On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're Not Human — And Nobody's Asking | Written by Marco Ciappelli & Read by Tape3

An Analog Brain In A Digital Age — A Newsletter by Marco Ciappelli

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're Not Human — And Nobody's Asking

There was a moment — brief, unrepeatable — when the internet felt like a genuinely open place. No profiles. No algorithms deciding what you deserved to see. No one monetizing the fact that you existed. You showed up, you explored, you talked to strangers in other countries about things that mattered to you, and the whole thing felt less like a product and more like a discovery. Like finding a door to another dimension.

There's a cartoon that captured that moment perfectly.

1993. The New Yorker. Peter Steiner. Two dogs, one at a computer, and the line that accidentally defined an entire era of the internet: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog

It was funny. It was also prophetic. And it was optimistic in a way we've completely forgotten how to be about the web. Anonymity as freedom. Identity as something fluid, chosen, playful. You could be anyone. You could be from anywhere. You could reinvent yourself in real time, with no one to contradict you.

Then surveillance capitalism arrived and broke the party.

Cookies. Behavioral profiling. The algorithmic panopticon. Suddenly everyone knew everything. You weren't a dog anymore — you were a demographic, a data point, a cluster of purchase histories and scroll patterns. The internet that promised liberation became the most precise identity-tracking machine ever built. Anonymity collapsed under the weight of monetization.

Nobody knows you're a dog became everyone knows you're a dog, what breed, what you ate for breakfast, and which vet you Googled at 2am.

And now we're in the third act.

A Buddhist monk named Yang Mun has 2.5 million Instagram followers. He posts silent morning meditations. He has made over $300,000 since October. Three Buddhist scholars reviewed his content and confirmed: his wisdom isn't grounded in any actual scripture. It just sounds like it is.

Yang Mun doesn't exist. He was built with ChatGPT, HeyGen — an AI platform that generates realistic synthetic human video, a face, eyes, a voice, moving and breathing and entirely artificial — and a handful of other tools, by a creator operating inside what's being called "Big Slop": a venture-backed industry that manufactures fake influencers, automates their posting, and scales them to millions of followers while platforms, politely, look the other way.

Hat tip to Jack Brewster, whose LinkedIn post on Yang Mun is what started this thread of thought.