2023 - Quite a Ride

This is this time of the year: New Year’s Eve is approaching and I have taken the habit - here are 2021 and 2022 editions - to make a subjective situation report on how my views on social media and the world in general have changed during the course of this year. I believe it is a good hygiene discipline. If one thing is sure about digital culture, it is that nothing is simpler than loosing oneself in the eternal now. “The thing”s that social media are talking about are changing on a never slowing down pace.

What happened, how was it perceived, and in general what do we learned from 2023 ?

AI has become mainstream

The AI stormed the front of the news consistently throughout this year. Chat GPT and the various generative models were all over the place. In universities, schools, companies etc. AI made its way to the top. Chat GPT is the fastest growing technology ever. During 2023 it moved from essentially 0 to more than a 100 million users. With Google’s version Gemini who knows how many users there are today. The multiplicative effects of new information technologies worked as efficiently as possible. Yet AI were already in our digital lives: the social media feeds are built by AI for years. This motivated one of my first 2023 post. MidJourney gives a glaring representation of what is the mental landscape of social media:

Very early in 2023 started a weird conversation on AI safety. Doomers and acceleraters started to have heated debates on the future of AI research. We even had a call for à x months pause in research. I have participated in this discussion, had some X space with Doomers and tried to inject some sobering facts to the conversation. First - it is not a totally new situation: machines are stronger than human at chess for 25 years now, and second - thinking is not enough, you have to act in the material world and it is much more complex than usually thought. Here are links to two of my posts on this subject:

I also started to see nth order effects linked to AI developments. Notably because the LLMs need new fresh material to thrive on. It is going to become a problem because most of internet material is going to be produced by AI. Most of mainstream news could be redacted by LLMs you wouldn’t see the difference. One of the last area in which humans produce genuine data are social media. Therefore the data coming from social medial will be the fuel of LLMs. The recent launch of Grok that works on X.com is one example but I expect much more effects to come, among them an internet that is more and more closed.

Freedom of Speech and Reach

Of the most important thing that I realized during this year was that freedom of speech is a very flawed frame for digital societies. The “Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach” quote from E. Musk could be the motto of our times. Freedom of speech was a relevant concept in an editorial society in which written texts are vetted before being printed. In a digital society there is no barrier to prevent you from publishing and spreading your content worldwide. The order of magnitude to keep in mind is the following: the output of an average academic on a 1 year period weights, in terms of bits of information, as much as a standard TikTok video. Soon it will be way less because videos will be 4k or whatever. Today the real question is not around production but around consumption: who is going to access your content ? This is a tricky question because we are under a deluge of content. Just like obesity is a disease of an abundance economy, we have the same problem with information. The part that is hard to understand is that social media platform have an extraordinary power in choosing what they allow to go viral. This is mostly a hidden force that is witnessed only by second hand guesses. I addressed this question here:

Another related point that I discussed about in 2023 is the fact that the information flow is not symetric in social media. Here again it is something you can only guess and for which you would have hard times to discern directly. The way E. Musk interacted with Twitter crowd was a very good proxy to this idea. I posted about that here just when 2023 was starting out.

Evanescence

By this end of the year I have the feeling that things are getting more and more evanescent. I discussed the idea that power is no longer what it used to be: we have this idea that political power is expressed via different branches (legislative, executive and judiciary) but it less and less true. Nations states are no longer able to compete with big tech to provide new things. On the other hand they keep the raw power (military and police). Increasingly it is in a dance between tech and legacy institutions that the real power expresses itself in our digital society. Typically the tech comes with a new product/idea (AI in 2023, but crypto few years earlier and who knows what in the years to come) and Thierry Breton’s of the world come with new pieces of legislation to restrict the use of this novelty. In reality the legislation will never be fully applied and CEOs will be received as head of states. Don’t forget that this is this year that Musk unilateraly decided to shut down internet access to a country at war, during an offensive.

I had the idea that power is now a distributed feature of our society. Distributed being understood as in “distributed system”. I will certainly think more about that for the next year. Here are my two posts about this intuition:

Similarily most of the conversation is now held on social media: legacy media like TV and newspaper are trailing. Life is elsewhere. A major problem in having serious conversations over social media is that it is hard to refer to. The interaction part is great, and really brings benefits with relation to legacy media, but it is ineffable. You can’t cite it like a book or an article. It looks like a perpetual election campaign but without any vote. In the end it is very hard to pinpoint important moments or arguments. Something is lost in the public discussion. This is the flip side of the fact that news has become a continuous process: the news cycles are no longer aligned on the rythm of monthly/daily publication. Moreover you may easily find today people trapped in a news cycle of their choice and talking about vaccination hesitancy today…

2023 was way crazier than I expected. I don’t know how it could be that 2024 will be even worse but I have now close to no doubt that it will be the case. See you next here to see how it unravelled.