Guillotine: Give all children unrestricted internet access

In case you were wondering where half the world’s capital ran off to, two hot new AI innovations dropped: OpenAI’s Sora and Meta’s Vibes. They are both social media feeds. Sora’s gimmick is that you can now very easily make AI videos with real people in them. I first found out about it through a reel in which Jake Paul whines to the camera about AI deepfakes which appear to put him in various dignity-compromising scenarios. Because this was IG reels, his speech was interspersed with said deepfakes.

 

 

​That should be against the rules, as Sora doesn’t allow you to make AI videos of real people without their consent, but Paul neglected to mention that he lets his likeness be used on the platform. Why bother to produce whatever content the Paul brothers make in 2025 when you can outsource it to the terminally online and robots instead? If new Jake Paul content isn’t titillating enough, Sora also lets you use the likeness of dead people—who aren’t disposed to hiring lawyers—without asking anybody. This all lets the user make some lovely politically and/or racially charged slop to post on Xitter, complete with a comically small watermark to let you know it’s fake.

 

 

​If the Platonic Sora video is a deepfake of Jake Paul coming out of the closet, then the Vibes Vibe is that one AI video of the fat woman jumping backwards with a boulder on a glass bridge. Vibes is not slop—to call it slop would be an insult to $15 nutritional bowls. It is a TikTok-style feed entirely made of AI videos, and boomers have no natural immunity to it. Their concerned comments under the Vibe were indistinguishable from the bot comments. Sora and Vibes are two wolves inside AI’s future: provocation and lobotomy.

 

 

So—that’s maybe not the best argument for giving kids unrestricted internet access. But look a little deeper: these new AI victims are of specific ages. They’re either younger than Zoomers (we’ll roughly call Zoomers people who were teenagers during Covid) or older than them. And Zoomers—who, famously, had their brains experimented on in real time during Covid, are literally the only people capable of understanding the world.

 

 

Take the Charlie Kirk shooting: When there was a hunt to find the shooter’s politics, everyone our age immediately knew what Type of Guy he was. UwU notices bulge? If you’re reading this, you are gay? You can practically hear the band class and the bassboosted Soviet Union national anthem already. This was not the reaction of people older than us, who simply did not get any of these cultural referents. They threw up their hands, said welp, and turned to drawing up some insane conspiracy theories. The worst part was that people younger than Zoomers had the same reaction—it’s not just an old-young divide, it’s full social atomisation.

 

 

Conspiritorialism is a recourse to doing politics without understanding it. It allows you to make some unfalsifiable claim, leave the evidence to someone profiting on the internet, and feel like you’ve participated in political life, all without any of the effort and human connection that makes politics worthwhile in the first place. So many people who wish to make any sense out of our ever-spiraling sphere of cultural referents will instead get one-shotted by some AI slop and conspiracies and left by society to marinate on Xitter and make outraged Xosts for the rest of their lives.

 

 

​If we go down this path, internet usage will be treated like junk food: the wealthy will have it in sensible moderation, while those profiting from social collapse will overwhelm the rest with it. The plan to tastefully desist from internet usage is a path to the total atomisation of a civil society drowned in slop—nobody understanding each other, everybody locked inside their own feeds. It will be an unequal world in which any sort of democracy as we know it today will be impossible.

 

 

Our solution began, as most things do, with Covid. Because we, Zoomers, spent our primary developing years on the internet, we have a sense of cultural cohesion that goes beyond both boomerslop and 67. Obviously we all turned out a little screwed up, but it’s better than having no immunisation to the internet at all. Better education is needed, but it has to be sex ed for the internet, not relentless screen chastity. Even if you don’t get a phone until you’re a certain age, you’ll be one-shotted all the same. And if some superman can somehow avoid the internet for their entire lives, then they’ll end up permanently severed from social and political life.

 

 

We are on the verge of a permanent rift between those with and without immunity to the slop platforms. Even if you, tasteful Oxford student, will benefit from the stultification of most people, democracy will not. Face the storm head-on and give the kids their iPads.

 

Words by Myles Lowenberg. Image courtesy of Wayan Vota via Flickr.