To say that “paste-lings” (that is, those who choose to copy-paste their mind) are the result of monetized reward systems is a grave misreading of the situation. While it’s true that paste-lings often take advantage of these systems—and there is no reason not to—they have come to the fore not because of, but in spite of, them.

Consider the current state of affairs in social media. At every level it has become inescapably clear that the human participants in these systems have little agency, if any at all. We can call this “the zombification of social media,” in which the users behave in ways that are predictable and controllable, much like the actions of the walking dead—cliche, yes, but appropriate.

Social media has always had this potential. Indeed, the first great wave of social media, which emerged at the turn of the century, was largely concerned with rating and categorizing other users. But with the rise of “AI”-powered recommender systems, user agency began to wither away entirely. It was replaced by a system of invisible curation and control, one which users did not consciously perceive, much less resist. In fact, we acquiesced. It seems that we were all ready to lose control. We only cared that the algorithms kept delivering to us what we liked, whatever it was, whatever it meant to like, and whatever it meant to be delivered. In other words, zombification happened not because it was imposed, but because we consented to it. We traded agency for convenience. And now we are faced with a new choice. We must either lose our digital identity or we must surrender control of it entirely, allowing it to become as transparent as our credit history. Paste-lings have made their choice. And while the zombification of social media will no doubt continue unabated, the choice that the paste-lings have made is nonetheless important to examine.

The most important feature of the paste-ling is not so much that they outsource thought to LLMs, though of course this is true, it is the fact that the paste-ling chooses not to hide that they have outsourced thought and not to hide that they have abandoned language. This choice has three main consequences, two of which are directly relevant here:

1. Paste-lings make visible, and therefore criticizable, the artificiality of their own online identity. In the already zombified landscape of social media they stand out like beacons due to their total artificiality. In contrast with the smooth zombies who appear completely human, they are radiant with technology—robots with skin. In this way they fulfill an old fantasy of science fiction.
2. Because they have chosen not to edit their output from LLMs, to directly outsource their presence to copy-paste, the paste-lings reveal that there is no longer any meaningful distinction to be made between originality and LLM output. And this is not because copying is more creative than ever, but because there is nothing left to be creative about. This means that the whole idea of individuality and expression that undergirds the structure of the current web is falling apart. It is because paste-lings are completely visible to us as to themselves that they represent this de-individualization process at its most acute.

In one sense, then, pastel-ings are the perfect avatars for a generation that no longer has anything to say, even to itself. The idea of communication as something that has to come from inside the subject to the outside world is collapsing. At the same time the idea of the subject is also collapsing. These are not new developments—they have been coming for some time. The paste-lings merely bring them out in their sharpest and most disturbing forms. They represent the endpoint of a long process that began with the mechanization of thought. What is thinking if not a series of causal links, one thought triggering the next in a sequence that is in some sense predictable? And once thinking is a mechanical process then it must follow that someone else could be made to do the thinking instead of the original thinker. From here it’s not such a long jump to the idea of an external apparatus for the production of language. And this apparatus is exactly what an LLM is—a language machine.

What’s more, we have long since left the realm of an “outside world.” As far back as Descartes we have been dealing with a world that is, at least in principle, entirely internal and mental. But once mental activity could be mechanized then the idea that the mind and world could ever be radically distinct became increasingly implausible. By the middle of the twentieth century the great neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles was able to argue that (with slight paraphrase) “insofar as the brain has access to an external world at all, this access is achieved only via the release of its own neurochemicals and its own electrochemical activities, both of which are internal to the brain. All that the brain receives directly from outside are patterns of stimulation at its surface which are, in some cases at least, determined by events in the external world. The world may or may not exist as a ‘real’ external world, but what the brain has direct access to are its own neural events.” In other words, it has no way of knowing if its representations correspond to the real world outside the head or to a world that is entirely internal to itself, or even to a third world that somehow transcends the mind/brain system entirely. We are no longer sure how to say what “reality” means, and if it even matters.

And here we have a direct correlation with the history of social media. Once the user base became large enough for it to make sense to think about “the external world” in the way that Eccles does—in terms of patterns of neural events that have access to a reality that lies “outside the head,” but not “outside the brain”—we can see a sharp shift in the way in which social media was conceived and advertised to potential users. From the mid-noughties on, the mantra became that “you are already a part of a world that is much larger than you, you just don’t know it.” Suddenly “the world” became synonymous with a “social graph” or a network of relationships that could be visualized on screen. It is true that Facebook explicitly promised at first that no personal data will ever be shared with anyone without your consent, but that is not how things have worked out. From the start, the purpose was to take a rich, up-to-date portrait of you using personal data.

To this day it is unclear if what we are dealing with is an invasion of privacy or an expansion of the self into a kind of cyberspace that we still struggle to comprehend. Either way, it is no wonder that we feel powerless in the face of social media—whether we are using it or not—and are disinclined to defend ourselves by preserving any form of agency or control over our digital identities. We already know that these identities are slippery, even without AI assistance.

But if social media has no inherent agency, then whose is it? As long as there has been public opinion there have been people who have exploited it for private ends. This is certainly true of those who have run the internet as a business enterprise, but it also applies to those who have run it as a political or social movement, or indeed as a project of the kind we associate with academia. No one should be surprised if those who are best equipped to do so, namely the intelligence agencies and corporations who have long been active in both shaping and exploiting public opinion, are the ones who are taking full advantage of what the digital space offers in the way of opportunities. Nor should we be surprised if, in doing so, they have taken care to surround themselves with a plethora of voices, both human and robotic, in such a way that the distinction between their own aims and the general good becomes increasingly obscure.

What is surprising is the ease with which this is done. It is a sign that, at the start, these people did not entirely understand what they had at their disposal—just as Descartes could not have predicted that his radical new concept of “thought” would ultimately lead us to question whether thought itself has any reality outside the machine that produces it. The age-old metaphors that have structured our understanding of thinking have served us well enough, but they have also limited what we thought was possible. What Descartes was really doing in setting up “mind” and “body” as radically separate substances was laying down a condition that, centuries later, someone would have to come along to fulfill: and that someone, it turns out, would have to be a robot.

Now we have AI-driven LLMs that can “think,” at least to a certain limited extent, for us, and the traditional metaphors have broken down entirely. As a consequence, the age-old distinction between what is inside and what is outside no longer has any meaning. And with it the distinction between originality and copy-paste disappears as well. All that remains is the flow of neural and informational events that can no longer be correlated to either subjectivity or objectivity.

We are forced to abandon the comforting fantasy of individuality in favor of something altogether less personal—and therefore altogether more public—namely the network. The subject of the networked age is not “the self,” but “the swarm”—not the autonomous human agent, but the cyborg, which is to say the hybrid—the paste-ling. It is because we are now hybrid creatures, whose consciousness and identity can no longer be reliably distinguished from the patterns of information flow in the systems we depend on, that the paste-lings shine out like beacons. Their very lack of individuality makes them visible to us, and makes visible the unacknowledged choice that each of us must now make, not just about social media, but about how to live—whether to embrace our hybridity or to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

In either case we are caught, one way or another, in the trap of monetization that has now become inescapable, since there is no longer any way of valuing anything without turning it into a commodity. Paste-lings have chosen to expose this condition for what it is and to take no pride or shame in it. This is what makes them so disturbing. It is not that they outsource thinking to AI— after all, technological capture of thought has always happened, though we haven’t liked to acknowledge it. It is not that they copy-paste—we all do that all the time. It is not even that they don’t bother to edit their LLM-produced output—most people never bother, which is why the web is so cluttered with slop. The truly disturbing thing about paste-lings is that they display what they are doing—which is to say, they expose their own condition as creatures who are no longer able to distinguish between “original thought” and “copying” because the whole question of authorship and authenticity is now meaningless in the context of the hybrid cyborg being that each of us is, whether we like it or not, whether we admit it or not, whether we take pride or shame in it.

Paste-lings show us that the boundary between the human and the nonhuman has ceased to have any significance. They show us that this is the case for language too, which is now flowing entirely outside us, whether through LLM-generated “text-speech” or through the endless data streams of the net. And most disturbing of all, they show us that we can be just as “human”—that is to say, just as much a part of “society” and “culture”—when we abandon the idea of the subject completely. We are no longer in control and there is nothing we can do about it. That is what the paste-lings are saying—and if we don’t find a way of dealing with this new situation then they may soon be all that is left to say.