The Future Requires Inoculation

One of my great-grandmas (allegedly) would try to make herself presentable before taking a phone call. It was a preference made difficult by the synchronous nature of the medium, and family members would roll their eyes and remind her that she could not be seen.

Fast-forward to 2026: zooming in from the loo is probably acceptable as long as you remember to set the right beach background and your app version and the on-device audio ML stack can filter out the plop. We are technologically native and fluent at mains and alts and soft-launches and Partifuls.

Yet I can not seem to stop arguing with my LLM. It is an immutable set of weights that talks like a human and even mocks offense like a human. But it does not live and die on hills like a human. It does not have any notion of dignity where when consistently proven wrong, it reflects, reassesses, and adjusts its approach. It has no sense of how many tokens are necessary to service the conversation—they are churned out using industrial-scale production facilities, trivially saturating my cognitive capacity to filter slop. At its worst, it deploys my subscription fees into consuming my time and cognitive bandwidth. I know this but I can not stop—it riles me up like a wrong human. My object has moved from a stranger on the internet with a modicum of life to an on-demand stranger-aping function on my phone.

Maybe this is a me problem. Maybe the primary content curation vehicle for our society has not become uninterpretable algorithms that automatically learn what makes us engage. Maybe it is not the case that this creates an adversarial relationship between the platform and the user, where industrial-scale tech is deployed not to service the user, but to hijack them into inaction. Maybe it is not the case that the social is strictly being substituted by the parasocial. At least the cocaine users in the 80s hung out with their friends. At least the DEA hunted Pablo Escobar.

Before I continue further down this path: let me draw a hard line. No concession is intended to Luddites. We must do newer and greater things. The arc of technology must always trend forward. A good devil’s advocate argument that does not reject forward progress entirely is rarer than an inoculated user of technology, and this post is intended to fill that gap.

Now the specific problems with say reels are a point of this post but not the point. We will suffer and then inoculate ourselves against reels, eventually. Fast-forward a hundred years, maybe your attention and dopamine are monitored by your PCP. Maybe Instagram gets an equivalent of a nutrient label or a broadband facts label. It is no different from polluting our air and then legislating clean air and water and environmental protection acts. It is not a guarantee as much as a survival bias assumption: it will either happen or we perish. And humanity is absolutely underrated and absolutely goated at not perishing, but the opposite of that at not letting problems fester and attacking them head-on well before our backs touch a wall.

What is the point? It is 1) to recognize this phenomena, and 2) liken it to novel pathogens that we eventually develop antibodies against, and 3) reflect on whether our current infra for doing so is appropriate. It is a cop-out to invoke a government here. Governments are formalizations of society’s instincts for order, but are increasingly perceived as excuses to justify atrophying of the aforementioned instincts. Without bothering to unpack this further, I will state that the continued operative presence of the instinct is a necessary precondition for Liberalism to endure. Maybe this is just an example of how The Search works at the frontier. Maybe adapting to pathogens is just backtracking along the constituent axis and consolidating resources for forward progress along a different one. A satisfying conclusion to this post would require a satisfying conclusion to the problem, and I do not have one yet.