Excesses

The Möbius strip

I've been noticing a strange loop for a while now. I see a long article going around that looks interesting, I open it, I check the reading time, and before the second paragraph I ask the AI to summarize it for me. I read the summary. Days later, I tell someone how good the article was.

I assume I'm not the only one. The things we feel as intimate, those small operations we do almost in secret because they sound a bit embarrassing, tend to be pretty universal. And I think what's happening is that I produce, with AI's help, a volume that a human without AI wouldn't read in full. And that others produce, with the same help, another volume that I won't read in full either. The only ones who have read the texts whole, word by word, are the machines. And I don't just mean articles. I mean almost everything that circulates now.

We say AI makes us more productive, and that's true in one sense of the word. We produce more, faster, cheaper. But there's another part of the calculation that's hardly ever named: producing more forces the rest of the world to process more. And processing more, like anything else, has a cost.

There's a case of this loop more material than the assisted reading one. Take job hunting. As a candidate, I can generate with AI's help a CV optimized for each position I apply to, adapting language, keywords, emphasis. On the other side, the recruiter gets hundreds of CVs impossible to read one by one and processes them with another AI that filters according to criteria they don't fully control either. I know there's a machine on the other side. The recruiter knows I know. And still we both keep playing, fabricating polished documents that neither of us is going to read in full, for a real decision about a real position that real people are aspiring to.

What's strange isn't the multiplication of content or the loss of attention. It's that the loop holds even when everyone knows it's there. Nobody is forced in, but nobody can afford to stay out. If I stop generating optimized CVs, my chances drop. If the recruiter stops processing with AI, they don't get through them in time. The whole system works like a Möbius strip where producing and receiving have become the same movement.

There's a detail that almost never comes up in these conversations. This automated filtering of candidates is classified as a high-risk system by the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, with obligations of human oversight, transparency and traceability that come fully into force in August 2026. We're going to have to learn to operate inside a different framework. But for now we're all still inside the loop.

More for everyone, less for each one

Let's do the math. If I write twice as many articles a year thanks to AI, my readers have to split the same time between twice the texts. The same happens with every blog, newsletter, thread, podcast, video. Aggregate supply multiplies. Available attention does not.

Some estimates put around ninety percent of online content as synthetic in origin. There are content farms producing close to a hundred thousand articles a day each. The internet, which was never small, is turning into something that doesn't even pretend to be read. It's content produced to feed algorithms, not people.

There's a word for this that's made a quick career: slop. Garbage. Processed food for machines. Merriam-Webster named it word of the year in 2025. It's not a technical term. It's a collective verdict.

Mr. Creosote

There's a Monty Python sketch in The Meaning of Life that I think fits perfectly here. Mr. Creosote walks into an elegant restaurant, sits down, and orders the entire menu. He eats copiously. He vomits copiously. He orders more. He eats again. He vomits again. The waiter, unfazed, brings him plate after plate. At the end, he offers him one last bite. Just one. Mr. Creosote hesitates, accepts it, puts it in his mouth, and explodes.

What's disturbing about the scene is that nobody forces Mr. Creosote to keep eating. Nobody threatens him. Nobody pressures him. He eats because he can. He vomits because he has to keep eating. The last bite isn't the cause of the explosion. It's just what comes after all the previous ones.

Something of that resembles how we're living the current moment. We produce because we can. We consume because we have to keep producing, comparing ourselves, keeping up. The feeling of falling behind, what we now call FOMO, intensifies every time a new territory opens up in which we could in principle be: the generated short, the produced song, the app anyone can build in an afternoon, the self-published novel, the avatar-narrated presentation. Each new territory is one more bite.

Byung-Chul Han calls this excess of positivity. A society where nothing is forbidden, only things still undone. What exhausts us today isn't a lack of options. It's the excess.

Curation as craft

If all this is true, the important problem isn't producing. Producing is solved, or will be. The important problem is choosing. What to read, what to listen to, who to pay attention to, what to ignore. And choosing well, in a saturated environment, is a skill far less democratized than it seems.

Here, with renewed force, an old figure reappears: the curator. The one who selects, who filters, who says "this deserves your time, this doesn't." It has always existed. In a world short on production it was a luxury. In a saturated world, it's a necessity.

There's an echo here with something many of us lived through fifteen years ago. When Tumblr was Tumblr, what made a page worth visiting wasn't the content its owner generated, but what they reblogged. Each Tumblr was a personal collection, a sensibility embodied in a sequence. You followed someone not because their voice interested you, but because their selection trained your eye. It was silent work, with no metrics, no positioning, nothing resembling a content strategy. But it was work. And the result, when done well, was a strange and very valuable cultural object: a page that taught you how to look at a specific territory.

Maybe we have to go back to something like that. Not to literal Tumblr, but to the idea behind it. That selection is a form of authorship. That a good filter is worth more, in conditions of excess, than good content.

The loop, again

I think sometimes about how all this is going to look in a few years.

I don't have an answer. But I do have a suspicion. That the problem was never producing too little. That producing too much isn't the solution either. That the interesting question, the one each of us has to learn to ask ourselves, is this: what deserves to exist? what deserves to be read? what deserves your time, the only resource nobody has managed to multiply yet?

Until we have an answer for that, we're going to keep eating.

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