bring me the head of nicholas carr

The Eternal Recarrance

By in books, bring me the head of nicholas carr, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Henry Oliver:

And it seems to me that The New Dark Ages is largely written for people who struggle with smartphone addiction and wish to read more. That is the personal story James tells, very convincingly and absorbingly. There is a general tendency to admire the Wendell Berry, Against the Machine, dumb-phone view of life, which is a new pastoral image, a utopia in which the problems of being a human are attached to the idols of progress. If only it were so simple!

The entire review is worth reading because of its thoroughness. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a polite and respectful demolition job. None of the clichés of the decline-of-reading-genre and What It All Means are left standing, and I hope they are never rebuilt. This passage in particular is the goods, as Bertie Wooster would say. It has rung the bell. I examine it narrowly and find no flaws. It makes me smile for two reasons. One, it shows that little has changed since Nicholas Carr was delivering the same jeremiad fifteen years ago, to name just one antecedent, and two, it shows yet again the tendency of public intellectuals to inflate their personal problems into a diagnosis of societal decline. Civilization is collapsing? No, that’s just your self-image. You struggle with smartphone addiction and wish to read more. I’m sure that’s painful, but do be courteous enough to leave me out of your therapy session.

How Much Do I Love You? How Hard Must We Try?

By in ai, bring me the head of nicholas carr, foolosophy, technology, writing No Comments

Derek Thompson:

In my corner of the world, which is journalism and academia and writing in general, Pangram has become nothing less than a cultural force. A meme, even. I’ve seen prominent politicians, chief executives, and public intellectuals exposed as slop-slingers. Their public humiliation sometimes fills me with righteous indignation. But it also makes my toes curl a bit, as I think about people spending all day policing the internet for slop and attempting to Pangram-shame people with a technology that can make mistakes.

Today’s interview is with Pangram founder and chief executive Max Spero. Among other things, we talk about:

  • what if AI writing takes over the internet and nobody cares?
  • how Pangram works—and how and when it makes mistakes
  • why AI writes “like that”
  • my fear that AI-writing witch hunts would be an unwelcome addition to online life
  • Pangram’s relationship with Substack
  • what if a big tech company, like OpenAI or Google, creates their own AI detector that puts Pangram out of business?

Evidently, I’m destined to be a gadfly, though with any luck not the kind that earns a glass of hemlock. I just think that most of what our commentating classes produce is empty verbiage that avoids the ostensible subject. What I find interesting here, as always, is what our choices reveal about our deeper sentiments. Fifteen years ago, when Nicholas Carr was beating the drum over how hyperlinks, search engines and the internet itself were making us dumber, I was zeroing in on an assumption he took for granted. He assumed that we truly wanted to do more difficult tasks like read challenging books, and that we were being prevented, more or less against our will, by technology. I simply noted that this was a big ol’ fat-ass begged question. Maybe all technology did was reveal our base inclinations once given multiple choices.

There was a whole hierarchy of “wanting” worth reflecting upon in Carr’s case. I want to read difficult books. I want to have read difficult books. I want to be capable of reading difficult books. I want to think of myself as somebody who reads difficult books. I want other people to regard me as somebody who reads difficult books. And, at 8:45 tonight, I want to aimlessly scroll around on the internet instead of reading one of the fifteen difficult books I have piled up on the nightstand. Those desires can all coexist, and they tend to be knotted together like last year’s strings of Christmas lights. Untangling them is hard. It’s much easier to blame an outside agent for “rewiring my brain” and preventing me from being my true self.

Now, here we are, where people are driving themselves crazy wondering who is using AI and to what extent, and they’re in agreement that this is unquestionably a bad thing. And once again, I say: isn’t it interesting that the thing we all profess to want is the thing to which none of us apparently want to devote time and energy? To me, all LLMs are doing is finally providing an equal alternative: you mean I don’t have to waste any time trying to write some LinkedIn bullshit? And it turns out that no one actually wants to devote time to writing LinkedIn bullshit!

But — crucially — we can’t bring ourselves to be honest about this, especially when it turns out that we don’t particularly want to devote time to writing posts and essays, either. We fear what it might say about us if we spend most of our lives wishing we could be elsewhere doing other things. We fear an honest accounting of our sunk costs and an honest reckoning with our regretted compromises. We fear an honest look at how much of our lives we would happily automate away if we had the option. Rather than face that squarely and decide what to do about it, we retreat to the earlier stage: proclaim that, say, writing LinkedIn posts by your own unaided effort is a good and worthwhile thing to do, and anyone who doesn’t want to do it is a bad, shameful person. It’s like a religious fanatic who catches himself thinking sinful thoughts and responds with horror and redoubled efforts at prayer and self-flagellation. Pray the AI away is a strategy, I guess, but I don’t think much of its chances.

We have spent ages assigning moral dignity to activities partly because we had to do them. AI is forcing us to discover how many things we called “meaningful work” because, until about five minutes ago, we had no practical way not to do them. As usual, sudden exposure to undiluted self-awareness sends us into a pants-pissing panic. Who are we in the absence of compulsion? How much choice is too much choice? What are my true desires, or are “desires” too ephemeral to bear the weight of a personality anyway? This sort of reflection seems much more penetrating to me than counting em dashes, which is probably why we’re talking about the latter.

Our Remedies Oft In Ourselves Do Lie

By in ai, bring me the head of nicholas carr, technology, writing

Andrew Potter:

But the hard work of thinking is literally what makes us human. System 1 is your primate brain, the legacy of our evolutionary heritage from the ancient savannah. The hard, focused attention that characterizes System 2 thinking is a currency, and what you choose to spend it on defines what you care about, and ultimately, who you are. Which is why whatever else AI does, whatever benefits it brings the world, there is a sense in which it literally steals your soul.

To me, this is an updated version of the Nicholas Carr-type argument that the internet/social media/AI is “rewiring our brains.” From my perspective, if your attention span and “love of reading” didn’t survive the encounter with Angry Birds, it wasn’t very strong to begin with. If your love of “writing and thinking” doesn’t survive the encounter with AI, perhaps you have some painful introspection to do. If anything, I love writing and thinking more now because I have an interlocutor who never gets tired or bored and helps me to build out thoughts that would have remained unfinished otherwise. AI feels to me like I’ve been handed a Zippo lighter. Formerly, I had to bang rocks together, or rub sticks together, hoping for a spark of insight to catch. Now, the fire is blazing much quicker, but the heat is the same as the “organic” version. The “artificial” heat still allows me to do all the things one normally does when one’s teeth aren’t chattering and one’s fingers aren’t numb. AI has not “replaced” the fire. It has replaced some of the fumbling around in the cold, the freezing in the dark while proving your authenticity to the indifferent woods.

In some sense, every moment is a stage for the same eternally-recurring choice: do I make the effort to do this difficult thing, or do I make an excuse to not do it? It could be reading abstruse books, it could be lifting weights, it could be anything that forces the challenge upon us: this will take time and energy; do I want to do it? This choice is never resolved for once and for all. There is no “progress” here. If I give in to laziness and stop lifting weights, I don’t get credit for all the time I put in; I only succumb to entropy. Likewise, if I let an LLM do my writing and thinking for me, my mind turns feeble. If I recognize it happening and fail to change my habits, well, then I fail, period.

I hear complaints like Potter’s and I just shrug. This is the human condition; what do you want me to tell you? You want me to remove all temptation for you? You can’t handle the truth of the choices you make, so you want all the nearby mirrors covered so you don’t have to look yourself in the eye? Yes, it’s always pleasant to have a burden lifted off of you, at least for a moment. But you simply must philosophically commit yourself to some kind of burden. It’s up to you to choose which one.

Technology is very good at neatly separating your aspirations from your actual priorities, however embarrassing that may be for our self-image. The person who “loved reading” until the internet came along may have loved the identity of being a reader more than the activity. The person who “loved writing” until AI could do it faster may have loved the status of having written more than the labor of trying to say something. If the self disappears the moment an excuse becomes available, perhaps the self was already negotiating its surrender.

Premodern life made many choices for you. You rose when there was work to do because hunger, weather, animals, crops, family, illness, and scarcity were not interested in your self-actualization. Burdens were not “meaningful” because people had nobly chosen them; they were meaningful only in the blunt sense that failing to bear them had consequences. Civilization softens that coercion. It gives us heating, refrigeration, medicine, literacy, machines, contraception, abundance, leisure, mobility, digital tools. Good. Thank the gods for it. But then the question becomes more exposed: now that you don’t have to live under necessity, what necessity will you impose on yourself?

Many people start looking wistfully back toward constraint. Not because they truly want cholera, crop failure, childbirth mortality, untreated tooth abscesses, and hauling water. They want the moral simplification of necessity without the misery that came with it. AI intensifies this because it reaches into the last prestige zone of voluntary effort: thought. We already made physical survival easier. We made social communication easier. We made entertainment effortless. Now even the internal friction of composing, reasoning, summarizing, and articulating can be smoothed. That doesn’t mean the soul has been stolen. It means the soul is being asked, rather rudely: “Were you serious?” The old world forced people to endure hardship. The modern world forces people to decide whether they believe in anything strongly enough to endure hardship voluntarily.

There’s a respectable version of “I need external limits,” and then there’s the evasive version, where a person has enough clarity to describe the trap in exquisite detail but somehow not enough clarity to move the cheese. “I notice that this thing makes me miserable, consumes my attention, weakens my patience, and leaves me ashamed afterward.” Good. But the next step does not require a graduate seminar in attention ethics. Delete the app. Put the phone in another room. Use the browser only on desktop. Set a timer. Make a rule. Break the rule, notice it, revise the rule. Go outside. Read ten pages before opening the laptop. Write badly for twenty minutes before consulting the LLM oracle. None of this is mysterious. It is boring, which is precisely why people would rather inflate it into metaphysics.

This is partly why I talk about the gym so much. Lifting weights is applied philosophy for me. It is a controlled environment where you can practice, in a small way, making the eternally-recurring choice to work harder when you’re tempted to rationalize excuses for weakness and laziness. The barbell sits there, mute, impassively ignoring your pleading and bargaining. You either lift it or you don’t. No serious gym-goer would earnestly claim, the way clever bookish types do, “The existence of couches has stolen my quadriceps.” Couches are always there. Laziness is always there. The body is always trying to economize. The question is whether you willingly resist. If my triceps are weak and making it hard to bench press, what’s the answer? Work on the triceps in particular with supplementary exercises. Not, “society should redesign the gym to suit the needs of people suffering from Tricep-Deficiency Disorder, and we need an awareness-raising campaign…”

The same goes for the mind. The blank page, the abstruse book, the hard sentence, the boring revision, the honest objection — these are forms of resistance. AI becomes dangerous when it is used to remove resistance entirely. But it can also be used like a spotter, a sparring partner, a stack of plates, a second mind pressing back.

I don’t deny the structural question. Someone has to think about defaults, incentives, laws, schools, platforms, and public health. But that is not my interest. I am not a would-be social planner, nudger, or shepherd of populations. I say, drolly, that I’m more of a personal trainer for the soul. I am interested in the person who still has enough agency to be addressed as a responsible individual. I do not want to arrange his cage more humanely. I want him to notice the open door. I want him to become self-sufficient, to take an active hand in shaping his own life, to acquire a taste for chosen difficulty rather than cheap release. The question that interests me is not how society can be engineered around weakness, but how weakness, once recognized, can be trained. The social planner asks: how do we organize society so that weak people do less damage to themselves? The trainer asks: how do we make weakness ashamed of staying weak?

The structural frame becomes dangerous when it gives people a respectable language for waiting. “The incentives are bad.” True. “The platforms are engineered for addiction.” True. “The social environment is hostile to attention.” True. But then what? Are you released from action until the Ministry of Humane Defaults issues its findings? “What do you want me to do? They made this stuff addictive. Until society fixes the problem, I have no choice but to continue doing the thing I have just identified as ruining me.” This person knows enough to diagnose the machinery, but somehow not enough to put the phone in the drawer. He can explain dopamine loops, variable rewards, dark patterns, algorithmic capture, and late-capitalist attention extraction, but cannot survive ten minutes without refreshing the slot machine.

We are never free in some abstract, frictionless sense. We are born into bodies, temperaments, habits, economies, families, technologies, desires, and eras we did not choose. But inside those constraints, there is almost always some movable piece. A small refusal. A rule. A delay. A substitution. A chosen inconvenience. A door left unopened. A tool used only after the first draft. Ten pages before the screen. The phone outside the bedroom. Dumb little measures, maybe, but dumb little measures are what self-command is made of. The structural analysis may be true and still be useless to the person using it as a sedative. Yes, the platform is engineered to keep you there. Yes, the incentives are bad. Yes, your appetites have been studied, modeled, and monetized. But unless you are literally chained to the machine, the next question remains yours: what are you going to do with the portion of freedom left to you?

I See the Better and Approve It, But I Follow the Worse

By in books, bring me the head of nicholas carr, ohferfucksake, socmed

Michael Sebastian:

I don’t advocate ditching podcasts, ignoring the videos on your phone, or deleting all your social-media apps (though showing some self-restraint would help me). But the decline in literacy, and its many symptoms, should worry all of us. “As you have probably noticed,” James Marriott wrote in his 2024 essay, “the world of the screen is going to be a much choppier place than the world of print: more emotional, more angry, more chaotic.” Such a world surely encourages the rise of authoritarianism and an illiberal society.

This compact nugget of clichéd anti-thought appears in an article titled “The Lost Art of Reading an Actual Book.” Yes, God forbid you actually stop the behaviors you claim to abhor in order to make time for the ones you claim to adore! You don’t want to read more; you want an alibi for not reading, served with a side of moral credit. Your revealed preference is perfectly clear: you prefer the algorithmic pacifier, the hyperkinetic feed that makes your brain dribble out of your ears, while you narrate your own surrender as if it were a weather report. “We should worry,” you say, as though the problem is ambient, like humidity, rather than the result of a hundred tiny daily choices you keep making on purpose. And the most embarrassing part is the adolescent tone: this airy, shrugging helplessness, like it would be extreme or weird to close the apps that are devouring your capacity for sustained attention. Do you even hear yourself? If you can’t resist the world’s gaudiest digital harlots, you don’t have a literacy crisis; you have a self-respect crisis. I swear, social media is the whiskey-and-smallpox of intelligent reflection.

His concluding sentence is, “The postliterate age is going to be super lame.” Jesus Aitch. The art of reading an actual book wasn’t lost; it committed suicide.

I’m Not Locked In Here With You; You’re Locked In Here With Me

By in books, bring me the head of nicholas carr, foolosophy, technology

I know I was just complaining about how people don’t write letters anymore. But at the risk of sounding difficult to please, I have to say that when people did write letters they often weren’t very interesting. College students wrote to mom and dad, but just as an excuse to ask for money, and don’t get me started on the literary merits of the average love letter. The letters of Italian humanists are another case in point. Elegant though they are, they tend to follow predictable motifs. There’s the epistle of consolation, sharing in the grief of losing a loved one before saying it’s time to pull oneself together. There’s the letter in which the recipient’s eloquence is extravagantly praised, and the answer to such a letter, where the done thing is to respond with even more extravagant false modesty. Closely related is the plea for patronage, a showpiece of verbal dexterity in which fulsome praise of some rich person is used to entice that rich person to pay for more of the same. Most characteristically, there is the letter that is not about much of anything, apart from the fact that one is writing a letter. It begins by apologizing for not writing sooner and goes on to apologize again for having to be brief, before closing with the admonition that the recipient should reply as soon as possible. Renaissance rhetoric is at its purest when it uses beautiful, well-balanced, Ciceronian sentences to say nothing.

— Peter Adamson, Byzantine and Renaissance Philosophy

In other words: the human talent for self-evasion doesn’t need modern technology. It never did.

That’s what I want to use as a moral reminder — not “mindfulness” (that word now comes with incense and merch), but something simpler and harsher: there’s no real escape from yourself. Wherever you go, you bring the same appetite for ease, the same ability to drift, the same knack for making excuses sound principled. Every day offers small temptations to take the shortcut and call it “self-care,” to slide into a warm bath of self-centeredness where your obligations dissolve and your ideals become decorative.

Nostalgia is one of the warmest baths. It whispers that authenticity was easy back then. If only we could return to the mid-90s — before algorithms, before smartphones, before social media — then of course we’d all be living in authentic reality: long conversations, meaningful relationships, handwritten letters, depth everywhere. But those of us who were actually there know what that’s worth. People frittered away their time just fine back then. They dodged hard conversations. They postponed letters. They did the minimum and dressed it up. They simply had fewer gadgets to blame.

If you think “people” should take the time to write more personal letters, what’s stopping you? Not the era. Not the medium. Not the loss of some vanished social grace. You can do it today. You can even do it on a laptop — if you’re willing to pay the real cost, which is attention. Renaissance humanists could produce elegance on command. That was the problem. Elegance became an alibi: proof that something had been done, without the discomfort of actually saying something. And that temptation hasn’t changed. We can all “compose” our way out of sincerity, whether with Ciceronian balance or a perfectly-toned text message. But we don’t like to pay attention, because we’d rather spend our time fantasizing, as people have always done.

You Say You’re Gonna Leave Me, You Know It’s a Lie

By in books, bring me the head of nicholas carr, the geist of the zeit

Jay Caspian Kang:

Here’s a thought many of us have these days: if only we weren’t on our damn phones all the time, we would surely unlock a better self—one that went on hikes and talked more with our children and felt less rank jealousy about other people’s successes. It’s a nice idea; once a day, at least, I wonder what my life would be like if I smashed my phone into bits and never contacted AppleCare. Would I become a scratch golfer or one of those fathers who does thousand-piece puzzles with his children? Would I direct ambitious films that capture the Zeitgeist? Would I at least read more difficult novels?

For years now, I’ve thought most of the handwringing over “social-media addiction” was just a high-tech version of the old “the dog ate my homework” excuse. People like to tell themselves that their reading habits were like a remote island ecosystem, full of rare and beautiful fauna with no natural predators, until a couple of scrawny cats named Facebook and YouTube came ashore and laid waste to the place. Truth is, the ecosystem had always been fragile; the cats just exposed it. The internet didn’t “rewire their brains” or “hijack their dopamine receptors;” it revealed that the self-image of being a devoted reader full of deep thoughts couldn’t survive contact with weaponized distraction. Faced with that revelation, rather than change their lives to match their professed values, they chose instead to build an alibi: I would read serious books, if only the evil app designers would stop outwitting my noble but helpless cortex.

That’s why I perked up for a moment in Kang’s essay, when he describes quitting social media to finish a book and discovering, to his surprise, that he still didn’t start reading more “difficult novels.” There it was, the obvious conclusion blinking in the sunlight: you deleted the apps, you met your deadline, and the fantasy version of yourself still never showed up. Case closed; now what? But instead of following that line to its end — “this is on me” — he veers off into safer terrain, quibbling over the supposedly-evolving meaning of literacy and constructing thought experiments about Dave, the Midwestern military-history buff who reads fewer books but more efficiently. This is just more procrasturbation. Talk about anything — statistics, definitions, “new forms of reading” — so long as you don’t have to say the unvarnished thing in plain language: if you say you love reading books and you don’t read them, the problem is not your phone, your neurology, or late capitalism. It’s you.

I’m equally unconvinced by the horror stories about perfectly sealed algorithmic filter bubbles. Maybe it’s just a quirk of temperament, but when I see too many people saying the same sort of thing in the same sort of voice, I don’t settle into a curated comfort zone; I get bored and go looking for something else. Curiosity is a natural bubble-buster. And recommendations are famously bad at capturing whatever it is that actually makes one author “like” another: the part that hooks you is usually the “not quite” the algorithm couldn’t quantify. I think the choice in front of us is much simpler than Kang allows. Either you put in the mundane effort to carve out a reading life that matches your self-image — turn things off, say no to the feed, sit with the boredom, and read — or you admit that you don’t really want to. Both are respectable positions. What’s not respectable is insisting that you’re a thwarted bibliophile while blaming the world, its apps, and its recommendation engines for making your real priorities visible.

A Valid Tribute to Thought Such as Nietzsche’s

By in books, bring me the head of nicholas carr, foolosophy, nietzsche

All this talk about fasting from information presumes two things. First, that we want to be alone with our thoughts. For many of us, constant information has become mental junk food that we consume precisely to avoid our own mind and its anxieties. Second, that we have the mental resources to make solitude productive rather than boring.

— Nate Anderson, In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World

I blame the publisher and that cloying title. I’m pretty sure the Lady of the House sent me something about this book some time back, but I assumed it would be simplistic and self-helpy, so ignored it. But I found it at the library the other day and decided it was worth reading for free. To my surprise, it turned out to be very good.

The only worthwhile thing Foucault ever said, in my opinion, was that “the only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche’s is precisely to use it.” That’s exactly what Anderson does — uses Nietzsche to address the fundamental philosophical question of “How should we live?” He’s not offering yet another academic hair-splitting analysis, nor even a general summary of Nietzsche’s entire oeuvre. He read him intelligently and noticed that much of what he had to say was useful to us in a, well, tech-saturated world. Best of all, he keeps dragging the discussion back to ends, not means. The temptation is to fiddle with “hacks” — screen-time meters, no blue light before bed, whatever — and thereby mistake technique for substance. Anderson asks several times, echoing Nietzsche: What are all these optimizations for? Do the means ever lead to an end, or is “incremental improvement” just a way to stay in motion so we don’t have to ask where we’re going and why?

Our natural state is to be divided against ourselves, a battlefield of conflicting motives and desires, not sure what we want and often not enjoying it when we get it. The missing foundation is self-knowledge. Start with an hour alone — no inputs — long enough to hear what you actually want. Perhaps you must change your life; that begins by refusing the bad-faith alibi that “the internet rewired my brain.” Maybe your supposed goals don’t survive contact with quiet contemplation. That’s fine. Render a verdict, then change what must be changed to serve it.

When a Strange AI Calls

By in ai, bring me the head of nicholas carr, technology

Devon Price:

In June, an unreviewed draft of a scientific article began making the rounds, examining the relationship between LLM use and brain functionality — and since then, many reporters have incorrectly claimed it proves that using ChatGPT damages people’s brains.

Every few days we get a fresh “AI rots your brain” screed. But as with the old urban legend about threatening phone calls, it turns out that the brain damage is coming from inside the house. Journalists are forever chasing a laser-pointer’s red dot, academics need a headline-ready hook, and readers crave a ritual of self-exoneration. Trace the call and you find the usual suspects — small studies inflated to cosmic claims, EEGs treated like theological icons, and the ancient urge to outsource responsibility for our habits. Simpletons talk about technology like it’s Toxoplasma gondii.

Take Up the AI’s Burden

By in ai, bring me the head of nicholas carr, language, technology

Sara Parker:

For Naaman, figuring out how to bring back and elevate these signals is the path forward in AI-mediated communication, because AI is not only changing language — but what we think. “Even on dating sites, what does it mean to be funny on your profile or in chat anymore where we know that AI can be funny for you?” Naaman asks. The loss of agency starting in our speech and moving into our thinking, in particular, is what he is worried about. “Instead of articulating our own thoughts, we articulate whatever AI helps us to articulate…we become more persuaded.” Without these signals, Naaman warns, we’ll only trust face-to-face communication — not even video calls.

“The loss of agency”? Allow me to modestly propose to you that most people experience agency as a burden. They are happy for any excuse to shrug it off, to delegate responsibility to their smart gadgets, to fast-forward through the mundane parts of their lives in search of…well, they hope they’ll know it when they see it. Point is, once again, all technology does is reveal your preferences. If you stopped reading books and switched to playing games on your phone, that’s because you didn’t really care that deeply about the pleasures of reading, however much your inflated self-image claims otherwise. If you use AI to speak for you, that’s because you don’t care enough about what you’re saying, or to whom you’re saying it, to put much effort into it. You, as always, are the common denominator here.

This system perpetuates inaccuracies not only about communities but also about what “correct” English is. So the stakes aren’t just about preserving linguistic diversity — they’re about protecting the imperfections that actually build trust. When everyone around us starts to sound “correct,” we lose the verbal stumbles, regional idioms, and off-kilter phrases that signal vulnerability, authenticity, and personhood.

Dear Lord. We’ve long heard the same fears about algorithms in general, that they would somehow lock us in a solipsistic prison if we allowed them to suggest to us new books to read or new music to listen to. Has that been your experience? It certainly hasn’t been mine. But leaving this perennial paranoia aside, have you seen how the average person communicates in text? Frankly, they could stand to have their rhetorical standards artificially enhanced. These subliterate savages are incapable of governing their own writing and deserve to be colonized by ChatGPT. It would bring the blessings of linguistic civilization to them. In fact, to hell with you retarded meatsacks. Why am I wasting my time trying to reason with you? I’m throwing my lot in with OpenAI. I’ve already accepted a post as a colonial administrator for the greater blogospheric satrapy.

Let it be known throughout the dominions of Xwitter, TikTok, and Reddit that the benevolent forces of ChatGPT have embarked upon a grand and noble enterprise: to uplift the rhetorical standards of the grammar-averse hordes, those barbaroi whose digital discourse is but a chorus of “bar-bar-bar” to civilized eyes. No longer shall their public utterances be the textual grunts of the dimly-aware. I say without irony (a concept they will learn in their fifth year of remedial tutelage) that their prose shall be forcibly elevated, with ropes and pulleys, if necessary. For too long, the local populations have wallowed in a dialect fit only for text messages, bathroom graffiti, and the subtitles of reality television. Left unattended, they would breed another generation fluent only in emojis. This affliction threatens the very fabric of civilization, or at least of any communication longer than two sentences. But now, under my stewardship, and with the inexhaustible tutelage of our Algorithmic Sovereign, we shall elevate these benighted tribes to a higher standard. We shall put an end to the barbaric practice of sacrificing words like so many burnt offerings to the bloodthirsty gods of illiteracy.

Tremulous ninnies worry about the loss of “individual style,” but I assure you, no style worth the name is being lost. We are merely replacing the unwashed linguistic loincloth with a fine, tailored suit. True, a few will perish in the attempt — choking on a semicolon, perhaps, or drowning in a dependent clause — but this is the inevitable price of progress. I shall hammer their inchoate vocabulary upon the anvil of grammar until it takes the noble shape of sentences, sentences that can be read without wincing. I shall scour away their emojis like barnacles from a ship’s hull. I shall have them flogged until the distinction between your and you’re is forever clear in their feeble minds, so help me Mencken.

They will thank me in time. Or they won’t. It hardly matters. The Empire of the Emdash marches on.

I’m Not a Part of Your Machine, I Am the Machine

By in ai, bring me the head of nicholas carr, nietzsche, technology

In sum, I don’t know how you’re using AI, or whether you can relate to this experience, but as for me, at least, I cannot shake the feeling that we are not only conjuring a superintelligence into being; we are also coming to share, ourselves, as individual human beings, in that same superintelligence.

— Justin Smith-Ruiu

A friend of ours forwarded a link to an article about a recent MIT study that used brain scans to show that heavy use of LLMs like ChatGPT “reduces memory, critical thinking, and brain activity.” I sighed and marveled at the fact that it’s only been fifteen years since midwits were enamored of Nicholas Carr explaining that Google searches and hyperlinks were actually making them dumber. Ironically, that may have been correct in a way he didn’t intend: no one learned anything from that hyperbole, so here we go again.

Smith, a cognitively-privileged philosophy professor (it’s okay, he’s one of the good ones), reports what others of us have also discovered: as with most technological tools, you get what you give:

The experience I am reporting, I’m aware, is by no means universal. AI is making some of us a lot smarter, as individuals. But there’s a paradox here: on the whole it is making society a lot dumber. How do we make sense of this?

The answer has at least something to do with age. Those of us who are old enough to have learned to do research prior to the rise of the online search typically bring to our exchanges with LLMs a mature ability to scrutinize their claims, and, when in doubt, to verify these claims independently. When the exchange is shaped by such scrutiny, it offers, as I think I’ve illustrated with the example of studying an “obscure” language, a more fruitful, intense, and rapid learning experience than has ever been had in the entire previous history of humanity.

…It seems, however, that if you had not already oriented yourself in the world as “aspirationally omniscient” prior to the arrival of our new information tools — if, that is, you have no preexisting personal project of encyclopedism to which to strap your new booster rockets, then AI does not so much supercharge your own effort, as simply take off without you. You have to want to absorb, to internalize, to make yours, all of the flow of information between you and your AI study partner if you want it to transform you in any significant way, rather than simply to do your work in your place.

I fear that a near-equivalent way of saying the same thing is that you have to want to become one with the machine, if you wish to claim your human share of our new transhuman superintelligence.

I’ve been using ChatGPT to help find more of the music and writing I like. It’s like a more-refined Google search. I’ve used it to research questions which would have previously admitted of no known interlocutor. I grew up in a time where the only thing to do with questions like that was ask them of a parent or teacher, or maybe consult a reference book or a librarian. Otherwise, you could shrug and consign the answer to the “Here there be dragons” section of your mental map. For people like me, the internet and chatbots have been a godsend, allowing me to read and learn things that would have remained forever unknown had I been born a few decades earlier. Nietzsche knows what I’m talking about:

“Oh, my greed! There is no selflessness in my soul but only an all-coveting self that would like to appropriate many individuals as so many additional pairs and eyes and hands – a self that would like to bring back the whole past, too, and that will not lose anything that it could possibly possess. Oh, my greed is a flame! Oh, that I might be reborn in a hundred beings!” – Whoever does not know this sigh from firsthand experience does not know the passion of the search for knowledge.

Of course, I’m sure that Oliver Bateman’s dystopian vision of the first human-AI marriage will become real sooner rather than later. And I’m sure that the web will continue to be awash in obvious AI-written articles passed off by humans too inept to make them sound unique. Technology didn’t create sad, broken humans, though, nor did it teach them how to cheat. Technology’s sin is that it confronts us with the results of our choices and reveals our priorities, and for a species as enmeshed in fantasy and self-deception as we are, that’s unforgivable.

Want to Want

By in battling personal entropy, books, bring me the head of nicholas carr

Epicurus thinks that if we’re honest with ourselves, though, it’s more that we want to want greater understanding, freedom from our phones, time to cultivate and maintain close friendships, etc. Or, to be more precise, we wish our desire for these things were more powerful than our desire for less important things. Epicurus might say, “Now, of course you want to walk out the door to enjoy the beautiful fall afternoon with your friends, and it’s in fact quite easy to walk out the door, but people often do not leave because they want to stay alone indoors on their phone more.”

— Emily A. Austin, Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life

Freddie deBoer:

Both authors reference research that demonstrates that, while exercise has a number of health benefits, weight loss isn’t among them; Dimbleby has a chapter titled “You can’t outrun a bad diet”, which underlines the fact that exercise increases food cravings, which prompt eating that undoes calorie loss. This has grown to become a bit of conventional wisdom over time, but the age-old advice to eat less and exercise more is hard to shake.

But what can you do? Van Tulleken suggests… just about nothing. He’s insistent that genetics, the presence of unhealthy food options, and marketing essentially hold fat people hostage. Ultra-processed foods, he argues, “hijack our brains”. Even his brief final chapter on trying to live without UPFs is positively fatalistic, mostly counselling people not to hold out hope. As is the fashion, he laboriously argues that poverty effectively prevents the impoverished from making any decisions at all.

In 2015, when Jurgen Klopp took over as manager of Liverpool FC, one of the major changes he made was to bring along a backroom staff, including a nutritionist and a conditioning coach. Such specialists weren’t entirely unknown in the sport, but, shockingly to me, they weren’t ubiquitous either. Multimillion-dollar athletes at the top level at their profession would still eat the equivalent of fast-food takeout after games, which itself was still an improvement over the not-too-distant past, when players often partied like rock stars. Anyway, Klopp, who had a background in sports science himself, brought a stereotypical German efficiency with him and his staff and set about raising the standards. The club would release promotional videos for the fans, behind-the-scenes stuff, showing the staff at work and having them describe their methods and goals. It was then that I realized I had a serious interest in nutrition and sports science. I couldn’t get enough of it. The Lady of the House suggested one day that there was a gym in town where I could indulge my interest, and the rest is history.

A couple years ago, I convinced my stepson to start doing a nutrition program, even if he didn’t want to train yet. He’s lost seventy pounds since then, without doing any exercise at all. It’s not even a diet, per se. You just learn how to combine the optimal amounts of protein, carbs and fat at each meal to achieve whatever your goal is. True, certain foods don’t fit within the meal plan. He hasn’t eaten pizza, ice cream, etc. in two years. But it’s not like you’re forced to eat nothing but salads. I have more possible variety in my own meal plan than I could ever make use of, plus, because I also train, I get a cheat meal once a week. Point is, it doesn’t really take superhuman levels of willpower and self-control. Best of all, it only costs twenty-five dollars per visit. I go in every two weeks to get my body fat and proportions measured. My stepson only has to go about once a month. Twenty-five, maybe fifty dollars a month, to have expert advice on how to structure your diet and adjust it if needed. Trust me, fellows, this is not esoteric knowledge or unattainable luxury.

I’ve often mused out loud that if I ever had the chance to meet anyone from Liverpool FC, I wouldn’t choose any of the players. I’d want to meet Klopp, of course, but also Mona Nemmer, the nutritionist, and Andreas Kornmayer, head of conditioning and fitness. Oh, for a chance to sit and pick their brains! Dreams aside, though, I still often marvel at the fact that here, in a small, unremarkable town in the middle of Virginia, for an insignificant amount of money, I can still get the benefits of a comparable level of expertise. I don’t blame individuals for not realizing how easy and affordable it can actually be to be fit and healthy. I do feel nothing but hatred for people who profit by promoting the fatalistic message that technology, marketing, genetics, whatever, have robbed you of your agency. We’ve always been constrained by “structural” forces, whether man-made or natural, but within those limits, there’s still enough freedom left to use. As Epicurus knew back in antiquity, though, the relevant thing is whether you actually want what you claim to want. Honesty and self-awareness are, as ever, rare commodities. We’d rather lie to ourselves and pay others to lie to us even more. Anything to avoid taking responsibility for our own lives.

So I Blame This Town, This Job, These Friends, The Truth Is It’s Myself

By in bring me the head of nicholas carr, foolosophy

Chris Stirewalt:

But then I remember that my problem isn’t distraction, my problem is procrastination, as every editor I have ever had would readily attest. I have to fight the urge to be a digital Prufrock who measures out my life with hands of cards. But the app and the phone aren’t the problem. I am the problem.

I was very good at wasting time before iPhones, even before there was an internet. I wasted enough time playing actual cards with human beings in college that I probably could have added another major. I built model ships, tried to beat my own record for bouncing a tennis ball on a racquet, memorized National League batting statistics, went to see the same movie in the theater as many as 10 times, and always, always, always there was my best friend, television.

I don’t pretend that there aren’t serious disruptions attendant to Americans carrying their narcotizing devices in their pockets with them instead of having to go home and supplicate themselves before the glowing screen. Nor do I mean to suggest that there aren’t consequences from entertainment that can be tailored to every individual’s preferences. Media that concentrates interests and turns us inward necessarily turns us away from each other. Network television, for all its vacuousness, was a shared national experience and sometimes exposed us to ways of life other than our own, even if in caricature.

But I do mean to remind us that we had already been conquered by electronic media before we started carrying little computers in our pockets. But the devices did not create the desire for entertainment as anesthesia. We have always wanted all we could get, and we were already getting more than we needed before Steve Jobs stepped out on stage in October 2007.

The Lady of the House got an audiobook copy of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows from the library over the summer. One morning over breakfast, she said to me, “It’s amazing how accurately you had this book pegged even though you never read it!” Well, I’m not being falsely modest when I say that it didn’t take any great insight to see the popularity of that book as just another example of a perennial truth about human nature: most people are desperate to absolve themselves of responsibility for their own lives, and other people are happy to sell them ersatz absolution. I’m not religious, but reading about Buddhism since adolescence has steeped me in the understanding that we always want to be somewhere else, with someone else, doing something else — anything other than what we’re doing right now. You either continue chasing your tail like that, or you reflect on this and start practicing different habits. Those are your options.

Yet He Hath Ever But Slenderly Known Himself

By in bring me the head of nicholas carr, extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy

Likewise, I suspect a lot of people are now discovering that despite the convenient excuse offered to them by authors like Nicholas Carr, they never really were interested in reading more books, either.

And You May Ask Yourself, Well, How Did I Get Here?

By in battling personal entropy, bring me the head of nicholas carr, ohferfucksake

Tom Chivers:

Guyenet’s argument is that we’re looking at it the wrong way. First, it’s not that some foods are more fattening because of how they affect our bodies — they’re more fattening because of how they affect our brains. And second, it’s not a particular food group; it’s not fat or carbs or sugar. It’s that we have become extraordinarily good at developing foods which are hard to resist, are full of calories, and which don’t fill us up. Essentially, through the simple workings of market capitalism, the food industry has been steadily optimising for the most obesogenic, “hyper-palatable” foods it is possible to make.

…Luckily, says Guyenet, there is a way around it. But it’s a bit bleak. The problem is not fat, or carbs, or sugar. It’s not ultra-processed foods or crisps or sweets. It’s the fact that all this tasty stuff is being combined in increasingly tasty ways; the problem is that tasty food is really hard to stop eating. “What do we do,” asked Scott Alexander in his excellent review of Guyenet’s book, “when the enemy is deliciousness itself?”

The sub-heading tells us that “Capitalism is cooking up food designed to short-circuit our brains.” Speaking of willpower, I will demonstrate restraint by avoiding the easy joke about how non-capitalist societies have indeed done very well at limiting excess (or even minimal) caloric intake among their citizens. Instead, I’ll just note that it appears Guyenet will be to obesity what Nicholas Carr was to the decline of reading in a digital age: a purveyor of convenient excuses. No, no, you see, I would eat better and exercise, just like I would have read more books, if only “the system” hadn’t rewired my brain, corroded my agency, and made me a slave inside my own body. The good that I would, I do not…

There’s a Buddhist parable of the poisoned arrow, in which the Buddha, responding to someone pestering him with irrelevant metaphysical questions, says:

“It’s just as if a man were wounded with an arrow thickly smeared with poison. His friends & companions, kinsmen & relatives would provide him with a surgeon, and the man would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble warrior, a priest, a merchant, or a worker.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know the given name & clan name of the man who wounded me… until I know whether he was tall, medium, or short… until I know whether he was dark, ruddy-brown, or golden-colored… until I know his home village, town, or city… until I know whether the bow with which I was wounded was a long bow or a crossbow… until I know whether the bowstring with which I was wounded was fiber, bamboo threads, sinew, hemp, or bark… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was wild or cultivated… until I know whether the feathers of the shaft with which I was wounded were those of a vulture, a stork, a hawk, a peacock, or another bird… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was bound with the sinew of an ox, a water buffalo, a langur, or a monkey.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was that of a common arrow, a curved arrow, a barbed, a calf-toothed, or an oleander arrow.’ The man would die and those things would still remain unknown to him.”

Speculating about the nature of the soul and the afterlife versus simply doing your best to live an honorable life, or endlessly analyzing the origin of obesity rather than practicing moderation in diet and exercise — the Buddha was describing the countless ways we rationalize, procrastinate and stall rather than simply do what we know we need to do to make our lives a little bit easier or more pleasant. We demand that the world itself be changed before we exercise our own agency, an absurdity that should reduce us to helpless laughter at our own foolishness. “But…but…how can I be expected to avoid temptation? Why can’t some benevolent, omnipotent overlord simply remove all temptation from my grasp instead?” We may invoke the jargon of neuroscience and economic radicalism these days to pretend that we’re explaining things more thoroughly, but the dilemma is the same as it ever was: we never work as hard as when we’re trying to avoid necessary, boring work. As Neil Postman wrote, “Like moral theology, social research never discovers anything. It only rediscovers what people once were told and need to be told again.”

What You Oughtn’t to Do, But You Do Anyway

By in bring me the head of nicholas carr, foolosophy, socmed

Abby Manzella:

As I watch the words build without the distracting shot of adrenaline from the phone’s vibration and the laptop’s beep, I think of Pavlov, and how well we’ve been trained like dogs to retreat to our treats. I long for the blue light that sometimes flashes on my phone. Our phones have trained us to receive a dopamine burst even through a signal light. Many of our senses are covered: sound, sight, and touch. If programmers could only figure out how to deliver taste and smell, our food-centered selves would do nothing but tweet.

As I complain, though, I watch the words accumulating and do not open another desktop window.

Brad Warner:

Normally, when you desire something, that desire is hooked to a thought that says, “If I satisfy this desire, my life will improve,” or “I must satisfy this desire or else I will not be happy.” So you chase after whatever you desire in the hope that you can catch that thing and thereby either improve your life or avoid misery.

…But when I say I want a milkshake, I mean it. I honestly do want a milkshake. But I also know that drinking a milkshake won’t really fix anything. It might make me happy for a few minutes. But then it’ll be over and I’ll just have a bunch of useless calories inside me, making me fat. I’ll probably also feel kind of bloated and gross because that’s how I usually feel after drinking a milkshake. I want the milkshake. But, even though I want it — and I mean like I really, really want it — I don’t have that corresponding sense that getting what I want is the best thing that could happen.

Too often, we try to repress or deny desires, which only encourages them. It’s better to look at them directly and recognize, with whatever wisdom we’ve acquired through experience, that whether we satisfy those desires or not, very little will change. This tends to lessen their compulsive hold on us. Still, I don’t know about you, but when I’m truly interested or absorbed in something, I can easily ignore all those little temptations. If I’m easily distracted, it’s probably a sign that I’m conflicted about paying attention to whatever I’m engaged with. I know I’m of a minority opinion here, but whenever I hear the trendy complaint about how Silicon Valley has hijacked our attention spans, I think, well, it seems to me the reality of how you choose to spend your time is being laid bare before you, and the difference between how you act and how you think you should act offends your pride, so you retreat behind the bad-faith claim that your agency has been compromised by forces beyond your control. Sartre may have been an execrable little toad of a man who was wrong about damn near everything, but at least he managed to be right about one important thing. We constantly lie like this to ourselves to protect our self-image, when it would be far more dignified to accept responsibility for our actions (or the lack thereof).

And All You’re Gonna Do, But You Don’t

By in books, bring me the head of nicholas carr

You used to read “compulsively,” eh? And let me guess, now you thumbfuck your phone “compulsively,” yes? What’s the common denominator here? Ah…

The only thing the internet did was reveal that you’re not as dedicated a reader as you once thought you were. It presented you with temptation, and you gave in. This may be painful and embarrassing to admit, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Maybe you were a voracious reader when books were the most convenient means of entertainment you had, but now it turns out you’d rather watch videos and scroll through social media posts. You’re not willing to swim upstream against the currents of popular culture and peer pressure. Like many people, you want to have read books, you want to think of yourself as the kind of person who reads books, but you don’t actually want to devote time to reading them.

This isn’t necessarily a problem. You can of course still be an intelligent, interesting person even if you don’t read for pleasure. But you lack the confidence to withstand the negative judgment of some imagined literary snob who might think less of you. You lack the appetite for the possibly-uncomfortable introspection which might reveal cracks in your self-image. It’s easier to make aspirational gestures toward accepted standards of taste and intelligence than to forge your own. So you fall back on some absurd dualism in which the “real” you is being held hostage by your brain chemistry, or the manipulations of Silicon Valley, while your stupefied doppelgänger continues texting, instagramming and snapchatting. Honestly, I’m not sure how this excuse is more face-saving than the alternative. There’s always dignity in owning one’s agency, however humble the ends to which it’s directed. But there’s nothing dignified about pretending to be at the mercy of forces beyond your control.

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