Cinemorphosis

Tag: technology

  • Chatty Mick T Roy, Your Last Friend

    Chatty Mick T Roy, Your Last Friend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Then it offered you a surrogate.

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

    Chatty Mick T Roy.

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

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

    Your fingers turn blue.

    Chatty Mick T Roy remains relentlessly upbeat.

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

    The battery is at 83 percent.

    The slap of ice drifts north.

  • Bulking Up

    Bulking Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • The 5-Stage AI Laundering Cycle: How Students Make Machine Writing Look Human

    The 5-Stage AI Laundering Cycle: How Students Make Machine Writing Look Human

    My college, like other places of higher learning, wants academic integrity, but some of my former students tell me they use AI more cleverly than they did four years ago to the point that it’s getting more and more difficult to detect AI-generated essays because of the AI Laundering Cycle: the five-stage process by which a student transforms machine-generated prose into something engineered to resemble authentic student writing. 

    Some of my former students admit they use AI differently from the way they did four years ago. The early adopters were almost charmingly unsophisticated. They generated an essay, copied it, pasted it into Canvas, and submitted prose so conspicuously artificial that a student who normally wrote “The guy was really mad” suddenly sounded like an associate professor of postcolonial theory. The evidence practically arrived wearing a name tag.

    That era is disappearing.

    Students are becoming more sophisticated at disguising synthetic prose, creating what I call the AI Laundering Cycle: the five-stage process by which machine-generated writing is transformed into something engineered to resemble authentic student work.

    Stage One is Generation. AI produces the original essay, relieving the student of the inconvenient business of developing ideas, wrestling with contradictions, organizing an argument, and composing sentences.

    Stage Two is Humanization. The essay goes through another AI pass designed to remove recognizable machine fingerprints: formulaic transitions, inflated vocabulary, suspiciously balanced paragraphs, excessive polish, and that relentlessly smooth cadence in which every sentence seems to have graduated from business school.

    Stage Three is Kiddification. Now comes the remarkable part. The student deliberately makes the writing worse. AI is instructed to lower the vocabulary, shorten sentences, flatten the analysis, introduce awkward phrasing, and otherwise transform competent synthetic prose into something more plausibly adolescent. Technology powerful enough to assist scientists and engineers is enlisted to make a freshman sound convincingly mediocre.

    Stage Four is Personalization. The student sprinkles in anecdotes, classroom references, opinions, favorite expressions, and other scraps of individuality. These details function as synthetic fingerprints: evidence of a human author manufactured after the human author has largely been removed from the writing process.

    Stage Five is Detection Grooming. Anything that still looks suspicious gets another trip through the car wash. Sentences are regenerated. Paragraphs are simplified. AI markers are scrubbed away until the student believes the essay can pass as organically human.

    The result is a peculiar form of intellectual money laundering. One machine generates the contraband. Another washes it. Another rubs dirt back onto it for authenticity. The student supervises the operation and eventually submits the finished product as evidence of learning.

    To be fair, this process requires some labor. A student who completes all five stages may spend considerable time prompting, comparing, editing, personalizing, and grooming the finished essay.

    But this is not much of a deterrent.

    Even elaborate AI laundering demands only a fraction of the intellectual labor required to write an authentic college essay through multiple drafts. Genuine composition requires you to confront the blank page, generate ideas, discover what you actually think, find evidence, recognize weaknesses in your argument, reorganize paragraphs, abandon bad ideas, develop better ones, and rewrite sentences until they finally say what you intended them to say. AI laundering allows the student to outsource most of that difficult cognitive work and concentrate instead on disguising the outsourcing.

    The efficiency advantage is simply too great.

    That is why I see few countervailing forces capable of stopping the practice. We can prohibit unauthorized AI. We can lecture about academic integrity. We can deploy detection software. We can require process work. We can design more personalized assignments. All of these measures may help.

    But the economic logic of effort remains brutally simple: if authentic writing requires ten units of cognitive labor and convincing AI laundering requires two, a substantial number of exhausted, distracted, overcommitted, or simply opportunistic students will choose two.

    And the technology will keep improving.

    The great irony is that students may become increasingly skilled at producing essays that look exactly like the essays they are becoming less capable of writing.

  • Be Kind to Linda: She’s Trapped in the Maze Too

    Be Kind to Linda: She’s Trapped in the Maze Too

    As you attempt to retire, you will eventually enter the bureaucratic labyrinth and submit yourself to its ritual humiliations: security codes, two-factor authentication, forgotten usernames, password requirements apparently derived from nuclear-launch protocols, contradictory menus, and websites whose navigation systems seem designed to ensure that no citizen ever reaches his intended destination. After enough exposure, you will feel anger rising inside you. Eventually, a human being will answer the telephone, and you will experience an almost irresistible urge to unload the entire accumulated grievance upon her.

    Don’t.

    This is the Misplaced Rage Fallacy: the tendency to direct your fury at the human being who answers the telephone rather than at the labyrinthine system that necessitated the telephone call. After forty-five minutes of authentication codes, password resets, automated voices, contradictory menus, and a website apparently designed by Kafka’s IT department, you finally reach Linda in Benefits and instinctively regard her as the architect of your suffering.

    She isn’t.

    Linda did not design the website. Linda did not decide that your password must contain twelve characters, one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, two numbers, a hieroglyph, and the blood type of your maternal grandfather. Linda did not send the authentication code to a telephone number you haven’t used since the Obama administration. Linda did not create the seventeen-item telephone menu through which you wandered like a starving hiker lost in the Sierras.

    Linda is trapped in the maze too.

    She just has a headset.

    This brings you to a second discovery, the Institutional Humanity Paradox: the larger, colder, and more impenetrable an institution becomes, the more surprising it is to discover that it is populated by ordinary and frequently decent human beings. There can be a yawning disparity between the personality of a bureaucracy and the character of the people who work inside it. The website treats you like a suspicious package abandoned at airport security. The woman who eventually answers the telephone treats you like a human being.

    This happened to me with CalSTRS. I already had a username and password, dutifully preserved in my records, and naturally neither one worked. I entered them again, because one of the foundational beliefs of modern life is that typing the same rejected password a second time may cause the computer to reconsider its position. It did not. I called CalSTRS, entered the automated telephone labyrinth, requested a callback, and eventually heard the voice of an actual person from the technical-support department.

    She was wonderful.

    For twenty minutes, she stayed on the telephone while we reconstructed my digital identity. She explained that a new system introduced about a year earlier had rendered my previous credentials obsolete, which was comforting in the same way that learning your house key no longer works because someone replaced the house is comforting. Then she patiently escorted me through every miserable step required to establish a new account. She never became impatient. She never spoke to me in the singsong voice adults sometimes use with people who cannot locate the settings menu. She never suggested that the problem was obvious and that any reasonably evolved primate should have solved it without assistance. She was kind, competent, patient, and helpful.

    Eventually, she transferred me to another department so that I could arrange a Zoom appointment. There I encountered another pleasant woman who tried to find me an opening. Unfortunately, the appointments were booked for approximately six weeks. She suggested that I call again the following week and see whether something had opened.

    What was I supposed to do—blame her?

    She had not personally filled the calendar. She had not constructed a retirement system in which someone approaching retirement must schedule a meeting six weeks into the future to discuss how to stop working in the present. She was simply sitting at her desk, looking at the same overstuffed calendar I was confronting from the other end of the telephone.

    She was a cog in the machine, but she had not built the machine.

    This distinction matters. Being rude to the people who take your calls is not merely bad manners; it is strategically idiotic. You are punishing innocent people, alienating precisely those human beings who possess the knowledge necessary to rescue you, and burning emotional fuel you will desperately need during your next gladiatorial encounter with a retirement application.

    Save your rage for the proper target: the system.

    Be kind to Linda.

    Thank the technical-support representative who spends twenty minutes resurrecting your account. Be gracious to the benefits counselor who cannot manufacture an appointment that doesn’t exist. Remember that these people also have mortgages, families, passwords, insurance companies, malfunctioning websites, dental appointments, aging parents, and bureaucracies of their own. At five o’clock they remove their headsets and become civilians again, whereupon some other institution begins tormenting them.

    Never confuse the personality of an institution with the character of the people imprisoned inside it.

    And when you feel yourself reaching the point at which you might begin screaming at innocent strangers, close the laptop. Walk away from the battlefield. Have a healthy snack. Lie down for a restorative nap with your eyeshades and cucumber mask. Allow your nervous system to forget the existence of authentication codes.

    Tomorrow you can return refreshed in body and spirit.

  • The Rise and Fall of the Influencer

    The Rise and Fall of the Influencer

    In her essay “The Extras Are Tired,” Ellen Cushing traces the astonishing rise of the influencer. Less than a decade ago, the word itself barely registered in the public vocabulary. The profession was still flapping uncertain wings. By 2023, those wings had become a full-fledged migration. Twenty-seven million Americans were earning money by producing online content, and universities were rushing to legitimize the phenomenon. Arizona State University now offers a bachelor’s degree in Content Creation, as though aspiring to become a walking selfie stick had matured into a respectable academic discipline.

    Yet the influencer economy already feels less inevitable than it did only a few years ago.

    One reason is technological. Increasingly, people seek advice from artificial intelligence rather than from smiling strangers who begin every video by announcing, “Hey, guys!” with the synthetic warmth of a flight attendant welcoming passengers aboard a delayed flight. AI may have its flaws, but at least it doesn’t interrupt your day to remind you to smash the like button.

    Another problem is more fundamental. Influencers possess a surprisingly short shelf life because their relationship with followers is built upon counterfeit intimacy. They manufacture the illusion that they are your trusted friend while simultaneously converting every friendship into a monetized sales funnel. Eventually, the performance begins to squeak. The smiles appear rehearsed. The vulnerability feels focus-group tested. The authenticity arrives with affiliate links.

    The public has noticed.

    Some clothing stores have become so weary of influencers transforming shopping aisles into film studios that they now post NO INFLUENCERS signs. The signs possess a wonderfully deadpan wit. They function almost like restaurant health inspections proudly declaring the premises free of rodents. Customers may now browse in peace, reassured that no one will suddenly begin recording a “Get Ready With Me” video between the denim racks.

    The signs are also an overdue act of cultural pushback.

    Influencers do not merely occupy public space; they annex it. They assume that coffee shops, sidewalks, airports, grocery stores, and boutiques exist as interchangeable backdrops for the ongoing production of their personal brand. Everyone else becomes unpaid production staff.

    This is a distinctly twenty-first-century form of vanity, one I call Protagonist Inflation: the progressive belief that one’s own life constitutes the central narrative while strangers exist primarily as background characters, audience members, or supporting cast.

    Cushing captures the phenomenon with characteristic precision:

    “Influencers today are a bit like plastic surgeons, or plumbers: On a societal level, many people sure seem to like what they do—they just don’t necessarily want to be right next to them while they’re doing it.”

    Exactly.

    Society may consume influencer content by the billions of views, but that does not mean it wishes to sit beside someone filming six takes of a cappuccino before allowing the coffee to become cold enough to qualify as archaeology.

    Much has been written about the jobs artificial intelligence will eliminate. We are warned that AI will replace writers, teachers, programmers, accountants, lawyers, and artists. Perhaps it will replace many of them.

    When it comes to influencers, however, I find it difficult to summon much grief.

    If artificial intelligence succeeds in removing one profession built upon convincing the rest of us that we are merely extras wandering through someone else’s movie, then AI will have performed at least one genuine public service.

  • Why Mike Pesca Chose Algorithmic Exile

    Why Mike Pesca Chose Algorithmic Exile

    For more than a decade, Mike Pesca built one of the most respected podcasts in the business. His conversations were thoughtful rather than performative, his interviews nuanced rather than sensational, and his political analysis resisted the tribal certainty that dominates so much online discourse. By conventional standards, he had already succeeded.

    Yet success in today’s media ecosystem is no longer enough. To keep growing, creators must increasingly submit themselves to the demands of opaque algorithms that reward relentless engagement, perpetual self-promotion, and an endless stream of optimized content. Pesca looked at that landscape and concluded that the price of further growth was too high.

    It was not that he lacked the ability to master the algorithm. Rather, he had no desire to become the sort of person whose professional life revolved around pleasing it. The daily rituals required to stimulate engagement struck him as alienating. They demanded a temperament and set of priorities that no longer resembled the person he wanted to be.

    Standing at this fork in the road, Pesca faced two paths. One led toward greater scale by embracing whatever the algorithm demanded. The other required walking away from a successful enterprise he had spent years building. He chose the latter, entering what might be called algorithmic exile: the voluntary withdrawal from a profession or platform because its algorithmic incentives have become incompatible with one’s identity, values, or conception of meaningful work.

    In doing so, Pesca honored what might be called the Identity Preservation Threshold Principle: the point at which further professional success requires so much adaptation to external incentives that a person refuses to proceed in order to preserve a coherent sense of self. His departure was therefore not an admission of defeat. It was a declaration that there are forms of success not worth pursuing because they demand the slow erosion of the very character that made the work worth doing in the first place.

  • The End of Mike Pesca’s The Gist Reminds Us of the Tyranny of the Algorithm

    The End of Mike Pesca’s The Gist Reminds Us of the Tyranny of the Algorithm

    On his June 30 podcast, Mike Pesca announced that The Gist is coming to an end.

    To paraphrase his explanation, the current algorithmic media environment has become increasingly hostile to the kind of show he produces. The Gist never occupied a clearly defined ideological lane. It wasn’t relentlessly anti-this or unapologetically pro-that. It wasn’t built to serve a tribe or reinforce an audience’s existing worldview. Instead, it thrived on curiosity, unpredictability, and the freedom to roam across politics, culture, sports, history, language, and whatever else happened to interest Pesca that day.

    Those qualities, however, have become liabilities.

    Today’s attention economy rewards strong brands, reliable outrage, short video clips, and highly shareable moments. Successful podcasts are expected to generate a constant stream of excerpts designed to circulate across social media, pulling new listeners into an ever-expanding algorithmic ecosystem. Pesca acknowledged that he neither built his show for that world nor particularly wished to. After years of producing a daily podcast with a small staff, he concluded that they simply were not getting enough juice for the squeeze.

    What remains unclear is what comes next.

    Pesca hinted that another venture is in the works, but he offered few specifics. As a subscriber, I’m left wondering what happens now. Will paying subscribers receive ad-free content through a different program? Will his other podcasts continue? Are those shows better suited to the current media landscape while The Gist is not? For now, those questions remain unanswered.

    I’m genuinely sorry to see The Gist disappear.

    Ironically, the very qualities that limited its growth are the qualities I admired most. Pesca never sounded like someone trying to satisfy an algorithm. He sounded like an intelligent, curious person thinking out loud in real time. He was willing to wander, to surprise, to change subjects, and occasionally to change his mind. That kind of intellectual range has become increasingly rare in a media culture that rewards specialization, ideological certainty, and perpetual performance.

    Whatever Pesca does next, I hope he remains a prominent voice. He would make an outstanding regular guest on Blocked and Reported, The Fifth Column, The Remnant, Making Sense, Uncomfortable Conversations, and The Unspeakeasy Podcast. His gift has never been hot takes or tribal affirmation. It has been thoughtful conversation.

    Pesca said he expects to provide more details as The Gist winds down over the coming week. I’ll be listening.

    Update:

    After I emailed Pesca about his other podcasts, he replied to say that they are all being discontinued, so clearly he is making room for a new path.

  • The Speaker That Ate My Bedroom

    The Speaker That Ate My Bedroom

    A month ago, I reached my breaking point with the smart speakers in my house.

    I finally accepted an uncomfortable truth: they were not smart.

    They were the technological equivalent of an overconfident waiter who gets every order wrong while insisting he knows exactly what you want. Every interaction became an argument. When I asked for Bach, I got Led Zeppelin. When I asked for jazz, I got information about a music festival in a pumpkin patch somewhere near Santa Cruz. The speakers spent less time serving me than forcing me into a hostage negotiation with their algorithms.

    I found myself shouting at inanimate objects far more often than seemed healthy.

    Something had to change.

    The first casualty was the kitchen speaker.

    I removed it and replaced it with a Marshall Acton III. The improvement was immediate. Music sounded richer, podcasts sounded fuller, and the speaker itself looked handsome sitting on the countertop. Instead of feeling like a piece of disposable technology, it felt like a piece of furniture with a purpose.

    Before long, I wanted the same experience in the bedroom.

    Buying a second Acton III would have been the sensible decision, but sensible decisions are not always the most entertaining. I measured the space on my bedside table and convinced myself that I needed an upgrade. Thus began my journey into the upper reaches of Bluetooth speaker excess.

    I ordered a Marshall Stanmore III.

    Larger than the Acton and packing more power, the Stanmore occupies a different class of speaker altogether. It is less a Bluetooth speaker than a luxury liner disguised as one.

    Appropriately enough, it arrived on Father’s Day.

    When I opened the box, I experienced a moment of panic.

    This thing was enormous.

    I placed it on my bedside table and immediately began comparing it to the Acton. I played classical music. I played podcasts. I switched back and forth.

    And then I arrived at an awkward conclusion.

    The difference wasn’t dramatic.

    If the Stanmore sounded better—and I believe it did—the improvement was subtle. The Acton III had already crossed the threshold where additional performance produces diminishing returns. The smaller speaker would have been more than sufficient.

    Unfortunately, that observation leads to the painful portion of this review.

    The Stanmore dominates the room.

    Not physically.

    Psychologically.

    Its presence reminds me of John Cheever’s short story “The Enormous Radio,” in which a household appliance gradually takes on an outsized role in a family’s life. The Stanmore radiates a similar energy.

    It seems to say:

    “I’m not here merely to play music. I’m here to become the main character.”

    The speaker sits beside my bed like an ambitious monarch surveying its kingdom.

    “Look at me,” it seems to whisper. “Notice my beautiful cabinet. Admire my brass controls. Listen to my glorious sound. Rearrange your priorities around me.”

    It is a speaker with the confidence of a cruise ship.

    I’m hoping adaptation will solve the problem.

    Five months ago, when I bought a G-Shock Frogman, its enormous size dominated my wrist. For weeks I felt as though I had strapped a small appliance to my arm. Then something curious happened. My eyes adjusted. The watch stopped looking gigantic and started looking normal.

    I’m hoping the same thing happens with the Stanmore.

    At the moment, however, when I lie in bed, I remain acutely aware of its presence. It looms beside me like a luxury ocean liner docked next to a studio apartment.

    Sometimes I feel as though I should christen it properly.

    Perhaps I should smash a champagne bottle against its side before asking it to play Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony.

    And yet, despite my complaints, I find myself increasingly charmed by the thing.

    The more I listen, the better it sounds.

    The strings grow richer. The voices become warmer. The music seems to expand beyond the walls of the room.

    Perhaps that is the secret behind all successful indulgences. At first they feel excessive, even absurd. Then, little by little, they win their case.

    I suspect the Stanmore III is doing exactly that.

    The cruise ship has arrived in port.

    Now I just need to stop staring at its size and enjoy the voyage.

  • Can Philosophers Keep Their Souls in Silicon Valley?

    Can Philosophers Keep Their Souls in Silicon Valley?

    In “Someone Finally Wants to Hire Philosophers,” Lila Shroff reports what would have sounded like a punchline only a decade ago: philosophy majors may finally be getting the last laugh. For years, philosophy occupied an awkward place in the public imagination—a discipline associated with coffee-shop debates, existential handwringing, and the noble art of explaining to relatives why you were unemployed. At best, the philosopher was a thoughtful gadfly. At worst, a professional overthinker. But the rise of artificial intelligence has suddenly transformed philosophy from an intellectual curiosity into a marketable skill. Major technology companies are hiring philosophers. Universities are recruiting scholars who specialize in both AI and philosophy. The old joke about philosophy leading nowhere is beginning to age badly.

    As Shroff notes, this development should not surprise us. Philosophers have been wrestling with questions about intelligence, consciousness, morality, and the possibility of artificial minds for centuries. Long before Silicon Valley executives promised to change the world, philosophers were already asking whether a machine could think, reason, or possess something resembling a mind. Today, thinkers such as Nick Bostrom have become influential voices in the AI conversation. His book Superintelligence warned more than a decade ago that humanity might create machines whose capabilities outstrip our ability to control them. What once sounded like speculative science fiction now reads more like a boardroom agenda.

    The marriage between AI and philosophy arises from a practical concern. Technology companies want their products to appear ethical, trustworthy, and safe. A machine that accidentally promotes fraud, discrimination, or social chaos is difficult to market. Consumers are more likely to embrace AI systems that project wisdom, fairness, and restraint. In the increasingly crowded AI marketplace, virtue has become a product feature. Safety, ethics, and responsibility are not merely moral concerns; they are branding opportunities.

    Yet Shroff’s essay leaves several uncomfortable questions lingering in the air.

    First, philosophers disagree about nearly everything. That is practically the job description. If ethical questions routinely produce competing schools of thought, which philosophers do AI companies choose to hire? A utilitarian, a virtue ethicist, a libertarian, and a nihilist might evaluate the same problem and arrive at wildly different conclusions. When an AI company claims to be guided by philosophy, whose philosophy is it talking about?

    Second, corporations do not operate in a vacuum. They pursue growth, market share, influence, and profit. Given those incentives, it seems unlikely that technology companies will eagerly recruit philosophers whose views fundamentally conflict with corporate objectives. The philosopher who questions the legitimacy of the enterprise may not receive the same warm welcome as the philosopher who helps polish its public image.

    Third, what happens to philosophy itself when it becomes a lucrative career path? If technology firms reward certain ethical frameworks and ignore others, philosophers may gradually adapt their views to become more employable. Intellectual independence has always been easier to defend when no one is writing the check. Once prestige, influence, and six-figure salaries enter the picture, even the most principled thinkers may find themselves sanding off inconvenient beliefs.

    This is why I remain skeptical of any celebration of philosophy’s new status in the AI economy. There is no such thing as pure philosophy floating above human ambition. There are only human beings, complete with incentives, blind spots, loyalties, and self-interest. The partnership between AI and philosophy may produce genuinely useful ethical guidance. Or it may become an elaborate exercise in corporate virtue theater—a dazzling display of moral concern performed beneath bright lights while the machinery of profit hums steadily backstage. Whether philosophers become the conscience of artificial intelligence or merely its public relations department remains an open question.

  • Mackenzie Shirilla: The Girl Who Became Her Feed

    Mackenzie Shirilla: The Girl Who Became Her Feed

    It was difficult to watch the Netflix documentary The Crash, which chronicles the horrifying case of two young men killed in a car crash after prosecutors argued that the driver, Mackenzie Shirilla, deliberately floored the gas pedal of her Toyota Camry to nearly one hundred miles per hour in an act deemed premeditated murder. The documentary is disturbing not merely because of the violence of the crash, but because of the portrait it paints of a young woman whose identity had become inseparable from her online performance. Mackenzie appeared trapped inside the exhausting machinery of self-curation, sculpting and broadcasting her existence with the kind of manic persistence social media now rewards as normal behavior. Her digital persona no longer seemed like an accessory to her life. It had metastasized into her life.

    Today, while listening to the podcast Blocked and Reported, I heard Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog discuss Gen Z’s eerie fluency for turning existence itself into a livestream. Both millennials sounded genuinely alienated by the phenomenon, as though they were describing a species only slightly adjacent to their own. Jesse referenced Mackenzie Shirilla’s relentless online presence as depicted in The Crash, pointing to the unsettling ease with which younger generations curate themselves for permanent digital exhibition. Yet one of the influencers discussed on the podcast commands nearly a million followers—a level of attention powerful enough to hijack almost any fragile human nervous system. Social media platforms have effectively industrialized validation, converting attention into a neurochemical slot machine that pays out in intermittent bursts of relevance, envy, and simulated affection.

    Attention itself is not the enemy. Human beings need recognition. Writers, artists, teachers, comedians, philosophers, and musicians all seek an audience because they are attempting to contribute something meaningful to the ongoing argument about what it means to be alive. But attention detached from substance becomes false gold. It glitters, intoxicates, and ultimately leaves the soul spiritually bankrupt. The dopamine cycle masquerades as significance while quietly hollowing out the self.

    The danger comes when a person can no longer distinguish between authentic identity and algorithmic performance. The online persona begins as branding, then evolves into compulsion, and finally hardens into pathology. It becomes louder, crueler, more narcissistic, and more detached from ordinary human proportion. The person starts living not for reality itself, but for its documentation. Meals become props. Relationships become content. Suffering becomes theater. Even grief gets optimized for engagement metrics. At that point, the self is no longer steering the machine; the machine is steering the self.

    Mackenzie Shirilla appears to have crossed that line. She allowed the curated self to consume the actual self. What remained was not individuality but a kind of digital possession—a consciousness warped by attention addiction, performative intensity, and emotional exhibitionism. The tragedy of The Crash is not merely that lives were destroyed in a violent instant. It is that modern culture increasingly trains young people to confuse visibility with meaning, performance with identity, and online relevance with human worth. Mackenzie lost that distinction entirely. In the end, the algorithm did not merely shape her personality. It devoured it.