The Gray Area: The End of the Human Internet

This is on with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher.

“We're off for the fourth of July holiday, but we still got something special for you today.”

We're bringing you an episode of The Great Area, another great box media podcast. It's a weekly podcast that looks at culture, tech, and politics with an eye towards philosophy. In this episode, host Sean Elling talks with Atlantic writer Charlie Wirtle about why so much of the internet now feels artificial, manipulated or unreal.

Sean's interviews are always insightful and Charlie is a friend of this show so stick around.

This is a great area. I'm Sean Elling. My guest today is Charlie Warazell. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of their newsletter, Galaxy Brain. Charlie wrote a piece about AI in what he calls a crisis of agency, which is just feeling

that so much of our lives online are being shaped and distorted by bots, algorithms and various AI-generated content. Everything feels a little fake, a little manipulated. If you spend any time at all online, you know what I'm talking about. So we get into why the internet feels so strange right now and whether it's still possible

to build spaces online that feel genuinely human. Hope you enjoy.

“How many third party vendors does your company use?”

20? 200? Thanks to AI. Someone on your team probably added three more this week. And your security lead has no idea.

Traditional third party risk management can't keep up.

Vanta gives you continuous coverage across every vendor, automatically, so you actually know what's in your stack and what to do about it. AI on riskoff vanta.com/tprm Support for the show comes from KPMG. In any organization disruption is inevitable, but struggling through it doesn't have to be.

The KPMG adaptability index is your blueprint for building capabilities to handle what comes next. It uses real data to look at how your culture, strategy and partnerships all work together to help your business thrive. Stop reacting and start adapting.

Visit kpmG.com/us/adaptability to explore the adaptability index and pulse surveys today.

Hi Ryan Reynolds here for a mid-mobile.

Are you looking for a beach read this summer? May I suggest your big wireless bill? It's got suspense, mystery, and slightly flat. Emotional arc and a shocking twist where you realize you've been overpaying the entire time.

They'll mince stories better every plan 15 dollars a month, even unlimited. That's it. Happy ending. Zero tears. Give it a try at midmobile.com/switch

Up from payment of $45 or $3.90 dollars for 6 months or $180 or 12 month plan required. $15 per month equivalent to taxes and fees extra. Initial plan for monthly greater than $50 to get a bite to me slow when it work is busy. C terms. Charlie Wazzell, welcome back to the show.

Thank you for having me. Yeah man, it's been a while. Let's talk about your recent piece and the Atlantic. There is a lot of AI discourse right now, but this piece is sort of getting at a part of it that seems a little under-discussed, which is the increasingly weird, but haunted internet

we all live inside now. So let's just start there.

“What is the feeling you are describing in this piece?”

The feeling that I'm describing is one of disorientation, but also paranoia, I think. I think what I feel a lot on the internet right now is this paranoia. I started the piece with a call back to a piece by the internet decorator Max Reed, who wrote "New York Magazine" back in 2018 about what he called the "inversion", which is this tipping point where the bot and fake content content made synthetically instead of just by, you know, you were me, human beings may like surpass some of the content that we all make.

And that the internet would sort of be just a majority fake to some degree or a majority automated. And that at the time I remember was a real revelation for a lot of people this feeling that, whoa, like you're telling me there's all these people using these sock puppet accounts on Twitter or Facebook or wherever or there's these fake bots trying to sell me stuff that a lot of websites are populated with, you know, automated comments or whatever it is.

And now that's honestly a pretty quaint idea that someone wouldn't be as aware of that, because in the generative AI age or whatever we're going to call it or whatever we're in,

that is jammed full of synthetic content in all sorts of ways.

“So you have synthetic text, you know, all the, all the things that we would call AI slot, right?”

And now you just have people generating whole sites with the click of a button, right, to promote something that either isn't real or that is, you know, a scam or, or, or, you know, like pretty awful, you have that happening on this vast scale. So much so that Google search, most of what you see is going to be garbage, right? Then you have synthetic music, AI slot videos and things, you know, clogging these feeds, and you have organizations that are doing a new style of content marketing,

a viral marketing in which they spin up fake accounts to seed algorithms with information

that is befitting their client, right? So if you're an artist, you can have, you, these viral marketing firms that will spam TikTok with your song so that it becomes the algorithm thinks, oh, this is a popular song, and then when other people start posting it, it gets priority inside the feeds. So it's this idea that like, what people are really doing now is they're not marketing to human beings, they're marketing to these algorithms. The end result of all of that, right,

this idea that everything around you might be fake. It creates the sense of paranoia. It's not just that there's not one thing that people are talking or thinking about. It's that you can make a convincing case that anything you don't like or that you think is suspect or that is weird in some way. It's a sire. It's fake. Somebody has seeded that, right? And that to me is it's a change. It is a dramatic change in the way that people behave online and it really affects everything

from our politics to our culture because you walk around with this feeling, there's this great term, the Liars dividend, right, which is the idea that you can, when there's so much garbage out there,

“people can cast dispersions on things that are real, right? So I think it's fake. I think it's”

I think it's a lie, right? You can sort of completely blur and warp reality. And I think that that's the way that culture works now. So not that we can know this really with any precision, but if you just had to guess, if you just had a big giant pie chart of all the shit on the internet, like roughly what percentage of that pie chart do you think would be synthetic stuff? It's such a good question. You can't take the temperature of the entire internet, right? But

you're seeing this play out in music with, I interviewed on my podcast this guy who is the frontman of a very beloved progressive rock band, King Gizzard and the lizard wizard. And they took their music off Spotify in protest of Spotify funding, their founder funding and defense

company. And when they left, they had domain squatters basically. King Gizzard squatters who came in

and took their page essentially by creating AI, Slop, music that sounded similar to their stuff and was making money off their streams and all that. And I had to, you know, fight Spotify to get it taken down, which they did. You have so many different playlists on Spotify that are I've done some reporting into this. You go into especially like the jazz or just instrumental time music, classical music. And you start clicking around on some of those artists and you don't

see anything, any human beings there, right? Like you don't, you go to these, you know, they're YouTube page. And then the YouTube page is just, you know, like the, when you don't, when you don't put a profile picture on it, right? And it only directs you back to the Spotify link. There's no, you know, manager page or anything like that or label. And you start to realize, oh, well, then I guess, I guess that's, because that's fake, right? And so you have, so

“I'm listening to jazz music that I think is made by another human being and it's not. And again,”

that sense of paranoia creeps in when you start to recognize some of some of these things. I think a lot of us want to walk through the world and say, listen, I've got reasonably good taste. I've got reasonably good judgment. I'm not sitting around listening to, you know,

because there's, there's so much volume. That is just so strange. You know, I mean, I, I know what

“you mean, but it's very hard to name, you know, somehow the internet feels fake and real and dead”

and alive, all at the same time. You know, people are clearly still there, but you never really

sure, like who or what is speaking, you're never sure who made the thing you're looking at. For why it appeared in front of you, it seems like we should definitely take a step back, maybe and just think about how bizarre this situation is for our primate brains. Yeah, and that, you know, was kind of coming off the backs of a lot of the early social media backlash to the, the election of Donald Trump and people starting to look into, well, what is happening? How is Facebook

changing this, right? And then, yeah, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, that same year 2018,

“where there was, what turned out to be, honestly, a bit of an overreaction to what is known as”

psychographic profiling. I was part of that overreaction. I think, I was, I was too, because we are

all figuring out, and this speaks to some of these platforms and their, their prominence in our lives, right? It makes a lot of sense to want to assign them an extreme amount of power, you know, they're connecting billions of people. They have all this money, they're building these tools of surveillance to track our every move. There's reason to be paranoid, you know, Cambridge Analytica was in the business of selling you, the idea that they were, they were

changing people's minds left in a right all the time that they could come into a place and effect

“in election, because it's a great tactic, not coincidentally. That's what the Artificial Intelligence”

companies have done for the last four years or so, right? They started with the Doommer marketing.

They started with the, we're going to build something so powerful. It's, it's a Manhattan

project for, you know, for words, et cetera. And so, yeah, we're going to blow up the world, but subscribe wherever you get your AI, right? And, okay, cool. And so, I think we used to think of the internet as an engine of connection, right, of sharing information, of a real, of like a human, to human thing. But it was, it was still deception and fakeery. Fakeery of all guy is, is obviously a volume game. And Artificial Intelligence, the general of Artificial Intelligence,

boom that we've seen, it's, it's a tool of scale. You push a button, you, you get a moby dick, you know, sized, uh, Tom of words, if you want, right? You can make the same video, uh, and a lot of creators do this, 200 ways, in 15 minutes. Me talking, doing my thing, okay, now make that, put me in 200 locations, let's spam the internet with it, see what the algorithm like, see what people like. And then use that. It's, it's like, it is a tool for volume, and that volume is synthetic.

I mean, maybe if the question back in, you know, 2018, 2019 was, you know, it is just a bot or not. I mean, now it just seems like more fundamentally with the hell kind of environment, even is this, right? And like, we don't even have a name for it yet. It's just weird and different. It's not the old internet. It's something else. And in the same way, I don't really think we have a, a real name for this period of history. Yeah. I don't think we really have a name for whatever this new internet is,

but it's, like, fundamentally different. It's a different thing all together. It is. And it's, what is fascinating to me is the way in which it, it functions in the, in the, what's interesting to me is the way that it is a outgrowth in some ways of, of the, the postures moment. Like, we've created, we've had this environment, right? We're, we're all given access to so much information that we can rationalize it anyway we want. It's one of my hobby courses that

nobody knows what anyone is doing online. And that is a problem, right? If I say something as a, you know, a columnist, the Atlantic, and put something out. The main beef that I get is you're living in some stupid bubble. That's not real. That's not representative of the information experience,

that's totally valid and totally true. But there's also a lot of people who are dismissing

certain things that are real because they don't want to see them. And it also because it doesn't

“reflect a their algorithmic experience of the internet. And I think it's really difficult when you”

don't know what anyone else's experience is like, right? But you walk around a little bit feeling kind of insane. Like, I, I, I feel sometimes when I plug into whatever discourse or conversation and, you know, I write about the internet, I'm not terminally online in my real life. Like, I go there for the purpose of understanding it, this, you know, reporting on it, studying, seeing things that bubble up, I like to be outside in my other times. People constantly will say, like, dude, you got to

get off the internet. And I think that that is in some ways a response to what you're saying makes me uncomfortable, not only because I maybe disagree with the information, but because your experience is clearly so different than mine, that it's, it's awkward for me to imagine that we are existing

“inside the same culture, or that we have to interact with each other and talk about these things.”

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's not really post-truth. At this point, it's post-real or post-human.

Like, like, how much of the internet at this point is basically just like machines performing

humanity back at us under the guise of being people. Right? So, so this, for the piece, I referenced this researcher, him, Aiden Walker. He's a Gen Z online researcher. He's extremely smart about means and, you know, it's a great example of someone who takes something that's like kind of silly and concept and actually gets to like the philosophical human understandings of all this. And he came up with this theory. So, what we've been talking about with the, you know, there's machines

and algorithms that are just kind of like running the whole show, right? That's been referred to as

“the dead internet theory, the idea that there's really not a lot of humanity on the internet.”

It's all the bots. And we kind of just sit there. Aiden Walker took that a step further recently and he, his theory, it's, it's a somewhat colorful, is that it's like the cuck internet theory. Say more. Yes, I will have to say more, which is that the product, the synthetic product of these artificial intelligence things, be it like, you know, a slot video of a cat, you know, dancing on a street in Paris or whatever, right? That a bunch of people are flicking through,

you know, Instagram reels or Facebook and just, you know, hitting like or whatever. Oh, that's cute. I'm going to forward that to whatever. You have that, which is synthetic. It's machines. It's machine made. It's trained off of all of these other machines. Then you have the algorithm, which is predisposed to like that stuff because that stuff is all trained off of what the algorithm has already shown you and given you, right? You have this. When you,

what's happening is those things are are beating. Those things are in the room interacting with each other. And the human is sitting in the corner in the chair, watching that. The human is the consenting observer to an interaction, a melding of sorts of these two machines that have been predisposed to do this in service of viral advertising revenue. And that that is a lot of what the internet is. The internet isn't dead. Internet is really active. It's moving. It's doing

stuff. These two elements that aren't human are, you know, doing it all night long. And we, the human are just sort of sitting there like, okay, yeah, no. I'll have some more, I guess. Yeah, sure. You know, we are consenting to it in some sense. Other people would argue that, you know, we're being forced. You know, in the old internet, you, you had the capacity to explore. Truly, right? You would stumble and clip around and kind of get lost. And now, so much of it is just a

giant sprawling machine designed to mainline into your veins as much content as possible, content optimized for engagement. So you're not really exploring or participating in that way.

You were just a passive product. I mean, as you put it to peace, right? We basically now exist humans

to feed data into the machinery. That is what we were doing. And it is keeping a stupified and entertained along the way. But that's fundamentally what our, what we have been reduced to.

is as a crisis of agency, not that it's over. But we are all really concerned about our future agency.

“Like, I don't think these tools are powerful enough yet. Like, I think it's giving these tools”

and Silicon Valley, it's buying too much into the narrative to say, we're all automatons. Like, you know, I think from a culture standpoint of consuming, you know, endless scroll vibe, like, the best example of this is you go on a social media app or something like that, or you're just wasting time on your phone and you look up and you go, man, what, like, that was not how I wanted to use those 20 minutes, right? But that feeling of regret that you might have, that's an example of that

consuming part of the agency. But on the side of jobs and, you know, and, and, and AI job loss,

things like that, I don't think these tools yet. I mean, maybe if you're, if you're, you know, a programmer or someone in this highly technical space where these agentic coding platforms are doing such a good job of cranking out in human amounts of code so quickly, I can understand that there's fears, but it's more the anxiety of what is coming. We are in this, this crisis of, like, generative AI is making us ask this, this really weird question, which is what is a human for,

right? And that's, that's, that's a wild thing to have, you know,

“publicly traded companies asking you, right? What is the human for? And I think that is what we're”

feeling right now as, as a society, whether you are a booster, who is worried and has a little

bit of the doomerism stuff in it, or you're somebody who is out protesting data centers in your town. It's, a lot of it is centered around this, this idea of, like, what is a human for? [Music] Support for this show comes from Framer. If your team wants a website that looks and feels handcrafted, but is still fast to ship, Framer is built for that. You design on a visual canvas with responsive

layouts, hosting, and a CMS built in so the work is production ready from day one. Agents work alongside you draft pages and polish sections, then you review and publish what goes live. Framer is the pro site builder for creators, teams, and businesses that want a professional site and care enough to get every detail right. Agents solve the gap between AI-generated ideas and production ready website work. The agent works in the same place where the real site is designed

manager-viewed and published. It lands on the canvas, stays editable, and can be published when the team is ready. Agents in Framer work alongside team to streamline collaboration on the same canvas, build custom code components, create and manage CMS content, optimize SEO settings, and ship everything all in one place. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started, building for free today at framer.com/caro for 30% off a Framer pro annual plan.

That's framer.com/caro for 30% off. Framer.com/caro rules and restrictions may apply. Support for the show comes from groones. Summer can disrupt our routines with busy weekends that

“are full of travel and events, and with everything going on it can be hard to remember to stick to”

your wellness habits. While groones is one of the wellness habits you don't have to think about, it can be the easiest tastiest part of your busy schedule. groones are convenient, comprehensive formula, and one delicious daily pack of gummy bears. This isn't a multivitamin, a greens gummy, or a pre-biotic. It's all of these things, and then some manufacture the price, and it takes great. They're able to pack in 20 vitamins and minerals in a daily pack with 16

ingredients, all of which include nutrient-dense and whole foods. A greens pack also contains six grams of pre-biotic fiber, to help you visualize that that's equivalent to more than two cups of broccoli. Grounds and ingredients are backed by over 35,000 research publications. You can't fit the amount of nutrients, groones does into one daily gummy, which is why it comes in a pack. Say 52% off with the code [email protected]. that's code Cara K-A-R-A-G-R-U-N-S.C-O.

Support for the show comes from K-P-M-G. In any organization, disruption is inevitable,

for building capabilities to handle what comes next. It uses real data to look at how your

“culture, strategy and partnerships all work together to help your business thrive.”

Stop reacting and start adapting. Visit K-P-M-G.com/us/adaptability to explore the adaptability index and pull surveys today. I wanted to go back to the idea of siops, right? Maybe the answer really is just a paranoia, but that word siop has broken containment. What exactly does that

mean? Why is it become so prevalent now? Is it just everyone's paranoid of everything?

It's a military grade. It's an operation that is meant to trick you psychological. I don't have in front of a grandest in manipulation campaign. I think that, again, when we talk about anything that's happened in a technological, cultural sense, it all builds off of the stuff that came

“before. That's why the Cambridge Analytica history is really important here. It primes people”

to see these things as experiments. These tech companies made news because they did experiments. They were experiments in service of trying to tweak their platforms to be better at advertising. They weren't in a fairies-backroom horrible experiments in brainwashing and mind control. Again, we get to this situation where seeing it so much in AI. We're all these people in Silicon Valley. Why does every person in the country who's not deeply involved in these niche discourses

or working at these places? Why is everyone just flexibly hate artificial intelligence? Why does

“it pull worse than Donald Trump? This stuff is so cool. I'm racking my brain. Why doesn't this,”

it's like, well, you spent a lot of time talking about how dangerous it is, how civilizationally perilous it could be in the wrong hands. If we don't put the exact right guard rails up, awful things can happen. We could destroy our economy overnight. One of these things could take over and manipulate the stock market and crash everything. You hear all of this stuff. The thing is, when you repeat a lot of ominous crap over time, people start to internalize it.

That is part of it. We hear that these companies are so powerful. They're so able to manipulate

consumer sentiment. They're so able to make purchases. They're so useful to drive people to go out to campaign rallies and then they get hooked on whatever and then they start getting in these groups. Q and on was this fringe message board thing that was kind of silly and stupid and Facebook groups became this gathering place during the pandemic. For otherwise, pretty average Joe normal type people to engage with this thing and it became this cultural tribal community-based ideology

that broke contained and radicalized a whole bunch of people. When you see and you have all of these past examples of how this technology can get away from us and changes people start to internalize that and it's now people reach for this idea of the siop in the same way that people reach for Q and on. It's a way to explain something that you don't want to grapple with or that is uncomfortable or that you don't understand or that you can't easily assign something to. The whole the most recent

siop thing controversy is over this band Geese. This indie band who are very popular. They've

everywhere. They are as a band using some of these viral, apparently viral marketing firms or whatever.

That is its own thing. The core issue with the band Geese is that they're polarizing. Their singer has this warbling kind of sometimes atonal voice. They're a little bit hard to listen to for some people and other people think that they're the velvet undergrad. It's the super polarizing thing where someone listens to it and has to completely diametrically oppose opinions. Instead of trying to grapple with that, it's so much easier to just say if you hate Geese. Ye man, it's a freaking

sil. Well, the problem with paranoia, it kind of becomes its own trap. If you think everything

is manipulated, then you just become manipulable in a totally different way. Where is that line

“between healthy skepticism and losing your damn mind online? Because I think a lot of us are”

living uncomfortably right on that border all the time. It also doesn't help that we live in an era of great corruption, of great conspiracy theorizing. You look at what has happened with Donald Trump and cryptocurrencies and things like that. And you see an unbelievable amount of corruption just happening in plain sight, like rug poles from the president of the United States and his family. And no real accountability for that such that society just goes, oh, well, nevertheless.

And after a while, again, people are going to internalize these lessons and say,

well, if this is what I can see, if this is what I am allowed access to, then I'm pretty sure this is just how the world works. And so the things that I don't have the tools to explain, that's, you know, it's in some ways it's a rational response to some of these things that are that are happening even if they tend to be, you know, irrational theories.

“What makes something Slop? Is it just bad AI content?”

Really feels like Slop is broken contained in terms of, you know, no-am inclature. I'm inclined to say that it follows that pornography standard of, you know, when you see it, right? No, when you see it. You know, when you see it. I think what, for me, the way that I think about Slop, what a sense. The way that I deemed something as Slop would be having a kind of contempt for its audience, right? Like, you're, you're an idiot. You don't care. You're just scrolled. Like,

I'm going to, yeah, here's shrimp Jesus, you know, dummy. Like, when you feel that thing from someone who's like, I'm doing click volume ad arbitrage from the Philippines, from this, you know, center building is many different Facebook pages to spam, you know, unsuspecting older people without this media literacy, to just, you know, oh, yeah, like, you know, did you see that Garth Brooks spoke out about the Supreme Court case at, you know, at this sold-out concert in South Africa, you know,

like something totally random that didn't happen in just like shoving it down people's faces, because not because they have any particular political ideology, but they're just trying to make

“a quick buck. That is what I consider to be Slop. You know, I, I think when you look at”

very recently, there's been a spate of either sanctioned or non-sanctioned campaign videos that have come out like for, um, for Spencer Pratt and Los Angeles is one of him, like, as Batman, totally age-generated would have taken, you know, millions of dollars to make now somebody to can just make it on the outside the campaign can promote it for itself goes viral. I don't see that, like, it is Slop technically, but I see it slightly different, right? Like, that's like,

almost just propaganda or all that stuff come, those Lego videos of Donald Trump coming out of Iran to sort of, you know, knock on the US military response there. I don't see that as Slop, as much as, as propaganda, as a tool. For me, Slop is has to have contempt for its audience in this sense of, it's, it's just like really low rent. I'm, I'm wasting your time and energy in order to make

AI can make good art. I think do you have a strong take on that, whether something vaguely sloppish encounters good art? You know, I just, I just read this new book coming out by Corey Dr. O, the activist writer or science fiction writer who points the term in solidification. And he

“notes in the book and I, I think this is a pretty incisive observation that AI art is supposed to be,”

it's not good, but it's like, it's good enough to be offensive and that AI art, I maybe, you know, slightly butchering his, his understanding here, but it's, it's, it's really, it's a, it's a proof of concept. It's supposed to make people a certain group of people really mad, right? It's supposed to have someone see it and go, oh man, they're going to put everyone who can draw out of business. It's going to change all this art because that's really useful marketing for these companies.

It's a really useful narrative. It's, oh, look how powerful this stuff is, right? And I think what's

interesting about that is that a lot of this isn't, is it good or is it bad? Is it, is it powerful?

“Is it, does it have the ability to disrupt livelihoods? For me, it's still like the deeper,”

probably slightly nerdy question is, you know, like it is art still art. If you don't experience it as an encounter with another person or like I don't really think it is, but I also can't really explain to you why it isn't. I just know piece of art that didn't come from a human mind that wasn't rooted in human experience. It doesn't mean anything to me. It is literally meaningless. But again, I don't really know why that is. I just feel it. Isn't this part of what's so exhausting

about this moment that's been foisted on so many of us who enjoy the human stuff? Like you're describing why that conversation is really so, so hard. And it's that there's like

“something ineffable about human contact, right? And like that's why we're all here. We're all here”

on earth. Like I think so much nowadays of that, again, I'm putting it up with the the Kurt Vonnegut quote that like we're put on the earth to fart around, right? Yes, I can go have somebody mail the letter for me or I can send an email or I can go down to the post office and interact with some weird people and see some stuff and then get a sandwich and then watch the birds, you know, and do all and it's like and then I get a flat tire and then I have to call someone

and then they help me, you know, on and on. It's like that's why we're all here, right? To do that, to have those weird unexpected interactions and this machine's like, what if I told you you don't have to do any of that ever again? And then you go, "What is a human for?" Support for this show comes from Wix. You can make a great looking website with Wix and you can do it your way. Whether you want AI to jump in or prefer to do things yourself, get a custom ready to

use website in minutes with Wix's AI website builder or choose from more than 2,000 templates. Get built-in solutions tailored to your business and enjoy easy, fuss-free domain registration,

web hosting included. Wix powers more than 280 million businesses around the world,

because with Wix, you can own your individuality, create freely, and scale fearlessly. Ready to create your website? Go to wix.com. That's wix.com. This show is supported by Atio, the AI CRM. Atio is the AI CRM that turns every customer signal into context you can act on. Connect your email, calendar, and product data, and Atio instantly builds your CRM within rich data and a complete

picture of every deal. Then you can ask Atio anything, spot a deal at risk, draft outreach, uncover new prospects, so you can spend less time in your CRM and more time building relationships. Ask more from your CRM. Ask Atio. You can go to atio.com/vox and you'll get 15% off your

first year. That's atio.com/vox. We all have to drink water, and staying hydrated is one of

Are you getting enough from it? Is it satisfying you? Or is drinking it becoming a chore?

“Here's a tip to spice things up. Hint water. With delectable flavors like water melon,”

Georgia Peach, even lemon zest freeze, hint is water that will make you into desire, water, no sugar, no sweeteners, no calories. It just goes to show. Sometimes the right hydration partner changes everything. Try hint, available at drink hint.com, and in stores nationwide. What's your favorite part of the internet now? I mean, the pods and newsletters read it boards. Where's the little pocket of the old internet on the new internet that you

retreat to? I have a couple of things. I'm not clearly giving all this stuff very skeptical of all the AI stuff. In the sense of the future that's being pushed on us, the people who are in charge of it, who in many ways are a lot of the same people who brought

“us social media, web too, and then it's like, oh, we're not going to deal with the consequences of”

that. We're moving on. That said, I have some real delight using the coding agents, sometimes to build little things. I live on an island. I can frequently see from like across the road and down there's a little window, and I can see container ships as they pass sometimes. And I love

that. So I coded this thing. I'm not a coder. I coded this little thing. There was basically like

go to vesselfinder.com, get the API code, and then here's my physical location. Made a little act to put on my desktop. It just gives me a little like notification. It's quiet. It doesn't paying. Doesn't do anything just shows. And it says what the ship is. And then I can click the link and see where it came from, where it's going. I love that. I think that's so fun. It doesn't as it's supposed to pop by my my thing. And that's really actually feels, in a way, like it evokes

the spirit of like the early internet, which is like I want access to something. I want to try to do something a little bit creative. And you just gave me some tools with which I can do that. It didn't harm anyone. It's not taking anything. It's just for me. I'm not voicing and I think one. So that is a little piece of internet that I love. That's leave it right there. Charlie, what is your newsletter and what is your podcast called and where can people check those out?

Both are called Galaxy Brain. You can find it on the Atlantic. You can subscribe to it on the Atlantic.

“You should subscribe to the publication, but it's also where on YouTube or Apple Spotify”

wherever, wherever you get them. And yeah. Thanks for having me. I appreciate this. This is great conversation. All right. Check it out. People Charlie does great work. He has for a long time. And he will be back. I have an unreasonably good authority. So, all right, man. Thanks for coming and doing. Thanks for having me.

All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Charlie has always been one of my favorite people to talk to

about anything involving tech and culture. So I hope you enjoyed that. As always, we do want to know what you think. So drop us a line at the gray area at fox.com. Or you can leave us a message on our voicemail line at 1-800-214-574-9. Please also rate, review, subscribe to the podcast. It helps us grow our show. This episode was produced by Thor New Rider and Beth Morrissey who also runs the show engineer by Shannon Mahoney and Christian Ayala. In fact, checked by Melissa Hirsch and him among her

wrote our theme music. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. The gray area comes out on Monday's end Fridays. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts. If you watch podcasts while you listen, you can do that too. Go to youtube.com/vox for video versions of the gray area. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox is journalism by joining our membership program two day. Go to vox.com/members to sign up. And if you decide to sign up because of this show,

let us know. Thanks for listening to this special episode of the gray area. We'll be back with a new episode of

Nothing says summer like a sunny backyard hang. Think light colored linens everywhere

“and an easy conversation on your lips. Your favorite or driven one hand and the bright refreshing”

taste of a Saint Germain Spritz in the other. Those are the details that stick with us.

And the Saint Germain Spritz, an elevated take on the Hugo Spritz, is the simplest part.

Just mix sparkling water, wine, and Saint Germain for your go-to summer cocktail. Visit Saint GermainLecore.com to shop and explore recipes. Enjoy responsibly. Support for the show comes from Harvey AI. The future of law is a gentic, not just tools that assist, but AI agents that navigate complex matters.

“That's why Harvey created agents that can do the work from end to end. They build a plan,”

pull from secure data sources, run sub agents in parallel, and draft the work product ready for your review. So you delegate the work and on the judgment. Trusted by more than 60% of the Am law 100 and leading Fortune 500 legal teams, Harvey is the AI operating system designed specifically for legal work. Harvey, AI tailored for law. Learn more at Harvey.ai.

“Support for the show comes from fetch pet insurance. Do you have a pet?”

Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill of over a thousand dollars.

And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise. That's where fetch pet insurance comes in.

fetch is the most complete pet insurance. Get paid back up to 90% of that bills. You can use any vet in the U.S. and Canada. All that's are in network. Go to fetch pet.com/safe right now for your free quote that's fetch pet.com/safe.