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**Adam Stacoviak:** But on a podcast, it's "what the crap", kind of thing. |
**Drew Wilson:** Yup. Yup. Dude, I hear you. I hear you. Yeah, it's good. My kids now are old and grown... Almost all of them are teenagers now, and you've gotta watch yourself. They like to do what you do. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** They do. And they emulate you. Even if you don't want them to. If you're like "Don't do what I do", they're like "Listen, my default gear is dad or mom gear. Like, wherever they're going, I'm going that direction." |
**Drew Wilson:** Yeah, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It has been fun, Drew. Thank you so much for sharing your journey again, and getting into some details, and we'll see about getting you back on, man. |
**Drew Wilson:** Yeah, dude. It's been great. Thanks again for having me, and we'll chat later. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Alright, man. |
• The Dead Internet Theory, proposed by Jerod Santo, suggests that the internet is becoming increasingly robotic and automated. |
• Spencer Chang's competing theory, the Alive Internet Theory, posits that despite the rise of AI-generated content, humanity is still present and creating online. |
• The Alive Internet Theory is inspired by the Internet Archive's vast collection of human-created content, which shows the unique touch and creativity of humans. |
• The theory also celebrates the ways in which humans use AI to create new and innovative things. |
• The Alive Internet Theory has a website that randomly selects and displays content from a specific time period, showcasing the vast and often bizarre nature of the internet. |
• The website's creator aimed to simulate the experience of an LLM training on the Internet Archive, highlighting the paradox of humans creating content that is then used to train AI. |
• The Internet Archive's trillionth web page milestone and creating an art piece to celebrate it |
• Stumble Upon's legacy and how it compares to the Internet Archive's content |
• Spencer Chang's experience as an independent artist, designer, and technologist, receiving grants and commissions |
• The intersection of art and technology, and how it allows for creative and financial sustainability |
• The tension between passion and business, and the challenges of turning a passion into a job |
• Communal computers and blurring the line between physical and digital |
• RFID tags and digital experiences in everyday objects (e.g. ceramic fortune cookie) |
• Melding physical and digital worlds with unique experiences |
• Design objects or art objects that connect the physical to the digital |
• Using everyday objects to create digital experiences (e.g. pillow, bathtub, WiFi router) |
• "Will it internet?" series on Instagram, turning everyday objects into digital experiences |
• Integrating digital functionality into ordinary objects (e.g. Casio watch) |
• Party software using Shortcuts on iOS |
• Limited NFC access on iPhone, impacting art and creativity |
• Programming chips and accessing NFC, using Shortcuts and APIs |
• Acquiring NFC chips from suppliers in China |
• Communicating with chips using phone apps and firmware |
• Internet Sculptures, a shop for computing-infused objects |
• Computing Shrines, a new project with immersive digital experiences |
• Collective experiences and interactions with visitors |
• Examples of Computing Shrines, including a phone booth for messages |
• Inspiration from geocaching and folk practices of leaving traces in public places |
• Environmental concerns and alternatives to tagging rocks and defacing surfaces |
• Creating interactive public art installations that encourage engagement and sharing |
• Designing sculptures and experiences that leave a lasting impact, such as the phone booth shrine and rock stacking experience |
• Exploring the concept of perpetual energy and how to create it through art and technology |
• Discussing the funding and sustainability of public art projects |
• Developing open-source software, including the playhtml library for collaborative web elements |
• The idea of creating a perpetual energy machine or sustainability model through art installations |
• The experience of using social media platforms is often solitary, despite millions of people using them. |
• The concept of a shared, real-time experience where actions affect everyone else can create a new type of digital social interaction. |
• Playhtml is an open-source project that enables the creation of such shared experiences. |
• The project is also an implementation of public good technology, providing free infrastructure for others to use. |
• The infrastructure is designed to be scalable, with users able to choose between using the provided infrastructure or running their own. |
• Examples of projects built using playhtml include interactive games, a horse racing game, a tug of war game, and a fridge poetry game. |
• The fridge poetry game has had tens of thousands of players and features a shared, collaborative poem that emerges over time. |
• Discussion of Spencer Chang's domain names and website URLs |
• Introduction to the concept of subdomains as a cost-saving measure for domain name renewals |
• Alive Internet Theory as a topic of conversation and community preservation |
• Encouragement from Spencer Chang for listeners to participate in preserving the internet |
**Jerod Santo:** Today, I'm joined by Spencer Chang, who made my day earlier this week. Spencer, you made my day with your Alive Internet Theory. I emailed you, even before, I think, I put it in Changelog News. I'm "I've got to talk to this guy. This guy is making me happy." So welcome to the show. |
**Spencer Chang:** Thanks for having me, Jerod. |
**Jerod Santo:** So I have been fretting the Dead Internet Theory for probably the last 18 months, off and on, whether it's in Changelog News, or just in conversation on the show... Because I feel it. I feel the encroaching of the robotic content increasing the upward swing. And so the theory to me feels a very good on... |
**Spencer Chang:** Yeah. I mean, I didn't come up with this name. It's interesting, I think it just sort of emerged naturally online. I found a lot of random Tumblr posts referencing this, TikTok posts, some people made YouTube videos about it... And I think it just -- it naturally emerged in response, and it's basical... |
My take on it - I felt very inspired coming across this stuff, and I've also been thinking about the dead internet theory... And I created this -- the prompt of it was I was commissioned to do a piece for the Internet Archive, and it felt very fitting to sort of bring these two things together, because they've archived... |
**Jerod Santo:** Three decades, pretty much, yeah. |
**Spencer Chang:** They have tens of millions of content, which is just a very crazy scale to think about each of these things was uploaded by a human in some point in the past. And I was just going through the archive's contents from different years, and it's very cool to see... I don't know, it's just very cool to se... |
**Jerod Santo:** It'd never do that. |
**Spencer Chang:** It's too weird. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yes. There is a fluidity and kind of a roundness to AI-generated content that humans don't exhibit. We are jagged little pills, as they say... And there are things that we can do, that the current crop of technologies are never going to be able to do. Now, maybe the next crop will pin us down a little ... |
Now, humans wielding AI can do new things. You start to get some pretty crazy creations. You're "You know what, that is actually pretty smart." But it was the idea behind it that made it what it was, versus the actual execution... Which is totally fine. |
So tell me about this website... I know how it works, I've described it on the show... You load up a time period, and then you hit Go, and now you're just throwing a collage of just insanity at our faces. That's pretty much the idea, right? |
**Spencer Chang:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** How do you do that? |
**Spencer Chang:** \[07:57\] I basically, just pull random content from the archive for a specific time period, and it's just filtered by media type. So I'm pulling images, I'm pulling audio, and I'm putting video files... And there's no -- yeah, almost no curation whatsoever, because I wanted it to be a very... I want... |
**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. |
**Spencer Chang:** So you might run into NSFW content as well, because that's just part of what's on the internet... |
**Jerod Santo:** Because you're not curating it. It's just what it returns, you know? |
**Spencer Chang:** Yeah, because if I curated it, it would be my version of the internet. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
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