When the digital campfire burns only for machines: Thoughts on the bot epidemic
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So, I was organizing some archives at the Carnegie Library branch (old habits die hard, even though I'm retired now) and my brain drifted back to this thread I read a few weeks ago. A webmaster was venting that 99% of their traffic was bots. Just... machines. Crawlers. Scrapers. No humans.
It hit me right in the chest. Here I am, a 60-year-old from Pittsburgh who stumbled into spirituality after a pretty dark mental health crisis in my 20s, trying to find genuine connection and measurable results in my inner alchemy work. And the digital world is 99% synthetic?
How does this mess with our practice? If we're posting here, are we actually resonating with other humans, or are we just shouting into a void of algorithms harvesting our words for data? It feels like drawing the Moon in a reading, doesn't it? All that mist, the illusion, the sense that the ground isn't solid. The Moon warns us about our perception being clouded. If the ecosystem is shaped by machines, are we projecting our spiritual needs onto a mirror that doesn't even reflect back?
From a psych angle, this screams confirmation bias. If bots are scraping and regurgitating content based on engagement, we might be trapped in loops where we only see what confirms our biases, making true growth impossible. Real inner alchemy requires friction, right? It requires meeting the shadow, not just a reflection of your own desires generated by a script.
I'm cautiously optimistic about tech, but this has me wary. When I was in therapy, we talked a lot about reality testing. This feels like a massive reality test for the collective. How do we maintain authentic connection when the background noise is automated? Do you guys feel the "bot energy" when you browse? How do you ground your practice when the external world feels this synthetic? I'd love to hear your thoughts!
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