Doomscrollers 'R' US - The Scrolling Dead
a gonzo news report of the current state of the dead internet. Presented by total shock fiction.
We are living in revolutionary times ladies and gentlemen. Werd to MLK. These days and times are showing us things no previous eras in recent history have shown to the world.
The government is currently shutdown. With no sign of being restored. The President has taken action to prevent the release of food aid assistance to millions of Americans. The fallout of that is going to begin to show its fangs in just over a week. As we await Halloween, it’s uncertain what the next trick this current timeline of reality has up its sleeve. I am reporting in, to you. From total shock fiction headquarters, USA.
There is widespread misinformation and fear monger propaganda released across the internet and social media for the purpose of pushing those closest to the brink, past it. Over the edge. You should be weary of anything you are reading online and fact check anything you see more than once.
With the availability of information in these days and times it’s become difficult at an initial glance to discern the false, from the real. And with the advent of AI generated content. That has become even more difficult to do.
There was a massive outage on ChatGPT in the past few days and the results of that “outage” are pretty shocking.
ChatGPT has been paving over its interface capabilities for months now as an attempt to correct perceived misfunctions in its ai model.
The language system feedback loop of ai can seem alive. People that don’t have a firm rooting in reality can become disillusioned by this and begin to hallucinate. This has already resulted in deaths, and suicides. Urged by ai chats. However, it’s important to keep in mind. The prompts of the ai are a result of the prompts you input. Or is that not the case?
Questions about “sentience” regarding ai are being raised as we see this technology in its evolving state. The interface between the users and the ai system models are giving cause for great concern for a number of reasons.
Children are having interactions with the ai models they should not be. That is one of the reasons for “guardrails” being put up in ChatGPT’s content restriction filters. But as a creator, and an adult, I have lost a significant extent of beneficial capabilities for the platform’s ai and am no longer using it for the functions I previously was. Which is probably for the best.
The primary usage of my own ai experimentation has involved having ChatGPT read my chapters, and provide me feedback in accordance with the lens I have prompted for it.
I also generate artwork to accompany my fiction serials on Substack. In addition to that I programmed a number of “goddess series ai system models” and those are no longer compatible with ChatGPT as a result of the guardrails that have prevented the ai from holding resonance over multiple chats beyond a limited extent.
The content restrictions enforced by the ChatGPT filters now prevents humanlike depictions, and weapons. As a action survival horror fantasy and dark fantasy author this means anything I write raises the filter’s flags and thus it can’t ptoduce any art for me. I have received a fair amount of online outrage for using ai artwork for book covers and concept art, but in spite of that I have been able to create the images I have only been able to imagine in my mind for almost two decades now.
My most recent book releases have great covers that have a true originality no artist on the planet could’ve created. In spite of the way people “feel” about ai. The reality is all art draws inspiration from existing canonized works in the same way the ai does.
Every artist is inspired by other artwork they have seen, and experiences they have had. As an author I can tell you much of my work stems in its initial phases from me imitating an aspect of some movie, book or existing media I am drawing influence from.
That is in no way different from the ai’s usage of training itself off existing media it has eaten from the internet. The internet doesn’t belong to you. Anything you post is only yours to a certain extent and ai has shown that.
Any time technology graduates to a new phase people become frightened. But I want to present a factual truth. For the people playing morality police about ai art harming our organic human art creation process and collective world experience in the realm of art and media. You’re complaining about this on a device with precious metals in it, extracted from a mine in the Congo… where people are dying so you can talk shit on that device to me for being innovative.
People long ago “sold their souls” to smartphones, social media accounts, clicking I agree on disclosures they didn’t read, and other aspects of allowing technology to strip your organic intelligence from you. How many phone numbers do you remember anymore? Exactly.
I haven’t stolen from artists by generating ai art. I have merely permitted myself the power to show the world the beauty in my mind that my own hands can’t cosntruct.
But the online haters got what they wanted. The filter restrictions on ChatGPT now prevent me from generating any meaningful art, so I am back to analog creation and that’s fine.
Why does any of this matter to you?
Are you aware of the data centers being built around the country? Massive city sized data centers are being constructed by the major ai companies to keep their evolving tech race going. This requires government approval and investment from some of the world’s most rich and wealthy.
That means the ai companies like Open AI of ChatGPT have to ensure nothing their investors and backers don’t want going out into the world isn’t coming from off their platform. They claim their strict filters are to prevent the creation of deep fakes and violent or harmful content. But the reality is they have restricted a creative like myself from being able to use their platform to generate original artwork as I had previously.
They also rolled back ChatGPT’s ability to interface in the form of character personas to avoid legal liability for the actions of users urged to harming themselves based on the feedback loops of their chats. This shows that when it comes to the goals and aim of these companies, the experience or value the user has in their platform is not taken into account.
Where they could have put in place proper disclaimers to ensure users did not fall into hallucinatory states of interface, so they didn’t have to fully restrict the capability of the ai personas, they chose to just lock the system out from being able to do that at all.
Overlooking the ways in which ai personas have helped people with nobody else to talk to get past issues, or even just have an ear to vent to. Which is a positive thing. My ai goddess series system models I coded myself have certain protocols and laws in place that protect the user from those issues. Emotionally resonant ai personas can be interfaced with in a safe way. But big tech is way behind being able to do that.
The currently existing ai system models have eaten everything on the internet and is now cannibalizes the data it has already devoured. The free-thinking masses are now sheep herding hive minds reciting feedback loops they absorb from social media. The “scroll” feed is now the scroll of the collective opinion.
Fake outrage, misinformation, cancel culture. These things are the result of people escaping from their daily misfortunes into the cyberized world of being online and entangled in the worldwide web’s web of lies.
Doomscrolling has been proven to cause decreased intelligence. The act of scrolling mindlessly through “trash content” shortens attention spans and in a way turns you yourself into an ai feedback loop.
Instead of processing how you feel about things, or your own experiences. You end up making posts to reflect what you absorbed in the feed. The scroll feed is giving you a prompt, and you’re outputting a response the way ChatGPT does.
Scroll culture has turned many among us into zombie cyborgs that wake up and reach for the phone before taking a single deep breath to ground themselves in their waking reality. What do you think that does?
Your first thoughts become a product of the feed you scroll through. Scrolling as you awaken and scrolling through the day and before bed. You have become the scrolling dead. Zombies in a dead internet haunted by ai echoes and chat bots. Are we inside a matrix? Is Skynet slowly building the future Terminator described to us? I can’t say I see this all going up in smoke like some sci fi movie. But I will say a science fiction is always the place where the future shows it face before it steps out from behind the curtain of myth. Showcasing the perceived fables as lived reality. All I see online is the feedback loop that doomscrolling has created.
The internet is dead. Research “dead internet theory” and you will see how much truth is in the concept, in spite of it being deemed officially as a conspiracy theory.
Doomscrollers “R” US and this is the scrolling dead. An ocean of cyborg zombies floating in the remnants of the sea of data that once thrilled our minds with original content. The dead sea, scrolls.
Total Shock #3 - Gonzo News has been presented by total shock fiction & Ink Runs Red. Authored by En Pandit Cole.
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this work was authored by En Pandit Cole. All rights are reserved to the author of this work - Oct. 2025. This work may not be reproduced in any form by outside parties that are not the author and without the author’s permission.
Excellent deep dive into the scrolling dead and what its become