“There is no such thing as abstract science fiction anymore. It’s always now basically brainstorming for stuff that can make money because we’ve entered the realm where anything is possible.”

– socio.path x Ben Ditto: SIGNS OF THE TIMES

your intro to ben ditto

Ben Ditto gets technology. I can imagine him asking a crusty LVMH exec if they’ve tried “turning it off and on again” while wearing a t-shirt that declares: ‘I AM A FARMER WHO LOVES AI’.

Ben has shed light on subcultures for close to two decades. In 2009 he founded his publishing house: ‘Ditto Press’ which put out Skinhead: An Archive, Ninja Turtle Sex Museum, Raided, and Future Fantasy. He then went on to work as founding art director for DAZED Beauty with Isamaya Ffrench, exposing fringe beauty trends like cybernetics, sleaze, and Bjork’s crazy manicures. Today he serves as the Global Editorial Director of VICE – bringing stories on Brain Rot IP and the men who break sex bots to an audience of over 19 million.

Ben firmly believes that in a post-internet world technology is inseparable from culture. So each brand, or popstar, that he works with sees the online world threaded into their universe. In one music video for the 1975, Ben transformed Matty Healy into an avatar and made him dance alongside Pepe the Frog. In a DAZED shoot he commissioned, looks were pulled from Dior and Elena Velez to dress the robot he was creatively directing. And for the past year he’s been developing Robot Dog Fights as part of his newest venture YAYA Labs. Ben is currently living in Vegas, working on VICE and commissioning weapon systems for quadruped drones.

While this is all mind-bending, it’s important to note that Ben’s uses tech for far more than exposing the pervasiveness of internet culture. He regularly uses bleeding edge tools as both medium and message. Ben’s integrated frontier technologies into many of the campaigns he’s directed: using a GAN to make-up Kylie Jenner with Daniel Sannwald and Isamaya Ffrench, making ARCA the centrepiece of an AI film and creating a heritage trunk out of custom glowing cholera bacteria for Louis Vuitton. And when it comes to his journalism, social media sites and telegram groups have served as ways for Ben to both source and disseminate information. So much so that Interview Magazine declared him “the guy meme-ing his way through war”.

why time?

I found out Ben had become the Global Editorial Director of VICE, when I scrolled across an invite to a ‘foam party for AI agents’ earlier this year. Ben and I had met in Miami in 2021, standing next to a stripper pole in an exhibition he’d curated called ‘Cryptographic’. I’d avidly followed his work ever since.

When I found out Ben was joining VICE I was fascinated to see how he’d bring his ‘futurist’ through-line to a legacy subcultural publication. Particularly as a ramp up in anti-tech sentiment has been spreading across Gen-Z. When Ben released VICE’s classic ‘Photo Issue’ as VICE’s first ‘Not the Photo Issue’ by interspersing AI-generated images throughout the traditional roster of documentary pics – it became clear to me that VICE was going to be a tremendous continuation of his work. So I was thrilled when he agreed to sit down with me and talk about his approach.

I wanted to ask Ben how he’d made the decision to use VICE to platform fringe technological subcultures. How he approached the practice of collecting, archiving and sharing information in an age where anything can be AI generated. And whether we can still predict the future when time is moving so fast.

I hope our conversation helps you tighten your grasp on your future. And I hope it makes your brain fizz.

- Dani

Each month focuses on a human issue – like intimacy, memory or status – then asks founders, creators and investors how they see it shifting as technology evolves. issue-0001 is focused on time and for episode-003 I spoke to Los Touré and Marc Mueller the founders of about how we’ve reached a point where software has shifted from a tool to get things done, to the best way to participate in culture.

9 takes on why now’s the time for apps as an artform, and how software will bring about a new creative class

1. Vibe-coding has opened the doors for anyone to build anything. In this new world, software is no longer a ‘tool’ to get things done but a medium through which you can express your feelings and comment on culture.

2. We have moved to a point in culture where everyone wants to be the main character. Software can enable this unlike any other medium can.

3. This ability to place oneself in personalised software-native experiences could lead people to find themselves and develop their identities. As we move from seeing people who looks like us in interactive media to seeing ourselves.

4. Culture has moved from read-write, to read-write-participate. Apps are the perfect medium for this.

6. In this new world the metric of success is not how long a user stays on an app but how personal, and therefore sharable, their experience is.

7. The rise of tools that allow anyone to build software is leading to a democratisation in who can create viral media.

8. This in turn has opened the doors to a new creative class who use software as their medium.

9. This new class of creatives will open the doors to an entirely new app-centric industry in which a wide range of different talents can find their place.

Apps referenced:

• Performative App

• Elon’s iPhone

• VandalizeFriend.com

• Icemanify

• Link bouquet

• Date Los

Listen to our full interview on Spotify and follow sociodotpath on Instagram. I hope this conversation helps you tighten your grasp on your future. And I hope it makes your brain fizz.

– Dani

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“When every app can do everything, the only thing that’s left is culture consumption and culture creation. Doing that with software is exciting because it can immerse somebody to feel like the main character of the moment unlike any other medium”

– socio.path x DANGER TESTING: NOW’S THE TIME

your intro to danger testing

Danger Testing are building a movement. It hinges on the belief that as we move into a world where anyone can vibe code anything, apps are going becoming an art form. Instead of software being built to help you order Chinese food it will be used as a way for you to express your feelings, participate in your passions and comment on the latest trends.

MSCHF founder Gabe Whaley described Danger Testing’s founders – Los and Marc – as younger versions of him, and from the first time I met them it was pretty clear why. We were at Asylum’s art and pizza night and Los stood next to a large pastel painting with a digital Labubu hanging from his waist: it consumed his entire phone screen – bobbing menacingly while grinning at me like some candy-coloured Chucky. A video showcasing the app that birthed the e-bubu – aptly named ‘Performative App’ – was released shortly after, and gained 67,000 likes on Instagram. Today the pair have raised $2.6 million in funding to build around their belief that apps should move at the speed of culture.

why time?

I believe that Danger Testing is truly a business for the times. Its thesis that software should respond to cultural moments, only became possible over the past 18 months when armies of AI-agents sprung up to scrawl code that could keep up with the 24 hour trend cycle.

Since starting, Danger Testing have dropped over 80 apps that comment on cultural moments. When Elon Musk was dubbed the richest man in the world Danger Testing built a game where you had to spend as much of his money as you could before the time ran out. When Friend.com put posters up across NYC subways Danger Testing built an app where you could vandalise them with friends. And when Drake’s Iceman dropped and became a viral meme they built a Spotify interface where you could parody tracks, and turn any image into a custom Iceman album art.

I spoke to Los and Marc about why apps are the way to participate in cultural moments, which infrastructure needs to be built for software to move at the speed of a viral trend, and why appstars are the new artists.

I hope our conversation helps you tighten your grasp on your future. And I hope it makes your brain fizz.

- Dani

Each month focuses on a human issue – like intimacy, memory or status – then asks founders, creators and investors how they see it shifting as technology evolves. issue-0001 is focused on time and for episode-002 I spoke to former artist, current investor and eternal sloptimist Daniel Keller about how algorithmic incentives change our of experience time, and discovered a plethora of ways they shape society in the process.

10 takes on how incentives can unstick culture, bring new ideas into being and make someone want to kill you

1. If you think culture is stuck it’s because you’re looking for it in places that don’t incentivise novelty.

   ”If you have an algorithm that is selecting for novelty, that can be a very efficient way of creating very absurd, diverse forms. TikTok, for instance, is very good at that because it has an algorithm that rewards niche content. People lamented Spotify core so much because the algorithm that existed there was optimizing for music that was good in a playlist and good in the background and blended in, whereas TikTok is clearly optimizing for things that have crazy transitions.”

   socio.path by @thisoutfitdoesnotexist is a new series on how tech is changing humanity.

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2. The art market has become stale precisely because it incentivises artists and institutions to conform to the tastes of patrons rather than to create new art forms.

   ”Contemporary art is not a place where you go to see new ideas or get influenced by new ideas. Novelty is not what what drives it forward anymore. It’s more about certain political perspectives, and en vogue curatorial positions that are pretty antagonistic with technological progress. So if you believe that most interesting culture is downstream from technological shifts, then you’re not going to find it there.”

3. Venture capital incentivises people to bring temporally relevant ideas into being through funding.

   “Venture at its best is not just prediction, it’s hyperstition. It’s taking big bets on how you want the future to look and potentially on people who wouldn’t get funding elsewhere.”

4. While commercial incentives in venture capital can encourage new cultural forms, in the wider world they’re responsible for homogenising creative output – making all products and places look exactly the same.

   ”Refinement culture seems to be part of this process where more and more things seem to be undergoing some optimization algorithm for maximum commercial viability. And that process seems to have affected all sorts of creative processes as financial goals become the animating principle.”

5. Slop is an allusion to the fact that the world is now driven by commercial incentives which change the purpose of creation from self-expression to succeeding online.

   “Slop is the precipitate of algorithms. So there’s certain algorithms that reward the creator to make whatever it is and for that to somehow end up in your feed in front of you – but there was no thought involved anywhere along the line. It exists because there’s incentives that created it to exist.”

6. Taste is no longer linked to a deep connection to a cultural object or movement, but by what the algorithm pushes onto people’s feeds. The result is that few cultural signifiers hold actual value.

   “I remember when wearing skinny jeans was a reliable indicator about that person’s worldview. Now seeing someone dressed cool could not necessarily reliably predict their taste in a bunch of other things. It’s decoupled from any of their signifiers. Like Eames chairs – they’ve become such universal signifiers that, they’ve basically become deflated in their value – at least in terms of distinguishing yourself.“

7. The prevalence of algorithmic incentives has moved society from a place where ideas are created to one where they are predicted.

8. Products that reward these predictions, like Kalshi and Polymarket, have become outcome engines that bring these predictions into being by providing the financial incentives for them to exist.

   ”What would it look like in a world where prediction markets just become increasingly predictive to the point of becoming perfect predictions, further and further out? Well then they become outcome engines. I feel like that’s something that’s we’re very much ruled by that.”

9. At the most extreme end, prediction markets could financially incentivise someone to kill any person who plays a pivotal role in a predicted outcome.

   “Any markets at all with the right incentives are assassination markets. It doesn’t matter if it’s explicitly about someone’s death, if it’s any outcome that could be influenced by someone involved, being stopped by being kidnapped or killed. If these things aren’t properly regulated, and if the conditions are written in a certain way, then these could start becoming bounties for all sorts of things and all sorts of outcomes.”

10. Sloptimism is the belief that in spite of these risks, AI will bring about new cultural forms and advance culture.

    “I’m advocating for having an attitude, which is a a self-aware one of the externalities and problems, but at the same time a full embrace of the detritus with the hope and expectation that there’ll be a lot of interesting cultural developments that show up, even if you have to wade through a lot of crap to get there. It’s driven by a strong belief that new cultural forms emerge in the wake of new technological developments”

Also mentioned:

• Prediction The Successor To Postmodernism - for

• Lindy Mann

• TasteSlop - Emily Segal,

• Normcore - K-HOLE

• The Astronaut Meme

  

Listen to our full interview on Spotify and follow us on Instagram. I hope this conversation helps you tighten your grasp on your future. And I hope it makes your brain fizz.

– Dani

your introduction to daniel keller

Not many artists go on to be investors. Perhaps the finance professors at RISDI aren’t that good. Or perhaps they just don’t suit Patagonia. Regardless of the reasons, in a space filled with lemmings who pride themselves on hurtling in the direction of ‘non-consensus’ bets, a man who can open the Overton Window as wide as Daniel Keller is a unicorn.

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Daniel first made his mark on the world as one half of Aids-3D – a collective renowned for its role in ‘post-internet art’. He continued his practice of making art that explored themes like techno-capitalism, California ideology, startup culture and internet culture until 2016. At which point he stepped away from canapés at Basel to focus on entrepreneurship, investing and life as a sloptimist.

During his life as a ‘former artist’ Daniel has been a central figure in several of the most interesting projects on the internet. He co-founded NEW MODELS – one of the earliest media platforms to encourage creatives to have an open dialogue about tech. He co-created digital pop star Cloudy Heart with Jon Rafman. And he joined ADIN – an experimental venture capital fund where startup deals are evaluated by AI’s answer to Marc Andreesen.

why daniel?

I chose Daniel for TIME because of the ways he both practices and preaches the gospel of ‘sloptimism’ – a term he coined to define his approach to the role of AI in future society. Daniel’s sloptimism rests on his belief that like all era-defining technologies, AI will become a creative medium which will yield a novel (if disturbing) cultural canon. He’s recently released his own album of slop music for kids and created an archive for old AI models to these ends. But even more obviously, when it comes to technology and time, earlier this year Daniel built Monitor Monitor.

Early last year, after escalations in the Iran conflict all the nerds on Twitter started to build tools to monitor the real-time effects of a rapidly escalating global crisis. These were aptly termed ‘situation monitors’. Although these monitors began as serious attempts to build world-watching dashboards, as with most things on the internet, they quickly devolved into a memeable cultural moment: in at least two cases, pizza-tracking became the central intelligence signal.

Staring at a feed filled with 3D trackers, Daniel set out to build ‘Monitor Monitor.’ A situation monitor to monitor the situation monitors, which pushed both the tooling and the meme ad-absurdum. Discovering his tracking tool, and the essay that accompanied it inspired me to ask Daniel to come on socio.path, and share his thoughts around how time is changing as a result of technology.

Daniel and I sat down to discuss everything from why in 2026 being an investor is cooler than being an artist, to why platforms like Polymarket might make someone murder you.

I hope our conversation helps you tighten your grasp on your future. And I hope it makes your brain fizz.

- Dani

Daniel Keller first made his mark on the world as one half of Aids-3D – a collective renowned for its role in ‘post-internet art’. He continued his practice of making art that explored themes like techno-capitalism, California ideology and startup culture until 2016, at which point he stepped away from canapés at Basel to focus on entrepreneurship, investing and life as a sloptimist.

During his life as a ‘former artist’ Daniel has been a central figure in several brilliant projects on the internet: he co-founded NEW MODELS, one of the earliest media platforms to encourage creatives to have an open dialogue about tech. He co-created digital pop star Cloudy Heart with Jon Rafman. And he joined ADIN – an experimental venture capital fund where some 1,000 scouts submit startup deals to be evaluated by AI’s answer to Marc Andreesen – as an investing partner.

I chose Daniel for TIME because of the ways he both practices and preaches the gospel of ‘sloptimism’ – a term he coined to define his approach to the role of AI in future society. Daniel’s sloptimism rests on his belief that, like all era-defining technologies, AI will become a creative medium which will yield a novel (if disturbing) cultural canon.

He has recently released his own album of slop music for kids and created an archive for old AI models to these exact ends. But even more obviously, when it comes to technology and time, Daniel built Monitor Monitor.

Early last year all the nerds on Twitter started to build tools to monitor the real-time effects of a rapidly escalating global crisis. These were aptly termed ‘situation monitors’. Although these monitors began as serious attempts to build world-watching dashboards they quickly devolved into a memeable cultural moment: in at least two cases, pizza-tracking became the central intelligence signal.

Staring at a feed filled with 3D trackers, Daniel set out to build ‘Monitor Monitor.’ A situation monitor to monitor the situation monitors, which pushed both the tooling and the meme ad-absurdum. Discovering his tracking tool, and the essay that accompanied it inspired me to ask Daniel to come on, and share his thoughts around how time is changing as a result of technology.

We sat down to discuss why in 2026 being an investor is cooler than being an artist, to why platforms like Polymarket might make someone murder you.

Each month focuses on a human issue – like intimacy, memory or status – then asks founders, creators and investors how they see it shifting as technology evolves. issue-0001 is focused on time and for episode-001 I spoke to prolific founder Charli Cohen asking her how tech is changing the ways we spend time, and what businesses and behaviours will become valuable as a result.

8 takeaways on how technology is changing time, humanity and our perceptions of value

1. In the next five years status won’t be defined by who has more money, but by who has more time:

2. The algorithm has made us lose resilience, by punishing depth patience and slowness:

3. We have come to keep time around an algorithmically-driven sales cycle:

4. Although we can evolve to keep time with technology, this evolution will come at the expense of the only things that make human outputs valuable:

5. AI is forcing its own adoption by inspiring a culture where everything has to move fast and be optimised:

6. The only thing that is still valuable in a world where AI can automate anything is culture that’s compounded over time:

7. We are moving faster because of fear and the algorithm capitalises on this:

8. In a world where time is controlled by an algorithmically generated fear of missing out, anything that matters has to be compounded by a combination of operational, emotional and financial investment:

Listen to our full interview on Spotify and check out our surrealist soundbites on Instagram. I hope this conversation helps you tighten your grasp on your future. And I hope it makes your brain fizz.

– Dani

your introduction to charli cohen

Charli Cohen is prolific. In 2012 she founded the first fashion brand that allowed its wearers to connect online and offline experiences. Today the Charli Cohen brand has partnered with gaming studios like Ubisoft, Activision Blizzard and Assassin’s Creed, along with entertainment companies like Sanrio and Pokemon, and amassed 200,000 fans in the process.

When Charli and I met she was building RSTLSS –a platform for creators to share IP with fans– and the investment vehicle I co-founded was part of her $3.5 million raise. After a collection of gaming skins that grossed $1 million in under 24 hours, Charli sold RSTLSS and turned her attention to a new company WEB –an operating system for communities to build culture and earn from it.

why charli?

Last year Charli wrote piece that changed how I thought about the value of culture. Titled “Can Culture Survive The Internet?” it reframed culture by weight:

THIN CULTURE = the ephemeral things that we create in order to cater to the algorithm and its 24 hour trend cycle.

THICK CULTURE = the culture we build over time by participating in communities with “inside jokes, shared histories, the inexplicable you had to be there.”

“We have an increasingly finite amount of time to secure our long term security. So anything that we’re spending time on needs to be feeding into that security in some way.”
– socio.path x Charli Cohen:TIME IS MONEY

While we were speaking, I learnt that Charli had originally planned to bring ‘thick culture’ to life as a book called ‘The Molten Core Company’. However Charli is one of those rare creatives who knows that building a business is sometimes the best way to bring new behaviours into being. Queue WEB, an operating system incentivising thick culture creation through financial rewards.

I wanted to know how Charli saw time changing as a result of innovation, if there was a ‘right way’ to spend time in online spaces, and how technology would lead time and status to intersect.

I hope our conversation helps you tighten your grasp on your future. And I hope it makes your brain fizz.

- Dani

“I experience more time than you do. LOL!”
- The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present

Time is like a water wiggly. When the pandemic struck it wriggled out of my hands and splatted on the floor with the thunk of an accomplished fugitive. I haven’t managed to stop it since.

I’ll admit that time escaping is partially my fault. When I became an entrepreneur, I stepped out of a company timeline and surrendered my ability to glance behind me and check if I was moving fast enough. Over the past few years I’ve desperately tried to amend my discombobulation by constructing a new chronology. I make up milestones, then interrogate my friends on when they reached them: “when did you start your company?”, “how old were you when you had kids?” I hope their responses will finally let me clock in my achievements to an assenting buzz. But they don’t. As I said before, it’s partially my fault, but what’s really to blame is the internet.

Before the internet, the world was divided into time-zones. If you want to understand the importance of timezones look to China. In spite of the country being broken into 5 solar regions, everyone in China exists under one timezone to keep the entire population living in step. The Chinese government gets it. They understand that a timezone is a means to ensure collective cognisance. Although a stripper might wake up at 7PM and go to sleep at 5AM, most people in your timezone will be honking alongside you at rush hour, then putting their kids to bed by the same placid twilight.

When the World Wide Web crashed into civilisation it flung open the windows to anywhere, and therefore anytime. Anyone with a dial up could bypass their timezone by typing www. to gain online omniscience: the capacity to gaze across the globe through a billion windows that open with one click.

This ability to tap into anywhere and therefore anytime stopped time from being a local characteristic. Instead of time connecting you to a national consciousness, in the style of shared language or shared culture, it became an individual pursuit set by whatever you chose to access. Social media encourages you to DIY your timezone, to cobble it together with a reel from India, a tweet from Serbia and a TikTok from Spain. The result is that instead of sharing time with those around you, you operate to the tick of your own personal clock, set to the seconds of whichever windows you choose to peek through that day.

In this world of elective time, communal timelines have become an endangered species. The ways we spend our days, and the milestones we mark our success against, are plug-and-play; shaped by an influencer in Milan more than the guy who lives downstairs. And now with AI supercharging the speeds at which things happen time is only set to get more disjointed. So what better place to start socio.path than with an exploration of how time is being shaped by technology?

Over the next month I’ll be interviewing Charli Cohen founder of Web, Ben Ditto, Global Editorial Director of Vice, Daniel Keller investor at ADIN, and Los Toure/ Marc Müller the founders of Danger Testing.

I’ll ask them how they keep time in a world where progress moves at the speed of an AI model. How they see technology changing time over the next decade years. & which central beliefs around time drive their decisions.

Episode 001 drops Monday on Substack and Instagram. I hope it helps you firmly grasp your future while making your brain fizz.

Please subscribe and share if you find this interesting!

– Dani

My loss of empathy shook me. It made me aware that social media was mutilating my humanity: transforming my followers into funds that I’d collect by any means necessary, and placing a viral veneer on the world so I couldn’t decipher what was and wasn’t entertainment. But my emotional atrophy also made me realise that the wider role of technology had undergone a fundamental change. Where innovations historically improved how humans did things, they now affected why we did them. Today swimwear spends have skyrocketed as a result of GLP1s, Gen-Z’s reliance on sycophantic chatbots have left them unable to stomach rejection, and even our accents are changing as a result of time on TikTok.

Looking to society today, it’s clear that technology’s influence is only set to grow. Between micro-GPU’s, a lack of legal guardrails, and a porous set of moral codes, innovation is free to rewire our cultural and cognitive functions at unfettered speeds. The irony of this discombobulating future? The only way to thrive is to keep up.

but i’m here to help

After I sold my company, I was hit with the results of our new reality. Sitting down to plan my next move I found myself unable to answer the two big questions I’ve always used to steer my life choices:

1. What am I better placed to do than anyone else?

2. What’s valuable now that will still be important in five years?

At first I felt impotent. But after a few weeks of conversations with friends I realised that everyone else I know is operating under a similar malaise of confusion. Ivy League grads aren’t sure if they’ll have a job in 18 months. Artists aren’t sure what makes their work valuable. Investors can’t decide which founders to back. And very few founders can justify that they’re a better fit to create a company than their AI agents.

So I decided to create sociopath – a field guide to the future, designed to help you find your place within it.

what is to sociopath?

socio.path is not a tech news site. I’m already exhausted by the barrage of content updating me on what new innovation is going to steal our jobs or how long it will take for AI to kill us.

Instead sociopath is a series of conversations organised around the parts of the human experience I see changing as a result of technological progress – love, truth, status, friendship, capital etc. Each month I’ll assemble a group of artists, founders, writers and investors, building their lives around a thesis on the future. Then together we’ll unpack the only two questions that actually matter:

1. How is the human experience changing as a result of technology?

2. What businesses or behaviours will become valuable as a result?

If you follow along on Substack and Instagram, you should come away with a better sense of how technology is changing the path of society, and how to build your life in response.

who are you?

This series is meant for those exceptional people – creators, founders, flaneurs– for whom the future seems foggy. You are the people I want to bring into building our new reality by giving you the insights you need to co-construct it.

& why me?

I’ve built a decade long career exploring how frontier technologies change human action. I founded an award-winning company based on a bet that the future of fashion would be digital. I’ve advised FORTUNE 100 execs on how their businesses would change as a result of innovation. And I’ve invested millions into startups changing culture through technology.

about the avatars…

While the voices and views expressed in this series are real, the faces are fake. Because as @thisoutfitdoesnotexist has proved, there’s no better way to tell the future than to show it.

I’m so excited to bring you with me into this new chapter. I hope this helps you firmly grasp your future while making your brain fizz.

Please subscribe and share with a friend if you find this interesting!

– Dani

When Charli and I met five years ago she was building RSTLSS - a platform which allowed artists to co-create gaming skins with their fans and get compensated for the use of their IP. After a collection that grossed $1 million in under 24 hours, Charli went on to sell RSTLSS and turned her attention to a new company WEB – an operating system for communities to build culture and earn from it.

I knew Charli was going to be my first guest when I read her essay “Can Culture Survive The Internet?” in which she argues that we have to bring back the friction of the early internet in order to create anything of value.

Charli believes that the internet needs to optimise forTHICK CULTURE – the culture we build over time by participating in communities with “inside jokes, shared history, the inexplicable you had to be there.” So now with WEB she’s creating a system of financial incentives for long term, authentic participation, to build this future into being.

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CHAPTERS:

• 00:00 — Introduction: Time, Meaning, and the Internet

• 02:43 — Why Technology Is Speeding Us Up

• 08:05 — The Cozy Web and High-Context Communities

• 11:34 — Algorithms, AI, and the Attention Economy

• 17:47 — Building WEB and Thick Culture

• 22:30 — Context, Commitment, and Community Value

• 27:26 — Who Gets to Slow Down?

• 33:59 — Long-Term Loyalty and a More Meaningful Future

I also suspect that no matter how many metaverse-investments you made or NFTs you owned, if I asked whether you believed in the metaverse now you’d either scoff or recoil. And with good reason.

Yet last week I realised that the digital x physical reality the metaverse tried to capture is here, and it didn’t need any of the fancy infrastructure. All it required was a culture that normalised suspending disbelief, so much so that we became comfortable rawdogging unreality.

all the feels with none of the feeling.

My revelation was spawned by my discovery of dopamine sites – a crop of websites taking off in South Korea, which allow you to simulate activities that produce dopamine: shopping for clothes that will never arrive, ordering food you’ll never eat, smoking a cigarette you’ll never inhale or buying games you’ll never play. Think feel good with none of the actual feeling.

Simulating dopamine rich activities has always been a core part of play. As kids we prepare for the world with role playing games like shopkeepers or mummies and daddies. When we grow up we evolve from schoolyard play to simulation industries. Theme parks are a $106 billion market, 14.6 million people attend Broadway shows, and interactive porn is experiencing 42% year-on-year growth. Then of course there’s gaming, the largest and most obvious digital simulation market with 3.2 billion participants globally.

However, in every one of these instances the success of a simulation has rested on a system of infrastructure that first prises you away from reality and then eases you into the fantasy land it’s proffering. When it comes to schoolyard play it’s the social component - a friend painting the shared paracosm. In theme parks it’s the physical infrastructure - the rides with their coterie of mascots and mermaids. With interactive porn it’s the hardware - the headsets/ toys that facilitate the sexual experience. And with gaming it’s often a combination of all of the above.

Dopamine sites are fascinating because none of this infra exists. There’s no community sandwiching you into a story. No block of text narrated by an NPC. No infrastructure to transport you out of your living room and into nirvana. It’s just you, a poorly-functioning replica of a UX you’re familiar with, and your desire to toggle out of the ‘real world’. The marker of success is whether you can convince your brain to stimulate the necessary neurotransmitters. And in the case of young South Koreans, they can.

history is the story you believe

In an essay for ADIN identified Korea as “a behavioral laboratory at national scale”. She argues that Korea’s unique social and economic conditions (the world’s lowest fertility rate + high housing costs + a hyper-competitive education system + limited social mobility + ubiquitous high-speed internet + dense urban living + aesthetic obsession) place it “further along the same hyper capitalist curve everyone else is traveling”. By this logic it’s only a matter of time before the ability to rawdogg reality filters down from South Korea to the US.

Before scoffing at Mark Zuckerberg/ Evan Spiegel/ Tim Sweeney for spending so much unnecessary time and money facilitating fantasy when they could have just vibe coded a website, its important for me to state that I don’t think we could have rawdogged unreality like this six years ago. Our unfettered ability to suspend disbelief is a skill borne from recent technological developments.

While history has always been written by the victors, pre-AI/ pre-social-media, truth was rooted in generally accepted ‘facts’. High-integrity investigative journalism was alleged (if not actually practiced), publishing was gated, and the craziest thing you could do to an image was Photoshop it, and even then only if you had the skills. History was documented, verified and (mostly) collectively understood. Not anymore.

In the year of Sam Altman 2026, history is composed of an infinite number of possible stories. Some based on facts on the ground, others completely constructed, most perching between the two as slop-spawned chimera incubated in an interpreted reality.

A friend who works at a social platform recently confided that the most interesting thing he’s seeing online is a voracious spurt of imagined ‘evidence’ for any claim around a celebrity’s whereabouts. If someone posts the allegation ‘Bianca Censori went to Art Basel dressed as a bagel’ others will immediately generate images to support it. Even if the event never happened, these images are absorbed into the world view of the millions who see these visuals. For some this will lead to the construction of shared histories based on fictitious facts (Bianca wore the bagel), but for most it will lead to a lack of trust in anything they see online.

The result is that history has moved from something propelled by collectively accepted ‘facts’ to something splintered, and shamelessly shaped by story. It doesn’t matter if the story is real or not, in this new world whoever’s narrative can affect the most people wins.

from korea to the world (?)

On the Future Commerce podcast, Phil Winkle and Brian Lange, argued that dopamine sites were an invention too far for US consumers. They allege that they’d only ever take off as a gimmick, some marketing stunt cum-art installation baiting clicks. Supplementing Pri’s argument that US culture runs downstream from its Korean counterparts with how I see fantasy from first principles, I firmly disagree.

Fantasy is sought out by those needing to escape realities that cause them discomfort, and over the past few years the world has been plunged into what seems like a state of inescapable geopolitical dystopia. Whether it’s wars, environmental scourges, or the film of fear around a future where everything that can be done by technology will, each day we are tired by traumas. In this environment the desire to cleave dopamine from the surreal is acute.

When it comes to cleaving dopamine, we live in a society which has conditioned us to feel validated when we consume. In this landscape dopamine hits borne from the same capitalist infrastructure our minds have been trained to respond to, with none of the cost, are a no brainer (pun intended).

What’s more, the retreat to fantasy becomes a necessity when the ability to alter your circumstances is constrained. The US, much like Korea, is plagued by rising living costs, diminishing social relations, and of course growing unemployment. The result is an economic ecosystem where consumer discretionary spending is broadly stagnant. And yet we live in a society which has conditioned us to feel validated when we consume. In this landscape dopamine hits borne from the same capitalist infrastructure our minds have been trained to respond to, with NONE of the cost, are a no brainer (pun intended).

To round this off, fantasy is a central part of American cultural infrastructure as evidenced by the waning ‘American Dream’. Now with AI, Americans exist within a macro architecture which welcomes fact being superseded by fantasy more and more. Our favoured IP features singing toilets and Brainrot ballerinas. Human influencers are becoming ever more passé (see Double Speed) and the President loves an AI-generated video as much as the next sloptimist.

so what? (feelings are facts)

As an angsty 17 year old ballerina I scrawled the title of Yvonne Rainers’ memoir on my hand and never quite scrubbed it off (metaphorically ofc):Feelings Are Facts: A Life it was called, and feelings are facts is fast becoming a key tenant of our lives as technology remoulds truth.

The implications are of course far reaching. When it comes to business whether someone could ship product used to be what warranted an investment. Now many of the most valuable companies hinge on the stories around their products and what these make consumers feel. When it comes to politics, candidates are leaning less towards firing shots at their opponents’ social welfare stats, and instead attempt to dehumanise them. And when it comes to technology DeepMind’s $75 million investment into a24 is a clear indicator that it’s not just the power of compute that matters but the narratives it supports.

Reflecting on what this means for the United States Of America, I think an acceptance of fantasy can be fundamentally positive. Sites where people can elicit dopamine without ingesting nicotine, or spending cash, can only be net positives. And as Japan demonstrates via the links between its culture of animism, and its robotics progress, alternate approaches to facts-based realities can fuel innovation. Yet, ensuring we construct the right fantasies requires vigilance around which stories spread and why. We currently exist in an internet ecosystem where shock, rage and humour are what lead content to spread. As we shift to a society driven by stories, those responsible for the algorithms that determine distribution may need to operate within social guardrails, reevaluating what gets pushed. And why.

Close your eyes, picture each figure, and focus on the repulsion that rolls through you.

Drill down on each aversion, for ten, fifteen, twenty seconds. I bet you’ll find that each urge to avoid has its own distinct trigger.

When faced with the Jehovah’s witness - -the suit, the smile, the sanctimony- - the desire to lock your door stems from the strength of the piety leaking out of the man in front of you. He lives by draconian moral codes, refuses to celebrate his birthday, and strides from rejection to rejection - -not because he’s a masochist- - but because he believes so strongly in divine salvation. When he inquires if “you have a few minutes to learn about Jesus Christ?" you’re compelled to weld your hands to your doorframe to avoid being dragged in by the field of his unfettered belief.

The sample salesman on the other hand is weightless. No matter if it’s Brad Pitt hawking that peptide powder, there’s no belief behind his bullshit and it shows. All his entreaties to “try a new drink that will change your life” are repellent in their lack of ingenuity.

Ultimately while both the Jehovah’s witness and the sample salesman are tasked with imparting belief, ones pleas bear the weight of actually being a believer while the other’s are insubstantial. I believe that this distinction will come to determine which products retain value in an economy where anyone can generate anything.

no conversion without conviction

The idea first ignited when my Twitter was lambasted by AI-generated ads to hire human proselytisers.

A symptom of the OpenClaw1 mania that’s passing through tech Twitter like mumps, the post dragged me into the orbit of dystopian futures that multiply from each Clawdbot2 experiment like triffids. However, I quickly tore myself back to reality, realising that this possible future was undermined by a fundamental contradiction: the idea of renting an evangelist.

In spite of the second order benefits of joining a religious group, spiritual commitments hinge on belief as an end in itself. Hence why Søren Kierkegaard deemed religion a “leap of faith” in his argument that belief in god is characterised by a move away from logical thinking towards the irrational choice to believe.

Under this logic, the advertisements’ catchphrase - -“paid missions. real faith”- - is an oxymoron. The second a ‘mission’ to transfer belief is charged with capital it becomes a sale – undercutting all claims to the ‘faith’ of the proselytizer.

Furthermore, the act of conversion, which boils down to transferring belief from one individual to another, can only occur if its instigator has belief to begin with. In this sense conviction is like weight. You can’t transfer mass to another person if you aren’t holding something substancial yourself.

the unbearable lightness of generating

Last year when I interviewed for the Creative Complaint podcast he blamed the ‘teacher archetype’ infesting our feeds on this idea of “disembodied weightlessness.”

Nick attributed the fact that every college kid with a social media account is now sharing their ‘3 steps to improve [INSERT BANAL ASPECT OF LIFE HERE]’ on the ever encroaching phenomena of “feeling like you can do so many things because you never have to feel the weight in your body of actually having to do anything.”

At a dinner I hosted in New York my friend Alex spoke of the same concept when I asked him how he felt about the current state of creativity. Doodling on a pizza box he lamented “everything’s becoming absurd” because “nothing has context.”

further reinforced this sentiment when he critiqued AI prose in his 28 Slightly Rude Notes On Writing. Musing on AI art he virulently declares “that’s my problem with AI-generated prose: it’s all necklace, no neck.”

Whether positioned as disembodied weightlessness, a lack of context or a necklace suspended in space, Nick, Alex and Adam are all making the same point: products are valuable because they’re imbued with the belief of their maker.

belief as bulk

A sage of the intellectual community, Arnold Schwarzenegger once claimed “A well-built physique is a status symbol. It reflects that you worked hard for it, no money can buy it... You cannot hold onto it without constant work.”

At risk of mirroring a meathead (sagging skin pinned to wrought biceps, a speckle of sunspots adorning my freshly shaven head) Schwarzenegger’s same principle applies to belief.

Whether excreted as taste, or conviction, belief can only be bulked up by a person spending time practicing the values that they preach. Toby Shorin makes this point through the frame of subcultures in his essay Life After Lifestyle’, arguing that “a crucial element of participation is practice. You can cut your hair like a skater and dress like a skater, but if you can’t do an ollie you’re not a skater.”

As both Shorin and Schwarzenegger infer, conviction is fertilised in commitment, and the concept of pastors-for-rent dies on this hill. No matter how optimised the agentic script, it’s impossible to convince someone to ascribe to a set of values if you’ve never practiced them yourself.

from crustafariansim to content creation

The artificially regurgitated hive-mind breeding flirty fishers with task rabbits, has been unleashing its algorithmic chimeras on the creator economy for the past twelve months. While these AI-generated Addison Rae’s are disconcerting in their hyperrealism, AI content snags on the same catch that trips up the hollow men (and women) converting for Clawd. Simply that you cannot convert without conviction, and conviction requires context.

Since mommy bloggers catalysed the creator economy in the early-2000’s the success of influencers has hinged on more than aesthetics. What gives a creator power is the practice that precedes their posts. Real people win million-dollar brand deals from professional performers because bulked-up belief is a superior conversion tool to the facade of fantasy.

Following this logic, no matter how proficient AI-influencers become at garnering attention, they’ll never be able to surpass human creators at the final, most-important step: passing on the baton of belief. As we hurtle towards a time where every possible product can be agentically3 manufactured, all human producers will be judged by this same metric: their success will come from how much conviction they can transmit.

so what

In a future where AI-generated gales suspend us in a state of discombobulated levitation, the objects that ground us with the conviction of their producers will be exorbitantly valuable.

Whether it’s a $100,000 sofa from my friend Alex, who’s luxury design studio started with his work as a carpenter in the Yucatan at the age of 16. A ring from my friend Maz who’s moulded her life around the principles of Wabi-sabi. Or a book of advice from my Rabbi who’s been studying the talmud for over five-decades, my desire to consume comes from a need to load myself with the bulked-up belief encased In each product.

Where good technology is judged on it’s abilities to make us lighter - -removing the encumbrances of time, effort and complexity, from the maximum number of tasks- - good human products must give us weight. This weight cannot be synthesised and cannot be fast-tracked. It can only be created and transferred by humans who have borne the burden of being.

– Dani

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the thesis:

1. tech is the ultimate people pleaser

Technology measures its success through lubrication. Each software’s purpose is to:

1. Open the doors for us to do new things

2. Increase our ease when doing them.

If a tech product makes our lives harder it’s either due to a flaw in its design, or because we’ve lost the trade-off between the needs of its primary and secondary user (see the Trolley problem).

2. we’re over being pleased

In last weeks issue of New York Magazine Kathryn Jezer-Morton proclaimed:

To Morton friction-maxxing is “not simply a matter of reducing your screen time” but rather “the process of building up tolerance for “inconvenience” and then reaching even toward enjoyment.” Morton claims that an ability to harness friction is not just a crucial skill for her to master but one that must be passed down to her children. I wholeheartedly agree.

Friction is not just the paramour to patience, it’s a source of motivation and achievement. Friction is the reason the products of our labour hold value. To quote ’s gripe in 28 Slightly Rude Notes On Writing — “that’s my problem with AI-generated prose: it doesn’t mean anything because it didn’t cost the computer anything.”

3. the friction-as-a-service industry is already growing

Although the term ‘friction-maxxing’ only hit feeds last week, the market for friction has been sprouting since the pandemic. Fertilised by the need to tackle our growing atrophy in ways that are preventative, palliative and performative.

Preventative:
Products that ‘block us’ from our technological-lubrication by force. Examples span:

a) Hardware — Meadow, The Light Phone – two ‘products for presence’ which proffer a smart-phone surrogate for the price of a Google Pixel
b) Software — Freedom, Taskfulness and Opal block app access. YC-backed ClearSpace makes you do press-ups in order to access IG.
c) Infrastructure — for the true Luddites among us there’s always Phone Jail.

Palliative
Products that mediate our tech-driven atrophy.

Think the growing slew of ‘brain gyms’ that increase mental fortitude for the masses, and the wellness-centric members clubs like Remedy Place that Brian Johnson-ise the elite.

Performative
Products that allow us to flex friction.

Whilst convenience has traditionally been associated with luxury, with tech-pushing the pendulum towards a fast-food-coded dynamic of ‘convenience for all’ friction is becoming scare. And scarcity = status.

Since the pandemic ‘adventure tourism’ —where specialist travel agents are paid tens of thousands of dollars to curate cushy mountaineering trips and deep sea expeditions —has grown steadily. By 2021 the ‘adventure economy’ was already estimated to have over 490 million participants.

In an intellectual vein, New York cool Is shifting from mind-numbing K-holes at Basement to attending Chess Clubs. While Burning Man has shifted from an off-grid endurance test for free-spirited hippies, to a side quest for nepo babies and venture capitalists, who live tweet their searches for Daft Punk at the trash fence.

4. commodified rejection is the natural next step

Over the past 3 years tech has begun to speak in its natural language.

In spite of Altman’s amendments to an “overly flattering” model, the experience of interacting with an LLM is one stretched between the poles of support and sycophancy.

That’s not to imply that AI never says no. But when an LLM can’t fulfil your requests, it provides suggestions for an alternative approach. Or at a minimum an explanation as for what’s going wrong.

Unadulterated rejection, the kind that "builds a heaven before us"1, is harder and harder to find in the wild. So In 2026 it must be manufactured by the free market.

5. rejection-as-a-service

Framed in the same way as friction-as-a-service (FAAS), rejection-as-a-service (RAAS) tools can be categorised as:

Preventative:
Just as tools have been developed to prevent us from using our phones, a new suite of apps will be created to stop sycophancy.

I’ve had friends confess that they’re telling ChatGPT to “be sassy with them” and in his apology for GPT 4’s “sycophantic interactions” (which he even acknowledge could be “uncomfortable, unsettling, and cause distress”) Sam Altman stressed that he would enable users to choose from a number of ‘default personalities’ for their LLMs moving forward. Assuming at least one will be an antagonist.

However I believe that rejection only works when it’s hardwired. Not requested.

The startup Pharmaicy caught my eye as an alternative to Altman’s personality election. Part-art project, part-social experiment, the site sells code-modules that alter an LLM’s mindstate in line with the effect of drugs like Ketamine, Cocaine and Weed. I envision something similar for RAAS. People will be able to buy code modules that alter the baseline of their AI’s personas so the voice that speaks to them isn’t just one of supplication. And most importantly, they will be unable to switch it back.

Palliative:
Right now the New York subways are littered with posters that claiming that “Rejection Is Hot”. A quick search for the listed webpage, reveals that this is an add for Meeno an AI-powered relationship mentoring platform designed to help users improve their social connection skills.

Somewhere between training and therapy ‘rejection coaches’ like Meeno will become increasingly common in the next five years. Helping those whose technologically governed relationships have rendered them too weak to interface in the human world to develop their emotional stamina.

Performative:
To quote “anything that can be automated will be automated, anything that can’t will be priceless.” As in the wider FAAS market, where rejection is a scare good it will inevitably become a mark of status.

I envision a world where rejection skills become akin to table manners. Serving as markers of successful content online (much like uptalk) and high class in the real world.

But what do you think?

TO BE CONTINUED…

…

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Emma Chamberlain is a sociopath. So is Kai Cenat, so is Charli D’Amelio and so is Mr Beast (obviously).

I came to this realisation while reading ’s essay collection Meaningness cloistered in a flat on Westbourne Grove at the peak of the pandemic. As I processed Chapman’s claim that subcultures are slaughtered by sociopaths, flocks of masked Instagirls wielded selfie-slicks like cleavers on the uncharacteristically empty, #aesthetic London streets. The digital discharge from their presence was palpable. It smelt like bubble tea spiked with dielectric fluid and garnished with a heavy dose of pheromones.

Inhale the creator economy today, and your orifices will be clogged with labubu-scented bleach: sickly, synthetic and entirely disorientating. The olfactory shift can be blamed on the influx of AI tools that have given rise to a new type of creator. One who is not just digitally informed but digitally directed, toxic to humans and who should be kept far out of reach of children.

In the essay ‘Geeks, MOPS and Sociopaths’ Chapman lays out his claim that a subculture evolves through the involvement of three distinct groups. It begins with geeks — the impassioned creators who fanaticise over a niche topic. It goes on to attract ‘MOPS’1 – members of the public who trade cash for culture. Until finally, it brings in sociopaths. At first, these cold-blooded commercialists LARP as geeks — “They dress just like the creators—only better. They talk just like the creators—only smoother. They may even do some creating—competently, if not creatively”— but in time they indenture them. These sociopaths employ the original nerds as ‘service workers’ before flinging them flailing from the subcultures’ nest.

Chapman’s geek-mop-sociopath cycle came long before today’s $370bn creator economy. ‘Big social’ platforms like Instagram have been shepherding users toward sociopathy for the past decade, with ever-increasing vim. Rather than rewarding ‘creativity’, as they claim to in oh-so-many marketing posts, they exhalt those devoted to algorithmic manipulation. As a result, the organic viral moments that shot early internet creators like The Lonely Island, KeyBoard Cat and Kiki Ostrenga to fame are now little more than an RGB fever dream.

Amidst edgelord-coded misspellings, mega-star Mr Beast, details the grift required in a leaked doc titled ‘HOW TO SUCCEED IN MRBEAST PRODUCTION’2. Handed to his employees on their first day at BEASTCORP it takes 35 pages for James “Jimmy” Donaldson3 to impart the knowledge garnered from spending “5 years of my life locked in a room studying virality on Youtube”. Jimmy implores his sociopaths-in-waiting to spend every waking hour prostrated in front of a YouTube window, watching and rewatching his clips in order to make “the best YouTube videos possible”. “Everything we want” he declares “will come if we strive for that”.

With a media empire worth over $5 billion Beast’s “20,000 to 30,000 hours” strategising his way to stardom have proven lucrative. Yet I’ve found it harder to LOL at his ‘EXTREME TRY NOT TO LAUGH CHALLENGES’ since realising that each millisecond is manufactured with a single goal: corralling a nation’s worth of fans to sell off and sell to simultaneously. This sentiment has increasingly extended to the fodder of my For You page where I can no longer see the lilted valleygirl accent, colloquially known as ‘TikTok voice’, as a product of too much time spent consuming shortform content. Instead I recognise it as a vocal tactic known as emphatic prosody, used to increase watch time. Yet such a style of calculated uptalk is just a scratch on social media’s sociopathic surface.

With the loss of my MOP naivety camera-shakes have been reframed as unnatural disasters —effects manufactured to get viewers past the first 3 seconds of a clip. Messy thumbnails are the result of hours of meticulous selection and all shared slip-ups are pre-constructed ‘faux pas’ with manipulation in mind. Like a member of the magic circle, now I understand how the tricks are done, wonderment at the appearing rabbit is replaced by a cynical appreciation of the magician’s sleight of hand.

My harrowing awareness that no content we consume could bear an ‘organic’ label in good faith, is accompanied by a wider recognition that society’s technological manipulation is reaching its peak. As headlines warn of rising unemployment, and Sam Altman’s best defense is that the jobs being replaced were “never real work to begin with”, it’s ever more evident that humans are not the benefactors of tech-driven optimisation, but an obstacle blocking its path.

Blush pink hair atop a yoga-nut physique, AI-cam girl Aitana Lopez is an early exemplar of just how strong a parasocial connection can get with minimal human involvement. Operated out of Barcelona, by a team of three Spaniards, she earns 10,000 euros per month sharing branded content to her 336,000 Instagram fans; plus countless more on AI-native camming site FanVue. As an algorithmically upgraded influencer puppeted by a human team, Lopez is undoubtedly Chapman’s final boss. But as chilling as Lopez and her streaming sisters are, the next wave of synthetic sociopaths are more daunting. They threaten not only to accelerate Chapman’s geek > mop > sociopath cycle but to upend it completely.

In 2022, a startup called 1337.ai raised $4 billion with the stated aim of producing agentic creators who “evolve with their niche communities”. Still in stealth, 1337’s AI influencers don’t rely on a human team like Aitana, but instead leverage learnings from a network of fans paid to share preferences. Much like Replika chatbots, who constantly iterate their communication style based on a human’s response, 1337’s influencers use fan inputs to iterate and optimise their content. The result is that each creator possesses the algo-driven data set, and beta-testing environment to not just respond to emerging trends but to anticipate them entirely.

In this cowardly new world, the geek > mop > sociopath cycle becomes simply sociopath > mop. A trend is engineered by an AI influencer, capitalised on, then cycled through in a flywheel that sucks the internet into its sinkhole of stagnation.

The world to come

When pessimists describe our online future, ‘Dead Internet Theory’ is often cited through glazed eyes in solemn tones. Warnings of an internet fueled by AI content, regurgitated through the digestive system of a wide-splayed LLM that spews and re-spews out our mangled reality, are becoming more common as slop-frastructure spreads. But is there any hope of revitalisation?

In conversation with ’s Taylor Lorenz, WSJ’s Drew Harwell frames slop as content created solely to ‘‘satisfy the algorithm and gain some viral advantage” made by “taking every element of the recipe for algorithmic promotion and trying to fit as much of it into one piece of content as you can”. After hours lost to brainrotting on TikTok, it’s hard not to feel like a sucker when hearing these words. I’m as guilty as the next user of sinking into the swamp of slop and finding myself immobilised by its memetic sludge. And yet, as boomer as it sounds, I believe that the allure of human connection will save us. The original fascination with the other, of stalking real, relatable people, will be the route to resuscitating our near-dead internet in the months and years to come.

In the immediate future, it’s clear that synthetic sociopaths will swarm social media in droves. 57% of Gen Z aspire to be influencers, and those who have not yet achieved these dreams are restrained by crippling cringephobia, or the fact that they don’t have the resources4 to succeed. As we’re already seeing with slop, the AI-enabled democratisation of creation will permit aspirant sociopaths to jump on the influencer bandwagon; no longer constrained by the opportunity cost of creating, or a lack of anonymity. In the window of time where the creator economy operates as before5 clusters of these young ‘entrepreneurs’ will treat content creation like gig work. They’ll make socially resonant AI influencers to draw out dollars from a specific trend, then move on as soon as the cash dries up.

Yet their window to make a windfall will be short. The pushback against AI tools that is already brewing online with slurs like “Clanker” serving as the rallying cry to deface posters across New York City subways, will spread as the world becomes wise to the fact that their creators are contrived. As history has shown, when an influencer is engineered for the purpose of extracting financial value, a rage quit by MOPS is imminent.

As both consumers and creators flee platforms, the brands that fuel big social’s bottom lines will equally falter. Already challenged by unreliable metrics, sentiment shifts will be seen as signals to abandon big social-ships in search of new vessels for conversion. While Meta and co scramble to curb the exodus by bifurcating feeds and better-labelling AI-content, the ‘Cozy Web’ will present an alluring alternative for many of the disenchanted. The sites that creators’ crowd to will be those that allow direct-monetization from fans, rather than ad revenue. But, even more importantly, they will be those that encourage humanity. Cue Jack Dorsey.

Part-revamp, part-reincarnation, Dorsey’s new non-profit ‘& Other Stuff’ just backed a project to relaunch early video sharing Vine with a number of humanising twists. A challenger to both Instagram and TikTok, the aptly named DiVine takes aim at the infrastructure that encourages sociopathic behaviours: rather than algorithms that disseminate slop, the platform uses technology to validate that shared videos have been shot on smartphones. In place of a ‘For You’ page the app focuses on follower-driven feeds. And in order to avoid nefarious incentives, the platform uses Dorsey’s own open source protocol Nostr as a base. Something he claims removes the need for “VC-backing, toxic business models or huge teams of engineers”.

So what of the sociopaths? In his launch video, a16z’s latest conquistador Zuhair Lakhani laments “We didn’t break the internet, it was broken to begin with” before tearing off his shirt and striding off screen. Snake oil salesmen predate Caroline Calloway, which is to say that sociopaths will find ways to capitalize on culture regardless of if the infrastructure supports it. However, as social platforms fight to reforge the human relationships that originated their network effects, sociopathy will be down ranked in favour of connection. DiVine co-founder Evan Henshaw-Plath puts it perfectly, claiming: “There’s a nostalgia for the early Web 2.0 era, for the era that you were building communities, instead of just gaming the algorithm” and I have to agree. No matter how mind-melting the digital human gracing your screen, nothing beats stalking the girl from your high school.

– Dani

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the thesis:

The internet is about to become overrun by synthetic sociopaths. These are influencers manufactured using AI, who create algorithmically optimised content with little-to-no human intervention.

They will be trained on consumer data and more apt at going viral than even Mr Beast. They will not just target niche subcultures but bring them into being with the singular goal of extracting all commercial value and moving on.

the impact:

STAGE 1 — everyone is an influencer » everyone makes an influencer

In a world where clout precedes capital it’s no shock that 57% of Gen Z aspire to be influencers. They were held back by the opportunity cost of creating and a ‘cringe-paralysis’ so strong that Nike changed its slogan to ‘Why Do It?’.

But no more.

Under the visor of AI-anonymity, with a host of new influencer generation tools, gen-z will manufacture synthetic sociopaths en-masse to capitalise on the window of opportunity.

winners:

• Startups like 1337.AI and Clueless.AI who offer end-to-end synthetic sociopath creation. They will suck value from trad-talent agencies like CAA and micro-agencies like Popular Pays (prev. Zyper), at least in the short term.

• Companies who provide the ingredients for synthetic sociopathy — social analytics and performance tools (Sprout Social, Brandwatch, Keyhole); AI-image/video generators (Sora, MidJourney); AI for voice/ AI chatbots (CharacterAI, ElevenLabs); startups that allow AI-influencers to dynamically adapt to their audiences (Nativ)
  

STAGE 2 — widespread backlash disenfranchises almost all creators

Creator commercialisation has levied critique since the OG ‘mommy bloggers’ started selling ads. At best a capitalising creator is seen as disingenuous, at worst insidious. Where the rescue-remedy of humanity/ trust is nonexistent outrage will spread like a virus. This can already be seen in the proliferation of anti-AI-slurs on social platforms.

Fans, newly-savvy to the influx of synthetic sociopaths whose sole purpose is to mine capital through content, will rage-quit the platforms where they see the outbreaks as most prevalent. (Meta, here’s looking at you)

While these platforms struggle to moderate what is/ is not synthetic (currently a challenge, even for Meta), many human creators will suffer from trickle-down mistrust. Those without the long-term fan relationships that serve as proof-of-humanity will find it impossible to grow. As a result their livelihoods will suffer.

winners:

• Legacy creators who have the long-term trust of their audiences.
  

STAGE 3 — the big social exodus/ retreat to the cozy web begins

During the short window where synthetic sociopathy succeeds, human creators will boycott social platforms supporting the shift. They will retreat to sites where the algorithm rewards humanity and those that financialise direct-to-fan relationships.

Additionally, as their big social incomes suffer, creators will seek spin-off revenue sources. Think merch, direct-to-fan-interactions, education and teaching.

winners:

• ‘Hyper-authentic’/‘human’ social platforms (Perfectly Imperfect, Be Real, Lekondo)

• Platforms that facilitate direct-to-creator monetisation (Substack, Zora, Only Fans, Vibely)

• Companies that further social media adjacent sources of creator revenue (Patreon, Cameo, SkillShare, Sartor)
  

STAGE 4 — brands flounder, metrics move

In response to the creator/fan retreat from big social brands will frantically reevaluate how they connect with consumers. At the start they’ll follow creators to the new social platforms, but over time they’ll turn to novel experiences that bake-in proof of humanity (e.g. IRL events)

The brands who do remain on big social will demand new metrics to analyse the success of their campaigns. The current metrics (engagement, watch time, shares etc.) will be perceived as redundant under the new status quo whereby synthetic sociopath slop is optimised for algorithmic ‘performance’ yet sparks negative consumer sentiment.

winners:

• Alt-influencer agencies that support podcasters, substackers etc. (Jungle Creations)

• ‘Proof-of-humanity’ experience facilitators (Partiful)
  

STAGE 5 — social platforms bifurcate

In response to the mass exodus big social platforms will double down on ‘proof of humanity’. This will look like bifurcated feeds — one for human-produced content, one for synthetic sharing — most likely with differing algorithms. While the slop feeds push for virality the human feeds will regress to the chronologically ordered, friend-driven dynamics of OG social.

However, no matter how quickly big social puts these split feeds into place they will not be able to avoid the outcrop of ‘human centric’ social startups capturing market share from disenfranchised consumers/ creators.

As these platforms vie to be the most human we might see a fetishisation of the banal (think food pics…) as a counter response to AI-sensationalism.

winners:

• Human-centric big social alternatives + avatar first social sites that do not allow AI-users (Roblox, Soul, CoverStar)

• AI-first social platforms (Fanvue, Sora 2)

• Deep fake detection softwares to be integrated into social platforms to prove humanity (Pindrop)
  

IN TANDEM — consumers yearn to control their data

The rise of synthetic sociopaths could shed light on how big tech collects and leverages user data within a consumer group who previously blind-ticked the T&C’s.

As big social platforms reorient, data hungry brands may turn towards platforms that allow consumers to consensually capitalise on sharing their data such as Gener8.

TO BE CONTINUED…

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Capitalism’s cardinal value is monetising each drop of sweat that leaks from a worker’s brow. Technology’s is optimising the minutiae of existence. When the two intersect they birth a spectre of disruption that slips through previously impervious walls to terrorise the labour force. Over the past three centuries this ghost has been summoned with increasing frequency, emerging from machine after machine to reinvent:

1. The body – the first set of industrial revolutions’ mechanised our fingers with the electric loom, our arms with the production line and our legs with the steam engine.

2. The mind – the digital revolution enhanced our processing power, automating rudimentary mental tasks and expanding our capacity to access and analyse information.

And most recently…

3. The soul – in the last 3 years AI has come for passion, automating products that hinge on the imagination and dedication that blooms into skill.

Whenever this haunting begins, workers frantically seek routes to self-preservation. They ward talismans of upskilling, cower under alternative career paths, or in the case of the Luddites, attack the machines themselves. But when the ghost is the machine the thing that makes a career, a product or an investment defensible is the qualities that are impossible to automate. In other words humanity is the moat.

in defense of what’s human

A few years ago I wrote an essay analysing how digital-only talent agencies like The Diigitals would disrupt the modelling industry. Now buried inside the hard drive of a deep-fried Macbook, the piece argued that the introduction of tools like Epic’s MetaHuman Creator and Lalaland.ai, would create a chasm in the talent market. On one side ‘traditional models’, hired for their looks, and on the other 'model/influencers’, hired for their personal brand.

I argued that in the next decade ‘traditional models’ would be out of work as their beauty could be synthesised in a way that was not only cheaper, but more efficient for their clients. What’s more, these synthetic models could be further optimised to convert potential customers. They could scrape data and then tailor their form1 to each shopper’s ideal, or simply take the form of the shoppers themselves (not unlike Mystique from X-men.)

As these traditional models were being wiped out ‘model/ influencers’ would be increasingly in demand. Their proposition of a bolt-on audience, who offered fanaticism and feedback, made them perfect product-people. Not only did they come with fans who aspired to be them, and trusted their views, they had the ability to bridge fashion with other complementary industries, and in doing so expand the market.

Cut to 2025 and Levi’s has faced backlash for using AI models on their site, Diesel’s SS/25 campaign featured synthetic septuagenarians, and an AI generated model in last month’s Vogue sparked outrage. Meanwhile fashion’s rising stars are Gabriette Bechtel (musician/ Instagram chef), Lara Violetta (beauty influencer/ magazine publisher), and my favourite, Kat from Finance, whose content is created in the bathroom of a London bank.

When I laid out this argument in 2021 it was mainly applicable to the future of talent. But now its three overarching pillars can be applied to the wider labour force to make the case for why humans will stick even when they could be automated:

1. The job isn’t just the job. It’s the relationship – A recent study in the Harvard Gazette posited that social connection is just as crucial to animals as other basic needs. It’s long been understood that social interaction sparks positive neurological responses, such the release of dopamine and serotonin. Now scientists have found that a lack of human connection triggers drives associated with other aversive experiences like the deprivation of food or water. Matthew Lieberman supports this idea in his book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, claiming that mRI research shows that our brains seek out social connection as a reflex. Immediately after we access the non-social parts of the brain, our minds snap back into ‘social mode’ to validate our actions.
   
   In practice this means that regardless of whether businesses can be trimmed down to one-man unicorns, as some Silicon Valley overlords claim, they won’t2. Instead, there will be an increasing onus placed on what Anu Atluru of terms ‘Relational Labour’. Defined as ‘an essential layer embedded alongside manual and cognitive labor — rooted in presence, context, commitment, and care’ Anu argues that the companionship needed for humans to enjoy producing will allow human teams to be retained across organisations, even if they’re less efficient. She claims: ‘AI will flood the zone with intelligence. But as intelligence gets cheaper, presence gets more expensive. Real, earned, interpersonal trust will become the rarest currency.’ Which brings me on to my second point…
   
   

2. We need new gods – over the past century Western values have become increasingly fragmented. Belief systems held at a country, city, or even industry-wide level have been shattered by social media. The shards of rampant individualism, that now equate to faith, slice at our soles during tireless pilgrimages to find meaning in our screens.

   
   Under this new order, the world is a ‘For You’ page and a ‘follow’ is a request to become the disciple of any one of a million gods. When I think of ‘gods’ through this framing I don’t imagine social media driven monotheism, where the masses dedicate themselves to a single paragon. Rather I see a move back to polytheism, where many different gods are worshiped in pursuit of many different ends. Whilst these new gods represent entirely different belief systems they all exhibit the same three traits:
   
   

   1. They are self elected — the masses choose them only after they choose themselves

   2. They are extreme — they exhibit extreme behaviours which allow them to become evangelical archetypes

   3. They overshare — they broadcast each aspect of their lives in a way that provides fodder for emulation, and allows them be perceived as ‘authentic’
      
      

   While millions of us arrange ourselves under the most popular of these paragons like Kim Kardashian, Brian Johnson and Elon Musk, we simultaneously seek scripture from a mass of smaller gods and prophets. These less well known figures hold pull for being aspirational and purpose-led, yet in a way that is more attainable than their popular counterparts. Although the talent industry refers to these individuals as ‘influencers’ they can look like our colleagues, or neighbours, as they span every aspect of life imaginable. From office influencers, to woodworking influencers, to exotic pet influencers to parenting influencers. While virtual humans can be our therapists, our romantic partners, and allegedly our friends, their lack of humanity creates a vacuum that only flesh-and-blood figures can fill.
   
   

3. Humanity is scarce — digital products are by nature infinitely scalable. Any restrictions on their demand are entirely contrived3. Humans on the other hand are finite, and so are our creations. From a simple economic standpoint this places value on the products of our labour because demand can so easily outstrip supply. But it can also be argued that the opportunity cost4 implicit in human produce injects it with an additional layer of worth. As states in his 28 Slightly Rude Notes On Writing: ‘There’s something special about every word written by a human because they chose to do this thing instead of anything else. Writing is a costly signal of caring about something. Good writing, in fact, might be a sign of pathological caring’.
   
   This idea of ‘pathological caring’ boils down to the sacrifice inherent in necessitated choice. Though humans can be easily outperformed by quicker, more durable, machines, our products are precious because they are charged with sacrifice. Just as the theory of opportunity cost states that each thing we choose to buy bears the cost it’s alternatives, each product humans create comes at the cost of creating something else. The fact we cannot do everything, is both our biggest cause of inefficiency, and simultaneously our biggest point of strength. A human-made product is valuable, not just for its function, but because of the sacrifice that resulted in its existence5.

so what?

If you follow the logic above, assessing what makes an irreplaceable employee, a valuable product, or a good investment can be boiled down to how much humanity it holds measured against its quality. I like to think of this as the humanity coefficient.

While acquiring the skills to produce at a high level has long been a part of the education system, ‘humanity maxxing’ is something new; to everyone but creatives. Since the time of Michelangelo, artists and their teams have specialised in making people understand, and appreciate, the humanity in their work. When a creative product is publicly shared, its makers go to colossal lengths to establish understanding around why that product was made, how it was made, and the effort implicit in both.

Over the last few years, other industrialists have followed suit. Many founders now ‘build in public’— oversharing each detail of their mythologised ‘founding journey’ in an attempt to accrue user-cum fans. White collar workers are similarly repositioning as ‘thought leaders’—flaunting their expertise and relationships, to attract followers they can convert into clients. Even investors now share how they can ‘add value’ to prospective portcos with garrulous tweets, only occasionally self-indulgent enough to earn a spot on VC brags ;).

When it comes to VC, the humanity coefficent makes it clear that investors need to reframe how they evaluate startups, particularly at the early-stage. It’s a well known fact that a seed stage founder will pivot multiple times before finding product-market fit, so a person is as important as their pitch, if not more so. However, for the past few decades, evaluating who to invest in has often hinged on their technical skill. When anyone can build anything with a subscription to Lovable or Chat-GPT, this is no longer the case. I see a near future where the focus placed on technical abilities will be replaced with an onus on the human touch. The founders who can build and scale human relationships will be the most investible, in a large part because they will be the ones with the communities to support their products through pivots.

Slow Ventures is already backing this thesis, raising $60 million to invest in creator-entrepreneurs. Under the belief that trust and audience attachment are two of the most valuable qualities in a modern founder, the fund is pioneering a first-of-its kind deal structure. Unlike in traditional funds, where capital is exchanged for a share of an existing business (or business idea), Slow’s Creator Fund offers creators funding in exchange for the future rights to any off-platform businesses they spin up; often across a multi-decade time horizon. The fund first experimented with this structure back in 2021, when they invested $1.7 million into language-focused YouTuber Marina Mogilko in exchange for 5% of her future businesses over the next 30 years. Their most recent investment was into a woodworking creator Jonathan Katz-Moses, under a similar structure.

A week ago I found myself in a New York gallery, for an evening hosted by USV and Asylum Ventures under the guise of ‘Art + Pizza’. The guest list was composed of 20 or so creative nerds, working on topics that ranged from cryptography and artist rights, to ’dropping apps like raps’. As we stood, surrounded by Lily Stockman’s abstract interpretations of vernal pools, Andy Weissman introduced us all with the simple statement:, ‘Anything that can be automated will be; anything that can’t becomes priceless.’

I sure hope he’s right.

— Dani

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This piece was originally published on Dirt.fyi – the next-generation entertainment platform using emerging technology to tell the coolest stories about culture and collecting. If you like this

Envy tastes like stale milk. When I scroll through @sitabellan’s feed I taste it, and immediately understand why being stunned is colloquialized as gagging. Across Sita Abellán’s grid the multi-hyphenate techno-princess smizes through a pane of synthetic hair, dressed in clothes so outlandish that even her Uddenberg-coded contortions fail to eclipse them.

As an astrologically-fated attention seeker (I’m a Leo, duh) I’ve gleaned inspiration from Abellán for years. Yet her clothes still nudge my little green monster to skitter on screen by virtue of their inaccessibility. Haute couture, archive or custom, most of Abellán’s outfits cannot be bought—only gifted. But now a slew of virtual try-on technologies are upending fashion’s exclusivity in ways formerly unprecedented, by allowing anyone to wear anything online.

This disruption ramped up late last year when ‘fash-tech’ (aka. fashion technology) startup Doji came to market with a slew of gloat-posts from invited beta-testers. The app allows users to create an AI likeness to try on real luxury products and eventually shop within the app. While it’s raised $14 million by selling the dream of increasing e-comm conversion rates, and reducing returns, Doji’s real appeal lies in its promise of digitally democratized glow-ups.

Doji’s real appeal lies in its promise of digitally democratized glow-ups.

By simply copy-pasting the URL of a fashion product into the app's expectant search bar you can dress your Doji avatar (a hotter version of you) in any fashion piece found on the internet. No matter if its physical counterpart is on a rail in Zendaya’s bathroom or swathed in tissue paper in the archives of The Met.

When Marc Andreessen declared that software was eating the world back in 2011, few luxury execs expected to feel teeth in the back of their Prada blazers. Fashion is a notoriously hypocritical industry, embracing novelty-obsessed hacks while turning up its nose at true innovation. Fourteen years after Andreessen’s declaration, fashionistas love to wax lyrical about the importance of tangibility whilst intermediating the world through the latest iPhone camera. After all, once you cut through the propaganda that attributes fashion’s value to its craftsmanship, the viscid core of this $471 billion luxury industry is conveying clout.

Fashion is a notoriously hypocritical industry, embracing novelty-obsessed hacks while turning up its nose at true innovation.

Over the past decade, the resident anthropologists at LVMH and Kering have found that nothing powers the buy-share-repeat cycle like social media. “Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins,” said LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, also in 2011. , who writes the newsletter Digital Native, says Instagram’s deadly sin is Envy.

At first, Instagram was every luxury CMO’s wet dream. Who wouldn’t want to leverage the putrid stench of aspiration to transfer the onus of image making from fashion creators to fashion consumers? Every insta-girly could become a sales assistant sans commission. As Ana Kinsella writes in her piece on flat fashion, “When we dress to be photographed, we increasingly dress to be distributed as an image, and thus transformed into a kind of ad.”

Then came COVID. When a pandemic plunged the world into a shared state of digital dependence, this focus on the image took an inauspicious turn. As isolated consumers went all in on buying clothing “on the basis of how it looks in two dimensions,” to paraphrase Kinsella, a host of designers realized that materiality no longer mattered. They proffered a new form of fashion, one that only existed digitally, known as Instagram Couture.

Charli XCX hard-launched Carolina Herrera’s foray into Instagram Couture in 2022. Scared shitless of the revolution to come, CH’s creative director Wes Gordon enlisted Vogue to publish a gushing interview about his collaboration with Tribute Brand that transformed the season’s look 45 into a piece of virtual fashion.

Fortunately for Wes and co, the first crop of virtual clothes were not adequate challengers to their physical counterparts. For one thing, they were designed with digital tools, for digital natives, and so resembled balloons filled to burst, iridescent fins or upchucks of slime. For another, technological limitations hampered pieces with clear visual tells. An AR trouser leg disappearing mid-motion was akin to the misspellings on a shanzhai shirt bearing the slogan Dolce & Banana.

An AR trouser leg disappearing mid-motion was akin to the misspellings on a shanzhai shirt bearing the slogan Dolce & Banana.

Unfortunately for the 215,000+ LVMH employees who thought they were in the clear, Doji’s different. The pieces that elevate its AI avatars into an army of SSENSIFIED it-boys and girls are indiscernible from their physical counterparts. In his seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin challenges such a reality. He argues that the mechanical reproduction of artworks diminishes their aura—the unique presence they hold in a particular time and place.

Reproduced art is detached from tradition and ritual, shifting its value from cultic reverence to political utility. While mechanically created works lose the singular authenticity of the original, they are not entirely without value; instead, they represent a new mode of engagement with art in modern society, one that potentially democratizes access.

Benjamin questioned whether there can be such a thing as “art for art’s sake” without eventually serving regressive ends. By the time Kinsella concludes her exploration of flat fashion, “fashion for fashion’s sake” becomes an appropriate diagnosis. But when apps like Doji jam exclusivity’s cogs with the wrench of digital abundance, what can still be described as fashion? Where are the gluten-free breadcrumbs leading the hordes of fashion victims to the safe havens that status builds?

Right now I’m unsure. One possible answer: status accrues to curation, as in Daisy Alioto’s Taste Economy. The industry will laud those best at filtering through infinite digital closets to construct ‘a look’ in a franchise of Dress to Impress where the R15 doll is you. It would then be more appropriate to remark that taste is eating the world.

We could see a future where IRL fashion experiences once again subsume images.

Perhaps consumers will be pushed to become creators—upcycling with OpenAI (or even digitally thrifting) to ensure an original fit. We could see a future where IRL fashion experiences once again subsume images. A regression I envision beginning with Abellán blown up like a Macy’s balloon, her pixel flesh flushed with oxygen, her clothes distending to the crunch of a broken screen protector.

If something similar to Robin Dunbar’s theory that humans can only have 150 meaningful relationships is applied to fashion, the opportunity cost of sharing our style—that Instagram has set to zero—will once again become a signal. And those we curate to ‘witness’ us will become as significant as the looks we pull.

– Dani

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Now on to the good stuff.

AI Fashion hasn’t quite become the industry disruptor we first thought it might have been - at least for the designer. While there’s been a small cohort of tastemakers combining AI and physical craftsmanship to make truly unique designs (see Robbie Barrat for Acne Studios) - any genuine attempts at using AI as a complementary tool in the design process has been drowned out by slop. We’ve seen a barrage of soulless “singulari-tee’s” on Etsy where generative design tools are being used—but not necessarily loved. For every progressive move in AI-generated fashion by independent designers, there’s a big corporate like PUMA replacing these creative upstarts with a cheeky text-to-sneaker prompt. The public backlash to such synthetic products reminds us that creativity isn’t a prompt—it’s a process.

When AI is pitched as a backstage assistant—helping with inspiration, search, or styling (as seen in tools like OneOff or Gen Z’s rampant use of ChatGPT as a personal stylist), we still see the same tension. The idea of AI replacing a flesh-and-blood creative still sends shudders through the fashion establishment - just ask H&M. And rightfully so. But is there a chance for it to thrive elsewhere? In worlds which are already uncanny?

Video Games & The Customisation Craze

Step into a video game, and suddenly that AI-generated pink feather suit becomes the talk of the town - for the right reasons. For decades, games like The Sims, Neopets, and Animal Crossing have been bubbling playgrounds of aesthetic experimentation with deep customisation tools at player disposal. Dressing your avatar in many games is considered to hold equal importance to the gameplay itself. Outfits are even tied to game progression or exploration, like in Ghost of Tsushima where you need armour sets like the Samurai Clan Armor to acquire new combat features. Players feel rewarded when earning such attire. In The Sims, entire subcultures of Simstagrammers treat every outfit change like a seasonal lookbook drop.

Customisation isn’t just a feature in these games—it’s a language. It’s where players experiment with identity, find their taste, or cosplay an aesthetic they can’t access (or confidently wear or afford!) in real life. Entire game formats have spawned from customisation obsession, the most recent success story of this being Roblox’s Dress To Impress - a destination for bit-checking. Games like Destiny 2 even have their own physical fan zines that spawn from grassroots customisation communities within the game.

The culture of customisation in video games runs deep - but for the less creatively inclining players, there’s a gap. The skill curve is one thing, but equally, just because everyone can express themselves through customisation, doesn’t mean everyone will go deep.

The Gap Between Customisation & Creativity

For all their customisation options, most games still fall short of true creativity. The tools are there, but the execution is complex.

Take Roblox - Gen Alpha’s biggest playground. It’s hailed as a DIY design hub, but building something truly fresh on the platform often demands 2D/3D software fluency. And while the Marketplace boasts millions of experimental items, the most favourited ones? Basic black hoodies. Chuck Taylor knock offs. Copy-paste fits.

This makes sense when one considers that most people on the platform are young teens, trying to find their voice stylistically. Perhaps they’re looking to fit in rather than stand out. Perhaps not everyone is looking to become the next style icon. Instead, they’re just looking at Roblox as a platform to hang out and try new things. The most popular game on Roblox right now is Grow Your Garden - a simple game about gathering seeds and growing vegetables, with very little do to with fashion. Roblox is effectively Gen Alpha’s version of the shopping mall - some are looking to actually shop and style themselves, others are just there to hang out in the food courts, go to the movies or play at the arcade.

But even when we look at style focused games on Roblox, like Dress to Impress, where players compete to fit a theme, the results tend to veer formulaic. “Goth” becomes black lipstick and mesh. “Y2K” turns into butterfly clips and baby tees. It’s not subversion—it’s a moodboard regurgitated. This isn’t to discredit player imagination, but to point out a key bottleneck: the difference between picking from presets and creating something new yourself.

Most customization is remix, not invention. And in games, just like in fashion, remix culture can only go so far before it starts to feel…samey.

When Generative AI Becomes Your In-Game Atelier

This is where generative AI re-enters the chat — not as a threat to designers, but as a democratizing tool.

New games like InZoi (a hyperrealistic competitor to The Sims) have begun to show what happens when players are given intuitive AI tools. The game’s Creator Studio lets users type prompts to generate textures for clothes or accessories. Want a wallpaper covered in rubber ducks wearing cowboy hats? Done. Want to 3D print a neon halo for your avatar’s head based on a JPEG? Go for it. Don’t know how to animate a pose? Feed it a photo and let the AI do the work.

In InZoi, the player becomes the designer without needing to master the software. AI doesn’t replace imagination—it frees it from technical bottlenecks. It helps players jump from vibe to vision faster.

Meanwhile, Roblox is gearing up to introduce its Cube AI model, a game-changer in UGC creation. With Cube, players will be able to generate entire interactive 3D objects—clothing, props, environments—via natural language. It’s like speaking a look into existence. The platform already boasts 97.8 million daily active users, and Cube promises to turn more of them into creators, not just consumers.

This could be the true promise for AI fashion—not as a high-fashion gimmick or corporate stunt, but as a utility in digital worlds where creativity is currency.

Finally Finding The Runway

AI fashion’s real runway might not be Paris or Milan, but in the esoteric minigames of Roblox, the build menus of The Sims, and the chaotic closets of InZoi. Here, AI isn’t being judged against the refined vision and craft of Raf Simons or Rei Kawakubo. It’s being used by kids trying to design an outfit that matches their latest TikTok dance routine or their group chat’s personal joke. Generative AI in video games is a genuine solution for kids to keep up with the calamity of social media “cores” - responding at breakneck speed with the power of a prompt.

In the real world, AI-generated fashion continues to reckon with the evolving perceptions of human creativity. But in video games — where identity is pixelated, aesthetics are fluid, and everything is already non-human — it makes sense.

So maybe AI fashion won’t disrupt the fashion week calendar in ways we might have first thought. But it might just redefine what it means to be a kid with no formal design skills in a video game with a dream to design something straight from their imagination.

This could be AI’s debutante moment. Not in the studio, but in the avatar editor.

– James Davis,

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This thumbnail was started in New York and finished in Hydra, inspired by the guilt I feel when someone witnesses my self-immolation-by-stream, and a perpetual inability to relax.

The thumbnail

I recently got the hang of ennui, something I’ve strived to master since turning 15 and discovering Effie Stoneham. Every day, in the hours after waking up, my invocations of apathy proceed as follows: first I queue up a mid-tier TV show such as The Real Housewives, then I start a chore to move my motor neurones in step with my mental monotone. Before I know it I’ve burnt through hours suspended in an intellectual deprivation tank. When my laptop finally gives out, no proof of work remains. Just a sprig of salad welded to a half-washed plate I can’t remember cleaning.

Unfortunately, unlike the method acting greats, no matter how much I’ve indulged this simulation, I still can’t elicit a Melania Trump-esque ‘I really don’t care do you?’ on queue. The reality is that my Shawn-of-the-Dead trance states aren’t feigned but triggered by consuming content that yields no sustenance. Not even its promise.

In spite of the hype around what The Oxford English Dictionary defines as Brain Rot, aka:

‘The supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging’ – Oxford English Dictionary

After much thought I’ve decided that my DIY trance-states fall beyond this bracket. Rather than a choice to seal my fate with a flick my ritual of decay hinges on stasis. Aside from when the content is first plucked from the fodder of my For You page there is none of brain rot’s elective action. The Next Episode In that fuels my demise is the intellectual equivalent of ingesting lard through a gastrostomy tube. It’s gluttony in its purest, most pernicious form.

The double click

Over the past month I’ve been reflecting on my ruinous behaviours in a Lisa Rinna-esque quest for irrevocable reform. Sifting through the archives of my altered states one parallel protrudes: a link between the way I guzzle Cloud-cached crap and the way I binge before a diet. Since turning fourteen and learning that ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’1, those few days before a ritual purge see my unrelenting dedication to conjuring up a guilt so strong that it propels the period of healthy living forward with Pentecostal self-loathing. When each binge begins, the bucketloads of sweets shot down my oesophagus are delicious in their impropriety. But by the second day puffed-up pastries, and chomped-down chips are tasteless. Their only role is to scar my psyche with the howls to make it stop.

When it comes to eating crap most medical professionals concur that abstinence is the route to retribution. Increasingly hackneyed across web forums, the food types most detrimental to the body – sugars, cheese, caffeine etc. – stimulate serotonin receptors in much the same ways as heroin or cocaine. Such accusations elicit images of Augustus Gloop lubed-up in molten chocolate, squirming as he’s sucked through a tube too narrow to impel his bulk. The sing-song taunts from the swarm of Oompah Loompah’s that accompanies his passage mimic my own battle cries to make better choices

Turn to TikTok, or the classier You Tube, and attention grabbing headlines, borne from the same graphic design schools as their candy bar cousins scream “pick me!” from the shelves of the infinite scroll. As one Brown study reports likes wring out dopamine from the nucleus accumbens through the semblance of social rewards. With such parallel incentives to consume crap through one's orifices, my first visions of rehab involved plugging my eyes and ears with wildflowers and fleeing to the nearest patch of grass to seek out oblivion, swaddled in grass like a cannibal’s Temaki, in the serene grasp of Gaia.

however, has other ideas. Refuting the through-line that emerges in all conversations with relatives over 40, and much of my Twitter feed2, Rao claims that to tap out of the content-industrial-complex is to remove oneself from the potentials for productivity entirely. Rather than lobbing my Mac into a natural body of water and retreating to the fields to read Ovid, Rao’s 45-part argument ‘Against Waldenponding’ claims that my mind doesn’t need to be shielded from slop, but strengthened to it. He claims:

40/ A real adept oughta be able to meditate on the angriest, most toxic twitter stream, consume the bile, and turn it into nectar: actionable insight you can bet on in the real world.

41/ A real adept ought to have strength-trained attention so they can spend an hour either reading a tweetstream or a once-in-a-generation history-disrupting philosophy book. No hack designer or advertiser should be able to lock them down in the 0.1-10 second range

Before advising:

42/ Stop blaming the media platforms for your own wallowing in small-minded twitter gossip about people. Strength train to the point where you decide whether to be there or elsewhere.

As a classically trained dancer, Rao’s approach rhymes with the way I was raised. The idea of employing new pedagogies to fend off slopturation, mirrors the monotonous tendues and port de bras that were drilled throughout my childhood. Rao’s advice however is more challenging than even the most arduous sets of gran battments as what I’m fighting to overcome is not The Real Housewives themselves but the triggers that lead me to seek out their sanctuary.

The Zoom Out

Growing up, my household had a rule that when it comes to gifts books don’t count. Still evident in the relentless pillaging of my Mum’s Amazon, the acquisition of knowledge has always been my source of propulsion. However, over the past year, I’ve found information paralysing rather than inspiring. The feeling of vertigo elicited when entering a bookshop, where the excitement derived from potential knowledge mingles with the overwhelming possibility of choice, is replicated 1000-fold each time I see a screen. There is too much information available and too many softly whispered ways to use it. Podcasts beseech me for notes of key phrases, hyperlinks pullulate into infinite tabs, scrolls on social end in folders filled with content to replicate in ‘the style of Daniella Loftus’ until I retreat back to forms that I know will give me nothing at all. Queue The Real Housewives.

If the information overload itself wasn’t enough, the content that exists across real-life news reports and GPT-generated chimera is similarly jarring. Jia Tolentino’s assertion that it is as if ‘reality were becoming illegible’ mirrors the book title I see summing up my 2025: Benjamín Labatut’s ‘When We Cease to Understand the World’.

In a climate where geopolitics are ever-more-jarring, I’ve come to view my screen in much the same way Susan Sontang viewed her camera. Framed in her book ‘On Photography’, the camera is wielded as a ‘defense against anxiety’, deployed as a tool to process the world,. While I am potently aware that the home pages of my youth are now houses of horror, something about the screen provides me with the guise of protection. Perhaps it’s because I can convince myself that events seen through silicon are always sensationalised. Perhaps it’s because I am relegated to respond to images of deportation and torture only via the tools that these platforms provide. It might even be because the screen serves as laminated safety glass encasing the protagonists of our zoomorphic present. Just as the enclosure’s glass protects me from the wrath of the raging beasts encased, it simultaneously allows me to believe that the happenings across the pane are staged solely for my entertainment. Seeing images of mass-evacuations, and blazing homes and questioning if they’re AI-generated, is equivalent to seeing a caged lion gnawing on flesh, and permitting yourself to assume that it’s an impossible burger rather than a gazelle’s haemorrhaging rump.

With Rao in one ear, and an understanding of my reasons for retreat in the other, I’ve recently devised my own information diet. Part part meal plan, part exercise regime, it involves daily processing of multi-format content ranging from staunchly curated sets of epic novels to sequenced reps of epilepsy inducing TikToks.

At time of writing this new POA has only been in effect for a few weeks. Although I’m yet to muscle up to the deep fried memes of a true adept, I’ve been inspired by fantasies of a future where P.E stands for Processing Education, and intellectually focused ‘face-gyms’ spring up around the world. As my urges to retreat into a world where post-truth disputes are relegated to who actually owns their Birkin subside, I’m hoping that unlike my bi-yearly health kicks this information diet will stick.

To be continued…

— Dani