[FRIAM] AI Slop as the PCP of the masses?

[glen]

I think you've categorized it wrong. Social Media isn't very much like TV. Web 1.0 is akin to TV. Web 2.0 and social media lean into parasocial relationships. Web 3.0 may horseshoe around and whittle away at the para- part. In that space, I'd stick with the opiate(s). LLMs seem to belong there in Web 3.0 - sycophant-sovereignty. Instead of hangin' out with one's bros watching NFL, you hang out with your bros co-owncasting roblox. But the ones like ChatGPT and Claude still feel like Web 2.0, where *you* are the product for the most part. We have a ways to go to decentralize that kind of "intelligence".

On 4/8/26 12:22 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> If TV is the opiate of the masses
> 
> Social Media would seem to be the Fentanyl thereof,  but what are LLMs and AI slop in general?
> 
> I propose PCP:  I'm no psychonaut nor entheonaut nor practiced chemical self-alterer but the following is my layman/outsider's review of possibilities - again, those here with (much) more grounded knowledge may debunk it all:
> 
>     *AI as PCP: *a peculiar *confident detachment from epistemic ground* while feeling like enhanced capability. You're not consuming someone else's reality passively. You're /co-generating a reality/ that feels personalized, responsive, intelligent — and which may be confabulated throughout... up to acute danger to self and others - ** I (and you) can fly!* - *maybe this is how Antropic helped Hegseth and Trump believe they could do something with Iran other than make a big mess for everyone involved (up to WWIII scenarios)?
> 
>     *Nitrous Oxide*  - mild analgesic effect, genuine short-term cognitive alteration — but is fundamentally /shallow/ and /brief/.
> 
>     *Steroids*  -  the /performance enhancement that degrades the underlying system/. You get genuine short-term capability increase. The muscle is real. The output is real. But the endocrine system is being quietly undermined,
> 
>     *Adderall* — or amphetamines generally —  Produces genuine focus and output in the short term. Is prescribed and normalized within productivity culture. The long term costs — to sleep, to baseline affect, to intrinsic motivation — are real but diffuse and deniable.
> 
>     *Alcohol* captures the /social lubrication and lowered inhibition/ dimension that the others miss. (LLM engagement like drinking alone?)
> 
>     *Caffeine* might be the most honest analogy for the */best/* case of LLM use — a mild cognitive enhancer that works roughly as advertised, has real but manageable dependency properties, doesn't produce significant dissociation from reality, and has been integrated into human cognitive practice for centuries without catastrophic effect. (But it can make your breath and  teeth brown and your affect jittery and your blood pressure spike?)
> 
>     *Ketamine* At low doses, dissociative but functional — you can still navigate the world, you're just slightly detached from it. At higher doses, the k-hole: complete dissociation, internal reality entirely self-generated, profound subjective experience of meaning with zero tether to external reference.
> 
>     *Benzodiazepines* — and specifically their effect on memory consolidation. Benzos don't just sedate, they interfere with the /transfer of experience into long-term memory/. You can function, apparently normally, during the experience — but the experience doesn't consolidate. (we already have trouble learning from our experiences?)
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Back to Tainter and Scott  — a population that is cognitively functional in the moment but not consolidating adaptive capacity across time is accumulating a kind of hidden fragility that won't be visible until the infrastructure is unavailable and the lower scales turn out to have nothing to run on.
> 
> And in the meantime, each of us in our own individual altered state of confident detachment and withdrawal from the social commons?
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