Have you ever wondered where we disappeared to?
The answer is simple: We just couldn’t take it anymore.
Allow me to explain:
The glory days of the internet are long over. It had a good run, but it’s done.
I’d compare this sorry state of affairs to the history of widespread cocaine use in America, it’s almost the exact same story. (Okay, okay, it’s not even a remotely similar narrative, but don’t harsh my analogy!) At first, it was all fun and games. Pure and undiluted nose candy for the masses. The 1970s must’ve been incredible! But then the Devil’s dandruff starts getting stepped on. Unscrupulous dealers began cutting their Peruvian marching powder with baby laxatives and veterinary dewormers. Ultimately it becomes more of a situation where the dealers were cutting their baby laxative with cocaine and not the other way around. Now it’s all just garbage.
And that what’s happened with Internet content, too. When everyone got online in the mid-90s, it was fun and wild and fascinating. New and novel experiences awaited. Fast forward to today and the World Wide Web is sadly akin to a selfie and meme-filled version of WALL-E’s junkyard planet or an ocean full of plastic bottles and other human-created detritus. A friend of mine once described what we did at Dangerous Minds as “panning for Internet gold” but I told him I thought it was more like spelunking in a dank cave, standing in a river of shit wearing hip-high waders and a gas mask.
Today’s internet is by and large a highly toxic HAZMAT site. Assholes are everywhere you turn. You can’t escape them. But on top of that, all the creativity has vanished. What started as a massive outpouring of cross-cultural communication, international information exchange and just plain HIGH WEIRDNESS has turned into a filtered, Facetuned selfie-infested septic tank of “LOOK AT ME” frivolity, knucklehead narcissism and abject idiocy. The rise of the TikTok “expert” dolling out their supposed wisdom in 45-second increments seems to me an especially pernicious development. These people are seldom experts on anything other than hashtags and yet they all apparently have an audience 10X that of CNN’s.
With the AI apocalypse rapidly encroaching upon us it’s about to get even worse. I knew it when I first saw that Star Wars if it had been directed by Wes Anderson video. “Hmmm, that’s kinda clever” immediately gave way to “Okay I get this and I can’t be bothered to even watch it to the end.” It was a watershed moment for me and when I realized THIS SHIT IS THE FUTURE.
In retrospect, I wish I was right about this, but when the latest text-to-video AI product, Dream Machine, was released last week, what did the public decide to do with it? Something far more regrettable: animating popular memes!
Dream Machine by Luma AI is just 3 days old.
— Madni Aghadi (@hey_madni) June 15, 2024
Now memes are becoming videos.
10 wild examples:
1. Distracted boyfriendpic.twitter.com/QXNDQdkY4P
I know, let’s make it worse! That short animated clip of the Distracted Boyfriend meme represents—sums up even—how low we’ve sunk culturally. This is it, people, the crown of creation. This mindless nonsense is the rest of your life and for the lives of every generation to come until the world finally ends in a paroxysm of kitsch.
Wouldn’t it have been better to point all this capital and technology towards developing a utopian future where no one has to work and everyone is freed up to develop their own individuality and creativity?
NOPE! Not when you can have an animated “Zuckerberg is watching” meme instead!!
7. Zuckerberg is watchingpic.twitter.com/NphmK5nvg8
— Madni Aghadi (@hey_madni) June 15, 2024
We simply couldn’t take it anymore. The Internet has just gotten too fucking dumb. And it’s hardly a case of the culture being dumbed down. On the contrary, it’s being dumbed UP.
So Dangerous Minds is evolving into something new. We’re going to do something different. Something that’s not been filtered or Facetuned or to be found anywhere in this cultural wasteland full of regurgitated garbage. Something with actual experts who know what they’re talking about and can speak intelligently for longer than a minute. Something that will make you smarter.
We’ll announce what this new venture is in the coming days, so keep watching this space, where all will be revealed…