> I think there's a big difference between general ai (LLMs) and the troubling implementations of ai like flock ... spotify and their distortion of music ...

I'm curious about the distinction you're making here. If we accept mainstream uses of LLMs, such as writing online content or generating images, why is music different?

As for the surveillance stuff, outside some geek bubbles, it's really not something that people care about. The prevailing narrative is that crime is getting worse and when the push comes to shove, most residents want more policing, more license plate readers, etc.

I don’t know how ubiquitous it is in my circles, but I have noticed a lot of folks in their 20s and 30s tell me they only buy paper books, never Kindle. I started buying only the latter years ago because of the convenience and lack of a need for storage, but have recently switched to getting everything I can (digitally) through the library and the Libby app.

"Analog dance music" FTW

Also - Analog Computing [0] seems like it could be particularly well-suited for AI, e.g. by leveraging optics [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09430-z

Change the subdomain to lite for a more text-oriented experience. https://lite.cnn.com/2026/01/18/business/crafting-soars-ai-a...

There might be a browser plugin to automatically do this, like exist with old.reddit.com.

This JavaScript (make a bookmarklet) should open the latest archive.ph snapshot of any page you're on:

  javascript:window.open('https://archive.ph/newest/'+location.href.split('?')%5B0%5D,'_blank')

If you're running ublock, [edit: after accepting] just block the elements - kill the dark overlay, kill the big subscribe box that slides in at the bottom. There's nothing else.

CNN still doesn't have much worth reading, certainly not this. This isn't a real trend, this is a party a friend of the author threw.

It's "exploding" in the same way like "quiet resignation" was "exploding". In other words - it isn't.

The number of knitting kits sold (an example from the article) to me sounds like it might correlate more with the number of TikTok videos about knitting than the hours spent knitting.

The article almost encourages this interpretation, although I'd praise it for at least acknowledging the "performance" part.

It seems to mash consumerism, commercial Social Media and GenAI into one though.

Still, I try to see the positive side, and I think there certainly could be such a trend.

No idea if it's just a small part of people going against the grain, or a broader shift.

Regarding media addiction, there is a pattern that would be kind of similar, the large cohort of elderly people who are addicted to media and the commercial web, compared to the comparatively smaller portion of younger people falling victim.

Among my "elder millenial" friends, I can only say that abstinence from doomscrolling and modern tech (especially smartphones and SM) seems to correlate with integrity and smartness.

People having offline hobbies is healthy and completely separate from AI providing real value to society.

If the AI industry takes a hit because people are returning to offline hobbies, it’s a signal we’ve been building the wrong things.

I think rather than collapse it may get filtered down more. I've already got ad blockers and some similar stuff like fbpurity which removes the sponsored nonsense from facebook. LLM type AI might help there by filtering down to things you are interested in and connecting with real friends rather than the junk that commercial algos push at you.

It’s not gonna collapse. It can only grow bigger; the entire world economy runs and depends on the internet.

Rather, what will happen is a bunch of us will willingly stop participating and stepping away from the technological singularity. A bit like the Amish, this time not for religious reasons. Let the urbanites enjoy their AI-generated virtual realities, with work, sex, and food from the comfort of your phone, competing for fewer and more bullshit office jobs creating more addictive apps; I just want to live on a farm with solar panels, grow tomatoes and write code for fun.

Why have I been seeing people use "enshitification" so much lately? Yes I know where it comes from and what it means. It's like Cory Doctorow is the new Noam Chomsky of IT and enshitification has replaced "manufactured consent".

Some have walked away from the worst sites already but the majority are undiscerning and if they haven't left by now I don't think anything will be different in 2026.

The 2000s internet was way bigger than the 2026 internet. Every google search pulls up the same 50 sites now, and the first page will be split between just two sites, as if I needed 6 slightly different Amazon links about a book I was googling.

In the 2000s you could literally use google to scrape for open camera feeds; it was just internet-grep. Random people had extensive pages about their random hobbies. The actual internet was buried when the search engines decided to ignore queries and guide traffic, and eventually mostly disappeared. Back then there was more variety on youtube; there was more variety on myspace than is now on facebook.

People spend more time on the internet now, but it's just scrolling versions of the same 20 stories of the day linked from the same 50 sites on the same 5 social network feeds. Even those 50 sites are all owned by the same 10 people, which means you get between one and two self-interested perspectives on those 20 stories. The rest of the internet is filled with slop and the rest of your feed (from real people you don't even really know) is repoasts that they imitated from seeing them updooted somewhere else. It's positively claustrophobic.

The catch is that they eliminated public space and made unmediated communication suspicious and borderline illegal, so where are you going to go? Find somebody on an app to hang out with? Watch some netflix? Isn't that still the internet? Make your kids put down their phones and talk to you? How are you going to have a party if you don't post it on facebook?