The Ultra-Processed Internet

Transcript

Hello everyone. How are you? So I have a quite a lighthearted talk for you today. Um contrary to our usual talks for those who are familiar uh we're not going to talk about guerilla interoperability. We're not going to do a deep technical dive into the father stack or how to ensure self sovereignty into your apps. Instead, I want to introduce you to a analogy that I'm going to be using and abusing throughout this talk. Um, it's an analogy that speaks specifically to people in the room that might be more uh working on consumer apps or trying to

distribute apps or technologies that they just built and that preserve the privacy of their users that are self-s sovereign or are decentralized but have experienced the exact same problem that we have for the past two years which is that the cognitive load in order to explain to the average person that is maybe not a technologist or not even in tune with what's happening in the space. It is way too high for someone to get up to speed to why privacy or even decentralization is important for them. So we've tried different approaches throughout uh throughout those years of having doo and

dishes. new uh uh in our public beta. And one of them, a more recent one that has been working quite well in some of the talks we're doing at university and some communities that are completely out of crypto, specifically European tech scenes that are not only not familiar with crypto, but maybe even a bit hostile towards it. So we always try to find ways to talk about those things without directly mentioning the the B- word blockchain. So the analogy today is about the ultrarocessed internet but the actual talk is uh really on digital sovereignty. For those

who don't know I'm one of the co-founders of Fverse. Um we have two public beta apps dedux.new dishes.new. There are uh full on full feature parity uh alternatives to Google Docs, Google Sheets, Excel, Word. Uh but they come with end to end encryption. Uh we cannot censor you. Even if tomorrow we all disappear in the team, you'll still be able to take your data uh with you and rage quit our apps without needing to ask for our permission. So let's get into it.

There are uh three parts to the talk. Uh I'm going to keep them really quite light. The first one is on um how to make digital sausages. You you'll apologize. You you you'll excuse me for the analogy throughout the talk, but I'm going to stretch it as much as I can, and you're going to be my guinea pig pigs to see if it actually sticks or not. So uh the first part is really about uh uh ultrarocessed foods and how we can draw some of uh the the narrative built around it over the past 25 years and use it for our digital environment in order to make it much

easier for even my grandparents to understand why it is so important to actually have a healthy digital diet. And it's not just a luxury to have uh uh privacy or some decentralization. I will in the second part just briefly mention uh uh the AI wave and how it's accelerating a lot of uh what we call overprocessing of data overprocessed uh apps and the insidious characteristics of ultrarocessed apps including mass surveillance including lockin mechanisms etc. And finally, I'll just give you the

alternative uh what we call sovereign apps. Apps that allow you to have a healthy digital diet without having to learn everything from uh from the ground up or convince everyone around you to switch apps so that you can actually communicate with them etc. and uh what are those nutritious characteristics uh in those apps that you should be looking out for. So let's start uh quick definition. What is ultrarocessed food?

I think we all have a small mental model of what it is. But more precisely uh we refer to ultrarocessed foods as industrial formulations made mostly from substances extracted or derived from foods combined with additives, artificial flavors, colors, sweeteners, and they come with little to uh no intact whole food remaining within them. I'll give you some uh some examples after. And a simple way to spot them is that uh if you look at the back of your hyperprocessed food, you'll see a list of ingredients, substances that not only look like uh your chemistry class um

manual, but also is things that you would never have at home or never even consider cooking with. So, what do we know about ultrarocessed food? I think you're all really familiar with uh with the consequences of uh of uh those things. Every day we have new research. This is one of the latest one on how it might be connected to uh dementia. But the risks are quite prolific. You have obesity, weight gain, uh on average 500 more calories per day to the person that is consuming ultrarocessed food. Uh type 2 diabetes very connected to it. cardiovascular diseases including heart disease and

stroke, a bunch of different cancers, depression and anxiety, early cause of mortality all together. Sorry, I started by saying it's a light-hearted talk and I'm now talking to you about all the diseases you can get in your life. So the reason why it's so important to draw uh this analogy and why I want to stretch it as much as possible is that if there is one thing that has widespread consensus despite uh political divides so across the political uh aisles is that ultrarocessed foods are harmful. Whether it is uh your current left-wing

administration or the next right-wing administration, they have this point in common. They're voters as well, which is the understanding that what they're eating is not good for them. And there needs to be an effort to dissociate or try to introduce more healthy food into people's lives, which is of course not just something to do with a click of your fingers. It is a socioeconomic matter because it is the less wealthy among us that are most often focused on uh ultrarocessed food consumption. So the solution needs to be uh general and not just targeted. Now uh how are those

ultrarocessed foods made? Anybody knows what this uh uh really appetizing pink goo is? >> Chicken nugget. >> Chicken nuggets. Yes. Okay. I see we have some fellow Redditors uh in the crowd. So, yes, this is your average chicken nugget. Um what's wrong with it? So, uh first of all, it's one point that I'll keep coming back to, especially in my analogy with uh with digital apps. It's impossible to tell what the hell is inside. Okay. So, uh, okay, the final product, you think you're eating chicken, but actually it looks more like the Play-Doh of my little cousin. So,

um, those ultra processed foods, they're engineered for what they call the bliss point. So, uh the exact ratio of salt, sugar, fat that maximizes your cravings without actually satisfying what uh your body needs in terms of nutrition. They're stripped again of all the nutrients, fiber, vitamins, and whole ingredients uh uh removed uh to extend the the shelf life of those ultrarocessed byproducts. They're super obuscated. Sorry for the language um AF uh because they're designed to make it impossible like we said uh to see what's

inside with the naked eye. And even if you have the description, they always play with uh the actual uh um uh the actual components. For example, uh if you eat a uh a yogurt that says 0% sugar, you should know that they can play with the 0%. Anything under 0.5% is actually considered 0% legally. So there is always little insidious way in which you're being lied to or fed something that uh you thought was healthy but is not necessarily so. Finally, the the this is maybe more of an econ economic logic, but the reason why uh those

things exist is that uh it allows for cheap ingredients. Uh it allows for uh setting prices that are incredibly difficult to compete with and so are hyperaccessible to people that are potentially struggling or not able to go to your average Whole Foods and buy a $15 salad. So, uh, just one extra example, Pringles, which I'm a big fan of, unfortunately, has less than 50% of potato. Uh, so it's just a good indication of, uh, you know, even something as simple looking as a potato crisp is not a potato crisp.

Now, for the digital side of the of the talk, uh, the same playbook is applied to a lot of our digital life. uh this is where I'll try not to stretch too much the analogy but you'll see the the same words appearing from uh uh from hyperprocessing to obfuscation of ingredients to uh the addiction that it they're designed to cause in you etc. you recognize the logos. I don't need to go into them.

So, sorry my slides are a bit all over the place. Uh I will justify the the provociveness of the picture in the next uh slides. But essentially uh what both ultrarocessed food and ultrarocessed uh digital diets uh do is that they create a dependency uh for their users for people consuming them while delivering diminishing value. Uh and both use the same tactics uh obuscation of components, convenience uh addiction, price points that are impossible to ignore, monopolistic distribution, etc.

So, uh just to go a little bit deeper into it. Sorry, I see the the slides are a bit uh all over, but we'll uh we'll persist. Um uh the first is that they're uh Okay. Yes, sorry. Uh the first is that they're engineered for the engagement peak. really trying to maximize the amount of screen time that you dedicate to that uh uh product to that service etc. The other is that they strip people of their agency either through opaque algorithms through uh through data extraction lockin mechanisms that make it very difficult for you to even

understand how you could get out of the platform. Uh this gets even worse with AI systems. We'll touch on it in a bit. uh of course they're optimized for profit. So uh uh user experience degrades as extraction increases and you have uh really uh antagonistic uh uh incentives on on both side here. You have closed sourced components. So most of our apps uh at least those that 3.5 billion people spend every day on like Google Docs, like Google Drive, like Tik Tok, etc. Uh we know very little about how they're actually made. Uh the

servers are out of bounds, the code is unavailable. uh even if it was available, it changes every day and there are new mechanism introduced without you actually knowing or ever consenting to. Last time I connected to my Microsoft account, there was a big fat copilot message telling me that now I should write not with my own thoughts but by using uh the AI that Microsoft provides. And this contributes to that hyperprocessed uh uh digital life we're creating which I'm trying to uh press uh press um pose on. Uh the other is that the packages promise privacy promise uh uh fun

liberation etc. But uh you cannot actually verify it. Even if there is a label, there is no proof. There is no way for uh from the technical to the average person to actually verify any of the claims made. Um same for those apps that claim encryption, privacy, security, but use those are mainly uh marketing words and don't provide the tools to verify the claim. uh the pictures will continue worsening. Um if you can't expect if you can't inspect it uh you cannot trust it. It's a very simple moto that you should carry with you as you go through your uh your uh

digital diet um uh reformulation let's call it. And one uh slide here is dedicated uh to the concept of enchitification. Most of you are probably familiar with the term for those of you who are not. It's something that was coined by uh this uh activist slashjournalist slash techchnologist Cory Doctor. It became the uh word of the year in 2023. So it's catching on and it describes basically a process in three stages in which every platform we know and love or used to love becomes So uh the first is

you bait uh same thing with hyperprocessed food but in digital platforms you try to be good to users the first time they are introduced to you. You offer free features, great UX. You subsidize the prices as much as possible, which by the way is exactly what is happening today with AI. If you think that your $200 cl code subscription is going to last, I have bad news for you. Um, so Amazon is well known for that. They were selling below cost. Google gave clean search but then started introducing uh ads everywhere and now something even worse called

Gemini uh etc etc. Then the moment that they reach a certain critical mass of uh of users, they switch. They start abusing those very uh uh free tier users and concentrating most of our efforts towards business customers that come with big uh bags of cash and are actually much more in line with what the bottom line of the company is, which is maximize the amount of money coming in. So from that point onwards you start seeing more ads more data harvesting surveillance or bulk data collection you never uh were made aware of or that weren't even present in the privacy

policy but suddenly are and nobody kept track of. So this is how organic search uh uh uh died. This is how sponsored content is now the first four results you get on Google search etc. Here is the lock in business. Uh here is where you lock in businesses as well. Finally, you go into the full extraction phase where even your business customers uh get abused. Uh ad prices go up, quality of uh of the ad reach goes down. Uh you can see it with Meta. their ad business is uh going down significantly and they're trying to resubsidize it now in

order to make it attractive again for uh businesses. But unfortunately by that stage you're locked in. It is very difficult to get out of those platforms especially if you've built a bit of your career, your persona, your businesses uh your business around it and you've already sunk a million dollars into trying to build your distribution machine into it. So this is how platforms die. Uh first actually we just did the the more advanced um uh description of it.

Next, you all know those platforms. Uh, Google search went from uh uh organize the world's information and don't be evil to SEO spam sponsored result and AI generated slop everywhere. Uh there is a nice slide next about this Facebook same. It started for friends and family. Well, after the try to find a girl that is hot on your campus, which was the original idea of Facebook and it became a sea spool of rage bait, ad saturation, etc. Amazon, same. It used to be the everything store and it became anti-competitive

platform by excellence where uh if you have a product that uh that does well they undercut you with their own alternative at a lower price or you get completely obliterated out of the platform. Same for Twitter. No need to tell you. You probably all have mental health issues because of it. Uh, at least I'm projecting what I have. Uh, Uber, same thing. Wage manipulation is rampant at the moment. The Europeans are trying to regulate it, but it's not working very well. Spotify, Adobe, Notion, Google Docs is one that I really pisses me off the most. One, because we're building something that is uh it's

alternative, but mostly because it was such a simple app. I wanted to write on it, collaborate with people and now I'm supposed to have everything rewritten by some slop machine or my colleague will send me a document that is sloppy from start to bottom and I have to pretend that yeah okay it was a great document let me let me give you some feedback so and it's hard to think of any platform that we all use that hasn't fallen into that uh decay slow decay uh uh process Now, uh I'll skip this. It's uh pretty much the same that you get uh zero guarantees of privacy, portability, uh

uh agency, etc. It gets worse and worse. I don't know what your screen time is. Mine is double this average. So, uh it is important to see those metrics as just a big call for how urgent the problem is. Now just a few uh things about uh AI because it is uh one of those mechanisms or components that is accelerating the process that I am describing here. Uh go do your own little tricky uh searches on Google and you'll find incredible results. So how many rocks should I eat uh per day? According to a geologist at

UC Berkeley, you should eat at least one small rock per day. Okay, this is one of the most used services on the internet and we're supposed to accept the introduction of AI without the consent of uh its users as progress rather than what it actually is which is just an attempt at extracts more value from the users on those apps even at the detriment of even the basic uh uh purpose of the original app itself. So instead of getting search results, you're getting some predictions that are statistically defined on what could uh a good rate of rock eating look like. So

this goes everywhere in multiple categories. You have AI spam floods on most social media, synthetic media that is introduced. You cannot even distinguish anymore if you're looking at a real image, video, etc. Um with it the trust between ourselves, between communities, even towards a platform erodess. Uh you have hyperpersonalized behavioral manipulation. this even before AI or before transformers was a big issue. You had the best engineers in the world uh and billions of dollars behind them all optimized for how do we get Andreas to be addicted or uh to get

him to buy the next uh shitty product based on his Google image searches. And now it's becoming even more personalized, even more widespread. across the internet, it follows you, etc. Price discrimination is completely related also with AI being uh pepper sprayed everywhere, not pepper sprayed. The wrong analogy kind of um and uh yes, basically those traps are getting uh smarter. Um the the four boxes here kind of say the the same story. What I want to get your attention on is that uh it's about to get much

worse on your favorite AI tools and platforms. One warning sign that I discovered recently, I just wanted to share it, is that Fiji Simo, who used to be the architect of Facebook's uh news feed monetization, uh is now the chief executive of application and business at OpenAI. And there is this great quote by them which is imagine AI that changes its answers uh depending on which business paid for the priority slot. Amazing future ahead of us.

So let's go into the solutions now or try to uh get you a little bit more optimistic uh um about uh about our future. These are some of the principles. One missing I'll add it in a bit. Uh about for nutritious software or a healthier digital diet. One is that you want end to end meaning platforms trans uh transmit what user request and not what the algorithm inferred or preferred from the activity of the user. So remove the opaque intermediaries.

uh the right to exit or the right to rage quit if you prefer which is I want to leave a platform without losing my data, my content, my social graph and I want that freedom not to be dependent on the platform telling me yes give us six to 10 years of business days and uh we'll get back to you on if this is possible or they'll give you a big fat CSV file like on WhatsApp which nobody knows how to uh dissect or make any sense of maybe it's a bit easier today with AI but still worthless uh most of the time um you want data sovereignty so you want to own your data uh period uh

no fine print no change of policies that suddenly make you unable to rely on the mental model you had for the platform that you're using no hidden surveillance which keeps getting worse including with the mass introduction of AI everywhere ware interoperability. Uh this is something we spend a lot of time talking about in our team. We gave a talk recently on guerilla interoperability. So the concept of even if the app you're using does not allow you to uh uh interrupt with another app or take your data out. There are ways for you to force that reality onto the centralized app. Check out the YouTube

video if you're interested in more or come talk to me. Uh transparency, open- source code, anyone should be able to audit, modify, and improve. No more black boxes. And finally, sustainability. Uh something that ideally is funded by users, not only advertisers or not at all. Uh and where the customer is the user, uh not the product. Finally, one that I'll add, I missed it here, but end to end encryption. We believe very strongly that it should become the next uh core primitive on the internet. We're collaborating more and more on all types of files on in all types of platforms. And it's important

that we try to actually uh have privacy by default everywhere. Uh just a quick table. I won't go over uh every detail of it. It's more for a picture. if you're interested. But uh some of the most important features are privacy data ownership, no vendor lock in, verifiability of the software, no censorship, a business model that's sustainable and not by default design against the benefits of its users. Uh and here are some examples.

Finally, just a quick slide. I won't go too deep into it because I'm over time already. Sorry, I have a propensity for a bit of blah blah. Uh, which is the local first philosophy or uh what uh more recently people have rebranded as file over app. What is it very simply? Uh in most of today's digital tools, it is a philosophy of app over file. So your data lives inside the app on their servers in their proprietary format PDF, DOCX, it's it's not open formats.

Leaving means losing all that meaning losing really your digital uh uh life. Uh you need permission to go the app is a product etc. Fileover app which is how we built uh every app at fverse is uh puts the file uh as the centerpiece of everything that you do. So your data lives in your files in the files that you own in open formats on your device. Ideally first apps become interchangeable tools that read and write your files and you can swap them freely. So if everything becomes a file, it doesn't matter what app you're using.

You can go from one to the other and get the best UI that you want. You can walk away very easily and the file of course outlives the app. the the company can go bankrupt, the company can disappear, can turn evil, etc. But if everything is centered around your app, you don't really care. So own the file and you will never be held so hostage by the app. Finally, 1 2 3 4 5 uh what can you do to reclaim your digital diet? One is uh ask yourself what apps you use daily, which ones are ultra processed, which uh nourish you. Uh second, substitute uh those apps ideally especially cloud

monopolies. Find sovereign alternatives, own your data, support open source, advocate for better apps out there. This is just an example of uh the ones to avoid and the ones to uh actually move towards. For those uh that don't know the logos, you have Fver, Brave, Radical Tour Empire Signal Graphenos, Gnosis, and Mouad. Highly recommend all of them. And I'll finish wrong slide. Okay, I'll finish with that actually. Thank you very much.

I don't know if I have time for questions. If anybody uh wants uh come find me later. Uh yeah. Thanks.