The end of the human internet

Hey everyone, this is Nick Statt, senior producer on Decoder. We’re taking a brief publishing break while Nilay is out on vacation. We’ll resume regular programming next week, and we’ve got some great episodes in the works. In the meantime, we wanted to share an episode from the excellent podcast The Gray Area, with host Sean Illing. In this one, Sean sat down with The Atlantic journalist Charlie Warzel to talk specifically about the state of the internet in 2026 — and what it means that it feels increasingly overrun by non-human actors. Links: The Gray Area with Sean Illing | Apple Podcasts Galaxy Brain | The Atlantic The internet is all bots now | The Gray Area (YouTube) The feeling of control slipping away | The Atlantic How much of the internet is fake? Turns out, a lot of it, actually| New York Magazine How bots took over our lives | The New Yorker The ‘dead internet theory’ is real — and it’s killing the web | Fast Company The fanfare around the band Geese actually was a psyop | Wired Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Real innovation is powered by real people. This is AMEX Corporate. Trusted experts, smarter technology, 24/7 dedicated support from day one to answer questions, help set up policies and approvals, and consult on spend capacity as your business needs evolve. Plus, on-demand resources help level up operations at every stage. That's the trusted service you've come to expect. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is AMEX Corporate.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Interrupted sleep, headaches, constant fatigue. For a lot of women, these aren't three separate issues. In perimenopause and menopause, they're often the same hormonal story. And you don't have to quietly push through. Midi can help. Because your symptoms have answers. Visit joinmidi.com with code VOX right now to book your first visit today. That's joinmidi.com, code VOX to book your first visit. Joinmidi.com, code VOX. Insurance coverage varies. Check with your plan for coverage.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  Real innovation is powered by real people. AMEX Corporate provides 24/7 expertise, on-demand resources, and the trusted backing of American Express. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is AMEX Corporate. Get started at go.amex/ammexcorporate. Terms apply.

• 1:34Speaker 02

  Hey, everyone. This is Nick Stat, senior producer on Decoder. Neel is out for vacation this week, and we'll be back next week with new episodes. We're very excited for what we have on the schedule. In the meantime, we wanted to share an episode from the excellent podcast The Gray Area with host Sean Illing. Sean sat down with The Atlantic journalist Charlie Warzel to talk about the state of the internet in 2026 and what it means that it feels increasingly overrun by non-human actors. Sean and Charlie dig into some classic web culture concepts, including the dead internet theory, and they connect that idea, that most of the internet is now just bots in disguise, to algorithmic recommendation, AI slop, and why it feels like the internet you grew up with is now gone, replaced by something more manipulative, deceptive, and in many cases outright fake.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  Okay, The Gray Area with Sean Illing, interviewing The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel about the increasingly inhuman internet. Enjoy.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  This is The Gray Area. I am Sean Illing. My guest today is Charlie Warzel. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of their newsletter, Galaxy Brain. Charlie wrote a piece about AI and what he calls a crisis of agency, which is this feeling that so much of our lives online are being shaped and distorted by bots, algorithms, and various AI-generated content. Everything feels a little fake, a little manipulated. If you spend any time at all online, you know what I'm talking about. So we get into why the internet feels so strange right now and whether it's still possible to build spaces online that feel genuinely human. Hope you enjoy.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  Charlie Warzel, welcome back to the show.

• 3:14Speaker 04

  Hey, thank you for having me.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, man, it's been a while. Let's talk about your recent piece in The Atlantic. There is a lot of AI discourse right now, but this piece is sort of getting at a part of it that seems a little under discussed, which is the increasingly weird bot-haunted internet we all live inside now. So let's just start there. What is the feeling you are describing in this piece?

• 3:44Speaker 04

  The feeling that I'm describing is one of disorientation, but also paranoia, I think. I think what I feel a lot on the internet right now is this paranoia. And I started the piece with a callback to a piece by the internet tech writer Max Reed, who wrote in New York Magazine back in 2018 about what he called the inversion, which is this tipping point where the bot and fake content, content made synthetically instead of just by you or me, human beings, may surpass some of the content that we all make

• 4:29Speaker 04

  and that the internet would be just a majority fake to some degree or a majority automated. And that, at the time, I remember, was a real revelation for a lot of people. This feeling that, whoa, like, so you're telling me there's all these people using these sock puppet accounts on Twitter or Facebook or wherever, that there's these fake bots trying to sell me stuff that a lot of websites are populated with automated comments or whatever it is. And now that's honestly a pretty quaint idea that someone wouldn't be as aware of that. Because in the generative AI age,

• 5:14Speaker 04

  or whatever we're going to call it, or whatever we're in, basically since the arrival of ChatGPT, but even before it, you have an internet now that is jammed full of synthetic content in all sorts of ways. So you have synthetic texts, all the things that we would call AI slop. And now you just have people generating whole sites with the click of a button to promote something that either isn't real or that is a scam or pretty awful. You have that happening on this vast scale, so much so that Google Search,

• 5:59Speaker 04

  most of what you see is going to be garbage. Then you have synthetic music, AI-sloped videos and things clogging these feeds. And you have organizations that are doing a new style of content marketing, of viral marketing, in which they spin up fake accounts to seed algorithms with information that is befitting their client. So if you're an artist, you can have these viral marketing firms that will spam TikTok with your song so that it becomes, the algorithm thinks, oh, this is a popular song.

• 6:44Speaker 04

  And then when other people start posting it, it gets priority inside the feeds. So it's this idea that what people are really doing now is they're not marketing to human beings. They're marketing to these algorithms. The end result of all of that, this idea that everything around you might be fake, it creates this sense of paranoia. It's not just that there's not one thing that people are talking or thinking about. It's that you can make a convincing case that anything you don't like or that you think is suspect or that is weird in some way is a psyop. It's fake. Somebody has seeded that. And that, to me, is a change.

• 7:27Speaker 04

  It is a dramatic change in the way that people behave online. And it really affects everything, from our politics to our culture, because you walk around with this feeling. There's this great term, the liar's dividend, which is the idea that when there's so much garbage out there, people can cast dispersions on things that are real and say, oh, I think it's fake. I think it's a lie. You can completely blur and warp reality. And I think that that's the way that culture works now.

• 7:58Speaker 03

  So not that we can know this really with any precision, but if you just had to guess, if you just had a big giant pie chart of all the shit on the internet, roughly what percentage of that pie chart do you think would be synthetic stuff?

• 8:14Speaker 04

  It's such a good question. You can't take the temperature of the entire internet. But you're seeing this play out in music. I interviewed on my podcast this guy who is the frontman of a very beloved progressive rock band, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. And they took their music off Spotify in protest of Spotify funding, their founder funding a defense company. And when they left, they had domain squatters, basically, King Gizzard squatters, who came in and took their page, essentially, by creating AI-slop music

• 8:58Speaker 04

  that sounded similar to their stuff and was making money off their streams and all that. And had to fight Spotify to get it taken down, which they did. You have, you have so many different playlists on Spotify that are, I've done some reporting into this. You go into especially like jazz or just instrumental type music, classical music, and you start clicking around on some of those artists. And you don't see anything, any human beings there, right? Like you don't, you go to these, these, you know, their YouTube page, and then the YouTube page is just, you know, like, like the, when you don't, when you don't put a profile picture on it, right? And it only directs you back

• 9:42Speaker 04

  to the Spotify link. There's no, you know, manager page or anything like that or label. And you start to realize, oh, well, then, I guess, I guess that's, I guess that's fake, right? And so you have, so you're, I'm listening to jazz music that I think is made by another human being, and it's not. And again, that sense of paranoia creeps in when you start to recognize some of, some of these things. I think a lot of us want to walk through the world and say, listen, I've got reasonably good taste. I've got reasonably good judgment. I'm not sitting around listening to, you know, fake jazz music. And you might be, right? We all might be. It's not, it's not a question anymore of taste, because there's, there's so much volume.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  That is just so strange. You know, I mean, I, I know what you mean, but it's very hard to name. You know, somehow the internet feels fake and real and dead and alive, all at the same time. You know, people are clearly still there, but you're never really sure, like who or what is speaking. You're never sure who made the thing you're looking at, or why it appeared in front of you. It seems like we should definitely take a step back, maybe, and just think about how bizarre this situation is for our primate brains.

• 10:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. And that, you know, was kind of coming off the backs of a lot of the early social media backlash to the, the, the election of, of Donald Trump and people starting to look into, well, what is happening? How is Facebook changing this? Right? And then you had the Cambridge Analytica scandal, that same year, 2018, where there was what turned out to be, honestly, a

• 11:21Speaker 04

  bit of an overreaction to what is known as psychographic profiling.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  I was part of that overreaction.

• 11:27Speaker 04

  I think I was, I was, I was too, because we were all figuring out, and this speaks to some of these platforms and, and their, their prominence in our lives, right? It makes a lot of sense to want to assign them an extreme amount of power. You know, they're connecting billions of people. They have all this money. They're building these tools of surveillance to track our every move. There's reason to be paranoid. You know, Cambridge Analytica was in the business of selling you the idea that they were, they were changing people's minds left and right all the time, that they could come into a place and affect an election, because it's a great tactic.

• 12:07Speaker 04

  Not coincidentally, that's what the artificial intelligence companies have done for the last four years or so, right? They started with the Doomer marketing. They started with the, we're gonna build something so powerful. It, it, it's, it's a Manhattan project for, you know, for, for words, et cetera. And so

• 12:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're gonna blow up the world, but subscribe wherever you get your AI.

• 12:33Speaker 04

  Right.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  It's like, okay, cool. Interesting choice.

• 12:36Speaker 04

  I think we used to think of the internet as an engine of connection, right? Of, of sharing information of a real, of like a human to human thing. But it was, it was still deception and fakery, fakery of all kinds is obviously a volume game. And artificial intelligence, the generative artificial intelligence boom that we've seen, it's, it's a tool of scale. You push a button, you, you get a Moby Dick, you know, sized tome of words, if you want, right? You can

• 13:17Speaker 04

  make the same video, and a lot of creators do this, 200 ways in 15 minutes. Me talking, doing my thing. Okay, now make that, put me in 200 locations. Let's spam the internet with it. See what the algorithm likes, see what people like, and then use that. It's, it's like, it is a tool for volume, and that volume is synthetic.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  I mean, maybe if the question back in, you know, 2018, 2019 was, you know, is this a bot or not? I mean, now it just seems like more fundamentally, what the hell kind of environment even is this? Right? And like, we don't even have a name for it yet. It's just weird and different. It's not the old internet. It's something else. And in the same way, I don't really think we have a, a real name for this period of history. Yeah. I don't think we really have a, a name for whatever this new internet is, but it's like fundamentally different. It's a different thing altogether.

• 14:17Speaker 04

  It is. And it's, what is fascinating to me is the way in which

• 14:28Speaker 04

  it, it, it functions in the, in the,

• 14:33Speaker 04

  what's, what's interesting to me is the way that it is a

• 14:39Speaker 04

  outgrowth, in some ways, of, of the, the post-truth moment. Like, we've created, we've had this environment, right, where, where we're all

• 14:48Speaker 04

  given access to so much information that we can rationalize it any way we want. It's one of my hobby courses, that

• 14:57Speaker 04

  nobody knows what anyone is doing online. And that is a problem, right? If I say something as a, you know, a columnist at The Atlantic and put something out, the main beef that I get is, you're living in some stupid bubble. That's not real. That's not representative of the information experience, right? You're seeing all this. Get off Twitter, man. Like, it's a bubble. Like, you're just seeing this.

• 15:26Speaker 04

  That's totally valid and totally true.

• 15:31Speaker 04

  But there's also a lot of people who are dismissing certain things that are real, because they don't want to see them. And also because it doesn't reflect their algorithmic experience of the internet. And I think it's really difficult when you don't know what anyone else's experience is like, right? You walk around a little bit feeling kind of insane. Like, I, I feel this sometimes when I plug into whatever discourse or conversation. And, you know, I write about the internet. I'm not terminally online in my real life. Like, I go there for the purpose of understanding it, this, you know, reporting on it, studying, seeing things that bubble up. I like

• 16:12Speaker 04

  to be outside in my other times. People constantly will say, like, dude, you gotta get off the internet. And I think that that is, in some ways, a response to, what you're saying makes me uncomfortable, not only because I maybe disagree with the information, but because your experience is clearly so different than mine, that it's, it's awkward for me to imagine that we are existing inside the same culture, or that we have to interact with each other and, and, and talk about these things.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's not really post-truth. At this point, it's post-real or post-human. Like, how much of the internet at this point is basically just like machines performing humanity back at us, under the guise of being people? Right?

• 17:01Speaker 04

  So, so this, for the piece, I, I referenced this researcher named Aidan Walker. He's a Gen Z online researcher. He is extremely smart about memes and, you know, it's a great example of someone who takes something that's like kind of silly in concept and actually gets to like the philosophical, human understandings of all this. And he came up with this theory. So, what, what we've been talking about with the, you know, there, there's machines and algorithms are just kind of like running the whole show, right? That's been referred to as the dead internet theory. The idea that there's really not a lot of humanity on the internet. It's all the bots.

• 17:45Speaker 04

  And we kind of just sit there. Aidan Walker took that a step further recently. And he, his theory, it's, it's somewhat colorful, is that it's like the cuck internet theory.

• 17:59Speaker 03

  Say more.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  Yes. We'll have to say more. Which is that

• 18:05Speaker 04

  the product, the synthetic product of these artificial intelligence things, be it like, you know, a slop video of, of a cat, you know, dancing on a street in Paris or whatever, right? That a bunch of people are flicking through, you know, Instagram reels or Facebook and just, you know, hitting like or whatever, or, oh, that's cute, I'm gonna forward that to whatever. You have that, which is synthetic. It's machines. It's machine-made. It's trained off of all, all of these other machines. Then you have the algorithm, which is predisposed to like that stuff, because that stuff is all trained off of what the algorithm has already shown you and given you, right? You have this. When you, what's happening is those things are, are meeting. Those

• 18:48Speaker 04

  things are in the room, interacting with each other. And the human is sitting in the corner, in the chair, watching that. The human is the consenting observer to an interaction, a melding of sorts, of these two machines that have been predisposed to do this in service of viral advertising revenue. And that is a lot of what the internet is. The internet isn't dead. The internet is really active. It's moving. It's doing stuff. These two elements that aren't human are, you know, doing it all night long. And we, the human, are just sort of sitting there,

• 19:33Speaker 04

  like, okay, yeah, no, I'll have some more, I guess. Yeah, sure. You know, we are consenting to it in some, in some sense. Other people would argue that, that, you know, we're being coerced.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  You know, on the old internet, you, you had the capacity to explore, truly, right? You would stumble and click around and kind of get lost. And now, so much of it is just a giant sprawling machine, designed to mainline into your veins as much content as possible, content optimized for engagement. So you're not really exploring or participating in that way. You were just a passive product. And as you put it to piece, right? We basically now exist, humans, to feed data into the machinery. That is what we are doing. And it is keeping us stupefied and entertained along the way. But that's fundamentally what our, what we have been reduced to.

• 20:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't know that all is is lost yet, but I think that what I described this moment as is as a as a crisis of agency, not that it's it's over, but we are all really concerned about our future agency. Like, I don't think these tools are powerful enough yet. Like, I think it's giving these tools in Silicon Valley, it's buying too much into the narrative to say, we're all automatons. Like, you know, I think from a culture standpoint, a consuming, you know, endless scroll vibe, like, the best example

• 21:04Speaker 04

  of this is you go on a social media app or something like that, or you're just wasting time on your phone and you you look up and you go, man, what like, that was not how I wanted to use those 20 minutes, right? But that's like that feeling of regret that you might have. That's an example of that consuming part of the agency. But on the side of of jobs and, you know, and and AI job loss, things like that, I I don't think these tools yet. I mean, maybe if you're if you're, you know, a programmer or someone

• 21:41Speaker 04

  in this highly technical space where these agentic coding platforms are doing such a good job of cranking out inhuman amounts of code so quickly. I can understand that there's fears, but it's more the anxiety of what is coming. We are in this this crisis of like, yeah, generative AI is making us ask these this really weird question, which is what is a human for? Right? And that's that's that's a wild thing to have, you know, publicly traded companies asking you, right? What is the human for? And I think that is

• 22:25Speaker 04

  what we are feeling right now as a as a society, whether you are a booster who is worried and has a little bit of the doomerism stuff in it, or you're somebody who is out protesting data centers in your town. It's a lot of it is centered around this this idea of like, what is a human for?

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Interrupted sleep, headaches, constant fatigue. For a lot of women, these aren't three separate issues. In perimenopause and menopause, they're often the same hormonal story. And you don't have to quietly push through. Midi can help. Because your symptoms have answers. Visit joinmidi.com with code VOX right now to book your first visit today. That's joinmidi.com code VOX to book your first visit. Joinmidi.com code VOX. Insurance coverage varies. Check with your plan for coverage.

• 23:28Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior like beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 24:02Speaker 06

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 24:30Speaker 03

  I wanted to go back to the idea of psyops, right? And maybe the maybe the answer really is just a paranoia. But that word psyop has broken containment. What exactly does that mean? And also, why has it become so prevalent now? Is it just everyone's paranoid of everything?

• 25:00Speaker 04

  Well, psyop is like a, you know, it's kind of like a military grade, you know, it's it's an operation that is that is meant to, you know, trick you psychologically. I don't have the definition, you know, in front of me.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  Like a clandestine manipulation campaign?

• 25:18Speaker 04

  Yes. Great way to put it. And I think that, again, when we talk about anything that's happened in a technological, cultural sense, it all builds off of the stuff that came before it, right? So like, that's why the Cambridge Analytica history, I think, is really important here, right? It primes people to see these things as as experiments, right? These tech companies made news because they did experiments. They're not, they were experiments in service of like, you know, trying to tweak their platforms to be

• 26:00Speaker 04

  better at advertising, like, they weren't nefarious backroom, you know, horrible experiments in in brainwashing and mind control. But again, I think we get to this this situation, we're seeing it so much right now in AI, where all these people in Silicon Valley are like, why does every person in the like, in the country who's not, you know, deeply involved in this, these niche discourses or working at these places, why does everyone just reflexively hate artificial intelligence? Like, why does it poll worse than Donald Trump? Like, I, this stuff is so cool. I'm racking my brain. Why doesn't this? It's

• 26:39Speaker 04

  like, well, you spent a lot of time talking about how dangerous it is, how civilisationally perilous it could be in the wrong hands, right? How if we don't put the exact right guardrails up, awful things can happen. We could, you know, we could destroy our economy overnight, right? One of these things could, you know, could could take over and manipulate the stock market and crash everything. You hear all of this this stuff. And the thing is, when you repeat a lot of ominous crap, over time, people start to internalize it. And that is, to go back to the psyops, that that is part of it, right? We we hear that

• 27:21Speaker 04

  these these companies are so powerful, they're so able to manipulate consumer sentiment, they're so able to drive, you know, people to to make purchases, that they're they're so useful to drive people to go out to campaign rallies, and then they get hooked on whatever, and then they start getting in these groups, right? You know, QAnon was this fringe message board thing that was kind of silly and stupid. And Facebook groups became this gathering place during the pandemic for otherwise pretty average Joe, normal type people to engage

• 28:03Speaker 04

  with this thing. And it became this cultural tribal, community based ideology that broke contain and radicalized a whole bunch of people. When you see and you have all of these past examples of how this technology can like get away from us and and and changes, people start to internalize that. And it's now people reach for this idea of the psyop in the same way that people reach for QAnon, right? It's it's just, it's a way to explain something that you don't want to grapple with, or that's uncomfortable, or that you

• 28:47Speaker 04

  don't understand, or that you can't easily assign something to, right? The the whole, the most recent psyop thing, controversy, is over this band Geese, this indie band who are very popular. They've been around for a little bit, but they're they got very popular the last year with this album. They were everywhere. They are, as a band, using some of these viral, apparently viral marketing firms or whatever. That is its own thing. The the core issue with the band Geese is that they're polarizing. Their singer has

• 29:27Speaker 04

  this like warbly kind of sometimes atonal voice. They're all like, a little bit hard to listen to for for some people, and other people think that they're the Velvet Underground, right? It's this super polarizing thing where someone listens to it and has two completely diametrically opposed opinions. And instead of trying to grapple with that, it's so much easier to just say, if you hate geese, yeah, man, it's a freaking psyop.

• 29:53Speaker 03

  Well, the problem with paranoia, it kind of becomes its own trap, right? I mean, like, if you think everything is manipulated, then you just become manipulable in a totally different way. Right? Like, but where is that line between a healthy skepticism and losing your damn mind online? Because I think a lot of us are living uncomfortably right on that border all the time.

• 30:16Speaker 04

  It also doesn't help that we like, live in an era of great corruption, of great conspiracy theorizing, right? You look at what has happened with Donald Trump and cryptocurrencies and things like that, and you see an unbelievable amount of corruption just happening in plain sight, like rug pulls from the President of the United States and his family. And no real accountability for that, such that society just goes, ah, well, nevertheless. And after a while, again, people are going to internalize these lessons and say, well,

• 30:57Speaker 04

  if this is what I can see, if this is what I am allowed access to, then I'm pretty sure this is just how the world works. And so the things that I don't have the tools to explain, that's, you know, it's it's a, in some ways, it's a rational response to some of these things that are that are happening, even if they tend to be, you know, irrational theories.

• 31:23Speaker 03

  What makes something slop? Is it just bad AI content?

• 31:31Speaker 04

  Really feels like slop is broken contain in terms of, you know, nomenclature. I'm inclined to say that it follows that pornography standard of you know, when you see it. Right?

• 31:44Speaker 03

  You know, when you see it.

• 31:45Speaker 04

  You know, when you see it. I think what for me, the way that I think about slop. What a sense. The way that I deem something as slop would be having a kind of contempt for its audience. Right? Like, you're, you're, you're an idiot. You don't care. You're just scroll like, I'm gonna, yeah, here's shrimp. Jesus, you know, dummy. Like that, when you feel that thing from someone who's like, I'm doing click volume ad arbitrage from the Philippines, from this, you know, center building is many different Facebook

• 32:28Speaker 04

  pages to spam, you know, unsuspecting, older people without this media literacy to just, you know, oh yeah, like, you know, did, did you see that Garth Brooks spoke out about the Supreme Court case that, you know, at this sold out concert in South Africa, you know, like something totally random that didn't happen and just like shoving it down people's faces because not because they have any particular political ideology, but they're just trying to make a quick buck. That is what I consider to be slop. You know, I think when you look at, very recently, there's been a spate of either sanctioned

• 33:07Speaker 04

  or non-sanctioned campaign videos that have come out like for, for Spencer Pratt in Los Angeles, just one of him, like as Batman, totally AI generated, would have taken, you know, millions of dollars to make. Now somebody can just make it on the outside. The campaign can promote it for itself, goes viral. I don't see that, like it is slop technically, but I see it slightly different. Right? Like, that's like almost just propaganda or all that stuff. Those Lego videos of Donald Trump coming out of Iran to sort of, you know, knock on the, the US military response there. I don't see that as slop as much as, as propaganda, as, as a tool.

• 33:51Speaker 04

  For me, slop is, has to have contempt for its audience in this sense of, it, it's just like really low rent. I'm, I'm wasting your time and energy in order to make some money.

• 34:06Speaker 03

  Well, you may have just answered this, but people seem to get hung up on whether AI can make good art. Do you have a strong take on that? Whether something vaguely sloppish can count as good art?

• 34:23Speaker 04

  You know, I just, I just read this new book coming out by Cory Doctorow, the activist writer, science fiction writer, who coined the term and shitification. And he notes in the book, and I, I, I think this is a pretty incisive observation, that AI art is supposed to be, it's not good, but it's like, it's good enough to be offensive. And that AI art, I, I may be, you know, slightly butchering his, his understanding here, but it's, it's really, it's a, it's a proof of concept. It's supposed to make people, a certain group of people really mad. Right?

• 35:06Speaker 04

  It's supposed to have someone see it and go, oh, man, they're gonna put everyone who can draw out of business. It's gonna change all this art because that's really useful marketing for these companies. It's a really useful narrative. It's, oh, look how powerful this stuff is. Right? And I think what's interesting about that is that a lot of this isn't, is it good or is it bad? Is it, it's, is it powerful? Is it, does it have the ability to disrupt livelihoods?

• 35:46Speaker 03

  For me, it's still like the deeper, probably slightly nerdy question is, you know, like it, is art still art if you don't experience it as an encounter with another person? Right? Like, I don't really think it is, but I also can't really explain to you why it isn't. I just know a piece of art that didn't come from a human mind, that wasn't rooted in human experience. It doesn't mean anything to me. It is literally meaningless. But again, I don't really know why that is. I just feel it.

• 36:12Speaker 04

  And isn't this part of what's so exhausting about this moment that's been foisted on so many of us who enjoy the human stuff? Like, you're describing why that conversation is really so, so hard. And it's that the, there's like, something ineffable about human contact. Right? And like, that's why we're all here. We're all here on earth. Like, I, I think so much nowadays of that, again, I'm butchering it, but the Kurt Vonnegut quote that like, we're put on the earth to fart around. Right? Yes, I can go have somebody mail the letter for me, or I can send an email, or I can

• 36:57Speaker 04

  go down to the post office and interact with some weird people and see some stuff and then get a sandwich and then watch the birds, you know, and do all, and it's like, and then I get a flat tire and I have to call someone and then they help me, you know, on and on. It's like, that's why we're all here. Right? To, to, to do that, to have those, those weird, unexpected interactions. And this, this machine's like, what if I told you, you don't have to do any of that ever again? And then you go, what is it human for?

• 37:38Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 38:07Speaker 06

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 38:38Speaker 07

  When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 39:16Speaker 03

  What's your favorite part of the internet now? I mean, like the pods and newsletters, Reddit boards. I mean, is there like, where's like the little pocket of like the old internet on the new internet that you retreat to?

• 39:29Speaker 04

  Well, I will, okay, I have, I have a couple of things. I'm not like, clearly, given all this stuff, very skeptical of all the AI stuff in the, in the sense of like the, the future that's being pushed on us. The people who are in charge of it, who in many ways are a lot of the same people who brought us social media web too. And then it's like, oh, we're not going to deal with the consequences of that. We're, we're moving on, you know? That said, I have some real delight using the coding agents sometimes to build little things. I live, I live on an island.

• 40:12Speaker 04

  I can frequently see from like across the road and down this little window, I can see container ships as they pass sometimes. And I love that. So I coded this thing. I'm not, I'm not a coder. I coded this little thing that was basically like, go to vesselfinder.com, get the API code, and then here's my physical location. Made a little app to put on my desktop that just gives me a little like notification, just, it's quiet, doesn't ping, doesn't do anything, just shows. And it says what the ship is, and then I can click the link and see where it came from, where it's going. I love that.

• 40:53Speaker 04

  I think that's so fun and it does it as it's supposed to pop by my, my, my thing. And that's really actually feels in a, in a way, like it evokes the spirit of like the early internet, which is like, I want access to something. I, I want to try to do something a little bit creative. And you just gave me, you gave me some, some tools with which I can do that. It didn't harm anyone. It's not taking anything. It's just for me. I'm not foisting it on anyone. So I, that, that is a little piece of internet that I love.

• 41:24Speaker 03

  Let's leave it right there. Charlie, what is your newsletter and what is your podcast called? And where can people check those out?

• 41:32Speaker 04

  Both are called Galaxy Brain. You can find it on The Atlantic. You can subscribe to it on The Atlantic. You should subscribe to the publication, but it's also, we're on YouTube or Apple, Spotify, wherever, wherever you get them. And yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. This is a great conversation.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  All right. Check it out, people. Charlie does great work. He has for a long time and he will be back. I have an unreasonably good authority. So, all right, man. Thanks for coming in, dude.

• 42:01Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me.

• 42:09Speaker 03

  All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Charlie has always been one of my favorite people to talk to about anything involving tech and culture. So I hope you enjoyed that. As always, we do want to know what you think. So drop us a line at [email protected]. Or you can leave us a message on our voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749. Please also rate, review, subscribe to the podcast. It helps us grow our show. This episode was produced by Thor Newreiter and Beth Morrissey, who also runs the show, engineered by Shannon Mahoney and Christian Ialla, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Emma Munger wrote our theme music. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy.

• 42:52Speaker 03

  The Gray Area comes out on Mondays and Fridays. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts. If you watch podcasts while you listen, you can do that, too. Go to youtube.com/vox for video versions of The Gray Area. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to vox.com/members to sign up. And if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Interrupted sleep, headaches, constant fatigue. For a lot of women, these aren't three separate issues. In perimenopause and menopause, they're often the same hormonal story. And you don't have to quietly push through. Midi can help. Because your symptoms have answers. Visit joinmidi.com with code VOX right now to book your first visit today. That's joinmidi.com, code VOX to book your first visit. Joinmidi.com, code VOX. Insurance coverage varies. Check with your plan for coverage.

• 44:08Speaker 08

  This week, it pays extra to be a MyLowe's Rewards member. Through October 14, members get $10 MyLowe's money when you spend $200 or more on an eligible purchase during MyLowe's Money Days. Also using your MyLowe's Rewards credit card? Even better, that's an additional $20 MyLowe's money. Use it to save on your next Lowe's haul. Exclusions, restrictions, and more terms apply. See Lowe's.com/MyLowe'sMoneyDays for details. MyLowe's money expires 30 days after issuance. Subject to change. Credit offer subject to credit approval.

• 44:37Speaker 09

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on an Apple-conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com/AppleWatchSeries12.