Get It Twisted

You know, I used to do blogs six days a week. The labor inherent in that kind of frequency was exhausting on its own, of course, but the other downside was just being tied to the news cycle. If you've set yourself the task of ginning up content that often, it's the easiest shaft to mine. The only other option to keep people coming back that often and regularly involves way more nudity and Photoshop fluency than I'm comfortable with.

Switching to weekly blogging was a sanity-saver. Sure, it coincided with me having to stop being a stay-at-home parent and join the work force as my marriage disintegrated, but I was burning out on that posting tempo regardless of where my then-wife was sleeping and with whom. Seven days between posts gave me miles and miles of headspace to consider and foster ideas, let them germinate, root and grow shoots I could then brutally harvest in unripe form and scatter haphazardly to the wind (Blogger). It's a decent metaphor, but come on, what can you grow that's worth growing in seven days? The fastest thing I've seen anyone grow is a radish, and a) those still take like six weeks and b) who wants a radish? All the effort and patience and you get a cherry-sized nubbin that tastes like hot soap.

It doesn't matter though, because all of the headspace we might use to this end or that has been colonized and infected by a relentless news cycle detailing the rolling, bouncing catastrophe that is Late Stage Imperial America. Surprise invasion of a country picked seemingly from a hat? OK, one of those. Hang on, let's also throw in the extrajudicial murder of an unarmed citizen by federal agents. Is that all for this one calendar week? I dunno, I've deliberately not checked by phone since I started typing. For all I know Pete Hegseth has announced we've made contact with aliens, one of which he then attempted to karate-chop in the neck on live TV. It seems far-fetched, but guys, Venezuela? We're eight days into the year! Where is this going?!

Maybe the AI curiosity, the indefensibly inexplicable apparent impulse to cede a lot of basic human functional ground to automation using a system that has actively and repeatedly demonstrated its total inability to do any of the promised functions, is just desperation to dissociate. In the emotional/psychological sense, sure, but also technologically and socially. The promise of the internet was both improved connection and immediacy, but we hadn't really considered how both of those outcomes would leave us battered by every piece of news and completely vulnerable to whatever the next hailstorm of human misery a global army of faceless messengers can hurl at us without regard to our readiness. In fact, the only thing anything like "AI" has gotten right is weaponizing and arming a swarm of info-firing bot accounts on twitter or facebook, directed by adversary states/agitators or (at this point really, because that's just a feature of how the internet works now) all on its own, unbidden.

AI as it works now is promising to put a mediating layer between us and the thousand nettle-stings we're promised every single hour of every single day just by electing to try to navigate through the forest of informational nightmares guided by our smartphones. It sounds like an insulting way to break human connection in its most basic forms by usurping all the things that define us as cells within a social organism, but maybe now the cells are so sick, we could use a bit of a barrier to affect a quarantine. The news and the vectors (human and bot) that carry the blight can't hurt me if they're interacting (coming and going) with a digital projection of myself propped up by my AI valet. Sounds creepy and unnatural, I know, but if we're all pretending to be people, that Uncanny Valley gets a lot shallower really fast.

The kids these days have the right answer, that the solution is to "touch grass," ideally without the app or website on your phone to tell you what kind of grass it is. The point is to be ignorant of some things, at least for a little while. It's not an abdication or surrender of our social obligations; it's really knowing the difference between being information-overloaded and properly informed. Of course you can, if you want, even opt to be ignorant of literally everything, but ironically you might need AI's help with that.