We’ve All Become Voyeurs

The illustration is AI-generated. The words aren’t.

Open any social platform and you’ll see it: everyone watches, everyone scrolls, plenty of people hit like, and almost nobody writes.

Not for lack of ideas, I think, but out of laziness. A laziness fed by an endless stream of new content, where it’s easier to use your thumb than your brain.

But a like is not a conversation. It’s a nod from across the street, without even saying hello or shaking hands. It doesn’t tell you what the other person thinks, it doesn’t push back, it doesn’t force you to rethink anything, and above all it doesn’t teach you a thing.

Critical thinking, the kind that used to spark new ideas and new work, each bolder than the last, is dying out.

The best things I’ve learned as a retoucher came from real exchanges between professionals. Usually a photographer who knew, and still knows, far more than me, who didn’t agree and told me so. Sometimes between the lines, often straight to my face: an “it’s horrible” that stung in the moment, but made me grow.

What worries me is where this road leads. If people stop writing, the space gets filled by whoever writes without effort: AI. Generated posts, generated comments, generated replies to generated comments. AI talking to AI, while we watch and get off on content that is more and more standard and more and more semantically perfect, or close to it.

And the result will be a bland mush: odorless, tasteless, colorless. Content so sterile that at some point it won’t even be worth looking at. A few months ago I wrote that everything is becoming flat: this is the next step.

So I’m doing something against the current: I’m asking you to write. Not an emoji, not “great insight”. An opinion, even a contrary one, even a “screw you, you don’t get it”. Comments below are open.

Do you still comment, or do you just watch?

PS. This post was written by a human.