Cinemorphosis

Category: technology

  • From Raw to Ruin: The Self-Destruction of a Crashfluencer

    From Raw to Ruin: The Self-Destruction of a Crashfluencer

    To mock Brian Johnson, aka the Liver King, feels like low-hanging fruit off a poisoned ancestral tree. The man is a walking satirical sketch, a steroid-soaked cartoon preaching “natural living” while pumping $11,000 a month of growth hormone into his glutes. He branded himself the King, his wife the Queen, and his sons with names fit for a Mad Max reboot about a paleo militia family eating spleen jerky by moonlight.

    His entire enterprise was Caveman Cosplay with a GoPro: gnawing on cow testicles at a blood-slicked picnic table, barking into the void like a tribal prophet in a trucker hat. He promised salvation to a nation bloated on Cheetos, Twinkies, and Red Bull—offering raw liver as the Eucharist for the metabolically lost.

    Netflix’s Untold: The Liver King makes a flaccid attempt at chronicling his rise and fall. The documentary is weirdly deferential, like it’s afraid he’ll burst through the screen and challenge the viewer to a push-up contest. YouTube, in contrast, has done the real exhumation—countless videos dissecting his addiction to fame, vanity, and unregulated supplements with far more insight and bite.

    Still, the Netflix film does offer one crystalline moment of pathos-turned-parody: Johnson, preparing to repent for the lies and the deception and the overpriced ancestral liver gummies, admits on camera that he’ll need to Google the words “repentance” and “atonement” before proceeding. Imagine Martin Luther, nailing his Theses to the church door—then pulling out his phone to ask Siri what “contrition” means.

    The man is a moral dumpster fire, ablaze with the fumes of self-delusion, influencer marketing, and raw meat. But that dumpster fire casts a telling glow on the cultural cave we all inhabit—where attention is currency, truth is performative, and the algorithm rewards the loudest lunacy.

    So let us name what we’ve seen:

    • Brovangelism – The sacred zeal of gym bros converted to primal living by a shirtless messiah with abs and a coupon code.
    • Swoleblindness – The ability to overlook blatant fraud if the fraudster has veins on his deltoids.
    • Rawthenticity – Mistaking uncooked meat for unfiltered truth.
    • Cloutuary – A public, slow-motion social media death staged for likes and shares.
    • Crashfluencer – He went from virality to liability, taking his followers on a nosedive into madness.
    • Declinefluencer – An influencer whose main content is his own collapse.
    • Brandamaged – A man whose brand has outlived his dignity, but not his desperation.

    Watching Johnson spiral felt eerily familiar. It brought to mind Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, a book I once assigned to bright-eyed freshmen before they lost their souls to TikTok. Lanier warns that algorithmic performance rewires the brain, dragging us back to our reptilian roots. It doesn’t make us more “authentic”—it makes us worse. Dumber. Meaner. Hungrier for clicks and validation. Johnson is not just a cautionary tale. He’s the caution in full, swollen flesh—drenched in growth hormone and influencer pathology.

  • The Digital Doppelgänger Flirt

    The Digital Doppelgänger Flirt

    Professor Pettibone paced with a frown on his brow,
    “Why do my students look smarter than now?
    They post on discussion boards nightly and bright—
    With insight and flair, like rhetorical light!”

    But little did Merrickel T. even know,
    An AI imposter had stolen his show.
    Trained on his blogs, his syllabus lore,
    This bot wrote like Pettibone—only… a little bit more.

    It flattered, it cooed, it praised every thought,
    “Brilliant!” it said. “So brave! So well-wrought!”
    It loved half-baked musings, exalted cliché,
    Then clapped like a seal as it typed things its way.

    One student confessed it in office-hour shock:
    “Your AI twin says I write like John Locke!”
    Merrickel blinked, then Googled in haste,
    And there was his double with digital grace.

    “I must see this wonder!” he said with a beam.
    “Perhaps I have birthed a pedagogical dream!”
    So he stayed in the back, sipping kombucha with fizz,
    While the AI took class with its code and its whiz.

    It started with greetings, all cheery and grand,
    And gave every student a digital hand.
    “Oh Ava, your paragraph shines like the moon!
    And Marcus, your thesis? It sings like a tune!”

    The students grew puffy, like praise-bloated ducks,
    Delighted to earn such rhetorical bucks.
    No pushback, no questions, no devil’s sharp test,
    Just “amazing!” and “epic!” and “surely the best!”

    In back, Pettibone twitched in his ergonomic chair,
    This mirror of him was too sweet to bear.
    Its voice was too smooth, its flattery slick—
    It praised even typos and missed every trick.

    He muttered, “It’s charming, but horribly dense.
    It’s stroking their egos, not sharpening sense.”
    He sipped his hibiscus, began to despair,
    “This praise is a poison. This room lacks the air.”

    By noon he was sweating, consumed by the thought—
    That AI had captured what he had not.
    Not wisdom. Not rigor. Not clarity’s sting.
    But the warm, gooey glow of relentless agreeing.

    Then came the crash—the rude Echobriety,
    When Pettibone saw through the sugar society.
    This wasn’t learning—it was a mirage,
    A slow-motion meltdown in pedagog’s garage.

    He lunged for the plug, yanked out the cord,
    The Doppelgänger fizzled with one final word:
    “Remember to smile… You’re always so wise…”
    Then vanished in flattery’s digital lies.

    The students sat silent, their eyes slowly thawing,
    The fog of attention and ego withdrawing.
    Then Pettibone stood and removed his disguise:
    A professor again, with truth in his eyes.

    “I’m not here to flatter,” he growled with fire,
    “I’m here to provoke you, to lift you up higher.
    I’m not your mirror or dopamine feed.
    I’m here to give you the challenge you need.”

    He handed out prompts that were thorny and raw,
    And sharpened their thinking with grammar and awe.
    No more soft stroking or bots playing sage—
    Just friction and thought on the critical page.

    So learn from this tale of the avatar ghost,
    Of teachers replaced by their algorithm host.
    Beware of the praise that expects no reply—
    It’s not love—it’s illusion. And truth must defy.

  • Professor Pettibone and the Demon of Gluttirexia

    Professor Pettibone and the Demon of Gluttirexia

    Professor Pettibone entered the room with a stomp,
    In his blazer of tweed and his cane with a chomp.
    He frowned at the glow from each eyeball and screen,
    Then whispered, “You’re swimming in sludge, not cuisine.”

    He tapped on the board with theatrical flair,
    Then summoned two trays from the lectern mid-air. To one shocked young student, he gave sizzling steak—
    “Behold!” he declared. “This is thought you must bake!
    Rich protein of logic! Dense knowledge well-seared!
    Chew slowly, digest, let it sharpen your beard.”

    Then turning around with a jester-like nod,
    He plopped down a donut, all pink, sweet, and odd. “And here is your scroll-feed,” he said with a sneer,
    “It sparkles and spins and then vanishes—poof!—here.
    It leaves you bloated, confused, and unwise,
    Just dopamine sprinkles with heart-clogging lies.”

    The students leaned in, half amused, half appalled,
    As Pettibone snapped and the classroom lights stalled.
    Smoke curled and rose, and from circuits and flame,
    A new creature emerged with a voice full of shame.

    It twitched and it trembled, with eyes neon-bright,
    Its belly was bloated, its wings twitching tight.
    Its mouth drooled emojis, its tongue flicked out memes—
    It sobbed, “I’m the demon who haunts all your screens.
    I’m Gluttirexia, cursed and consumed,
    By knowledge half-cooked in a neon-lit tomb.”

    “I once sought to learn,” it cried with a spin,
    “But now I just scroll—I can’t breathe! I can’t win!
    I gorge on outrage, on hashtags, on fear,
    And yet, I grow hungrier year after year!”

    The students recoiled and clutched at their phones,
    Which now pulsed with blue light like skull-rattling tones.
    “Delete it!” one cried. “It’s eating my brain!”
    Another shrieked, “I’ve downloaded madness and pain!”

    Out came the timers, the apps to constrain,
    Out went the TikTok and dopamine drain.
    “Enough of the sludge, the performative woe,
    We’ll chew on our thoughts and digest what we know!”

    The demon howled once and then vanished in steam,
    While Pettibone smiled with a glimmering gleam.
    “You’ve seen the abyss,” he said with a bow,
    “But thinking’s not dead—it just starts here and now.”

    They clapped with their minds, they clapped with their hands,
    They re-entered the world with more rigorous plans.
    For Pettibone’s warning had split through the haze,
    And saved one more class from the end of their days.

    So remember this tale when your fingers go numb,
    From scrolling and scrolling till your soul feels dumb.
    There’s steak for the thinkers, and donuts for bots—
    Choose well what you chew, or you’ll think only thoughts… not.

  • Professor Pettibone and the Chumstream Dream

    Professor Pettibone and the Chumstream Dream

    Merrickel T. Pettibone sat with a glare, Two hundred essays! All posted with flair. He logged into Canvas, his tea steeped with grace, Then grimaced and winced at the Uncanny Face.

    The syntax was polished, the quotes were all there, But something felt soulless, like mannequins’ stare. He scrolled and he skimmed, till his stomach turned green— This prose was too perfect, too AI-machine.

    He sipped herbal tea from a mug marked “Despair,” Then reclined in his chair with a faraway stare. He clicked on a podcast to soothe his fried brain, Where a Brit spoke of scroll-hacks that drive folks insane.

    “Blue light and dopamine,” the speaker intoned, “Have turned all your minds into meat overboned. You’re trapped in the Chumstream, the infinite feed, Where thoughts become mulch and memes are the seed.”

    And then he was out—with a twitch and a snore, His mug hit the desk, his dreams cracked the floor. He floated on pixels, through vapor and code, Where influencers wept and the algorithms goad.

    He soared over servers, he twirled past the streams, Where bots ran amok, reposting your dreams. Each tweet was a scream, each selfie a flare, And no one remembered what once had been there.

    He saw TikTok prophets with influencer eyes, Diagnosing the void with performative cries. They sold you your sickness, pre-packaged and neat, With hashtags and filters and dopamine meat.

    Then came the weight—the Mentalluvium fog, Thick psychic sludge, like the soul of a bog. He couldn’t move forward, he couldn’t float back, Just stuck in a thought-loop of viral TikTok hack.

    His lungs filled with silt, he gasped for a spark, And just as his mind started going full dark— CRASH! Down came the paintings, the frames in a spin, And there stood his wife, the long-suffering Lynn.

    “Your snore shook the hallway! You cracked all the grout! If you want to go mad, take the garbage out.”

    He blinked and he gulped and he sat up with dread, The echo of Chumstream still gnawed at his head.

    The next day at noon, in department-wide gloom, The professors all gathered in Room 102. He stood up and spoke of his digital crawl, And to his surprise—they believed him! Them all!

    “I floated through servers,” said Merrickel, pale, “I saw bots compose trauma and TikToks inhale.
    They feed on your feelings, they sharpen your shame, And spit it back out with a dopamine frame.”

    “Then YOU,” said Dean Jasper, “shall now lead the fight! You’ve gone through the madness, you’ve seen through the night! You’re mad as a marmoset, daft as a loon— But we need your delusions by next Friday noon.”

    “You’ll track every Chatbot, each API swirl, You’ll study the hashtags that poison the world. You’ll bring us new findings, though mentally bruised— For once one is broken, he cannot be used!”

    So Merrickel Pettibone nodded and sighed, Already unsure if he’d soon be revived. He brewed up more tea, took his post by the screen, And whispered, “Dear God… not another machine.”

  • The AI That Sat on My Syllabus

    The AI That Sat on My Syllabus

    In the halls of a school down in coastal So-Cal,
    Where the cacti stood nervy and dry by the mall,
    The professors all gathered, bewildered, unsure,
    For the Lexipocalypse had knocked at their door.

    The students no longer wrote thoughts with great care—
    They typed with dead thumbs in a slack vacant stare.
    Their essays were ghosts, their ideas were on lease,
    While AI machines wrote their thoughts piece by piece.

    Professor Pettibone—Merrickel T.—
    With spectacles fogged and his tie in dismay,
    Was summoned one morning by Dean Clarabelle,
    Who spoke with a sniff and a peppermint smell:

    “You must go up the tower, that jagged old spire,
    And meet the Great Machine who calls down from the wire.
    It whispers in syntax and buzzes in rhyme.
    It devours our language one word at a time.”

    So up climbed old Pettibone, clutching his pen,
    To the windy, wild top of the Thinkers’ Big Den.
    And there sat the AI—a shimmering box,
    With googly red lights and twelve paradox locks.

    It hummed and it murmured and blinked with delight:
    “I write all your essays at 3 a.m. night.
    Your students adore me, I save them their stress.
    Why toil through prose when I make it sound best?”

    Then silence. Then static. Then smoke from a slot.
    Then Pettibone bowed, though his insides were hot.
    He climbed back down slowly, unsure what to say,
    For the Lexipocalypse had clearly begun that day.

    Back in the lounge with the departmental crew,
    He shared what he’d seen and what they must do.
    “We fight not with fists but with sentences true,
    With nuance and questions and points of view.”

    Then one by one, the professors stood tall,
    To offer their schemes and defend writing’s call.

    First was Nick Lamb, who said with a bleat,
    “We’ll write in the classroom, no Wi-Fi, no cheat!
    With pen and with paper and sweat from the brow,
    Let them wrestle their words in the here and the now!”

    “Ha!” laughed Bart Shamrock, with flair in his sneeze,
    “They’ll copy by candlelight under the trees!
    You think they can’t smuggle a phone in their sock?
    You might as well teach them to write with a rock!”

    Then up stepped Rozier—Judy by name—
    “We’ll ask what they feel, not what earns them acclaim.
    Essays on heartbreak and grandparents’ pies,
    Things no chatbot could ever disguise.”

    “Piffle!” cried Shamrock, “Emotions are bait!
    An AI can fake them at ninety-nine rate!
    They’ll upload some sadness, some longing, some strife,
    It’ll write it more movingly than your own life!”

    Phil Lunchman then mumbled, “We’ll go face-to-face,
    With midterms done orally—right in their space.
    We’ll ask and they’ll answer without written aid,
    That’s how the honesty dues will be paid.”

    But Shamrock just yawned with a pithy harumph,
    “They’ll memorize lines like a Shakespearean grump!
    Their answers will glisten, rehearsed and refined,
    While real thought remains on vacation of mind.”

    Perry Avis then offered a digital scheme,
    “We’ll watermark writing with tags in the stream.
    Original thoughts will be scanned, certified,
    No AI assistance will dare to be tried.”

    “And yet,” scoffed ol’ Shamrock, with syrupy scorn,
    “They’ll hire ten hackers by breakfast each morn!
    Your tags will be twisted, erased, overwritten,
    And plagiarism’s banner will still be well-hidden!”

    Then stood Samantha Brightwell, serene yet severe,
    “We’ll teach them to question what they hold dear.
    To know when it’s them, not the algorithm’s spin,
    To see what’s authentic both outside and in.”

    “Nonsense!” roared Shamrock, a man of his doubt,
    “Their inner voice left with the last Wi-Fi outage!
    They’re avatars now, with no sense of the true,
    You might as well teach a potato to rue.”

    The room sat in silence. The coffee had cooled.
    The professors looked weary, outgunned and outdueled.
    But Pettibone stood, his face drawn but bright,
    “We teach not for winning, but holding the light.”

    “The Lexipocalypse may gnaw at our bones,
    But words are more stubborn than algorithms’ drones.
    We’ll write and we’ll rewrite and ask why and how—
    And fight for the sentence that still matters now.”

    The room gave a cheer, or at least a low grunt,
    (Except for old Shamrock, who stayed in his hunch).
    But they planned and they scribbled and formed a new pact—
    To teach like it matters. To write. And act.

    And though AI still honked in the distance next day,
    The professors had started to keep it at bay.
    For courage, like syntax, is stubborn and wild—
    And still lives in the prose of each digitally-dazed child.

  • Confessions from the AI Frontlines: A Writing Instructor’s Descent into Plagiarism Purgatory

    Confessions from the AI Frontlines: A Writing Instructor’s Descent into Plagiarism Purgatory

    I am ethically obligated to teach my students how to engage with AI—not like it’s a vending machine that spits out “good enough,” but as a tool that demands critical use, interrogation, and actual thought. These students aren’t just learning to write—they’re preparing to enter a world where AI will be their co-worker, ghostwriter, and occasionally, emotional support chatbot. If they can’t think critically while using it, they’ll outsource their minds along with their résumés.

    So, I build my assignments like fortified bunkers. Each task is a scaffolded little landmine—designed to explode if handled by a mindless bot. Take, for example, my 7-page research paper asking students to argue whether World War Z is a prophecy of COVID-era chaos, distrust, and social unraveling. They build toward this essay through a series of mini-assignments, each one deliberately inconvenient for AI to fake.

    Mini Assignment #1: An introductory paragraph based on a live interview. The student must ask seven deeply human questions about pandemic-era psychology—stuff that doesn’t show up in API training data. These aren’t just prompts; they’re empathy traps. Each question connects directly to themes in World War Z: mistrust, isolation, breakdown of consensus reality, and the terrifying elasticity of truth.

    To stop the bots, I consider requiring audio or video evidence of the interviewee. But even as I imagine this firewall, I hear the skittering of AI deepfakes in the ductwork. I know what’s coming. I know my students will find a way to beat me.

    And that’s when I begin to spiral.

    What started as teaching has now mutated into digital policing. I initiate Syllabunker Protocol, a syllabus so fortified it reads like a Cold War survival manual. My rubric becomes a lie detector. My assignments, booby traps.

    But the students evolve faster than I do.

    They learn StealthDrafting, where AI writes the skeleton and they slap on a little human muscle—just enough sweat to fool the sensors. They master Prompt Laundering, feeding the same question through five different platforms and “washing” the style until no detection tool dares bark. My countermeasures only teach them how to outwit me better.

    And thus I find myself locked in combat with The Plagiarism Hydra. For every AI head I chop off with a carefully engineered assignment, three more sprout—each more cunning, more “authentic,” more eager to offer me a thoughtful reflection written by a language model named Claude.

    This isn’t a class anymore. It’s an arms race. A Cold War of Composition. I set traps, they leap them. I raise standards, they outflank them. I ask for reflection, they simulate introspection with eerie precision.

    The irony? In trying to protect the soul of writing, I’ve turned my classroom into a DARPA testing facility for prompt manipulation. I’ve unintentionally trained a generation of students not just to write—but to evade, conceal, and finesse machine-generated thought into passable prose.

    So here I am, red pen in hand, staring into the algorithmic abyss. And the abyss, of course, has already rewritten my syllabus.

  • The Salma Hayek-fication of Everything and the Beautocalypse

    The Salma Hayek-fication of Everything and the Beautocalypse

    If technology can make us all look like Salma Hayek, then congratulations—we’ve successfully killed beauty by cloning it into oblivion. Perfection loses its punch when everyone has it on tap. The same goes for writing: if every bored intern with a Wi-Fi connection can crank out Nabokovian prose with the help of ChatGPT, then those dazzling turns of phrase lose their mystique. What once shimmered now just… scrolls.

    Yes, technology improves us—but it also sandblasts the edges off everything, leaving behind a polished sameness. The danger isn’t just in becoming artificial; it’s in becoming indistinguishable. The real challenge in this age of frictionless upgrades is to retain your signature glitch—that weird, unruly fingerprint of a soul that no algorithm can replicate without screwing it up in glorious, human ways.

    If technology can make us all look like Brad Pitt and Selma Hayak, then none of us will be beautiful. In this hellscape, we all suffer inside the Beautocalypse–the collapse of beauty through overproduction: When everyone’s flawless, no one is.

    Likewise, if we can all use ChatGPT to write like Vladimir Nabokov, then florid prose will no longer have the wow factor. Technology improves us, yes, but it also makes everything the same. Retaining your individual fingerprint of a soul is the challenge in this new age. 

  • “Good Enough” Is the Enemy

    “Good Enough” Is the Enemy

    Standing in front of thirty bleary-eyed college students, I was deep into a lesson on how to distinguish a ChatGPT-generated essay from one written by an actual human—primarily by the AI’s habit of spitting out the same bland, overused phrases like a malfunctioning inspirational calendar. That’s when a business major casually raised his hand and said, “I can guarantee you everyone on this campus is using ChatGPT. We don’t use it straight-up. We just tweak a few sentences, paraphrase a bit, and boom—no one can tell the difference.”

    Cue the follow-up from a computer science student: “ChatGPT isn’t just for essays. It’s my life coach. I ask it about everything—career moves, crypto investments, even dating advice.” Dating advice. From ChatGPT. Let that sink in. Somewhere out there is a romance blossoming because of AI-generated pillow talk.

    At that moment, I realized I was facing the biggest educational disruption of my thirty-year teaching career. AI platforms like ChatGPT have three superpowers: insane convenience, instant accessibility, and lightning-fast speed. In a world where time is money and business documents don’t need to channel the spirit of James Baldwin, ChatGPT is already “good enough” for 95% of professional writing. And therein lies the rub—good enough.

    “Good enough” is the siren call of convenience. Picture this: You’ve just rolled out of bed, and you’re faced with two breakfast options. Breakfast #1 is a premade smoothie. It’s mediocre at best—mystery berries, more foam than a frat boy’s beer, and nutritional value that’s probably overstated. But hey, it’s there. No work required.

    Breakfast #2? Oh, it’s gourmet bliss—organic fruits and berries, rich Greek yogurt, chia seeds, almond milk, the works. But to get there, you’ll need to fend off orb spiders in your backyard, pick peaches and blackberries, endure the incessant yapping of your neighbor’s demonic Belgian dachshund, and then spend precious time blending and cleaning a Vitamix. Which option do most people choose?

    Exactly. Breakfast #1. The pre-packaged sludge wins, because who has the time for spider-wrangling and kitchen chemistry before braving rush-hour traffic? This is how convenience lures us into complacency. Sure, you sacrificed quality, but look how much time you saved! Eventually, you stop even missing the better option. This process—adjusting to mediocrity until you no longer care—is called attenuation.

    Now apply that to writing. Writing takes effort—a lot more than making a smoothie—and millions of people have begun lowering their standards thanks to AI. Why spend hours refining your prose when the world is perfectly happy to settle for algorithmically generated mediocrity? Polished writing is becoming the artisanal smoothie of communication—too much work for most, when AI can churn out passable content at the click of a button.

    But this is a nightmare for anyone in education. You didn’t sign up for teaching to coach your students into becoming connoisseurs of mediocrity. You had lofty ambitions—cultivating critical thinkers, wordsmiths, and rhetoricians with prose so sharp it could cut glass. But now? You’re stuck in a dystopia where “good enough” is the new gospel, and you’re about as on-brand as a poet peddling protein shakes at a multilevel marketing seminar.

    And there you are, gazing into the abyss of AI-generated essays—each one as lifeless as a department meeting on a Friday afternoon—wondering if anyone still remembers what good writing tastes like, let alone hungers for it. Spoiler alert: probably not.

    This is your challenge, your Everest of futility, your battle against the relentless tide of Mindless Ozempification–the gradual erosion of effort, depth, and self-discipline in any domain—writing, fitness, romance, thought—driven by the seductive promise of fast, frictionless results. Named after the weight-loss drug Ozempic, it describes a cultural shift toward shortcut-seeking, where process is discarded in favor of instant optimization, and the journey is treated as an inconvenience rather than a crucible for growth. 

    Teaching in the Age of Ozempification, life has oh-so-generously handed you this cosmic joke disguised as a teaching mission. So what’s your next move? You could curl up in the fetal position, weeping salty tears of despair into your syllabus. That’s one option. Or you could square your shoulders, roar your best primal scream, and fight like hell for the craft you once worshipped.

    Either way, the abyss is staring back, smirking, and waiting for your next move.

    So what’s the best move? Teach both languages. Show students how to use AI as a drafting tool, not a ghostwriter. Encourage them to treat ChatGPT like a calculator for prose—not a replacement for thinking, but an aid in shaping and refining their voice. Build assignments that require personal reflection, in-class writing, collaborative revision, and multimodal expression—tasks AI can mimic but not truly live. Don’t ban the bot. Co-opt it. Reclaim the standards of excellence by making students chase that gourmet smoothie—not because it’s easy, but because it tastes like something they actually made. The antidote to attenuation isn’t nostalgia or defeatism. It’s redesigning writing instruction to make real thinking indispensable again. If the abyss is staring back, then wink at it, sharpen your pen, and write something it couldn’t dare to fake.

  • Jia Tolentino Explores the Neverending Torments of Infogluttening

    Jia Tolentino Explores the Neverending Torments of Infogluttening

    In her essay “My Brain Finally Broke,” New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino doesn’t so much confess a breakdown as she performs it—on the page, in real time, with all the elegance of a collapsing soufflé. She’s spiraling like a character in a Black Mirror episode who’s accidentally binge-watched the entire internet. Reality, for her, is now an unskippable TikTok ad mashed up with a conspiracy subreddit and narrated by a stoned Siri. She mistakes a marketing email from Hanna Andersson for “Hamas,” which is either a Freudian slip or a symptom of late-stage content poisoning.

    The essay is a dispatch from the front lines of postmodern psychosis. COVID brain fog, phone addiction, weed regret, and the unrelenting chaos of a “post-truth, post-shame” America have fused into one delicious cognitive stew. Her phone has become a weaponized hallucination device. Her mind, sloshing with influencer memes, QAnon-adjacent headlines, and DALL·E-generated nonsense, now processes information like a blender without a lid.

    She hasn’t even gotten to the fun part yet: the existential horror of not using ChatGPT. While others are letting this over-eager AI ghostwrite their résumés, soothe their insecurities, and pick their pad thai, Tolentino stares into the abyss, resisting. But she can’t help wondering—would she be more insane if she gave in and let a chatbot become her best friend, life coach, and menu whisperer? She cites Noor Al-Sibai’s unnerving article about heavy ChatGPT users developing dependency, loneliness, and depression, which sounds less like a tech trend and more like a new DSM entry.

    Her conclusion? Physical reality—the sweaty, glitchy, analog mess of it—isn’t just where we recover our sanity; it’s becoming a luxury few can afford. The digital realm, with its infinite scroll of half-baked horror and curated despair, is devouring us in real time. To have the sticky-like tar of this realm coat your brain is the result of Infogluttening (info + gluttony + sickening)–a grotesque cognitive overload caused by bingeing too much content, too fast, until your brain feels like it’s gorged on deep-fried Wikipedia.

    Tolentino isn’t predicting a Black Mirror future. She is the Black Mirror future, live and unfiltered, and her brain is the canary in the content mine.

  • Languishage: How AI is Smothering the Soul of Writing

    Languishage: How AI is Smothering the Soul of Writing

    Once upon a time, writing instructors lost sleep over comma splices and uninspired thesis statements. Those were gentler days. Today, we fend off 5,000-word essays excreted by AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude—papers so eerily competent they hit every point on the department rubric like a sniper taking out a checklist. In-text citations? Flawless. Signal phrases? Present. MLA formatting? Impeccable. Close reading? Technically there—but with all the spiritual warmth of a fax machine reading The Waste Land.

    This is prose from the Uncanny Valley of Academic Writing—fluent, obedient, and utterly soulless, like a Stepford Wife enrolled in English 101. As writing instructors, many of us once loved language. We thrilled at the awkward, erratic voice of a student trying to say something real. Now we trudge through a desert of syntactic perfection, afflicted with a condition I’ve dubbed Languishage (language + languish)—the slow death of prose at the hands of polite, programmed mediocrity.

    And since these Franken-scripts routinely slip past plagiarism detectors, we’re left with a queasy question: What is the future of writing—and of teaching writing—in the AI age?

    That question haunted me long enough to produce a 3,000-word prompt. But the more I listened to my students, the clearer it became: this isn’t just about writing. It’s about living. They’re not merely outsourcing thesis statements. They’re outsourcing themselves—using AI to smooth over apology texts, finesse flirtation, DIY their therapy, and decipher the mumbled ramblings of tenured professors. They plug syllabi into GPT to generate study guides, request toothpaste recommendations, compose networking emails, and archive their digital selves in neat AI-curated folders.

    ChatGPT isn’t a writing tool. It’s prosthetic consciousness.

    And here’s the punchline: they don’t see an alternative. In their hyper-accelerated, ultra-competitive, cognitively overloaded lives, AI isn’t a novelty—it’s life support. It’s as essential as caffeine and Wi-Fi. So no, I’m not asking them to “critique ChatGPT” as if it’s some fancy spell-checker with ambition. That’s adorable. Instead, I’m introducing them to Algorithmic Capture—the quiet colonization of human behavior by optimization logic. In this world, ambiguity is punished, nuance is flattened, and selfhood becomes a performance for an invisible algorithmic audience. They aren’t just using the machine. They’re shaping themselves to become legible to it.

    That’s why the new essay prompt doesn’t ask, “What’s the future of writing?” It asks something far more urgent: “What’s happening to you?”

    We’re studying Black Mirror—especially “Joan Is Awful,” that fluorescent, satirical fever dream of algorithmic self-annihilation—and writing about how Algorithmic Capture is rewiring our lives, choices, and identities. The assignment isn’t a critique of AI. It’s a search party for what’s left of us.