I keep thinking about how we feed the monster.

There is a story we tell each other, a story we're told in movies and books: that the authentic self is valuable and expressing it loudly and clearly is an act of political resistance.

There is an industry that harvests walled gardens for profit. It used to be the targeted advertising industry that harvested content we created and meta-data about our content consumption and network of contacts. Now, it's generative AI. Walled gardens like social platforms (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok), discussion boards (Reddit, Quora, StackOverflow) and even beautiful projects of selfless collaboration like Wikipedia - all of these are food that goes straight into the belly of the stochastic parrots (ChatGPT, Bard, Claude etc.)

We express ourselves. We want to be seen and heard, we want our expression to be useful and understood. So we go to the walled gardens and document our inner life. The monster comes at night and gobbles it all up eagerly.

We say, "it's natural to want to be seen and understood", so we express. But isn't this cruel optimism - doing something that pushes you further away from the goal? We seek understanding, yet our creations feed something completely incapable of understanding. The monster regurgitates our words, arranged into a parody of ourselves.

I look at the Fediverse, Cohost, Cara, the Indie Web, Kitten and the small web and wonder - is this the way out? Can this be the resistance that starves the monster?

And then, I wonder, anxiously: where do we gather to talk and dream about better resistance?