Genesis

The Land

The land on which human minds dwell is under attack, by no other but humankind.

While natural things must grow under constraints and artful things often emerge from pains, if unchecked, harmful things are bound to mushroom out of abundance:

• The billboards along the highways are mostly boring, but some maybe funny or even interesting. Bottom line is, there are only so many billboards they may erect and you always have the option of setting your gaze on the farmlands or rolling hills behind. No so with digital advertisements. They’re universally annoying. They fill up and slow down your browser. They follow you where ever you go. Even after you learned to visually ignore them, they would startle you out of your seat with sound by hijacking your speaker… There are no physical limits to and no escape from them.
• Tag, hopscotch, hide-and-seek, and nerf wars… Those games we used to play with our neighborhood friends are wholesome and healthy, but they have their physical limitations: For example when it rains or your friend moved overseas. No so with video games. Rain? Oh, it’s raining outside! Long distance? What long distance? You just click on my friend’s avatar, if it’s green, you then play and chat with her across the ocean! So the younger generation, for hours and hours on, are tied to their chairs and glued to their screens.
• Poems, novels, letters and recipes… all those words ever written by human! The very thing that makes human human. But they don’t come easy: agonies, inspirations, rejections and revisions… No so with generative AI. Need to write a report on a subject? Just prompt AI to generate it. Ask your coworker to review the generated report? She would just prompt another AI do just that. Language, what used to be the result of second order mindful thinking, degenerates into orders of orders of mindless generation.

Medical doctors have a name for those uncontrolled growth that spread uncontrollably: cancer. From where things are going, we’re at least in stage II.

No Land

If I tell you there is a piece of land on the web that has no advertisement, no AI generated content, no digital games, well trafficked and is profitable, you would say to me: no, there is no such land.

Adding ‘K’

‘K’ for knowledge.

Youtube and TikTok for videos, Wikipedia, WhatsApp and Twitter for text, Spotify for music, Instagram for pictures… For all modalities of artifacts and each of their many forms there are more than one dedicated platforms, except knowledge.

The Knoland

Like beehives for the bees and anthills for the ants, Knoland is the kingdom of inquisitive minds.