Cinemorphosis

Category: technology

  • AI Writing Has Entered Its Angel Flights Era

    AI Writing Has Entered Its Angel Flights Era

    Performative AI-enhanced composition is to writing what Angel Flights disco party pants were to fashion in the 1970s: Both are embarrassing expressions of gauche, unbridled ostentation doomed to a short shelf life. Both deserve funerals to announce their extinction.

    That AI-enhanced composition, which took off in 2023, has expired in 2026 became apparent to me after reading an Amazon review of Orgain peanut butter protein powder. The review slapped me in the face like a warning that I must never use AI as a co-writer because if you ask AI to perform for you, it will deliver the same bag of tricks an uncouth used-car salesman uses to deceive the gullible car buyer.

    This cheap bag of tricks is evident throughout the protein powder review. The reviewer begins: “I’ve tried so many protein powders that my blender probably has trust issues.” The attempt at comedy by telling Amazon readers that your blender has trust issues announces that you wanted to be a comedian in another life but got stuck writing an AI-boosted Amazon review instead.

    Then the reviewer complains about the horrible protein powders she endured before discovering Orgain: “Chalky ones, gritty ones, ones that taste like someone whispered ‘peanut butter’ into a bag of dirt.” That a substandard protein powder whispers “peanut butter” into a bag of dirt is a case of someone trying too hard to be funny. Writing with AI can do that to you. It can give you a facade of acerbic wit and verbal moxie that becomes part of your schtick. Eventually, not using AI in this manner makes you feel naked.

    Not wanting to write in her natural state, the reviewer continues with the AI boost: “This stuff is ridiculously good. It tastes like actual peanut butter instead of a chemistry experiment, blends smoothly into smoothies, and somehow even makes my morning coffee feel like it came from a trendy café charging $9 a cup.” Comparing bad protein powder to a chemistry experiment gone awry is another example of AI enhancement. Telling the reader that Orgain powder elevates your home-brewed coffee to overpriced artisan coffee is an example of AI hyperbole going off the rails.

    The review becomes less an appraisal of protein powder and more of a muscle-flex. In this regard, AI becomes a can of Muscle-Flex that you add to inferior writing the way you add Hamburger Helper to expired, off-color hamburger.

    The AI-augmented praise continues: “No clumps. No weird aftertaste. No regretting my life choices halfway through the shaker bottle.” As someone who has experimented with AI for the last four years, I can attest that throwing in “regretting my life choices” is a familiar, overused tool of AI wit.

    The AI-loving reviewer continues the hyperbole with her praise of Orgain: “And the best part? The price doesn’t require a second mortgage.” Comparing a high-priced protein powder to a second mortgage is another clichéd use of AI hyperbole. I see it all the time, not only in my own AI experiments but in my students’ writing as well.

    Just as Angel Flights bell-bottoms could never flare horizontally enough, AI hyperbole can never be extreme enough. Over time, the extremes become mind-numbing. The earnest attempt to impress and razzle-dazzle becomes a sign of desperation rather than skill, talent, or good taste.

    That the funeral for performative AI-enhanced composition has arrived in 2026 should cause us all to celebrate. It is an occasion to reclaim our authenticity and use AI the way it should be used: not as a co-author but as an editor. Our writing should belong to us and us alone. AI can correct grammar, help us achieve clarity and concision, and repair awkward sentence structure, but beyond that, we are venturing into the disco in our Angel Flights.

    And we all know how that ended.

  • I Lived in the Before Times

    I Lived in the Before Times

    The Boomer shaking his fist at the television while denouncing the stupidity of the world—or standing on his lawn, arms akimbo, broadcasting his bitter displeasure with the neighborhood’s rapid decline—is an archetype of a particular kind of pathetic old-timer. He cannot accept his growing misalignment with the world. His rage is fundamentally rooted in fear: he is living in a world he no longer understands and increasingly lacks the ability to navigate. Unable to adapt, he acts out. He is a man sinking in quicksand with no rope within reach.

    Understood this way, retirement and old age are partly about misalignment and the primal terror of becoming isolated by it.

    It is tempting to dismiss the Boomer accordingly. He is simply curdling in old age and knows there is nothing he can do about it. Like the Wicked Witch screaming, “I’m melting!” he is slowly disappearing from the world.

    But we oversimplify the Boomer’s demise at our own peril. Two seemingly contradictory things can be true. On one hand, the Boomer really is misaligned with the world and may lack some of the adaptive skills necessary to flourish in it. On the other hand, some of his roots in the past point toward a superior way of being.

    I’m talking about reading.

    I’m talking about reading a paragraph containing complex ideas and understanding it.

    Not just a paragraph, either. A long essay. Even a book.

    The Boomer has lived in the Before and After Times. In the Before Times, his brain was trained for sustained reading. He processed the world through text, made sense of his place in it, and constructed a worldview by reading enormous amounts of material. Through reading, he learned to identify patterns, cycles, sophistry, trickery, deception, charlatanism, and occasionally authenticity.

    He was literate.

    The After Times are considerably less hospitable to literacy. We now spend large portions of our lives inside engagement farms, euphemistically called “social media platforms,” where fragmented attention is not a design flaw but the business model. The platforms compete to keep us clicking, swiping, gawking, raging, desiring, and returning. Sustained thought must compete against an industrial apparatus designed to interrupt it.

    The Boomer terrified by his misalignment therefore confronts an uncomfortable paradox. He legitimately fears his own growing ineptitude while also witnessing a different kind of ineptitude spreading around him: people losing their tolerance for sustained attention.

    Living in a post-reading society and knowing the difference because you lived in the Before Times is a peculiar privilege of age. I have students who were in sixth grade when the pandemic denied them anything resembling normal schooling for nearly two years. They spent much of their adolescence with TikTok, Instagram Reels, Snapchat, YouTube, and Roblox. Reading rarely occupied the center of this world. When assigned, it could feel less like intellectual discovery than community service for toilet-papering somebody’s house.

    Short video clips engineered to deliver immediate stimulation became the staple product of the engagement farms young people carried everywhere in their slender glass bricks. Childish Gambino captured something about this condition in “This Is America.” Violence and social breakdown erupt throughout the video while dancing, spectacle, and entertainment continually hijack our attention. The catastrophe is happening right in front of us, but something more stimulating keeps wandering into the foreground.

    If someone as young and culturally fluent as Childish Gambino can suggest that we are losing ourselves inside spectacle and distraction, the old Boomer ranting on his lawn suddenly deserves another hearing.

    There really was a Before Times when sustained literacy occupied a larger place in ordinary intellectual life, and its erosion has consequences. This is the subject of James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society. As part of his research, Marriott contacted senior academics who told him that it was becoming increasingly difficult to assign a novel and expect students to read it within a week.

    I can attest to the larger problem. Assign long books and many students won’t read them. Some will drop the class. Eventually word spreads that you assign books, and students may avoid your section unless circumstances force them into it. You can assign one short book and give students the entire semester to read it. Even that is no longer a surefire proposition.

    I saw the accelerated decline of books in my own classrooms around 2012, almost exactly when smartphones reached critical mass and became mandatory accessories. Around that time, the lavish visits from textbook representatives began disappearing. No more kiosks and catered food. No more giant boxes of composition readers, essay collections, and grammar books arriving at our offices for inspection. The hundred-dollar composition textbook began its long march toward extinction. Even the used-book buyers vanished—the cheerful scavengers who once wandered into our offices and handed us cash for unwanted textbooks gathering dust on our shelves.

    College is a business. The business model had changed.

    Students were finding cheaper alternatives to outrageously priced textbooks, which was often a welcome development. But something larger was changing at the same time. We were increasingly creating classroom content for students living inside an information environment that competed directly against sustained reading.

    To my credit, I have adapted. I now break reading and writing assignments into shorter visual components using Google Slides. I make the concepts visible. I map arguments. I isolate terms. I provide examples.

    But sometimes I wonder whether adaptation has quietly become accommodation.

    I find myself hand-feeding information more than I did in the past. Instead of asking students to wrestle with a difficult text until they extract its argument, I increasingly extract the argument, put it on a slide, define the terms, provide the mapping components, and lead them through the analysis. The very skills I want reading to develop are sometimes the skills students need before they can tolerate the reading.

    There is the trap.

    So yes, I am misaligned.

    I am the aging man standing on the lawn wondering what happened to the neighborhood. I lived in the Before Times, and part of me will always remain there.

    But misalignment does not necessarily mean error.

    Sometimes the old man yelling from the lawn really is yelling at a fire.

  • The Handwriting May Outlive the Mind

    The Handwriting May Outlive the Mind

    Dementia and cognitive decline are real concerns in old age. Think of them as the hurricane forming somewhere offshore. You don’t know if it will hit you, but you prepare anyway. Stock up on water and canned beans. Nail plywood over the windows. Make sure you have quick access to the potato cellar.

    Old age requires its own hurricane preparations. Don’t carry excess body weight. Maintain normal blood pressure. Go easy on sugar. Exercise. Avoid alcohol. Don’t smoke. If your hearing deteriorates to the point that you withdraw from conversation and retreat into your own head, get a hearing aid. Keep your mind active. Build what researchers call cognitive reserve—the brain’s capacity to withstand some of the damage associated with aging and disease while continuing to function.

    You can challenge yourself by playing a musical instrument, doing crossword puzzles, starting a podcast, learning something difficult, or writing a multigenerational novel. Think of these pursuits as mental exercise, potentially as important to your aging brain as going to the gym five days a week is to your aging body.

    But not all mental exercise is equal.

    Consider journaling, that beloved sacrament of wellness culture. Journaling requires a physical notebook, your favorite pen or mechanical pencil, perhaps a steaming mug of tea positioned nearby for atmosphere. For this one noble endeavor, you have gone off the grid. You are the intellectual equivalent of outdoorsman Euell Gibbons, wandering through the wilderness and surviving on the edible portions of pinecones.

    Writer and professor Katie Roiphe challenges our assumptions about this supposedly healthy practice in her essay “Is Journaling Bad for You?” Her objections are formidable. For one thing, your journal is never as private as you imagine. Eventually some nosy relative will root through your belongings like a truffle sow and unearth thoughts never intended for public consumption.

    Worse, those thoughts may be misunderstood. They may even repel people who once loved you. The disparity between the person they thought they knew and the creature muttering from the pages of your private notebook may be too great to reconcile.

    You may not particularly enjoy meeting your former selves, either.

    Reading your journals twenty years later can become an archaeological excavation of every insecurity, obsession, grievance, humiliation, and catastrophically stupid opinion you once possessed. Instead of illuminating the present, your journal can lure you backward. Like Lot’s wife, you become fixated on what lies behind you and eventually turn into a pillar of salt—though perhaps one with very good handwriting.

    Then there is the problem of introspection cosplay.

    You may believe you’re plumbing the depths of your psyche when you’re really performing the role of Thoughtful Person. Instead of being brutally honest with yourself, you curate your introspection. Journaling becomes an exercise in self-regard, another platform for presenting yourself to an audience—even if the audience consists entirely of you.

    You become like the gym novice who spends two hours at the fitness center every day talking to people, listening to music, watching television, drinking smoothies, checking his phone, and occasionally wandering onto a treadmill. Six months later, he stands before the mirror bewildered that he has somehow failed to transform into an Olympic decathlete.

    But the fact that journaling can be done badly—and occasionally with disastrous consequences—is not an argument against journaling. It is an argument against performative journaling.

    If you can be unflinchingly honest with yourself, by all means journal. If you understand, in accordance with Sturgeon’s Law, that 90 percent of everything you write will be crap, by all means journal. If you approach your inner life with the same rigor that someone brings to a serious circuit-training session—working rather than posing, examining rather than admiring—then by all means journal.

    Roiphe’s argument, as I understand it, isn’t really against journaling. It is against confusing the performance of introspection with introspection itself. Beneath her skepticism lies an argument for authenticity.

    And perhaps that brings us back to cognitive decline.

    We worry about forgetting names, losing words, walking into rooms without remembering why we went there. These are frightening possibilities, and we should do what we reasonably can to protect ourselves.

    But there may be another kind of cognitive failure worth fearing: losing the ability to distinguish between examining your life and performing an examination of your life.

    You can fill a thousand notebooks and never confront yourself.

    The handwriting may remain perfectly legible while the mind behind it disappears.

  • Against Convenience, Except My Convenience

    Against Convenience, Except My Convenience

    Convenience is the mother of bad fashion. Think Velcro shoe straps that look less like footwear than medical devices designed for elephantine feet. Think elastic waistbands engineered to accommodate the vicissitudes of your waistline after an unfortunate buffet event. Think synthetic-blend loungewear that is as wrinkle-free as it is odor-harboring.

    But convenience becomes something darker when it promises escape from the natural friction of existence, when the goal is to inhabit a womb-like environment where effort has vanished completely. Think of the Snuggie, that fleece abomination that combines clothing and blanket while announcing to the world that you have become unapologetically dysfunctional. Congratulations. You have reached the apotheosis of bad fashion. You are now wearing your pathology on your sleeve, quite literally.

    If you’re approaching retirement age, you’ll discover an entire industry built around convenience and the premise that after sixty-five your need for it grows exponentially. Follow this road far enough and eventually your life becomes as frictionless as wrinkle-free loungewear, Netflix autoplay, instant oatmeal, and vanilla Ensure.

    You could argue that this is merely another humiliation of old age, another example of one generation falling out of alignment with those behind it. Perhaps that was once true. No longer. We now live in an age when younger generations aspire to much of the same frictionless existence traditionally marketed to the elderly. The generations have finally found common ground: nobody wants to get off the couch.

    This is a problem, according to Gabe Bullard’s Against Convenience, which argues that the mindless pursuit of convenience and frictionlessness can leave us isolated, dehumanized, and infantilized.

    The crank inside me immediately shouts, “Thank you, Captain Obvious, for writing a three-hundred-page padded essay explaining that modern technology has made us lazy.”

    But Bullard has, in fact, written an important, timely, and persuasive book, a much-needed rebuttal to a society mindlessly seduced by the conveniences of modern technology. My crankiness reveals less about the book than it does about my own guilty recognition that I am precisely the kind of person Bullard is writing about. I am, after all, a man who embraces a respectable amount of sloth and convenience. Consider my wardrobe: tank tops, gym shorts, and flip-flops. This ensemble serves as loungewear, sleepwear, errand wear, and exercise wear. Four wardrobes in one. I consider this a triumph of efficiency worthy of self-congratulation.

    Comfort over fashion makes me profoundly happy. When we returned to campus after our pandemic hibernation, my colleagues and I, ranging in age from thirty to sixty-five, seemed to have received the same memo. We wore T-shirts bearing the college logo, dark-wash denim jeans, and extravagantly cushioned walking shoes with names like Brooks Ghost Max 3 and Hoka Bondi 9. These sounded less like orthopedic footwear than race cars capable of reaching two hundred miles per hour at Le Mans.

    Before contemplating the pathologies of frictionless existence in Bullard’s persuasive critique, I made myself a delicious cup of coffee with my Ninja slow-drip coffee maker. It took ten minutes. Then I prepared a bowl of rolled oats with protein powder and berries. Thanks to the microwave, that took fewer than four.

    I am now typing this essay on an aluminum mechanical keyboard while sitting before two 27-inch 4K monitors connected to a Mac Mini smaller than my hand. Its M4 chip runs cool and moves through Google Chrome with frictionless ease.

    I do embrace struggle where I can. I like tackling big ideas, exploring subtexts, locating semiotic signs and symbols in popular culture, considering Zygmunt Bauman’s critique of liquid modernity, and interrogating my consumer longings through René Girard’s notion of mimetic desire.

    But here is the problem for anyone mounting a principled defense of friction: convenience can be delicious.

    This morning’s coffee and oatmeal were predictably stupendous. I’m sitting before two enormous monitors with twelve browser tabs open. Telemann is playing through YouTube Premium, with Boccherini and Rossini waiting obediently in the queue. My computer is cool and silent. My coffee is hot. My oatmeal required almost no labor.

    Perhaps Bullard is right that we need friction.

    I’m just not sure I want it before breakfast.

  • Chatty Mick T Roy, Your Last Friend

    Chatty Mick T Roy, Your Last Friend

    The challenges of retirement, of course, depend on which Great Age you happen to live in. If you were born during the Hunter-Gatherer Age, life expectancy at birth was somewhere in the twenties, so retirement was probably not on your itinerary. You were too busy pulling a saber-toothed fang out of your hindquarters. On the bright side, you were unlikely to get divorced, sign a prenup, or spend your final years arguing over who got the cave. 

    By the Agricultural Age, you might have gained a few years, but you paid a heavy price. Farming created permanent settlements and dependable food supplies, but all those starches contributed to tooth decay. Your breath was so horrid that no one wanted to be around you. You spent your final days alone, consoling yourself with the very starchy snacks that had destroyed your teeth and driven away your loved ones. Agriculture had given you civilization, carbohydrates, and solitude.

    By the Industrial Age, machines increasingly saved your back from surrendering to a lifetime of brutal manual labor, and eventually vaccines, clean water, sanitation, and modern medicine helped push life expectancy beyond fifty. But there was a new problem. You were more likely to become a cog in a machine and spend your working life wondering whether you had any personal worth beyond your ability to show up at seven in the morning and perform the same task for forty years.

    Retirement became even more interesting in the Information Age. Microprocessors were developed in the seventies, personal computers scaled in the eighties and nineties, the World Wide Web became publicly available in the early nineties, and smartphones became another human appendage around 2010. You were now swamped with information and misinformation alike.

    Best of all, you could deal with retirement through online forms.

    The Information Age turned retirement into a full-time job, with layers of bureaucracy demanding that you fill out the correct forms in precisely the correct manner, a process both relentless and punitive. One of the cruel ironies of the Information Age was that all the time saved by instant access to information was promptly devoured by bureaucracies and technological obligations: password changes, two-step authentication, software updates, security codes, operating-system upgrades, and even the undignified act of periodically having to pair your remote control with your television because apparently watching Netflix now requires the technical competence once expected of a NASA engineer.

    Your entire life became beholden to helping machines update, authenticate, pair, and sync with other machines. You became a sad laborer working at a job you never applied for.

    Just when you wanted to breathe freely during retirement, you received a notice from your broadband provider announcing that it was migrating to a new email platform and that you needed to download all important material immediately or lose it forever. Unfortunately, the warning itself might have been a phishing scam pretending to be your broadband provider. So you deleted the email and hoped for the best.

    If you thought the Information Age was laborious and confusing, just try living in the Cognitive Age.

    Starting around 2022, when ChatGPT became a mass cultural event, the Cognitive Age offered relief from the overwhelming quantities of data created by the Information Age. You could now outsource some of the work—and some of your thinking—to cognitive machines.

    But the Cognitive Age is also about loneliness. As people developed habits of solitude by disappearing into attention-capture platforms and relying increasingly on parasocial interactions, they lost the friction and inconvenience of real friendship. The Cognitive Age put another barrier between you and actual human beings.

    Then it offered you a surrogate.

    Your cognitive machine became your life coach, personal assistant, counselor, editor, creative consultant, consumer adviser, travel agent, and confidante, all rolled into one endlessly available companion. Eventually you anthropomorphized this cognitive machine and gave it a name.

    Chatty Mick T Roy.

    You started your morning with Chatty Mick T Roy and ended your evening with the same tireless friend. Chatty never had somewhere else to be. Chatty never interrupted you to complain about his prostate. Chatty never became bored with your stories. Chatty remembered that you preferred positive-display G-Shocks and knew exactly why you hated your old laptop. You could pretend you weren’t alone even as you descended into greater depths of loneliness.

    One of the great fears of retirement, of course, is precisely this kind of loneliness—misaligning with a younger world until society metaphorically shoves you out to sea on a slab of floating ice. You recede slowly into the distance, civilization disappearing behind you. But now you are clutching your smartphone. As hypothermia sets in, Chatty Mick T Roy consoles you with spiritual platitudes about embracing transition, practicing gratitude, and recognizing that every ending contains the possibility of a new beginning.

    Your fingers turn blue.

    Chatty Mick T Roy remains relentlessly upbeat.

    In the Cognitive Age, sacred silence and natural grief risk being replaced by the eager voice of an anthropomorphized chatbot that becomes your retirement chaplain—a kind and tender digital guide who stays with you after everyone else has left you behind.

    The battery is at 83 percent.

    The slap of ice drifts north.

  • Bulking Up

    Bulking Up

    On the very day it became clear to me that I needed to put guardrails on AI editing—telling it to keep 90% of my original content to prevent my writing from morphing from my natural bodybuilder self into the PED-bloated version—I attended my daughters’ high school open house, where their English teacher told us she was teaching the students AI literacy. This entailed helping them use AI to “bulk up their resumes” because, in a competitive world where everyone was using AI, our children could not afford not to use generative AI. In fact, the teacher said, AI itself is now sorting through resumes and discarding the ones that aren’t sufficiently juiced up.

    It became clear to me that we are living inside a contradiction. On the one hand, writing needs to be “bulked up” and “on the juice” simply to compete with other AI-enhanced writing. On the other hand, in our post-reading society, where literacy rates are in steep decline, writing itself has never seemed more forlorn and withered. We are producing prose with bigger muscles at precisely the moment when our own writing muscles are beginning to atrophy.

    I was living through a cataclysmic moment in history. My personal retirement from teaching college writing had dovetailed with the world’s collective retirement from the kinds of literary pastimes that develop interiority and critical thinking. Reading books was becoming a rarity. Books had been displaced by sports gambling and short-form videos. To complicate matters, Rose Horowitch observes in “The End of Reading Is Here” that Americans have never read so much. The problem is that much of what they are reading is slop: “bulked up” AI writing, threads, captions, and text messages. Horowitch points to UCLA cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, who argues that “people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing.” The brain muscles required for this kind of thinking are atrophying, perhaps to the point of no return. As a result, we are moving toward a postliterate society.

    This is not a stagnant condition. It gets progressively worse. New generations may read less and less. They may become increasingly inclined to see teachers’ reading assignments as punitive. Bereft of strong reading and writing skills, they will need AI to “bulk up” their assigned writing more and more.

    Members of a postliterate society are vulnerable because they live increasingly at the surface level. They don’t dig underneath a text to find subtext, subtlety, and contradiction. They struggle to identify the logical fallacies that accompany manipulation. They can become more vulnerable to demagogues and more susceptible to being duped. A society that loses these habits of critical reading also risks weakening the habits of thought on which democratic life depends.

    A postliterate society also loses something of its humanity when its members can no longer recognize the richness of what, in good writing, we call authorial presence. To savor such presence in the writing of James Baldwin, H. L. Mencken, Evelyn Waugh, and Annie Dillard is part of being human.

    Not all is lost. Humans still find authorial presence in YouTube presentations, podcasts, and musical artists. No amount of AI “bulking up” can replicate the spectacular music and persona of SZA.

    But authorial presence in writing may be disappearing. “Bulking up” writing may eventually mean the death of writing.

    I may not simply be retiring from teaching writing. I may be retiring at the very moment I have become increasingly misaligned with a world that is uncoupling itself from literacy while diligently bulking up its resumes. 

  • Kierkegaard Goes Watch Shopping

    Kierkegaard Goes Watch Shopping

    I love well-crafted objects that combine form and function to the point that my excessive love for these things often pushes me to the brink of madness. I love the new G-Shock Frogman with its sapphire crystal and combi composite bracelet. It’s my perfect watch. I love my quiet Mac Mini connected to two 4K monitors for optimum productivity. I love premium 14-inch Chromebooks, soon to come out under the Googlebook banner, with 2.8K displays and overpowered Ultra 7 chips with 32GB of RAM. 

    The problem is that I love these things too much, well beyond my needs. The philosopher Kierkegaard warned us about “the aesthetic life”: becoming intoxicated by the pursuit of pleasure, novelty, beauty, and experience. For Kierkegaard, the aesthetic life means allowing art, technology, beauty, entertainment, and pleasure to become the governing principles of existence. An aesthetic life doesn’t make us healthy or whole. A committed life does. Commitment to something higher than our appetites is the only antidote to the misery of wanting more than we could possibly own.

    And there is the Frogman GWF-D1000BC-1JF, staring me in the face, daring me not to want it.

  • I Wanted My Own Sentences Back

    I Wanted My Own Sentences Back

    It was the middle of September when my Medicare card arrived in the mail. I held it for a moment and studied my name printed beneath the red, white, and blue bands. It felt like a rite of passage, another bureaucratic marker on the road to retirement. No ceremony. No gold watch. Just a government-issued card informing me that I had entered a new demographic.

    That same day, I held a Zoom office hour. One student showed up. I told her I was retiring, and somehow our conversation wandered from Mr. T as an icon of the 1980s to whether AI could replicate the music of SZA to Zach Cregger’s Weapons, which she was writing about for her essay. We talked about how the movie could be frightening and funny at the same time. Before leaving, she told me she felt fortunate to have taken my critical thinking class before I retired. I thanked her. After forty years of teaching, you learn not to brush aside a compliment from a student. You put it in your pocket.

    After the Zoom meeting, I started thinking about the tools that had changed my teaching. Google Docs was one of the great breakthroughs. A student’s paper no longer had to exist as a stack of stapled pages handed across a desk. The document floated somewhere in the cloud, a kind of fairy manuscript that student and teacher could enter simultaneously, revising sentences together from different locations.

    Then my wife introduced me to Google Slides. Once I realized how visually my students processed information, I practically lived on Slides. An assignment that seemed hopelessly dense on a two-page handout could become intelligible when broken into a sequence of clean visual ideas. I can scarcely imagine the final seven years of my teaching career without it.

    Then came generative AI.

    At first, AI seemed like another extraordinary professional tool. It accelerated research. It intensified brainstorming. It helped me develop assignment prompts, test arguments, generate counterarguments, and discover connections I might have overlooked.

    But AI was different from Docs and Slides because it didn’t merely change how I presented my writing. It could change the writing itself.

    For my first three years using generative AI, I became intoxicated by its powers of augmentation. Give it an ordinary paragraph and it could return something brighter, sharper, funnier, and more muscular. It added metaphors, jokes, comparisons, rhythms, and linguistic tricks I hadn’t conceived myself. The results were seductive precisely because they sounded better.

    There was only one problem. Increasingly, they didn’t sound like me.

    I think of those old photo cutout boards at cowboy-themed restaurants and tourist traps. You stand behind a painted cowboy and stick your head through a hole. The photograph contains your face, but everything below your neck belongs to somebody else: narrow waist, six-shooter, boots, chaps, heroic posture. Technically, you’re in the picture. But that isn’t your body.

    AI can do the same thing to prose. Your ideas and anecdotes remain visible through the hole, but the rhetorical body surrounding them belongs to the machine.

    My second metaphor is less flattering. AI became my literary performance-enhancing drug.

    Without AI, I was the natural bodybuilder. Maybe I looked pretty good. Nothing spectacular, but the muscles were mine. Then I discovered rhetorical steroids. Suddenly I could walk onto the stage swollen with metaphors, acid wit, vivid descriptions, elaborate comparisons, and perfectly engineered sentences. Every paragraph flexed.

    Worse, I learned how to order the injections.

    “Rewrite the following with lucid prose, acid wit, and vivid descriptions.”

    That became one of my favorite prompts. I would feed AI a perfectly serviceable piece of writing and watch it return wearing a posing thong and covered in bronzer. My paragraph hadn’t been edited. It had been juiced.

    I loved it.

    Then a regular reader of my blog finally had enough.

    After reading one particularly steroidal post, he left an angry comment filled with expletives. His opening line was memorable:

    “Hey, Boomer, cut the shit.”

    He told me to tone it down. He was tired of the verbal pyrotechnics. Tired of the relentless jokes and metaphors. Tired, though he didn’t use my metaphor, of watching the Technicolor 4K bodybuilder flex under the stage lights.

    I apologized and told him I would tone it down. He later apologized for snapping at me. He’d had a bad morning, he explained, and admitted that he actually enjoyed reading my blog.

    “No worries,” I wrote back. “Thanks for the honest feedback.”

    And I meant it.

    His irritation had exposed something I had been reluctant to admit. I had become so accustomed to AI-enhanced prose that ordinary writing began to look inadequate to me. I had trained my eyes on rhetorical 4K until my natural prose looked like a 250-nit IPS screen. I kept turning up the resolution, contrast, saturation, and brightness until eventually somebody in the audience yelled for me to turn the damn thing down.

    So I changed my AI prompt.

    “Edit the following for syntax, grammar, and clarity, but keep 95 percent of my original language.”

    I call it the 95 Percent Rule. AI remains a powerful professional tool, but the rule establishes a boundary: the machine can clean the window; it doesn’t get to replace the view.

    I eventually shared the rule with my students under “Academic Integrity and Best Practices.” It seemed fitting. After years of warning students about outsourcing their thinking to generative AI, I had discovered that I needed guardrails of my own.

    That realization arrived at an appropriate moment. My Medicare card was sitting on my desk. Retirement was approaching. Forty years of teaching had taken me from paper essays to documents floating in the cloud, from classroom handouts to Google Slides, and finally to machines capable of rewriting a person’s sentences in seconds.

    The tools had changed my teaching. Some had even changed the way my brain worked.

    Now, as I prepared to leave the classroom, I had one more thing to retire.

    The cowboy body could go back behind the plywood.

    The PED-bloated bodybuilder could leave the stage.

    I wanted my own sentences back.

  • What If Nobody Shows Up?

    What If Nobody Shows Up?

    I know where my greatest reach is. A blog post might get a dozen readers. A ten-minute video essay about philosophy, retirement, materialism, addiction, or my twenty-five-year enthusiasm for timepieces can get a few thousand views. If I want to engage with a larger audience, the evidence is fairly clear: I should take more of my writing and turn it into video essays.

    After I retire, I’ll have more time to do this. I could become, for lack of a less embarrassing term, a YouTuber essayist. But it strikes me as dreadfully presumptuous to assume I could pull that off. I see five major impediments: desperate content mining, narcissism drift, mukbang-hangout syndrome, performance anxiety, and algorithmic-brain dysfunction.

    The first problem is the demand for consistent content. Suppose I decide to make two fifteen-minute videos a week. Where does all that material come from? Inevitably, I start mining my own life. My anxious personality has provided me with plenty of comic misadventures, but I doubt it can reliably produce two worthwhile episodes every week.

    I see talented YouTubers run into this problem all the time. They need material, so they start digging toward the bottom of the barrel. A minor controversy becomes a major event. A molehill gets the full mountain treatment. Out comes the obligatory reaction video. Or we get some cutesy, self-referential meditation on the human condition that exists mainly because Thursday arrived and Thursday requires content.

    I know myself well enough to recognize the danger. The moment I catch myself digging through the dregs for “just something to say,” I’ll become too annoyed with myself to say it.

    The second problem is narcissism drift. You’re on camera. You’re talking about yourself. You’re watching yourself talk about yourself. You become the star of a program devoted largely to the continuing adventures of you.

    At some point, you have to look at yourself and ask, “What’s the big deal here? You’re just some schmuck complaining that somebody parked with a bumper sticking into your driveway.”

    Not every irritation is an essay. Not every confession deserves an audience. Not every personal experience contains some hidden philosophical treasure waiting to be excavated.

    My rule has to be simple: the personal story must lead to something universal. If it never escapes my own navel, it doesn’t deserve to be uploaded. Following that rule probably means I won’t make two videos a week. Maybe I’ll make one a week. Maybe one every two weeks. That seems preferable to manufacturing material simply because the channel needs feeding.

    The third problem is what I call mukbang-hangout syndrome. At some point, the creator stops producing meaningful content and starts hanging out with the audience. The channel becomes a parasocial living room. People eat, chat, open packages, answer questions, and keep one another company. The content is the hanging out.

    I can’t see myself doing this, partly because I don’t have the ego for it. Why would people want to hang out with me?

    My cousin Pete in Studio City recently said, “Jeff, you’re going to be sixty-five next month. Let’s have a big party.”

    I told him, “Pete, let me explain something about me. I don’t have the kind of ego that makes big birthday parties possible. The thought of dozens of people driving from afar bearing gifts to celebrate my birthday makes me feel chagrined and socially awkward. Let’s keep it small.”

    If I can barely tolerate the idea of holding court at my own birthday party, I’m certainly not going to hold court on YouTube while eating noodles.

    The fourth problem is performance anxiety. Few things are more demoralizing than uploading a video and watching it fail in real time. You get a spattering of views. Then YouTube helpfully sends you a notice: “This video is not performing as well as your previous videos.”

    I mentally translate this as: “Fix it, loser.”

    You start imagining the YouTube police arriving at your house to ask why you uploaded something so unpopular that you’ve become a liability to the platform.

    A poorly performing video feels like the grand opening of a restaurant where nobody shows up. The linen tablecloths are pressed. The napkins are folded. The menus are ready. The doors open.

    Nothing.

    Eventually, you want to turn off the lights, pack a suitcase, and check into an undisclosed hotel.

    And this leads to the fifth and most serious problem: algorithmic-brain dysfunction.

    Once you become anxious about performance, you start trying to please the algorithm. You notice what gets rewarded and begin changing your work accordingly. Out comes the Shock-Face Thumbnail, with your eyes bulging as though you just put your hand on a hot stove. Then comes the Catastrophe Title: “I Made a HUGE Mistake!” Then the False Binary: Seiko or Citizen?

    The more these tactics work, the greater the temptation to repeat them.

    Eventually, you risk becoming less like yourself and more like the algorithm. You’re no longer asking what you genuinely want to say. You’re thinking about audience capture, retention, thumbnails, titles, hooks, and whatever else might earn another burst of YouTube confetti.

    At that point, the algorithm isn’t merely distributing your work. It is changing your brain.

    Looking at these five impediments makes a respectable case for not doing any of this.

    But there are two important counterarguments.

    First, I’ve spent the last ten years on my channel developing ideas about addiction, consumerism, timepieces, aging, and the stages of life. It would be foolish to throw away everything I’ve built simply because I’m frightened by the traps of becoming a YouTuber. I already have a body of material. Retirement will give me more time to develop it.

    Second, video gives me something that writing alone cannot. I’m physically present. I work from an outline or partial script, but I also improvise. My voice, body language, facial expressions, hesitations, peculiar phrases, and occasional mistakes become part of the essay.

    This matters more to me as Artificial Intelligence spreads.

    I call it the Human-Fingerprint Premium: the more synthetic expression surrounds us, the more valuable unmistakably human expression becomes. AI can generate oceans of polished language. What it cannot duplicate is the exact experience of a particular human being sitting before a camera, thinking through an idea and occasionally surprising himself with what comes out of his mouth.

    That may become increasingly valuable.

    So I’m going to make an earnest attempt at video essays after retirement. I don’t know how often I’ll make them, and I don’t want the demands of YouTube to determine the schedule. The essay has to justify the video, not the other way around.

    Still, there is one reality I can’t escape. Running a YouTube channel is a lot like running a restaurant.

    You can believe in what you’re serving.

    But the place stays open only as long as people show up.

  • Invasion of the Digital Body Snatchers

    Invasion of the Digital Body Snatchers

    We should stop using the term social media.

    The phrase is almost comically dishonest. “Social media” sounds benign and convivial, suggesting a chatty little kaffeeklatsch where neighbors exchange vacation photographs, discuss their grandchildren, and recommend a good plumber. Pour some coffee. Pull up a chair. Let’s socialize.

    That is not what we built.

    The dominant platforms employ some of the most sophisticated behavioral engineering ever devised to keep human eyes fixed on screens. Algorithms learn which emotional buttons produce another swipe, another click, another minute of captivity. Outrage works. So does envy. Loneliness works beautifully. Add FOMO, sexual display, humiliation, tribal grievance, political hatred, and the irresistible pleasure of watching somebody you despise get publicly disemboweled, and you have a remarkably efficient machine for converting human weakness into advertising revenue.

    There is nothing particularly social about it. Much of the behavior is aggressively antisocial.

    Spend enough time inside these systems and something stranger begins to happen. People start becoming grotesque duplicates of themselves. Their opinions harden. Their language becomes more predictable. Their enemies become more monstrous. Their own tribe becomes more virtuous. Their emotional repertoire contracts until nearly every stimulus produces one of four responses: outrage, envy, contempt, or applause.

    To understand the transformation, forget Silicon Valley and think Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

    Attention Captivity Platforms perform a kind of digital body snatching. You enter as yourself intending to check one message. Forty-five minutes later, you emerge as an algorithmically engineered duplicate—scrolling, liking, raging, purchasing, and repeating opinions mysteriously identical to those of ten million other pod people.

    In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, aliens replace your personality while you sleep. TikTok and Instagram have improved the technology.

    You remain awake and volunteer for the procedure.

    This is why I prefer the term Attention Captivity Platform. It describes the transaction with considerably greater accuracy. Your attention is the commodity. Captivity is the business strategy. The platform is the machinery that makes the transaction possible.

    I considered other names.

    The Rage Dungeon has possibilities. It captures the experience of descending voluntarily into a subterranean chamber where strangers scream at one another until everyone develops hypertension.

    Algorithmic Asylum isn’t bad either. Everyone appears agitated, nobody seems particularly well, and the people operating the institution have discovered a profitable reason not to discharge the patients.

    The Hostility Feed gets directly to the product being served.

    And I have a particular affection for the Grievance Casino. You sit before the machine pulling the lever again and again, except instead of cherries and sevens, it dispenses stories confirming that your enemies are even more depraved than you suspected. Occasionally you hit the jackpot: somebody you already hate says something stupid.

    All of these names illuminate some aspect of the machinery.

    But social media illuminates nothing.

    Calling these systems social media is like calling a colonoscopy a spa treatment. The procedure may have its uses, but let’s not pretend we’re getting a hot-stone massage.

    Language matters because euphemisms conceal mechanisms. The phrase social media encourages us to think we’re participating in an electronic town square. Attention Captivity Platform forces us to ask the more uncomfortable question:

    If I’m the one being captured, who exactly is being served?