In my previous post, I outlined a confrontation that had happened when revisting a ruined house nearby. In a world where the Silicon Valley business model is obsessed with surveillance capitialism, tracking online behaviour, harvesting personal data, and selling that data, it’s no surprise that a growing number of people become very touchy indeed when a lens is pointed in their direction or the direction of something they own.
Old shed on a dusty corner at sunset – Nikon Z5
Ethics is a branch of Moral Philosophy that concerns itself with morality and how people should behave and why. Despite the fact that we were on a public road at the time of the incident, doing nothing legally wrong, and making photos, was our behaviour ethical? Why were we confronted and what ethical framework, if any, should inform photographic practice?
It’s very easy to dismiss confrontations with a deft wave of the legal hand: making photos from public spaces of things visible from those spaces is not legally wrong. Yet, doing so can provoke a strong reaction in many people. It may not be illegal, but is it ethical? Is it right or wrong to make photos of a property owned by someone else? And how should we react, as photographers, when we’re confronted?
Keep Out – Nikon Z5
I think self-reflection is a useful tool for personal growth and change. It allows us to consider our system of beliefs, our thoughts and feelings, and our behaviours in the larger context of culture and society. What beliefs inform our behaviours? And when those beliefs are challenged by someone else who thinks, believes, and behaves differently, what should we do? I’ll be coming back to these questions…
Have you been involved in a flame-war online? Have you witnessed dog-piling on social media that causes crushing anxiety in the vulnerable? If so, maybe you’ve largely retreated to safer spaces online, cozier and more comfortable spaces, like direct messaging, where you feel like you have more control over your privacy and your online interactions. In these spaces of the cozy web, we distance ourselves from the bots, data scrapers, ads, web predators, profiteers, and shills of the corporatised web.
Darkening – Olympus OMD EM5 Mark 2
The Dark Forest
If aliens exist and life in the universe is abundant, why haven’t we made contact yet? The dark forest hypothesis presents one possible answer: the universe harbours plenty of alien life, but it remains hidden and silent for fear of making too much noise and attracting predators. I guess our radio broadcasts into the darkness of space are going to be a problem then!
Yancey Strickler applies the dark forest hypothesis to the internet ~ the top layer is inhabited by predators: data scrapers, bots, surveillance capitalism, marketers, shills, and growing generative AI. The cozier web lies beneath this layer and is where many of us hang out to get away from the internet of predators. You can drill down all the way until hitting the dark web. It’s a complex digital ecosystem.
Reflections of a network – Olympus OMD EM5 Mark 2
Into this dark forest, we introduce AI, where entire websites are being populated with AI generated content in the hopes that a few stray clicks will make some coin for faceless people somewhere. Error-filled news articles, health tips, wellness blogs, crypto ads and more are being churned out at a growing rate of digital knots ~ most of it designed to make money, gain followers, and inflate reputations. It’s trashy, low-quality, dull content, generated by AI LLMs and lazy and unimaginative human parasites. This is the anti-web – the web where AI talks to itself and we remain hidden in the forest.
Hyperlinks lost
Some months ago, I watched a video that was clearly advertising a wellness product. I didn’t think much about it until I looked closely at the woman in the ad and her movements – they were looped and repeated, her facial expressions betraying the stiff smile of generative AI. It was chilling really. The stuff of cyberpunk nightmares in a world where we don’t recognise each other, question reality, and where human interactions are mediated through digital networks shaped by personal profiles that AI has built to represent each of us so huge corporations can maintain their walled gardens, their power, and their profits.
It’s hard to remember now, but I know it wasn’t always like this. The idea that the internet could be a hostile dark forest seemed far from my mind in the 1990s. The hyperlink once connected intimate digital ecosystems together ~ humble links living on obscure web pages, pointing you in a hundred different directions and encouraging you to surf the web. It was almost aimless. There’d be evenings where I’d dial-up, connect, and then see where a search would take me: a personal page, a few broken thoughts from a person living on the other side of the world, a cool-links page, onwards to another page living in the digital corners, and ending up somewhere obscure and unexpected where I might learn about dolphin language experiments. It’s not altogether different from simply wandering about with a camera, without expectation or judgement.
As Friedrich Nietzsche said: “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”
There was once a time when it seemed like the web could liberate entire nations and set information free. There was a promise in the medium – a thousand thousand thousand human thoughts and feelings connected by the humble blue hyperlink in a web browser. Instead, we have tech-billionaires who have constructed platforms and closed systems and called it the modern web – Web 2.0 or 3.0, or whatever the zeitgeist and marketing departments demand. In their systems, hyperlinks are nothing more than restricted sections in a social media Bio – a way to funnel the gullible, the vulnerable, and the young to AI-written websites and empty blogs where generating income from clicks is all that matters. The click of the humble hyperlink has been twisted into a way to service the predatory machine in the dark forest. We’re sedentary now, having forgotten how to walk aimlessly, and doomscrolling our days away.
The Rusty Ruin Journal 