An AI in Every Email, DM, and Groupchat—Zuckerberg's Vision for the Future of the Internet
Today's newsletter is my attempt to triangulate two points of view articulated by people with very different takes about the future of the internet: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and writer Cory Doctorow. Zuckerburg has done as much to define the social media era of the internet as anyone. Doctorow, on the other hand, is a pied piper of internet counter-culture, as a co-founder of Boing Boing, and author of over a dozen books.
I've been on Al Gore's internet long enough to remember how open it used to be. The online Wild West that I first encountered in the late 1990s is now tamed and largely commodified. “The internet” used to mean a bunch of things: USENET newsgroups, blogs, IRC, imageboards, and a constellation of websites ranging from weird to truly "Something Awful." Now, according to Tech Monitor, roughly 60% of all internet traffic is people on FANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google). Most of the rest is (increasingly AI created) search engine optimized longform ads masquerading as usable content and overly elaborate narratives about fairly simple recipes.
We used to go to different websites, thus the term “surfing the web”. We now largely just open apps and their business models are predicated on keeping us on them for as long as possible—often by making us as angry as possible. Zuckerberg in creating Facebook and its algorithmic timeline is as responsible for this as anyone. Which is why I was surprised to hear him dedicate the first half of this interview with the Verge to praising the concept of interoperability.
If you’ve ever had a “should I send it on Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, or CashApp?” conversation, you should understand the potential of interoperability. It is defined as “the ability to transfer and render useful data and other information across systems, applications, or components.” So, if someone chooses to write on Mastodon, my current social app of choice, you could read it on other apps. More importantly, with interoperability, if one decides to leave Mastodon, they could take their social connections (social graph), including past posts and followers with them. As an aside, this newsletter is interoperable, you get it on the app or in your email but I can dip from Substack and move to another platform on a whim.
Most of the internet isn’t like this—it’s a choice made for us—not by us.
Hearing Zuckerberg talk about bringing interoperability to Facebook’s suite of products caught me off guard. He, more than anyone, lined his pockets by erecting virtual fences on the internet. Presumably he would have an interest in keeping people from taking their collection of Instagram posts and followers to an alternative like PixelFed or Flickr.
Facebook Wants to Put AI Everywhere
For a moment, he had me on interoperability, but then he went full Zuck and shifted to his intent to introduce AI chatbots across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram.
This is already off to a flying start. This week, Facebook rolled out a feature that allowed people to AI generate stickers and it created predictably bad results.
Introducing an AI into every email, group chat, and DM conversation is literally the worst possible idea imaginable from a privacy standpoint. It would be rocket fuel for stalkers, creepy ex-boyfriends, and the other dregs of the internet. There are currently apps out there, Texts from My Ex and Amori, that allow you to upload your prior text conversations to create an AI clone of your partner, to chat with—this literally the plot of a Black Mirror episode.
The idea of Texts from My Ex is gross enough, but having one of the largest corporations in the world signal their intent to roll out technology that will essentially do the same thing is troubling and definitionally dystopian.
Doctorow: Antitrust Law Exists for a Reason
In Doctorow’s conversation with Vice, he was more effusive than Zuckerbeg in his support for interoperability online. Rather than Zuckerberg’s “I like this philosophically,” he made the case that interoperability can and should be mandated by regulators.
Because of the long-embedded Silicon Valley ethos, the Californian Ideology, internet policy conversations tend to be dominated by a form of techno-libertarianism. It was refreshing to hear someone talk about the affirmative case for using the power of the state.
Doctorow also hammered the commodification and homogeneity of the internet and again placed the blame at the feet of regulators for largely abandoning antitrust enforcement in the Reagan years and never looking back.
The case of Facebook is instructive: being allowed to acquire WhatsApp, in 2014, and Instagram, in 2012, mean the company has 7 billion customer accounts. That number nears the total global population because many users have accounts on multiple of the platforms. That level of market dominance should never have been allowed and leads to our reality where according to Doctorow, the internet is now “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.” It is largely a failure of the DOJ and if regulators don’t act, we’ll get more of the same.
My takeaway from these two conversations was that the internet we have is flawed and dominated by a few mega corporations and their mega apps. Over the next year, those same corporations are going to insert (data scraping) AI into every conversation we have on those apps, unless lawmakers stop them—and most of them barely know how to text.
Quick note, there will be no newsletter next week. Hope and I will be traveling back from a fall break trip to Armenia next Sunday.
As always, if you have any thoughts or feedback about the newsletter, I welcome it, and I really appreciate it when folks share Takes & Typos with their friends.
As always, if you have any thoughts or feedback about the newsletter, I welcome it, and I really appreciate it when folks share the newsletter with their friends.