So, are you really unplugging?

I recently stumbled upon r/BetterOffline, a subreddit launched two years ago around Ed Zitron’s podcast. Zitron, a communications professional turned one of the tech industry’s sharpest critics, has built a community of roughly 160,000 weekly readers. I ended up spending two hours there, the curation was excellent, and the comment section even more so.

One thing immediately caught my attention. It may seem trivial, but I have a soft spot for details, especially when they surface in unexpected places. In this case, it was the moderation rules. Eight months ago, the subreddit explicitly prohibited AI-generated content. Today, the rule has changed: it targets low-effort posts, with a one-week ban for offenders. I find that semantic shift remarkably well judged, especially as platforms like LinkedIn and Substack have recently introduced buttons labeled “Seems like AI slop.” …

It’s tempting to reduce the problem of our time to a simple equation: AI = slop. However I think that the shortcut misses the point. AI does not inherently produce slop. The reality is more subtle: AI makes it possible to produce vastly more content. Writing has always been, in part, a way of organizing one’s thoughts. When generating text becomes almost instantaneous, that natural filter begins to disappear. Output skyrockets, and quality quickly becomes optional. That does not mean AI-assisted writing is inherently mediocre. It’s entirely possible to produce something insightful with your hand on the algorithm, provided there’s genuine thinking behind it, and provided you've weeded out the "lighthouse in the storm" clichés and the machine's other major signature quirks

Conversely, being 100% human has never been a safeguard against producing forgettable work. Quite the opposite. In the end, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect a minimum of intention before adding yet another voice to the ambient noise.

And the loudest voices on the subreddit are often those of tech workers themselves.

Why? Because at many companies, perhaps most of them, using AI has become mandatory. It’s measured and managed through dashboards tracking lines of code generated, tokens consumed, and productivity targets that have tripled, then tripled again. The same old obsession with quantifying work, when what really deserves attention is its qualifying it.

The result? One senior software engineer describes having lost all interest in his profession. He says he now spends most of his time reviewing AI slop, to the point where he’s considering leaving his company altogether and asking for “a list of companies that aren’t AI-pilled?”

His frustration goes beyond individual burnout. It illustrates a classic negative externality. The effort supposedly saved during creation is quietly shifted onto the review process. Researchers have begun describing this phenomenon as review friction. Is it inevitable? We could start by giving up the race to generate code ever faster and instead build tools that help assess what is produced. But abandoning the pursuit of speed alone would also require changing how we measure productivity. As long as success is defined by the sheer volume of code shipped (the perfect recipe for slop), we will keep optimizing for the wrong thing.

A more meaningful measure would account for the cost of review, the amount of rework required, and perhaps even whether people are actually developing their skills.

I also came across AI Resist List. Judging by the name, I expected a directory of anti-AI initiatives. In reality, it’s far richer and more nuanced.

There are, of course, a few well-aimed jabs, such as a tracker of model failures and Microsoft’s “microslop.” But there are also deeper initiatives, from mapping Big Tech’s financial influence over the media to legally challenging the construction of data centers.

The site also offers genuinely valuable resources. One I particularly enjoyed is Better Images of AI, which encourages us to retire the ubiquitous humanoid robots and glowing neural brains in favor of visuals that more accurately reflect what AI actually is. The same spirit runs through its Possible Futures section, which showcases projects that push back against the dominant narrative. Some focus on repurposing hardware that would otherwise become electronic waste. Others explore technology cooperatives as alternative models.

I spent some time reading about the Slow AI project, whose philosophy draws inspiration from the Slow Food movement. The aim is not to slow innovation itself, but to question the assumptions through which we imagine AI. After all, why should its future necessarily depend on ever-larger models? The collective explores several alternatives. Small AI advocates for smaller, specialized models designed for specific contexts rather than the entire world. Ancestral AI proposes a different way of thinking altogether, treating data as a form of cultural heritage to be preserved rather than a resource to be extracted. The project points to Polynesian navigation systems and the Andean quipus—knotted cords once used to record information—as reminders that there are other ways to organize and govern knowledge.

That same willingness to step sideways appears in everyday digital life. When an app called Roost lets us send messages by virtual carrier pigeon (perhaps the ultimate expression of “slow-cial” media!) it reminds us that people thrive on detours, rituals, and symbols. In a similar vein, Esoteric AI playfully challenges our faith in predictive algorithms. One project has an AI interpret the movements of birds captured by webcam, reviving the role once played by the augurs of ancient Rome. The obvious question follows: how much meaning are we really willing to assign to those correlations between pixels? Ultimately, we remain tireless makers of meaning.

Speaking of imagination, it’s hard not to mention Midjourney. Did you know that the image generator has never raised a single dollar from venture capital, yet remains profitable? That in its early days everything happened on Discord, where anyone could see everyone else’s prompts and creations? And that, even today, every profile begins with the question: “What will you imagine?”. Midjourney feels like a vast ethnography of our collective imagination. And its founder, David Holz, seems intent on taking that exploration much further.

Perhaps that’s no surprise. In his case, this way of approaching the world is almost hereditary. His father practiced dentistry from a sailboat, sailing from bay to bay across the Caribbean to treat patients. It was an unconventional idea of a medical practice, to say the least.

That same spirit now shapes the mission Holz assigns to his own ventures. Midjourney openly identifies human flurishment as one of its core objectives. Yet his ambitions extend well beyond image generation. Through unexpected strategic moves, such as acquiring Co–Star, the social astrology app with more than five million downloads that helps people construct and share narratives about who they are, or developing Midjourney Medical, which repurposes medical imagery into contemplative and therapeutic experiences focused on emotional well-being rather than diagnosis, he appears to be building an ecosystem designed to explore every layer of the human condition.

The more I reflect on it, the less I think Midjourney is building AI tools. It is building frameworks for interpretation. Tools that invite each of us to project something of ourselves onto them.

Yet perhaps this search for meaning, despite all its raw poetry and carefully orchestrated dreams, overlooks the same thing as all the other AI players.

Creation has never been a matter of throughput. More often than not, it begins with absence. You know that unsettling absence? The one that freezes you at the start. The feeling that nothing will come. And yet, beneath the surface, something keeps working. Quietly. The particles that were once in motion begin to settle, like a good wine left to decant, until the noise finally clears. And it is often there, in that newly uncovered silence, that everything begins again.

Which is why, this summer, the most stimulating laboratory may not be found on Reddit or inside an image-generation server. It may simply be found in that suspended stretch of time we call contemplation.

MD