It feels kind of sad, knowing that I directly benefited from the internet (1990 - 2010) and through it achieved so much: financially, mentally, educationally, friendships, etc. And now that period of potential nourishment from its existence is basically over. Newcomers to the internet are more likely to think TikTok is the entire internet, rather than seeing the whole internet, and its substrate surface as it were.
People saw it coming of course, I'm reminded of "Pandora's Vox On Community In Cyberspace By Humdog" written in 1994, that called it all out straight:
"... and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called โthe means of production.โ capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul. people who post frequently on boards appear to know that they are factory equipment and tennis shoes, and sometimes trade sends and email about how their contributions are not appreciated by management."
The internet is quickly becoming entirely factory workers, harvested by neural networks.
And the theft already happened. The mass harvesting of data already occurred. Now sites like Reddit are scrambling to try and get SOME money for more up-front 'refreshing' of the datasets, because OpenAI has already basically admitted that without human factory workers creating "real data", the "fake data" ends up eating itself in Oroborus-like JPEG compression. It's why OpenAI wants into our Google Docs, Dropboxes, and every corner where Humans actually Create. Because without it, their fake little mechanical turk can't continue pretending to be a Real Boy and make them money with the bezzle.