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How to Survive the Death of the Internet

Fractal Philosophy

244,655 views

The internet is incomprehensibly big and filled with slop.
In this video we talk about how it got like that, how search and recommendation algorithms were designed to fix it, and why they are now breaking down. Also featured is me getting upset at other people's attitudes towards AI, and my personal recommendations for how to produce and consume stuff on the internet going forward.

Theoretically I should put more keywords from the video in the description here in order to improve SEO and such things, but that's kind of the entire thing I am arguing against. (Also AFAIK on Youtube specifically that kind of thing barely matters - its all about that title and thumbnail)

New discord for the channel here: Discord: discord
Running a new book club there now and will hopefully launch some indie game playtests and the like in the future. Also some other cool people to chat with.

If you want to follow me at a different site for free or want to support this channel financially I am on patreon here: Patreon: FractalPhilosophy
There is also an audio only version of this video from before I got laid off on there, so that might be fun to compare against.

0:00 Library of Babel
6:02 Library of the Internet
11:35 Search Algorithms
19:07 The Dying Internet
27:30 Engineer Defines Art
32:47 AI, Art, and Angry Narration
42:16 How to Survive
46:20 Outro

積読
Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
Enshittification by Cory Doctorow
The Score by C. Thi Nguyen
Games: Agency as Art by C. Thi Nguyen
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
The Grasshopper by Bernard Suits
Unflattening by Nick Sousanis
Romance of the Three Kingdoms attributed to Luo Guanzhong
The Dark Forest by Cixin Lui
Legend of the Galactic Heroes by Yoshiki Tanaka
Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Speaking of Youtube videos linking to other videos - I've been watching this one a lot recently.
Will The Computer Love The Sunset

20 Comments

@TastySlowCooker 20 hours ago (edited)

This reminds me of a videographer friend who had the hobby of watching a random YouTube video with zero views, and leaving a technical criticism of the videography. Like critiquing that how a baby was framed didn’t make thematic sense, or pointing out that the background of someone’s dog was washed out

@craftersshaft 18 hours ago

Guy who has only seen The Boss Baby, checking out his 937,027,263th book in the Library of Babel: Getting a lot of 'Boss Baby' vibes from this...

@WarFant 22 hours ago (edited)

0:15 "oh, so it's the library of babel."
looks at the chapter name
"oh"

@nickm3694 17 hours ago

The one thing I wish more people would point out about the Library of Babel is that it's not just way more likely to produce nonsense. It's also way more likely to produce false information, fake answers to millenium problems, and future predictions that won't actually happen, because there's just so many more ways to be wrong than there is to be right about something.

@anderskallberg7969 19 hours ago

"LLMs are the demon that cries out for its mother when you try to kill it, not because it has a mother, but because it knows it's the type of thing that will get humans to treat it better" 38:54
Damn, that's a terrifyingly accurate simile of their soulless nature

@Kram1032 15 hours ago

A conservation focused company of all things falling off the AI deep end is kinda insane

@laserpanda9553 17 hours ago (edited)

The library of Babel is the only library you can't learn from. There's infinite noise. You can find a cure to every cancer but you can find infinite "cures" for every cancer, and you would have no way to tell

@InkandCorrosion 16 hours ago

Management is, almost universally, incompetent. Back when Claude first came out, I was working at a publishing company. The chairman looked at Claude, found that it could, sometimes, if it managed to get the stanzas and feet correct, write sonnets. He spent six months spamming his staff with Claude-generated sonnets and, somewhere amidst that, decided that his editors should just use Claude to write all of the content for the books he wanted to publish.

The editors dutifully tried it, despite knowing the problems, and then had a 3-hour meeting with this idiot where they had to explain to him, while he literally kicked and screamed at them, that he would literally be committing plagiarism. And not just that, but, if you remember the content from back then, BAD plagiarism. The kind where none of the sources exist, the links don't work, the books and papers were never written, and the authors are fabricated.
This guy is like late 60-70s. And instead of listening to them, he just tried to yell over the top of their arguments while they tried to stop him torpedoing his entire fucking company.

They had to do this every other week. That is barely an exaggeration. I hear this same kind of story a lot.

Management are largely boomers, and they are fucking incompetent.

@Wintersolstice82943 18 hours ago

Something else that's interesting to think about is that these platforms aren't actually incentivized to show you the best content to keep you watching/scrolling. In reality they have to keep showing you things that are decent enough to keep you engaged but not good enough to keep you satisfied, so you keep looking, watching more videos. It's effectively a casino, where you gamble with your time and they give you just enough quality to keep you there. I also think this has led to general taste in media and content lowering over time, but that's a far more subjective and nuanced conversation.

@madengineerkyouma 6 hours ago

"If a technology is not helping you, you can just ignore it"

That's why I disabled my youtube history so I don't even have a homepage anymore, pretty much all of what I watch is creators I already followed before that, creators who are mentioned by creators I follow and friend recomendations.

@gioXLVI 19 hours ago

Games unlimited games,
But no games

@SmartGamer1234 17 hours ago

44:52
"Significantly, I don't make music. I think creating art in any medium will give you a better appreciation for art in any other medium."

this really connects with me and I don't know why...

@kacperepcakacperepcak 18 hours ago

>How to survive the death of the internet

Honestly, I'm more worried what will happen if it will not die.

@b130610 19 hours ago

Holy crap, if the company that fired you is the one I'm thinking of, their new website is actually hilarious. It's like a parody modern companies slapping "ai" on their name. Love your video essays, and hope that they work out for you!

@SparkpadArt 13 hours ago

The blandness of AI content has given me a greater appreciation for human-made art, flaws and all. Whether it's labeled "good" or "bad", I look for works that are fun, that make me feel something, that I find meaningful enough to replay in their entirety whenever I think of them.

@DAG_42 13 hours ago

Omg the horror of the leadership at your former employer... it's terrifying the people in leadership can be so deeply naive on 3 or 4 levels at once. Just wow

@DoshDoshington 11 hours ago

Very good video. This mirrors a lot of my own personal experience with art and content creation. It's also a reminder of the unfortunate reality where as long as there exists a financial incentive for these companies to allow AI slop, (even to the detriment of their product's actual purpose) there will be no meaningful change on par with the original search algorithms.

@henysoft 21 hours ago

You've quickly become my favourite youtuber, within the three uploads I've watched

@monad_tcp 11 hours ago

41:05 the fact that managements SO EASILY got captured by LLMs everywhere says something very critical about management. That their job is actually the easiest to automate, and that their decisions really don't bear any consequence. They're playing with a toy wheel, LLMs basically connect the toy wheel to the actual machine. Which will end up very well for society.