In the Web 2.0 era, I always started my day in my RSS reader. A mainstay of this blog at its peak was covering the debuts and new features from many different approaches to staying caught up on friends and the news, not just from Google Reader (RIP), but Feedly, Lazyfeed, Flipboard, TweetDeck, Shyftr, my6sense and too many others to mention.

I took my Twitter account private four years ago. It's over.

A common refrain through the rise of social media in the Web 2.0 surge was that "you are who you follow". Your personal choices of what you post and who you engage with are an echo of your personality and your interests, and it becomes a reinforcing loop. The people you follow select what you choose to consume, and what they share becomes part of what you believe to be true. An extension of that view is that "you are where you engage" and where you choose to engage is as much a descriptor at this point as the people you engage with -- especially as large-scale social networks and platforms have increasingly been identified with specific political leanings, or, unfortunately, their billionaire owners.

The Human–AI Co-Creation Studio [Image via Gemini]

As a teen training to get my driver's license, my dad wanted me to learn "the right way". To him, that mean getting my first experiences behind the wheel with a stick shift, learning how to coax his sturdy and unimpressive 1990s era Mazda 323, with manual transmission, from low gear to highway cruising speeds, all while avoiding stalls and switching gears smoothly. Through this training, many trial and errors were had as I gained experience.

Eventually, I took and passed the drivers' test, but in an automatic vehicle - my mom's wood paneled Oldsmobile station wagon. Despite its heavy build and thoroughly unattractive appearance, the car's automatic transmission reduced complexity for me, letting me focus on driving the car, not just fighting to get it to work. Now, depending on which survey you choose, less than 1/5th of drivers know how to use a manual transmission, and those cars account for only 2% of all sales in the United States. While there will always be strong opinions about the efficiency or quality of manual vs automatic, from a technology perspective, it's a relic of a previous era.

The rapid ascent of AI-assisted coding, much like that transition from manual transmission to automatic, has reduced complexity and expanded the total market for participants -- not only changing how software engineers work, but making it possible for those without coding experience to speak their ideas into existence, and iterate to make them real. If you can think it, you can build it.

While some debate if AI is conscious or sentient (it's not), it certainly isn't yet fully autonomous. Working with any of the leading AI-powered code environments is a continual give and take between the LLM and the human, a hybrid approach Sean Goedecke calls our "centaur age", reflecting the reality of a time when the machines are so fast and so capable, humans can't directly compete alone but work in tandem with their silicon partners.

Goedecke says: 

"It is no longer possible to credibly argue that an unassisted software engineer can beat a centaur team. The value provided by coding agents is just too great: not just the speed of producing code, but the speed of review and testing."
-- Software's centaur age may last decades

What I have experienced, both at the office, and in my own side projects, is that AI isn't just changing the end product of what we build, or speeding our ability to eliminate tasks -- but more importantly, enabling us to do things we simply were unable to before, expanding our scope and redefining what we could achieve. In the last three years, we've graduated from simple question and answer chatbots to progressively capable workspaces that are waiting to take our instructions, and agents eager to do our bidding.

Two major pillars feeding my views on technology since the beginning of the Web 2.0 era have been especially consistent: first, there is no information overload, as you control the levers of what you view and engage with, and second, true personalized feeds that you understand and prefer over a chronological or curated experience are ideal. You should be delighted and informed from the content you engage with. It shouldn't feel uninvited, and it shouldn't feel strange to you. Yet the last decade-plus, as many services, applications, devices, channels, and influencers have fought for our attention, and we have become deeply aware of how tailored algorithms have changed to keep us engaged, we have given in to quick hits of entertainment instead of deep information.

The dizzying array of podcasts, newsletters, TikToks, Instagram Reels, subreddits, Spotify recommendations, YouTubers and Twitch streamers, all asking us to tune in, like and subscribe has ensured we don't have a common thread of media consumption, a shared reality and foundation for discussion with a common experience. It became inevitable, as I predicted this attention crisis back in 2010, saying there was "no off button, ever", with our devices "in a state of constant connectivity." When given a choice between bitter truths and dopamine, we as a population have been begging for the sweet stuff every time.

Each revolution in media creation and consumption has followed technological innovation that enabled it. It took the printing press to make books cheap and abundant, leading to a sharp rise in literacy five-plus centuries ago. The telegraph, the radio, the television followed. Eventually, the Web.

Constant connectivity, infinite choice. [Image via Gemini]

Initially a simple text medium with low quality images and buffering sound, the Web later expanded to include video, though not great at first. As bandwidths increased at home and at work, and wireless broadband became ubiquitous, we have always found a way to fill the container. As those containers filled, the media consuming them evolved as well, from static text sites we discovered through links and forwarded emails, to user generated content, up to the high fidelity real time multi-camera experiences we can experience today from practically anywhere.

The Gen Z early career entrants to today's work force have only known a world where everything is available all the time, on demand, where anybody can become famous for a moment, and being an influencer is a totally normal thing. Their first phones were smartphones. They never had to know what channel something was on, or when it aired. For them, news channels have always been 24/7 and hyper partisan, with no need to wait around for evening updates that just recapped everything they might have already seen online.

As Garbage Day (no really, that's the name of it) has pointed out regularly, the monoculture has essentially gone away. Even the top songs topping the Spotify charts seem foreign. We don't all participate in the same trends. We don't follow the same people. Even as people vainly wished the web would bring us together to shared experiences, I knew twenty years ago the web would enable us to retreat to safe spaces with like minded individuals. When given the chance to participate with people who agree with us and share our views, we will choose them, instead of engaging with communities we may not enjoy or feel contentious.

The vast array of choices, and our decision tree, means our small sliver of space is uniquely our own. Fatigued by the real world, people have found comfort in the hamster wheel of short form videos, memeification of pretty much everything, and the collapse of discussions to finding the perfect reaction emoji as the smallest gesture available to avoid leaving the other party on read. As we see everyone with their earbuds in, staring at their phones, flipping from one piece of content to the next, vaguely approximating the humans in Wall-E, we get it. It's the result of the containers, the personalization, and the need to feel connected and entertained. The apps do an incredible job of giving you what you want. If they didn't, you would find another way to kill the time.