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Leon Furze asks whether platforms and multimodal AIs are steering us toward the “death of communication,” moving from Metal Gear Solid 2’s dystopian monologue through Dead-Internet theory, DARPA’s LifeLog and Google’s “Selfish Ledger,” to Luciano Floridi’s idea of “distant writing.” He argues that while data-hungry algorithms and bot-filled timelines have eroded trust, authorship is not dying so much as shifting from execution to design across text, image, audio and video. Drawing on Molly White’s call for “a different web,” Kress and Van Leeuwen’s multimodal theory and Arendt’s stewardship ethics, Furze concludes that human intentionality—slow newsletters, long-form blogs, careful multimodal design—can still create authentic context, keeping communication alive despite AI’s encroachment. Originally published at: https://leonfurze.com/2025/05/30/ai-and-the-death-of-communication/

Links:
https://leonfurze.com/2025/05/30/ai-and-the-death-of-communication/
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-internet-theory-wrong-but-feels-true/619937/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog
https://futurism.com/speculative-google-video-model-human-behavior
https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5232088
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/john-warner/more-than-words/9781541605510/
https://leonfurze.com/2024/06/24/multimodal-discourse-and-generative-ai/
https://leonfurze.com/2024/09/04/flattening-the-strata-of-digital-texts-with-generative-artificial-intelligence/
https://leonfurze.com/2024/04/23/making-meaning-with-multimodal-genai/

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