Cinemorphosis

Category: technology

  • Trapped in the AI Age’s Metaphysical Tug-of-War

    Trapped in the AI Age’s Metaphysical Tug-of-War

    I’m typing this to the sound of Beethoven—1,868 MP3s of compressed genius streamed through the algorithmic convenience of a playlist. It’s a 41-hour-and-8-minute monument to compromise: a simulacrum of sonic excellence that can’t hold a candle to the warmth of an LP. But convenience wins. Always.

    I make Faustian bargains like this daily. Thirty-minute meals instead of slow-cooked transcendence. Athleisure instead of tailoring. A Honda instead of high horsepower. The good-enough over the sublime. Not because I’m lazy—because I’m functional. Efficient. Optimized.

    And now, writing.

    For a year, my students and I have been feeding prompts into ChatGPT like a pagan tribe tossing goats into the volcano—hoping for inspiration, maybe salvation. Sometimes it works. The AI outlines, brainstorms, even polishes. But the more we rely on it, the more I feel the need to write without it—just to remember what my own voice sounds like. Just as the vinyl snob craves the imperfections of real analog music or the home cook insists on peeling garlic by hand, I need to suffer through the process.

    We’re caught in a metaphysical tug-of-war. We crave convenience but revere authenticity. We binge AI-generated sludge by day, then go weep over a hand-made pie crust YouTube video at night. We want our lives frictionless, but our souls textured. It’s the new sacred vs. profane: What do we reserve for real, and what do we surrender to the machine?

    I can’t say where this goes. Maybe real food will be phased out, like Blockbuster or bookstores. Maybe we’ll subsist on GLP-1 drugs, AI-tailored nutrient paste, and the joyless certainty of perfect lab metrics.

    As for entertainment, I’m marginally more hopeful. Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman—these are voices, not products. AI can churn out sitcoms, but it can’t bleed. It can’t bomb. It can’t riff on childhood trauma with perfect timing. Humans know the difference between a story and a story-shaped thing.

    Still, writing is in trouble. Reading, too. AI erodes attention spans like waves on sandstone. Books? Optional. Original thought? Delegated. The more AI floods the language, the more we’ll acclimate to its sterile rhythm. And the more we acclimate, the less we’ll even remember what a real voice sounds like.

    Yes, there will always be the artisan holdouts—those who cook, write, read, and listen with intention. But they’ll be outliers. A boutique species. The rest of us will be lean, medicated, managed. Data-optimized units of productivity.

    And yet, there will be stories. There will always be stories. Because stories aren’t just culture—they’re our survival instinct dressed up as entertainment. When everything else is outsourced, commodified, and flattened, we’ll still need someone to stand up and tell us who we are.

  • The Death of Dinner: How AI Could Replace Pleasure Eating with Beige, Compliant Goo

    The Death of Dinner: How AI Could Replace Pleasure Eating with Beige, Compliant Goo

    Savor that croissant while you still can—flaky, buttery, criminally indulgent. In a few decades, it’ll be contraband nostalgia, recounted in hushed tones by grandparents who once lived in a time when bread still had a soul and cheese wasn’t “shelf-stable.” Because AI is coming for your taste buds, and it’s not bringing hot sauce.

    We are entering the era of algorithm-approved alimentation—a techno-utopia where food isn’t eaten, it’s administered. Where meals are no longer social rituals or sensory joys but compliance events optimized for satiety curves and glucose response. Your plate is now a spreadsheet, and your fork is a biometric reporting device.

    Already, AI nutrition platforms like Noom, Lumen, and MyFitnessPal’s AI-diet overlords are serving up daily menus based on your gut flora’s mood and whether your insulin levels are feeling emotionally regulated. These platforms don’t ask what you’re craving—they tell you what your metrics will tolerate. Dinner is no longer about joy; it’s about hitting your macros and earning a dopamine pellet for obedience.

    Tech elites have already evacuated the dinner table. For them, food is just software for the stomach. Soylent, Huel, Ka’chava—these aren’t meals, they’re edible flowcharts. Designed not for delight but for efficiency, these drinkable spreadsheets are powdered proof that the future of food is just enough taste to make you swallow.

    And let’s not forget Ozempic and its GLP-1 cousins—the hormonal muzzle for hunger. Pair that with AI wearables whispering sweet nothings like “Time for your lentil paste” and you’ve got a whole generation learning that wanting flavor is a failure of character. Forget foie gras. It’s psy-ops via quinoa gel.

    Even your grocery cart is under surveillance. AI shopping assistants—already lurking in apps like Instacart—will gently steer you away from handmade pasta and toward fermented fiber bars and shelf-stable cheese-like products. Got a hankering for camembert? Sorry, your AI gut-coach has flagged it as non-compliant dairy-based frivolity. Enjoy your pea-protein puck, peasant.

    Soon, your lunch break won’t be lunch or a break. It’ll be a Pomodoro-synced ingestion window in which you sip an AI-formulated mushroom slurry while doom-scrolling synthetic influencers on GLP-1. Your food won’t comfort you—it will stabilize you, and that’s the most terrifying part. Three times a day, you’ll sip the same beige sludge of cricket protein, nootropic fibers, and psychoactive stabilizers, each meal a contract with the status quo: You will feel nothing, and you will comply.

    And if you’re lucky enough to live in an AI-UBI future, don’t expect dinner to be celebratory. Expect it to be regulated, subsidized, and flavor-neutral. Your government food credits won’t cover artisan cheddar or small-batch bread. Instead, your AI grocery budget assistant will chirp:

    “This selection exceeds your optimal cost-to-nutrient ratio. May I suggest oat crisps and processed cheese spread at 50% less and 300% more compliance?”

    Even without work, you won’t have the freedom to indulge. Your wearable will monitor your blood sugar, cholesterol, and moral fiber. Have a rogue bite of truffle mac & cheese? That spike in glucose just docked you two points from your UBI wellness score:

    “Indulgent eating may affect eligibility for enhanced wellness bonuses. Consider lentil loaf next time, citizen.”

    Eventually, pleasure eating becomes a class marker, like opera tickets or handwritten letters. Rich eccentrics will dine on duck confit in secrecy while the rest of us drink our AI-approved nutrient slurry in 600-calorie increments at 13:05 sharp. Flavor becomes a crime of privilege.

    The final insult? Your children won’t even miss it. They’ll grow up thinking “food joy” is a myth—like cursive writing or butter. They’ll hear stories of crusty baguettes and sizzling fat the way Boomers talk about jazz clubs and cigarettes. Romantic, but reckless.

    In this optimized hellscape, eating is no longer an art. It’s a biometric negotiation between your body and a neural net that no longer trusts you to feed yourself responsibly.

    The future of food is functional. Beige. Pre-chewed by code. And flavor? That’s just a bug in the system.

  • How Headphones Made Me Emotionally Unavailable in High-Resolution Audio

    How Headphones Made Me Emotionally Unavailable in High-Resolution Audio

    After flying to Miami recently, I finally understood the full appeal of noise-canceling headphones—not just for travel, but for the everyday, ambient escape act they offer my college students. Several claim, straight-faced, that they “hear the lecture better” while playing ASMR in their headphones because it soothes their anxiety and makes them better listeners. Is this neurological wizardry? Or performance art? I’m not sure. But apocryphal or not, the explanation has stuck with me.

    It made me see the modern, high-grade headphone as something far more than a listening device. It’s a sanctuary, or to use the modern euphemism, an aural safe space in a chaotic world. You may not have millions to seal yourself in a hyperbaric oxygen pod inside a luxury doomsday bunker carved into the Montana granite during World War Z, but if you’ve got $500 and a credit score above sea level, you can disappear in style—into a pair of Sony MX6s or Audio-Technica ATH-R70s.

    The headphone, in this context, is not just gear—it’s armor. Whether cocobolo wood or carbon fiber, it communicates something quietly radical: “I have opted out.”

    You’re not rejecting the world with malice—you’re simply letting it know that you’ve found something better. Something more reliable. Something calibrated to your nervous system. In fact, you’ve severed communication so politely that all they hear is the faint thump of curated escapism pulsing through your earpads.

    For my students, these headphones are not fashion statements—they’re boundary-drawing devices. The outside world is a cacophony of canvas announcements, attention fatigue, and algorithmically optimized despair. Inside the headphones? Rain sounds. Lo-fi beats from a YouTube loop titled “study with me until the world ends.” Maybe even a softly muttering AI voice telling them they are enough.

    It doesn’t matter whether it’s true. It matters that it works.

    And here’s the deeper point: the headphone isn’t just a sanctuary. It’s a non-accountability device. You can’t be blamed for ghosting a group chat or zoning out during a team huddle when you’re visibly plugged into something more profound. You’re no longer rude—you’re occupied. Your silence is now technically sound.

    In a hyper-networked world that expects your every moment to be a node of productivity or empathy, the headphone is the last affordable luxury that buys you solitude without apology. You don’t need a manifesto. You just need active noise-canceling and a decent DAC.

    You’re not ignoring anyone. You’ve just entered your own monastery of midrange clarity, bass-forward detachment, and spatially engineered peace.

    And if someone wants your attention?

    Tell them to knock louder. You’re in sanctuary.

  • Siri at 30,000 Feet: Watch Reviews from the Android Abyss

    Siri at 30,000 Feet: Watch Reviews from the Android Abyss

    I’ve recently fallen into a strange corner of YouTube, where watch reviews by non-English speakers are automatically dubbed into English by an AI translator. The result? A surreal auditory hallucination that sounds like Siri moonlighting as a flight attendant. Every video becomes a low-budget dream sequence: a monotone voice calmly explaining bezel alignment while I mentally brace for instructions on how to locate the nearest flotation device.

    These AI-dubbed reviews don’t just kill the vibe—they exterminate it. What might have been a charming deep dive into dial texture or lug curvature turns into a bureaucratic fever dream. I’m not learning about watches. I’m trapped in a dystopian airline safety video, narrated by an android who sounds like he’s instructing me on what to do in the event the cabin has a drop in oxygen.

    The silver lining? These videos are the perfect antidote to impulsive spending. No matter how alluring the lume or limited the edition, the second I hear that synthetic drone describing a in robot voice a strange new word– “sapphireklysteelcasebackwithantimagneticresistance”–my urge to buy evaporates. The watch becomes a prop in an uncanny AI daymare—and I, mercifully, return to reality with my wallet intact.

  • You don’t need Soma. You’ve got ChatNumb

    You don’t need Soma. You’ve got ChatNumb

    In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley introduced Soma—a state-sanctioned sedative that numbed the masses into docile contentment. It didn’t solve problems; it dissolved them. Conflict, anxiety, existential dread—gone in a puff of pharmaceutical fog. Soma didn’t spark joy; it scrubbed discomfort. It was emotional Febreze for a society allergic to depth. People weren’t living—they were coasting on a chemically induced flatline, their critical faculties dulled to the point of extinction. No questions. No friction. No soul.

    Well, good news. Soma’s here—but it’s not in a pill bottle. It’s in your search bar, your chatbot, your synthetic co-pilot. It’s called AI. And unlike Huxley’s version, this one doesn’t need to sedate you. You do it to yourself. Every time you delegate thought, judgment, or original insight to an algorithm, your self-reliance shrinks like a muscle in a cast. The fewer mental reps you do, the more comfortable you get in the warm bath of synthetic cognition. The mind adapts. It flattens. You feel “efficient,” “optimized,” “smart”—but the uncomfortable truth is, you’re just well-lubricated for obedience.

    You don’t need Soma. You’ve got ChatNumb–the condition that sets in after tens of thousands of reps with your favorite AI assistant. The symptoms? A faux sense of competence, lizard-eyed placidity, and a vague suspicion that you’ve stopped thinking altogether. It’s not that you’ve been silenced. You’ve been auto-filled.

    The Age of Soma isn’t coming. It’s here. And we welcomed it with open thumbs. God help us all.

  • The future, we’re told, is full of freedom—unless you’re the one still cleaning the mess.

    The future, we’re told, is full of freedom—unless you’re the one still cleaning the mess.

    Last semester, in my college critical thinking class—a room full of bright minds and burnt-out spirits—we were dissecting what feels like a nationwide breakdown in mental health. Students tossed around possible suspects like a crime scene lineup: the psychological hangover of the pandemic, TikTok influencers glamorizing nervous breakdowns with pastel filters and soft piano music, the psychic toll of watching America split like a wishbone down party lines. All plausible. All depressing.

    Then a re-entry student—a nurse with twenty years in the trenches—raised her hand and calmly dropped a depth charge into the conversation. She said she sees more patients than ever staggering into hospitals not just sick, but shattered. Demoralized. Enraged. When I asked her what she thought was behind the surge in mental illness, she didn’t hesitate. “Money,” she said. “No one has any. They’re working themselves into the ground and still can’t cover rent, groceries, and medical bills. They’re burning out and breaking down.”

    And just like that, all our theories—algorithms, influencers, red-vs-blue blood feuds—melted under the furnace heat of economic despair. She was right. She sees the raw pain daily, the kind of pain tech billionaires will never upload into a TED Talk. While they spin futuristic fables about AI liberating humanity for leisure and creativity, my nurse watches the working class crawl into urgent care with nothing left but rage and debt. The promise of Universal Basic Income sounds charming if you’re already lounging in a beanbag chair at Singularity HQ, but out here in the world of late rent and grocery inflation, it’s a pipe dream sold by people who wouldn’t recognize a shift worker if one collapsed on their marble floors. The future, we’re told, is full of freedom—unless you’re the one still cleaning the mess.

  • WordPress: My Kettlebell Gym of the Mind

    WordPress: My Kettlebell Gym of the Mind

    I launched my WordPress blog on March 12, evicting myself from Typepad after it was sold to a company that treats blogs the way landlords treat rent-controlled tenants: with bored disdain. Typepad became a ghost town in a bad neighborhood, so I packed up and moved to the gated community of WordPress—cleaner streets, better lighting, and fewer trolls.

    For the past ten weeks, I’ve treated WordPress like a public journal—a digital sweat lodge where I sweat out my thoughts, confessions, and pedagogical war stories from the frontlines of college teaching. I like the routine, the scaffolding, and the habits of self-control. Blogging gives me something I never got from social media or committee meetings: a sense of order in a culture that’s spun off its axis.

    But let’s not kid ourselves. WordPress isn’t some utopian agora where meaningful discourse flourishes in the shade of civility. It’s still wired into the dopamine economy. The minute I start checking likes, follows, and view counts, I’m no longer a writer—I’m a lab rat pressing the pellet button. Metrics are the new morality. And brother, I’m not immune.

    Case in point: I can craft a thoughtful post, click “Publish,” and watch it sink into the abyss like a message in a bottle tossed into a septic tank. One view. Maybe. Post the same thing on Reddit, and suddenly I’m performing for an arena full of dopamine-addled gladiators. They’ll upvote, sure—but only after the professional insulters have had their turn at bat. Reddit is where clever sociopaths go to sharpen their knives and call it discourse.

    WordPress, by contrast, is a chill café with decent lighting and no one live-tweeting your every existential sigh. It’s a refuge from the snarling hordes of hot-take hustlers and ideological bloodsport. A place where I can escape not only digital toxicity, but the wider derangement of our post-shame, post-truth society—where influencers and elected officials are often the same con artist in two different blazers.

    Instead of doomscrolling or screaming into the algorithmic void, I’ve taken to reading biographies—public intellectuals, athletes who aged with dignity, tech pioneers who are obsessed with taking over the world. Or I’ll go spelunking into gadget rabbit holes to distract myself from the spiritual hangover that comes from living in a country where charisma triumphs over character and truth is whatever sells ad space.

    In therapy-speak, my job on WordPress is to “use the tools,” as Phil Stutz says: to strengthen my relationship with myself, with others, and with the crumbling world around me. It’s a discipline, not a dopamine drip. Writing here won’t make me famous, won’t make me rich, and sure as hell won’t turn me into some cardigan-clad oracle for the digital age.

    What it will do is give me structure. WordPress is where I wrestle with my thoughts the way I wrestle kettlebells in my garage: imperfectly, regularly, and with just enough sweat to keep the madness at bay.

  • 5 Ways We Can Get Addicted to AI Writing Platforms

    5 Ways We Can Get Addicted to AI Writing Platforms

    I’ve tried to stay current with the way technology is affecting my college writing classes. I dipped into the pool of AI-writing platforms like ChatGPT, and after 16 months or so, I can say that the program has gotten the best of me on many occasions and caused me to step back and look at its power to trap us. These platforms are addictive for 5 reasons. 

    One, AI polishes and strengthens your prose in flattering ways that can give you false confidence even as it can be wordy and obscure the clarity of your original draft. I call this false confidence “writer’s dysmorphia,” the idea that AI gives your prose a “muscle-flex” that you can’t muster without it. 

    Two. Another cause of addiction is the way we anthropomorphize AI, giving it a pet name and developing a fake relationship with it. This relationship exists in our heads. In many ways, this relationship can suffocate us as AI insidiously creeps into our brains. 

    Three. As we develop this “relationship” with AI and become grateful for its services, we feel like we owe it our attention. In this regard, it becomes the abusive spouse who wants to be addressed and to remain relevant in our lives. 

    Four. Our addiction grows as we lose confidence in our non-AI writing and, in turn, our non-Ai self. We constantly want to adorn ourselves with AI’s ability to razzle-dazzle.

    Five. Over time as we outsource more and more work to AI, we become more and more lazy and suffer Brain Atrophy Creep, losing our brain power slowly but surely.

    For these reasons, I’m doing more non-AI writing, such as this piece, and learning to find confidence on my own. 

  • Beware of the ChatGPT Strut

    Beware of the ChatGPT Strut

    Yesterday my critical thinking students and I talked about the ways we could revise our original content with ChatGPT give it instructions and train this AI tool to go beyond its bland, surface-level writing style. I showed my students specific prompts that would train it to write in a persona:

    “Rewrite the passage with acid wit.”

    “Rewrite the passage with lucid, assured prose.”

    “Rewrite the passage with mild academic language.”

    “Rewrite the passage with overdone academic language.”

    I showed the students my original paragraphs and ChatGPT’s versions of my sample arguments agreeing and disagreeing with Gustavo Arellano’s defense of cultural appropriation, and I said in the ChatGPT rewrites of my original there were linguistic constructions that were more witty, dramatic, stunning, and creative than I could do, and that to post these passages as my own would make me look good, but they wouldn’t be me. I would be misrepresenting myself, even though most of the world will be enhancing their writing like this in the near future. 

    I compared writing without ChatGPT to being a natural bodybuilder. Your muscles may not be as massive and dramatic as the guy on PEDS, but what you see is what you get. You’re the real you. In contrast, when you write with ChatGPT, you are a bodybuilder on PEDS. Your muscle-flex is eye-popping. You start doing the ChatGPT strut. 

    I gave this warning to the class: If you use ChatGPT a lot, as I have in the last year as I’m trying to figure out how I’m supposed to use it in my teaching, you can develop writer’s dysmorphia, the sense that your natural, non-ChatGPT writing is inadequate compared to the razzle-dazzle of ChatGPT’s steroid-like prose. 

    One student at this point disagreed with my awe of ChatGPT and my relatively low opinion of my own “natural” writing. She said, “Your original is better than the ChatGPT versions. Yours makes more sense to me, isn’t so hidden behind all the stylistic fluff, and contains an important sentence that ChatGPT omitted.”

    I looked at the original, and I realized she was right. My prose wasn’t as fancy as ChatGPT’s but the passage about Gustavo Arellano’s essay defending cultural appropriation was more clear than the AI versions.

    At this point, I shifted metaphors in describing ChatGPT. Whereas I began the class by saying that AI revisions are like giving steroids to a bodybuilder with body dysmorphia, now I was warning that ChatGPT can be like an abusive boyfriend or girlfriend. It wants to hijack our brains because the main objective of any technology is to dominate our lives. In the case of ChatGPT, this domination is sycophantic: It gives us false flattery, insinuates itself into our lives, and gradually suffocates us. 

    As an example, I told the students that I was getting burned out using ChatGPT, and I was excited to write non-ChatGPT posts on my blog, and to live in a space where my mind could breathe the fresh air apart from ChatGPT’s presence. 

    I wanted to see how ChatGPT would react to my plan to write non-ChatGPT posts, and ChatGPT seemed to get scared. It started giving me all of these suggestions to help me implement my non-ChatGPT plan. I said back to ChatGPT, “I can’t use your suggestions or plans or anything because the whole point is to live in the non-ChatGPT Zone.” I then closed my ChatGPT tab. 

    I concluded by telling my students that we need to reach a point where ChatGPT is a tool like Windows and Google Docs, but as soon as we become addicted to it, it’s an abusive platform. At that point, we need to use some self-agency and distance ourselves from it.  

  • If Used Wisely, AI Can Push Your Writing to Greater Heights, But It Can Also Create Writer’s Dysmorphia

    If Used Wisely, AI Can Push Your Writing to Greater Heights, But It Can Also Create Writer’s Dysmorphia

    No ChatGPT or AI of any kind was used in the following:

    For close to 2 years, I’ve been editing and collaborating with ChatGPT for my personal and professional writing. I teach my college writing students how to engage with it, giving it instructions to avoid its default setting for bland, anodyne prose and teaching it how to adopt various writing personas. 

    For my own writing, ChatGPT has boosted my prose and imagery, making my writing more stunning, dramatic, and vivid.

    Because I have been a bodybuilder since 1974, I will use a bodybuilding analogy: Writing with ChatGPT is like bodybuilding with PEDS. I get addicted to the boost, the extra pump, and the extra muscle. Just as a bodybuilder can get body dysmorphia, ChatGPT can give writers a sort of writer’s dysmorphia. 

    But posting a few articles on Reddit recently in which a few readers were put off by what they saw as “fake writing,” I stopped in my tracks to question my use of ChatGPT. Part of me thinks that the hunger for authenticity is such that I should be writing content that is more like the natural bodybuilder, the guy who ventures forth in his endeavor with no PEDS. What you see is what you get, all human, no steroids, no AI.

    While I like the way ChatGPT pushes me in new directions that I would not explore on my own and makes the writing process engaging in new ways, I acknowledge that AI-fueled writer’s dysmorphia is real. We can get addicted to the juiced-up prose and the razzle-dazzle.

    Secondly, we can outsource too much thinking to AI and get lazy rather than do the work ourselves. In the process, our critical thinking skills begin to atrophy.

    Third, I think we can fill our heads with too much ChatGPT and live inside a hazy AI fever swamp. I recall going to middle school and on the outskirts of the campus, you could see the “burn-outs,” pot-addicted kids staring into the distance with their lizard eyes. One afternoon a friend joked, “They’re high so often, not being high must be a trip for them.” What if we become like these lizard-eyed burnouts and wander this world on a constant ChatGPT high that is so debilitating that we need to sober up in the natural world upon which we find the non-AI existence is its own form of healthy pleasure? In other words, we should be careful not to let ChatGPT live rent-free in our brains.

    Finally, people hunger for authentic, all-human writing, so moving forward on this blog, I want to continue to push myself with some ChatGPT-edited writing, but I also want to present all-natural, all-human writing, as is the case with this post.