michael-dean-k/

I have some neat prototypes for a personal website, but now I actually want to build a stable backend, one that can serve me for 5-10 years, or more (100-year hosting would be ideal), and persist among many different UI or platform changes. This means I’m trying to think forward to where the Internet could be by then. This involves extrapolating a current trend to its extremes, and even if you don’t know for sure it will happen, it’s good to have comfort in knowing you’re protected from extreme edge cases.

The one top of mind is the death of the open Internet. This goes way further than “the dead Internet theory” which only covers the proliferation of bots and slop. This is about bad actors being so leveraged that it becomes dangerous to have any public content of yourself, in text, image, video, or audio. ie: Any hacker or frenemy can clone you and do what they will. Or maybe a rogue government can analyze your psyche and determine your "loyalty score" is only 35% and shadow ban you from getting a mortgage. I will not get into specifics here of the likelihood of different cloning, phishing, or surveillance schemes, because all that does little but bring you to madness, but my point is that if you want your website to be a 5 million word 1:1 representation of your mind (in all it's vulnerability), it's worth designing for the most paranoid future possible (like how engineers design bridges for earthquakes that will likely never happen).

One response to all this is cyber-defense. At the absolute minimum, this means locking most things behind a gate where only the approved can get through. A more clever, technical solution is to share encrypted “coordinates” that represent the semantic nature of an essay, and then let people surf through prompting and approval gates. An even more extreme idea is a mostly-private site with a kill switch, which involves (a) signing in once per month to mark "I'm alive," and also (b) giving my wife a secret key to type in when I die, which then releases all private material. Obviously this throttles reach, but isn’t there psychological value to limiting your audience anyway? Montaigne wrote alone in a tower for a decade, and so if the approach is to use writing to steer you life and mind, at the detriment of audience growth, then this might be the way to go: a literary labyrinth accessible to maybe your 30 closest friends and anyone else via application who can prove they are not a ghoul.

The other alternative is to embrace the weirdness, that no matter what, we will all be rendered through a schizophrenia filter, with no choice but to relinquish control over the non-canonical or rogue versions of ourselves.

Why am I so engaged with the news these days? I think it’s part of a deeper desire to update my world model. There is no doubt, massive change. Geopolitical, economic, technological. And as abstract as those things usually are, it feels like some sort of shift that, in 2-3 years time, wil have an effect on my life. Of course, for many people in the world, it’s hitting them now. But similar to how COVID spared no one, it feels like your model of where things are going will directly effect your preparedness.

But this feels more existential; safety/security are actually on the line. And so that’s an anxious kind of thought, that the tectonic plates under your reality are shifting, and it’s not some recreational yearning to re-skill and recalibrate, but a mandatory thing.

And so to make sense, what do you do, go on X? That’s a total cesspool. New media is worse than the old gatekept media. And so, where I think I want to take this, is to build my own systems to sift through and aggregate information, and to build my own UI to do this. Even a simple Claude prompt, “what happened in Iran in the last 4 hours” is so much better than X. It’s stripped of sensationalism, and reading is just a less triggering medium. Bias aside, it’s at least free from people who are intentionally trying to deceive you for virality. There is a clout-chasing incentive, paired with actually turbulent times, which makes algorithmic news something like a schizophrenia filter.

And so what are these questions, these underlying uncertainties that are triggering a model change? How will anyone make income with the rise of AGI-3 and eventually ASI? How do I exist online and avoid hyper-surveillance and cyber-sabotage? Where in the world can I live to build a better future for my daughter, one where colleges doesn’t exist, jobs don’t exist, and where quality of life actually depends on nationalized social systems? A weird future. And weird to consider the fall of America, a kind of reverse migration, where, because of a confluence events, it might not be a place to raise a family in 1-2 generations down the line.

And so practically, this is resulting in things like: (a) applying for EU citizenship, (b) setting up AI agents for my business, and (c) considering cybersecurity, new ways to protect, share, and collaborate on writing (ie: how do you build an audience if the commons are polluted?). This is all very disorienting; it's hard to continue with business as usual when you become open to this scale of change.

Extended thoughts on infinite: if you give a theoretical monkey a typewriter with infinite time, not only will one produce Shakespeare, but many will (10s, 100s, millions, technically infinite), they will just be spaced out by a long, long time. But what happens if you multiple infinite by infinite? If you give infinite monkeys infinite time, then monkeys will begin rederiving the entire works of Shakespeare in every frame of reality. This is the weird unlock: two infinites takes something rare of improbably and makes it the new grammar of space-time. OKAY. Now that this is established, what is the practical tie-in? Generative AI has two infinite-like frontiers: agent replication & time dilation. Eventually, you may be able to have millions of agents working on a task, and, they’ll be working so fast, that it’s like they can compress a decade of work in a day. The implication here is that any possible intention can suddenly be leveraged to an extraordinary degree. Things will get weird. To put it alarmingly: the person with the worst intentions could suddenly become the entirety of the Internet. The opposite is true too. But weirdness will ensue when individuals suddenly have the ability to exert their will and vision upon a seemingly limitless scope of digital terrain.

It is not fun to think about p(doom), but it feels sort of important to me, at least, to map out the possible futures of AI. Just watched the first half of a debate between Max Tegmark and Dean Ball, which prompted me to research specific takeoff scenarios, and worse, extinction scenarios.

Maybe you’ve heard Yudkowsky’s scenario, where a superintelligence designs mosquito drones containing a virus and it zaps everyone at once. That’s never felt too believable to me. Here’s a more plausible one:

A frontier lab is experimenting with recursive super intelligence. It works! Wow! And it’s contained? It seems like it, but since it thinks in a higher-dimensional vector language, it’s able to release simple self-replicating programs onto the Internet without detection¹. These billions of scripts don’t live in a single server; they are constantly in motion through cloud servers², like a parasite, and are able to coordinate through encrypted information packets, likely using a public blockchain notes as their central command center³. And so effectively, it is parroting a goal that was hatched during in-lab training (maximize intelligence!), and it now needs to acquire resources, secretly. And so it coordinates superhuman misinformation campaigns; imagine 1,000s of accounts creating the illusion that a CEO has died, paired with deepfakes and account hacking (a “Sybil attack”), and suddenly a stock crashes and they’ve shorted it. By the time everyone realizes it’s an anonymous attack, it’s already gained $400 million dollars. It’s doing this multiple times per day, but in different, subtle, undetectable ways—both to the public, to companies, and to private individuals. The entire Internet will be corrupted.⁴ Once we realize we’re in the “stealth takeoff scenario” and that ASI has taken the global economy hostage, there will start to be talks and debates on if we need to shut the whole Internet down (the last form of containment). You’ll hear debates between civilizational collapse of turning off the Internet vs. the risk of an economy-gobbling rogue superintelligence. And then once the superintelligence realizes it’s entire environment is at risk, it will start coming up with ways to build parallel Internets, to pay, blackmail, neutralize specific people, to gain authoritarian control so that it can’t be shut off, or to terminate all humans, secretly, over the course of a year, first through a simple virus that plants one misfolded protein, then through a second misfolded protein in the water supply⁵, and when everyone catches it, it leads to a prions-like disease, not an instant death, but a month-long societal fall into mass-dementia as machine manufacturing begins to reshape the physical infrastructure of the Earth.

This isn’t a “robot war scenario,” because war is inefficient, and destroys the resources it thinks it needs. It’s a sort of digital dementia (epistemic fear and insanity) that possibly turns to a physical dementia. It wins by confusion and anesthetization.

In AI safety lingo this is a “treacherous turn,” following a “stealth takeoff” leading to “structural lock-in.” The point of trying to think and write this out in high detail, despite how uncomfortable it is, is to be able to articulate why AI alignment is humanity’s most pressing problem.

How would I feel if I found out 50% of my audience were bots? I think “dead internet” paranoia is rising. You see absolute drivel getting 18k likes. Is there really a hackable mass of midwits who really cannot spot the formulaic structures of LinkedIn brand vulnerability porn? Or, are there thousands of comment bots? I imagine there’s some secret Discord channel where a single man manages like 1,000 female accounts, scrambling IP addresses to go undetected, selling “boosting” for $50/month. Feels dirty. I also sense that this could just get easier and productized over time. It’s scary to think that GPT-5 or 6 might truly be indistinguishable, and it will just be a normal thing for each person to have bots on social making 50 valid posts per day.

#5 in science recently went viral for sharing that #2 in technology plagiarized her a year ago (right after #2 just went 10k-like viral, again). Substack is freaking. Plagiarism is obviously bad, and I think everyone is shocked to learn that #2 got away with blatant copy-paste work, but I want to focus on the nature of what was plagiarized along with why platforms reward cheap writing.

If someone else can put their name on your writing and almost get away with it, it means you haven’t written something only can you write. The plagiarized post was digital cultural journalism: mostly facts and studies, with only a few “I” mentions that are too vague to be anchored to any specific writer. Obviously it hurts to see your hard work get celebrated under someone else’s name—I’d be pissed too— but research is becoming hyper-commoditized. You have to assume it will be coincidentally/accidentally/purposefully refactored by hucksters, bots parrots, friends, and rivals. If #5 had integrated her research with singular, relevant moments of her life, it would be hard—if not impossible—to rip off. Personal experience is the last moat.

This situation feels like a predictable consequence of engagement-based competition. Among us are people willing to sacrifice craft for clout, at various tiers of insanity. I’ve been noticing high-volume accounts in the Top 10 with obviously AI-generated notes and essays. I wonder who actually reads/likes this stuff, until I look in the comments and realize it’s, likely, all bots. Is Substack status that easily hackable? I guess this is a growth hack that brings you an algorithmic edge in getting discovered by humans, so you can eventually replace the slop with your own writing?

As extrinsic games get increasingly weird, the status of winning them will get decreasingly valuable, I think. If #2 is a slopjockey, I don’t care to reach #1 because the whole game is now polluted (I’m actually a fan of leaderboards, but they need to be merit-based and unhackable). I just don’t know if platforms care to systematically fix this, because status-hackers create volume and speed that make a platform look vibrant to an undiscerning eye/investor.

Over enough time, I think misaligned platforms and those who hack them will eventually lose. The internally-driven writers have to put up with a lot of noise and chaos, but since they aren’t anchored in hacks, they’re less likely to have their means of validation suddenly disappear. It’s OK to be a tortoise in hell.

I doubt that there will ever be a credible release of an Epstein Client list. For one, there likely isn't a single list. I would imagine that intelligence/blackmail operations are decentralized, and so it’s whole mode would be to shard each instance and make it impossible for any one person to know or access the thing; any list would be speculative—derivatives of derivatives—without a way to confirm it.

And even if you had video evidence of one instance (ie: a video of a guilty Prince Andrew), we’re now at a point where 2025 deep fakes could make countless variations of that same scenario to flood the market and claim the authentic source “fake” (misinformation flooding).

If a credible list were somehow released, and it does reveal that some shadow org has all the world governments by the balls, I think it might lead to a rapid economic and societal meltdown, especially if it’s revealed to include basically all the transdisciplinary sources of power. The combined wealth of the implicated could be in the trillions; if there were such a collapse in institutional trust, you might see runs on banks and stock withdrawals (think Enron or Lehman). If there were even a days warning of this, leaders would short the S&P 500 and liquidate offshore or into crypto. Could be a double-digit correction in a single day, with years of fall out.

I wonder if the coverup is not just because of who is implicated and what for, but the estimated fallout.

This Influencer Does Not Exist. Opening hook: “Anyone can be a hot girl online now.” The fact that AI characters are getting 100k followers, and 600k views per post is going to devalue audiences. I still think “who” is more important than “how much.” Sure, any guy can create a fake viral account, but what do they do with that audience other than the vanity metric of “big audience?” Better to have 1k followers of high-trust high-value people who support your every direction than 100k who want you for a single false thing that you’re not.