Zuckerberg recently gave us his version of AI-paradise. It's a living hell. The Nordic countries and Europe must respond

I was born in 1999 and am too young to have experienced the golden days of the internet. I never saw a digital world characterized by openness, creativity and ingenuity. Instead, I've grown up with an internet infested with advertising, polarised comment boxes and content designed to keep you glued to your screen for the longest possible time. The internet has in many ways become much worse than when I was born.

Over the course of my lifetime, social media has also become much less social. Facebook and Instagram started as places for friends and family. Now they serve Ragebait,”Slopvideos and more and more ads.

It's not an accident, but what's called enshitifikation. Enshitification is a term that describes the process by which most digital platforms inevitably get worse over time. I think Ki models are next in line. To understand why, we must first look at the three typical phases of the enshitification process.

From Fun and Free to Addiction and Monopoly

First comes growth phase, where the platforms compete to get the most users possible by offering a positive, often free, experience. The goal is to lure you in and gather data about what you like. This is the phase where most communities occur and where you might even make real human connections. During this period, the platforms are willing to lose money in the short term to build a loyal user base.

When the user mass is large enough, phase two begins: monetization. Now the investments have to be recovered. Ads gradually start sneaking in between records from uncles and aunts, algorithms are gradually screwed to prioritize paid content and data harvesting intensifies. The user behavior you generate is turned into commercial products that are sold to the highest bidder.

This ultimately leads to recovery phase where the platforms are so dominant that hardly anyone can compete against them. The stress of switching to an alternative service that not your acquaintances use is so high that most people can't bear to do it, even if they complain about the platform. Because of the monopoly, advertisers also lose, because they can no longer reach their customers without paying the platform an ever-higher ad premium.

New possibilities for the use of artificial intelligence

So how can artificial intelligence be subjected to enshitification?

In two fresh interviews Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently unveiled his vision for KI. There he talks enthusiastically about how Meta can completely automate marketing. The idea is simple: the only thing businesses need to do is go to Meta and say “We want to sell as much of this product at this price.” Then Meta's KI systems take over.

Zuckerberg envisions Meta offering users digital friends, therapists and also potentially KI boyfriends

They automatically select the ideal target audience, create messages and posters, fix placement in the feed and influence users to buy the product. There will be a”Black Box” where the Ki is given free rein to generate tailored advertising without anyone knowing how it's done.

Content in your feed will be generated by KI

Zuckerberg also talks about what he calls”the third epoch” for social media where he envisions Ki-generated content taking over your feed to a greater extent. It will be”highly personalized”, that is, tailored to keep you scrolling and willing to buy. The result is a feed that never sleeps, but constantly adjusts to catch your attention. That's bad news for anyone (myself included) who is struggling to put down their cell phones.

Artificially intelligent friends

The last thing Zuckerberg envisions is for Meta to offer users digital friends, therapists and also potentially KI boyfriends. These interlocutors should know our entire message and picture history, listen to everyday problems and give advice. But how good can KI friends be? They will certainly help loners, but fundamentally there is a skewed relation: the KI assistant works for a company that makes a living from microtargeting.

The really disturbing thing is how empathetic, persuasive and flattering the models can be. Imagine an interlocutor who always understands you, always has time, always remembers everything -- but who at the same time has hidden goals set by distant leaders in the United States (and China, primarily to sell you stuff. This is Zuckerberg's dream.

We can stop the enshitification of KI

But this dream is not inevitable. Enshitification happens because we allow it, because we choose convenience over control. “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product” is not a law of nature. It's a result of conscious business models.

There are indeed digital services that have resisted enshitification. Wikipedia has remained ad-free and user-controlled. Signal offers end-to-end encrypted communication that makes data harvesting impossible. Even email remains an open standard no single actor can control. The common denominator is smart choices of architecture, governance model and financing that prevent monopolization and commercialization.

KI is not a fun service, but critical infrastructure

I really don't have the belief that Norway has the ability to make top models on its own. On the other hand, I believe that Europe can do it, or ideally the Nordic countries. But for European KI to succeed, the systems must be competitive, easily accessible and as good as the American ones. We need to treat KI as critical infrastructure instead of a fun online service. This requires significant investment, the attraction of international expertise, and willingness to commit long-term.

Perhaps most importantly, it requires that we stop treating KI as a free good and instead recognize that good systems have a price -- either in the form of direct payment or indirectly through the commercialization of our attention.

Google's motto was once”Don't be evil“. In an era where tech giants openly dream of turning our deepest human relationships into marketable products, we need more than passive hopes for tech companies to act ethically. We need real alternatives built on fundamentally different premises.

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