Monoculture

In farming, monoculture is the industrial practice of planting a single crop to increase efficiency and yield. In the short term, you increase profits. When the long term shows up, you destroy biodiversity and degrade the soil, making it nutrient deficient and more susceptible to pests and disease. That, in turn, requires more chemicals that need to be sprayed, which degrade the soil even further.

Monoculture is a death spiral and will inevitably destroy the ecosystem.

The culture of the internet over the last two decades has incentivized us to produce instant, fast content for attention and clicks — producing more and more mediocre work that has continued to accelerate. Now, in less than two years of AI, we’ve seen that acceleration go into warp speed, producing an unprecedented amount of slop. Slop on top of slop.

The monoculture of fast, lousy work depleted the soil. Now the slop has arrived, and there’s nothing left to resist it. As I pointed out the other day (Day 3653), 22 years after the launch of Facebook, the long-term effects are now here, and we have to deal with them.

Instagram influencers don’t even need to be in front of the camera anymore when Nano Banana can produce the video. You don’t need to use your voice when CapCut that will read the script ChatGPT produced. Why even read and review the transcript? Ship it—if it’s bad and no one notices, you can send the next thing right away. Aim to go viral!

This is the race to the bottom—a noisy, crowded ecosystem, algorithm-driven with no one behind the wheel, eroding the internet a little more every day.

The alternative is to race to the top.

Ship work that matters. Produce the content you would want to read. Spend time with it. Be proud to have your name on it.