October 25, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ • McDialogues™ Understanding the Grammars of Electric Culture and Propaganda Science An Exploration of Technology Ecology as an Anchor in a Sea of Change and Tactical Training in Counter-Propaganda Science by Nelson S. Thall . Former Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Center On Global Communications, Ross, Ca. and McLuhan Media Scientist, Former President/Director, Marshall McLuhan Centre On Global Communications, Toronto, Canada.
FOUND AT MACHINE SPEED, FIXED AT HUMAN SPEED
Can the Volunteers Who Hold Up the Internet Keep Up With AI?
A Graduate Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, writing in Business Insider on October 24, Alistair Barr reports that AI is exposing long-standing software weaknesses. Essential parts of the internet depend on software maintained by small teams or volunteers, even as enormous technology companies rely on it. After all the complaints about “AI slop,” his article turns our attention to the human-made weaknesses already there. Did AI create this danger, or was it there all along?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
The weakness is old. The speed that exposes it is new. We had mistaken the absence of a breakdown for the presence of a sound foundation. We saw the websites, the services, the endless parade of content. We did not see the small teams and volunteers holding essential parts of the structure together. They were ground. Now AI accelerates the search for weaknesses, and the ground becomes figure. What had quietly supported our daily lives suddenly becomes the news. We expected the machine to litter the internet with its mistakes. Here it exposes the mistakes we had already built into it. Breakdown becomes breakthrough when the disturbance makes the environment available for inspection.
Can repair and responsibility keep up with discovery? AI can help find and fix the flaws, but a proposed repair still has to be assessed, tested, and put into use. Machine speed does not remove human responsibility. Nor should volunteers be expected to carry the burden for every company that depends on their work. By accelerating the discovery and possible exploitation of old weaknesses, AI changes the conditions under which the whole system operates. A flaw we could neglect yesterday becomes an emergency today. Asking whether AI created the crisis or merely revealed it therefore does not take us far enough. It reveals the old ground while helping to create a new one. The people maintaining the software were always essential. The acceleration makes our dependence on them harder to overlook. The breakthrough is not simply that the machine has found the flaw. It is that we can finally examine what we had been taking for granted.
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Source: Alistair Barr, “The internet has a human slop problem, and AI is exposing it,” Business Insider, October 24, 2026.
All intellectual property contained herein was conceived, originated and authored exclusively by Nelson S. Thall. Artificial intelligence, aka a pseudo-conscious machine (PCM), was not employed. We hired a stenographer. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
© 2026 Nelson S. Thall. All Rights Reserved.
I can be reached at: nelson@themediumisthemessage.com