You’re right - you’ve successfully built an infrastructure that keeps you outside the slop machine. Kagi, Whoogle, fediverse, HackerNews - that’s strategic refusal working as intended. The slop is concentrated on mainstream platforms where people haven’t opted out. Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube - my friends still using those are drowning in AI-generated engagement bait, fake historical photos, GPT-written content. It’s not subtle anymore for people still plugged in. The kirkification angle is trickier though - it’s not just what you see, it’s how you’re represented in spaces you’re not in. Someone can generate deepfakes of you and you’d never know. Your digital body gets remixed without consent. Your “maybe I can’t recognize it anymore” point is real. The aesthetic tells are getting harder to spot. Five years ago it was obvious, now it takes active effort. Platform rules banning it would help but verification at scale is nearly impossible. The only reliable defense is what you’re doing - removing yourself from spaces where slop is profitable. But that’s also a technical barrier. I can set up Whoogle and fediverse accounts, but my friends on Instagram? That’s where their community actually is. Opting out means losing access for most people. This is why municipal-scale infrastructure matters - if a town runs its own services, suddenly opting out isn’t a technical hurdle, it’s just where the community is. You asking “where is the slop?” while others drown in it proves we’re already living in parallel internets. The bifurcation is real.

You’re absolutely right about the ageism - that was lazy framing on my part. The vulnerability is psychological and universal, not demographic. I’ve watched my technically-savvy friends fall for the same engagement manipulation as anyone else. I respect the hell out of the radical position you’re taking, and you’re correct that it solves the problem for you personally. But for a lot of us here, the threat model isn’t “can I individually opt out” - it’s “how do I minimize harm while participating in systems I can’t fully escape.” I’m 24, unemployed, job searching in tech. Most employers require LinkedIn, GitHub, email. My actual community - the people I game with, the friends who get me - are scattered across the continent. The meatspace-only option isn’t realistic for someone in my position. Alberta doesn’t exactly have the densest scene for the communities I’m part of. So I’m attempting harm reduction: self-hosted Matrix instead of Discord. Jellyfin instead of Spotify. Soju IRC bouncer instead of Slack. My own Proxmox homelab instead of cloud services. It’s not as pure as full disconnection, but it means I’m not feeding OpenAI’s training datasets or Meta’s engagement algorithms with every interaction. Your point about treating followers as “avatars of the same algorithm” is exactly what I’m trying to escape by moving communication to federated and self-hosted protocols. When I’m on my own IRC server or Matrix instance, I’m talking to people, not to a feed curated by an engagement-maximizing black box. The municipal infrastructure angle matters because it scales the individual solution. I worked at a municipal fiber network - we have the infrastructure to host community services. If a small municipality can run Mastodon, Matrix, and Nextcloud for residents, that’s hundreds of people removed from surveillance capitalism. It’s not everyone going full hermit, it’s building parallel infrastructure that respects privacy by default. Your cross-referencing and source verification advice is solid, but it requires people to first recognize they’re in an algorithmic environment. That’s why I think local-first infrastructure matters - it makes the choice explicit rather than defaulted. I hear you on offline community being the real answer. But for those of us who can’t or won’t fully disconnect, reducing the attack surface and building privacy-respecting alternatives feels like the next best thing.