Cinemorphosis

Category: technology

  • How Not To Turn Into a Pillar of Salt in the Internet Age

    How Not To Turn Into a Pillar of Salt in the Internet Age

    Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation didn’t teach me anything comforting. It confirmed what I already suspected: addiction isn’t a habit; it’s a ravenous creature with a bottomless stomach. The more you feed it, the louder it howls. It storm-raids your mental vaults, looting the energy you need for your work, your relationships, and your sense of self. And your family feels the theft—spiritually, emotionally, domestically. Addiction doesn’t just eat you; it nibbles at everyone near you.

    Even with self-awareness, even with a clear understanding of triggers and a sincere desire for freedom, you don’t get a clean fight. The casino is rigged. Modern dopamine doesn’t drip from a bottle or a needle—it streams through fiber-optic cable. Our phones and laptops, the same devices we use to create, to earn, and to connect, also serve as the slot machines we keep in our pockets. The house never closes, and the drinks are free.

    Lembke tells us to avoid triggers, but what do you do when your trigger is baked into your professional life, disguised as “productivity” and “connection”? Avoidance becomes theater. You can only tiptoe around the swamp for so long before some lonely hour arrives, and curiosity knocks like an old vice with freshly polished shoes. A hit of self-pity, a twitch of boredom, a flicker of FOMO—and suddenly you’re back in the feed trough, gulping pixels like syrup. The crash comes fast: shame, exhaustion, vows of purity. Then the next impulse, the next relapse, the same ancient ritual. Lot’s wife didn’t want to look back; she simply couldn’t resist. Neither can we, sometimes. Salt is surprisingly modern.

    So the task becomes stark: learn to live in this world without turning yourself into a monument of regret. Train your gaze forward. Build the strength to resist that backward glance. The modern life mission isn’t to slay the demon—he regenerates too easily. It’s to starve him, inch by inch, while protecting the scarce, bright energy that makes you human.

    Becoming a human being is a high-stakes game. Learning to live a life in which you don’t become a pillar of salt is one of life’s chief endeavors.

  • The Art of Humble Submission

    The Art of Humble Submission

    When you’re a writer, you draft, revise, despair, polish again, and then perform an ancient ritual of humility: you submit. Whether your offering goes to a magazine, an agent, or a publisher, the act is the same—a small bow before the gatekeepers. In On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche seizes on this word—submission—as the perfect metaphor for the writer’s life: a posture equal parts hope and humiliation. “Writers live in a state of submission,” he observes. “Submission means rejection. Rejection is the condition of the practice of submission, which is the practice of writing.” And digital culture has intensified the ordeal. With online forms and instant attachments, rejection arrives at industrial scale. A determined writer can now collect hundreds of dismissals a week. Ninety-nine percent will never land a deal, and those who do may make less than the barista who hands them their morning latte.

    So what exactly is a writer submitting to? Not just editors. Not merely algorithms. A writer submits to the dream that the private mind might earn a public life—that interiority, sculpted into sentences, might sustain you financially and spiritually. You write in the hope that your imagined worlds might become someone else’s emotional reality, that your pages might matter to strangers.

    Marche’s advice is blunt: persistence is not optional. Writing success is not a meritocracy but a lottery with a talent filter. The more tickets you buy, the better your odds. “Persistence is the siege you lay on fortune,” he writes—a relentless knocking at a door that may never open, but sometimes does for reasons no one fully understands.

    And this capriciousness is not unique to writers. Marche notes that actors secure roles only 7 percent of the time because of talent; the rest depends on age, look, market trends, and even “box office value in China.” Painters, dancers, musicians, designers—all create under the same unstable sky. To make art is to gamble against indifference. Persistence isn’t noble; it’s necessary, because fate occasionally rewards the stubborn.

  • From the Literary Golden Age to Algorithmic Wasteland

    From the Literary Golden Age to Algorithmic Wasteland

    In On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche dismantles the fantasy that writers can transform themselves into entrepreneurs and save the craft through hustle. He has watched brilliant minds waste their genius on branding decks and content calendars, convinced that a marketing plan can substitute for a literary life. Everyone, he notes, now arrives armed with a social-media strategy; even legacy writers chase streaming deals. Yet the “digital ad revenue” that was supposed to be salvation barely buys groceries. This notion of self-promotion on a social media platform may work for a handful, but for most of us, this plan is all chicanery. Most  writers would earn more working part-time at Starbucks than posting their book excerpts on Instagram. 

    And still writers persist, driven by an ancient question: How do you make a living by thinking? In a world where platforms shift beneath your feet, young writers must reinvent themselves with exhausting frequency—editing careers as relentlessly as they edit sentences.

    Marche reminds us that postwar America once had sturdy literary institutions: robust magazines, influential newspapers, university presses, publishers willing to cultivate voices rather than chase viral heat. That era nurtured Boomer writers who could achieve cultural celebrity and economic stability. But those scaffolds have collapsed. We live among the ruins of that golden age. Institutions fray, readership declines, and the professional writer now sits on the same endangered-species list as the white rhinoceros.

    With writing now fully digital, the terrain resembles a lawless frontier. The deep, contemplative reading that literature requires has been replaced by rapid-fire commentary. Instead of essays and books, the culture rewards short-form skirmishes and performative certainty. As Marche put it to Sam Harris, America’s most profitable export is now “the peddling of moral outrage.” Rage scales. Nuance suffocates.

    This erosion of the writing life carries consequences beyond the page. When outrage becomes the ambient air, critical thinking dries up, public trust decays, and democratic habits atrophy. To lose serious writing isn’t merely to lose an art; it is to endanger the civic imagination that sustains a republic. The crisis of literature is not an aesthetic inconvenience—it is a political warning flare.

  • The Homelessness of the Modern Writer

    The Homelessness of the Modern Writer

    In On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche shows zero patience for the self-help fable that “failure leads to success.” The myth says: suffer now, triumph later; keep grinding and the universe will eventually reward you. Marche calls this narrative pure nonsense. His friendships with writers who have made millions and basked in praise only confirm the truth: acclaim doesn’t cure insecurity, fame doesn’t dissolve alienation, and even celebrated authors carry the bruises of obscurity under their tuxedos. They remain misunderstood, jealous, anxious, and haunted by irrelevance. Success doesn’t banish failure—it merely decorates it. Celebrity is not salvation; it is a spotlight that makes the neediness easier to see.

    Marche believes the situation is worsening. We live, he argues, in a cultural moment where institutions are collapsing and traditional literary prestige has been replaced by digital noise. Novelists chase television deals. Journalists pivot into professional outrage machines. The literary public square has splintered into algorithmic micro-audiences. And in this fractured landscape, the writer’s deepest fear is not rejection—it’s evaporation. Not being debated, but forgotten.

    Even the “independent writer revolution” gets little mercy from Marche. Platforms come and go, each proclaimed the future of writing, each eventually forgotten. “Every few years there’s some new great hope—right now it’s Substack,” he writes. Then comes the hammer: “Substack will die or peter out just like the rest.” The point is not cynicism for sport; it is a reminder that technology cannot build the cathedral that literary culture once occupied. The medium keeps changing; the instability remains constant.

    As a reader drowning in subscriptions, I find his skepticism refreshing. I can’t reasonably pay $60 to $120 a year for dozens of Substack writers I admire. If I did, I’d be shelling out ten grand annually just to keep up. That is not a sustainable model for anyone but tech-company accountants. So yes, blogs collapsed, digital magazines buckled, and Substack may be next. Writers are still wandering, looking for a home that isn’t a platform built on a countdown timer. We are living in a literary diaspora—talent everywhere, shelter nowhere.

  • Why Publish a Novel When You Can Rant Weekly?

    Why Publish a Novel When You Can Rant Weekly?

    In On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche reminds us that roughly 300,000 books appear in the United States every year, and only a few hundred can reasonably be called creative or financial successes. Most books by “successful” authors flop. Most writers are failures. And then there is the vast shadow population: the would-be writers who never finish a book, yet earnestly introduce themselves at parties as working on one. If they are legion, it’s because failure in writing isn’t an exception — it’s the baseline condition.

    Lately I hear a parallel refrain: “Everyone has a podcast.” The cultural fantasy of “being a writer” — once the preferred badge of intelligence and depth — is being shoved aside by the fantasy of being a podcaster, which is the new intellectual flex. Instead of the solitary novelist hunched over drafts, we get booming-voiced men with battle-hardened beards and canned energy drinks, thumping their thighs as they dismantle “the mainstream narrative.” And if that theatrics doesn’t suit your tastes, you can choose from endless niches: politics, wellness sermons, nostalgia rants, paranormal confessionals, or gentle whisper-therapy for anxious brains. The point isn’t content; the point is talking.

    Marche dissects the layers of literary failure, but he forces us to consider a stranger threat: failure may be vanishing simply because writing itself may be vanishing as an arena where one can fail. You can’t fail at spearing a sabre-toothed tiger in 2025; the task no longer exists. Likewise, journaling and “mindfulness notes” have replaced drafts and essays, but only matter once they’re converted into soundbites on TikTok or a monologue in a podcast episode.

    If writing once demanded endurance, rejection slips, and a skin thin enough to bruise yet thick enough to keep showing up, now the danger is different: a discipline can’t hurt you once it stops being culturally real. Increasingly, I wonder whether writing, as a vocation and identity, even exists in the same form it did twenty years ago — and if it doesn’t, what exactly does it mean to “fail” at it anymore?

  • Failure Is the Bedrock of Writing

    Failure Is the Bedrock of Writing

    Stephen Marche, veteran journalist and author, says the secret to becoming a writer isn’t inspiration or networking or the right MFA program. It’s endurance. Grim, stubborn, occasionally delusional endurance. His slim volume On Writing and Failure makes one argument with relentless clarity: if you want to write, prepare to suffer. Forget talk of “flourishing,” “mentorship,” and “encouragement.” Writing isn’t a wellness retreat. It’s a trench.

    Marche opens with the perennial questions writers whisper to each other after one rejection too many: Does this get easier? Do you grow thicker skin? The response he quotes from Philip Roth is a gut punch: “Your skin just grows thinner and thinner. In the end, they can hold you up to the light and see right through you.” In other words, the longer you write, the more naked you become. Vulnerability isn’t a side effect of the craft; it is the craft.

    Marche’s bleak comfort is that every writer feeds off failure. Success is accidental—a borrowed tuxedo, worn briefly. Failure is the body underneath. Even the authors smiling from dust jackets look like rescued hostages, blinking at daylight before returning to the bunker of their desks to keep going. They don’t do it because it’s glamorous. They do it because not writing would be worse.

    I understand the pathology. After decades of cranking out what I believed were novels, I finally admitted I couldn’t write one—not at the level I demanded, not at the level worth inflicting on readers. That revelation didn’t spare me failure; it merely revealed strata of it. There’s the failure of rejection, the failure of the work, and the quiet, private failure of recognizing your own limits. Perhaps I could’ve spared myself time and spared literary agents grief. But failure has its curriculum, and I attended every class.

    Marche’s book is a sober reminder that writing is less a triumphal march than a pilgrimage carried out on blistered feet. Failure isn’t a detour; it’s the terrain. Rock layers of it: topsoil doubt, subsoil rejection, shale humiliation, limestone stubbornness. Dig deeper and you hit coal—compressed ambition under impossible pressure, black and combustible.

    Failure isn’t fashionable grit or a TED Talk slogan. When executives brag about “learning from failure,” they’re dilettantes. Writers are the professionals of defeat. To be a poet today is to live like a post-apocalyptic monk, scribbling in candlelight, shadow thrown against the cave wall, not out of masochism but because there’s no other way to stay human. The world may not care, but the work insists.

  • The Case of Brandy Melville and the Ethics of Audience Capture (College Writing Prompt)

    The Case of Brandy Melville and the Ethics of Audience Capture (College Writing Prompt)

    Some critics argue that Brandy Melville relies on predatory forms of audience capture—using exclusivity, body image ideals, and social media manipulation to attract and control its customers. Others claim that in today’s influencer-driven marketplace, Brandy Melville is simply deploying the same marketing strategies any brand must use to survive online.

    Write a 1,700-word argumentative essay that takes a clear position: while you may have moral concerns about Brandy Melville’s business practices, its methods of audience capture may be necessary for competing in the modern attention economy. If this is true, what does it reveal about the culture that rewards such tactics?

    In developing your argument, consider the following questions:

    • How do companies exploit psychological vulnerabilities such as FOMO, Groupthink, and body dysmorphia to build loyalty and drive sales?
    • What does this normalization of manipulation say about consumer identity in the influencer era?
    • Is there an ethical way to succeed in digital marketing without resorting to emotional exploitation?

    Support your claims with specific examples and credible sources—from documentaries, marketing analyses, or social-media research—to show how audience capture operates as both a marketing necessity and a moral hazard.

  • The Case for Strategic De-Skilling: Rethinking Skill and Dependence in the Age of AI (a College Writing Prompt)

    The Case for Strategic De-Skilling: Rethinking Skill and Dependence in the Age of AI (a College Writing Prompt)

    Background

    AI is a tool that we use in business, the arts, and education. Since AI is the genie out of the bottle that isn’t going back in, we have to confront the way AI renders us both benefits and liabilities. One liability is de-skilling, the way we lose our personal initiative, self-reliance and critical thinking skills as our dependence on AI makes us reflexively surrender our own thought for a lazy, frictionless existence in which we assert little effort and let AI do most of the work. 

    However, in his essay “The Age of De-Skilling,” Kwame Anthony Appiah correctly points out that not all de-skilling is equal. Some de-skilling is “corrosive,” some de-skilling is bad but worth it for the benefits, and some de-skilling is so self-destructive that no benefits can redeem its devastation. 

    In this context, where AI becomes interesting is the realm of what we call strategic de-skilling. This is a mindful form of de-skilling in which we take AI shortcuts because such shortcuts give us a worthy outcome that justifies the tradeoffs of whatever we lose as individuals dependent on technology. 

    Your Essay Prompt

    Write a 1,700-word argumentative essay that defends, refutes, or complicates the position that not all dependence on AI is ruinous. Argue that strategic de-skilling—outsourcing repetitive or mechanical labor to machines—can expand our mental bandwidth for higher-order creativity and analysis. Use Appiah’s notion of “bad but worth it” de-skilling to claim that AI, when used deliberately, frees us for deeper work rather than dulls our edge.

    Your Supporting Paragraphs

    For your supporting paragraphs, consider the following mapping components: 

    • cognitive off-loading as optimization
    • human-AI collaboration
    • ethical limits of automation
    • redefinition of skill

    Use Specific Case Studies of Strategic De-Skilling

    I recommend you can pick one or two of the following case studies to anchor your essay in concrete evidence:

    1. AI-Assisted Radiology Diagnostics
    AI models like Google’s DeepMind Health or Lunit INSIGHT CXR pre-screen medical images (X-rays, CT scans, MRIs) for anomalies such as lung nodules or breast tumors, freeing radiologists from exhaustive image scanning and letting them focus on diagnosis, context, and patient communication.

    2. Robotic Surgery Systems (e.g., da Vinci Surgical System)
     Surgeons use robotic interfaces to perform minimally invasive procedures with greater precision and less fatigue. The machine steadies the surgeon’s hand and filters tremors—technically a form of de-skilling—but this trade-off allows focus on strategy, anatomy, and patient safety rather than manual dexterity alone.

    3. AI-Driven Legal Research Platforms (Lexis+, Casetext CoCounsel)
     Lawyers now off-load hours of case searching and citation checking to AI tools that summarize precedent. What they lose in raw research grind, they gain in time for argument strategy and nuanced reasoning—shifting legal skill from memorization to interpretation.

    4. Intelligent Tutoring and Grading Systems (Gradescope, Khanmigo)
     Instructors let AI handle repetitive grading or generate practice problems. The loss of constant paper-marking allows teachers to focus on the art of explanation and individualized mentorship. Students, too, can use these systems to get instant feedback, training them to self-diagnose errors rather than depend entirely on human correction.

    5. AI-Based Drug Discovery (DeepMind’s AlphaFold, Insilico Medicine)
     Pharmaceutical researchers no longer spend years modeling protein folding manually. AI predicts structures in hours, speeding up breakthroughs. Scientists relinquish tedious modeling but redirect their expertise toward hypothesis-driven design, ethics, and clinical translation.

    6. Predictive Maintenance in Aviation and Engineering
     Airline engineers now rely on machine-learning algorithms to flag part failures before they occur. Mechanics perform fewer manual inspections but use data analytics to interpret system reports and prevent disasters—redefining “skill” as foresight rather than reaction.

    7. Algorithmic Financial Trading
     Portfolio managers off-load pattern recognition and timing decisions to AI trading bots. Their role shifts from acting as human calculators to setting ethical boundaries, risk thresholds, and macro-strategic goals—skills grounded in judgment, not just speed.

    8. AI-Powered Architecture and Design (Autodesk Generative Design)
     Architects use generative AI to produce hundreds of design iterations that balance structure, sustainability, and cost. The creative act moves from drafting to curating: selecting and refining the most meaningful human aesthetic from machine-generated abundance.

    9. Autonomous Agriculture Systems (John Deere’s See & Spray)
     Farmers now use AI-guided tractors and drones to detect weeds and optimize fertilizer use. They surrender manual fieldwork but gain ecological precision and data-driven management skills that improve yields and sustainability.

    10. AI-Enhanced Music and Film Editing (Adobe Sensei, AIVA, Runway ML)
     Editors and composers off-load technical tedium—color correction, noise reduction, beat synchronization—to AI tools. This frees them to focus on emotional pacing, thematic rhythm, and creative storytelling—the distinctly human layer of artistry.

    Purpose
    Your goal is to demonstrate nuanced critical thinking about AI’s role in human skill development. Show that you understand the difference between lazy dependence and deliberate collaboration. Engage with Appiah’s complicated notion of de-skilling to explore whether AI’s shortcuts lead to degradation—or, when used wisely, to liberation.

  • The Gospel of De-Skilling: When AI Turns Our Minds into Mashed Potatoes

    The Gospel of De-Skilling: When AI Turns Our Minds into Mashed Potatoes

    Kwame Anthony Appiah, in “The Age of De-Skilling,” poses a question that slices to the bone of our moment: Will artificial intelligence expand our minds or reduce them to obedient, gelatinous blobs? The creeping decay of competence and curiosity—what he calls de-skilling—happens quietly. Every time AI interprets a poem, summarizes a theory, or rewrites a sentence for us, another cognitive muscle atrophies. Soon, we risk becoming well-polished ghosts of our former selves. The younger generation, raised on this digital nectar, may never build those muscles at all. Teachers who lived through both the Before and After Times can already see the difference in their classrooms: the dimming spark, the algorithmic glaze in the eyes.

    Yet Appiah reminds us that all progress extracts a toll. When writing first emerged, the ancients panicked. In Plato’s Phaedrus, King Thamus warned that this new technology—writing—would make people stupid. Once words were carved into papyrus, memory would rot, dialogue would wither, nuance would die. The written word, Thamus feared, would make us forgetful and isolated. And in a way, he was right. Writing didn’t make us dumb, but it did fundamentally rewire how we think, remember, and converse. Civilization gained permanence and lost immediacy in the same stroke.

    Appiah illustrates how innovation often improves our craft while amputating our pride in it. A pulp mill worker once knew by touch and scent when the fibers were just right. Now, computers do it better—but the hands are idle. Bakers once judged bread by smell, color, and instinct; now a touchscreen flashes “done.” Precision rises, but connection fades. The worker becomes an observer of their own obsolescence.

    I see this too in baseball. When the robotic umpire era dawns, we’ll get flawless strike zones and fewer bad calls. But we’ll also lose Earl Weaver kicking dirt, red-faced and screaming at the ump until his cap flew. That fury—the human mess—is baseball’s soul. Perfection may be efficient, but it’s sterile.

    Even my seventy-five-year-old piano tuner feels it. His trade is vanishing. Digital keyboards never go out of tune; they just go out of style. Try telling a lifelong pianist to find transcendence on a plastic keyboard. The tactile romance of the grand piano, the aching resonance of a single struck note—that’s not progress you can simulate.

    I hear the same story in sound. I often tune my Tecsun PL-990 radio to KJAZZ, a station where a real human DJ spins records in real time. I’ve got Spotify, of course, but its playlists feel like wallpaper for the dead. Spotify never surprises me, never speaks between songs. It’s all flow, no friction—and my brain goes numb. KJAZZ keeps me alert because a person, not a program, is behind it.

    The same tension threads through my writing life. I’ve been writing and weight-lifting daily since my teens. Both disciplines demand sweat, repetition, and pain tolerance. Neglect one, and the other suffers. But since I began using AI to edit two years ago, the relationship has become complicated. Some days, AI feels like a creative partner—it pushes me toward stylistic risks, surprise turns of phrase, and new tonal palettes. Other days, it feels like a crutch. I toss half-baked paragraphs into the machine and tell myself, “ChatGPT will fix it.” That’s not writing; that’s delegation disguised as art.

    When I hit that lazy stretch, I know it’s time to step away—take a nap, watch Netflix, play piano—anything but write. Because once the machine starts thinking for me, I can feel my brain fog over.

    And yet, I confess to living a double life. There’s my AI-edited self, the gleaming, chiseled version of me—the writer on literary steroids. Then there’s my secret writer: the primitive, unassisted one who writes in a private notebook, in the flickering light of what feels like a mythic waterfall. No algorithms, no polish—just me and the unfiltered soul that remembers how to speak without prompts. This secret life is my tether to the human side of creation. It gives my writing texture, contradiction, blood. When I’m writing “in the raw,” I almost feel sneaky and subversive and whisper to myself: “ChatGPT must never know about this.” 

    Appiah is right: the genie isn’t going back in the bottle. Every advance carries its shadow. According to Sturgeon’s Law, 90% of everything is crap, and AI will follow that rule religiously. Most users will become lazy, derivative, and hollow. But the remaining 10%—the thinkers, artists, scientists, doctors, and musicians who wield it with intelligence—will produce miracles. They’ll also suffer for it. Because every new tool reshapes the hand that wields it, and every gain carries a ghost of what it replaces.

    Technology changes us. We change it back. And somewhere in that endless feedback loop—between the bucket piano tuner, the dirt-kicking manager, and the writer lost between human and machine—something resembling the soul keeps flickering.

  • Maps, Not Megaphones: Lessons from Harari, Harris, and Kaplan

    Maps, Not Megaphones: Lessons from Harari, Harris, and Kaplan

    Yuval Noah Harari opens 21 Lessons for the 21st Century with a line that feels more prophetic with each passing year: “In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.”


    He’s right. Millions of people rush into the digital coliseum to debate humanity’s future, yet 99.9% of them are shouting through a fog of misinformation, moral panic, and algorithmic distortion. Their sense of the world—our world—is scrambled beyond use.

    Unfair? Of course. But as Harari reminds us, history doesn’t deal in fairness. He admits he can’t give us food, shelter, or comfort, but he can, as a historian, offer something rarer: clarity. A small light in the long night.

    That phrase—clarity in the darkness—hit me like a gut punch while listening to one of the most illuminating podcasts I’ve ever encountered: Sam Harris’s Making Sense, episode #440 (October 24, 2025), featuring author and geopolitical thinker Robert D. Kaplan. Their conversation, centered on Kaplan’s terse 200-page book Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis, offered something I hadn’t felt in years: coherence.

    Most days, I feel swept away by the torrent of half-truths and hot takes about the state of the planet. We seem to be living out Yeats’s grim prophecy that “the center cannot hold.” And yet, as Kaplan spoke, the chaos briefly organized itself into a pattern I could recognize.

    Kaplan’s global map is not comforting—but it’s lucid. He traces the roots of instability to climate change stripping water and fertile soil from sub-Saharan Africa, forcing waves of migration toward Europe. Those migrations, he argues, will ignite decades of right-wing populism across the continent—a slow, grinding backlash that may define the century.

    Equally destructive, he warns, is our collapse of media credibility. Print journalism—with its editors, fact-checkers, and professional skepticism—has been displaced by digital media, where “passion replaces analysis.” Emotion has become the currency of attention. Reason, outbid by rage, has left the building.

    Listening to Kaplan for a single hour taught me more about the architecture of global disorder than months of doomscrolling could. His vision is bleak, but it’s ordered. Sobering, but strangely liberating. In a time when everyone is shouting, he simply draws a map.

    And as Harari might say—maps, not megaphones, are what lead us out of the dark.