Rage Against The Slop

I read two things that completely changed how I think about internet content: a post on the Dead Internet Theory, and Anu's piece on performative praise. Anu's post, in particular, felt like it was subtweeting my entire online life, so I won't even try to summarize it here—go read it first, then come back.

OK and we're back.

Anu's point, at least the way it hit me, is that once you factor in performative praise, we're already somewhere inside the Dead Internet Theory. Between "LFG!", "congrats goat," or pretending like we had anything to do with a funding round/exit/insert-generic-corporate-event here, we're just perpetuating the problem.

"There was no way I, Ian Kar, was just mainlining AI slop and engagement-optimized press releases like everyone else. I'm a writer, a reader, I told myself, I'm the guy with Opinions and Taste."

This fact honestly broke my brain. Part of my identity has always been around being an intellectual (I'm not, but I wish I was.) And I was letting that part of me down.

The truth is I get all my news from X and social media. I don't really subscribe to any magazines or longform writing anymore. All the books I read are work-ish related, and all the newsletters I read now are for stock market investors or AI product stuff. But all that is extremely promotional content. None of that is neutral; if anything I'm basically just reading glorified marketing slop.

My boomer fix was to subscribe to the Financial Times, the Serious Paper for Serious People, at an extremely stupid price point. It was…fine? Very European, obsessed with Trump wanting Greenland and open letters from Nordic royalty. Which, whatever. I do want to be well read about the world news, but I'm also interested in hyper niche topics too, like AI and banking, prediction markets, weird market microstructure.

I still begrudgingly keep the subscription, but it became painfully clear that neither the FT, nor the Journal, nor Perplexity, nor anyone else was going to hand me the specific, extremely personalized info feed I wanted.

So I decided to make it myself. Welcome to Machine Earnings, my attempt to build a small, human-curated, slightly unhinged signal in a very dead internet. It's dedicated to keeping you (and me) up to date on the Machine Economy—because if the machines are going to run capitalism, we should at least understand the operating manual.

Machines already run the economy. Humans are still very much important—we still coordinate, orchestrate, and supervise these systems. But anyone on the ground knows the truth: if a line of work can be handed to software or an agent, it eventually will be.

A lot of the technorati tell you to work insane hours so you don't end up in a "permanent underclass," which is a convenient story when you're the one with the equity. The more uncomfortable truth is that AI is going to create entire categories of work that don't exist yet—training agents, auditing models, architecting machine workflows—and millions of people are going to end up working there, whether they meant to or not.

We owe it to ourselves to get smarter and more self-reliant. Luckily with AI, all that becomes a lot easier. Using agents to sort through the never ending firehose of information between traditional news, social media, blogs, newsletters, YouTubes, and all the private communities and chats I'm in makes information curation a lot easier. It also becomes something a lot more sharable and engaging too.