TRASHFUTURE - Shrimp Jesus the Redeemer feat. Jason Koebler

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

The cast joins guest Jason Koebler of 404 Media to discuss the recent downward spiral of Facebook, a platform currently being destroyed by AI and a total lack of content moderation that cannot admit the causes of its crisis because it, too, is dumping money into AI. And yet it is among the notionally most valuable companies on earth. But don’t worry—if you die, your account can be hacked and used to post spam bot comments on the worst art you’ve ever seen. Check out Jason’s work at 404 Media here: https://www.404media.co/author/jason-koebler/ If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *EDINBURGH LIVE SHOW ALERT* We're going to be live at Monkey Barrel comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe on August 14, and you can get tickets here: https://www.wegottickets.com/event/621432 *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

I just, I'm so pleased to announce we won. We won. We asked. Smokers. Smokers undefeated. As the UK, the UK will not be banning smoking before the general election. The commons leaders confirmed it. Turns out that like non-smokers are in fact the jokers.

Exactly. Yeah. So smoking is once again cool in the UK. It's going to be happening forever. Rishi Sunak, Nanny State, defeated by the fact that inflation went down a little bit, and he decided to call a general election while he figured he'd be least hated, took several of the most hilarious pictures that have ever been taken of him, and honestly, this is like the smoking golden path. This is the, I mean, this is the thing, right? What could be more British than

a visibly very depressed billionaire walking out in the pissing rain, being drowned out by Kirstarmer's like dead-eyed Psiops team, blasting things can only get better out of a speaker to say, actually it's fine, you can all keep smoking. It's perfect. Unironically, the best thing that's happened in ages. I mean, look, you cannot take away the British public's right to smoke and expect to win an election. Smoking is the only thing holding this country together. If you have to deal with the state of shit in this country for a whole day and then you can't have a fag about it, violent revolution. That's right. That's right. A general election has been called a bunch of bills are not going to be coming along.

Why? Like literally 20 points behind. And I can only imagine that like Rishi Sunai, kind of like looking at the weather forecast, thinking about California, thinking about the prospect of being a billionaire with a do nothing job in California, while it's still summer,

and then going, yeah, you know what? We can just fucking knock off early. And this is thoroughly pissed off a bunch of like his own MPs and journalists. who took to Twitter with the whineest possible objections of like, I've booked my holidays there wasn't supposed to be politics on. Yes. Yeah.

I thought he was going to like hang on for like just in the vain hope of a second Falklands war. Yeah, for real. I think that was that was the only thing that could save him. Although I do, part of me does suspect that he's triangulated that like the 4th of July is the date where the weather is likely to be the best. And he's working to Hussain rules of like the size. sun will gaslight people into believing that Britain can be redeemed. It is an election that can only be described in several ways, either as the producer's election,

which is that so Rishi Sunat can finally stop being the world's most miserable billionaire. Or, it also could just be the least consequential election of our lifetimes in this country, more akin to like an internal party leadership electorate, as we finally decide, who will drink from the puddle? I want to ask you guys, what are you all going to be doing instead of voting on polling day? Are you going to, like, are you just doing like a lion or like a barbecue? What's the situation? I'll tell you what I'm doing. I already have this plan.

Me, Paul Mason and Elon Levy are going to do our Model NATO summit. And it's going to be unlimited free Sigs. Yeah. Me, Paul Mason, and Elon Livia are going to be absolutely roaring down packs of Sigs doing model NATO. The British civilian podcaster's office. Yeah, I've got a sleeve of 400 Lambert and Butler, and I've invited my best friends, even leave Ian Bull Mason round.

Rolling out of your party looking like that one photo of Therese coffee. Fantastic. That's what I'm doing. What are you guys doing? I'm probably just sleeping in, to be honest with you. I'm, I tell you what I'm not doing. What I'm not doing. I'm breaking the habit of a lifetime. I've said this before in the show, that I have a kind of deeply seated automatism, right, where when an election is called,

irrespective of what's happening, who the candidate is, anything else, I kind of like, I lose control of my body and I marched down to the nearest polling station by my kind of like basal nerve system to put an X in the box next to the Labour candidate. It's just like a physiological reflex for me. Yeah, it's your annual Manchurian candidate reaction. Exactly, exactly. But like, I, I honestly believe I can break myself of it this year. I think I can do it. I think I can just stay home, you know?

Yeah. I'm hurriedly trying to sign a tendency on a flat in Rochdale so I can vote for the only truly left-wing politician in the UK, George Galloway. Hussein, what's your 4th of July plan? I'm kind of torn because I'm sort of thinking I could make a very elaborate pasta. Yeah, sure. Like one of those, like, real, like, you sort of get up,

Some fermentation, you know, this sort of, like, day-long fermentation types of things. I might, like, take the full dad pill and, like, do some DIY. Nice. Yeah. Yeah, just, like, just be like, oh, this polling day is time to build a shed. So I'm going to be doing that. Rishy Sunek, I'm building this dish and spice rack. Thank you very much. When he was, like, sort of coming out and just, like,

looked like the most miserable billionaire. He reminded me a lot about 50 cent tweet about how he hated being at his grandma's house. I don't need this shit. I'm rich. I'm really compelled by the most miserable billionaire in the world as a freight. Like, we just kind of, we make one billionaire miserable. It's like billionaire or mail us. Like, we have to do it.

Yeah. That's how you know that Britain is really like, it is really like an equal opportunities place in the sense of like, you can come from anywhere in the world and like, you know, you are just going to be miserable. The thing that unites everyone is their sort of like undefined, but nevertheless, less universally acknowledged misery and the idea that you sort of just have to deal with it. Things can only get better. And people hate him because he has a way out.

Yeah. That's my theory. Like, people hate him because he has a way out and like none of the rest of us do. Because he has this one weird trick, which is being rich. And having like multiple passports. Citizens hate him. I don't want to talk too much about the actual platforms because we have talked about the platforms and they're mostly promising the same things in different colors.

We've talked enough about Rishi Sunak's platform, which he uses to look over logo If you'll all open the Google document I've sent you, I've been compiling some of the funnier photos of Sunac. One of them is, of course, him walking back into Downing Street looking like he's gone for a swim in his suit. Yeah, I don't know why, for some reason, localized entirely within Central London over Downing Street, the greasiest rain this country could produce. Like, that doesn't have microplastics in it. That has macroplastics. It's like they dumped cooking oil for them. I think it's funny that we have the prime minister who, despite the fact that he's a billionaire, the fact that he's the prime minister of the UK makes him spiritually Charlie Brown, just like

followed by a rain cloud. He didn't listen to the menswear guy about how to buy a perfect suit that can withstand the rain. Please scroll down, though. And it's generated my favorite picture of Rishi Sunak now ever taken. Yeah. Remember, you've clearly seen it. Actual, actual height. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's stood at full stretch here.

Of him standing in front at a brewery in Glomorgan, just doing the thing politicians do on the campaign trail where they're like, ah, very good, great brewery. I suppose I can count in your support. People just be like, yeah, I guess so. Thank you for coming to the brewery, Rishi Sunak. He's squatting in front of a piece of machinery behind three guys who are standing up at full height. It's giving Kim Jong-il is what it's giving.

That takes me back. It's giving the Steam game, you don't know Jack is what it's giving, because you can only see the top half of his head over this beer vat. It's incredible. It's a real political master's stroke to begin your campaign. Bearing in mind that you are a short man who does not drink and does not watch football and is clearly not interested in football, to go to a brewery and begin your conversation with voices of the country by trying to talk about football and also being photographed around big burly men. Yeah.

But who run a brewery. Also, to kind of like audition to write jokes for have I got news for you here, to go to a brewery and set yourself up for the lines about not being able to organize a piss up in it. It's a beautiful, beautiful start to six weeks of extremely, like, this is like nerd prom, which makes me sick, is the thing. Like, seeing political journalists like metronome between, I have a holiday booked in June, which, fuck you. And this is just like the thick of it and I'm having a great time. To which also, fuck you.

We have to live with this. We have to live with the people who are excited by politics as it is in this country for like over a month. And I am absolutely dreading it. Yeah. Nick Robinson is back and people are saying he's more. powerful than it. The British political journalist, never knowingly right, is lurching onto Twitter at this very moment to post about how something is a good look or a bad look in an election, the

results of which have already been predetermined because Kirstama is going to win 95 out of 100 seats, and the other five are going to be like some uneasy coalition of like rump Tories and reformed psychos. spending the whole election day making an extremely elaborate Roberto Pesto pasta essentially right like everyone knows how much

I like to talk about the Mesoamerican ball game guys love talking about the Mesoamerican ballgame it's such a stereotype but the Mesoamerican ball game Am I male socialized because I love talking about the Mesoamerican ballgame Yeah well the thing is Mesoamerican ballgame has mainly been popularized to

you know increasing the amount of sports betting that people are doing I think we also need to focus on the Meso-American shaft game because it's like strong. Yeah, yeah. You're a cool girl who's also into sports, like the Meso-American ball game. Like that show The League. Yeah, I watch it for the Meso-American ring girls. No, no, no.

Okay, we're not doing this again. But the Meso-American ball game was often, it was like rigged and the winning side in a war would then win the kind of semi-rigged symbolic game. And what I see now is just six weeks of Rishi Sunak flailing at a rubber ball with his hips trying to get it through a stone hoop. Well, Kier Starmer effortlessly bicycle kicks it in because, like, the press have been sort of guiding his hand for months because the Tories have just been too embarrassing. Kier Stama wielding the ceremonial obsidian knife as he ascends the fucking Templumayo my oar. Yeah. As listeners to this show, though, it's not because people like him. It's because they fucking hate the alternative.

Because he's favored by the gods. What more do you people want? It's going to be pretty crazy when Kirstama gets to, you know, make a human sacrifice out of Grant Shaps. That's a bit that they don't foreground as much. Look, we have a very old political system, all right? But, you know, this is going to be essentially a kind of rigged circus for six weeks. Well, hold on, hold on.

I'm just going to just going to circle back on the phrase rigged. as opposed to the scrupulously fair normal circus in which it's really like a game of chance and skill. Yeah, you know, which clan falls off the unicycle is all predetermined. That's why I don't watch the circus. It's not a deterministic circus, yeah. The circus isn't a real sport, you know? They're just acting it out. Yeah, well, a lot of the trapeze artists get CTE as well.

Okay, it will be a circus and largely rigged. Unlike a sposo, the clown had had so many injuries that he didn't murder suicide. I really think rigged circus is like a perfect, like 3 a.m. Trump tweet phrase. Yeah. A rigged circus. Okay, you go in there. They got the elephants. I don't know.

I say, okay, wow. They've got this clown. It's the same guy. He's getting squirted in the face from the flower. And you're telling me he didn't know that. They say he didn't know. I say, wow, okay, that's interesting because every night he gets squatted in the face with the same flower. And they're saying he doesn't know.

I just find it very hard to believe. And then they've got the lion, very sad. I hate what I have to do, the, like, performance-enhancing drug tests at the circus. And one of the clown's pisses his hearts. Yeah. They're all doing EPO. Honestly, if you try to take a urine sample from a clown, it is such a fucking mess

process I should straight out of their ear mostly comes out of the like flower on that lapel honestly clown burkine is fucking disgusting I consider regular

burghine to be clown burkine yeah that's right oh my well well you know what that's gonna be what we just described that's what the next six weeks is gonna be like here

yeah that's the headline That's the TF kind of like take home about the election is rigged circus. Kirstarmer is going to be tricked by a clown and it's going to like ruin his bath party majority. Why has everyone at this circus trying to tie me up in Shibari, right? Is this some kind of rigged circus? And also, right, this is... Where are all these straight people who've gotten into sex parties here? Why is there are essential?

massage workshop. And look, I just want to be prime minister. I can't believe I have to go through this rig. Yeah, he has to do all of that. And then at the end of it, he has to, like, kick Grant Shapp's lifeless, decapitated body into a senote to ensure the bount of water. Yeah. Britain's a fucking weird country.

And he doesn't even have, like, a billionaire lifestyle to go back to. He's just normal upper-hill class. His father was a toolmaker, I hear. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, he made the knife he used to decapitate Grant Shaps with. My father was... But the sick ill pack is delicious. My father was an onyx toolmaker who created honest sacrificial knives.

All right. Moving on slightly, which is that like, this is also an election that if we want to talk about foreign policy is being fought at a time where increasingly like the UK is an absolute irrelevance. and both of these clowns at the rigged circus will have to pretend that it's not. And I think the best example of that is, this just came across the transom today, which is basically like operations

that came across the news feed today, which is that Operation Prosperity Guardian has essentially failed. Oh shit. Did the Houthis ever figure out like why Americans don't have free health care? Yeah, it's to pay for all the ice cream parties on the flagship in the Red Sea.

Uh-huh. We challenged the Houthis to a game of the Meso-American ballgame, and they were actually surprisingly good at it. Which is again, this is like, you're what are you running on, right? Both of these parties are running on like, we'll make Britain matter. We're going to, David

Lammy, if asked, it was like, oh, we're going to have a progressive realist foreign policy. It's like, no, you're fucking not. No, you're not, because the one thing you wanted to do. It doesn't mean anything. Yeah, but like, yeah, you also, that you act, that implies that that, like, foreign policy is a thing that we get to

decide in this country, you know? Absolutely. And so if you're going to be like, if you're running this, again, thinking about this purely as like the domestic political side of it, you're running it from a position of absolute weakness that you're not allowed to acknowledge. In the case of like trying to project power, we can't do it. In the case of like rebuilding our crumbling decaying infrastructure, we can't do it. I mean, you know, it's, I just, I just don't see, I don't see why anyone would bother turning up to this thing, right? Maybe if like the process it's, itself excites you, right? Like, if you... Yeah, it's like some kind of circus. If it's like the thick of it, right? Which is maybe the show that has been most effectively absorbed into the body politic of this country, by the way.

If it's like that, if you are the kind of like hopeless briefcase fetishist who is like, I love elections, I love politics with a capital P, and I love power and the exercise of power, whatever passes for in this country, then yeah, you can absolutely get excited about this, you know? And I think the people who are really excited about the Starma project are the people who are going to be like very into that. The Stami Army.

Yeah, exactly. What about this? The thick of it, but it's set in a circus and it stars Malclown Tucker. And he's like, Of course it's rig, it's a fucking circus. Look at your shoes. They're long. They're much longer than your feet. What did you think was going to happen? Oh, is that? You think that's a

normal flower on your chest? It's fucking water comes out of it. So I'm on the first person to notice there's a fucking elephant in the circus. There's a fucking circus. Anyway, that's enough UK politics for us for now.

I don't think we're going to get better than rig circus. That's enough of the rig circus. It's not. That's correct. Before we go into our second half, though, we'll leave UK politics for now. Our second half, by the way, I should set up. I was too excited about the smoking being legal again.

With Jason Keebler from 404 media is all about like how Facebook became all about shrimp Jesus. But first, I want, before we go there, I want to talk about a plan. Because for a long time, the question on every Middle East watcher's mind has been, what is the day after plan for Gaza? And the Israeli government has released what is essentially a kind of, I don't know, if you, to call it a kind of Verhoven-esque extraordinarily insulting, grotesque set of designs and plans to essentially have Gaza be a quote, Singapore in the Levant by 2035. Yeah, they've released this with a bunch of AI-generated art.

The other big headline thing is rail service to Neum, which is a very funny idea. I think basically you have to take this not as a serious document as a serious plan because it isn't, but also like, essentially this exists because Netanyahu is like under pressure, both like within his coalition and from Biden. Not any meaningful pressure exactly, but of the kind to be like, you have to at least do the homework in some respect. You have to say that you have a plan and have a plan that you can gesture to in order to continue like, you know, perpetrating this genocide.

You have to be able to be like, well, this is what I'm going to do after we've, you know, completed it. And so, quite literally, the lowest effort thing possible of being like, I would just have the fucking, like, get chat GPT to do it, get, you know, open AI, generate some images, which look like predictably AI art, which means they look like absolute shit. We're gonna have luxury hotels and fine dining. I mean, you're not far off is the thing. Like, basically, it's of the kind of mode of like, you know these like Gulf Arab states

and Saudi Arabia? well, we like those guys because of their, like, oligarchy. So what if we just did that in Gaza? And there's, like, there's sort of AI-generated art of a bunch of guys in, like, standing around in what may as well be, like, neon, like, Gaza annex. And it's just, this is never going to happen for a number of reasons. But, like, it exists as a kind of thing to say that there is a plan. And I think we have to interpret it on that basis first.

Hamas leaders being like, I'm no fan of the Lakud party, but I do like Panda Express. So I have to offer some critical support. The thing is, if you're in Hamas and you want to live somewhere like Doha, you just go and live in Doha, as a bunch of them do. But to like bring it to Gaza is like an impossibility for a bunch of reasons, one of which is the Israelis. Like, as much as Nanyahu wants to like have this document in existence, this. This is nothing that Israel would ever accept, like any conceivable Israeli government. I remember in October, there was a sort of sad article by Yuval No. Hariri, who is just the author of Sapiens, who was just like, uh, hmm, if only they built

Singapore and the Levant, none of this would be happening. Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. And that's from the guy who invented the Robo Sapiens, so you know they're smart. It's the specific kind of like anti-Arab racism of being like, why can't you just be like Dubai, the kind of Arabs that we like. Yeah. And I think looking at this document, I think November, what you say is basically correct,

which is just, you need to have something. And so they've looked at all of the other crazy fantasies of the region and said, okay, we'll just do that. But I think this is, this is sort of something as well that's worth noting, which is this has so much in common with other, like, I would say, extremely right-wing totalitarian, you might call them fascist movements, which is like, you know what other country did exactly this?

fucking neon. Other right wing movements such as like California Forever also did this. It's like... The art looks like they've just kind of transplanted the California Forever Solano County stuff to like a vaguely Middle Eastern setting. Yeah, it's like the fascist aesthetic isn't like Jackboots and Hugo Boss and shit anymore. It's AI generated eco-modernism. Like this is what they they love, I think my quack theory is that they love doing this because it's like, okay, we need to have an aesthetic to get people on board with our vision, right? Well, no one wants to work with us who's good at making stuff. The best we got was like the rappers who have been banned from the US. But the great thing is what I always said that like AI generated imagery

in general represents is the ability of management to just start cranking stuff out without having to involve even someone who is a vague subtype of jobbing creative. or human being for that matter. I mean, in a literal sense, but that's always been true in a metaphorical sense. Like, you can have, if you look at, like, fascist art through the ages, right? Like, whatever sort of, like, school of art, it's aping, there's this kind of, like, hollowed-out nature of it. It gives me the kind of, like, unease that you have in, I'm, Riley, you've made me like you by making me read this book. Like, you get by looking at a predator species in blindsight, right?

where you're like, this is something that does not exist as the same kind of communication that I as a human being have with other human beings, right? It is something that's meant to kind of put you at your ease and it seems fundamentally wrong because it's, like, it's deceptive. It's alien and it's predatory. And now we've made that slightly less subtle in that it doesn't actually require a physical human hand. I think if Marinetti were alive today, he would be sitting on Mid-Journey, making me. eco-modernist walkable town squares next to EV factories 24 hours a day. Yeah, absolutely. It's a fundamentally, it's a parasitic ideology on any form of art and any school of art. And so, yeah, I think maybe there was a potential for AI generated images to have some kind of artistic use that wasn't this. Less so now, you know, because it's just

borrowed inside of it. Less than any specific content of the plan, which I agree is like just there so it can exist, so it can be pointed. Yes, it's jingling keys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's still a little bit of a keyhole you can look through to be like, okay, well, this is an emerging sort of fascist aesthetic. And, you know, this is the sort of futuristic skyscrapers, solar fields, water desalination plants that they're all showing are created through essentially magic as, well, quote,

unquote, magic in the art form, but also the idea is that they will just sort of emerge, right, without ever having to consider the politics of the situation. And that's ultimately what accepting this document as it's intended to be, which is, okay, well, I guess they have a plan now. That requires you to do that, to upset the politics of the situation from your own conception of it. It requires you to be like, oh, good. Well, if I guess in this case where like Israel, Jordan and Egypt and the UAE all engage

in like a joint governance of a sort of collectively administered security zone with the PA managing the finances, I guess a bunch of EV factories might just emerge if we get the right tax credit structure in there, right? You know? Yeah, which you were building on top of like a forest of like amputated limbs and like rubble? And, you know, I don't think I've ever seen as much of a coded threat as the prime minister's office then saying that what's successful in Gaza, the scheme could be rolled out across Syria, Yemen and Lebanon.

Oh. Yeah, now he's doing river to the sea, huh? Anyway, I think that's about time for us to go into our second half. What do you all think? I think that having recorded the second half, third. It has a considerably more upbeat tone than we ended the first half on. And it's gonna be a really weird disjointed vibe. So yeah, let's do it.

I was gonna say I'm really looking forward to finding out what's in the second half. And finding out what I might say. I think my favorite, like as a call forward, my favorite thing that you say in the second half, Milo, is you're naming your favorite callback to the first half. Pretty kind of time loop. But the fact that you know what's in the second half means that this is a rigged podcast. Yeah, that's right.

If you really think about it. This is rigged. And by this, we may be. mean trash future. Yeah. Yeah. That elephant's not even real. It's two guys in the front of the back.

You have a listener are surprised, but we know exactly what's going to happen. Two guys in the front of the back. Each half has two guys. No, I meant two guys, one in the front, one in the back. No, no. Can't take it back. I was trying to figure out the logistics of that was like two. You could have one in each leg, I guess, like hopping.

That's very intimate. Yeah, they would just need to get really good. You know, you need to drift. Four guys would need to drift. Okay, all right, all right, all right. Let's hand over to all of us and Jason from 404 right now. All right, see in a few seconds, everyone. Hello, everyone from the first half.

Welcome to the second half. What a first half it was. Hey, and you know what? We certainly know all of... Hey, Milo, why don't you say your favorite callback? Oh, it's impossible to choose, really. No, we've talked a lot about the AI garbage dispense. in the past. And we're now going to speak with Jason Kebler from 404 Media and the 404 Media

podcast about the research he's been doing into how Facebook turned from the er-spreader of Macedonian teenagers saying that Hillary Clinton was going to do the knockout game into products of the garbage dispenser itself. That's right. In the next section, we are exploring the gospel according to Shrimp Jesus. Jason, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. So, I think the first question I have, like, just jumping into it is how impressive is it on the Life Nature group that the talented son has drawn a self, a photorealistic self-portrait? Dude, the market for self-portraits is through the roof, at least on Facebook. Just incredible children artists drawing photos of themselves and going massively, massively

viral on Facebook over and over and over again. I think it's super impressive as well that a quintuple amputee, was able to draw a self-portrait and everyone seemed to... And it's their birthday. And the thing, too, is that Squid famously, like, quite difficult to draw, you know, to get all of the, like, contours and the shading and everything. And yet, you know, many of these, these very talented child artists are absolutely out here, like, nailing it.

Incredible, incredible, incredible cetaceans. No, no. We are talking, of course, but just a few of the things that if you go on Facebook, which I think probably very few people listening to this, with the exception maybe of Jason who does it for research purposes and is on the call right now do, you will find not sort of people posting photos of their breakfasts or whatever, which was the stereotype of 10 years ago, or 15 years ago.

Hypothetical, much greater breakfast. Yeah. Well, what about a breakfast of crab Jesus? Some say the greatest breakfast ever made. Yeah, the most important meal of the day is crab Jesus, actually. Eat it of my body, these crabs, You know, we haven't seen crab Jesus being cooked yet in any of these AI images, but it's going to happen. Like, there's a cadence to these things where, like, things start going viral and then they start getting blended. And something that I've been seeing is AI generated food and AI generated recipes going viral on Facebook.

So soon it will be, like, take one shrimp Jesus and put it in a pot of boiling water. Well, you know, actually, there is technically no Jesus in crab Jesus. And so since 1996, manufacturers have been legally obliged to legal it as Jesus-flavored crab. Doing like crab Jesus transubstantiation. It's like, they have to somehow make blue wine for his blood and communion. So what we're talking about, of course, we're not talking about my talented son who has drawn a self portrait despite being a quintuple amputee, we are talking about the thing that seems to be the dominant way of communicating on what is still kind of, is it maybe, the world's most popular

social media platform? Yeah, the stuff that is currently driving your parents or grandparents may be insane and new and interesting ways. So, Jason, I'm just going to ask you this. What do Shrimp Jesus, Uncle Sam Jesus, and numerous images of children being torn apart by space monsters and 20 million identical comment responses of Amen have in common. Can you set the table for us? The content that you just described is some of the most popular content on Facebook right now. If you log on and show even a passing interest in anything that is AI generated, you will start seeing these super bizarre images.

And there's thousands and thousands and thousands of them. I feel like I've been going crazy the last few months because I've just been looking at tens of thousands of images of like fucked up shrimp Jesus, like amputee children. A lot of Jesus with soldiers in like burnt out houses and things of this nature. And then just like thousands and thousands of comments. I've been calling it a dead mall vibes where it's like there once was a civilization here on Facebook. But now it's just like a couple weird kiosks keeping the lights on.

and it's like they're all selling crap more or less. I've really been enjoying the Bible cops. This is, because as I understand it, like the process by which what gets picked up and what like these, what gets generated is already sufficiently arcane. That there's kind of like, it's already quite divorced from reality.

But then when I see like on Facebook, an AI generated image of a police car with a big Bible, on the top of it, just being shared to more bots. It's so perfectly surreal that I want to understand how this happened and how we got there. Oh, everyone trusts the Bible cops. Of course, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I've been doing a lot of, like, amateur sociology because it's like stereotypically, like, Facebook is full of people who love Jesus and people who love cops. And so, like, over time, there were, you know, all of these viral images of cops. of AI-generated cops and all these viral images of AI-generated Jesus, and it just makes sense that at some point they were blended together, and you have cops carrying a gigantic Bible on the roof of their cruiser. As it should be.

Yeah, cops, all of whom individually is Jesus, kind of pole-bearing a shrimp Jesus coffin. I say this is what Green Day was concerned about when they wrote the album American Idiot. But like this content, right? Is it just, is it popular in the sense that like it's all bot and like kind of like really like low quality like scammy accounts interacting with each other or are real people going fuck yes, love the shrimp Jesus. I want to see more shrimp Jesus. Yeah. So there's two types of AI generated content on Facebook.

At least I've created two categories. There's like realistic looking AI. and then there's fucked up AI. So I put Shrimp Jesus in the fucked up category where you can kind of... Wait, what? I know, I know. Our Lord and Savior.

It's pretty fucking normal to a real American like me. I was going to say, Jason, that's exactly what Martin Luther would have said if he had AI. Yeah. But when I started reporting on this, like back in December, there were all these photos going viral

of these chainsaw wood carving images where it was like a guy with a chainsaw kneeled next to a sculpture of a dog. And this is an actual type of content that goes viral on Facebook all the time. There's this dude in the UK who does commissions of people's dogs. Like if you want a statue of your dog carved out of a log, you pay him like $10,000 and he'll make it. And he will painstakingly document that process and then post it on Facebook. And his images go viral pretty often. So back in December, I noticed that there were all these variations of that dog sculpture and that man where like the dog was slightly different or the man was slightly different or the man had seven fingers instead of five fingers or maybe if you're a chainsaw dude, you only have like three fingers because of various chainsaw accidents.

And these were going viral. And the comments on these were real people. It was people who had no idea that this stuff was fake or AI generated. And that's the same, like, look at this pretty picture I drew, like that sort of thing, where something is off. And if you understand AI and if you looked at AI generated images, you would be able to tell. But if you're like average Facebook user, you might not be able to tell. And the reason that I say that these were real people is because the comments are like engaging

with what the image is. They're saying, like, wow, this is a beautiful dog. Like, I need to buy one. Where can I get one of these? And then, like, I've spent way too much time clicking into the profiles of people who comment on this stuff. And it's a bunch of images of them, like, going to high school reunions and funerals and all the, like, boring stuff that people post on Facebook about.

But then over time, it's like the surreal and bizarre started popping up. And that stuff also started going viral. viral. And the comments on these are always just like, amen or a bunch of emojis. And these, like, I think most of them are bots. I'm pretty sure that most of them are bots. And I think it's like, obviously it's an automated, these are automated pages that are publishing this stuff. They're publishing like 20, 30 photos an hour. And a lot of them have one, two, three likes. And then they'll be one with like 300,000 likes and 5,000 comments. And I think, I think the vast majority of people engaging with this stuff are bots, but there are also humans, too.

So I think my, the biggest question I have is like, this is clearly a huge, a huge change that has happened on Facebook. And I think one of the threads that I'd like to follow maybe later on is how Facebook's internal, basically internal like incentives, the way the company exists itself, like the algorithm you might say that's in the heads of the executives at Facebook made this inevitable. That's one thread to pull. But first, I just want to pull on, like, there's still people are expending. Like, they're spending money on AI image generations on compute. They're spending time coming up with prompts and posting.

And they're spending time making the pages. And they're spending time making the bots. Like, even though this is a lot of this, what's going on, is enormously interactive. Interactive, excuse me, is enormously, like, automated. I can't. And the sort of strange directions it goes is kind of what happens when you let the computer just kind of vibe for a while and then come up with whatever.

It just creates strange pastiches of things and just go the same direction for a million years, like a golem. But my question is, why do this? Who is... Why make... You believe in crap Jesus.

Who is making money from this? Why is this being done? Why is this happening? Yeah, yeah. So, a lot of people when these... Because these images keep going viral on Twitter and Blue Sky and, like, screenshots. of like look how cooked Facebook is. And the thing that people say immediately is dead internet theory,

which is the theory that the internet is just bots talking to other bots. And that is true to an extent. Like there's a lot of automated and inauthentic behavior happening here. But there's a lot of humans in the loop and a lot of human time and energy being wasted on this stuff. So I think that's a great question. And the answer is basically like they are doing this to get a lot of followers to their Facebook page. And then at some point, they pivot the content. Either they pivot it to start

linking to drop shipping schemes where you can buy like a shitty dog leash and then, you know, give them your credit card information. And some of them are outright scams. Others are just like, maybe we can sell 17 baby onesies and make money that way. And then a lot of them are linking out to AI generated content farms. So they're linking out to pages that are heavily heavily monetized with ads. You click them and there's like 50 ads that pop up. So there's that. And then there's also a black market for Facebook pages in general where if you can get

100,000 people or a million people to like your Facebook page, you can then go sell it on a marketplace for a few thousand dollars. And the people who are doing this are largely in developing countries. One of the few things that Facebook did after the 2016 election was it required you to say where you were operating from. And so a lot of these pages are being operated in Vietnam, Thailand. There's a ton in the Philippines in Nigeria. And these are places where you don't necessarily need to make thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars for it to be like a worthwhile endeavor.

Yeah. And so what's really striking in this sort of pivots to the business element of it is, you know, when you talk about all that money that's being made, you know who's not making a fucking red cent from any of these interactions is Facebook? I mean, I don't know. I don't know because here's the reason why these things are going viral. It's like first, there's tons of inauthentic behavior that's boosting them in the algorithm. But it used to be that if you log on to Facebook, you would see pages that you liked and you would see stuff that your friends and family were commenting on. And then you would see like ads that people were paying to boost. And about a year ago, Facebook changed its algorithm to compete with TikTok. It did this specifically on Instagram and Facebook, where the newsfeed is not just pages that

you've liked and things that your friends and family are doing. They're doing the whole for you algorithm, like specifically the for you page. Oh, which everyone loves. Which everyone loves. And so they're showing you things that are popular like throughout the entire network. And Zuckerberg was on the earnings call a few months ago. and he said that 30% of all posts that people see on Facebook are now surfaced through this recommendation algorithm.

And so you have like random people in Ohio being served content that like bots in Brazil are liking. And that would seem... Come to Brazil, say the bots. Just your grandparents getting radicalized, but Brazilian radicalized? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And my grandparents are really into Bolsonaro right now.

They're writing him in at the US election. My grandma has a huge ass Well, there was just a flood in Brazil And there was a story like earlier this week About how AI generated images of that flood That include like Jesus And all of these fucked up things that we're talking about Are just going massively viral on Facebook

And so the AI is getting topical In a way that is like, I don't know I'm not a big like Facebook disinformation Through the election or whatever guy but it is the case that now, like, the current theme of the AI is related to a news event. And I think that that is kind of, it's not great. What I sort of think about, like, again, like people from Ohio looking at their Facebook, again, I say people, like septuagenarians from Ohio, specifically, not just any people,

looking at their Facebook feeds, and then seeing, like, wow, I can't believe that, like, Jesus came and blocked the floodwaters from this one house in Brazil. It's like a kind of, it's like a kind of universal worldwide dancing plague, almost, or a universal worldwide internet-connected, AI-enabled series of like, almost ecstatic delusions. You get my meaning, right?

Like, this is, people who want to see that and want to believe, hallelujah, he is, you know, Emmanuel and he's in Brazil. It was fine. I just didn't expect it to be. Brazilian. Right? This is, it's not about like, it's not about disinformation or believing things about like certain political parties or whatever at this point.

It's just about just total, a total disconnect with reality. Are you attached to consensus reality or not? Yeah. Yeah. A total disconnect with consensus reality. That's being enabled by like these tools just hammering and accelerating a process that was already happening. Yeah.

So on the first article I wrote. about this. I had a whole rant that we ended up cutting because it was very mean. But I basically argued that it's like, it's the metaverse for like boomers. They're like cosplaying like they're having interactions with people

but really they're just like talking to bots all day. And so it's like an online version of a nursing home where just like cooked people are talking themselves and it's like, that's so depressing. You can go really dark places with this though because it's like I've just watched here is like

my favorite, I guess, thing that I've seen. It was an AI-generated deck, like a wood deck in someone's backyard. And there were all of these people who were arguing about whether the deck was up to code or not, like, whether the pillars and the planks had been, like, installed properly. And it's like, this fucking deck does not exist. Like, it doesn't exist. And there are, like, dozens of people, like, arguing back and forth about whether or not this deck was up to code.

And it's just a lot of that. It's like a lot of wasted time. I love to give an entire generation a kind of sort of jingling keys on the way out, you know? Well, you know, one of the things that we run across quite a bit in terms of looking at startups, when we want to talk about startups, is it's really popular to be like,

hey, hate your grandpa, cool, so do we. Can't make a walk laps in the garden anymore to raise money for the NHS. Yeah, because of woke. Yeah, you can give him an AI to talk to. And then he won't bother you anymore. We've seen like the sort of high legitimacy, so to speak, version of that, which is a bunch of startups that kind of harvest VC funding for like, we're going to put the fucking elderly assistance robot in a care home. And it's going to like listen to your, like, you know, your grandfather's war stories or whatever.

And then here we're at the sort of like lower legitimacy end of that where it's like your, your grandpa is going to get fucking radicalized about Lula. My grandfather has bought a motorbike and he's got a new girlfriend who has a suspiciously fat cock. I'm not sure what's going on. Still have the favela. Yeah, that's right. And this is, I think, like, the creation of Facebook as a kind of fake social network, right? And there used to be tools that Facebook created. Shut up for a come back there and slap your profile.

Oh, sorry, Potemkin Social Network. How about that one? Yeah, yeah. Sure. Shut up before I come back there. Now, there's tools like crowd tangle that Facebook, I believe, either built or allowed in on purpose, to give marketers more confidence in spending money with them that would show like, here are the actual people, here's how they're interacting, here's how they're going to click on ads if you use our fantastic tracking system to like to place ads on pages. And you've written about this, others have written about this as well, is Facebook has been like turning all that shit off because there are fewer and fewer.

Did they just get bored of running, like, being Facebook? It's feel like, this shit sucks now. I'm just going to let it like rewild itself. It does feel like a rewilding. It's like someone turned off the lights, or at least all the employees left, but the network is just, it's still on. See, I understand why this happens with Twitter, right? Which is that, you know, Elon Musk fired everybody for being too woke

and is now tearing copper wire out of the walls looking for the cathedral. But like Mark Zuckerberg is ostensibly still like engaged with Facebook. Is it just that he wants to be doing other stuff and he just doesn't give a fuck about Facebook anymore? To be serious for a moment, I did a gigantic story about content moderation on Facebook like five years ago where we had these internal documents from Facebook about what their rules were. And these documents were insane and they were very specific. It was like, this is like an exact example. Like, under what circumstances is Facebook going to delete a butthole? It's like an actual example.

And they were like, well, if the asshole is being used in a political context, such as if you replace Kim Jong-un's eyes with an asshole, that is like a political statement and we will leave it up. Sort of Rick and Morty Carway type vibe. It was crazy. and it was so hyper-specific. And we kept publishing these articles and eventually Facebook emailed us

and was like, yo, you guys should come to Menlo Park, come to our headquarters and talk to the people who make these rules. And we will show you how crazy the stuff that we deal with is on a day-to-day basis. And so I went there

and I went to one of their meetings and I sat in on it and I wrote a big article about it and it was about the TidePod Challenge where kids were eating Tidepods. And you had like all of these like PhD people and people used to work in government, like essentially creating a rule for when are we going to allow children to post videos of themselves eating tidepods or whatever. And it's like it's crazy.

Like it's completely crazy. But these people were like very, they took safety on the platform very seriously. And they were relatively good about detecting and taking stuff down. especially after 2016. And just like Twitter, Facebook has fired many of these people. There's been, like, mass layouts on that team. And Facebook was trying very hard for a while to, like, create rules.

And it fancied itself as, like, a quasi-government state. It set up that whole, like, oversight board that was set up, like, the Supreme Court. And then AI comes around and they just don't care anymore. They don't do anything anymore. I used to screenshot bad things that I saw on Facebook that I was going to write about, just things that obviously violates rules like terrorism, extremism, so on and so forth. Because Facebook used to detect and delete that stuff. And over the last six months, I've stopped screenshoting it.

I just saved the links because I know Facebook is not going to detect this stuff. Like I was on Facebook last week and I found like 500 different pages just posting hentai, like completely naked animatrix like all over going viral, many of them AI generated. And it's like Facebook has completely stopped trying to police this stuff. My view is right.

This goes back to what you say in 2022, the TikTokification of every social media network, which is like more algorithmic pushing, less like people actually using it for what they want to use it for, which is to connect with friends or what have you. And this is kind of an arms race or a sort of Thucydides trap

between social networks of like, okay, TikTok is rising and they're doing that by being more pushy with stuff and people are interacting with it more and it's more addictive. So we need to make our thing more addictive, which means making it far easier through things like pages as opposed to groups or by like, by just removing every single limit on things being shared, whether that's trust and safety or removing actual. It used to be, I think, that you could only forward WhatsApp to like 500 people. That's what I've been taken down. And it's just like, At this point, people's nans needed to send more of the Jesus memes to people. It used to take down the Indian internet every morning because people would send like 400 megabyte good morning gifts to one another.

Yeah, that's right. I would love to receive a 400 megabyte good morning gift, to be fully honest. As someone who's received plenty of them. No, no, you don't. The first time would have like a novelty to it, I feel. Yeah. So the arm's race I'm talking about is just eyes are. on ads, which Facebook has been having more and more problems. I mean, they've been worrying about eyes on ads since 2006.

Like, ever since their revenue was counted in the millions, this has been something that they're worried about. And, you know, you've mentioned a few of the changes they've made, Jason, which is like just getting more and more involved, basically, in trying to push more content, more connections on you, whether that's trying to get you to friend more people, whether that's trying to, like, just tearing down the walls between your network and the rest of the network with the 4-U feed.

All of that, it just takes this thing that was at one point useful and in the pursuit of showing you ads has just completely demolished itself as a place where anyone can do anything other than have an argument with a robot about whether or not a porch is correctly built or jackoff, basically. Yeah, I mean, I think that Facebook has made the calculation that I think will be wrong. I hope we'll be wrong,

but maybe isn't yet, that any engagement is better than no engagement. And so, you know, it's been putting its own AI into Facebook. And so it's in this difficult situation that it's created for itself, where the platform is being taken over by AI. And Facebook can't say AI is bad

because Facebook, like every other tech platform, is shoving its own AI into every different part, of the ecosystem. And so I think that it doesn't want to take a stand against AI-generated content because it wants you to use Facebook's own AI on the platform. And I mean, a few weeks ago, Facebook integrated AI into a lot of different groups on the site. So if you post something in a Facebook group that has this enabled and someone doesn't respond within an hour, Facebook's AI will just respond to you.

And I think that it's like, yeah, I think it is that arguing with a robot thing where it's like, you have all these people who don't have anything better to do with their time and who are just endlessly scrolling Facebook because I guess, I don't know, they haven't moved on to Twitter or something. And they post something and if they don't get a response, maybe they're going to leave the platform, like maybe they won't check the platform again that day. But if a robot responds to them, they'll log back on and they'll see another ad or another 15 ads. That's really sad. Look, Facebook's Brazilian AI is actually my best friend.

We're constantly doing wallposts for each other, FIFA apologies, and it's certainly controller mayor bunda. What if the Facebook AI response to you ends up falling in love with like one of those pussy in bio-a-is? Has anyone like considered what happens then? Oh my God. That's good. It's good.

A beautiful love story of our time. I just think that the idea of like, oh, compute is basically free to me. Therefore, I'm just gonna keep everyone involved by having them send 400 megabyte good morning gifts to a robot every time that they're like talk to. If this was like 2011, we would get a movie where it's like it's all animation, but like the voice actors are surprisingly famous

where Crab Jesus falls in love with a pussy and bio girl. It'd be like the emoji movie all over again. Chris Pratt is Crab Jesus. Jerry Seinfeld is in it for some reason. I think it could still happen. That's my favorite. Like, my thinking is, number one, But it could still happen.

Number two, if it hasn't happened, someone do that and also let me in the writer's room. I've got some ideas. I-Way-Way voices AI-Way-W-W-A. Yeah, Zendaya is the pussy in bio. Just in character is Cheney from Dune. But I think what we're looking at, right? It's a company that from first principles has walked backwards into creating what is essentially a mass spam network by prioritizing just.

as much posting as possible to as many eyes as possible, addiction and just stare at the platform at all costs while hemorrhaging actual users and like causing the elderly to become deranged with Brazilian bots. So just so that it can keep this valuation that is increasingly looking like, why? Who is paying the money? No one's paying the money for the fucking Oculus Rift.

The Metaverse was a bust. It's actually dead. The Metaverse was a bus because it didn't have huge Brazilian asses. That was the problem. All that's left are like the old and vulnerable and scammable, and Facebook has looked at that population and said, all right, I guess that's who we've got,

I suppose. It's so funny as well that while all of this is happening, you're like, what's, what's Mark up to? What's that guy doing? And the answer is, you should do Jitsu.

Yeah, is like posting a video of himself on Instagram, like throwing like an asser guy across a field into a target with his perfect dead eyes. I'm like, I don't know that any of this is healthy. He's ready for the war with the machines. That's true. That is true.

Like, I think should ALE be right and, like, you know, we should all start smoking and, like, having casual sex and everything because the AIs are going to, like, come and try and slave us in five and ten years. Like, place yourself under the command of Mark Zuckerberg, right? Because that man has been training. Yeah, he would never come in a fluffer. D. Always Bustin I ever. That's a call forward to this week's bonus episode.

Anyway, I think what we, if you look at what Facebook is now, I think it's a perfect example of just of what happens when you let these people, and these people, like the people running Facebook, the people, abiding by the logic of the market of the business they're in, which is ad sales, when you let them just run their fucking business into the ground. I think this is just what it will keep becoming. We see other social networks becoming this as well. The whole thing, when confronted with reality,

when confronted with the fact that maybe, just maybe, what is essentially a gigantic, very effective, captive advertising company, probably shouldn't be the most valuable firm in the world, or one of the most valuable firms in the world. And, you know, you end up inevitably, it all converges on porn bots, basically. I think.

I think that this is the future of many social platforms. It's like Facebook has been around longer and has more people on it than all these other platforms. And one thing that I saw is that a lot of the bots that are commenting on these things used to be real people. As in like if you scroll back a few years, it's like they were people who were interacting with their friends and families. And the accounts got hacked at some point.

Like the accounts were hacked at some point. And so you have these accounts that used to be regular people's accounts and are now just being used to promote Brazilian disinfo or whatever, which is interesting. But then I think also, and this is dark, but it's like a lot of the people are dead also. I was going to say. Like Facebook has always catered to older people. Once it opens to the general public, you have these people who were 70 when they joined Facebook 20 years ago and they've been dead for 10 years. But their accounts haven't been deleted. they've just been taken over

and it's very hard to tell like who is a living, breathing human like on these platforms now? So what you're saying is we're talking less about a kind of dead internet theory more about a kind of zombie internet. My gam gam gam lives on.

It's crap Jesus. Praise the new flash. What of my schoolmate? This happened to one of my schoolmates. Like I don't know, well, but his Facebook account got hacked and he wasn't able to recover it. And so every time I sort of go

and I go on very rarely, But like when I've gone on like a few months ago, and I went onto his account, it just says, for the past two years, all it said is sex. Every day he'll post sex. I can't imagine. Like if someone dies, right? Like your mum dies, God forbidden. Then you log on and you see like your dead mum's profile posting like pussy and bio.

Well, because Facebook did the thing of like remembering so and so, right? Like that instituted that when the first problem was like, oh yeah, people die and like their platforms never get to. deleted and Facebook doesn't do anything about it. So they be instituted with that thing. But now that like the bots have sort of taken over and again like you know, there's less people calling out because viewer people use Facebook now, you end up having these like remembering

so-and-so accounts for just sort of do ads which is kind of also like a cool one thing your dad enjoyed was an ice cold buddline. I mean it's not even it's just like weird ads for like just like cheap consumer products or dodgy lawyers. My coffin is

lowered into the earth and from the bowels of the earth a voice echoes up. Ladies get the best vibrator here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, this could be like a this could be like an A24 movie, like a son who's so grief-stricken that when

his mother's Facebook account starts posting my pussy in bio, he clicks the link just because he has to check. He has to know. That's how Silent Hill 2 starts. Yeah, listen, if I die, just remember, remember me as I lived,

remember many of my classic phrases like, My night photo's in profile. Yeah. My sort of rabid hatred for Lula and like support for Bolsonaro. Yeah. It's like, I remember November so well. She always knew

her to get a great deal on authentic raybans. Anyway, I think that deriving what is essentially a horror movie premise from the corporate structure of Facebook is as good a place as any to leave it. Jason, Thank you so, so much for coming and talking about your work with us today.

I've had a blast. Yeah, thanks for having me. And if you haven't been on Facebook recently, you should go check it out. It's pretty dark. Are you plugging Facebook? This whole thing was paid for by Facebook, yeah. You do need like a dot-edu account to check it out. You know what else you should check out is the 404 Media Podcast.

And also, of course, overthrowing the Brazilian government. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's right. We're going to do January 9th again. I'm going to have such an interesting time at Customs if I ever go to Brazil because of this specific podcast. And, and also, don't forget, because we'll just do the outro with all of us here. Once you've checked out, 404 Media, the 404 Media podcast, don't forget to check out if you are in Scotland, our Edinburgh show on the 14th of August. Yeah, where our guest will be Crab Jesus and also Ghiab,

Sonaro. I mean, what a get, honestly. And so we're going to be doing that. Milo's got his website, which has a bunch of tour shows on it. You can check those out if you're interested. So many of that. Why not? Why not? What are you doing on June 5th? It's so important that you can't go see Milo.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll answer me that. Yeah. Do you think, do you think, hey, my podcast co-host drew this self-portrait. Buy a ticket if you're proud of him. That's right. I am, I am quintublee. So we will see him there, see you in Edinburgh, or we will just see you tomorrow if you're one of the lucky people who bought a ticket to the live show in London, which is, I believe, sold out unless we've managed to release more tickets. Sold out. If we can't release more tickets, it will stay sold out. Anyway, we will see you at any and all of those times. So Jason, thank you once again and goodbye, everybody.

Bye.