Why modern tech is sucking the soul out of content
The more digital content demands our attention, the more valuable human experience becomes. In this clip from You’re Not the Audience, Parliament Creative Director Calvin Ross Carl explains why this isn’t a simple story of AI being bad and craft being good, and how tech’s endless abundance has turned into noise. He describes how scarcity is shifting toward craft, taste, expertise, and tactile experiences like vinyl, and why today’s algorithms act as agents of genericism and homogenization. It’s from the You’re Not the Audience episode on beauty and attention, The Search for Beauty in the Age of Algorithms.
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Outline
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl starts by rejecting a simple framing. AI and social media are just the latest tech competing for attention, and there’s real good in them. Tumblr changed his life. But the enshittification process whittles that good away, and the downsides now make it hard to appreciate what technology can do.
His focus is on how abundance has become noise. When everything is available everywhere at once, novelty loses its value, efficiency loses its appeal, and people start romanticizing slower ways of making. Scarcity shifts toward craft, taste, expertise, and tactile experiences, which is why everyone is buying vinyl.
Calvin then describes attention as increasingly extractive. Platforms and algorithms are built to win a few more seconds and create addictive loops, while very little gives attention back. Echoing an idea from Parliament founder Chris Erickson, he notes that you can’t follow best practices and also create revolutionary ideas, and that AI trained on established thinking struggles to make lateral leaps.
Highlights
The issue isn’t that tech is bad but that its downsides now dominate.
Endless abundance turns into noise and drains novelty of value.
Scarcity is moving toward craft, taste, expertise, and physical experiences.
Attention has become extractive, with little given back.
Today’s algorithms push toward genericism and homogenization.
Key insights
Value follows scarcity
Technology was once scarce and exciting. Now that it’s everywhere, the scarce and valuable things are human ones.
We’re all victims and instigators
Even a livestream demands attention. Every brand participates in the battle for seconds, which makes giving attention back a meaningful choice.
Feedback loops breed sameness
As algorithms feed off their own output, they reinforce established patterns rather than introduce new ones.
Detailed analysis
The clip is careful not to romanticize the past or demonize technology. Calvin’s argument is economic as much as cultural: when something becomes infinitely abundant, its value collapses, and value migrates to whatever is still scarce. For brands, that means the most differentiating assets may be human experiences, tactility, and genuine expertise.
He also acknowledges that the current state of AI probably won’t last forever. For now, though, tools built on established human thinking make it hard to step outside that thinking, which is exactly where new ideas come from.
Conclusion
As attention gets extracted at every level of life, human experience becomes the scarce resource. Brands that recognize that shift can stand out by offering something real instead of more noise.
Transcript
So we’re talking human attention, and how I think it’s really the attention that you give to art and things like that that makes it valuable. And this isn’t a simple conversation of AI is bad, or social media is bad, and craft is good. I think AI and things like it are just the latest tech competing for our attention. Everything’s screaming for our attention. We all know the downsides of AI and the attention economy, and I think there are some upsides to these things. There’s some good, but we’re just in a time where the downsides make it really hard to appreciate what technology is now capable of doing to our brains. For both social media and even some AI tools, I think some of this stuff can be incredible. I was a diehard Tumblr kid. Tumblr changed my life, and that was all social media. So there are whispers of good in all this stuff. It’s just how the enshittification process starts whittling them away.
So my real focus is more just about how the more digital content demands our attention, the more valuable human experience becomes. And I think that’s a pretty important thing for us as branders to remind ourselves of.
Tech is about giving us abundance. There’s no real scarcity in it. It’s everything everywhere all at once. And the problem with that at this point is that our attention is so whittled down that abundance is just leading to noise. Novelty is losing all value. We talked about that a lot during the beer episodes: when there’s so much novelty, it’s not novel anymore. And even efficiency starts to lose its value, and we start romanticizing these slower means of creation and slower means of making. So technology was once this scarce, unique, new thing, but now that scarcity is shifting toward craft, taste, expertise, tactility, real physical experiences. That’s why everyone’s buying vinyl.
Everyone in chat, put your most recent vinyl you bought in chat. Anybody a vinyl nerd in here? If you’ve bought vinyl, you’re one of the nerds I’m talking about here. Jared says, “Oh crap.” Yeah, what’s your most recent vinyl purchase? I’ve got to actually think of what mine was. I don’t know. I go to a lot of metal shows, and so I end up just picking up vinyl for bands as they’re touring, just to share the love, give them a little bit of cash to pay for gas.
But okay, so that’s scarcity. All those things are becoming scarce, the things that are very specific human experiences, and that’s because attention is becoming an extractive thing at this point. [unclear]. Oh, I don’t know that one. All right, I’m going to take note. I’m screenshotting it so I remember. Screenshotted.
So the idea is that attention is almost becoming extractive at this point. It’s starting to suck a lot out of us. Every platform, AI, every social algorithm is focused on one thing and one thing only, and that’s getting a few more seconds of your time and creating this addicting loop that’s based on that. This is nothing new. We’ve all complained about notifications, ads, social media. I mean, live streaming: I’m demanding your attention right now. This is all doomscrolling. We’re all victims, and we’re all instigators as well.
But I think this is just the point where all of these things are constantly battling with each other, all for attention. This is just maximum optimization at every level of our physical and digital lives. The big part about this is that we’ve reached a point now where very little of this is actually giving attention back to us. I’ll talk a lot more about what that means, but just the idea that they are only extracting from us at this point. Nobody is convinced that social media and things of the sort are actually a net good anymore.
And I think the problem with it, too, is that they’ve all started feeding off themselves, and we’ve fed it so much that now, at the current state at least, AIs and algorithms are just agents for genericism and homogenization. This probably won’t always be the case, but that’s where it’s at now. Chris Erickson, founder of Parliament, always had this idea that applies here, and I’ve always loved it. It stuck with me: you can’t always follow best practices or gold standards and also create completely new, innovative, revolutionary ideas. Those are almost at odds with each other. And a lot of the AIs and algorithms and things of that sort are based on understood human thinking. So when you’re using those things for something else, it’s hard to actually step out of that, do some lateral thinking, and create something new.