Cinemorphosis

Category: Education in the AI Age

  • Posting Ennui and the Rise of Podcast Land

    Posting Ennui and the Rise of Podcast Land

    It’s a small miracle that Kyle Chayka’s New Yorker piece, “Are You Experiencing Posting Ennui?”, wasn’t published five years ago. The argument feels overdue—like an obituary written long after the corpse started to stink. Chayka observes what most of us have already felt in our scrolling bones: the golden era of amateur posting—your breakfast photo, your blurry concert shot, your moody-filtered selfie—has gone the way of the lava lamp and the Livestrong bracelet. What was once dubbed “valorized amateurism” now reads like cringe-inducing narcissism.

    In its place, we have the glossy perfection of influencers and the manic edge of doom content. It’s either an unboxing of a $5,000 Japanese toaster or a clip forecasting economic collapse by Tuesday. There is no middle.

    Some of this is generational. Millennials have aged out of thirst traps and into soft lighting and privacy. Gen Z, including my daughters, treat public self-aggrandizement with the kind of disgust once reserved for timeshare pitches and chain emails. To them, most online posting isn’t just unnecessary—it’s embarrassing.

    Chayka diagnoses the affliction as posting ennui—the existential fatigue of shouting into a void dominated by micro-celebrity algorithms and brand-filtered banality. We used to post in order to share something real; now we post to survive the algorithm’s cold indifference. And the algorithm doesn’t even show our friends anymore. So what’s the point? The casual post is now a ghost of its former self—undone not by controversy, but by irrelevance.

    Then there’s AI, which hangs over this whole landscape like a digital grim reaper. Now, even authenticity feels manufactured. Who made that caption? Who edited that face? Is that even a real voice? The uncanny valley has extended to your Instagram feed.

    Chayka predicts we may be headed toward what he calls Posting Zero—a post-social media state of blissful digital silence, where the compulsion to perform evaporates, and nobody’s life is reduced to a grid of curated lies.

    And honestly? I’m here for it.

    Let the pixelated word salads and beige hotel mirror selfies die a quiet death. Let the algorithm cannibalize itself. But here’s where I’ll add a wrinkle Chayka overlooks: even as posting dies, Podcast Land thrives.

    The podcast isn’t dead. It’s ascendant. While selfies wilt, microphones multiply. I know people—and I count myself among them—who have fully relocated to Podcast Land. Sam Harris talks to me for two hours a day. I fall asleep to history podcasts. I nap with AirPods in. I swing kettlebells to longform interviews about Stoicism and dopamine. I am deep in Podcast Land. I’ve got residency status.

    So yes, let the Instagram Stories dry up. Let the TikTok dances lose their rhythm. But don’t mistake this silence for disengagement. We’re still listening. We’re still absorbing. We’re just done performing.

    Welcome to Posting Zero. Now please keep your voice down—I’m trying to hear what Sam Harris is saying about the AI Takeover.

  • The Cult of Cool: How Fashion Brands Turned Insecurity Into Gold

    The Cult of Cool: How Fashion Brands Turned Insecurity Into Gold

    Three documentaries—White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, Brandy Hellville and the Cult of Fast Fashion, and Trainwreck: The Cult of American Apparel—reveal a sobering truth: some of the most iconic youth fashion brands haven’t just sold clothes; they’ve trafficked in identity, manipulated insecurity, and run full-scale psychological cons dressed up as marketing.

    These brands built empires on seductive illusions—creating tight-knit aspirational worlds where beauty, desirability, and social status were pre-packaged into a logo and sold at a premium. The catch? Entry required blind conformity to a narrow aesthetic, behavioral uniformity, and uncritical loyalty. This wasn’t fashion—it was Groupthink in skinny jeans. And behind it all pulsed the emotional engine of modern consumer culture: FOMO, the fear of being left out, unseen, unchosen.

    White Hot, reviewed by Ben Kenigsberg, focuses on Abercrombie’s marketing of “aspirational frattiness”—a euphemism for white exclusivity wrapped in khaki shorts and cologne. It was a smug, muscular nostalgia trip to a sanitized, all-white upper-class fantasy where thinness, wealth, and preppy arrogance were the unspoken requirements for membership.

    At the helm was CEO Mike Jeffries, a marketing savant whose obsession with aesthetic purity bordered on cultic. Under his reign, the company embraced racist T-shirts, discriminatory hiring practices, and a toxic definition of “cool.” His executive team mirrored his vision so fully they might as well have been in a bunker, smiling and nodding as the walls caught fire. Groupthink didn’t just enable the brand’s rise—it ensured its blindness to its own downfall.

    Why revisit Abercrombie now? Because its story is a pre-Instagram case study in the mechanics of cult marketing: how insecurity is mined, branded, and sold back to consumers at 400% markup. My students in the 90s already saw through the ruse—complaining the shirts fell apart in the armpits within a week. What mattered wasn’t the clothing but the illusion of status sewn into every threadbare seam.

    Ultimately, White Hot offers a rare glimpse of justice: a cool brand undone by its own arrogance, its aesthetic no longer aspirational but pitiful. The Abercrombie collapse isn’t just a business story—it’s a warning. When branding becomes religion and coolness becomes a weapon, consumers become disciples in a theology of self-erasure.

  • College Essay Prompt: The Grift of Belonging—How Fashion Brands Exploit FOMO and Groupthink to Sell Identity

    College Essay Prompt: The Grift of Belonging—How Fashion Brands Exploit FOMO and Groupthink to Sell Identity

    In the documentaries Brandy Hellville and the Cult of Fast Fashion (Max), Trainwreck: The Cult of American Apparel (Max), and White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch (Netflix), we are offered more than a look behind the clothing racks. These films expose how youth fashion brands operate less like retailers and more like grifters, running elaborate psychological cons built on seduction, social pressure, and identity manipulation.

    These brands don’t just sell clothes—they sell belonging, and they weaponize insecurity to do it. Their marketing creates an aspirational world that is carefully curated, hyper-exclusionary, and emotionally intoxicating. Entry into that world requires conformity to a narrow ideal—of beauty, behavior, and belief. At the heart of this system are two powerful social forces: FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and Groupthink.

    While FOMO drives individual consumers to chase relevance and inclusion, Groupthink fuels collective complicity, where employees, customers, and even bystanders suppress doubt, overlook harm, and internalize toxic norms in order to remain inside the circle. Together, these forces create an ecosystem of manipulation where criticism is taboo, difference is erased, and buying in—literally and figuratively—feels like survival.

    Your Task:

    Write a 1,700-word argumentative essay analyzing how Brandy Melville, American Apparel, and Abercrombie & Fitch function as grifters—leveraging FOMO and Groupthink to manufacture desire, manipulate behavior, and enforce social conformity through branding.

    In Your Essay, Consider the Following Questions:

    • How do these brands construct seductive, high-stakes visions of coolness, youth, and exclusivity?
    • In what ways does FOMO—the fear of exclusion—serve as a psychological lever to draw people in and keep them engaged?
    • How does Groupthink operate in these brand environments? How are dissent, difference, or skepticism suppressed in favor of uniformity and loyalty?
    • How do these companies manipulate the illusion of “insider” status—through curated aesthetics, handpicked employees, or social media echo chambers?
    • What grift-like techniques (seduction, manufactured scarcity, social engineering, moral fog) are used to keep both employees and consumers compliant?
    • How do the documentaries use tone, visuals, interviews, and editing to critique—or subtly romanticize—these systems of control?

    Essay Requirements:

    1. Central Argument
     Craft a strong, focused thesis that shows how these fashion brands use FOMO and Groupthink to control image, behavior, and consumption under the guise of self-expression and community.

    2. Comparative Analysis
     Engage with all three documentaries. Look for recurring themes, techniques, and cultural patterns across the case studies.

    3. Use of Specific Evidence
     Draw on key moments from the documentaries—interviews, visual motifs, narrative arcs, and branding materials. Don’t summarize. Analyze.

    4. Secondary Sources
     Incorporate at least two secondary sources (academic articles, media theory, psychology, or cultural criticism) that deepen your understanding of FOMO, Groupthink, manipulation, or consumer identity.

    5. Citations
     Use MLA format consistently for in-text citations and your Works Cited page.

    Bonus Thought-Starters (Optional for Conclusion):

    • Are these brands unusual outliers—or simply more transparent about how capitalism shapes identity?
    • How does Groupthink evolve in online spaces where fashion trends are algorithmically enforced?

    Is it possible to create a fashion culture built on inclusion, authenticity, and critical thinking—or is grift the cost of staying “relevant”?

  • Love in the Time of ChatGPT: On Teaching Writing in the Age of Algorithm

    Love in the Time of ChatGPT: On Teaching Writing in the Age of Algorithm

    In his New Yorker piece, “What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?”, Hua Hsu mourns the slow-motion collapse of the take-home essay while grudgingly admitting there may be a chance—however slim—for higher education to reinvent itself before it becomes a museum.

    Hsu interviews two NYU undergrads, Alex and Eugene, who speak with the breezy candor of men who know they’ve already gotten away with it. Alex admits he uses A.I. to edit all his writing, from academic papers to flirty texts. Research? Reasoning? Explanation? No problem. Image generation? Naturally. He uses ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini—the full polytheistic pantheon of large language models.

    Eugene is no different, and neither are their classmates. A.I. is now the roommate who never pays rent but always does your homework. The justifications come standard: the assignments are boring, the students are overworked, and—let’s face it—they’re more confident with a chatbot whispering sweet logic into their ears.

    Meanwhile, colleges are flailing. A.I. detection software is unreliable, grading is a time bomb, and most instructors don’t have the time, energy, or institutional backing to play academic detective. The truth is, universities were caught flat-footed. The essay, once a personal rite of passage, has become an A.I.-assisted production—sometimes stitched together with all the charm and coherence of a Frankenstein monster assembled in a dorm room at 2 a.m.

    Hsu—who teaches at a small liberal arts college—confesses that he sees the disconnect firsthand. He listens to students in class and then reads essays that sound like they were ghostwritten by Siri with a mild Xanax addiction. And in a twist both sobering and dystopian, students don’t even see this as cheating. To them, using A.I. is simply modern efficiency. “Keeping up with the times.” Not deception—just delegation.

    But A.I. doesn’t stop at homework. It’s styling outfits, dispensing therapy, recommending gadgets. It has insinuated itself into the bloodstream of daily life, quietly managing identity, desire, and emotion. The students aren’t cheating. They’re outsourcing. They’ve handed over the messy bits of being human to an algorithm that never sleeps.

    And so, the question hangs in the air like cigar smoke: Are writing departments quaint relics? Are we the Latin teachers of the 21st century, noble but unnecessary?

    Some professors are adapting. Blue books are making a comeback. Oral exams are back in vogue. Others lean into A.I., treating it like a co-writer instead of a threat. Still others swap out essays for short-form reflections and response journals. But nearly everyone agrees: the era of the generic prompt is over. If your essay question can be answered by ChatGPT, your students already know it—and so does the chatbot.

    Hsu, for his part, doesn’t offer solutions. He leaves us with a shrug.

    But I can’t shrug. I teach college writing. And for me, this isn’t just a job. It’s a love affair. A slow-burning obsession with language, thought, and the human condition. Either you fall in love with reading and writing—or you don’t. And if I can’t help students fall in love with this messy, incandescent process of making sense of the world through words, then maybe I should hang it up, binge-watch Love Is Blind, and polish my résumé.

    Because this isn’t about grammar. This is about soul. And I’m in the love business.

  • FOMO and the Mirage of Desire (a college writing prompt)

    FOMO and the Mirage of Desire (a college writing prompt)

    Begin your essay by clearly defining FOMO—the fear of missing out—as both a cultural phenomenon and a psychological force. Then, in roughly 300 words, write a personal narrative that illustrates a time when FOMO led you into a situation filled with traps, illusions, or regrets. If you’d prefer not to write about your own experience, you may interview a friend or family member and recount their story instead.

    Your narrative should focus on how FOMO clouded your judgment. Describe how it made you ignore red flags, suspend critical thinking, or believe in something too good to be true. Whether it was a product, an experience, a relationship, or a trend, reflect on how the desire to be part of something—or to not be left out—overpowered your better instincts. Show how FOMO doesn’t just spark curiosity or envy; it distorts decision-making and often leads to costly or embarrassing consequences.

    Use vivid details, clear storytelling, and reflective insight. The goal is not just to entertain but to unpack how FOMO can seduce intelligent people into chasing mirages—shiny promises that evaporate upon closer inspection.

  • My Philosophy of Grading in the Age of ChatGPT and Other Open-AI Writing Platforms (a mini manifesto for my syllabus)

    My Philosophy of Grading in the Age of ChatGPT and Other Open-AI Writing Platforms (a mini manifesto for my syllabus)

    Let’s start with this uncomfortable truth: you’re living through a civilization-level rebrand.

    Your world is being reshaped—not gradually, but violently, by algorithms and digital prosthetics designed to make your life easier, faster, smoother… and emptier. The disruption didn’t knock politely. It kicked the damn door in. And now, whether you realize it or not, you’re standing in the debris, trying to figure out what part of your life still belongs to you.

    Take your education. Once upon a time, college was where minds were forged—through long nights, terrible drafts, humiliating feedback, and the occasional breakthrough that made it all worth it. Today? Let’s be honest. Higher ed is starting to look like an AI-driven Mad Libs exercise.

    Some of you are already doing it: you plug in a prompt, paste the results, and hit submit. What you turn in is technically fine—spelled correctly, structurally intact, coherent enough to pass. And your professors? We’re grading these Franken-essays on caffeine and resignation, knowing full well that originality has been replaced by passable mimicry.

    And it’s not just school. Out in the so-called “real world,” companies are churning out bloated, tone-deaf AI memos—soulless prose that reads like it was written by a robot with performance anxiety. Streaming services are pumping out shows written by predictive text. Whole industries are feeding you content that’s technically correct but spiritually dead.

    You are surrounded by polished mediocrity.

    But wait, we’re not just outsourcing our minds—we’re outsourcing our bodies, too. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic are reshaping what it means to be “disciplined.” No more calorie counting. No more gym humiliation. You don’t change your habits. You inject your progress.

    So what does that make you? You’re becoming someone new: someone we might call Ozempified. A user, not a builder. A reactor, not a responder. A person who runs on borrowed intelligence and pharmaceutical willpower. And it works. You’ll be thinner. You’ll be productive. You’ll even succeed—on paper.

    But not as a human being.

    If you over rely on AI, you risk becoming what the gaming world calls a Non-Player Character (NPC)—a background figure, a functionary, a placeholder in your own life. You’ll do your job. You’ll attend your Zoom meetings. You’ll fill out your forms and tap your apps and check your likes. But you won’t have agency. You won’t have fingerprints on anything real.

    You’ll be living on autopilot, inside someone else’s system.

    So here’s the choice—and yes, it is a choice: You can be an NPC. Or you can be an Architect.

    The Architect doesn’t react. The Architect designs. They choose discomfort over sedation. They delay gratification. They don’t look for applause—they build systems that outlast feelings, trends, and cheap dopamine tricks.

    Where others scroll, the Architect shapes.
    Where others echo, they invent.
    Where others obey prompts, they write the code.

    Their values aren’t crowdsourced. Their discipline isn’t random. It’s engineered. They are not ruled by algorithm or panic. Their satisfaction comes not from feedback loops, but from the knowledge that they are building something only they could build.

    So yes, this class will ask more of you than typing a prompt and letting the machine do the rest. It will demand thought, effort, revision, frustration, clarity, and eventually—agency.

    If your writing smacks of AI–the kind of polished mediocrity that will lead you down a road of being a functionary or a Non-Player Character, the grade you receive will reflect that sad fact. On the other hand, if your writing is animated by a strong authorial presence, evidence of an Architect, a person who strives for a life of excellence, self-agency, and pride, your grade will reflect that fact as well. 

  • North Star or Snake Oil? The Search for Purpose in the Age of Bro Influencers (college writing assignment)

    North Star or Snake Oil? The Search for Purpose in the Age of Bro Influencers (college writing assignment)

    Many young men today face a crisis of direction. Without clear boundaries, a sense of purpose, or structured models of discipline and development, they are left to navigate a world that often feels chaotic and hollow. Scholars and cultural critics such as Richard Reeves and Scott Galloway have explored this issue, arguing that the absence of a guiding purpose—or “North Star”—leaves many young men drifting in an existential vacuum. In your first paragraph, summarize the key points made by Reeves, Galloway (find essays or videos of your choosing online), or both about this phenomenon and how it reflects a broader social and psychological struggle.

    In your second paragraph, reflect on someone you know—perhaps even yourself—who has experienced the effects of growing up without a clear sense of purpose. Describe how this lack of direction may create a deep hunger for structure, meaning, or identity. Then explain how this hunger can make young men especially susceptible to so-called “Bro Programs” like those promoted by the Liver King or the creators of The Game Changers. Consider how the promise of transformation, strength, and belonging offered by these influencers might seem like solutions, even as they often exploit vulnerability and suspend critical thinking.

  • Toothpaste, Technology, and the Death of the Luddite Dream

    Toothpaste, Technology, and the Death of the Luddite Dream

    A Luddite, in modern dress, is a self-declared purist who swats at technology like it’s a mosquito threatening their sense of self-agency, quality, and craft. They fear contamination—that somehow the glow of a screen dulls the soul, or that a machine’s hand on the process strips the art from the outcome. It’s a noble impulse, maybe even romantic. But let’s be honest: it’s also doomed.

    Technology isn’t an intruder anymore—it’s the furniture. It’s the toothpaste out of the tube, the guest who showed up uninvited and then installed a smart thermostat. You can’t un-invent it. You can’t unplug the century.

    And I, for one, am a fatalist about it. Not the trembling, dystopian kind. Just… resigned. Technology comes in waves—fire, the wheel, the iPhone, and now OpenAI. Each time, we claim it’s the end of humanity, and each time we wake up, still human, just a bit more confused. You can’t fight the tide with a paper umbrella.

    But here’s where things get tricky: we’re not adapting well. Right now, with AI, we’re in the maladaptive toddler stage—poking it, misusing it, letting it do our thinking while we lie to ourselves about “optimization.” We are staring down a communications tool so powerful it could either elevate our cognitive evolution… or turn us all into well-spoken mannequins.

    We are not guaranteed to adapt well. But we have no choice but to try.

    That struggle—to engage with technology without becoming technology, to harness its speed without losing our depth—is now one of the defining human questions. And the truth is: we haven’t even mapped the battlefield yet.

    There will be factions. Teams. Dogmas. Some will preach integration, others withdrawal. Some will demand toolkits and protocols; others will romanticize silence and slowness. We are on the brink of ideological trench warfare—without even knowing what colors the flags are yet.

    What matters now is not just what we use, but how we use it—and who we become in the process.

    Because whether you’re a fatalist, a Luddite, or a dopamine-chasing cyborg, one thing is clear: this isn’t going away.

    So sharpen your tools—or at least your attitude. You’re already in the arena.

  • Why Reading Is the Last Romantic Act

    Why Reading Is the Last Romantic Act


    If you take my Critical Thinking class, let me set expectations up front: I will not stand at the front of the room and lecture you into becoming an intellectual. That’s not how it works. I can’t command you to read. I can’t install curiosity like a software update.

    What I can tell you is this: the default setting is mediocrity. It’s smooth, seductive, and socially acceptable. The world—especially its algorithmic avatars—is built to exploit that setting. Platforms like OpenAI don’t just offer tools; they offer excuses. They whisper: You don’t have to think. Just prompt.

    You’ll get by on it. You’ll write tolerable essays. You might even land a job—something stable and fluorescent-lit with a breakroom fridge. But if you keep outsourcing your critical thinking to machines and your inner life to streaming platforms, you may slowly congeal into a Non-Player Character: a functionally adequate adult with no self-agency, just dopamine hits from cheap tech and cheaper opinions.

    The world needs thinkers, not task-completers.

    And that’s why I push reading—not as an obligation, but as a doorway to a higher mode of existence. Reading changes the texture of your thoughts. It exposes you to complexity you didn’t ask for and patterns of mind you didn’t inherit. But here’s the inconvenient truth: no one can make you read.

    Reading isn’t a commandment. It’s a love affair—and like any love worth having, it’s irrational, wild, and self-chosen. You don’t read because it’s good for you. You read because at some point a book wrecked you—in the best way possible. It made your brain itch, or your chest tighten, or your worldview crack open like an old floorboard.

    And that’s what I want for you. Not because it makes me feel like a good professor, but because if you don’t fall in love with ideas—on the page, in the margins, in someone else’s wild, flawed sentences—you’ll live a life someone else designed for you.

    And you’ll call it freedom.

  • Ozempification and the Death of the Inner Architect

    Ozempification and the Death of the Inner Architect

    Let’s start with this uncomfortable truth: you’re living through a civilization-level rebrand.

    Your world is being reshaped—not gradually, but violently, by algorithms and digital prosthetics designed to make your life easier, faster, smoother… and emptier. The disruption didn’t knock politely. It kicked the damn door in. And now, whether you realize it or not, you’re standing in the debris, trying to figure out what part of your life still belongs to you.

    Take your education. Once upon a time, college was where minds were forged—through long nights, terrible drafts, humiliating feedback, and the occasional breakthrough that made it all worth it. Today? Let’s be honest. Higher ed is starting to look like an AI-driven Mad Libs exercise.

    Some of you are already doing it: you plug in a prompt, paste the results, and hit submit. What you turn in is technically fine—spelled correctly, structurally intact, coherent enough to pass. And your professors? We’re grading these Franken-essays on caffeine and resignation, knowing full well that originality has been replaced by passable mimicry.

    And it’s not just school. Out in the so-called “real world,” companies are churning out bloated, tone-deaf AI memos—soulless prose that reads like it was written by a robot with performance anxiety. Streaming services are pumping out shows written by predictive text. Whole industries are feeding you content that’s technically correct but spiritually dead.

    You are surrounded by polished mediocrity.

    But wait, we’re not just outsourcing our minds—we’re outsourcing our bodies, too. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic are reshaping what it means to be “disciplined.” No more calorie counting. No more gym humiliation. You don’t change your habits. You inject your progress.

    So what does that make you? You’re becoming someone new: someone we might call Ozempified. A user, not a builder. A reactor, not a responder. A person who runs on borrowed intelligence and pharmaceutical willpower. And it works. You’ll be thinner. You’ll be productive. You’ll even succeed—on paper.

    But not as a human being.

    You risk becoming what the gaming world calls a Non-Player Character (NPC)—a background figure, a functionary, a placeholder in your own life. You’ll do your job. You’ll attend your Zoom meetings. You’ll fill out your forms and tap your apps and check your likes. But you won’t have agency. You won’t have fingerprints on anything real.

    You’ll be living on autopilot, inside someone else’s system.

    So here’s the choice—and yes, it is a choice: You can be an NPC. Or you can be an Architect.

    The Architect doesn’t react. The Architect designs. They choose discomfort over sedation. They delay gratification. They don’t look for applause—they build systems that outlast feelings, trends, and cheap dopamine tricks.

    Where others scroll, the Architect shapes.
    Where others echo, they invent.
    Where others obey prompts, they write the code.

    Their values aren’t crowdsourced. Their discipline isn’t random. It’s engineered. They are not ruled by algorithm or panic. Their satisfaction comes not from feedback loops, but from the knowledge that they are building something only they could build.

    So yes, this class will ask more of you than typing a prompt and letting the machine do the rest. It will demand thought, effort, revision, frustration, clarity, and eventually—agency.

    Because in the age of Ozempification, becoming an Architect isn’t a flex—it’s a survival strategy.

    There is no salvation in a life run on autopilot.

    You’re here. So start building.