"Social media follower counts have never mattered less, creator economy execs say", Amanda Silberling, senior writer at TechCrunch (https://lnkd.in/dszmYsJa) proposes the perfect article where to start from for reflection about ethics and governance in the "Age of AI".
The shift from "who you follow" to "what the AI likes" is perhaps the most significant governance challenge we face in the mid-2020s, the traditional "Social Graph", the network of people we chose to followl, has been officially dethroned by the "Interest Graph", powered by black-box recommendation engines. Follower counts have never mattered less, this is at least the message of the article, it is the time of the AI:"... according to the executives that TechCrunch spoke to about the near future of the creator economy, creators are finding new ways to harness and cultivate their relationships with their followers, some acting as a salve to AI slop, while others are flooding the zone with a new form of slop themselves".
Well, another icerberg where I invite you to put the head beneath the surface because there are at least three questions:
Who holds the "editorial" power? If followers don't determine reach, but algorithms do, who is the editor of our digital reality?
Are transparency and explainability even possible?
What happens to "human agency"? Are we still active participants and protagonists in our digital lives, or have we become passive consumers of an
AI-filtered feed?
Movies such as The Truman Show, Matrix or Idiocracy in my opinion are the convergence of three dystopian visions but the essence of current state of the AI-driven "Interest Graph" because:
We need a "stage door", a governance mechanism that grants us the right to exit the filtered reality.
We need the "red pill", the insistence that truth holds more value than a frictionless, AI-generated comfort zone or tailored (by others) experience.
We need governance that incentivizes algorithms to promote our agency, cognitive health, our wellbeing and not just dopamine loops and the systematic offloading of our critical thinking.
Who, or what, is the Demiurge of our digital reality? Can we still think about a distinction between digital and non-digital life?
In philosophy, the Demiurge is the "artisan" who fashions the material world.
Today, this artisan is the algorithmic' "god" but it doesn't create the world from nothing, it takes the "chaos" of our data and shapes it into a structured, personalized reality.
Is this Demiurge good and benevolent or is it an ignorant jailer?
We must govern how technologies impact our perceived reality, we must be aware because without consciousness we are just part of an endless show.
Welcome 2026.