I was thinking of this line from Montaigne recently:

our private wishes are for the most part born and nourished at the expense of others.

I recalled it in the context of a 6000 word essay from Mark Zuckerberg about the future of AI, which for the most part read like a lot of empty words about the greatness of himself. But here’s what stuck out to me:

People have an infinite demand for new experiences and have always found new problems to tackle.

I guess that’s one way of putting it. Another might be that human beings have an infinite number of ways their impulses can be exploited for commercial gain and if they aren’t apparent, extraordinarily powerful technologies and interests will happily create them.

I was recently on Instagram and was immediately bombarded with a massive number of right wing videos spreading political propaganda. I found this odd, because I’ve already filtered my feed to not include political content. And I blocked the sources of these videos as soon as I came across them.

This, I later found out, was only making the situation worse, because the time it takes to ban a specific piece of content is actually considered attention spent on a video, so it was just encouraging more of the same. I had to go into my settings and reset my recommended feed. And this worked.

But what I then received instead was bizarre. I suddenly started to see lots of videos of women at various stages of undress. I didn’t even know this was permitted on the app. Now, honestly, I don’t really care if someone shows me bare breasts and butts, I don’t think that’s a major concern (although I would understand parents not wanting their children to see this.)

What I found incredible is that the pictures were far more explicit than that. And it just underscored what a wild west this country has become, with no meaningful regulation in place at all. I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg is perfectly happy to siphon off some of the OnlyFans revenue his sites have become feeder sources of traffic for.

And so I’m stuck in an endless cycle of resetting my feed, which really should just make me shut it down entirely. What do I need this for?

I guess for that “infinte demand for new experiences.” Zuckerberg promises these Meta-created AI agents that will know us so well, they will go out and get us the things we need before we even know we need them. So his vision of the future is just to turn us into spending, masturbating drones of Meta, creating him endless mountains of money.

These private wishes all have a cost, even if experienced on a free app. We’re all wasting our time and attention. We’re surrendering moments of potential connection and creativity. We’re creating all powerful unregulated — increasingly unregulatable — corporations that will destroy our ability to join together and solve real collective problems.

Only “problems” with potential profits will be solved in the future. The rest, the real social ills, will just continue to grow. Our privacy will be destroyed by Zuckerberg’s next iteration of perv glasses. People will lose individuality and will just mimic the behavior they see on screens. We’ll lose our taste in everything and will just share the experiences that look most similar to others shared with us.

All to make Zuckerberg and others like him richer and more powerful. Welcome to the future of infinite problems to tackle.