It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. – Jiddu Krishnamurti
This isn’t meant to be a tech blog. It’s a reaction. A physical emanation of at least one of my anxieties in a world that seems to be changing so fast in every direction that I need to spill it out somewhere. It might be buried under an immense amount of AI slop and no one but me may ever read it, but maybe I’ll sleep better at night.
I worry about what the internet is turning into, the dead internet theory seems more real every day. I can’t even look at Facebook anymore and Instagram also is creeping into the ‘what is even real’ realm. I worry about the big picture effects AI will have on our critical thinking skills – especially my own.
I worry about the decisions we’re already letting it make and how it’s displacing jobs in a world where empathy is not part of the decision making. I worry about being automated out of a job as I watch many lose their jobs from automation. There is no escaping in any industry it seems automation is becoming more prevalent in a more hands-off approach. It’s no longer just what ads to serve you in a video, but what you should be charged, if you might qualify for a job, and if you might be worthy of life in a military situation or social benefit type of way (e.g. drone targeting, benefits fraud detection, or predictive policing).
I’m writing this as an attempt at personal reflection, to watch the world unravel in real-time, and to talk about it. I want to be critical of the changes going on, the good, the bad, the ugly, and to be part of the discussion even if I’m just yelling at a metaphorical brick wall. I want to be able to challenge myself, to ask better questions, and to think about these things holistically. In a way (at the time of writing this) the AI bots just can’t quite do yet.
There will be no AI-written posts here. That defeats the purpose. It’s going to be a place where I flesh out my ideas and thoughts on the happenings in the AI space. How it is affecting me, and how I see it affecting others.
The (loose) Promise: What to Expect
I am going to attempt to write bi-weekly. Mostly short form because that’s all the time and mental energy I can put forth on this right now. But when I have time, and if there’s a topic that puts a particular spark of interest, I will write more long-form content as well. Expect a lot of word-vomit, but the authentic, real, messy, just-trying-to-figure-it-out kind of stuff. I’ll experiment with topics, there will be some glitches (no pun intended, really) and I’ll probably post things you’ll disagree with. This is the internet, after all. Maybe it’ll make you laugh, cry, groan, or in a perfect world full of fulfillment, make us all think about things in ways we haven’t considered before.
In future posts, I’ll be digging into things like AI-generated noise online, the ways our tools shape our thoughts, and what it feels like to navigate a web that’s increasingly synthetic. Some days it’ll be critique. Some days confession. Some days just a strange link I couldn’t stop thinking about. I don’t have a formula — that’s kind of the point.
A Note on the Name
I thought it’d make for a cool email handle. Then when I came up with this idea at 2am the night before a 10 hour workday I thought, this is the type of content this domain would be perfect for. It’s a sour, sometimes unpleasant look in the mirror and at all the ways around us that AI is changing things in ways that we don’t really fully understand yet. And I remember when my teachers used to rue spellcheck. So I’ll come here with my eyes open and awake… in hopes I might be able to sleep better every once in awhile.