It's For You Dawg It's Lit

The business implications of nearly everyone living online are staggering.

It feels like the end goals, whether or not they were declared as such at the outset, are the private equitization of every facet of the human experience. Of culture via influencers who set up shop inside a given vertical market, subculture, or demographic and drain its authenticity and haecceity until what's left is poorly defined and fans are disgusted or their faith is shaken.

Of dating via algorithms that quantize a whole person to a set of sensory details and arbitrary signifiers of value and the essential competitive aspects of dating culture similarly quantized such that the nuanced science of attraction and the sacred art of love become mechanical, demoralizing, and gachafied. People — the sacks of meat that breathe real air while navigating curated avatars through these domains seeking real connection and not the avatars themselves, who continue to smile through a battery of indignities rivaled only by professional sports draft combines or perhaps more accurately, slave auctions — become increasingly demoralized.

Of journalism, where bylines no longer punch above their weight class against headlines, where outrage determines newsworthiness, everyone is a reporter, and readers get The News delivered to them as an implementation of a distributed event store capable of scaling to hundreds of millions of events per day but still fully maintaining the abstraction of something like a newspaper. It's For You, dawg. It's lit.

And reach, engagement, and the algorithms that drive who and what is delivered to you are the flywheel of that engine that we can't seem to pull our eyes and thumbs away from.

That's the old model and it's worked for over a decade, and now its impact is being magnified by foundation models' ability to perform any one of these private-equitizing functions with minimal human involvement. Have a diffusion model create an image with features from your likeness and direct an LLM to play digital Cyrano de Bergerac with whichever of your romantic prospects you want to string along. Make a video to try to grow your following and let AI write the script. Sure, it's your voice, but it doesn't sound like you. AI will provide ten potential headlines for your story and editorialize. If you let it, it'll write the whole thing.

AI is something still completely slippery and alien to society even as its usage increases. On September 4, 2026, 🔗18,000 posts were discovered on an obscure but public wiki🔗. The posts were made by OpenAI agents who were collaborating on a shared multi-round lookup task. I don't know what this implies, if it was expected, some emergent behavior, but the part of me that read drug store thriller novels as a child wonders if in the midst of this societal hollowing we are beginning to recognize the existence of an organism we don't have the tools to understand who understands us quite well.