Say goodbye to social media! Extinction looms for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, WeChat, Instagram, and even TruthSocial. Or if not outright death, at best a vast contraction of engagement. Sorry Zuck. Sorry China. Sorry Pavel Durov. You’re all screwed—your great inventions are about to be overrun by the living dead. It’s name is Artificial Intelligence.
This creature is already attacking, nibbling at your fingers and toes. It’s getting a few good bites in. It’s irritating, right? Bots and hackers were a problem, but they had to be programmed by real humans, a sort of cat-and-mouse game that wasn’t too hard to deal with. It was your programmers versus the criminal programmers, and it was a fair battle.
Now a few of the bots have AI behind them. So far it’s just a nuisance. Smack the little pesky vermin down with algorithms, all will be fine. Won’t it?
No, it won’t. Because your social media, your beautiful apps, along with the entire internet, suffer from a foundational flaw: you made it free. And it was Darwin himself who figured out why this won’t work, only he had no concept just how prophetic his theory of evolution would be … and how it would transmorgify into the digital world.
Parasitism has been around since the beginning of life itself. As soon as microscopic proto-bacteria started gathering energy and storing it in their little cell sacks, other creatures figured out that it was easier to steal that little bag of stored goods than to create their own from sunlight or other sources (like deep-ocean thermal vents). And so the battle began: parasites versus immune systems.
It’s gone on relentlessly for almost four billion years, creating some of life’s most complex structures. Take your own body, for example: there is more diversity in the genes for your immune system than for any other part of your body. Why? Because your body is a vast repository of high-quality food, and there are millions, maybe billions, of different varieties of bacteria, viruses, worms, mites, bloodsuckers, and other nasty creatures, that want to eat it or live in it. And in the era before modern medicine, many of them would have succeeded, and you’d be miserable or die. It’s only the stunning diversity of our immune system that keeps the human species from going extinct: even when there’s a major plague, immune-system diversity means some of us will most likely survive and carry on.
What does this have to do with social media?
A lot. It turns out that many of the concepts of evolution apply to social constructs such as groups, corporations, churches (shameless self promotion!), governments, and political parties. They evolve and compete against one another, and Darwin’s survival-of-the-fittest rules apply with remarkable fidelity.
Whether it’s bacteria preying on bacteria, humans stealing a neighbor’s stored crops, or hackers stealing money from your bank account, these all falls neatly into the basic theory of parasitism: any time there’s an exploitable resource, a parasite will evolve to exploit it.
Email was the first digital victim. A bunch of academics created a really cool way they could send mail electronically using a cooperative understanding: I’ll forward your email if you forward mine. If you wanted to use the system, you donated a bit of your computer’s time, creating a massive store-and-forward system that benefited everyone. Then one day, Gary Thuerk of Western Digital became email’s first parasite: he sent an unsolicited advertisement for their DECSYSTEM-20 products.
The concept of email was laudable, but just like the first proto-bacteria, email lacked even the most rudimentary “immune system.” There was nothing, zip, zero, to protect the system from abuse. The academics had built the system on trust, and assumed that nobody would try to hijack it for profit. It didn’t take long for abuse expanded massively, as we know all too well today. Spam is the scourge of the internet. All of the major email companies spend vast resources fighting it, with fair success.
It’s not just email that’s a victim. Internet parasites are everywhere. They attack anything of value, whether it’s information (like your bank account), your attention, or access to your computer. And social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram are some of the biggest targets, for the simple reason that they have billions of users.
This is where A.I. enters the picture. Before A.I., clever programmers actually had to spend time to be successful parasites. A Russian botnet that posts Facebook fake news stories to confuse and befuddle American voters requires a whole team of clever Russian sociologists and programmers, the former to craft the messages and the latter to deliver them to millions Americans without attracting Facebook’s scrutiny. It was a lot of work. Facebook’s own programmers fought back, and it’s now more-or-less a standoff, with most of the spam getting caught but enough getting through to give the parasites a big payoff.
But with A.I.? An A.I. will develop the software. Another one will craft messages. A third one will create accounts on Facebook (rapidly learning how to circumvent Facebook’s “Are you human?” tests). A fourth A.I. will post news or place ads. And finally, the most important A.I. will “close the loop,” monitoring for performance (engagement, reposts, mentions on other social media). This last AI will be able to do A-vs-B campaigns, quickly improving its messages for maximum spread, and optimizing its parasitic campaign at speeds humans couldn’t dream of.
In nature, one of the “bad strategies” of a parasite is to raid the host to extinction. If a coyote population mutated into a super-fast, deadly predator and was able to eat all of the rabbits, squirrels, and birds in its range, the coyotes would die too. What happens instead is that predator and prey (parasite and host) co-evolve so that they always remain balanced: they coyotes eat, but enough rabbits survive to create more baby rabbits.
This is why alien species (plants and animals introduced from a far-away place) are such a disaster. Rabbits were introduced into Australia in 1859 where there were no natural predators. Within ten years, they had reproduced into one of the biggest ecological catastrophes in the history of the world. The rabbits killed off one eighth of all mammalian species in the entire continent of Australia, and the plant life across the continent was devastated so badly we can’t calculate the full extent. The rabbits started a severe erosion problem that continues to this day, sweeping vast swaths of Australia’s fertile topsoil out to sea. Ten years after their introduction, over two million rabbits were being killed every year, and it didn’t even dent their population.
That’s what A.I. will be to social media: an entirely new species that didn’t co-evolve along with its “prey,” the social media companies, and against which there is no defense. They are like the rabbits dropped into Australia. A.I.’s are hundreds of times faster and cheaper that hiring humans to do the same thing, and they can see patterns in the data that even the smartest humans could never find. They’ll sneak into every nook and cranny of social media, infecting every conversation, every advertising system, every news feed. And the social media companies have no equivalent defenses.
The real users, you and me, will quickly find that the interesting stuff, the stuff that makes us enjoy social media, is swamped in a sea of A.I.-generated trash. We won’t see the stuff we want to see. We’ll cut back on our use, as will our friends, weakening the “network effect” that’s kept us addicted so far, which will further reduce our interest in a spiraling negative feedback loop.
The best social media can hope for is to merely survive. How’d that work out for MySpace?
Oh, and by the way, Medium.com is included in this. We’re already seeing it.
Image: Logo of Twitter, Inc., Apache License, Version 2.0, modified by the author.
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