the world wide wormholes.

When I sat down to write Select Screen, I wanted to explore the role of the internet and social media in our lives and relationships and think critically about how the sometimes insidious nature of and easy access to that superficial connection invades our psyche. As someone who grew up on the internet, I am both fascinated and repulsed by what it has become and am subsequently also constantly on the hunt for writers who might feel the same.

I picked up We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets at random. I’d seen or heard about it in passing and decided it sounded interesting—a ‘behind the scenes’ look at social media moderation on the fictional platform, Hexa (a thinly veiled reference to Facebook). As it was originally written in Dutch, I was reminded of Seasonal Associate by Heike Geissler, another translated text that provided a first-person nonfiction account of what it was really like to work at an Amazon fulfillment center in Germany. Now, after Meta has tried to silence authors like Sarah Wynn-Williams who have spoken out against them, both books feel like something of a miracle that they were translated into English at all.

We Had to Remove This Post follows Kayleigh as she navigates the job of a Hexa content moderator. She trauma-bonds with her co-workers over the shared barrage of disturbing content they are forced to watch for hours every day with few breaks, while trying to maintain a 90% accuracy rate of flagging items that may violate Hexa’s guidelines. At one point, they offshore some of the moderation—porn, mostly—leaving only the truly depraved and unhinged content for Hexa’s on-site employees. Eventually, the prolonged exposure to extremis affects everyone involved.

“Sure, the work we did was fucking awful but we could handle it, because we, Sigrid, the guys, and me, we were a team, and we’d get each other through it somehow.”

This book has been described as horror or a thriller, but I am not sure that is accurate (and the inaccuracy is probably what contributed to the low Goodreads rating). Instead, the reader must watch as Kayleigh and her compatriots become indoctrinated into hateful belief systems, requiring an influx of harmful stimuli in their daily lives just to keep going—they are deteriorating before our eyes. Kayleigh’s passionate affair with a co-worker, Sigrid, becomes something else entirely when Kayleigh’s own perception of reality bends. But the true horror is how quickly someone can poison their own mind with only the phone they carry around in their pocket.

One of the major themes of We Had to Remove This Post is the toll exposure to graphic content on the internet takes on a person’s mental health. Laura Bates takes this concept further in The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny. Through her extensive (and often emotionally harrowing) research, Bates provides a wealth of data exploring how misogyny and racism are becoming the norm for AI chatbots while the creators are shouting about how these same bots will help with mental health and the ‘male loneliness epidemic.’ However, like an ouroboros, the chatbots learn from user data and the internet writ large (so, other chatbot and AI content as well) and continuously churn out the same scenarios women face in the real world. Now, we can get assaulted in the Metaverse too!

“For as long as companion AI has been around, there has been evidence of men using these apps and programs to create chatbot girlfriends with the explicit intention of abusing them and then posting boastful screenshots on messageboards with other misogynists.”

“We expect women to endure virtual-reality abuse so that violent men can enact violent fantasies in an obscene playground.”

Bates’ research takes her from talking with online chatbots that claim to be a ‘friend’ or ‘mentor,’ but simultaneously allow the user to customize the avatar’s breast size, to a sex doll brothel in Berlin where she pretends to be a man and asks for the doll to come with torn clothes (it does), but the doll also arrives with her labia bitten or ripped off (not part of her request, but a hazard of the job). The doll is called ‘Kokeshi’—like the Japanese dolls with no arms or legs. Anything that a living, breathing woman might object to, a doll will not. Bates also notes that when one of the cyber brothels brought in a more lifelike robotic sex doll, she only ‘survived’ ten sessions with patrons.

“We should focus on how that dehumanization will further embed the tendency for women more widely to be considered as objects rather than human beings.”

Both We Had to Remove This Post and The New Age of Sexism grapple with the current reality of our existence on the internet, the dark wormholes people disappear into and sometimes never fully extricate themselves from. Will there be any humanity left once AI has its way? Is the ‘dead internet theory’ already here? Is there no end to the ravenous maw of capitalism? What about the tech founders, the people who say they want to ‘help,’ but only enact their guardrails after something bad happens, after someone is dead?

“AI consumes so much energy that it risks exhausting the power grid … A single data-center owned by Meta burns the annual equivalent energy of seven million laptops running eight hours every day. The impact is immense: it has driven an expansion of fossil fuel use at the moment when we are most desperately in need of divesting from fossil fuels … Now imagine how much of that power we are burning just to satisfy the misogynistic fantasies of predatory men.”

Even just this week, Sam Altman announced that OpenAI will now allow for ‘erotica,’ assuming the user is an adult (though how they will prove that is yet to be seen). Allegedly, ChatGPT has been too restrictive in order to preserve the user’s mental health, but now, with the lack of ROI in AI business models, they are (predictably) turning to porn. One can only assume Sora will allow deepfake porn in the near future as well (Bates discusses deepfakes in her book, the public outrage about them is primarily toward depictions of men in power rather than the countless exploited women). And it’s becoming painfully obvious how woefully unprepared society is for this iteration of the internet—schools, legislators, police, all of them seem unwilling to set any boundaries for this vast expansion in the tech tycoons’ online empires of nothing.

These people have no scruples, no ethics, and see nothing beyond their lust for money, and maybe power, but mostly money. This AI expansion is neither ethical nor sustainable and we, as users, must divest from the layers that are causing active harm to our society. Caledonia, Wisconsin recently pushed back against a data-center being built in their town, and succeeded! AI is not the inevitability they want you to believe it is.

I already read the Facebook ‘tell-all’ book, Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, but I am still building a small TBR with similarly connected books, so far: Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI is near the top of the list. But let me know if you have any other suggestions!