AI Will Destroy Our Ability to Discover

We're so obsessed with getting an answer ASAP to move to the next thing ASAP that we're willing to sacrifice the beautiful messiness of accidental discovery that actually builds futures

Hi! We’re changing things up this issue and I’m looking to get some feedback from the hundreds of you that choose to subscribe to this newsletter, which by the way — THANK YOU! In an effort to make it feel more like a newsletter and less like an essay that desperately needs a trim, I’m introducing a few new sections and shortening the main essay. 

Posting Nexus was always about the incentive for attention, and how online identity when mixed with platforms gave us the most revolutionary invention in the last 1,000 years (the internet)...and all the problems that come with it. So the newsletter is being reformatted to include one major essay on the culmination of these topics, with three new subsections:

1. Attention 

2. Identity

3. Platforms 

My goal with these new sections is to give you all — people with very little time — some small windows into what’s competing for a sliver of our time to further illustrate how the intersection of attention, platforms, and identity create the incentive and disincentive frameworks that produce the digital world we live, breathe, and contribute to each day. 

Let me know what you think! Do you prefer this format? Are you more interested in one lengthier essay on one topic? What brings you the most value, and what are you over?

AI Wants to Destroy Your Ability to Think 

Gary Indiana died the day I started writing this essay. I was late to Indiana’s writing. I didn’t know his essays, his art criticism, or his playwriting. I wasn’t aware of what an icon of the New York scene (the one that everyone kind of wants to be a part of even if they don’t say it) he was. He was the guy who wrote about Andy Warhol, but whose readers wanted him. I wouldn’t have ever come to Indiana’s 1994 novel Rent Boy had I not made the decision earlier this year to walk the Brooklyn Bridge into the city on a random Sunday to catch an early afternoon movie at the Alamo in lower Manhattan. I didn’t have anything to do until later that evening — a rarity for me — and instead of choosing to work or get caught up on the TV shows stacked away in my queue line, I decided to stroll. 

There’s a McNally’s bookstore in the seaport district, about a 10 minute walk from the theater. It’s my favorite part of Manhattan. I strolled through the shop, I browsed the shelves, I picked up and read the back jacket descriptions, taking in the hand scrawled thoughts from staff members who placed their favorite books in prime attention-grabbing locations. I always have a list of books I’m trying to get to, and Rent Boy wasn’t ever on it. Instead, the book was handed to me by a clerk who suggested that, based on other books I was buying, I might be interested in. There was no pressure from friends on X to get caught up with the latest discourse. There was no checking off my Goodreads of the books I promised to get to in 2024. There was no timeline to finish a book I hadn’t even heard of in order to make my days feel like they had value and weren’t just wasted. This book I hadn’t thought of 10 minutes ago suddenly became my sole interest.

We’ve never owned our attention. We’re directed to something by someone. But the element of surprise, the ability to discover, rewarded the attention we gave. The last 15 years have seen companies like Meta, Google, and Netflix reduce the amount of seeking, of those little thrills in discovery, by altering the reality that is presented to us. Your Netflix screen is completely different from someone else’s screen not because certain titles aren’t available to you but because The Algorithm wants to reward the attention you’ve chosen to give Netflix by taking out the tedious act of browsing, of digitally scrolling, of thinking. Discovery is no longer a joy, but labor. 

The Algorithm boils down to machine learning, some of the most active forms of artificial intelligence that impacts our lives in formats we often don’t reflect on. You’re not thinking “Netflix is serving me exactly what it thinks I want” when you open Netflix; you’re just choosing something to watch. It’s AI designed for consumer efficiency, and it’s the start of our next AI consumer journey. My read on what the biggest companies in the AI space right now are trying to accomplish boils down to eliminating the act of discovery to quicken the act of doing. There’s this tweet that went around the other day that struck the chord pretty well. It went something along the lines of, “Why read the 100 page PDF when you can ask [insert LLM tool] to do it for you and spit out suggestions on next steps?” On the surface, this makes sense! If time is money, then saving so much of it through an automated process is a significant advancement. 

Except that the above hypothetical fails to take into account the connections, quirks, and small discoveries that come from spending time with a problem. An AI helper might spit out a summary and next steps, but is it going to use non-contextual clues to stumble upon a potentially better option? No, it’s not designed to. It doesn’t have decades of foundational knowledge and lived experience to make those possible conclusions. AI helpers can therefore provide an answer, but may constantly lag when trying to determine the best answer. 

It’s almost designed to eliminate creativity. Reading through the 100-page PDF is a slog, and no one would suggest otherwise, but are there connections made from the miniscule details that an LLM may not deem important, and that only comes from slowing down and diving in. There was another, related video that went semi-viral in which a professor wrote “No AI” on a chalkboard as the class prepared to take a test while a student simultaneously used an AI helper to get to the end of another class’ assignment faster. Now, students rushing through an assignment or test isn’t new. I was part of the Wikipedia generation. Why dig through hundreds of journals when Wikipedia’s community of knowers were adding their own expertise and citations? 

But the more we combine technological services designed to get to the end faster, to free up more time to consume more, the more we’re eliminating parts of us that lead to better innovation. Time spent to sit, think, and create. If the end goal is to finish something faster just to consume more, then we’re not necessarily creating tools that help with productivity, we’re allowing AI to do the work at the cost of diminished foundational skills, creativity, and knowledge. 

Consider that we’ve already seen the “Reverse Flynn Effect” come into play within the United States over the last 24 years. People aren’t necessarily getting “dumber,” although that’s how many choose to read the chart below. They are, however, not thinking as creatively, not as aware foundationally, and have less patience to learn those sets of skills when there’s a machine able to do it for them. 

The joke we all make about our teachers wanting us to know long division because we wouldn’t always have a calculator in your pocket prior to smartphones isn’t a story about how technology makes some tools extinct; it’s about how you can’t approach a question without the foundational knowledge of knowing what to look for and how to use these tools effectively. Can you attempt to solve an equation if you can’t identify what’s necessary each step of the way? That’s precisely why students learn long division. It’s not to make it more complicated, but to teach foundations so that students have the institutional knowledge to then circumvent the process of long division. You can only break the rules once you’ve mastered their restrictions. 

One of the beauties in the way we approach the world around us, typically inquisitive and curious, is that the only intellectually honest sentiment before any real discovery or newfound knowledge is “I don’t know what will come next.” And that’s followed by “I am going to find out.” If the step between “I don’t know” and “I’ve discovered” is squeezed — if those other accidental discoveries happen less and less because the answer, rather than the process, is the only thing that matters — innovation at scale will cease.

Viagra was originally designed by Pfizer to help with angina. It didn’t help heart disease, but men found an entertaining side effect. If we don’t allow ourselves to slow down, to research, to spend time and experiment, then we may not get a new Viagra. We may not get new Aspirins (also discovered accidentally). We may never stumble upon Gary Indiana. What a real bummer. 

Attention — They Paved Over the Goldfish in Brooklyn

If you don’t live in New York, and really if you don’t live in a very specific corner of Brooklyn, you might have missed a new aquarium that went up over the summer. Here’s the tl;dr: a local resident of the Bedford-Stuyvesant region in Brooklyn saw the opportunity for an “aquarium” in a little pouch of dirt that sat beneath a leaky fire hydrant. He bought 30 goldfish, ensured they were fed three times a day, and stood guard. The aquarium, which exists in a neighborhood home to longtime Brooklynites as well as media transplants and artists, wound up building an online following of nearly 14,000 Instagram followers and hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok. New Yorkers came to visit it like a tourist trap. Google Search listed it as a cultural heritage site. 

That was in the summer. Fast forward to this week, and the leaky fire hydrant was replaced with cement poured over the spot. The aquarium’s closure made it to the top of r/NYC, a subreddit with nearly one million followers, and was covered in-depth by the New York Post. One of the more fascinating developments in our newest attempts to grab attention is how the most chronically online are still drawn to the most physical, offline gaffes. This is how it used to be! Walking a tightrope between skyscrapers in Manhattan! Going over Niagara Falls in a barrel! The 2010s became a period of digital-first attention grabbers based on impressive physical collaboration. Newspapers, blogs, and even TV news spots were secondary to social media, a sign that in the pyramid of value for eyeballs, the new world overtook the old world.

The Harlem Shake was designed for YouTube but required strong real world planning. Physicality remains the highest form of aspiration — something to experience rather than something to scroll past — even if physical acts are now done with the internet solely in mind. Influencers on private planes, for example, have to show the ground outside moving to prove they’re not just taking photos in a studio. When everything starts to feel surreal, like a melting clock in a Dali painting, the more we’re connected to those by proof of existence, the more grounded we feel. 

Whether or not the BedStuy Aquarium was designed to grab attention (of course it was), the fact that it was a real thing people could visit and root on secured it attention in a very crowded digital space. 

Identity — Perceived Connection on Demand, or PCOD

If you know the name Corinna Kopf, you likely know it from one of two worlds: OnlyFans, where Kopf has made more than $65 million in three years, or David Dobrik’s Vlog Squad on YouTube. I found Corinna through the latter, as a reporter covering YouTube creators at a time when David Dobrik (more than 10 million subscribers) was king. If you haven’t watched any of Dobrik’s early Vlog Squad videos, it’s Gen Z’s Friends. You watched these groups of friends hanging out with one another constantly, sometimes getting into hi-jinxes (the more elaborate the better brand sponsors became), but mostly just doing what tweens stuck at home watching YouTube videos idolized: physical friendships with deep relationships. 

I’m not going to get into the study of parasocial relationships because most of you know what it is: an imagined one-sided relationship between a viewer and a performer where the connection feels so real that the viewer actually imagines it to be two-sided. The Vlog Squad encapsulated everything that YouTube success relies on — parasocial relationships with tens of millions of viewers. You may never meet David, or Corinna, but you knew them. You were part of the friend group. 

Now extend that relationship to nudity or pornography. It’s the opposite of PornHub, where faces and bodies blend together as someone scrolls past trying to find a video. Satisfying an itch. OnlyFans is about seeking out the person. Longing for intimacy. Add in popular features like chatting (often handled by agencies or through AI chatbot technology) and that parasocial relationship goes from feeling like a relationship to including the activity of a relationship. It’s interactive, and two-sided. For people who followed Corinna through YouTube to OnlyFans, this wasn’t just another performer on the internet: it was the vulnerable, explicit conclusion to a relationship years in the making. 

These types of years-long, multi-platform relationships will only grow more normalized and more widespread as companies like Meta incorporate LLM AI tools into DMs for influencers and creators to interact with their followers more consistently. Eventually, there will be a whole segment of adults in relationships with the same person chatting with millions of fans each day. None of it is real, and yet everything about it feels so. Emotion trumps logic every time. 

Platforms — Here’s How SEO Changed Band Names

Data analyst and newsletter author Chris Dalla Riva included this fantastic chart exploring the rise (and recent decline) in musicians who used bizarre punctuation in their name over the last 60 years. The skyrocket suggests a cultural trend, naturally, but also aligns with a more crowded internet and stronger reliance on SEO. As more artists moved from radio plays and record stores to SoundCloud, YouTube, and blogs, ensuring that people could find their music instead of having to sift through 10 pages of Google became a top priority. If The Beatles existed today, and you Googled “Beatles,” you may not even make the first page of results. That’s a death knell. The decline since around 2018? I’d argue streaming, and people searching Spotify instead of Google. SEO matters less when you’re inside a controlled, centralized environment dedicated to one interest.