Tag: dialup pastorale

Exit from Eden: Virtual Retreat

What if you achieve the future you always wanted, and find it empty?

The advent of Generative AI, with the new* video models able to reproduce video at scale is bringing with it an unexpected reaction from the digital native generations (Millenials and Gen Z): retreat.

The erosion of trust that has come from the rampant use of GenAI in a post-truth era that was already struggling to reflect objective reality has resulted in a rejection of the online devices and smartphones that they have grown up with, taking up analog pursuits – some of which were cultivated during the early stages of the Covid-19 response – along with a desire for the Dial-Up Pastorale (from back in Episode 34).

It isn’t a full blown retreat from the virtual just yet, but the signs are there. Those most sensitive to the coming changes taking the first steps away from online life.

It is a rejection of the “Exodus to the Virtual” that was anticipated back in 2007 by Edward Castranova, and similar observations that were echoed during that era of massive growth in popularity of MMOs and virtual worlds.

Exodus to the Virtual (2007) was Castranova’s follow-up to his work on Synthetic Worlds (2005) which was an analysis of the MMORPG Everquest through an economic lens. In Exodus, Castranova positioned himself on the crest of the wave of the hype cycle for MMOs, hypothesizing that the economies of these places, built on fun, would be attractive enough to entice people to migrate to them and spend most of their time online within these environments.

There are many ways that this hypothesis was colossally wrong.

Eighteen years later, that projected exodus is all but gone. Even though consumer VR hardware is more available, accessible, and consumer friendly, the desire to take that path has withdrawn for more of the population, either no longer having the means to undertake the exodus or rejecting it wholesale.

Where can this rejection be seen? It’s there, on social media, in the subtext of the wry comments of those claiming “the internet was a mistake” with every new “advancement” in technology or viral trend that escapes containment. But it is also there, more explicitly, in the claims and calls to action of the Digital Natives, TikTok posts steadily gaining more views and likes, claiming that they’re done and walking away from the internet, a claim they assert will definitely happen if they can no longer discern truth from unreality thanks to the next iteration in generative AI.

There’s a paradox here, where those who have already noped out of the virtual won’t be posting about it too much on social media (obviously), but there is a brief window where they may leave traces – evangelizing about their choices the way only a vegan crossfitter can, or talking themselves up to final leaving it behind, and trying to convince others to join them.

This rejection of a future imaginary – even the few drops that are starting now, signs of the damn beginning to leak, sweating through before it buckles and breaks unleashing the torrent that bursts its way through – is rare, though not unknown, as we have collectively stepped back from other imagined futures before, with the waning of the nuclear age that dominated half the 20th century.

It’s also a pitch correction, or rather pitch rejection as the sale of the commodified self loses its luster and sheen, only begrudgingly uptaken by those who need it for work, or those too young to recognize the gilt for the thing covering of glitter that it is.

So the retreat is underway, those stepping away from the din and fray of the online battledomes quietly slipping out, and others starting to notice them in their absence. And much like in a battle where it only takes a few to break before a full on rout is underway, we may soon see this happen en masse. It may not take an oracle to predict it, but an Oracle may be involved all the same.

*: as of October 2025 – Google Sora 2

The Mauve Pill

Been seeing a new type of post online, and there’s enough of them that it seems to be part of a trend. This might just be early days of it, but I thought I’d document my observations here, and return back to it as needed. I’m loosely calling it The Mauve Pill, for reasons we’ll get into in a bit.

Examples

Or this rather lengthy blog post:

https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever

(There’s more, I’ll try and pull them out of the bookmarks shortly.)

What are the points in common of The Mauve Pill?

  • Anti-“content” – not as a style, but as the wholesale rejection of “content” as a meta-descriptor for various media, or thinking it is a new term rather one that has been in use since the 1960s (at least)
  • Anti-AI, either in general or rejecting that it can have good uses
  • Performative “left” politics, but without grounding or reflection (ie “against all”)
  • Uncritical assessment of new technology
  • Adoption of “en~ification” (which is not a new thing, really, just capitalism by another name)
  • A belief in the Dial-up Pastorale – not recognizing that the web was corporate from early on

There’s likely more, but these were some of the constellation of ideas I was observing.

Why Mauve?

Well, truth be told, I needed a color. We kinda ended up here by process of elimination.

Red and Blue are already taken, and Blue has connotations besides.

Red pill: These were people who, in the parlance of the community, had swallowed the “Matrix”-inspired “red pill” and seen “the truth.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/30/books/review/ellen-reeve-black-pill.html

Blue is staying asleep, stuck in the matrix.

However, maybe there’s another option?

I hear ya, Zizek. What other options do we have?

Black is taken too. Elle Reeve covers this in depth in her 2024 book of the same name, looking at “the black pill of nihilism” and how that has led to the pipelining of individuals to the alt-right movement.

So we need to find another option:

Silver? Would this stand for cyber, all shiny and chrome? Nah. Doesn’t seem to fit with what we’re observing.

Gold? Does this just mean (monetized or capitalized, or maybe just crypto)? In which case, no, this won’t work.

Rainbow? No, Pink, no? These have obvious associations which don’t apply here.

Green would be eco-friendly, perhaps? Brown might be too? Again, not sure either would apply in this instance.

Orange would be labour, perhaps? Or other worldwide movements, and as such it feels that this is taken.

So let’s go with Mauve. It kinda reminds me of old 4 color CRTs, visually close to the magenta provided by the CGA video standard, along with Cyan, White, and the black of the background.

Is it a problem?

A little, as it takes spaces in the discourse about dealing with current problems, but is as divorced from reality as some of those other “Pilled” movements.

There may be points where they (the authors of mauve-pilled content) identify an issue, but the pilling leads them to come to very odd conclusions, or looping in irrelevant examples in their train of thought on their posts.

And I notice that I may agree with some parts of the argument, or even the conclusion, but there’s enough fallacious, irrelevant, or specious reasoning in the logic chain that I feel that the end result is suspect.

So I gotta examine my own facts, knowledge and assumptions (which is fine, you always gotta check yourself), and then I end up questioning what I know?

Except, “I ain’t passed the bar, but I know a little bit”

It’s like: “I don’t know what you’re talking about, which means you (probably) don’t know what you’re talking about”

And it’s a problem because it’s “pilled” – posts along these lines get positive reinforcement from other pilled members of the community, and that leads them to think they are correct in their (flawed) analysis, further entrenching them in their idea and unable to be reasoned out of it by an expert in the area (f’rex me; see above – I know a little bit).

So because it occupies space, it closes off rational discourse about the subject, and we end up endlessly have to talk around whatever the Mauve-Pilled topic is online for the next decade or so.

There are literally bigger issues to deal with right now.

It reminds me of the Dial-Up Pastorale articles I was noticing last year, and I think many of them could fit within this trend. The DUP dialog has certainly continued, gaining steam and more attention as more people seek alternatives to large platforms. There is still a large amount of platform illiteracy involved there too – BlueSky, Surf/Newsmast and especially SubStack are not any better than the alternatives people are fleeing to them from; the switch just hasn’t been flipped yet to commodify the userbase. (Though the time may finally be coming for SubStack due to their current content policies.)

This commodification is one of the things they appear to share in common in another way: they all engage in what I like to call “Commodified Curation”, the provision a non-algorithmic internet experience. Curated, if you will. Right now they appear to be mostly benign, lying somewhat dormant within the social media ecosystems they’ve attached themselves to, but eventually the worm will turn, the switch will flip, and we’ll see the various stages of commodification and monetization take place once again.

We’ll return to both #commodifiedcuration and #platformilliteracy in the near future. For right now, the question is what to do about The Mauve Pilled?

I think for now it’s worth highlighting that it is a thing, and seeing if there are other examples. How much of it is just the zeitgeist, and how much of it is resistant to discussion. Much of what I’ve seen feels non-rational, like the other pilled groups, and as the saying goes: “you can’t reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into”. Give or take; it’s been a while since I’ve read Jonathan Swift.

If there’s going to be any engagement, it’ll likely start small. I’ll let you know how it goes here, and we’ll try and collect it for a future podcast episode.