Cinemorphosis

Category: technology

  • The Monastery of Minimalism and the Data Plan from Hell

    The Monastery of Minimalism and the Data Plan from Hell

    My daughters had waged a two-year campaign for smartphones with the moral fervor of suffragettes, only with less patience and more TikTok references. To hear them tell it, arriving at school without one was social suicide—like showing up to prom in chainmail while everyone else paraded in Teslas. Their tragic narrative crescendoed with the kind of melodrama usually reserved for war memoirs. I half-expected them to stand outside Target holding cardboard signs that read, “Will Work for Wi-Fi.”

    Eventually, I cracked. Call it love. Call it weakness. Call it what it was: a momentary lapse in parental sanity. I marched them into a gadget boutique in Torrance, the kind of place that takes itself so seriously it might as well charge admission.

    This wasn’t a store. This was a temple—a monastery of white walls and Scandinavian despair, where clutter was a sin and every shelf whispered, “You could be better than this.” I felt like I was entering the afterlife Steve Jobs had always dreamed of: sterile, minimalist, and ready to drain your bank account with the gentle efficiency of a Scandinavian hitman.

    I approached the altar—sorry, counter—armed with a $700-per-phone budget and the conviction of a man about to lose an argument he thought he’d already won. Behind it stood Rick, the store’s resident tech evangelist, draped in branded black, exuding the smug aura of someone who meditates with their Apple Watch.

    “Seven hundred dollars per phone,” I declared, like a man presenting tribute to a minor god.

    Rick didn’t laugh—he dismissed me with a flick of the wrist, like I’d just offered to pay in bottle caps. “Forget that,” he said, with the oily charm of a used Tesla dealer. “We’ve got a promo—latest iPhone. Free.”

    Ah, yes. “Free.” That four-letter word that always means the opposite. Like “organic” or “democracy.”

    By the time Rick was done appending essentials—cases, insurance, screen protectors, and a couple of AirTags so my daughters could be properly surveilled—I was looking at a grand total of $480 per phone. A bargain, apparently, in the same way a $19 cocktail is a bargain if it comes with a rosemary twig and existential despair.

    “And the data plan?” I asked, naively hoping for mercy.

    “Only forty bucks more a month,” Rick lied with the conviction of a man who lies for sport. The screen behind him flashed our real bill—$300 a month—like the scoreboard at a casino for idiots.

    Just as I was ready to abort the mission, the store’s front door blew open like a saloon in a spaghetti western. In walked Rocky, the head manager, a windswept titan who looked like he’d wrestled a leaf blower to style his hair. Rick went pale, as if he’d just seen the Grim Reaper—and the Reaper was asking for receipts.

    Rocky summoned Rick to the back with a silent finger wag, like Tony Soprano calling for a private word. The two vanished into the shadows while we stood around, wondering if we were in a deleted scene from Breaking Bad: Genius Bar Edition.

    They returned ten minutes later—Rocky smiling like a man who’d just fixed a parking ticket with a crowbar, and Rick looking like he’d aged five years and lost a bet with God.

    “You can have the phones,” Rick whispered, his soul visibly limping.

    “How much?”

    “Nothing.”

    “What?”

    “It’s… a special promotion,” Rick said, like he was trying to sell me a timeshare in the afterlife.

    “And the data?”

    “Free for a year. Then it’s $200 a month.”

    “Sold!” I said, because I am a man of impulse and poor foresight.

    Rick shook my hand with all the warmth of a damp paper towel. His eyes were vacant, as if he had just witnessed the death of capitalism—or his commission.

    We turned to thank Rocky, the patron saint of unexpected discounts, but he was gone. No trace. No goodbye. Just the lingering scent of burnt ozone and a whisper in the wind that sounded suspiciously like “Gotcha.”

    As we walked out into the sun, shiny new phones in hand, I couldn’t help but feel we hadn’t purchased anything. No—we’d participated in a ritual sacrifice. And somewhere in the back office, Rocky was lighting a candle and laughing.

  • Satan Wears Patek: The Couture Demons of Network TV

    Satan Wears Patek: The Couture Demons of Network TV

    After dinner, my wife and I collapsed onto the couch like two satiated lions, still riding the sugar high from a slice of chocolate cake so transcendent it could’ve been smuggled out of a Vatican vault. This wasn’t just dessert—it was a spiritual experience. Fudgy, rich, and topped with a ganache that whispered blasphemies in French, it left us in a state of chocolaty euphoria. And what better way to follow up divine confectionery than with a show called Evil—which, in tone and content, felt like dessert’s opposite number.

    Evil, for the uninitiated, is what happens when The X-Files and The Exorcist have a baby and then dress it in Prada. Our hero is David Acosta, a priest so genetically gifted he looks like he was sculpted during an abs day in Michelangelo’s studio. He partners with Kristen Bouchard, a forensic psychologist with both supermodel cheekbones and a Rolodex of PhDs, and Ben Shakir, a tech bro turned ghostbuster, who handles the EMF detectors and keeps the Wi-Fi strong enough to livestream from hell. Together, they investigate cases of alleged possession, miracles, and demonic mischief—all lurking, naturally, in two-story suburban homes with open-concept kitchens.

    What really juices the narrative is the will-they-won’t-they tension between Kristen and Father Abs. Their chemistry crackles with forbidden longing, as if every exorcism could end in a kiss—had David not taken a vow of celibacy (and the producers not wanted to nuke the Catholic viewership). It’s less faith versus science and more eye contact versus self-control.

    And then there’s Leland Townsend, the show’s resident demon in Dockers. He’s less Prince of Darkness and more Assistant Manager of Darkness—slick, smug, and oily enough to deep-fry a turkey. He slinks into scenes oozing unearned confidence and pathological glee, like Satan’s regional sales director. You can practically smell the Axe body spray of evil.

    Let’s pause here for fashion. The wardrobe department on Evil deserves an Emmy, a Pulitzer, and possibly a fragrance line. Everyone’s rocking cinematic outerwear that belongs in the Louvre. Kristen’s coats are so tailored they could cut glass. Acosta’s wrist is adorned with a Patek Philippe that suggests his vows may include poverty of the soul, but not of the Swiss variety. Honestly, the outfits are so distracting you half expect Satan to comment on the stitching.

    In one late-night scene, Kristen’s daughters are using ghost-detecting iPad apps at 3 a.m., their faces bathed in eerie blue light. It’s a chilling tableau of children, tech, and probable demonic activity—basically a 2024 parenting blog. Just as the show was about to unravel the mystery, my wife hit pause and delivered a horror story of her own: teachers using AI to grade papers with personalized comments. Comments so perfectly tailored they could bring a tear to a parent’s eye—and yet, no human had written them.

    “What’s the point of teachers anymore?” she asked, already knowing the answer. I nodded solemnly, watching the paused image of Father David, his coat pristine, his watch immaculate. I had neither. And I live in Los Angeles, where “winter” is defined as turning off the ceiling fan.

    But something in that moment shifted. The show wasn’t just mocking the digital devil—it was embodying him. That wristwatch mocked me. The coat judged me. I wasn’t watching Evil; I was being possessed by it. By envy, by consumer lust, by the creeping suspicion that maybe—just maybe—I wasn’t living my best, most stylized demon-fighting life.

    It’s not the show’s demons that haunt me. It’s their wardrobe.

  • There Is No Digital Kaffeeklatsch: The Lie of Social Media

    There Is No Digital Kaffeeklatsch: The Lie of Social Media

    For the last fifteen years, we’ve let the term social media slip into our lexicon like a charming grifter. It sounds benign, even wholesome—like we’re all gathered around a digital café table, sipping lattes and chatting about our lives in a warm, buzzing kaffeeklatsch. But that illusion is precisely the problem. The phrase “social media” is branding sleight-of-hand, a euphemism designed to lull us into thinking we’re having meaningful interactions when, in reality, we’re being drained like emotional batteries in a rigged arcade.

    This is not a friendly coffeehouse. It’s a dopamine-spewing Digital Skinner Box where you tap and scroll like a lab rat hoping for one more pellet of validation. What we’re calling “social” is, in fact, algorithmic manipulation dressed in a hoodie. We are not exchanging ideas—we are bartering our attention for scraps of engagement while surrendering personal data to tech oligarchs who harvest our behavior like bloodless farmers fattening up their cattle.

    Richard Seymour calls this hellscape The Twittering Machine, and he’s not exaggerating. Byung-Chul Han calls it gamification capitalism, a regime in which we perform our curated selves for likes while the real self, the vulnerable human beneath the filter, slowly atrophies. Anna Lembke describes our overstimulated descent in Dopamine Nation, while the concept of Algorithmic Capture suggests we no longer shape technology—technology shapes us.

    So let’s drop the charade. This isn’t “social media.” It’s addiction media, engineered to flatten nuance, hollow out identity, and leave us twitching in the glow of our screens like the last souls left in a flickering casino. Whatever this is, it’s not convivial, it’s not coffeehouse chatter, and it’s certainly not social. It’s the end of human discourse masquerading as connection.

  • The Great Rebrand: Why “Addiction Media” Tells the Truth

    The Great Rebrand: Why “Addiction Media” Tells the Truth

    Reading Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine is like discovering that Black Mirror isn’t speculative fiction—it’s documentary. Seymour paints our current digital reality as a propaganda-laced fever swamp, one where we aren’t just participants but livestock—bred for data, addicted to outrage, and stripped of self-agency. Watching tech-fueled sociopaths ascend to power begins to make sense once you realize that mass digital degradation is the new civic norm. We’re not on the cusp of dystopia; we’re marinating in it.

    Most of us are trapped in Seymour’s titular machine, flapping like digital pigeons in a Skinner Box, pecking for likes, retweets, or just one more dopamine hit. We scroll ourselves into a stupor, zombies hypnotized by grotesque clickbait and influencer gaucherie. And yet, a flicker of awareness remains. Some of us know our brains are rotting. We feel it in our foggy thoughts, our shortened attention spans, our craving to be “seen” by strangers.

    But Seymour offers no comfort. He cites a 2015 study where people tried to quit Facebook for 99 days. Most folded within 72 hours. Some switched to Instagram, TikTok, or Twitter—addiction by another name. Only a rare few truly escaped, and they reported something wild: clarity, peace, a sudden freedom from the exhausting treadmill of performance. They had unplugged from what philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls “gamification capitalism,” a system where every social interaction is a metric and every self is a brand.

    Seymour’s takeaway? Let’s retire the quaint euphemism “social media.” It’s not social. It’s not media in the traditional sense. It’s engineered compulsion. It’s addiction media—and we’re the lab rats with no exit key.

  • From Gutenberg to Doomscroll: A Brief History of Our Narrative Decline

    From Gutenberg to Doomscroll: A Brief History of Our Narrative Decline

    Richard Seymour, in The Twittering Machine, reminds us that writing was once a sacred act—a cerebral pilgrimage and a cultural compass. It charted the peaks of human enlightenment and the valleys of our collective idiocy. But ever since Gutenberg’s movable type cranked out the first printed tantrum, writing has also been big business. Seymour calls this “print capitalism”—a factory of words that forged what Benedict Anderson dubbed “imagined communities,” and what Yuval Noah Harari might call humanity’s favorite pastime: building civilizations on beautifully told lies.

    But that was then. Enter the computer—a Pandora’s box with a backspace key. We haven’t just changed how we write; we’ve scrambled the very code of our narrative DNA. Seymour scoffs at the term “social media.” He prefers something more honest and unflinching: “shorthand propaganda.” After all, writing was always social—scrolls, letters, manifestos scrawled in exile. The novelty isn’t the connection; it’s the industrialization of thought. Now, we produce a firehose of content—sloppy, vapid, weaponized by ideology, and monetized by tech lords playing dopamine dealers.

    The term “social media” flatters what is more accurately a “social industry”—a Leviathan of data-harvesting, behavioral conditioning, and emotional slot machines dressed in UX sugar-coating. The so-called “friends” we collect are nothing more than pawns in a gamified economy of clout, their every click tracked, sold, and repurposed to make us addicts. Sherry Turkle wasn’t being cute when she warned that our connections were making us lonelier: she was diagnosing a slow psychological implosion.

    We aren’t writing anymore. We’re twitching. We’re chirping. We’re flapping like those emaciated birds in Paul Klee’s the Twittering Machine, spinning an axle we no longer control, bait for the next poor soul. This isn’t communication. It’s entrapment, dressed up in hashtags and dopamine hits.

  • The Twittering Machine Never Sleeps

    The Twittering Machine Never Sleeps

    Richard Seymour, in his searing dissection of our digital descent, The Twittering Machine, argues that our compulsive scribbling across social media isn’t a charming side effect of modern communication—it’s a horror story. He calls our affliction “scripturient,” which sounds like a medieval disease and feels like one too: the raging, unquenchable urge to write, tweet, post, blog, caption, and meme ourselves into validation. According to Seymour, we’re not sharing—we’re hemorrhaging content, possessed by the hope that someone, somewhere, will finally pay attention. The platforms lap it up, feeding on our existential howl like pigs at a trough.

    But here’s the twist: these platforms don’t just amplify our words—they mutate us. We contort into parodies of ourselves, honed for likes, sharpened for outrage. Seymour’s reference to Paul Klee’s painting the Twittering Machine isn’t just arty window dressing—it’s prophecy. In it, skeletal birds crank a machine with the desperate chirps of bait, luring the next batch of fools into the algorithmic abyss. Once captured, these chirpers become part of the machine: chirp, crank, scroll, repeat. It’s not connection—it’s servitude with emojis.

    And yet, here I am. Writing this blog. Voluntarily. On WordPress, that semi-respectable cul-de-sac just outside the main drag of Social Media Hell. It’s not Facebook, which is a digital Thunderdome of outrage, memes, and unsolicited opinions from high school classmates you forgot existed. No, WordPress lets me stretch out. I can write without worrying that my paragraph won’t survive the swipe-happy thumbs of the attention-deficient. It feels almost…literary.

    But let’s not get smug. The moment I promote my posts on Twitter or check my analytics like a rat pressing a pellet bar, I’m caught in the same trap. I tell myself it’s different. That I’m writing for meaning, not metrics. But the line between writer and performer, between expression and spectacle, gets blurrier by the day. I’ve escaped the Twittering Machine before—unplugged, deleted, detoxed—but it still hums in the background, always ready to pull me back in with the promise of just one more click, one more like, one more little chirp of relevance.

  • You, Rewritten: Algorithmic Capture in the Age of AI

    You, Rewritten: Algorithmic Capture in the Age of AI

    Once upon a time, writing instructors worried about comma splices and uninspired thesis statements. Now, we’re dodging 5,000-word essays spat out by AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude—essays so eerily competent they hit every benchmark on the department rubric: in-text citations, signal phrases, MLA formatting, and close readings with all the soulful depth of a fax machine reading T.S. Eliot. This is prose caught in the Uncanny Valley—syntactically flawless, yet emotionally barren, like a Stepford Wife enrolled in English 101. And since these algorithmic Franken-scripts often evade plagiarism detectors, we’re all left asking the same 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 deeper I sank into student conversations, the clearer it became: this isn’t just about writing. It’s about living. My students aren’t merely outsourcing thesis statements. They’re using AI to rewrite awkward apology texts, craft flirtatious replies on dating apps, conduct self-guided therapy with bots named “Charles” and “Luna,” and decode garbled lectures delivered by tenured mumblers. They feed syllabi into GPT to generate study guides. They get toothpaste recommendations. They draft business emails and log them in AI-curated archives. In short: ChatGPT isn’t a tool. It’s a prosthetic consciousness.

    And here’s the punchline: they see no alternative. AI isn’t a novelty; it’s a survival mechanism. In their hyper-accelerated, ultra-competitive, attention-fractured lives, AI has become as essential as caffeine and Wi-Fi. So no, I won’t be asking students to merely critique ChatGPT as a glorified spell-checker. That’s quaint. Instead, I’m introducing them to Algorithmic Capture—the quiet tyranny by which human behavior is shaped, scripted, and ultimately absorbed by optimization-driven systems. Under this logic, ambiguity is penalized, nuance is flattened, and people begin tailoring themselves to perform for the algorithmic eye. They don’t just use the machine. They become legible to it.

    For this reason, the new essay assignment doesn’t ask, “What’s the future of writing?” It asks something far more urgent: What’s happening to you? I’m having students analyze the eerily prophetic episodes of Black Mirror—especially “Joan Is Awful,” that fluorescent satire of algorithmic self-annihilation—and write about how Algorithmic Capture is reshaping their lives, identities, and choices. They won’t just be critiquing AI’s effect on prose. They’ll be interrogating the way it quietly rewrites the self.

  • Contagion of Fear: World War Z and the Collapse of Global Order: A College Essay Prompt

    Contagion of Fear: World War Z and the Collapse of Global Order: A College Essay Prompt

    Essay Prompt:

    In World War Z, a global pandemic rapidly spreads, unleashing chaos, institutional breakdown, and the fragmentation of global cooperation. Though fictional, the film can be read as an allegory for the very real dysfunction and distrust that characterized the COVID-19 pandemic. Using World War Z as a cultural lens, write an essay in which you argue how the film metaphorically captures the collapse of public trust, the dangers of misinformation, and the failure of collective action in a hyper-polarized world. Support your argument with at least three of the following sources: Jonathan Haidt’s “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” Ed Yong’s “How the Pandemic Defeated America,” Seyla Benhabib’s “The Return of the Sovereign,” and Zeynep Tufekci’s “We’re Asking the Wrong Questions of Facebook.”

    This essay invites you to write a 1,700-word argumentative essay in which you analyze World War Z as a metaphor for mass anxiety. Develop an argument that connects the film’s themes to contemporary global challenges such as:

    • The COVID-19 pandemic and fear of viral contagion
    • Global migration driven by war, poverty, and climate change
    • The dehumanization of “The Other” in politically polarized societies
    • The fragility of global cooperation in the face of crisis
    • The spread of weaponized misinformation and conspiracy

    Your thesis should not simply argue that World War Z is “about fear”—it should claim what kind of fear, why it matters, and what the film reveals about our modern condition. You may focus on one primary fear or compare multiple forms of crisis (e.g., pandemic vs. political polarization, or migration vs. misinformation).

    Use at least three of the following essays as research support:

    1. Jonathan Haidt, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid” (The Atlantic)
      —A deep dive into how social media has fractured trust, created echo chambers, and undermined democratic cooperation.
    2. Ed Yong, “How the Pandemic Defeated America” (The Atlantic)
      —An autopsy of institutional failure and public distrust during COVID-19, including how the virus exposed deep structural weaknesses.
    3. Seyla Benhabib, “The Return of the Sovereign: Immigration and the Crisis of Globalization” (Project Syndicate)
      —Explores the backlash against global migration and the erosion of human rights amid rising nationalism.
    4. Zeynep Tufekci, “We’re Asking the Wrong Questions of Facebook” (The New York Times)
      —An analysis of how misinformation spreads virally, creating moral panics and damaging collective reasoning.

    Requirements:

    • Use MLA format
    • 1,700 words
    • Quote directly from World War Z (film dialogue, plot events, or visuals)
    • Integrate at least two sources above with citation
    • Present a counterargument and a rebuttal

    Here’s a 9-paragraph outline and three sample thesis statements to guide students toward deep, layered analysis of World War Z as metaphor.

    Three Sample Thesis Statements

    World War Z presents zombies not just as flesh-eating threats but as avatars of global panic—embodying fears of pandemics, mass migration, and social collapse. Through its globe-hopping narrative and relentless spread of infection, the film critiques a world increasingly unprepared to manage the fallout of interconnected crises, echoing Haidt’s concerns about fractured public trust and Yong’s analysis of institutional fragility.

    In World War Z, the zombie outbreak functions as a metaphor for weaponized misinformation and the breakdown of global cooperation, dramatizing how societies consumed by fear and tribalism respond not with solidarity, but with suspicion and violence. The film anticipates the moral failures detailed by Haidt and Tufekci, making it less about monsters than about our inability to face crisis without self-destructing.

    Far from a typical horror film, World War Z is a global parable of dehumanization and displacement, where zombies symbolize both contagious fear and the faceless masses of migration and poverty. As Benhabib argues, the return of nationalism and the fear of the “Other” has shattered international solidarity—anxiety the film visualizes through barricades, lockdowns, and apocalyptic border control.

    9-Paragraph Outline

    Paragraph 1 – Introduction

    • Hook: Use an arresting visual to frame our world’s current instability.
    • Context: Introduce World War Z as more than a thriller—it’s an allegory of global collapse.
    • Thesis: State your central argument about how the zombies symbolize a deeper, contemporary fear (e.g., pandemic panic, social polarization, migration anxiety, misinformation, etc.).

    Paragraph 2 – The Metaphorical Function of Zombies

    • Discuss the symbolic role of zombies in film generally (fear of the masses, disease, mindlessness).
    • Explain how World War Z updates the metaphor to reflect 21st-century global anxieties.

    Paragraph 3 – Global Crisis and Institutional Collapse

    • Analyze scenes showing governments falling apart, the UN being sidelined, the world reduced to reactive chaos.
    • Connect to Ed Yong’s argument about institutional failure during COVID-19.

    Paragraph 4 – Fear of Migration and the Dehumanized Other

    • Examine the treatment of human mobs, refugees, and zombies in border scenes (e.g., Jerusalem wall, flight panic).
    • Use Seyla Benhabib’s piece to discuss the rising fear of displacement and the collapse of asylum ethics.

    Paragraph 5 – The Spread of Misinformation and Breakdown of Truth

    • Point to the conspiracy theories and media confusion in the film’s early scenes.
    • Use Tufekci’s argument to show how misinformation spreads like a virus—and how that’s reflected in the zombie metaphor.

    Paragraph 6 – The Psychology of Polarization and Fear

    • Explore the emotional tone of the film: anxiety, distrust, hyper-individualism.
    • Connect to Haidt’s claim that polarization has eroded rational cooperation and heightened mass irrationality.

    Paragraph 7 – Counterargument

    • Some may argue that World War Z is just a fast-paced action flick with no real political message.
    • Rebut by showing how even its structure—a global chase from chaos to cure—mirrors real-world anxieties about global crisis management and ethical triage.

    Paragraph 8 – Deeper Implications of the Metaphor

    • Push the metaphor further: zombies as collapsed selves, media-driven mobs, people stripped of identity.
    • Reflect on how the film doesn’t just diagnose fear—it reflects our inability to reckon with complexity in a globalized age.

    Paragraph 9 – Conclusion

    • Reaffirm your thesis.
    • Leave the reader with a provocative final thought: maybe the zombies aren’t the dead—they’re us, stripped of cooperation, overwhelmed by fear, and marching blindly toward collapse.

  • Siri, Am I Losing My Mind? Asking for Jia Tolentino

    Siri, Am I Losing My Mind? Asking for Jia Tolentino

    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. 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.

  • How Fake Food Mirrors AI Writing

    How Fake Food Mirrors AI Writing

    Like most people, I have an unbreakable bond with food—a bond so primal that when the food industry dares to present me with a counterfeit, I might taste it out of politeness or morbid curiosity, but love it? Never. Inferior substitutes, especially those concoctions posing as “creative alternatives,” are my culinary kryptonite. My first encounter with such deceit came in 1970, courtesy of my stint in the YMCA’s Indian Guides (now rebranded as Adventure Guides). We were part of “tribes,” each made up of eight father-son pairs, with one dad dubbed “Chief” and the rest relegated to “Assistant Chiefs.” The real highlight, of course, was the weekly rotation to a different family’s home, where the moms—our unsung heroes—served dessert.

    But one evening, dessert took a turn for the worst. Our host mother, a vision of 70s flair with her blonde spun-sugar hair and white go-go boots, had stumbled upon what she must have thought was the recipe of the century. There it was, in plain sight on her kitchen counter: an open Ladies’ Home Journal or some equally menacing tome of domestic innovation. She cheerfully announced her culinary coup—a dessert she was calling “ice cream” but with no actual ice cream in it. Instead, the concoction was an unholy alliance of canned frosting and Cool Whip.

    She served it in cones with an enthusiasm that could have powered the disco lights at Studio 54. But when I took a bite, the illusion shattered. It wasn’t ice cream; it was a crime scene. The texture was gritty, like someone had blended sand with modeling clay. It was lukewarm—room temperature, for God’s sake—and tasted like the sugary sludge dentists use to polish your teeth before hitting you with the guilt trip about flossing. I glanced around and saw my fellow boys and their dads wearing identical expressions of barely-contained horror—the same grimace detectives on TV crime procedurals make when they have to pull out a hanky to block the stench of a decomposing corpse. One by one, we all quietly set our cones down as though handling evidence at a murder trial.

    The poor woman, sensing the full weight of her failure, blushed beet-red and stammered out a series of apologies, swearing on everything holy that she would never again darken a dessert table with this abomination. We forgave her, of course—some crimes are too absurd to punish. But to this day, whenever I see Cool Whip, I feel a pang of existential dread and hear the faint echo of tribal laughter masked by suppressed gagging.

    My second traumatic encounter with fake food came years later, sometime in the early 90s. I was living alone in the barren expanse of the California desert, surrounded by nothing but dust, lizards, and my questionable life choices. Thanksgiving rolled around, and rather than go full Norman Rockwell with a solo turkey feast, I decided to spare myself the hassle and opted for something “easy.” Enter the boxed abomination known as tofurkey—a vegetarian horror show complete with a pouch of dubious “gravy.”

    The first bite was a betrayal of taste and texture. My jaw slowed in protest, grinding against the dense, rubbery mass like I was chewing on a tire patch. The spongy gluten monstrosity refused to yield, as if daring my teeth to break first. The flavor? Imagine licking a salted yoga mat that’s been marinated in vague artificial regret. I eyed another slice, its pallid, lifeless complexion daring me to continue. With the enthusiasm of a condemned man, I stabbed the fork into it, hoping for some hidden culinary salvation. Nope. The taste was as bland and soul-crushing as the first bite—less “holiday cheer,” more “processed despair.”

    Finally, I’d had enough. With a sigh that could’ve put out a candle, I carried my plate to the trash and scraped the entire crime scene into the garbage, where it belonged. Dignity had to be reclaimed. I poured myself a bowl of Cheerios, sliced a banana over the top, and drizzled on some honey. As I savored each crunchy, sweet spoonful, I felt a small but vital spark of culinary joy return. It wasn’t just a meal—it was a rescue mission for my self-respect. And let me tell you, a bowl of cereal has never tasted so victorious.

    The self-abasement and insult to others from eating and serving fake food was captured brilliantly in the early 1980s when comedian Bob Sarlatte took aim at the pièce de résistance of culinary chicanery: the Ritz Crackers recipe for Mock Apple Pie. Sarlatte was on a mission to uncover the absurdity behind Ritz’s audacious claim of making apple pie with, wait for it, crackers instead of apples. He was incredulous, practically frothing at the mouth as he dissected this travesty. “Why on earth,” he demanded, “would Ritz, in all their cracker-clad glory, boast about a recipe that doesn’t even remotely involve apples?” According to Sarlatte, this so-called “apple pie” was like calling a desert a beach because it had sand—except the sand was made of crushed Ritz crackers, and the beach was a figment of your imagination. The comedian was in no mood for Ritz’s grandstanding. To him, this wasn’t a culinary innovation; it was a culinary catastrophe. He took Ritz to task for attempting to pass off a cracker conglomeration as apple pie, as if the lack of fruit was a feature, not a flaw. “Who,” Sarlatte railed, “are you going to serve this Mock Apple Pie to? Your mock friends? People who enjoy mockery served with a side of disappointment?” Sarlatte’s razor-sharp wit wasn’t just about lampooning a recipe—it was about exposing a greater travesty: the shameless elevation of a subpar substitute as a triumph of creativity. This wasn’t a clever culinary trick; it was an insult wrapped in a cracker crust. Bob Sarlatte laid bare the staggering lack of self-awareness and the brazen audacity required to serve such an ersatz “apple” pie with a smug smile. It was a masterclass in how to serve up an insult with a cherry on top, minus the apple, of course.

    Sarlatte’s takedown resonates because food is sacred territory. Our connection to it is primal. Unlike AI-generated text, fake food assaults the senses in ways you can’t ignore. And while AI hasn’t (yet) encroached on the culinary world with soulless meal simulations, the market’s rejection of fake meat shows just how little tolerance we have for edible counterfeits. Sales of plant-based protein substitutes have tanked, a clear signal that consumers aren’t ready to trade their ribeye for a rubbery simulacrum. Simply put, there’s only so much culinary mockery we’re willing to stomach—literally.

    Fake foods fail 90% of the time with 90% of the people, but in the realm of writing, AI-generated prose seems to enjoy the opposite fate: it’s “good enough” 90% of the time for 90% of situations. So perhaps fake food isn’t the right comparison. When it comes to our slow surrender to mediocrity in writing, convenience food may be a more apt metaphor. Sure, a Hot Pocket isn’t a Russian piroshki, but its ham and cheese filling is technically real. The danger isn’t the outright fakery of fake food—it’s the insidious appeal of convenience that gradually numbs our taste for anything better. The same flattening effect occurs in writing, where AI churns out serviceable but soulless content, lowering our appetite for higher-level craftsmanship.

    Let’s be real: when you bite into a Big Mac, you’re not searching for the subtle interplay of flavors or the delicate dance of textures. You’re there for the holy trinity of fat, protein, and salt—instant gratification, hold the sophistication. Likewise, when you fire up ChatGPT, you’re not chasing literary immortality. You’re after a fast, serviceable product so you can free up time to hit the drive-thru. Convenience becomes king, and both your palate and prose pay the price. Before you know it, you’ve traded filet mignon for fast food and Shakespeare for shallow clickbait. Standards? Those eroded long ago, somewhere between the special sauce and the soulless syntax.

    We’ve already seen this erosion over the last fifteen years. Smartphones have replaced thoughtful correspondence with texts full of abbreviations and emojis. My students now submit essays littered with “LOL” and lowercase “i” like punctuation’s gone on permanent strike. But maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe this linguistic infantilization is the new standard, and business communication will one day be indistinguishable from TikTok captions. Still, I don’t entirely despair. Higher-level writing—like Joan Didion’s piercing cultural reportage—exists in a category of its own and doesn’t compete with the memos and press releases AI is destined to take over.

    What worries me more is that fewer people will seek out writers like Didion, Zadie Smith, or Hunter S. Thompson. Without readers, the appetite for great writing—and with it, deep thinking—shrinks. The flattening of taste becomes a flattening of consciousness, a slow bleed of our shared humanity. Look at our growing dependence on technology: GLP-1 drugs manage our weight, AI shapes our communication, streaming algorithms filter our music, and nutrition powders substitute for food. The result is a bland middle ground, a life devoid of both high peaks and deep valleys. We stop noticing the dehumanization because we’ve acclimated to it.

    But not all hope is lost. I remember hearing an interview on Fresh Air with Tiffany Haddish. Early in her career, Haddish struggled to find her comedic voice—until Eddie Murphy gave her a piece of advice that changed everything. He told her to have fun on stage, to genuinely enjoy herself. If she was having fun, the audience would feel it and respond. That human moment of mentorship transformed her career.

    This story reassured me for two reasons. First, Tiffany Haddish wasn’t mentored by ChatGPT—she was guided by Eddie Murphy, a living legend. Second, comedy itself is proof that people will always crave voices that cut through the emotional numbness of modern life. Great comedians, like great writers, are the axes that Kafka said could break the frozen sea within us. They shatter our tech-induced monotony and return us to the raw, messy experience of being human. As long as there are voices like Haddish and Murphy to remind us of that, there’s still hope that humanity won’t flatline into a dull, digital abyss.

    We may live in a world where powdered meal replacements pose as dinner and AI-generated text poses as thought, but the human appetite—whether for flavor or for meaning—can’t be faked for long. Just as we spit out Cool Whip cones and tofurkey slabs with a shudder, our souls eventually revolt against the flattening effects of machine-made language. We remember what real texture feels like, in food and in prose. We remember what it means to laugh at a story that stings because it’s true. And even if convenience wins most days, there will always be those who crave the messy, glorious excess of a banana split or the searing honesty of a well-told tale. As long as people continue to gag on mediocrity—be it edible or literary—there’s hope that the hunger for something real, soulful, and defiantly human will keep coming back.