There are a lot of tutorials online on how to block AI bots, scrapers, and crawlers from unethically stealing your original work to feed into a black box of training data of a massive corporation with their massive water-guzzling data centres.

And I absolutely understand the instinct: It's not a lot of work to put up the necessary files and technical barriers to stop generative AI from harvesting your humanity.

The thing is, though, these barriers are not steadfast. Bots and their corporate overlords are not playing by the honour system. The robots.txt is an honour system and etiquette, not a firewall. I'm not implementing anti-AI measures out of defeatism or reluctant surrender, far from it. I just don't give a fuck anymore.

Take a look at this video by Vinesauce playing AI Dungeon over six years ago. This was around the time I became familiar with generative AI, well before ChatGPT 3.0 existed.

It's been over half a decade of this. Over half a decade of discourse and seeing people still not understand basic fundamentals of this technology. It's been over half a decade and people who think this is a world-changing milestone still don't know what nucleus sampling is nor what an ideal cumulative probability threshold would be for the model they're "talking to".

I've written six in-depth articles on generative artificial intelligence and its many implications. From the authentication crisis to model collapse to AI-induced psychosis and being responsible for death by suicide to NSFW AI companions possibly being underpaid human workers to the insecurity and fraud of Moltbook to the narcissism of genAI art. I have exhausted all I have to say on the matter and my interest, as well as my interest in continuing to engage with the field whatsoever.

This is my swan song on AI.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't some sort of enlightened fence-sitting position where I am lambasting people continuing their anti-AI rhetoric. Far from. Rather, I am just being selective with my time and energy. There are a lot of things I care about, but there are far, far more things I actively choose not to care about. Deliberate apathy is a very underutilized tool.

I do not believe I need to take active steps to protect myself from an issue that is going to peter out and eat its own tail. It's been over half a decade of this and no major genAI company is profitable. Injecting ads into their adbots isn't going to make them profitable, scraping and stealing even more of the Internet than they have already (and they've stolen dozens of terabytes illegally already) isn't going to make them profitable. SSDs cost 16x more now in addition to the already-gnawing RAM shortages. I think to myself how I did not spend anywhere near the amount of time and effort and writing on NFTs prior to their collapse because the collapse was such an obvious prophecy.

Each time a new model is released, we see the benchmark graphs with higher and higher bars, bigger and bigger numbers reached. And yet we're still trying to count letters in berries, we're still trying to figure out the best way to travel to nearby car washes. We're still hemming and hawing over what policy should be in educational institutions.

I do not want to be defined by what I'm against—and I am passionately against many things in this unjust world. I want to be defined by what I love, and by my passions and interests. I want to amplify the voices of marginalized humanity and of my brothers and sisters, I want to focus my attention and the power of my (tiny) platform on goodness and humans.

I mean, another term for the IndieWeb is the Human web, right? I'm going to stick to that. Human-only content created by a human to share with other humans. Leave the eye-rolling parroted slop discourse on the slopnet.

More-than-human

At the same time, I am, though, interested in more than just humans. Let's talk about that.

American ecologist and geophilosopher David Abram coined the term "more-than-human world", not to talk about silicon, but to speak of the multitudes of organic life we share this planet with. Abram introduced the phrase in his 1996 book The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World as a deliberate corrective. He found himself frustrated with the environmentalist vocabulary of his time, how words like "nature" and "environment" quietly reinforced the idea that humans exist on one side of a wall and everything else exists on the other. "More-than-human world" collapses the wall entirely: human culture is a subset of the broader living world, not something separate from or superior to it.

Abram's thinking roots us back in the sensuous and the animate. Informed by phenomenology, by Indigenous knowledge systems, and by his own fieldwork in southeast Asia and the Americas, his philosophy is that the ecological crisis is fundamentally a crisis of perception.

We have become estranged from the breathing, expressive Earth around us, and we've mistaken that estrangement for progress. The more we outsource our cognition and creativity to systems that mimic but cannot feel, the more we accelerate that estrangement. The "ecology of perception" is the way that sensory experience binds our separate nervous systems to the encompassing ecosystem.

That's what is being lost when we spend our lives staring at outputs from a stochastic parrot instead of looking at the sky.

So when I say I'm done with the AI discourse and I'm orienting toward the human web, I mean it in the fullest sense Abram would recognize: the more-than-human web. The web of living relationships, of organic wonder, of voices that have bodies and histories and stakes in the world. The silicon is just infrastructure. It is not, and never has been, the point.

Steps Towards the Human Web

So, actionably speaking, what does leaning into the human web actually look like? Here's what I'm doing and what I'd invite you to consider too, if any of this resonates.

Write for people, not for machines. This one sounds obvious until you realize how much of what lives online is engineered for discoverability, for SEO, and for algorithmic approval. I'm writing here because I have things to say. I trust that the people who find their way here are capable of reading.

Own your domain and publish there first. If you have your own personal site, it can be your canonical source. Social media is a mere distribution layer. If Bluesky implodes, if Mastodon instances defederate and collapse, if platforms bury you, your words are still here.

Use RSS and subscribe to people you actually want to read. RSS is incorrectly seen as an ancient technology in Internet terms. It is glorious because it is boring and human-scale. Nothing curates your feed based on metrics. No ads interspersed. Just the words of people who chose to put something on the internet that day. Find a feed reader you like and start filling it with blogs.

Join a webring or start one. Webrings are human curation. They are circles of sites that have agreed to point to each other. That's the whole thing.

Link generously and without an agenda. Hyperlinks are the connective tissue of the human web. Link to the people who influence your thinking. Link to the small blogs writing about things that matter. Link to Abram's Alliance for Wild Ethics. Link to the weird corner of the internet you found that made you feel less alone. The more we link to each other, the less dependent we are on search engines to find each other.

Go outside. I say this without irony and with all the warmth I can muster. The more-than-human world is not on this screen. It's the songbirds and frigid cold air and the Sun at a specific hour in the bioregion you happen to inhabit. Abram would tell you that part of what makes us susceptible to mistaking AI for intelligence is that we've already half-forgotten what the real thing feels like. Get reacquainted with it.

This isn't about deleting accounts or opting out of everything. This isn't about surrender or going live in a yurt. Our energy is finite and our attention is finite and both are worth spending on things that are actually alive. The discourse will continue without me. The models will be released. The benchmarks will go up. The letters in the berries will continue to be miscounted.

I'll be here, writing for you, linking to people I think are worth your time, trying to stay honest, trying to stay in the more-than-human world as much as I can manage. I'll be breathtakingly uncaring of the artificial. That's enough.