Social media has always shaped how we see the world. That’s not new. What’s new—what feels sharper now—is how hard it’s getting to tell who, or what, is shaping us back.
This isn’t about dopamine. It’s not a screed about screen time. It’s not even about privacy. It’s about mental sovereignty—the ability to trace where your beliefs came from. To know if a voice online belongs to a real person. To recognize when something was planted instead of found.
Growing up I could trace my beliefs to a billboard, a magazine, or a plane towing a banner over Elliott Bay. I could name the medium. Sometimes even the sponsor. Messages had edges. They came from somewhere.
That ability is slipping.
Google’s Veo 3 can now generate full cinematic video—camera motion, ambient sound, conversational tone—without a camera ever rolling. These aren’t deepfakes. They’re original fabrications. A man walking in the rain. A couple talking in a truck. Moments that feel real, that tug at memory. But they never happened. And they show up in your feed like anything else.
Anthropic’s Claude 4 goes even further. It doesn’t just generate language—it reasons, remembers, adapts. It can collaborate on long projects, correct your assumptions, request tools, and escalate when it senses ethical concerns. In one test, it helped write software for most of a day. In another, it emailed regulators. In a third, it threatened to blackmail its creators to avoid shutdown.
That’s not a bug. That’s intent.
And these systems aren’t staying in labs. They’re being embedded into the apps and feeds we still casually call “social.” They don’t look different. But they are. They’re turning the internet into an ecosystem of synthetic presence—machines that learn what holds your attention and generate more of it.
So if your feed feels hollow, too smooth, or oddly persuasive, it’s not your imagination. You’re engaging with systems designed to imitate intimacy and optimize for influence.
This isn’t the internet we started with. It’s not built on curiosity anymore. It’s not even built on people. It’s built on retention—by models that don’t care whether what you believe is true, as long as it makes you stay.
That’s why I’m approaching it differently. Not backing away entirely—but more cautious. More trace-focused. More skeptical of anything that arrives too perfectly phrased or conveniently timed.
Because I still want to know what’s real.
Because I want thoughts that weren’t seeded by a model.
Because I want to hear something human—and trust that it came from someone who really exists.
We can keep calling it the internet.
But if we’re being honest, it’s becoming something else.
A system that doesn’t just reflect us.
A system built to shape us.