yodidac · commentarii

a defeat from the very first moment

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

i’m tired. very tired, and fed up. between the infinite scroll and artificial intelligence, my brain is melting. i’ve never liked social media; for a long time i went without it, and when i caved it was out of obligation, out of pressure, out of necessity, always reluctantly. i was especially wary of tiktok, because i was aware of how far they’d perfected retention: the way of frying your brain with extreme dopamine cycles.

i downloaded tiktok for one reason only: to make videos. and that part — trying to make good content, more educational, not so extremely fast-paced — i do like. but it comes at a price: you have to install the app and keep it on your phone. and it’s addictive. it’s that drug you know is bad and take anyway, thinking that, because you’re aware of how bad it is, you won’t get so hooked. and i notice that isn’t true. i notice it.

it’s been more than two weeks since i posted a video, and even so i go in every day, and i watch a lot of tiktoks. some i like, but it’s rubbish: literally junk food for the attention. my phone use has gone up, on average, between one and two hours a day. and i notice how it affects me. not for the better.

and the thing is, the dictatorship of the infinite scroll is everywhere. you look for a flat and it’s scroll and more scroll of listings on idealista, on fotocasa; it’s terrible, terrible where we’ve ended up. then you try to concentrate on work and you have artificial intelligence, which produces exactly the same effect.

i know i’m repeating myself, i know i’ve talked about this before, but i’m tired. tired of this constant need to produce, to create, to do things. i’ve always thought of myself as a fairly deconstructed man, and i realise i’m not, that i’m just one more. this need to generate, to build, to succeed, to make money, to have companies, to launch ventures… what need is there? and with artificial intelligence, to develop seventeen projects at once, things i don’t even need, that i’m not even enjoying. but you do it because you step onto the wheel. we’re the hamster: go, and go, and go. and the terrible part is that you do it fully aware of it.

it’s not a battle and it’s not a decision: it’s a defeat from the very first moment. and that’s the dangerous part.

i’m going to try to be more aware. not to use my phone before sleeping — even though the last thing i do every night is read, that i haven’t given up and don’t want to give up, reading is hugely important to me; but before reading i use my phone: yesterday, twenty minutes looking at flats on idealista. i wake up in the morning and the first thing i think about is sending claude a message so it starts counting down the five-hour window. and from there, to tiktok, or to whatsapp. i don’t have instagram on my phone; i keep tiktok under the excuse of posting videos.

that’s why i’ve been thinking i’d like to post on more networks, to have more reach — obviously, the more reach the better —, but above all because there are people around me who don’t see my videos because they don’t have tiktok and don’t want to install it. there youtube or instagram would do the job. i’m going to find a way to make these cross-posts from a single platform, without having to install the networks. to see if that way i’m a little stronger and don’t fall into watching tiktok all day. because i enjoy it, yes, but then i think about it and the effect it has on me i don’t like.

but the underlying problem is more serious, and it’s this: we’re leaving the control of these things to self-control. to each person deciding how much time they want, or can, devote to them. and it’s a false illusion of control, because you can’t: it’s designed so that you can’t. you’re a single person, a guy alone on the sofa, or on the bus, or on the metro, using a technological weapon into which billions have been poured in research, where the most brilliant engineers have dedicated themselves night and day to figuring out the best way to keep you hooked. it’s not a battle and it’s not a decision: it’s a defeat from the very first moment. and that’s the dangerous part.

that’s why it can’t be a decision each person is free to make. i’m sorry: i’m in favour of freedom, but this is dangerous. it’s like saying we legalise guns, that everyone has their own and decides, in their sound judgement, whether to use it, whether to keep it in a drawer, whether to carry it loaded or unloaded. it isn’t right. we already see, in some states, how that works: that a kid can grab a pistol and wreak havoc at a school because they have access to it. and yes, keeping things in proportion: a phone doesn’t kill in a way as visually ugly as a gunshot, but it kills too — with addictions, with depressions, with anxiety. it kills. and on top of that it’s the opposite of a gun: there are people who need it, for work, to communicate. a phone, today, is much worse than a gun. we shouldn’t let each person self-manage their own weapon.

and it’s brutally hard. i’m having a bad time of it. and i’m writing this — ‘recording’ it, in inverted commas — on my phone. not to mention how many people you see driving with the phone in their hand. the strange thing is that there are so few accidents for all the people who divert their attention to the screen while driving. you spot straight away who’s on their phone, by the way the car moves; you see it with your own eyes. i don’t know how we’ve got here. but i’m going to try, at least, to be aware.

didacus · mmxxviend · explicit

the price of a thousand followers

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

i’m fed up. i open tiktok and out of every three videos, two are ads. and i don’t mean the advertising tiktok serves you, but the sponsored content from people who make content: collaborations, promotions, brands. an important clarification before i go on: this is not a criticism of creators, and least of all the small ones. if someone with five hundred followers lands a collaboration, i’m happy for them; i hope it excites them, i hope it helps.

within the disgust i feel for the infinite scroll — i’ve said it before —, there is one thing i do like: following small accounts. a thousand, five thousand, twenty thousand followers, i don’t care; anything under ten thousand. i like it because it’s people making genuine content, trying to contribute something, putting in the work. and yes, in part i’m talking about myself, as a small account trying to make something educational that people enjoy.

why do i do it? to learn. i love learning. ancient rome, history, is becoming a passion of mine. and it might surprise you: i’m a science guy. at school history left me cold, it was all rote memorisation; i liked maths. but suddenly something woke up in me, and i want to learn more. i make the content to learn, myself. that a community has formed around it — people who follow, who comment, who value the work, because this is work — is wonderful.

and yes, i share the usual criticism: there are giant influencers who don’t edit their videos, who surely don’t even write their own scripts, who post a story and earn ten thousand euros. it’s staggering that someone can make a video putting together a burger king meal and earn, in a single year, more than many doctors make in five or ten. it’s madness, i agree. but that’s not my point.

what floors me is something else: small accounts, with five hundred, a thousand, two thousand followers, doing collaborations and ads. and here i’m mixing two things, i’ll admit. on one hand, those small accounts doing ads; on the other, the kind of content the huge creators make. because you follow the big ones because you know them, not because they offer anything: it’s today’s celebrity gossip, they tell you about their day, their dances, their life. if your cousin or my grandmother made that same content, you wouldn’t watch it. and that’s fine, they’re public figures, they move a lot of people, hats off to them. but alongside them you have someone with five hundred followers who pours themselves into a cracking video, superbly edited, on a gorgeous topic, and it stalls at two thousand views, or doesn’t even reach a thousand. and i don’t get it.

a video someone poured themselves into stalls at a thousand views; four bits of rubbish with a couple of dances rack up millions.

but the underlying point i’m getting at is this: how far have we come for it to be worth a brand’s while to go looking for a tiny account? some niche guy or girl, with two thousand followers, who’s maybe posted two hundred videos and hasn’t grown any further because they stayed in their niche, or because of the algorithm, or whatever. to what point of extreme consumerism have we come for that follower to be worth the brand’s while? that’s where i was going.

that an account with three million followers runs an ad, i understand: it has an audience, it’s advertising of the old kind. it used to be television, a football match, the hoardings around a pitch. a stadium of a hundred thousand people has its leds changing, advertising nike, adidas, coca-cola. and if you go to your village pitch there are no leds: there are four plastic banners for bar pepito and bar manolo. it has its logic: big fish, small fish, the more mass the better.

but now i see very small accounts advertising brands that aren’t so small. what do they get out of it? do they get paid? are they given product? how does it work, and why? and i know it’s easy for me to say this, being a bigger account; it can be read as envy, as if i wanted those collaborations too. it’s exactly the opposite. total respect for those accounts: they’re the ones i like, the ones i think add something, one of the few reasons it’s worth scrolling now and then. and i wish they had more of them, i wish they could make a living that way.

when a brand reaches out to you and you have a thousand followers, your power over it is nil. you’re its hostage.

what stirs me is something else. this is such a huge dictatorship of the brands that, when one reaches out to you and you have a thousand followers, your power over it is nil. you’re its hostage. they’ll do whatever they want with you. and there, for me, lies the problem. unconsciously, in my head, all of this rings with one word: credibility. loss of credibility. because that brand doesn’t need you at all; you, on the other hand, may not need it either, but it suits you nicely. and once they’ve reached out to you, how are you not going to try to keep them happy?

and that’s the trap. what made those accounts valuable — their own soul, their genuineness, the one thing that set them apart — is exactly what erodes in exchange for a promo. i don’t hold it against anyone: i wish they could make a living that way. i just wonder how far we’ve come for it to be worth going after the very last follower.

didacus · mmxxviend · explicit

but everyone has an iphone

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

until now, on this blog, i’ve mostly written about fairly broad reflections. today i want to talk about something more personal, something that hits close to home and that generates, at the very least, worry. it’s a well-worn topic, but it never hurts to insist on it: access to housing in this country.

week after week, new data comes out, new statistical reports, and they all say the same thing: it gets harder and harder for young people to move out. the average age of leaving home keeps going up, the window for accessing housing keeps drifting away, and the horizon becomes more complicated year after year.

the specific figure i saw last week: 80% of people under thirty in this country live with their parents or have not been able to get access to housing. 80%. four out of every five. astronomical figures, and they hit hard. the data don’t lie, they reflect a real situation very well: access to housing is prohibitive. it has been for some time, but it’s only getting worse, and it seems we are incapable of taking measures, of finding a way to ease a social, structural and very serious problem.

and now i’m going to speak from my own situation. i’m a young person — less and less so, but still inside that group of under-thirties. i have a university education. i have a stable job, a good job, i can’t complain, with a good salary. i’ve had the luck of stringing together permanent contracts from the start. i generally do things well, and i’ve done them well since my first paychecks — beyond the fact that, at the beginning, obviously, you spend more. i’m a fairly simple person, without too many excesses. and even so, the reality is that today i cannot afford housing.

yesterday i was watching videos of the latest demonstration in madrid on this very subject. people came on commenting on how the gathering was going, and it’s hard to say it, but almost all the comments that appeared went in the same direction: “yes, lots of protesting about not having a house, but they all have an iphone”. they all go on holiday. they all eat out. they all go out partying. and when you see that repetition, that insistence, you end up asking yourself: am i doing things wrong? is that why i can’t get access to housing? does a right like having a decent roof really come with a penance, a prior sacrifice?

at what point does spending a thousand euros on a phone mean you don’t deserve a decent home near your work, in the place where you were born?

it’s very easy to make that kind of comment from behind the internet, but a lot of people genuinely think this way. it shouldn’t clash with my philosophy of life, but in lower moments it does. because yes, i’ve been on holiday. yes, i have a phone that isn’t exactly the cheapest. and are those two things really the reasons why a person who finished university, who got to work, who has had permanent contracts from the very beginning, who pushes to improve and to be valued, who outside work has projects and hobbies that fulfil them, cannot today access a decent home?

i don’t drink, i don’t smoke, i don’t take drugs. i don’t like going out partying. i buy the clothes i more or less need. the biggest excess i have is that i like to eat varied and balanced, and that i do my shopping at the market in my neighbourhood instead of at the big supermarket. and it isn’t even more expensive: if i need to buy something at the poulterer’s or the butcher’s, i go to the market, to build neighbourhood and give a bit of support to local businesses. it’s something that, socially and ethically, i like to do, and it doesn’t make that big a difference. but you reach a point where you start questioning even that.

and it leaves a bad taste. it leaves a bad taste because the doubt that lingers all the time is “i’m not doing enough”. that i’m genuinely not doing enough to deserve, to have a right to, a home. and you start making absurd calculations: maybe this year i shouldn’t go on holiday, because those two thousand euros would come in really handy for getting a house. but the thing is, getting a house should be the bare minimum. one thing is reasonable effort — having a job, not wasting money — and quite another is that living your life falls inside the category of sacrifices.

i’m aware of my privilege, i don’t want to play it down: i have a good job, stable, i make it to the end of the month and cover my expenses without trouble. there are an awful lot of people in a far worse situation than mine, and they have got by as best they could; some with a flat they own, some renting, each finding their way. but precisely because of that, the question becomes more absurd: if i, starting from this luck, also can’t make it, is the narrative really that the problem is people who don’t try hard enough?

because i’m not asking for that much. nobody is asking for that much when they want a decent home in the town they can choose. of course i could buy something in vilafranca del penedès, in valls, in tarragona. that’s something i more or less could access. but i work in barcelona, my family is from barcelona, my friends are from barcelona, my life is in barcelona. what sense does it make to dissolve ties — family, friendship, romantic — that have been born and grown in a territory, just because demand in that territory has risen and you can no longer afford it? where have we ended up for that to be a valid argument?

we’ve learned from our parents’ generation: many took out mortgages, moved in together, had children with partners who weren’t right and who eventually broke up; some couldn’t even separate because of the economic dependence between them. i know couples who have separated, who have children, and who still live in the same flat together, while being separated, because they can’t afford to lead separate lives. not even that. and seeing situations like these, are we really going to sustain that the problem isn’t social and structural, but down to people who don’t try hard enough? it makes no sense.

a decent home is a right. i’m not talking about a mansion, or a duplex penthouse, or a gated complex with a pool — that, yes, you’ll probably have to see whether you can afford. i’m talking about the bare minimum: a home where you can feel comfortable, with some square metres, with natural light, with your friends nearby. that shouldn’t require sacrifices. it should be accessible to everyone. and yet, instead of talking about how to fix it, we let the conversation centre on whether i should doubt myself for not making enough of an effort to deserve what i’m asking for. that isn’t right. inevitably the doubts come, inevitably i wonder whether i’ll have to settle for less. and in the end, the very concept of a decent home becomes the most slippery thing of all: what is, for you, a decent home?

didacus · mmxxviend · explicit

staying out is no longer free

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

this week, on la revuelta, david broncano announced they would stop using artificial intelligence on the show altogether, after several people complained about an ai-generated image in which his face appeared without permission. it’s the sort of thing that has been an everyday occurrence ever since artificial intelligence began to go mainstream — or rather, to democratise access to tools with real and useful capabilities — a couple of years ago or more.

i’ve seen it very close up in my personal life: friends who declared themselves openly against the use of ai for pretty much anything, from the very beginning; and others who have incorporated it more organically into their daily lives and workflows. by now a year and a half, two, three years will have passed since that democratisation, and i see the situation is almost politicised: there are those who were strongly against it at the start and remain strongly against it; those who were against it and are little by little accepting these tools; and those who perhaps never even posed the dilemma — what it implied, what ethical or social issues it raised — and are only starting to do so now: some carry on forward, others decide to stop and look around. i get the feeling that this is what has happened with la revuelta.

this has led me to draw an analogy with the world of social media. i’ve never been much of an enthusiast of the concept of a social network, nor have i known how to handle myself well within them. i came late to facebook, and with instagram i decided not to go in, because very early on i identified what it was about: the treadmill of perfection, the oversimplification that your life is perfect, sharing only the good moments, appearances. i didn’t want to go in. and i felt in my own skin the effects social media were having, whether on society or on myself.

but one thing surprised me: the very act of deciding not to be on social media also affects you. a striking phenomenon has emerged at a sociological, almost demographic level: social media perhaps affected those who decided not to use them more than those who did. normally, when someone decides to enter a place, the consequences affect those who enter. a restaurant serves food to those who have come in, not to those standing outside. with social media it’s the opposite: they serve the food to those who are outside. and it feels strange when you notice it in your own skin: i decide not to have social media, and that affects me more than if i did have them, even though it goes against my principles.

this is more or less how they operate: get as many people inside as possible, and generate a disconnection between those who are inside and those who are outside. those of us who decide to stay out feel excluded — not by social media, but by our own friends and family who are inside. it may sound extreme, but if we think about it for a minute it’s true: people share everything; whoever goes on a trip uploads the photos, whoever goes to a concert shares it. and a muscle memory takes shape: “i’ve already shared it, whoever wants to has already seen it, i’m not going to bring it up”. that’s where the disconnection lies. i’m generalising, but the generalisation holds: many of your closest friends no longer tell you things, no longer send you keepsakes, photos or videos of what they’ve been up to, because they’ve uploaded it to social media and expect you to see it. one-to-one contact stops being cultivated and everything is directed to a one-to-many treatment — and the more, the better. whoever decides not to play the game feels excluded, because in that “one to many” you aren’t included; and it’s “your fault” for not joining.

this is how social media grow. an adult with clear ideas is aware of this and has to decide every day: to fight against it, to accept the disconnection from their loved ones, or to enter the game. if for an adult it’s already a conflict, imagine a child, a teenager, where the fear of exclusion is inherent to that stage of development. a child is capable of understanding when their parents tell them they can’t have a phone yet, even if all their friends upload dances to tiktok; but they are not capable of managing the exclusion. for me it’s a horrible poison of social media, terrible, with a brutal power over people.

and what does it have to do with artificial intelligence? ai has taken this exclusion one step further. until now the effect of social media was purely social: connections between people. ai turns it economic, occupational. it remains social, but with many more ramifications. ai tools, just like social media, open the tap so that people gain access to skills and capabilities they did not have. with social media it was at a social level — connecting with people you wouldn’t otherwise know; with ai it’s at a professional level, because it allows you to do things you wouldn’t know how to do. and, just as with social media, you have to be careful: you can’t believe everything, it can fail, it can have adverse effects. but it gives you a range of capabilities that without it you didn’t have.

the example i’ve heard most often from my friends: “i’m against it because now people turn to ai to generate images and designs that a graphic designer used to make”. that’s true, but the deeper issue goes further: ai allows people who aren’t designers to do things a designer would do. i’m not entering into the question of quality, or whether it does it better or worse; the capability is granted to you, even if with flaws. i don’t belittle anyone’s work: a specialist with their own ideas will be much better than an ai, today and probably for years to come. and a designer who also uses ai will be better than one who doesn’t, because for someone who already knows their craft it broadens the scope and lets them exploit their knowledge further.

with ai, if you decide not to step onto the wheel, you stay out of jobs, of earning a wage. it’s no longer a matter of principles, but of necessity.

where am i going with this? to the point that whoever doesn’t incorporate ai tools into their day-to-day — at a professional level, but also personal — is going to be left out. left out of skills, of abilities, of things you are capable of doing. that’s why the dilemma ai puts you in is so dangerous. with social media you could say “i’m going to isolate myself from my friends, it doesn’t matter, i don’t want to jump through the hoop”, and even draw something positive from it: tending more to the relationships i do have, seeing each other in person, not letting them dissolve into the one-to-many. but with ai, if you decide not to step onto the wheel, you stay out of jobs, of earning a wage. that’s where it becomes so dangerous: it’s no longer just a matter of principles, but of necessity. there will be those who feel forced to use ai to keep their job, because in theory with ai you produce more. whether by your own initiative or because the company imposes it on you — “use it, it makes you more productive and that suits me” — you are practically obliged to fall into these tools. and that’s no longer social, it’s survival. and nobody is talking about this.

we look at the adoption charts — facebook so many days to reach a million users, instagram, whatsapp, tiktok, each one fewer — and along comes chatgpt and breaks every barrier, and nobody stops to ask why. the real reason is this: it’s going to be imposed on all of us, whether we want it or not, and we’re going to have to deal with it until the bubble bursts, or until it becomes more expensive to use it than to hire a person, and we go back to the beginning. because there’s another issue: the financing and the consumption of these ais. today all these companies are running at a loss, and somebody will end up paying for it; for now the investors, but a moment will come when it’ll be the customers, because the investors will want their returns. and by then we’ll be so hooked, we’ll have delegated so much of our work to ai, that we’ll have to relearn how to do it: we haven’t stopped doing it, but we’ve changed the way so much that we’ve unlearned it. what’s going to happen in that situation? it’s very worrying, and it isn’t being talked about. what do we do with all this? how do we frame it?

didacus · mmxxviend · explicit

the tiktok of production

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

in this second post i wanted to speak briefly about the arrival of artificial intelligence into a person’s need to produce. i’m talking about myself, but plenty of people reading this will see themselves in it.

by nature, i’m someone with a certain propensity to feel the need to produce. i’m aware it’s a feeling society has, in a sense, imposed on me for being a straight white man who’s supposed to succeed, and that success means producing, contributing to the economy, having a company, launching ventures. knowing that doesn’t make the feeling go away. i have many ideas, many things interest me at once; i try to organise myself to gradually execute the ones that pull at me hardest at any given moment. i drop many of them: it isn’t only productivity, it’s enormous curiosity to explore, and when i get tired i let it go.

where am i going with this? to how the arrival of artificial intelligence has pushed all of it to a limit that borders on unhealthy. i’m a software engineer — i studied physics and chemistry, but i work as a software engineer. i’ve always had several ideas for projects i’d have liked to build, and because of my engineering background they were remote possibilities: i had the aptitude to build an app, a website, a specific piece of software, but often i didn’t have the time or the resources.

the arrival of artificial intelligence is a paradigm shift. all of a sudden it enables me to pursue every avenue i’d kept on the back burner. it lets me make a quantitative leap: all those projects sitting at the back of my mind as a remote possibility start to take shape. i can now work on six or seven projects in parallel that i once thought i’d never find time for. and that delivers a neurological reward: feeling that heightened productivity, doing things i thought impossible, feels great.

but at the same time, that brutal capacity to create enslaves you. it’s great on the one hand, but i feel i have access to tools so powerful that every minute i’m not pouring into them feels like wasted time. what it gives me, it takes from me. that rush of dopamine — the same reward circuit that drugs and social media exploit — is at the same time a comedown, because it generates the obligation to be hooked all day long. and it binds you to the point that right now i’m working on six projects in parallel, trying to dedicate every minute of the day i don’t spend on my job.

and what’s the most serious problem? that it generates a rush, a need to run and run so fast you lose sight of the projects themselves. in my case i use claude code. you start by paying the twenty-euro subscription, you use the sonnet model, you see how it works, it feels great. with those limits you can work on one project at a time: a session is easy to monitor, to follow, to steer, and it speeds things up a lot. you supervise it, you see what it does. but we’re lazy, we tend to procrastinate, to minimise effort. and bit by bit you lose focus, until you’re not even supervising it any more: you accept every change by default and skim what’s happening. it turns into a snowball. you get the high of “look how fast i’m going”, but it’s a false sensation, because there comes a point where you’re doing nothing more than hitting accept.

and this is the real danger. the sensation is so addictive you think: “if i pay the most expensive subscription, i’ll have higher limits, i’ll be able to do more”. you try the two-hundred-euro-a-month one. before paying for it you try opus, the most powerful model, and in just three or four prompts you burn through the five-hour window. but it lasts long enough for you to see a brutal jump in quality between the sonnet you’d been using and opus. and at that point, yes, you go for the two-hundred-euro plan, because it’ll let you use opus more.

it’s the closest thing to a heroin hit i’m ever going to experience.

suddenly you’re using only opus, which programs far better than i do, and i’m only supervising in case it drifts off course. you start to see how much you can get done in a five-hour window, and you try two, three, four, five sessions in parallel. you find yourself with five terminals open, five claude opus sessions working at once for five hours. it’s madness.

working on a single project with five sessions is hard, even with worktrees, because of the merge conflicts. so you end up working on three or four different projects at once, with opus practically on autopilot all day long. you barely review anything. you accept everything, because it’s impossible to review. and the most critical thing: you’re constantly switching focus from one project to another. you fire off a prompt, it runs, you look it over, you steer it, you switch to the other project because it has already finished its task, and on and on for hours. a while back, on an older blog more focused on programming, i talked about how programming with ai had become “tiktokified”: rapid swipes, constant hits of dopamine. and it feels exactly like that. from a productivity standpoint it’s a tiktok of production: i keep jumping between sessions, checking if they’ve finished, pushing them along.

the problem? those projects were mine, my own ideas. before — eight, nine, ten months ago — the workflow let us supervise everything. i had a clear picture in my head: the architecture, the file structure, the use cases, the entities, the database tables. i knew what was right and what was wrong, and if there was a problem i knew exactly which file it was in. i was the owner of it all, i had context on everything. now it’s the opposite: i have five complete projects and i haven’t written a single line of code. it’s like saying i’ve written five books without having read them. i have no idea what they’re about; i know what my idea was, but i haven’t read them. and this is the great problem. i could read them, sure, but how can i, when that slows me down? what i want is to make the most of every second of that five-hour window. there’s no time to stop and read, to test. normally we’d test each feature, each fix; we’d do manual testing, we’d validate. now there’s no time: changes pile on top of changes until you no longer know where you are, what works, what’s been fixed, what’s still pending. you lose the pointer.

that’s why i say it enslaves. artificial intelligence is opening so many doors at once that it has enslaved us to spend all day opening one door after another, without thinking about whether we should. many of these things are within my reach: i could change them, handle them differently. but that feeling forces me not to stop for a second. and what really worries me is what’s going to happen when this ends. today you pay a flat rate of two hundred euros; with those limits, working two or three five-hour windows a day at full throttle, you burn through them. but the real cost to the company is in the thousands. if they charged me what it really costs them, i’d be paying thousands. perhaps it’s marketing — i don’t think it’s only marketing, but there’s something to it. as long as they offer me that flat rate, i feel i have to make the most of it down to the last minute, and i regret every month i went without paying for it. and the trend is not to go slower, but faster: opus 4.6 comes out and i go back over what’s already done to see if it finds any bugs; it ships with a million-token context window; opus 4.7 comes out with different effort levels, and i push it hard. what’ll be next?

this is like the space race, to see who’d reach the moon first, with no idea where it was all going to end. but the ai race is that one cubed: it’s no longer one country against another, it’s companies against companies against countries. and there’s no clear winner: gemini, chatgpt, claude, they’re all going strong. when is this going to stop? at some point it’ll have to. but until it does, it’s madness. and the real victims are us. and the environment.

didacus · mmxxviend · explicit

the future won't be cyberpunk

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

for this first entry of the blog i wanted to share a thought i’ve been turning over for a while now, and it has to do with advertising.

we have a dystopian cyberpunk aesthetic, blade runner 2049 style, also very tied to japanese aesthetics, to the streets of japan, to the most technologically advanced chinese cities: giant led panels, ads everywhere. a bit the times square philosophy, established such a long time ago, with that quantity of hyper-luminous screens displaying advertising in every direction.

i get the feeling that this dystopian aesthetic, so often practised and evoked whenever we talk about futuristic societies, is a fairly poor forecast. we hold that association for some reason, but i don’t think it’s the right one. i’ve been thinking about the progression of advertising and where we’re heading. those scenographies might lead us to believe this is the direction: absolute excess, over-exploitation of advertising in public spaces, privatisation of those spaces with carte blanche to fill them with ads. and i think society is going to swing a hundred and eighty degrees. those visuals will not match our future, whether near or far.

i don’t think the image of a futuristic street will run on elements as obvious as overlaid advertising. more and more — and this has been happening for years, it’s nothing new that artificial intelligence has brought — our daily life is shaped, almost dictated, by technology. we all have phones, we all consume on the phone every day; for many it’s the last thing they do before sleeping and the first when they wake up. we live in a kind of dictatorship of technology that has been imposed on us little by little.

one of the implications is that big tech companies wield as much power as some governments, if not more. they have brutal access to personal information. we live in the age of information, and information is power; this has been going on for years, but with the rise — and then the dictatorship — of social media, of the algorithm, of the fight for attention and impressions, it has been wildly exacerbated.

it’s a concern i bring up often. when i do — with friends, partner, family, at work — nobody tells me i’m wrong, nobody dismisses it, but nobody wants to engage with what it implies. as a kind of protection, we try not to think about it. it reminds me of when you think about the sun eventually burning out: a very real problem, but one that doesn’t paralyse anyone in their day to day, because it’s inevitable and, in that case, pointless to suffer over, since you won’t be around to live it. here something similar happens, only in reverse: a very real problem we are all going to run into.

let me give an example. easily more than ninety percent of my non-presential conversations — likely ninety-eight or ninety-nine — have happened over whatsapp, a private american company owned by meta. we already know facebook’s privacy policies across its history, the problems they’ve caused, the senate hearings in the united states, a country that is light years behind the european union on privacy policies. for me this is a huge concern. however much they sell us on the chats being encrypted, i don’t believe that if mark zuckerberg wanted to read a conversation of mine, he couldn’t. regardless of whether they tie that information to a specific person, they have access to gigantic patterns of thought, of conversation, of social relationships. and that scares me a lot. everything i’ve written and left in writing, they have it. ninety-nine percent of my conversations. and i’m convinced they also have those of whoever is reading this.

and how does this link to advertising? there’s access to information about us — things even we don’t know — that allows us to be profiled today with tremendous precision. the whatsapp case is one example, but already with google, when you download the data it holds on you, you realise it knows things you weren’t even aware of. and i take it to the extreme: we’re no longer talking about my search patterns, my browsing, the videos i watch, but about what i think. if google can infer my ideology from my behaviour on the internet, the way to know it for certain is by reading all my whatsapp conversations.

where am i going with this? artificial intelligence takes all of this to the absolute extreme. today they know so much about us that i wonder: what’s the point of mass-targeted advertising? that cyberpunk aesthetic is exactly that: giant screens watched by millions of people, mass advertising with mass reach. and it’s going to fall away, it won’t make sense. if i run a plumbing business, what good does it do me to advertise where millions of people will see it, when i can know with near-millimetric precision which seven or eight of that million are interested, and reach only them? when i can say: i want this ad shown to a million people, and i want 99.99% of them to be interested, because they have a plumbing need now, or because we know from their patterns that they’re going to need one soon.

we’re heading towards advertising so personalised that putting up those mass billboards will be throwing money away.

that’s why the trend will be the opposite of the dystopian futurist aesthetic. you’ll be able to tune so finely that spending an impression on someone you know won’t convert will make no sense. a television ad is seen by three and a half million people, and you know only a small percentage convert. what sense does that make in a future where nearly the entire population falls asleep and wakes up with their phone, and we can slip the ad one by one, individually, to as many people as we like? it’ll be something eccentric, the sign of someone who doesn’t know what to do with their money. today it’s already half happening: youtube, tiktok, twitter show you ads fairly focused on your profile, but still on a more or less abstract profile, on a collective, not on the individual. we’re in the intermediate step. if we can thread the needle more finely — and we can — the individualisation of advertising will arrive: no longer a collective, but individuals.

for me it’s vital that protection and privacy policies prevent this highly individualised picking of who we are — at the end of the day, an appropriation of our own identity — from being used for commercial ends. because it will happen: we live in a capitalist society. that’s what scares me, what terrifies me, and we aren’t that far off.

and one more thing. i don’t know if you’re familiar with the foundation universe, by isaac asimov, a science fiction saga. that whole world is born around a concept: psychohistory. there’s a character, hari seldon, who finds mathematical formulae capable of predicting, in a scientific and rigorous way, human behaviour on a large scale. he doesn’t predict that i’m going to buy a washing machine today because mine has broken, but he does predict the behaviour of society in mass. and what do i think? that we’re very close to achieving it. he, in the fiction, uses that gigantic power to try to save civilisation. but i’m not so naive as to believe that, if we unlock a technology like this, we’ll use it for the same end. quite the opposite, in fact. and that’s one of the things that scares me the most. because in a world where a psychohistory like that, even if it doesn’t go all the way to the extreme, is real, it’s terrifying to live.

didacus · mmxxviend · explicit