There is nowhere for you to go.

Land use, AI, and the end of place as we know it.

This piece is about a more general issue where technology and planning intersect, it is not typical of this blog but I wanted to write about it a bit. Hope you enjoy.

“The internet isn’t real life” used to be a fair assessment of digital versus in-person social interactions. It was also, for me at least, something I would say to myself to feel comforted whenever some insane conspiracy seemed to be gaining prevalence online. The past few years have indicated this is now wrong. The Trump administration is de-facto run by a man who tweets so often that you can track his sleep schedule almost down to the minute from his tweets. The day I am writing this, the stock market fluctuated to the tune of multiple trillions of dollars based on a fake news story from a random twitter account.

The integration of the digital and physical worlds will have many profound impacts beyond the economy, though. One strong point of interest for planners and urban designers will be how it impacts “place”. The problems that arise from this integration will be an extension of an already negative trend. The social life of the average American has radically shifted from several decades ago, not just due solely to the internet, but due to the common land-use paradigm of the typical American city.

The Existing Place

The common land-use pattern we see in cities is mostly suburban, which is ideal for making us lonelier. The typical American spends just under 30 minutes commuting to work, so a bit under an hour both ways. They are likely doing this alone in a car. After spending 9 or so hours of their 16 waking hours commuting or working, they return to their single-family home in the suburbs. If they go out and get dinner or coffee, it is more likely they will go through a drive thru or get take-out rather than dine in somewhere. Most social activities they attend will require another drive somewhere. This is all an optimistic picture, as it assumes that a person can afford a car in the first place. If not, their commute ability and ability to access social spaces is greatly hindered.

The average American is not really at fault for this, however, as this is all by design. New development in many cities, including Louisville, is dominated by big-box stores and single-family homes. Using a car for transportation is still generally expensive on the personal level, but subsidized in a ton of ways on the societal level. Gas is taxed cheaply, so the gas tax does not keep up with road maintenance expenses. For decades, cities have required tons of parking spots at every business, basically enforcing suburbanization and car-reliance. This is only the surface level, car use is subsidized in too many ways to count [2] [3] [4]. Developers are also often incentivized to build those strip mall developments where there is more parking than building, either by simpler building codes, tax incentives, or cheaper entry cost.

Welcome to the Datakrash

A lifestyle has been reinforced by nearly every level of society that seems to maximize loneliness. As this lifestyle became more and more common, the rise of the internet came in to fill the void. New digital places were replacing the typical, real-life third places. Around 87% of Americans use social media daily. At the same time, only around 43% socialize with friends on a weekly or daily basis.

This is especially problematic for younger folk. Children are also more likely to have regulations that ban them from common third places, malls in Louisville and many other cities have pretty extensive rules that limit youth presence during the school day. At the same time, many of the social spaces online that were designed exclusively for children have disappeared. This all plays a role in around a third of children between ten and seventeen reporting that they use social media “nearly constantly” This constant or near constant use for many people is reshaping the social landscape, bringing the digital and physical together into this weird third-place concoction.

This all brings on its own suite of problems that have been written about extensively, whether that be the aforementioned loneliness, stunting of social development, social anxiety, and so on; but at least there was a consistent place for folks to socialize relatively safely. This is no longer the case, as the digital space many rely on for social interaction is being filled with AI bots.

AI has exploded over the past few years, with machine learning algorithms now being able to produce freakily photorealistic images, high-quality voice overs, and an insane amount of fake accounts. The social media companies that dominate the new digital places have fully embraced AI: Meta, Twitter (not calling it X), Google, Microsoft, and more have their own AI chatbots and suite of AI tools.

This all has made it easier to mass-create fake AI accounts that are pervasive across all platforms. The average Facebook user’s feed is around 30% AI, which seems an underestimate from personal experience. ChatGPT web bots now make up around 13% of all internet traffic, and some websites like Twitter are now ~80% bot traffic. What was once a digital town square has become nothing more than a digital regurgitation, with feeds being filled with fake images, fake voices, fake people, and AI hallucinations.

This ends up with the internet being unusable. Search engines now prioritize AI summary responses that are wrong up to 60% of the time. I used to use reddit to get reviews on expensive technological and household products before making big purchases, but now the site is prowled by AI bots that search for keywords to give recommendations of specific products. Real interaction and resources for internet communities are being relegated to obscure discord servers rather than the typical internet forum.

While many people will bring up the “dead internet theory” when discussing the rise of AI bots online, it is moreso something similar to a real life version of the “datakrash”, this is a really dorkish analogy but I think it's apt. In the Cyberpunk board games and video game, the “old” internet was destroyed by an event called the datakrash. This is where one man intentionally released a bunch of military-grade AI bots across the internet in a kind of digital gray goo scenario, where the bots self-replicated and made the internet practically unusable for everyone. This resulted in the internet being fracturing between smaller private nets rather than one all-encompassing one. This seems to be similar to what is happening now, with AI making discourse difficult across existing digital platforms and relegating real resources and social connection to smaller platforms and servers.

This may all seem somewhat disconnected from planning for most people, but the two are intimately connected. The digital place came to fill the void left by the destruction of physical spaces, despite the many downsides that brought. As the digital place becomes more and more difficult to inhabit, a shift will likely occur back towards the physical. Planners and designers need to (and largely are) prioritize creating spaces for people, rather than cars. Otherwise there will simply be nowhere for people to go.