AI Content and the Digital Farm: A Short History of Noisy Evolutions

Please don’t take this as a negative piece. I know I sometimes sound bleak and morbid, but I think of myself more as a realist. Where most people see facing the world as something horrific or depressing, I see one of my greatest gifts as being philosophical — without having the proper intellect of one — the ability to look at current affairs in the eye and not back down from “the truth.” George Orwell once called this a duty. But unlike him, as a nihilist, I think the use of such ideas is simply to document a certain experience, and that’s it.

Departed Identities of Lost Memories #1.

Think about this: at one point, most of the population were farmers on land they didn’t own and never would. Their only option for survival was to “keep digging.” Labor was the only thing they knew. Ideas about art, culture, and science were mostly only done by the aristocrats — those who didn’t have to work and had plenty of time to make discoveries shaped by how they saw the world.

Then came the age of propaganda — a strange new world where the farmers suddenly had a voice, could own land, and even shape how society worked. This didn’t appear out of nowhere; it was the result of many factors (and this is not a history piece, so let’s not get into them). But what we’ve learned from the world post-2008 and especially post-Covid is that this world is collapsing. And if you are a modern farmer today — meaning a person with monthly bills and taxes always due — your chances of shaping that world are shrinking fast, if they were ever really there.

Let’s narrow the lens further. The new land is digital. Most of us are unpaid laborers with infinite scrolling power, digging for the next dopamine hit. And for those who aspire to claim part of this land, the only option is to broadcast — to feed the farmers their next dopamine hit. One interesting thing about this land is that it isn’t a land of labor but of visual language. Like a small TV in your hand.

This means all those ambitions to “create something” end up being filtered through one requirement: it must be visually appealing. Call it art or not — that’s not the point. The most important part is that it looks appealing. If you want to succeed as a content creator, you need certain things: the right setting, the best light, the best mic, the best tone, the most appealing edits. What only TV anchors could achieve with entire teams a few years ago can now be done with Amazon gear and generative AI tools. As Yanis Varoufakis and Cédric Durand both describe in their work on technofeudalism, we are once again farming land we don’t own, only this time the fields are digital.

Here’s the shift: just three or four years ago, if you wanted to cover AI topics, you could post two or three times a month. That was already insane at the time, but at least you had a few days or weeks to test and develop. Now, in 2025, it’s a matter of hours before the next tool is out — and if you want to stay relevant, you have to keep digging. It’s inevitable then that all viral AI content is basically news about new tools or tricks: generic, semi-informative, and nearly identical.

I’m writing this at a time when I’m mostly pleased with an all-time low social media reach and consumption, because I’ve been lucky enough to find ways to pay the bills without digging in the latent space for content. That distance makes me reflect on my own experience and on others I’ve seen at the epicenter of it. I know my tone is negative, but what bothers me most is how uninspiring it all feels. Four years ago, you could easily spot beautiful things coming out of AI tools that weren’t polished for the algorithm or wrapped in the perfect edit. For me, there’s a constant struggle to use AI purposefully, away from shallow automation. And now, with all the noise — news anchors dressing up the same info in a thousand ways, overselling what the tools can do, being overly and falsely positive — how can I be inspired by mediocrity?

Everyone is in it for their own reasons: paying bills, chasing the dream of being discovered in their DMs, hoping for a life-changing breakthrough. And so nothing really changes. A revolution would require us to name the true problems first, but those problems cannot be isolated, and trying to extract them might even make things worse — as history often shows with revolutions.

So my disappointment is not that we are farmers in the digital and latent land — that much I accept. My disappointment is that we have become uninspired farmers. And that makes for a truly disappointing digital farming experience.