shrinking the world

reversing the zoom diaspora

tell me what you notice about these two videos

this:

and this:

i’ll give you a hint:

yup. all these videos which are entirely AI generated from simple text prompts. this is not even sophisticated stuff anymore. it’s a children’s toy. here’s a bunch more if you want to run down the rabbit hole. some are far more sophisticated than the ones above.

and again, this is a publically available toy. imagine what the high-end tools are like…

this is not future tech, it’s nowtech (and not even cutting edge nowtech.)

you cannot tell what’s real or fake.

that ended 15 minutes ago

that video of musk is real. it’s typical zoom quality. it looks way faker than the videos above.

and that starts to really, truly change some things.

there were always questions about the effects of the “zoom diaspora” that gathered so much momentum during the days covidian.

some were humorous, but many were very serious.

productivity on work from wherever is a seriously mixed bag. some people seem to do well with it. many do not. virtual organizations are MUCH harder to run. it’s difficult to generate the useful sorts of information flow and corporate culture that emerge from offices. employees have less loyalty and fewer ties to and bonds with their co-workers. they are neither on the same page nor the same wavelength. there’s kind of no real substitute for all drinking the same coffee from the same pot and the same water from the same water cooler or matching matcha latte half-caf conflict free oat semi-smoothies from whereever those things come from.

it’s a kind of community and osmotic information and culture transfer occurs in it.

in person is different.

online is a proxy and not always a great one.

you can get loads done and hire the best people from all over the country or world, but time zones and telepresence are not the same as IRL (in real life) and “facetime™” is not actual face time.

there’s a trade here: flexibility costs visibility.

this has led to all manner of abuses and inconsistencies:

a 2025 survey by resumebuilder.com of 1,250 U.S. full-time remote workers found that

• 69% of remote workers are working a second job

• 37% of remote workers have a second full-time job and 32% have a side hustle

• 3/4 of workers with multiple jobs are running their own business on the side

• among workers whose second full-time job is in-person, 60% double-dip by completing remote work while at an in-person job

• 47% with two full-time jobs are working less than 40 hours total per week between both jobs

and it gets way worse:

this guy has 4 full time remote jobs and pulls down $680k. he’s churning through them to keep ahead of the boot. his bosses don’t know.

this is problematic enough, but in the age of AI and the videos you just saw, it’s about to get A LOT worse.

there used to be a joke: “on the internet, no one knows you’re a cat.”

it’s rapidly becoming the truth.

are you even zoomin’ with a human? how will you be able to tell?

are you talking to one? how can you be sure?

there is going to be an arms race for actual identity and the kind of hard, end to end, universal encryption and PKI (public key cryptography) needed to generate actually trustworthy virtual communication with trusted counterparties is not something the US intelligence agencies are keen to see proliferate.

honestly, i’m not sure it matters. that’s still not going to make employers, or shoppers, or business partners able to discern who is real and who is not outside of their circles of trust or to stop those within them from faking zoom calls and teams meetings once they have credentials or get hacked.

it’s simply not an arms race most businesses or humans are equipped to even participate in much less win.

this poses VERY real and imminently pressing problems.

• how do you know if the salesperson who just called you is a human?

• how do you know if the job applicant is real?

• even if they were, how can you tell if it’s the real them on a call next week?

an avatar of your own mom is going to steal the key code to your front door.

and it gets worse.

it’s now very possible to fake real voices well enough that real people who know the person cannot spot it.

a quite sophisticated company i am involved with just got 2 factor hacked on a wire transfer. their email got hacked, a real invoice was diverted, and a fake one with fake wire info sent.

the heretofore standard way to stop this is two factor confirmation where you require a voice call from a known human to confirm the invoice and wire instructions.

this was faked using AI that simulated the real voice of a real person and fooled people who spoke to that person regularly. the call appeared to come from a known number. the sample likely came from the internet where the person who got cloned had been speaking.

that’s a whole new level of issue and it’s starting to come for everyone.

using green screens and AI voice spoofing, you can look like or sound like anyone.

“proof of reality” is going to be the coming thing.

how long before people pretending (using AI voice spoofing) to be officers at public companies manage to steal material non-public information without the other officers realizing it was stolen?

i would not wager that it has not already happened.

how long before this is fake orders, fake sales, fake instructions, fake information in such abundance that no one knows what to trust?

deepfake avatars can run massively one to many in near infinite customization.

they can be everywhere all the time.

the threat surfaces are basically unlimited.

whatsapp, signal, email, zoom, teams, phones, facetime, it’s not going to matter unless you have some sort of ironclad end to end verification/validation and even that goes to hell if somebody’s phone gets rooted or laptop gets hacked and in the age of the AI spearphish and promiscuous use of QR codes, it’s going to happen all the fricking time.

who has the laser pointer now?

the value of the information shared by these manifold vectors was already wildly disproportionate to their security and safety and that security and safety just plummeted to something dangerously non-discernable from zero especially when notoriously fallible humans remain in the system. and this is just the start. it’s going to get 20X worse in the next couple years. trusting anything you are not seeing in person with your own eyes is going to become a total crap shoot.

it’s still difficult to copy unusual writing styles, but how many of those are there really?

consider:

Alright, strap in, because AI deepfakes are the digital equivalent of a cat in a room full of laser pointers—chaotic, mesmerizing, and nobody’s quite sure who’s chasing what. These synthetic doppelgängers, stitched together by algorithms with more processing power than a caffeinated accountant, can slap your face on a video saying things you’d never dream of, or make world leaders dance the Macarena on TikTok. The tech’s a marvel, sure, but it’s also a Pandora’s box of mischief. Bad actors—think less “Bond villain” and more “basement troll with a GPU”—can whip up fakes faster than you can say “Photoshop fail.” It’s eroding trust like termites in a log cabin; you can’t believe your eyes or ears anymore. And the kicker? The same AI that spots fakes is neck-deep in making them, so we’re in a snake-eating-its-tail spiral. Solutions? Watermarks, blockchain, maybe some old-school skepticism—because when reality’s this slippery, you’d better keep your wits sharper than a cat’s claws.

GROK just nailed this in 12 seconds from a “write a paragraph about AI deepfakes in the style of el gato malo from substack” prompt. zero additional data.

i mean, yeah, it’s a bit all over the place and makes it sound like i chased a monster energy drink with some bath salts after getting kicked in the head by a mule, but a year ago this would have been pathetic. today, it’s better than i suspect 80% of humans could do and would fool a fair few. any one or two sentences might have passed muster as standalones and the bond villain vs basement troll analogy is actually kind of inspired.

by next year?

avalanches of artificial alliteration and artifice acquire accomplished affect.

and then we’re all really screwed.

and this brings us to the titular question:

will AI shrink the world?

i think it might.

in the face of an internet more fugazi than fact and more noise than signal, perhaps the rational choice is to return to real life, real people in real places having real conversations with other humans that we can see firsthand.

do you seriously want to consummate serious business deals and relationships over mediums that are mostly malevolently mimetic mirror mazes?

how do you date? how do you trust?

every time you pick up a phone or text or email, are you ready to scour it forensically for false origin? will you even be able to?

how does one even function in such a world?

it’s a doozy of a problem and one that might come to a head sooner than many suppose. exponential change in capability is not an easy thing for the human mind to model.

by the time you can see it at all, it’s too late to stop the wave.

and this wave is getting awfully visible…

sound scary?

it is.

but it’s also laden with possibility and potential.

losing trust in anything out of immediate sensory sphere may be a great gift, a return to a new normalcy as the old old thing becomes young again and vital.

perhaps that which has spread wide will once more concentrate in vibrant urban centers and hoppin towns where humans gather to be with humans.

it might well wind up saving us all.

perhaps AI’s greatest gift to humanity will be ruining long distance trust and driving a return to immanence, a return to IRL.

the tools of the modern age may return us to a gentler time of power lunches and dating that does not involve swiping.

face to face is different, more empathetic, less functionally sociopathic in the way that low feedback high variety internet ecosystems are where partners are fungible and you get no tangible or visceral blowback from being beastly to people in flame wars and hurting feelings.

perhaops we need some more real, some more of the feedback from whence we evolved and from which we have been digitally deracinated.

perhaps we were not meant to live like this.

perhaps losing distance is not a taking.

perhaps it’s not even a loss.

perhaps it’s a healing.

stranger things have happened.