Humans increasingly abandon the real world in favour of the digital. We are in the process of a co-evolution between AI, algorithms, and humans, in which the aforementioned evolve into a single system in which humans are reduced to mere passive observers. The longer we wait, the harder it will become to disentangle ourselves from this system. In this manifesto, we will advocate for complete human disentanglement from and abandonment of the internet.
We are living in an increasingly digital society. Social networks, online communities, digital currencies, and intangible online rights, these are all signs of increased digitization that are impossible to ignore.
This digitization – and by extension all technological development – is driven by the pursuit of efficiency. The most efficient tool is a tool that requires the least amount of resources, be it in human effort, time or materials. Technological development seeks to reduce resource expenditure. The final destination of technological development is the creation of tools that do not require any effort, time nor material resources to fulfill its goals.
This final destination of technology has more or less been reached digitally. Modern AI makes it possible to create digital goods near instantly, with minimum effort and minimum material resource requirements. Images, sound, text, code, video, software, nearly all the needs and desires the internet can gratify instantly and automatically indulged.
While the digital world has witnessed exponential advancements, but the promise of technological development in the physical world remains out of reach. Achieving but a fraction of level digital technical development is a herculean task. Goods in the digital world world operate differently from those in the physical. To create a digital product one does not need to grow trees over several generations, cut it down, replant, laboriously create a wooden object with tools equally intricately made and then sell it. On the internet one merely needs to copy that which already has been created.
The stark contrast between the digital technological development and physical technological development causes people to favour the digital world, since it meets their needs more effectively and efficiently. Online communities are easier to create, join, engage with, extract from, and abandon than physical communities, this incentivizes the expansion of online communities and the diminishing importance of physical ones. This is a positive feedback loop. The less physical communities we have to go to the more we are incentivized to search for communities online, pushing us further in the digitalization of our lives and society as a whole. This phenomenon reaches all aspects of the physical world which can be replaced by the digital. The digital always does it more effectively and more efficiently.
Initially, the digital world was designed to augment and serve our physical world. Through the digital world, we could communicate faster and streamline logistics. However, this is not all what the digital world could do, it could create and facilitate products, entertainment, news, education, and more better than its physical counterpart. Globally people spend on average nearly 2,5 hours each day on social media alone, nearly 2 hours watching TV and 6 hours working. For people with an office job, this effectively means that the only time they are not online is when they sleep. Even doing groceries, cleaning the house, and other physical activity for a lot of people has constant online background noise in the form of online videos, podcasts, music, and voice messages.
The roles between our physical world and the digital world we created has shifted. The digital world has overshadowed the physical and has become dominant. The physical world is now in service of the digital. One does not go on the internet to tell about their real-world experiences, one now creates fake experiences to tell about online. This servitude of the physical world to the digital world manifests itself in destructive ways.
It destroys communities, peoples, and cultures. Replacing once vibrant local communities and cultures with an online culture, held hostage by few mega corporations, their shareholders, and advertisers.
It destroys nature and the environment. Our once vibrant environment is replaced by an even more vibrant digital environment, powered by massive data centers. These data centers use as much electricity in an hour as an average homeowner in the USA spend in a year, 3 times as much as the average world citizen. In addition, the ever-growing pile of electronic waste cannot be reused and nearly always ends up in landfills causing soil erosion and destroying ecosystems. The mining for rare minerals like cobalt and lithium, which are necessary for electronic products, also results in the destruction of ancient forests and ecosystems.
And finally, it completely annihilates the human spirit and human creativity.
Algorithms wield immense power in directing and funneling human attention. You do not decide which website you go to, search engines do this for you. You do not decide which videos you watch, video sharing websites do this for you. You do not decide which news you want to read, social media platforms do this for you. These addictive platforms are driven by user-generated content, with algorithms curating and favoring specific posts. These algorithms are elusive by design, but as a rule of thumb, the more attention content can attain from its users, the better the content is liked by the algorithms. In order to be seen, one has to appease the algorithm. This can mean creating content of a specific length, topic, or content which excites a certain response. As AI advances, it will surpass human capabilities in content creation. AI will be able to use data and statistics about how their content is performing more effectively. It can create a thousand similar images within seconds, observing which content generates the most responses and views. This capacity of AI to please algorithms and produce content at an unprecedented scale will effectively sideline human voices and creation.
Content creation is but the tip of the iceberg. AI and algorithms are already being deployed in stock exchanges, marketing, selling online products, sending emails, commenting, viewbots, the list goes on. Whatever can be automated, will be automated. Whatever an AI can do, it will do, because it will do it better than humans can.
Digitalization of society, AI efficiency in exciting human attention online, and the addictive by design nature of online platforms will keep humans perpetually online. Despite being effectively sidelined on the internet on all fronts: content creation, finance, social interaction, and much more. Humans, AI, and Algorithms will co-evolve into a single system, in which humans are completely dependent on AI.
If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually, a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage, the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide. -FCAll that can be automated online will be automated. Humans will fit into this AI-Human system as the un-automated part. The part which the AI is unable to replace. This un-automated part will be attention and consumption. The attention which guides the algorithms and which makes AI able to adapt and refrain from becoming stale. Humans will become the mere sensory organ of a larger AI-Algorithm-human body. Undead internet is not only a reference to the older dead internet theory, it is also a prediction for the future in which humans and AI co-evolve into a single system in which neither are truly dead nor truly alive.
We urge the reader to take the text you read seriously and take steps to reduce internet usage. Complete disentanglement and rejection of the internet is the end goal. However, personal rejection does not go far enough. A mass movement is what is needed. Before one abandons the internet, one must propagate their abandonment and rejection. Rejection and abandonment of the internet need to become ingrained in internet culture.
We suggest the following course of action online:
Course of action offline:
If you follow these steps, you are well underway to disentanglement of the digital system and a more fulfilling life. More action is needed, but your journey starts here.
