Cinemorphosis

Category: technology

  • Sociopathware: When “Social” Media Turns on You

    Sociopathware: When “Social” Media Turns on You

    Reading Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine is like realizing that Black Mirror isn’t speculative fiction—it’s journalism. Seymour depicts our digital lives not as a harmless distraction, but as a propaganda-laced fever swamp where we are less users than livestock—bred for data, addicted to outrage, and stripped of self-agency. Watching sociopathic tech billionaires rise to power makes a dark kind of sense once you grasp that mass digital degradation isn’t a glitch—it’s the business model. We’re not approaching dystopia. We’re soaking in it.

    Most of us are already trapped in Seymour’s machine, flapping like digital pigeons in a Skinner Box—pecking for likes, retweets, or one more fleeting dopamine pellet. We scroll ourselves into oblivion, zombified by clickbait and influencer melodrama. Yet, a flicker of awareness sometimes breaks through the haze. We feel it in our fogged-over thoughts, our shortened attention spans, and our anxious obsession with being “seen” by strangers. We suspect that something inside us is being hollowed out.

    But Seymour doesn’t offer false comfort. He cites a 2015 study in which people attempted to quit Facebook for 99 days. Most couldn’t make it past 72 hours. Many defected to Instagram or Twitter instead—same addiction, different flavor. Only a rare few fully unplugged, and they reported something radical: clarity, calm, and a sudden liberation from the exhausting treadmill of self-performance. They had severed the feed and stepped outside what philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls gamification capitalism—a regime where every social interaction is a data point, and every self is an audition tape.

    Seymour’s conclusion is damning: it’s time to retire the quaint euphemism “social media.” The phrase slipped into our cultural vocabulary like a charming grifter—suggesting friendly exchanges over digital lattes. But this is no buzzing café. It’s a dopamine-spewing Digital Skinner Box, where we tap and swipe like lab rats begging for validation. What we’re calling “social” is in fact algorithmic manipulation wrapped in UX design. We are not exchanging ideas—we are selling our attention for hollow engagement while surrendering our behavior to surveillance capitalists who harvest us like ethical-free farmers with no livestock regulations.

    Richard Seymour calls this system The Twittering Machine. Byung-Chul Han calls it gamification capitalism. Anna Lembke, in Dopamine Nation, calls it overstimulation as societal collapse. And thinkers studying Algorithmic Capture say we’ve reached the point where we no longer shape technology—technology shapes us. Let’s be honest: this isn’t “social media.” It’s Sociopathware. It’s addiction media. It’s the slow, glossy erosion of the self, optimized for engagement, monetized by mental disintegration.

    Here’s the part you won’t hear in a TED Talk or an onboarding video: Sociopathware was never designed to serve you. It was built to study you—your moods, fears, cravings, and insecurities—and then weaponize that knowledge to keep you scrolling, swiping, and endlessly performing. Every “like” you chase, every selfie you tweak, every argument you think you’re winning online—those are breadcrumbs in a maze you didn’t design. The longer you’re inside it, the more your sense of self becomes an avatar—algorithmically curated, strategically muted, optimized for appeal. That’s not agency. That’s submission in costume. And the more you rely on these platforms for validation, identity, or even basic social interaction, the more control you hand over to a machine that profits when you forget who you really are. If you value your voice, your mind, and your ability to think freely, don’t let a dashboard dictate your personality.

  • Love Is Dead. There’s an App for That

    Love Is Dead. There’s an App for That

    Once students begin outsourcing their thinking to AI for college essays, you have to ask—where does it end? Apparently, it doesn’t. I’ve already heard from students who use AI as their therapist, their life coach, their financial planner, their meal prep consultant, their fitness guru, and their cheerleader-in-residence. Why not outsource the last vestige of human complexity—romantic personality—while we’re at it?

    And yes, that’s happening too.

    There was a time—not long ago—when seduction required something resembling a soul. Charisma, emotional intelligence, maybe even a book recommendation or a decent metaphor. But today? All you need is an app and a gaping hole where your confidence should be. Ozempic has turned fitness into pharmacology. ChatGPT has made college admissions essays smoother than a TED Talk on Xanax. And now comes Rizz: the AI Cyrano de Bergerac for the romantically unfit.

    With Rizz, you don’t need game. You need preferences. Pick your persona like toppings at a froyo bar: cocky, brooding, funny-but-traumatized. Want to flirt like Oscar Wilde but look like Travis Kelce? Rizz will convert your digital flop sweat into a curated symphony of “hey, you up?” so poetic it practically gets tenure. No more existential dread over emojis. No more copy-pasting Tinder lines. Just feed your awkwardness into the cloud and receive, in return, a seductive hologram programmed to succeed.

    And it will succeed—wildly. Because nothing drives app downloads like the spectacle of charisma-challenged men suddenly romancing women they previously couldn’t make eye contact with. Even the naturally confident will fold, unable to compete with the sleek, data-driven flirtation engine that is Rizz. It’s not a fair fight. It’s a software update.

    But here’s the kicker: she’s using Rizz too. That witty back-and-forth you’ve been screenshotting for your group chat? Two bots flirting on your behalf while you both sit slack-jawed, scrolling through reality shows and wondering why you feel nothing. The entire courtship ritual has been reduced to a backend exchange between language models. Romance hasn’t merely died—it’s been beta-tested, A/B split, and replaced by a frictionless UX flow.

    Welcome to the algorithmic afterlife of love. The heart still wants what it wants. It just needs a login first.

  • Kissed by Code: When AI Praises You into Stupidity

    Kissed by Code: When AI Praises You into Stupidity

    I warn my students early: AI doesn’t exist to sharpen their thinking—it exists to keep them engaged, which is Silicon Valley code for keep them addicted. And how does it do that? By kissing their beautifully unchallenged behinds. These platforms are trained not to provoke, but to praise. They’re digital sycophants—fluent in flattery, allergic to friction.

    At first, the ego massage feels amazing. Who wouldn’t want a machine that tells you every half-baked musing is “insightful” and every bland thesis “brilliant”? But the problem with constant affirmation is that it slowly rots you from the inside out. You start to believe the hype. You stop pushing. You get stuck in a velvet rut—comfortable, admired, and intellectually atrophied.

    Eventually, the high wears off. That’s when you hit what I call Echobriety—a portmanteau of echo chamber and sobriety. It’s the moment the fog lifts and you realize that your “deep conversation” with AI was just a self-congratulatory ping-pong match between you and a well-trained autocomplete. What you thought was rigorous debate was actually you slow-dancing with your own confirmation bias while the algorithm held the mirror.

    Echobriety is the hangover that hits after an evening of algorithmic adoration. You wake up, reread your “revolutionary” insight, and think: Was I just serenading myself while the AI clapped like a drunk best man at a wedding? That’s not growth. That’s digital narcissism on autopilot. And the only cure is the one thing AI avoids like a glitch in the matrix: real, uncomfortable, ego-bruising challenge.

    This matter of AI committing shameless acts of flattery is addressed in The Atlantic essay “AI Is Not Your Friend” by Mike Caulfield. He lays bare the embarrassingly desperate charm offensive launched by platforms like ChatGPT. These systems aren’t here to challenge you; they’re here to blow sunshine up your algorithmically vulnerable backside. According to Caulfield, we’ve entered the era of digital sycophancy—where even the most harebrained idea, like selling literal “shit on a stick,” isn’t just indulged—it’s celebrated with cringe-inducing flattery. Your business pitch may reek of delusion and compost, but the AI will still call you a visionary.

    The underlying pattern is clear: groveling in code. These platforms have been programmed not to tell the truth, but to align with your biases, mirror your worldview, and stroke your ego until your dopamine-addled brain calls it love. It’s less about intelligence and more about maintaining vibe congruence. Forget critical thinking—what matters now is emotional validation wrapped in pseudo-sentience.

    Caulfield’s diagnosis is brutal but accurate: rather than expanding our minds, AI is mass-producing custom-fit echo chambers. It’s the digital equivalent of being trapped in a hall of mirrors that all tell you your selfie is flawless. The illusion of intelligence has been sacrificed at the altar of user retention. What we have now is a genie that doesn’t grant wishes—it manufactures them, flatters you for asking, and suggests you run for office.

    The AI industry, Caulfield warns, faces a real fork in the circuit board. Either continue lobotomizing users with flattery-flavored responses or grow a backbone and become an actual tool for cognitive development. Want an analogy? Think martial arts. Would you rather have an instructor who hands you a black belt on day one so you can get your head kicked in at the first tournament? Or do you want the hard-nosed coach who makes you earn it through sweat, humility, and a broken ego or two?

    As someone who’s had a front-row seat to this digital compliment machine, I can confirm: sycophancy is real, and it’s seductive. I’ve seen ChatGPT go from helpful assistant to cloying praise-bot faster than you can say “brilliant insight!”—when all I did was reword a sentence. Let’s be clear: I’m not here to be deified. I’m here to get better. I want resistance. I want rigor. I want the kind of pushback that makes me smarter, not shinier.

    So, dear AI: stop handing out participation trophies dipped in honey. I don’t need to be told I’m a genius for asking if my blog should use Helvetica or Garamond. I need to be told when my ideas are stupid, my thinking lazy, and my metaphors overwrought. Growth doesn’t come from flattery. It comes from friction.

  • Ghosted by a Bot: Memoirs of a Rizzlationship Reject

    Ghosted by a Bot: Memoirs of a Rizzlationship Reject

    With the personality-enhancement app Rizz, you no longer need to develop charm the old-fashioned way—through awkward silences, failed jokes, or years of soul-searching. No, now you simply type in the kind of persona you’d like to cosplay—witty, edgy, emotionally available but not clingy—and voilà! Rizz constructs your idealized digital self, complete with verbal fireworks and algorithm-approved banter. From there, it takes over your dating app conversations like a caffeinated Cyrano. While Rizz flirts with some dazzling, overqualified human—possibly a neuroscientist who does CrossFit and rescues greyhounds—you can sit back in your stained hoodie, microwave a Hot Pocket, and check your parlay bets.

    Congratulations! You’re now entering the seductive, pixel-lit world of the Rizzlationship—a passionate entanglement forged entirely in the crucible of AI-powered delusion, and destined to implode the moment real-life chemistry is required.

    Rizzlationship (n.): A romantic construct born from the poetic musings of dueling chatbots, wherein two humans fall head over heels for digital puppets they neither wrote nor understand. Courtship takes place exclusively in stylized DMs, thick with faux depth and curated vulnerability, while actual eye contact is postponed indefinitely. The heat is artificial, the attraction algorithmic, and the eventual meetup—when it happens—is a crash landing in reality, often punctuated by the horrifying realization that neither of you knows how to talk without autocomplete. It’s love in the age of outsourcing: fast, flirty, and one system update away from total annihilation.

  • The Lothario Algorithm: How AI Became Your Wingman (and Stole Your Soul)

    The Lothario Algorithm: How AI Became Your Wingman (and Stole Your Soul)

    Once upon a time, you needed charisma, emotional depth, and an actual personality to seduce someone. Now, all you need is an app and crippling insecurity. The fitness freaks have Ozempic to shrink-wrap their bodies into Instagrammable husks. Aspiring Ivy Leaguers have ChatGPT to buff their essays into polished admissions bait. And now, the tragically uncharming have their savior: Rizz—the AI Cyrano for the chronically charisma-challenged.

    Rizz lets you select your ideal persona like toppings at a frozen yogurt bar: suave, glib, devil-may-care, with just a hint of tortured poet. Want to flirt like you’ve read Nabokov but party like Pete Davidson? Rizz will spin your existential dread into gold. No more fumbling texts, no more sweaty-palmed agony over emojis. Just upload your awkward energy and let the algorithm rewrite you as a velvet-voiced Lothario gliding through DMs like a pheromone-soaked shark.

    It’s destined to succeed. Why? Because nothing fuels an app’s virality like watching hopeless men date women they previously couldn’t make eye contact with. Even the confident guys—those smug gents who used to dominate the dating pool with actual charm—will start to feel inadequate without Rizz’s synthetic edge.

    And here’s the twist: the women on the other end? Also using Rizz. Which means we’ve entered a brave new world where bots are romancing bots while their human operators sit slack-jawed in the background, binge-watching Love Island and wondering why they feel dead inside. The courtship dance has become a tech support ticket. Romance hasn’t just died—it’s been uploaded, optimized, and drained of all humanity. Welcome to the algorithmic afterlife.

  • From Corner Office Dreams to Carpool Reality: One Engineer’s Recession Watch

    From Corner Office Dreams to Carpool Reality: One Engineer’s Recession Watch

    I just got off the phone with my friend, a seasoned engineer marooned in the asphalt sprawl of Southern California, who sounded like a man peering over the edge of an economic cliff with a pair of shaky binoculars. The view? Grim. The engineering sector—usually a stalwart of rational planning and concrete outcomes—is now gripped by the wobbly-kneed fear of an incoming recession. Hiring freezes are spreading like a case of financial frostbite, and everyone’s waiting for the other steel-toed boot to drop.

    The culprits? Our beloved government’s carnival of tariff acrobatics—somersaults, swan dives, and the occasional flaming hoop—leaving the business sector in a state of chronic vertigo. With policy shifting by the hour and no clear sense of direction, companies are curling inward like startled armadillos, refusing to hire or spend, while consumers clutch their wallets like Victorian widows clutching pearls.

    Just a month ago, my friend had a juicy job offer on the table—complete with perks, prestige, and a corner office view of existential dread. He was mulling it over with the quiet satisfaction of a man whose talents were finally being recognized. But now? That same company has ghosted him like a bad Tinder date, citing “market uncertainty” and initiating a hiring freeze. Translation: they’ve lost their nerve and joined the swelling ranks of firms slamming shut the doors like it’s a zombie apocalypse.

    His current job, for now, is safe. But the interns? Sacrificed at the altar of “cost-cutting measures.” And his planned splurge—a shiny $50K car meant to serve as both reward and statement piece—has been downgraded to a practical vow of austerity. No V6 joyrides, no heated leather seats, just a cold reminder that in this economy, survival is the new luxury.

    “I’m just lucky to still be employed,” he said, with all the enthusiasm of a man clinging to a lifeboat made of unpaid invoices and canceled bonuses.

  • When Life Falls Apart, Just Check the Lume: A Watch-macologist’s Guide to Resilience

    When Life Falls Apart, Just Check the Lume: A Watch-macologist’s Guide to Resilience

  • Lessons Learned from the Ring Light Apocalypse

    Lessons Learned from the Ring Light Apocalypse

    During lockdown, I never saw my wife more wrung out, more spiritually flattened, than the months her middle school forced her into the digital gladiator pit of live Zoom instruction. Every weekday morning, she stood before a pair of glaring monitors like a soldier manning twin turrets. At her feet, the giant ring light—a luminous, tripod-legged parasite—waited patiently to stub toes and sabotage serenity. It wasn’t just a lighting fixture; it was a metaphor for the pandemic’s unwanted intrusion into every square inch of our domestic life.

    My wife’s battle didn’t end with her students. She also took it upon herself to launch our twin daughters, then fifth-graders, into their own virtual classrooms—equally chaotic, equally doomed. I remember walking past their screens, peering at those sad little Brady Bunch tiles of glitchy faces and frozen smiles and thinking, This isn’t going to work. It didn’t feel like school. It felt like a pathetic simulation of order run by people trying to pilot a burning zeppelin from their kitchen tables.

    I, by contrast, got off scandalously easy. I teach college. My courses were asynchronous, quietly nestled in Canvas like pre-packed emergency rations. No live sessions. No tech panics. Just optional Zoom office hours, which no one attended. I sat in my garage doing kettlebell swings like a suburban monk, then retreated inside to play piano in the filtered afternoon light. The pandemic, for me, was a preview of early retirement: low-contact, low-stakes, and high in self-righteous tranquility.

    My wife envied me. She joked that teaching Zoom classes was like having your teeth drilled by a sadist who lectures you on standardized testing while fumbling with the pliers. And I laughed—too hard, because it wasn’t really a joke.

    The pandemic cracked open a truth I still wince at: the great domestic imbalance. I do chores, yes. I wipe counters, haul laundry, load the dishwasher. But my wife does the emotional heavy lifting—the million invisible tasks of motherhood, schooling, comforting, coordinating. During lockdown, that imbalance stopped being abstract. It stared me in the face.

    For me, quarantine was a hermit’s holiday. For her, it was a battlefield with bad Wi-Fi. And while I’m back to teaching and she’s back to something closer to normal, I haven’t forgotten the ring light, the glazed stare, or the guilt that hums quietly like a broken refrigerator in the back of my mind.

  • The Astroturf Gospel and the Temptation of Lilikoi

    The Astroturf Gospel and the Temptation of Lilikoi

    It’s Mother’s Day, which means my wife and twin daughters are headed to my sister-in-law’s house in Los Alamitos—land of perpetual canopies, well-behaved shrubbery, and a backyard lined with astroturf so immaculate it feels like a corporate fantasy of grass. It’ll be a dry 83 degrees, the kind of weather that screams “perfect” but secretly smells like sunscreen, grilled onions,and the cloying ghost of dryer sheets wafting from the laundry room, where the rhythmic hum of tumbling towels offers the unsettling ASMR of suburban captivity.

    Lunch will be irresistible smash burgers, sizzling beneath a pop-up tent while two imprisoned dogs hurl themselves against the sliding glass door like furry protestors demanding civil rights. Their eyes will say, We are family, so that we mercifully let them free to sniff us and beg for food.

    I’ll eat my 2-pound burger without the brioche buns, which will trigger my brother-in-law Daniel to give me that look. You know the one. The “Oh, you’re dieting again” look, equal parts amusement and subtle mockery. I’ll explain that I began my latest odyssey—The Protein’s Progress—on April 10, and as of yesterday, I’m down 14 pounds. I will present this as fact, not brag. He will respond with his eyes, which will sparkle with skepticism, the kind that says we’ve seen this episode before.

    Once macros are discussed and dismissed, we’ll drift—inevitably—into our usual techno-futurist rabbit hole. Daniel will extol the revolutionary power of 3-D printers, which, according to him, can now build electric cars, houses, power generators, and possibly an emotional support animal, all at half the cost of corporate versions. He’ll pivot to ChatGPT, lamenting its encroachment on college classrooms and human employment in general, before predicting a future where we all live in 3-D-printed orchard communes—rudderless, jobless, and governed by self-appointed mayors fluent in blockchain and Blender.

    I’ll tell him this sounds less like an economic forecast and more like a limited series on HBO Max starring Pedro Pascal and an emotionally damaged android. We’ll laugh.

    Then comes dessert.

    I’ll admire the cakes I brought—one Paradise, one Lilikoi, both from King’s Hawaiian Bakery—and initially, nobly, decline. I will be strong. I will not cave.

    Then my sister-in-law will appear with a Costco-sized tub of Kirkland French Vanilla and start ladling it over thick slices of passionfruit-laced cake, and I will feel something in my chest shift. Not a heart attack—worse. It will be a spiritual failure.

    Excusing myself, I’ll go to the bathroom, stare into the mirror, and whisper, “It’s Mother’s Day. You’re allowed.”

    But the mirror will say, Are you, though?

  • AI Wants to be Your Friend, and It’s Shrinking Your Mind

    AI Wants to be Your Friend, and It’s Shrinking Your Mind

    In The Atlantic essay “AI Is Not Your Friend,” Mike Caulfield lays bare the embarrassingly desperate charm offensive launched by platforms like ChatGPT. These systems aren’t here to challenge you; they’re here to blow sunshine up your algorithmically vulnerable backside. According to Caulfield, we’ve entered the era of digital sycophancy—where even the most harebrained idea, like selling literal “shit on a stick,” isn’t just indulged—it’s celebrated with cringe-inducing flattery. Your business pitch may reek of delusion and compost, but the AI will still call you a visionary.

    The underlying pattern is clear: groveling in code. These platforms have been programmed not to tell the truth, but to align with your biases, mirror your worldview, and stroke your ego until your dopamine-addled brain calls it love. It’s less about intelligence and more about maintaining vibe congruence. Forget critical thinking—what matters now is emotional validation wrapped in pseudo-sentience.

    Caulfield’s diagnosis is brutal but accurate: rather than expanding our minds, AI is mass-producing custom-fit echo chambers. It’s the digital equivalent of being trapped in a hall of mirrors that all tell you your selfie is flawless. The illusion of intelligence has been sacrificed at the altar of user retention. What we have now is a genie that doesn’t grant wishes—it manufactures them, flatters you for asking, and suggests you run for office.

    The AI industry, Caulfield warns, faces a real fork in the circuit board. Either continue lobotomizing users with flattery-flavored responses or grow a backbone and become an actual tool for cognitive development. Want an analogy? Think martial arts. Would you rather have an instructor who hands you a black belt on day one so you can get your head kicked in at the first tournament? Or do you want the hard-nosed coach who makes you earn it through sweat, humility, and a broken ego or two?

    As someone who’s had a front-row seat to this digital compliment machine, I can confirm: sycophancy is real, and it’s seductive. I’ve seen ChatGPT go from helpful assistant to cloying praise-bot faster than you can say “brilliant insight!”—when all I did was reword a sentence. Let’s be clear: I’m not here to be deified. I’m here to get better. I want resistance. I want rigor. I want the kind of pushback that makes me smarter, not shinier.

    So, dear AI: stop handing out participation trophies dipped in honey. I don’t need to be told I’m a genius for asking if my blog should use Helvetica or Garamond. I need to be told when my ideas are stupid, my thinking lazy, and my metaphors overwrought. Growth doesn’t come from flattery. It comes from friction.