".
On 4/8/26 12:22 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
If TV is the opiate of the masses
Social Media would seem to be the Fentanyl thereof, but what are LLMs and AI
slop in general?
I propose PCP: I'm no psychonaut nor entheonaut nor practiced chemical
self-alterer but the following is my layman/outsider's review of possibilities
- again, those here with (much) more grounded knowledge may debunk it all:
*AI as PCP: *a peculiar *confident detachment from epistemic ground* while
feeling like enhanced capability. You're not consuming someone else's reality
passively. You're /co-generating a reality/ that feels personalized,
responsive, intelligent — and which may be confabulated throughout... up to
acute danger to self and others - ** I (and you) can fly!* - *maybe this is how
Antropic helped Hegseth and Trump believe they could do something with Iran
other than make a big mess for everyone involved (up to WWIII scenarios)?
*Nitrous Oxide* - mild analgesic effect, genuine short-term cognitive
alteration — but is fundamentally /shallow/ and /brief/.
*Steroids* - the /performance enhancement that degrades the underlying
system/. You get genuine short-term capability increase. The muscle is real.
The output is real. But the endocrine system is being quietly undermined,
*Adderall* — or amphetamines generally — Produces genuine focus and output
in the short term. Is prescribed and normalized within productivity culture.
The long term costs — to sleep, to baseline affect, to intrinsic motivation —
are real but diffuse and deniable.
*Alcohol* captures the /social lubrication and lowered inhibition/
dimension that the others miss. (LLM engagement like drinking alone?)
*Caffeine* might be the most honest analogy for the */best/* case of LLM
use — a mild cognitive enhancer that works roughly as advertised, has real but
manageable dependency properties, doesn't produce significant dissociation from
reality, and has been integrated into human cognitive practice for centuries
without catastrophic effect. (But it can make your breath and teeth brown and
your affect jittery and your blood pressure spike?)
*Ketamine* At low doses, dissociative but functional — you can still
navigate the world, you're just slightly detached from it. At higher doses, the
k-hole: complete dissociation, internal reality entirely self-generated,
profound subjective experience of meaning with zero tether to external
reference.
*Benzodiazepines* — and specifically their effect on memory consolidation.
Benzos don't just sedate, they interfere with the /transfer of experience into
long-term memory/. You can function, apparently normally, during the experience
— but the experience doesn't consolidate. (we already have trouble learning
from our experiences?)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to Tainter and Scott — a population that is cognitively functional in the
moment but not consolidating adaptive capacity across time is accumulating a
kind of hidden fragility that won't be visible until the infrastructure is
unavailable and the lower scales turn out to have nothing to run on.
And in the meantime, each of us in our own individual altered state of
confident detachment and withdrawal from the social commons?
--
¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω.
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