Why the Future of Your Online Presence is Authenticity

Do you know somebody whose life seems so perfect on their social media, yet you know they feel miserable? We're incentivized to share our highlight reel life, no matter what lies beneath. Anybody telling you likes are not addictive is full of it.

Yet hope lingers. We have finally reached a point where businesses are moving away from the privacy-invasive, addictive model of ad-driven content. We need to be there for the new era.

Authenticity will become the currency of our online presence. Find out how to make the most of this opportunity!

Let's explore:

• How we got there;
• How to find your way in the "dark forest" of generated content;
• Which platforms you should experiment with;
• How to control your personal information in the new era.

TikTok Pushing the Culture to the Extreme

Have you seen the Wednesday Addams dance meme going around TikTok? If not, don't fret. The last thing I want is to trigger FOMO over silly trends that will wash away. Nevertheless, the meme's evolution is stunning: they are remixes of a remix. See, the dance from the Netflix series became viral when it was remixed with a 10-year-old Lady Gaga song that meshed perfectly with the goth teenager's movements when sped up 2x. As a matter of fact, it isn't even that remix that went viral, but the hundreds of crazy duets people made with it (my favourites are the father-daughter ones, too cute).

TikTok is all about content. Last year, it announced its music streaming ambitions. This week, it's podcasts. The company is taking Spotify and Netflix's turf, and TikTok employees are going to "heat" the content it wants to surface, as reported by The Verge. Even Forbes reports that sped-up music has become a marketing strategy!

The swipe-up hypnotizes. Content, content, content, remixed and reimagined. It's both exhilarating and overwhelming. Unsustainable, even.

The deluge of perfectly algorithmically-curated content is so extreme that there is nowhere to go but the straight opposite.  

Escape the Dark Forest of AI-Generated Content

Do you want to create 300 Tweets in less than 10 minutes for free? All you have to do is to put your 10 favourite Google AdWords long tail keywords in a spreadsheet, ask ChatGPT to spit out 30 variations of "engaging" content about these topics and schedule the content in a social planning app. You can even bulk-create them as images with Canva templates!

This is how, dear friends, spam weaponized AI. Businesses like Jasper are already paving the way. All this content will be white noise that we will have to learn to filter out.  My favourite article of the week, from Maggie Appleton, calls this phenomenon the "dark forest".

The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI

Proving you’re a human on a web flooded with generative AI content

Maggie AppletonJavi López G.

To protect ourselves from the noise of clickbait content, Appleton suggests adopting the "reverse Turing test": how to prove you are a human with a rich and complex life in a sea of dull self-generated content. Examples of strategies that can work now are:

• Telling stories with local knowledge and sensations
• Identify unexpected associations that show originality
• Enhance your language with informal, diverse, and creative speech patterns

Some say it will not really matter whether they are interacting with a human or not. This post tells the story of an individual who uses ChatGPT as a personal diary assistant to great results. I'm not convinced by how the author refutes the argument that chatbots don't exhibit genuine empathy: it would be a result of resistance to new technology. I'm an early adopter, and I don't buy it.

In other words, we will get spam on an unprecedented scale and we will need to build mental safeguards to protect our sanity from the dark forest of repetitive, automated content. We will put a premium on authentic emotional connection.

Explore Platforms for the Future

When I was a teenager, we communicated via MSN Messenger. MSN used your Hotmail account and allowed private communications before SMS and Messenger became a thing. MSN needed you to share e-mail addresses to communicate. Discovery depended on real-world or other online associations. You couldn't meet a stranger.

What's old is new again. See for yourself.  

Why you should care about the Gas Acquisition

Gas is an app that allows high schoolers to send themselves anonymous messages. Yes, exactly like the little papers you put in your crush's locker. Back in October, I wrote, "Gas will burn out quickly", noting the emerging social media would get acquired by Snapchat. Turns out Discord ended up sealing the deal.

I might have been too pessimistic about Gas because I couldn't see how it would monetize. The union with Discord makes all kinds of sense. Discord monetizes with the Nitro subscription which offers custom emojis and various streaming benefits. This is perfect for Gas, which can't harvest minors' personal information for ads.

Discord puts itself in a unique position: it already is the go-to destination for gamers and hobbyists, but now it adds teenagers, the biggest trendsetters. As noted in this analysis of Gas' business strategy, Teenagers have the benefit of time:

• Teens are willing to discover places away from their parents' oversight
• Teens seek change
• Teens value their peers' validation more than their parents

(I have a pre-teen, and I'm freaking out).

Discord+Gas provides a powerful socialization hub. Gas for school, Discord for gaming with your friends. You can host your own server, say crazy things, and not have to worry about the testicle ASCII art you've made coming back to haunt you when you start a career.

But cyber-bullying! Teenage suicides decreased during the covid lockdowns and researchers associated the phenomenon with a reduction in in-person bullying. Cyberbullying prolongs bullying once school is done, it does not feed it.

But Discord got a GDPR fine! Read the fine print: European Courts decided it was illegal to have a webcam not shut down when you press the 'X' button on an app...

This social media experience feels closer to the real world and, perhaps counter-intuitively, more private. And once again: you pay for the product, you are not the product.

BeReal is for real

I was also skeptical of BeReal's rise last year. Now, 6 months into TikTok and Instagram being part of my life, I'm starting to get it. There is something refreshing about doing "photo ops" with your actual friends on a schedule. It's bringing people close to home. People you have a relationship with. No brands, no photoshopped models, no life hacks, no marketing hooks.

I felt relieved when BeReal announced its intention to add paid features this week. The ad model is too invasive, I'm glad we are finally seeing the tides shift.

What's beautiful about BeReal is precisely that even if Instagram imitates the feature (which I found gimmicky before I actually tried BeReal myself), it cannot imitate the ideology.

We're coming full circle, back to the MSN Messenger days of yore. And I couldn't be more excited about it!  

How to Protect Your Information in All This?

Here's a bold prediction: if authenticity becomes the internet's currency, criminals will attempt to steal it. We are already seeing a rise in LinkedIn scammers. Deep-faked profiles, offering ludicrous jobs, and charging you upfront for "administrative fees". Criminals will thrive in offering "fake not-AI-I-swear people" to catch us off-guard.

Why? Revenue from ransomware activities is down 40%. Businesses are not paying ransoms anymore due to increased cybersecurity awareness and investments. Threat actors are losing the ransomware battle, finally. They will need to pivot. They will create fake employees to get real jobs. They will retort to identity theft. They will create more compelling fake dating profiles.

Researchers in cybersecurity have been sounding the alarm about AI weaponized for malware that evolves quicker to escape anti-virus solutions, or about super-personalized phishing campaigns. I am more worried about what I don't know! Fake influencers? Fake social movements?

The evolving threat landscape re-emphasizes the power of authenticity, especially if it connects back to the real world. We will need new "reverse Turing tests" to keep our game on.

This is a wild cyber world out there and getting wilder. You need to prepare: protect yourself and thrive.

Stay Sane Online!

🥊 Latest In Tech

Privacy and Cybersecurity

• Google Ads is increasingly used by hackers to distribute malicious pages (Story)
• PayPal suffered a credential stuffing attack, compromising 35,000 accounts (Story)
• T-Mobile suffers another cybersecurity breach, this time affecting 37 million customers. The breach happened mere days after T-Mobile's $350 million settlement on the 2021 breach that caused 77 million accounts to be exposed was due. (Story)

Why you should care: T-Mobile does not care. Take your business elsewhere.

Tech Business

• Google lays off 12,000 employees. Many of them, including 15+ years veterans, found out by seeing their office cards deactivated or their email accounts locked down. (Story)
• Twitter's headcount is down 80%, with only 550 engineers left and no discernible performance degradation. Venture Capital is taking notice. It is expected that tech companies will feel even more pressure to reduce headcount. (Story)

Why you should care: It's becoming very clear that companies are just doing layoffs because everybody does it. It's a weird "peer pressure" dynamic. If you have the chance of working for a company that keeps its eyes on the prize and maintains its focus on the long-term goals, stay put.

Artificial Intelligence

• Meta's Chief AI Scientist has had enough of the ChatGPT hype. He argues the technology is on par with current research. (Story)
• CNET chose to let an AI write articles by itself. Futurism reviewed them, and they are full of errors. (Story)

Why you should care: We need to keep the debates going. The commercialization of AI models is already underway. We need to figure out how to deal with the increasing fake content. ChatGPT was necessary. It ignited our consciousness. CNET's faux pas shows us how we want brands of the future to provide us with relevant content.

❓Question of the week

If you owned a large website of user-generated content such as Google, YouTube or Facebook, would you require a label on "AI-generated content"?