The end of the human internet

Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing, increasingly, is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, how to mind your manners.

New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. This is a gray area. I am Sean Illing. My guest today is Charlie Warzel. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of their newsletter, Galaxy Brain.

Charlie wrote a piece about AI and what he calls a crisis of agency, which is this 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.

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