Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • AI—Superpower for Learning or NPC Machine?

    AI—Superpower for Learning or NPC Machine?

    Essay Assignment:

    Background

    Students describe AI as a superpower for speed and convenience that leaves them with glossy, identical prose—clean, correct, and strangely vacant. Many say it “talks a lot without saying much,” flattens tone into AI-speak, and numbs them with sameness. The more they rely on it, the less they think; laziness becomes a habit, creativity atrophies, and personal voice is lost and replaced by AI-speak. Summaries replace books, notes replace listening, and polished drafts replace real inquiry. The result feels dehumanizing: work that reads like it was written by everyone and no one.

    Students also report a degradation in their education. Higher learning has become boring. Speed, making deadlines, and convenience are its key features, and the AI arms race pushes reluctant students to use AI just to keep pace. 

    The temptation to use AI because all the other students are using it rises with fatigue—copy-paste now, promise depth later—and “later” never arrives. Some call this “cognitive debt”: quick wins today, poorer thinking tomorrow. 

    Some students confess that using AI makes them feel like Non Player Characters in a video game. They’re not growing in their education. They have succumbed to apathy and cynicism as far as their education is concerned. 

    Other students admit that AI has stolen their attention and afflicted them with cognitive debt. Cognitive debt is the mental deficit we accumulate when we let technology do too much of our thinking for us. Like financial debt, it begins as a convenience—offloading memory, calculation, navigation, or decision-making to apps and algorithms—but over time it exacts interest in the form of diminished focus, weakened recall, and blunted problem-solving. Cognitive debt describes the gradual outsourcing of core mental functions—attention, critical reasoning, and creativity—to digital systems that promise efficiency but erode self-reliance. The result is a paradox: as our tools grow “smarter,” we grow more dependent on them to compensate for the very skills they dull. In short, cognitive debt is the quiet cost of convenience: each time we let technology think for us, we lose a little of our capacity to think for ourselves. 

    Yet the picture isn’t purely bleak. Several students say AI can be a lifeline: a steady partner for collaborating, brainstorming, organizing, or language support—especially for non-native speakers—when it’s used as a tutor rather than a ghostwriter. 

    When used deliberately rather than passively, AI writing tools can sharpen critical thinking and creativity by acting as intellectual sparring partners. They generate ideas, perspectives, and counterarguments that challenge students to clarify their own reasoning instead of settling for first thoughts. Rather than accepting the AI’s output, discerning writers critique, refine, and reshape AI writing tools—an exercise in metacognition that strengthens their analytical muscles. The process becomes less about outsourcing thought and more about editing thought—transforming AI from a shortcut into a mirror that reflects the quality, logic, and originality of one’s own mind.

    When used correctly, AI jump-starts drafts and levels the playing field; leaned on heavily, it erases voice, short-circuits struggle, and replaces learning with mindless convenience

    Question You Are Addressing in Your Essay

    But can AI be used effectively, or does our interaction with it, like any other product in the attention economy, reveal that it is designed to sink its talons into us and colonize our brains so that we become less like people with self-agency and more like Non Player Characters whose free will has been taken over by the machines? 

    Writing Prompt

    Write a 1,700-word argumentative essay that answers the above question. Be sure to have a counterargument and rebuttal section. Use four credible sources to support your claim. 

    Suggested Outline

    Paragraph 1: Write a 300-word personal reflection about the way you or someone you know uses AI effectively. Show how the person’s engagement with AI resulted in sharper critical thinking and creativity. Give a specific example of the project that revealed this process. 

    Paragraph 2: Write a 300-word personal reflection about the way you or someone you know abuses AI in a way that trades critical thinking with convenience.  How has AI changed the brain and the person’s approach to education? Write a detailed narrative that dramatizes these changes. 

    Paragraph 3: Write a thesis with 4 mapping components that will point to the topics in your supporting paragraphs.  

    Paragraphs 4-7: Your supporting paragraphs.

    Paragraphs 8 and 9: Your counterargument and rebuttal paragraphs.

    Paragraph 10: Your conclusion, a dramatic restatement of your thesis or a reiteration of a striking image you created in your introduction. 

    Your final page: MLA Works Cited with a minimum of 4 sources. 

  • Discontinued at the Light

    Discontinued at the Light

    At a red light yesterday, ferrying my daughters home from school, my car-spotter’s radar pinged. I scan traffic the way birders scan treelines, always hoping for the rare specimen with that elusive look. Something unusual flashed past—and in a beat I clocked it: a 2023 Nissan Maxima, the model’s final year. A voice in my head muttered, “Discontinued.” The word tolled like a small funeral bell, as if it weren’t about the Nissan at all but about me. You’re nearly sixty-four. You are discontinued.

    I refuse to go out like that. Aging is one thing; embalming yourself in morbid commentary is another. I don’t want to spend the next twenty years muttering “discontinued” at traffic, toast, or mirrors. That’s not wisdom. That’s a tantrum with better vocabulary.

    Let’s call morbidity what it is: the childish whining of a narcissist. Who escapes aging? Only the people who don’t get the privilege. Getting old means you’ve been alive for a long time and you’re still here. The refrain—“Discontinued,” “You’re washed up,” “It’s all over”—isn’t just bleak; it’s lugubrious, a mental ailment missing from the DSM-5-TR. Fine, I’ll name it myself: narcissistic morbidity. You moan about your age until you bore everyone around you, including the poor soul trapped inside your skull. You act like you invented birthdays.

    What makes my case extra ridiculous is that I’m in decent shape. I work out. I eat a high-protein diet. Yes, I’m fifteen pounds over fighting weight, but I don’t look like a cautionary tale. I should be grateful, robust, hearty, glad. And yet the diseased little sportscaster in my cranium keeps calling the game: I’ll be driving my daughters, spot a car out of production, and use it as my cue to point at myself—“Discontinued.”

    If I were a comedian, this would be a layup: a man in his sixties drowning in self-pity, heckled by his own internal voice. There’s material for days. But punchlines only work if you know your heckler’s origin story.

    Here’s the reveal: the voice isn’t new. I’ve had it since childhood, a fog machine that kept me holed up drawing and reading while calamity forecasts scrolled across my mind. “The circus will be closed. A lion will escape. There’ll be a riot. Let’s not go. Don’t worry about me; I’ll entertain myself.” “The ice-cream place won’t have my flavor. Let’s stay home; I’ll eat cereal.” “If I throw a party, no one will come. Cancel my birthday this year—and the years after. Who needs a birthday anyway?”

    My gloomy companion even had a cartoon avatar: Glum, the tiny pessimist from The Adventures of Gulliver, late ’60s. Dressed in green, eternally peckish, and permanently resigned—“It’s hopeless.” “We’ll never make it.” “It’ll never work.” “We’re doomed.” He was my first soulmate: snack-oriented, catastrophe-forward.

    Back then TV specialized in a certain archetype—the Dead Weight Character—the one who drags the mission, sandbags morale, and sabotages the plan by simply existing. Land of the Giants fielded Commander Alexander Fitzhugh, a selfish criminal who once gnawed a giant scientist’s rabbit pellets and urged his tiny crew to feast with him because of “nutrition,” a word he repeated over and over as he consumed rabbit pellets. They saw humiliation; he saw survival. Dead Weight comes in many flavors.

    And then there was the greatest Dead Weight of them all: Dr. Zachary Smith of Lost in Space, immortalized by Jonathan Harris, patron saint of theatrical dread. His alliterative insults aimed at the Robot taught me that language could purr, hiss, and bite. Dr. Smith is, frankly, the reason I went to college and became an English major. If you’re going to sabotage a mission, at least do it with diction.

    So if I must live with an inner prophet of doom, I might as well upgrade his elocution. If the voice insists on heckling—calling me discontinued at stoplights and breakfast tables—then give it rhetorical muscle and meter. Let it speak in crafted sentences, not groans. Aging will still arrive right on schedule, but at least the narration won’t be dead weight.

  • The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz (piano excerpt)

    The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz (piano excerpt)

    When I was five, I watched The Monkees episode “I Was a 99-Pound Weakling.” Micky Dolenz, tired of sand in the face, starts lifting to steal back his dream girl from beach tyrant Dave Draper—Bulk himself. He returns a walking bicep, ready for triumph, and finds the blonde beauty arm hooked through a new idol: a skinny intellectual reading Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Micky’s expression does the math—pecs don’t beat paperbacks—and the lesson welded itself to my skull. Many years later, I’d write a piano composition, “The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz.” What follows is an excerpt from that longer work. 


  • In Defense of Watching True Crime

    In Defense of Watching True Crime

     A couple of weeks ago my wife DMed me an Instagram reel: one reviewer, dozens of true-crime docuseries. I pressed play and fell down the shaft. I binged everything—some episodes like gravel in the throat, others slick as a thriller—and realized I was hooked the way novels used to hook me: late nights, one more chapter, living on cliffhangers and bad coffee.

    A year ago I would’ve dismissed the whole genre as tabloid embalming fluid: pain turned into programming. That was the lazy take, the one you reach for when you haven’t looked long enough. The better work in this space isn’t cheap; it’s meticulous. At its best, it has social value.

    Watch the detectives. The strong series showcase minds like scalpels—profilers knitting together motive and method, investigators reconstructing a life from fibers and timestamps. The good ones don’t myth-make; they interrogate reality. Their craft can outstrip a screenwriter because the stakes aren’t applause—they’re truth and, sometimes, prison.

    Credit the pursuit, too. The suspect is slippery, the evidence thin, and still the chase continues—phone records, shoe tread, the geography of a lie. You can see how the work rewires them. They read a face like a ledger. They separate panic from performance. They carry that calibration into ordinary life, for better and worse.

    But the badge isn’t a halo. Some episodes show coercive interrogations, tunnel vision, a theory clung to past its sell-by date while exculpatory facts stack up in the corner. Those missteps belong in the record. A genre that can praise tenacity should also indict certainty when it curdles.

    What keeps me watching, beyond craft and cautionary tales, is the way communities assemble under pressure—search parties in neon vests, casseroles and candles, volunteers mapping creek beds while the cameras spin. These stories remind you how much ordinary goodness survives the worst day a town can have.

    Then there are the perpetrators, often undone by their own theater. The vanity is operatic: cryptic boasts, trophies kept, shoplifting while on the run because entitlement feels bulletproof. Not all are violent; some are artists of fraud whose lies cascade through bank accounts, marriages, and nervous systems. The harm is quieter, not smaller.

    The hardest stretch is the parents—the permanent gray in the eyes, the architecture of a life collapsed on one missing pillar. They stay decent, they organize scholarships and vigils, they become advocates—but you can see the subtraction. A part of them is gone, and the camera can’t restore it.

    I do feel the moral splinter: I’m consuming narratives built from someone else’s worst night. There’s a voice that hisses, How dare you. And a voice that answers: Then look harder. Don’t watch for spectacle; watch to learn—about procedure, about predation, about how to be a better neighbor and a sharper juror. The difference between voyeur and witness is attention and intent.

    So here I am, converted, with reservations. The good series map the borderlands between justice and error, courage and vanity, community and collapse. They don’t restore innocence; they invoice it. If I keep watching, it’s because the genre—at its best—insists on seeing clearly, and because clarity, though it stings, is a civic skill worth practicing.

  • Latte Palace at the End of the Earth

    Latte Palace at the End of the Earth

    Last night I dreamed that my mother and her family—gone twenty years and counting—came back to life as if they’d only stepped outside for air. No trumpet blast, no spectral fog. Just my aunt’s kitchen in Los Angeles: sunlight on the vinyl, the smell of coffee and waffles, forks tapping plates like tiny hammers. My mother kissed my cheek the way she used to, a quick press and a pat—quality control for the living.

    Between bites of waffles and scrambled eggs my grandfather announced, in the same voice he used for weekend errands, that we were driving to a mansion in Alaska. He said “mansion” as if it were around the corner, not at the end of the continent and a climate shift away. Heads nodded. Coats appeared. Dream logistics are ruthless: one cut and we were already rolling, my grandfather at the wheel of a weary sedan, a caravan of relatives stacking up behind us like punctuation.

    The city dissolved. Los Angeles flattened into a silver slab, then a bright white riddle. Snow stitched itself across the windshield; the tires made that soft, murderous hush you hear on ice. My grandfather drove with cheerful indifference to physics, tapping the wheel to music only he could hear. I watched the road bloom and vanish and thought: so this is how resurrection handles transportation—no chariot of fire, just black ice and a bench seat.

    We crested a hill and there it was: a palace poured in espresso and cream, a latte-colored sprawl with too many windows and the kind of confidence money wears when it doesn’t expect to be told no. Someone in the back called it “Politburo chic,” and the phrase snapped into place—midcentury power with an indoor fur policy. The façade implied heated floors and quiet compromises. The roofline looked like it had read every memo and approved half of them.

    What struck me wasn’t that my family had returned; it was how casual I felt about it. My mother was alive. My grandfather was alive. Aunts and uncles murmured behind me, inventorying snacks, debating rooms. And I sat there with the calm of a man who receives an impossible package on his porch and signs without reading the label. Maybe grief is software and last night the update finally took.

    We idled at the circular drive while the house regarded us with its many eyes. I tried to imagine the foyer: the smell of wax and cold marble, a staircase that curves with the arrogance of a purebred. My brain kept blurring the picture like a censor’s bar. I could sense chandeliers, a staff of refined butlers. 

    But I woke up before entering the mansion. Now more than anything, I feel tantalized by what was inside that mansion. Now I’ll never know. 

  • 30 Student Responses to the Question “What Effect Does Using AI Have on Us?”

    30 Student Responses to the Question “What Effect Does Using AI Have on Us?”

    Prompt:

    Begin your essay with a 400-word personal reflection. This can be about your own experience or that of someone you interview. Focus on how using AI writing tools—like ChatGPT—has changed your habits when it comes to thinking, writing, or getting work done.

    From there, explore the deeper implications of relying on this technology. What happens when AI makes everything faster and easier? Does that convenience come at a cost? Reflect on the way AI can lull us into mental passivity—how it tempts us to hand over the hard work of thinking in exchange for quick results.

    Ask yourself: What kind of writing does AI actually produce? What are its strengths? Where does it fall short? And more importantly, what effect does using AI have on us? Does it sharpen our thinking, or make us more dependent? Do we risk becoming less original, less engaged—more like passive consumers of technology than active creators? As this process continues, are we becoming Non-Player Characters instead of humans with self-agency? Explain. 

    Finally, consider the trade-offs. Are we gaining a tool, or giving something up? Are we turning into characters in a Black Mirror episode—so enamored with convenience that we forget what it means to do the work ourselves? Use concrete examples and honest reflection to dig into the tension between human effort and technological assistance.

    Student Responses to Using AI tools for writing and education:

    1. “I am impressed with the speed and convenience but the final product is overly polished and hollow.”
    2. “I am amazed by the speed of production but all the sentences look the same. Honestly, it’s numbing after a while.”
    3. “The writing is frustrating because it talks a lot without saying much.”
    4. “I don’t have to think as much,” “I save time not having to think” and “I get used to this laziness.”
    5.  “AI writes better than I do, but it doesn’t have my unique voice.”
    6. “AI is like a steady writing partner, always there to help me and bounce off ideas, but lately I realize the more I depend on it, the less I challenge myself to think critically.”
    7. “Thanks to AI, I stopped reading books. Now I just get summaries of books. Now I get the information, but I no longer have a deep understanding.”
    8. “AI helps me take notes and organize ideas but it doesn’t help me truly listen, understand someone’s emotions, show empathy, or deal with uncertainty.”
    9. “AI writing is smooth and structured, but people aren’t. Real thought and emotions are messy. That’s where growth happens.”
    10. “When I’m tired, AI tempts me to just copy and paste it, and the more I use it in this manner, the stronger the temptation becomes.”
    11. “AI makes things really easy for me, but then I ask myself, ‘Am I really learning?’”
    12. “What started out as magical now has become woven into the fabric of daily life. Education has become boring.”
    13. “AI is a production superpower the way it inspires and organizes ideas, but I find over time I become more lazy, less creative, and rely on AI way too much.”
    14. “AI degrades the way we write and think. I can tell when something is written in AI-speak, without real human tone, and the whole experience is dehumanizing.”
    15. “I love AI because it saved me. I am not a native English speaker, so I rely on AI to help with my English. It’s like having a reliable tutor always by my side. But over time, I have become lazy and don’t have the same critical thinking I used to have. I see myself turning into an NPC.”
    16. “I have to use AI because the other students are using it. I should have the same advantages they have. But education has become less creative and more boring. It’s all about ease and convenience now.”
    17. “I used to love AI because it made me confident and motivated me to get my assignments in on my time. But over time, I lost my voice. Now everything is written with an AI voice.”
    18. “The more I use AI, the less I think things through on my own. I cut off my own thinking and just ask ChatGPT. It’s fast, but it kills creativity.”
    19. “When faced with a writing assignment and a blank mind, I would start things with ChatGPT, and it got things going. It wasn’t perfect, but I had something to start with, and I found this comforting. But as I got more confident with ChatGPT, I became less and less engaged with the education process. My default became convenience and nothing more.”
    20. “AI writing is so common, we don’t even ask if the writing is real anymore. No one cares. AI has made us all apathetic. We are NPCs in a video game.”
    21. “AI is a great tool because it helps everyone regardless of how much money we have, but it kills creativity and individuality. We’ve lost the pleasure of education. AI has become a mirror of our own superficial existence.”
    22. “When I first discovered AI to do my writing, I felt I had hit the jackpot, but then after taking so many shortcuts, I lost the love for what I was doing.”
    23. “It’s stressful to see a cursor blinking on a blank page, but thanks to AI, I can get something off and running quickly. The problem is that the words are clean and correct, but also generic. There is no depth to human emotion.”
    24. “I’ve been using AI since high school. A lot of its writing is useless. It doesn’t make sense. It’s inaccurate. It’s poorly written. It’s dehumanizing.”
    25. “AI is basically Google on steroids. I used to dread writing, but AI has pushed me to get my work done. The writing is polished but too perfect to be human writing. The biggest danger is that humans become too reliant on it.”
    26. “I barely use AI. It makes school trivial. It’s just another social media disease like TikTok, these streaming platforms that kill our attention spans and turn us into zombies.”
    27. “AI first felt like having the cheat code to get through school. But then I realized it puts us into a cognitive debt. We lose our tenacity and critical thinking.”
    28. “I am a mother and an avid reader, and I absolutely refuse to use AI for any purpose. AI can’t replace real writing, reading, or journaling. AI is a desecration of education and personal growth.”
    29. At first, I used AI to get ideas, but over time I realized I was no longer thinking. I wasn’t struggling to come up with what I really thought or what I really wanted to argue about. AI silenced who I really was.”
    30. “Using AI to do the heavy lifting doesn’t sit right with me, so I programmed my AI to tutor and guide me through studying, rather than using it as a crutch by providing prompts and tools to help me understand assignments.While my experience with AI has shown me its full capabilities, I’ve also learned that too much of it can ruin the entire experience, in this case, the learning experience.”
  • The Engagement Meter Hits 10 with my AI Writing Assignment

    The Engagement Meter Hits 10 with my AI Writing Assignment

    Every semester, I pull out my Engagement Meter and see what topics make my students’ neurons fire. This term, in freshman composition (C1000), the essays on “bro influencers manipulating young men” and “fast fashion manipulating young women” barely twitched the needle—a flat 3 on the Engagement Scale. Things improved when we compared Frederick Douglass’s memoir with the “Sunken Place” in Get Out, which jumped to a 7.

    In my critical thinking class (C1001), we hit an 8 when students explored how GLP-1 weight-loss drugs prove that self-control is no longer a moral virtue but a technical setting. They saw that biology and convenience have replaced grit and willpower.

    But the assignment that detonated the Engagement Meter—a clean, seismic 10—was the essay on AI. Students wrote about how AI tools make life easier while quietly siphoning their agency, originality, and voice. They confessed that “helpful” algorithms were making them sound polished but hollow, frictionless but forgettable.

    I call these scaffolded assignments “building blocks.” After seven years of teaching them, I’ve never seen such intensity. The AI essays weren’t just reflections; they were confessions—students realizing that technology isn’t merely reshaping their writing but their sense of self.

    The irony? The more they wrote about AI replacing them, the more human they sounded.

  • The Temu-ization of Everything—Again

    The Temu-ization of Everything—Again

    I’m reading Cory Doctorow’s freshly minted Enshittification. Early on, he revisits Facebook circa 2010: the honey pot that lured billions before curdling into a slurry of compulsion loops, conspiracy gristle, and industrial-scale data mining. It’s sharp, it’s punchy—and it gave me déjà vu. Then my stomach dropped: I like the coinage, I like the thesis that we’re living through the Enshittocene, but the insights feel old. Jaron Lanier mapped a lot of this terrain eight years ago in Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, a book I’ve taught over the last seven years.

    Doctorow’s Amazon chapter triggers the same shrug. The platform seduces us with convenience, tightens its talons, and gradually morphs from glossy marketplace into Temu-adjacent bazaar. True, and thoroughly litigated across a thousand essays and think pieces. We’ve been warned about the house always winning; we don’t need another tour of the casino floor.

    What I wanted—and didn’t get—was a deeper dive into the anthropology of the rot. Black Mirror’s “Nosedive” or “Joan Is Awful” doesn’t just wag a finger at platforms; it autopsies the psyche and the systems. New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka nails the gap: Enshittification is “pointed and efficient,” but reads like “professional blogging extended for three-hundred-plus pages,” leaving you hungry for a larger cultural x-ray that goes beyond the usual suspects.

    To be fair, packaging a messy discourse into one memorable term matters; not everyone read Lanier or binged Brooker. Doctorow’s snark has its uses. A clean label can move an idea from seminar rooms to dinner tables. But once you’ve named the disease, the next move isn’t to repeat symptoms; it’s to map vectors, power centers, and countermeasures with fresh cases outside the Big Tech pentagon.

    So yes: I love the word. But the book left me underwhelmed. Doctorow has given us the bumper sticker; I’m still waiting for the field manual. The Enshittocene doesn’t need another catalog of platform sins—it needs a blueprint that shows how to break the flywheels, where policy and design can bite, and why our appetites keep refilling the trough. Name the era, sure. Now show us how to survive it—and, if we’re lucky, how to end it.

  • State of the Misalignment Situation

    State of the Misalignment Situation

    I had hoped my blog, Cinemorphosis, would feed my video essays—serve as a compost heap of half-baked thoughts that could later bloom into something cinematic and worthy of making video essays. Instead, the blog has swallowed the energy that once went into my videos. What was meant to be a support system has become a rival ecosystem. The crossover I imagined—the blog fueling the videos and the videos enriching the blog—never happened. It turns out writing and filming come from different parts of the brain, and those parts refuse to share the same neural conference room.

    Friends say, “Don’t sweat it, McMahon. Just lean into the blog and let the videos go.” Easy advice for people who aren’t haunted by the specter of irrelevance. I can’t shake the feeling that the video essays keep me sharper—more visible, more alive. The blog satisfies my mind; the camera keeps me from turning into dust.

    Sam Harris once said he can spend five years writing a book, agonizing over edits and the publishing gauntlet, only to reach a few thousand readers—if he’s lucky. Meanwhile, a one-hour podcast can reach millions overnight, and snippets of it go viral before the author’s espresso cools. That line haunts me. The medium matters. The way we reach people has become part of the message.

    I see the same logic in my own small way. A blog post I’m proud of might earn a few dozen engagements. A decent video essay? Thousands of views, maybe more. But numbers only tell part of the story. The real draw is the vitality the videos demand—something performative, almost athletic. When I’m on camera, I feel like I’m “getting my reps in,” keeping mentally limber. The blog is therapy; the videos are training.

    Still, there’s a fine line between vitality and vanity. Part of me believes the videos keep me youthful, engaged, even relevant. Another part suspects it’s all just a resistance workout against mortality. Staying fit is one thing; refusing to age gracefully is another. Desperation doesn’t wear well on men over sixty, even under good lighting.

    So maybe writing suits me better now. Maybe the written word is the right pace for a man learning to accept that his eyesight, patience, and tech literacy are all in slow retreat. Maybe I should only return to video when I have something worth saying—something that isn’t just a performance of endurance.

    Which brings me to the real question: what do I still have to contribute?

    For over a decade, my YouTube channel orbited around my watch obsession. That obsession gradually narrowed until it became monastic—just diver watches, all on straps. I convinced myself that a collection larger than seven would doom me to spiritual ruin. I also stopped flipping watches like a Wall Street day trader, deciding it was bad for my mental health. That slowdown siphoned the manic energy that used to fuel my videos. The creative rush didn’t vanish—it simply rerouted into blog posts about my newest fixation: alignment. Or more precisely, misalignment.

    Because if I’m honest, I feel increasingly out of sync with the modern world. I adapt to new technology at the pace of continental drift. TikTok bewilders me. Smartphones offend my thumbs. Driving at night now feels like a scene from Apocalypse Now. My relevance, visibility, and patience are fading in a culture that worships youth and touchscreens.

    My anxieties about self-worth and mortality are now on the front burner, while watch collecting—the “Watch Potency Principle,” the “wrist-rotation anxiety”—has been moved to the back burner where it is simmering to a lukewarm stew.

    To illustrate my current state: two weeks ago, I bought a new LG OLED TV, which was fine—until I broke two Samsungs in one day trying to move them. I manhandled the first 55-inch like it was a kettlebell, frying half its pixels in a single jerk. Then I jammed my thumb straight through the second screen while relocating it from my daughter’s room. My wife, the household adult, had to carry the new Roku replacement into our bedroom as I stood there looking like a Neanderthal who’d just discovered electricity—and promptly electrocuted himself.

    My war with technology didn’t end there. The new garage door opener came with instructions written in a dialect of cruel mockery. The installer vanished without explaining how to sync it with my phone, so my wife once again had to step in and figure it out. Now I open the garage door through an app, and every time I hear the alert that the door is moving, I step back in awe—half-terrified, half-mesmerized—like a caveman who’s just invented fire.

    I feel both too old for this world and too infantile to function in it. A man-baby marveling at his gadgets, bewildered by his own house. Think about that. My house has become a museum for technology of the future while I wander through it like a mesmerized tourist. My mouth is agape and my daughters say to me, “Relax, Dad, this is our house.” I respond by saying, “No it’s not. It’s a museum of strange and wonderful things that I don’t know how to use.” 

    These are the moments that give me content for my blog Cinemorphosis. I post almost daily, while it takes me weeks to metabolize these experiences into something coherent enough for a video essay. Writing helps me think; filming helps me pretend I’m still current.

    So that’s my current state of affairs. This channel used to be State of the Watch Collection. Now it’s more like State of the Man Who Can’t Sync His Garage Door Opener.

  • The Eight Ages of –ification

    The Eight Ages of –ification

    From Conformification to Enshittification: how every decade found a fresh way to ruin itself.

    The Age of Decline, Accelerated

    In Enshittification, Cory Doctorow argues that our decline isn’t gradual—it’s accelerating. Everything is turning to crap simultaneously, like civilization performing a synchronized swan dive into the sewer.

    The book’s subtitle, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, suggests that degradation is now both universal and, somehow, fixable.

    Doctorow isn’t the first prophet to glimpse the digital abyss. Jaron Lanier, Jonathan Haidt, and other cultural Cassandras have long warned about the stupidification that comes from living inside the algorithmic aquarium. We swim in the same recycled sludge of dopamine and outrage, growing ever duller while congratulating ourselves on being “connected.”

    This numbness—the ethical anesthesia of the online age—makes us tolerate more crappiness from our corporate overlords. As the platforms enshittify, we invent our own little coping rituals. Some of us chant words with –ion suffixes as if they were incantations, linguistic ASMR to soothe our digital despair.

    When I saw Ozempic and ChatGPT promising frictionless perfection—weight loss without effort, prose without struggle—I coined Ozempification: the blissful surrender of self-agency to the cult of convenience.

    Now there’s an entire liturgy of –ifications, each describing a new layer of rot:

    • Enshittification — Doctorow’s coinage for the systematic decay of platforms that once worked.
    • Crapification / Encrappification — The transformation of quality into garbage in the name of efficiency.
    • Gamification — Turning life into a perpetual contest of meaningless points and dopamine rewards.
    • Attentionification — Reducing every act of expression to a plea for clicks.
    • Misinformationfication — When truth becomes a casualty of virality.
    • Ozempification — Replacing effort with optimization until we resemble our own avatars.
    • Stupidification — The great numbing: scrolling ourselves into idiocy while our neurons beg for mercy.

    But the crown jewel of this lexicon remains Enshittification—Doctorow’s diagnosis so precise that the American Dialect Society crowned it Word of the Year for 2023.

    Still, I’d like to push back on Doctorow’s suggestion that our current malaise is unique. Yes, technology accelerates decay, but each era has had its own pathology—its signature form of cultural rot. We’ve been creatively self-destructing for decades.

    So, let’s place Enshittification in historical context. Behold The Eight Ages of –ification: a timeline of civilization’s greatest hits in decline.

    1950s — Conformification

    The age of white fences and beige minds. America sold sameness as safety. Individuality was ironed flat, and television became the nation’s priest. Conformification is the fantasy that security comes from imitation—a tranquilized suburbia of identical dreams in identical ranch homes.

    1960s — Psychedelification

    When rebellion became transcendence through chemistry. Psychedelification was the belief that consciousness expansion could topple empires, if only the colors were bright enough. The result: self-absorption in tie-dye and the illusion that enlightenment could be mass-produced.

    1970s — Lustification

    A Freudian carnival of polyester and pelvic thrusts. From Deep Throat to Studio 54, desire was liberation and the body was both altar and marketplace. Lustification crowned pleasure as the last remaining ideology.

    1980s — Greedification

    When morality was replaced by market share. The decade baptized ambition in champagne and cocaine. Greedification is the conviction that money cleanses sin and that a Rolex can double as a rosary.

    1990s — Ironification

    The decade of smirks. Sincerity was cringe; irony was armor. Ironification made detachment the new intelligence: nothing believed, everything quoted, and feelings outsourced to sarcasm.

    2000s — Digitification

    Humanity uploaded itself. Digitification was the mass migration to the screen—the decade of Facebook envy, email anxiety, and dopamine disguised as connection. We stopped remembering and started refreshing.

    2010s — Influencification

    When everyone became a brand. Influencification turned authenticity into a business model and experience into content. The self became a product to be optimized for engagement.

    2020s — Enshittification

    Doctorow’s masterstroke: the final form of digital decay. Enshittification is what happens when every system optimizes for extraction—when user, worker, and platform all drown in the same algorithmic tar pit. It’s the exhaustion of meaning itself, disguised as progress.

    Epilogue: The 2030s — Reification

    If trends continue, we’ll soon enter Reification: a desperate attempt to make the unreal feel real again. After decades of filters, feeds, and frictionless fakery, we’ll long for something tangible—until, inevitably, we commodify that too.

    History repeats itself—only this time with better Wi-Fi.