Cinemorphosis

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  • Echo-Chamber Fatigue: When Trusted Media Starts to Sound Like Static

    Echo-Chamber Fatigue: When Trusted Media Starts to Sound Like Static

    For years, I counted The Bulwark and The Atlantic among the few media outlets that seemed to keep their heads above water. Thoughtful, principled, and often sharp in their critique, they offered a sense of clarity during a time when the political center felt like it was collapsing under the weight of tribalism. I read The Atlantic with the same reverence people once reserved for the Sunday paper. I tuned into The Bulwark’s podcasts with eagerness, particularly the sparring matches and tag-team lamentations of Sarah Longwell and JVL.

    But lately, something’s shifted.

    I’ve been struggling to name the feeling exactly—disenchantment, disconnection, even a touch of annoyance. It’s not that they’ve suddenly started publishing bad takes (though no one’s immune to that). It’s more that I’ve come to feel like I’m listening to the same looped monologue. Their arguments are often cogent, yes, but increasingly predictable—a chorus of like-minded voices rehearsing the same concerns, circling the same drain.

    Call it echo-chamber fatigue.

    The Bulwark, once a clarion voice of principled conservatism and a fierce watchdog against authoritarianism, now often feels like a room full of smart people endlessly rehashing the same grim diagnosis: American democracy is circling the drain. The problem isn’t that they’re wrong—it’s that I already see the collapse unfolding in real time. Listening to it dissected again and again isn’t cathartic anymore. It’s just salt in the wound.

    The Atlantic, long celebrated for its intellectual breadth, increasingly feels like it’s scanning for moral alignment before publishing an idea. There’s little friction. Little surprise. Just a gentle stroking of reader confirmation bias.

    Meanwhile, I find myself gravitating to media that feels more alive—podcasts like The Gist with Mike Pesca, Blocked and Reported with Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal, The Fifth Column, Ink-Stained Wretches, and even The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg. These shows don’t always align with my politics—and that’s exactly the point. They’re not trying to usher me into ideological safety. They’re wrestling with absurdities across the spectrum. They’re skeptical. Curious. Sometimes contrarian. Always human.

    And that, I think, is the deeper issue: emotional resonance. The Bulwark and The Atlantic haven’t necessarily changed. I have. Or perhaps the times have. I need more than agreement—I need tension, exploration, contradiction. The intellectual monoculture, no matter how principled, starts to feel like a sedative after a while.

    I’ve even considered canceling my subscriptions. But there’s friction there, too: The Atlantic remains a useful classroom resource, and every now and then, The Bulwark sparks a genuinely engaging dialogue that reminds me why I once admired it so much.

    So I stay, for now. But I’ve moved my ears—and increasingly, my attention—toward media that still surprises me. That still thinks out loud, rather than reading from a polished script.

    I’m not rejecting thoughtful media. I’m just bored of watching it slowly turn into liturgy.

  • 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.

  • Sometimes My Inner Adult Has to Clean Up the Mess of My Addictive Ways

    Sometimes My Inner Adult Has to Clean Up the Mess of My Addictive Ways

    I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve finished my work, promised myself a little harmless “watch browsing” as a reward, and ended up setting fire to my own peace of mind. It starts innocently enough—just a few clicks, some glossy macro shots, a limited edition here, a patina there. Eye candy, I tell myself. A visual snack.

    Then, inevitably, the spiral begins.

    Suddenly I’m convincing myself that I need another diver, another field watch, another reinterpretation of a watch I already own in three colorways. The whole endeavor, pitched as relaxation, mutates into a dopamine landmine. Each spec sheet whispers betrayal into my ear. That sapphire crystal isn’t in your current rotation. That Miyota movement ticks more accurately than your precious Seiko. Your collection, once a source of joy, now feels like a garage sale of missed opportunities.

    At this point, the adult version of me has to crawl out of whatever psychic broom closet I locked him in. He dusts himself off, adjusts his belt, and mutters: “Alright, junior. You’ve ogled enough. Shut the laptop. Go to your watch box, pull out the piece you’ve ignored for a week, strap it on, and sit with it. Feel the weight. Admire the bezel. Remind yourself why you bought it. And for God’s sake, stop self-inflicting existential crisis over a titanium caseback.”

    Because life’s too short to be haunted by the ghost of watches not bought.

  • Thank You for Your Support (and Your Gullibility): Two Corporate Con Jobs from the ’80s

    Thank You for Your Support (and Your Gullibility): Two Corporate Con Jobs from the ’80s

    I almost called this post “Memories of Manipulative Advertising,” but that’s like calling water wet. Advertising doesn’t sometimes manipulate—it’s a full-time gaslighter with a jingle and a logo. The question isn’t if it’s lying to you, but how cleverly, and with what flavor of Americana.

    Case in point: Bartles & Jaymes, the wine cooler swindle dressed up like a Norman Rockwell painting. Back in the 1980s, I worked at Jackson’s Wine & Spirits in Berkeley—a respectable shop selling overpriced Bordeaux to grad students pretending they weren’t on food stamps. Then came the Bartles & Jaymes blitz, courtesy of Hal Riney & Partners and the corporate overlords at E & J Gallo.

    Suddenly, America was smitten with two crusty front-porch philosophers in denim and flannel, sipping pastel-colored booze and thanking us for “our support,” as if we were funding their modest struggle to afford Hamburger Helper and citronella candles. They weren’t winemakers. They weren’t even real. One was a retired Air Force pilot, the other a contractor. But that didn’t stop millions from believing that these Gallo sock puppets had personally hand-crafted their strawberry kiwi elixirs under a tin roof in Appalachia.

    These weren’t ads. They were full-blown folklore, sold to a Reagan-era audience desperate to believe in something wholesome—preferably something with artificial watermelon flavor and a 5% ABV.

    But the biggest act of psychological warfare I witnessed during my wine shop tenure came not from Gallo, but from that fizzy behemoth: Coca-Cola.

    In 1985, Coke announced it was changing its iconic recipe. Cue the national meltdown. Pickup trucks rolled into the wine store like we were FEMA and this was the end times. Grown men, trembling with brand-loyalty withdrawal, bought crates of “original” Coke like it was bottled youth. I became an emergency hand truck operator, wheeling out what amounted to liquid nostalgia to wide-eyed customers who treated me like I was delivering insulin to a diabetic family.

    Then, surprise!—Coke re-released the original as “Classic Coke,” and everyone breathed a sugary sigh of relief. It was less a product relaunch and more a mass-conditioning experiment, proving that if you poke the American consumer hard enough, they’ll thank you for the bruise.

    These weren’t just ad campaigns. They were operatic manipulations of identity, trust, and memory—corporate psyops disguised as beverage options.

  • 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.

  • We All Have That One Band That Changed Our Lives Forever: The Sundays

    We All Have That One Band That Changed Our Lives Forever: The Sundays

    I suppose we all have one band that swept us off our feet and we are blinded at our own personal Damascus and changed by the music forever. My Damascus moment was with The Sundays. I was driving north, visiting my mother in the San Francisco Bay Area, when “Here’s Where the Story Ends” came on the radio as I wound up the dreamy green pastures and lazy windmills of The Altamont Pass. 

    The music seemed to radiate light all around me. I was careful not to crash the car. I calmed myself down and decided not to go straight to my mom’s. I drove straight to a record store and bought “Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic” and soon after heard on the radio that The Sundays were playing at Slim’s in San Francisco. I called some ex-girlfriends to see if they wanted to go, but they were too busy, so I went alone. 

    I leaned against a pillar and watched the 4-piece ensemble play the album. “My Finest Hour” and a song I had never heard before, “Turkish,” grabbed me the most. I bought a T-shirt. I still own it and wear it from time to time. “You’re Not the Only One I Know” remains my favorite song of all time. If you love that song, I recommend you find the rare B side of the Trash Can Sinatras’ “My Mistake” for a similar vibe. In any event, The Sundays changed my life and I will always be grateful for their music. 

  • 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.