Three Cheers For The Information Age!

thinking about how my parents fled vietnam, a country that was destabilized by the CIA spreading misinformation, and came to the united states, a country that's now being destabilized by vietnamese people spreading misinformation https://t.co/wpEBeN8wdv pic.twitter.com/Df30aiIgrx

— derek guy (@dieworkwear) November 24, 2025

pic.twitter.com/gNgVKWOZIW

— derek guy (@dieworkwear) November 23, 2025

i wonder if AI will crash luxury watch prices in the next ten years. a non-insignificant percentage of buyers are not interested in watches — they are interested in status. the watch is often a prop for online content. no point in buying watches when AI generates images for free pic.twitter.com/olr3Vr3w9n

— derek guy (@dieworkwear) November 23, 2025

listen to me. listen to me right now. if you don't know what this tweet means, just close your device. don't look anything up. go for a walk. return in a week. if you don't listen to me, your life will be ruined and i can't be held accountable

— derek guy (@dieworkwear) November 23, 2025

Twitter pays people based on engagement (views, retweets, comments, etc). It appears that many MAGA accounts are based abroad and they use AI technology to generate low-effort rage bait.

My guess is that this will get worse as AI tech improves. For instance, fake videos of minorities doing crime.

Really, how much effort does it take to generate rage? That will generate modest amounts of money (that’s not how Elmo got rich. Or anyone else, for that matter.). But inchoate rage is just…a short term money raiser. For the short term.

Trump gave some of that rage focus; for a time. Now it’s focusing on him (despite the best efforts of foreign (a/k/a fake MAGA). That was inevitable. Trump’s campaign mouth wrote a check his elected ass can’t cash. And disappointed MAGA is coming for payment.

Which is not entirely a metaphor. It’s actually the problem: money, and the lack of it. In the face of rising inflation, brought on by detaining/scaring all the labor out of the fields/meat processing plants, and tariffs, Trump can’t fix this with another conspiracy theory. And he dare not fix it by admitting he was wrong from the start. (He might get away with it with tariffs (but it will take too long). He can’t turn around and invite all immigrant labor back to the fields.)

AI doesn’t stop being a problem, and we don’t stop having to learn to cope with information v. understanding. I grew up with LBJ’s “Daisy” ad and Rod Serling effectively scaring us all to death about nuclear war. Nobody’s that afraid of nuclear war anymore (though we should be). We adapted. We adjusted. I also grew up on “The Selling of the President.” After Trump’s last election (ever!), I’m already wondering if campaign ads (beyond the crude “candidate makes promises”) matter any more. We’ve grown numb to them, which is a good thing. Propaganda has to adapt, too. Which is what it has done in my lifetime. And already even Twitter and social media is more useless than it once was. Not powerless; just not really as powerful as we were told it would be.

Something will replace it, of course. But unless AI itself charts a new course, humans will have to. And AI doesn’t have to be that new tool.  It might be; but it also, might not be. To the man with the hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. But that’s a definition for delusional, and ineffective, behavior.

As Trump is finding out.