What does it mean to be human? We look for a collective answer to that question so often, and we never find it – maybe because there isn’t one.
If you look back in your past, you might remember doing something that felt so right. Maybe it was hitting a ball with a bat, maybe it was solving some sort of problem, maybe it was writing something down that suddenly clicked. Whatever it was, that’s a good indicator of who you are. You’re not limited to one thing, either. You can be as many things as you get those feelings from. It’s a tropism. It’s an orbit, sometimes elliptical, sometimes more round, something that you always gravitate towards. That’s the part of being you that also happens to be a part of being human – the stuff that feels right for you differs from what others may feel – but we all feel it in some way.
And then there’s the part of being human where you shake the tension off, rolling your shoulders as you stop feeling the weight and start feeling the strength that you had forgotten under the weight. Or that you walked so far that even as you sit you feel your legs still feel like they’re in motion. Of that feeling of the wind through one’s hair.
There’s a range of other emotions, too, that make us human and that we try to attribute to other creatures – happiness, sadness, anger… and all the shades in between and that lines that connect them.
A machine, no matter how clever, can’t do that. They can now, however, express that from simply scanning what more than 10,000 primates put on the internet because 0.1% of the primates don’t think the 10,000 matter more than they do other than as revenue streams. Oh, how I could warm to that topic…
AI can pretend to be us. But it will never be us. We’re a lot more fun to create than AI if you know how to do it right, and if you don’t, there are instructional videos on the Internet that demonstrate how not to do it.
This post has been in the making over the course of a few days, much longer than usual, but I have been ruminating and getting interrupted by life and it’s distractions which ended up helping me finish it. Writing is like that sometimes.
Everyone’s going to be writing lists and going over the highlights of 2024, making predictions about 2025, and otherwise fighting for readership in the “Everyone Else Is Doing It” spiral toward zero. Sure, when you’re younger, it seems bold and new – but trust me, it’s not that bold or that new.
It’s outright boring when you start abstracting it away. What matters is what matters to you, and if you’re going to spend your time talking about other people, or waxing nostalgic about a single year (!) I have bad news: AI can probably do it better than you. It probably should, too, since those are low hanging fruit.
“Lemme see what happened this year and write about it! And I can write about next year and it will likely be all wrong but if I get one thing right the whole planet will bow to my wisdom!“
I was just muddling about yesterday and I felt like having a donut1 and a cup of coffee. I went to one of my less usual spots that had recently redecorated. It was cleaner, a bit brighter, and a bit more comfortable than it used to be.
They had chairs to sit in while looking out the glass wall some might call a window. I sat back and observed the people within the people-tank outside. It looks like an aquarium but is really a terrarium– a mildly amusing thing to consider is that in the orginal latin, aquarium meant a drinking place for cattle.
People shuffled around, some going to pay their phone bills, some going to find something to eat, some going to the bank, all on the Friday after Christmas. The clothing, sometimes new, was bright and festive for the most part, but if you want to know an area, look at the people’s shoes, particularly those of the men – we tend to beat the snot out of our shoes.
In the middle of all of this a lady comes into the area, a bit older than myself, and a bit more than a bit at that. As she was sat, she knocked her elbow against the end table so I looked over at the ‘thud’ to make sure she was alright. Instinctively, I asked if she was alright.
I was fiddling around with DALL-E today and it generated the image on the left, and it hit me squarely. I wanted a visual representation of what scraping does so that people could understand…
After all, people don’t care about having their work scraped unless they perceive that they have value that is being scraped.
It’s not a great image. I’d wager a human artist could do much better. While I do not appreciate the work of others scraped to generate stuff like this, I think it’s a good use of a Generative AI.
What I really wanted to generate was a little billionaire sitting on the shoulder of the AI holding a little leash, while the AI is connected to everything. There’s an idea for a real visual artist – go nuts!
AIs aren’t bad. It’s really the corporations behind them which practice tweedism in a democracy. They get to spend more on election campaigns, and they have a lot more of a say over nominations than anyone that can spend less than them. If you can control the nominations, you can control the vote.
If you can control the media, you can control the vote because you can manage the perceptions of the people who think their vote matters, and constantly polarizing things is good for business and managing perceptions.
I don’t know how we got here. I was just a latch-key kid in the 70s in Ohio, watching black and white re-runs of Superman with all that, “Truth! Justice! And the American Way!” Now being a latch-key kid is decidedly more dangerous. Just going to school goes beyond dealing with the bullies (easy enough, just hit them in the nose), now you have to worry about people unable to punch noses (for whatever reason) coming back to school and putting holes in people with their grandma’s AR-15. OK, I don’t think that’s happened yet, but it seems sadly plausible.
My big escapades included being shot with a BB gun – metal BBs – and getting cracked over the head with a baseball bat. Getting shot with an actual gun is some next level stuff. I don’t get how we got there, either.
Yet – when we’re young, if our parents are doing their jobs even 25% right1, we feel safe. I felt safe, with my greatest fear being the words, “Wait til your father gets home”. Things weren’t perfect, but overall, I felt pretty safe. I’d be in the front yard in suburbia, or riding my bicycle, or… something other than staring at a flat screen: Those Superman episodes were stolen, but what my parents didn’t know when they weren’t around…
Because I felt safe, I bought into the “Truth! Justice! And the American Way!” naively. Little House On the Prairie preached values, and when my mother wasn’t around, I got to watch “Gunsmoke” and “Wild Wild West” with my father – where other values were instilled.
Yet when I look around, I don’t see those values in a place of authority. In my lifetime, I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen them. It’s like watching a band lip synch at a concert: Something’s off. You can tell.
And how did we get to billionaires making money off of work they haven’t bought, haven’t even looked at themselves, created by people they don’t care about, and used to regenerate things without attribution or even thought. Just lawsuits in a world where words have gained the flexibility of contortionists.
I wonder how it happened so I can know where we should be – and then we have to figure out a way to get there, those of us that are interested.
Yes, I made that up, but I don’t think any parent gets things 100% right, and it’s probably for the best or there wouldn’t be a constant interest in improving parenting. Plus, we humans don’t come with instruction manuals. We are just tax breaks that grow up to pay taxes. ↩︎
I don’t know about you, but the world seems pretty whackadoodle right now. We have the whole Middle East thing, with Syria having just this weekend overthrown Assad, we have… well, the whole Israel vs. Everyone thing, we have the trade wars between the US and China that will drive prices of everything up likely, we have Ukraine still being invaded by Russia’s ‘3 month special operation’ over 1,000 days into it…
We want something sensible, so we go where we’re comfortable. It used to be caves, probably. Now we go to the echo chambers of social media that simply reinforces whatever we believe in. Unknowingly, we huddled masses contribute to the outright insanity of the world by becoming more and more polarized.
It’s that it’s perfectly fine to stop looking at the same stuff being offered on social networks, social media and websites. No one dies if you hit pause on the echo chambers. You might feel that way, but your concerns will be there when you get back.
It’s good to just reset yourself now and then. New speak calls it ‘self-care’, but to me that has become a platitude regurgitated by anyone who has seen memes on LinkedIn. Digital detoxification, whatever else, these are just fancy words that are bullet points that have no meat to them.
Do you know what self-care is? You can’t unless you know yourself, and as uncomfortable as you might be around yourself, you’re stuck with yourself for life. You can find all sorts of opinions all over the Internet. I don’t have one for you. What I’m saying is that it’s perfectly fine to explore other interests despite what the algorithms are offering you on your shopping websites, your social networks, and whatever you last saw scribbled on the bathroom wall. The last may actually be the healthiest for you.
If you take the age of humanity – draw the line where you will – and subtract your age, you will come up with the number of years that humanity has survived without needing to feed you information and get you increasingly emotional about topics, enough so that you’re hissing and spitting at other people online, or worse, standing with a group of people who all agree with your sentiments just so you can continue feeling safe.
The world isn’t safe. There are things that make us feel safe and comfortable. Like minded people (watch out when everyone starts dressing alike), new sheets, a cup of coffee, a really good steak or salad, or they same sort of content that you saw the day before. These do not really make us safe.
Beware oracles that always tell you what you want to hear instead of what you need to hear.
The first trick of getting out of an echo chamber is realizing you’re in one.
One of the reasons I have not been writing as much for the past for months was analysis paralysis. For years in corporate technology settings, I promised myself that I would make good on getting to writing at some point. I made a decision in the early 1990s to pay bills and help support parents rather than be the broke writer that had to compromise himself to earn a living. The world changed.
My plans I was in the process of making concrete were hit with the phosphoric acid of LLM training and competition even as I was laying the cornerstone.
My mother was a writer. She self-published in the 1970s through the 1990s by getting her poetry printed and, as far as I know, she never broke even. She kept writing anyway, and I think she was pretty good despite some of the opinions she expressed – she expressed them well.
There was one poem she wrote about how Poets were esteemed in Somalia and given prominence – I can’t seem to find it as she sadly didn’t publish it online – but the gist of it was that there are, or were, parts of the world where poetry was important. By extension, writing was important, and writing was respected.
Writers were seen as noble artisans of the written word, earning their keep through the sweat of ink that scrawled out of their hands and, later, keyboards. In today’s digital Wild West, writing for money online feels a bit like leaving cookies on the counter of a house full of raccoons. You’re crafting something delightful, but someone, somewhere, is plotting to grab it and run—no credit given, no crumbs left behind. Even online publishing with Amazon.com is fraught with such things, and the only way to keep from the dilution of your work is to dilute it yourself.
We find ourselves aliens in a world we created. Inadvertently, I helped build this world, as did you, either by putting pieces of code together to feign intelligence (really, just recording our own for replays) or our demand for fresh content that sparked imagination.
Welcome to the age of content scraping, where your genius headlines and painstakingly researched prose are more at risk than a picnic basket in Jellystone Park.
Scraping is nothing new. Companies—and bots with names like “Googlebot” (friendly) or “AggressiveRandoBot42” (not so much)—are prowling the internet, vacuuming up your hard-earned words faster than you can type them to train their Large Language Models, or AIs. They aren’t even considered shady. And it’s not just shady websites in the far corners of the web. You don’t know who is doing it.
What’s left for you? Crumbs, if you’re lucky. So, how do you stay ahead of the scrapers while still getting paid?
Step 1: Write With a Purpose
Personally, I’m not too much about monetization and yet I drink coffee that costs money. It’s a reality for all of us, a system born into where I can’t pay my bills by sending people words.
Let’s start with the golden rule of online writing: never write for free unless it’s a passion project—or revenge poetry about scrapers. Every blog post, article, or eBook should have a direct or indirect income stream attached.
Direct Revenue: Ads, sponsored posts, or affiliate marketing links.
Indirect Revenue: Use your content to build an email list or funnel readers toward a product or service you offer.
Be yourself: technologies are increasingly mimicking, but they can’t do what you do.
Scrapers might steal your content, but they can’t siphon your strategy directly. They can, however, adapt quickly based on the information they get, so you have to stay on your toes.
Step 2: Build the Fortress: Protecting Your Content
If you’ve ever tried to protect your lunch from a determined coworker, you’ll understand this analogy: scrapers don’t care about rules. But you can make their lives harder.
Add Internal Links: Keep scrapers busy by linking to other parts of your site. If they scrape one post, they get a tangled web that leads readers right back to you.
Use Watermarks in Imagery: For visual-heavy posts, watermark your images with your logo or website URL. It’s digital branding in action.
Insert Easter Eggs: Include subtle shout-outs to your own name or brand. Scrapers might miss these, but real readers won’t. You do know you’re on RealityFragments.com, right?
Consider Subscriptions: Some websites allow you to close your content to subscribers, but you need consistent readers to pull that off.
Step 3: Turn the Tables—Use Scrapers to Your Advantage
Here’s the plot twist: sometimes, scrapers inadvertently help you. When your content gets stolen but still links back to you, it can drive traffic to your site.
But how do you ensure that happens?
Embed Links Thoughtfully: Include links to high-value content (like an eBook sales page or an email sign-up form). If they scrape your post, their audience might still end up on your site.
Use Syndication Smartly: Syndicate your content to reputable platforms, as few as they are. These platforms might outrank the scrapers and help your original post shine. Also note when you post to them, you should still expect your content to be scraped
Use LLMs to check your own work: LLMs are trained by scraping. My own writing is something I like to assure is fresh and original, so I have LLMs I installed that are disconnected from the Internet (instructions on how to do that with 0llama here) to assure the same. I’ve found it very helpful to make sure I’m original since they scrape everyone else’s content… (and probably mine).
Step 4: Embrace the Impermanence
At the end of the day, the internet is a giant soup pot, and everyone’s stirring it. You can’t stop all the scrapers, but you can focus on making your content work harder for you.
Repurpose: Turn blogs into videos, podcasts, or infographics. It’s much harder for scrapers to steal a voiceover than it is to Ctrl+C your text. I stink at this and need to get better.
Engage Directly: Build relationships with your audience through comments, newsletters, and social media. Scrapers can’t steal community.
Focus on Creating: A creator creates, and the body of work is greater than the sum of its parts. I think of this as the bird that can land on a branch not because it trusts the strength of the branch but because it trusts it’s wings. Trust your wings.
Conclusion: Keep Writing Anyway
Writing for a living online in an era of content scraping is a lot like running a lemonade stand during a rainstorm. It’s messy. There are periods of disheartenment. Life is not easy. But when the sun comes out—or when the right reader finds your work—it’s worth it.
So, write boldly, monetize smartly, and remember: scrapers might steal your words, but they can’t steal your voice, though Sir David Attenborough can argue that. They cannot take away your ability to be human and create.
Stay witty, stay scrappy, and may your words always pay their rent and bring someone value.
Some people I trusted lied to me recently, knowing full well that I would find out within a matter of days. I, of course, found out earlier because of the relationships I have built over time, and so it came back to me almost immediately that I had been lied to.
Clearly, I’m not going to trust those two people as much again, but I suspected them not telling me the truth because of their behavior. The confirmation only proves what I suspected: They are poor liars.
It wasn’t about something important enough to make a difference, but two things bothered me about it: First, they knew I would end up finding out and were dishonest anyway, and second, that they would risk a relationship built over years to be dishonest to me.
Clearly I had valued the relationship more than they did, which is often the issue when it comes to forms of betrayal. If you value a relationship highly and the other values the relationship less than you expect, ‘betrayal’ is often what we feel. This is an important thing to know since I may have positional authority over them soon, particularly since as I have come to understand that they may have been instructed to lie by someone who will be an equal in the near future, which also tells me that the equal doesn’t see themselves as equal. They see themselves as above, and that does not bode well for any sort of relationship. Or maybe it’s just insecurity.
I tend to live my life openly and transparently. I value authenticity of people and provide the same. If I can’t say something because it might betray a trust, I say that or avoid being put in a position where I would have to say that. The people I try to surround myself with respect those sorts of boundaries, because if I invoke it for someone else, I will invoke it for them. Because of this, I have a small circle of people I call friends where the level of trust is high, and this could be because of my own attachment disorder as well; I understand I have one and have pushed back against it for some time. It’s hard to tell where it begins or ends. How one feels about a person isn’t always about the person.
This is pretty important to be able to work through. It seems like a life skill that we should pay more attention to, particularly in an age where people are having their text generated by algorithms trained on the output of what could be the most dishonest and delusional species on the planet.
In that regard and a few others, I am thankful for the dishonesty – it tells me who is not trustworthy over little things, and when they are not trustworthy over the little things, the big things are always suspect – for they are made of the little things.
Half watching the world’s rhetoric spinning against it’s axis, I ended up in a conversation with a supporter of the opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. We both agreed that the present leadership of the opposition party, the UNC, should step down, and the argument presented was that ‘we need to support her because…”
It’s a bad argument, albeit pragmatic. It’s like saying you’re going to have another drink when you’ve just dodged the barstools to get to the bar, weaving as if the entire bar were being tilted like the old pinball games. “One more drink…”
It’s a short term solution to a long term problem, and like such solutions, it generally comes with a hangover.
This same person – a friend, someone I respect – made the mistake that the U.S. Presidential debate hosted by CNN demonstrated why Biden should step down (I do not disagree) and why Trump should win. So the short term solution only applies to something he’s passionate about, but at a distance discussing another country, his argument changed. Why?
Passion disguised as pragmatism versus pragmatism.
There are so many problems with democracy that it makes young intelligent people look into other modes of government, from communism to socialism, and they’re equally screwed up at best because people are… people, regardless of what system you put them in. I’m half surprised sometimes that someone doesn’t suggest monarchies again, but then what is a dictatorship but a crownless monarchy, and what does democracy do when it wants to protect it’s interests? It embraces dictatorships with the belief that they can be controlled as much as voters think politicians can be controlled.
If you find yourself on a planet where they vote for politicians, leave. That’s my advice.
Politicians dress in whatever fabric of society is most popular, and like good marketers, sometimes they create the need to fulfill. Elected officials don’t do what we want them to do, they do what they want to do. We could simply remove them and vote on things rather elevate puppets we cannot control. You want to go to way? How much in taxes are you willing to put that way? Are you willing to go fight? To send your children to war? No? Well, you don’t really want a war.
You want to help here? Great, how much are you willing to pay in taxes to do so?
Of course, that dooms underprivileged communities, but they were doomed by the same systems that rule the world now, and no, no matter how much you protest, you’re still part of a system that allows and ignores protest. It’s not about voices, it’s about what’s trendy and popular because people don’t vote for rationality, they vote for comfort. When they get in that voting booth, all bets are off: It’s about how they feel.
And who are they most feeling about? Themselves and their circle, not some ideal that is lost when people outgrow Disney remakes of the classics. People aren’t as good at thinking as feeling.
That, you see, is how democracy died. The marketers became campaign managers, and the game is completely rigged.
Being ‘woke’ and being ‘enlightened’ are different, and are vectors, not scalars.
There’s a lot to consider these days regarding intelligence and consciousness. I’ve developed my own thoughts over time, as we all have to some degree, but few of us it seems have the time or inclination to really sit and think about such things.
What separates us from other forms of life on the planet? Only we have excised ourselves from the rest of life on the planet as far as we know, and that’s fairly narcissistic of our species, a species where we accuse individuals of our species of narcissism – which must mean that they’re pretty bad if they merit a diagnosis rather than suffer armchair psychologists around the world.
When we boil down what reality is for us, it’s all derived from our senses. We look, we smell, we touch and we listen – these are our inputs, and from it we develop a model of the world within what we call our minds, which we blame our brains for. Yet there are other senses we have related to our own bodies and how we physically and emotionally feel at any given time, and influences how we perceive the world.
How that interacts with others is akin, if not the same thing, as a ‘sphere of influence’ – something my father often talked about, since he had heard about spheres of influence somewhere: I’d read all the same books he had, sometimes even before he got finished reading them. I don’t know where he was introduced to the concept, but the concept is worth fleshing out in an era where we’re all data streams to fund some billionaire’s stab at a version of success that seems disassociated with the rest of the planet.
It is always fashionable to point out others live in bubbles, and saying that billionaires live in bubbles doesn’t let us off the hook. Some people admire the bubbles and want to get into a bubble – a sphere with that much influence.
I’ve been listening to Lex Fridman podcasts on YouTube in the background off and on over the past month, and I forget in which of them he mentioned that he wanted to use his influence for good in an election year, or in some other thing, and I admired his honesty in that and worried that his own sphere wasn’t broad enough to truly have an effect I would desire. Often he seems a supportive role in whomsoever he talks to. I forced myself to listen to his episode with Elon Musk – at least one of them, they seem to talk offline a lot – and in that podcast there seemed a lot of soft pitches to Musk, and much of it was nothing more than what I call an advertorial.
To his credit, the casual listener may not have picked up on that with Musk, and those who want to be like Musk (in whatever way) wouldn’t want to notice it, but as someone who is not impressed with Musk, I forced myself to listen to the interview and be as objective as possible. Musk, like everyone else, wants to make the world a better place, but the way that he sees the world is often incompatible with reality in my mind. That being said, I listened and found myself mildly impressed with how human he came across. Yet when I thought through everything, it was a mildly entertaining soft pitch for Grok throughout, while not actually challenging Musk.
The comments on the video were quite supportive of Musk. It’s a hit. Lex Fridman, then, would see how many views the episode had, read the comments, and think it was all wonderful – but having listened to many of these sessions, and watching the body language in the videos, some of those interviewed (and I include Musk) weren’t really challenged and where criticism of them was either ignored or simply peacefully bridged, as if the opinions didn’t matter.
And yet, there were gems, like this one with Sara Walker. It’s long, it’s worth it, and while she does seem to have what I call a ‘Valley Girl vocal tic’ which I generally don’t find endearing and often have trouble taking seriously. ‘Fer shure!’ and stuff like that have been grossly overdone with shallow movies, and isn’t something I hear often outside of that context – but she is amazingly well thought, and like me, she likes playing with words (and also like me, apparently, doesn’t think in words).
It was a soft pitch for her upcoming book, too, but in this context – and I’ll give Musk credit for saying this, paraphrased – advertising that is contextual to what a person wants or needs at a time is content. Well, maybe, it depends on how the want or need was created. It happens that she was talking about things that I was thinking about and she randomly popped up in YouTube. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, watch the video. She’s quite well thought on all of this. She’s someone I wouldn’t mind having coffee with, if she could put up with my speaking style – I imagine it works both ways. Regardless of how Sara Walker says it, she says a lot worth listening to1.
When ideas collide in the ether between we humans, it’s because of language communicating a common concept between people. It can be between two people, and that develops a common language. It can happen within a group of people who work or play with the same things, which gives us lingos. On rare occasions, these lingos – words or acronyms – can go mainstream, as the meme about memes did by Richard Dawkins. And even then they can be curtailed by languages2, and when it transcends language, it hits very mainstream.
One of the beautiful things that Levy writes on is IEML, a semantic language he created that has challenged me more than I have had the capacity to challenge it. I have yet to see someone come up with an equivalency, which may exist. I have also yet to see anyone approach a lot of knowledge management in the same regard, particularly in an age where Large Language Models are also ‘Literal Language Models’.
These spheres of influence are telling. Pierre Levy resides mainly in academia, and AI resides in the mouths of people marketing stuff that while initially impressive has demonstrated more and more that it can regurgitate the opinions of others based on what it has read. This marketers have celebrated as a success, and this I have seen as a limitation that more data is not going to solve.
‘Spheres of Influence’ also… aren’t spheres. They are shaped by what we are exposed to, and when people focus on one aspect I describe it as wobbling, because these ‘spheres’ spin, and it’s convenient to talk about spheres since they are so perfect – but we are not perfect, we have our biases, some of us delve deeply into subjects and change our centers drastically. People who are more open minded would be more fluid, like water, and those who are closed minded can be like concrete.
This kind of stuff is part of the basis of the novel I’ve been working on. Would love to hear more from others, though my own sphere of influence on the internet is not that large. Comment below.
Her book comes out in August 2024, and I’ll get a copy because of how she expressed what she did: “Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence”. I didn’t agree with everything she said, and that’s exactly why she’s worth reading for me. I may not know enough. 🙂 ↩︎
I prefer the Spanish word idioma for language – it seems much more sensible to me as it encapsulates dialects as well. ↩︎
