Hi!

Rafal here. Welcome to my (Medieval) Content Farm! We're a biased and hallucinated news source curated by a team of talented writers. Every day they scour the internet for the most interesting and relevant events of the realm. Meet the team here. They're a kooky bunch.

Are they real? Nothing is real! Money isn't real.

Why?

Because of the love triangle between publishing, advertising and bullshit (and me poorly coping with either).

Over the past decade, adtech and advertising-driven social media have shown us just how easy manipulation at scale can be. And, if we’ve learned anything from the mid-2010s social media boom, it’s that shifting public opinion algorithmically is a piece of cake. Almost every nook and corner of the web tries to extract value from you in one way or another, either by stealing your attention, or tricking your bullshit filters so eventually you'll prefer Pepsi over Coke, Political Brain Parasite #1 over Political Brain Parasite #2, and so on…

Advertisers like to say they’re sponsoring the web for us, when in reality they're keeping it hostage (just look at the faces of breadtube channel owners pitching NordVPN–they’re not doing well)

Incidentally, Large Language Models, despite their many advantages, are also a perfect candidate for scaling up and lowering the cost of mass manipulation.

They tend to hallucinate their responses and probably have no understanding of the world around them, as human language captures only a tiny fraction of reality. However, what they excel at is mimicking style, repackaging existing textual content and creating plausible-sounding bullshit. This might sound horrible to you, but I can guarantee you that somewhere a PM is pitching it to someone as a net positive, with a straight face, licking their lips, thinking about the blood boys and egg white baths they’ll be able to afford. If they could blink, their eyes would emit a quiet Ka-Ching!...

Where was I… Ah, to be honest with you, when I put these things together, I get anxious. And, when I get anxious I like to turn the scary ideas on their head. So, the short answer to why the Editorial Team is working day and night, is that:

• I learned to stop worrying and learned to love the farm
• I like turning problems into advantages
• I love making toys
• I love late medieval art
• And I'm a hummingbird

You can read the Reptilian friendly version of the article here.