fresh hell

I’ve Suffered the Tortures of the Damned

By in fresh hell, socmed

The Lady of the House showed me this “Facebook reel,” which appears to have been recently declassified as part of a CIA MK-ULTRA program. I suggested that she quit watching these things for a couple weeks and see if her ADHD doesn’t resolve itself. Seriously, imagine proposing this as a psychological experiment. Subjects will be seated in front of a small illuminated panel. Their eyes will be drawn between faces, captions, jump cuts, emojis, scrolling comments, rapid-fire images, and flashing lights. Every few seconds, the emotional register will change: hilarity, disgust, outrage, amazement, pity, contempt, back to hilarity. Grimacing visages will model the appropriate reaction. Sounds of pneumatic drills, explosions, squealing hinges, and nails on chalkboards may be introduced at random intervals.

Repeat for several hours a day.

Afterward, when the subjects report anxiety, restlessness, depression, insomnia, inability to concentrate, and the sensation that reading three pages of a book now feels like dragging a corpse uphill through wet cement, researchers will solemnly announce that the causes remain unclear.

Once upon a time, the news was delivered by grave men in suits, which had its own absurdities. Now the equivalent is Facebook UI clutter, reaction emojis, progress dots, usernames, a man’s disembodied head pasted over a screenshot of a tweet, screaming the tweet aloud while subtitles repeat the screaming and six other pieces of interface debris crawl over the image like ants on a dropped popsicle.

This “story,” such as it is, concerns some Europeans visiting America during the World Cup and reacting with amazement to our barbaric abundance: the food portions, the Wi-Fi, the interstate rest stops, the fact that the average Buc-ee’s is roughly the size of Luxembourg and smells better.

That’s it. That’s the story. Some foreign visitors noticed that America is large and amazing, tweeted about it, went viral, and now a bug-eyed intermediary who appears to have eaten a bottle of gas station stimulants has been dispatched to read the tweets aloud to people who apparently cannot be trusted to find them, read them, or decide what to make of them.

An old blog might have handled this by saying, “Here are a few funny tweets from Europeans discovering America,” followed by links or screenshots. You could have looked at them at your convenience. You could have paused, reread, skimmed, laughed, shrugged, or decided that the whole thing was mildly amusing but not worth rupturing a blood vessel over. The object would have been placed before you. Your reaction would have remained your own.

The reel cannot tolerate that arrangement. It thrusts the item toward you, screams the proper emotional response into your face, and yanks it away before your eyes have finished focusing. “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?” the host bellows, while the tweet sits there on screen, perfectly capable of being read by anyone with a fourth-grade education and two uninterrupted seconds. But two uninterrupted seconds are exactly what the format cannot permit.

The new middleman is not an editor, exactly, and not a critic. He is a digestive aid. He finds a tweet that has already gone viral, places his face beside it, reads it aloud in the tone of a man reporting shellfire, and supplies the emotional cues for viewers. The old web had explorers, cranks, diarists, obsessives, and link-hoarders. The platform web has feeders. You enter the app, sit still, and the belt begins to move. A European discovers ranch dressing; a man in a corner convulses; subtitles repeat what he is shouting; comments bloom underneath like mold. This, for reasons future anthropologists may decline to study, is called “content.”

And of course there is now a whole genre of videos in which a man watches another video while you watch him watching it. The original object is demoted to a little window in the corner while the reactor’s face occupies the sovereign territory. Surprise arrives pre-surprised. Amusement arrives pre-laughed-at. Outrage arrives already red-faced and pounding the table. You are not watching a thing. You are watching a designated reactor have an experience on your behalf. It would be merely repulsive if it weren’t sad: these videos reproduce the feeling of watching with friends, except without actual friends. A baby rhesus monkey in a laboratory clings to a sock-covered surrogate for a shred of comfort; the platform subject clings to a man’s floating head, pantomiming genuine emotion.

Stupid entertainment is an ancient and honorable human tradition. A potboiler may be stupid. A sitcom may be stupid. A novelty song may be stupid. But even the worst paperback in the drugstore rack has one great moral advantage over the modern feed: it knows how to shut up. A bad book may insult your intelligence, but it doesn’t seize your nervous system by the lapels. It doesn’t flash lights in your face, vibrate in your hand, split the page into six competing zones, or make the author’s floating head appear in the margin shouting, “BRO, THIS NEXT SENTENCE IS CRAZY.” It lies there, blessedly inert, until you pick it up. Even bad prose preserves a minimal dignity: the reader still controls the encounter.

The old complaint about television was that it turned people into couch potatoes. That now seems almost pastoral. A couch potato could at least sit still. The platform subject is something more agitated and less dignified: a potato wired to a car battery, twitching under fluorescent lights while a man in the corner narrates the event at the top of his lungs.

Thou Knowest the People, That They Are Set On Mischief

By in books, fresh hell

People do not deserve to have good writing; they are so pleased with bad.

— Emerson, The Heart of Emerson’s Journals

The Lady of the House began reading romance novels under the respectable flag of irony. “Oh, it’s funny, because the writing is so bad,” she said, as if conducting fieldwork among the primitives. But irony is a fig leaf with poor tensile strength. Before long, the leaf dropped. She was reading them openly, happily, without apology. Then came the minotaurs.

There is a romance novel in which a woman works at a facility where she “milks” minotaurs and falls in love with one. When I mentioned this, expecting at least a ceremonial shudder, she not only knew of the book but defended the nuances of its storytelling. A postal carrier I know then informed me that there is also a genre called “sentient object” romance in which women fall in love with inanimate objects. Doors, for example. Not metaphorical doors. Doors.

At such moments, one understands Emerson. Hell, one understands Moses. You turn your back on the people for a moment, and when you return, they are not merely worshiping the golden calf. They have written a three-book romantasy cycle about its emotional availability. The calf has trauma. The calf has boundary “issues.” The calf is touch-starved but learning to trust again. Or perhaps, in our degraded age, it is no longer a golden calf, but a golden minotaur. Moses smashed the tablets and had three thousand idolaters put to the sword. I am not unreasonable. I merely propose smashing the Kindles.

What Is to Be Bought?

By in conspicuous crusading, fresh hell

Say what you will about Paris Hilton, but she spent family money with the innocent joy of a golden retriever in diamond-studded sunglasses. She never asked us to believe that a shopping spree was dialectical praxis, never put on a cloth cap and pretended to be a proletarian. Piker has the rich boy’s ancient problem: he wants the money, the taste, the comfort, and the moral superiority of denouncing all three. Every expensive trinket must be offset by another call for the destruction of the system which produced it. One wishes he could work out the family drama in therapy, rather than staging it as revolutionary cosplay for Twitch.

Ceremonies of Regard

By in fresh hell, marriage

One of the things Nietzsche despised in Socrates was the latter’s confidence that whatever mattered in life ought to be rendered fully conscious, fully explicit, fully defensible. Reason at any price. Whatever could not survive cross-examination in the bright glare of dialectic was made to look shabby or confused. But a lot of ordinary moral knowledge exists first as caution, custom, proverb, and taboo. It is condensed experience before it becomes explicit theory. Only later, if pressed by some bright interrogator, does someone try to unpack the logic hiding inside it. And sometimes the unpacking is clumsy. That doesn’t mean the intuition was empty. There is something shallow in the dialectical move that says, “Aha, you cannot define or justify this cleanly, therefore you do not really know it.” No. Very often the average person knows the shape of a danger before the intellectual has finished naming it.

Which brings us to our featured tweet. Pace Rob Henderson, who lamented this as another example of an undying “luxury belief,” I see this as reason for good cheer. It seems that prestigious media outlets are backing away from their enthusiastic advocacy of polyamory in recent years to something more modest: unrequited crushes on other people. You might say they’re microdosing polyamory now. Sure, they’re still self-centered boors (and bores) who can’t tolerate any restraints on their endlessly fascinating self-expression, but at least they’re being a little more passive about it now.

Of course, merely noticing other attractive people is banal. Almost everyone with functioning eyes already knows that. What makes this genre irritating is the way it tries to inflate that ordinary fact into a badge of enlightened sophistication. The point is not, “married people are still human.” The point is, “we are the kind of evolved couple who can metabolize this with chic candor.” That’s where the faint whiff of poly ideology lingers. Not full polyamory, just the moral vanity of wanting to seem less possessive, less bourgeois, less square than the rubes. It is polyamory for people who want the aesthetic of sexual adventurousness without the administrative burden, jealousy spiral, and wreckage.

The average married couple has already worked out, without an essay in a prestige outlet, that attraction doesn’t cease at the altar. They have also usually worked out something else obvious to those not blinded by ideology: where attention goes, feeling often follows. Some subjects are better handled with discretion than with performative openness. Not because they are Victorians, but because they are adults. Nobody is scandalized by incidental perception, as opposed to cultivated attention. You see an attractive person; you register it; life goes on. What raises eyebrows is when someone starts lingering over it, discussing it, theorizing it, and then publicizing that whole process as a mark of health or honesty. At that point, the issue is: why are you feeding this? Why are you watering this plant?

Ordinary people’s suspicion is often wiser than the essayist’s self-exoneration. They understand that not everything dangerous begins with an overt act. A lot of it begins with permission, rehearsal, indulgence, and narrative self-flattery. People know, even if they cannot state it in therapeutic jargon, that attention is not neutral. Attention is investment. Repeated attention is cultivation.

I have named you queen.
There are taller than you, taller.
There are purer than you, purer.
There are lovelier than you, lovelier.
But you are the queen.

When you go through the streets
No one recognizes you.
No one sees your crystal crown, no one looks
At the carpet of red gold
That you tread as you pass,
The nonexistent carpet.

And when you appear
All the rivers sound
In my body, bells
Shake the sky,
And a hymn fills the world.

Only you and I,
Only you and I, my love,
Listen to me.

— Pablo Neruda, “The Queen”

What self-centered candor misses is that many of the things holding ordinary life together are not strict factual disclosures but small ceremonial acts of respect. A husband who does not feel obliged to narrate every passing attraction to his wife is not being “dishonest” in any meaningful sense. When he calls his wife gorgeous even though she looks disheveled at that moment, he is performing a tiny courtesy, a way of signaling where his loyalties and priorities lie. Social life is full of such gestures. We say “sorry” when someone bumps into us in the grocery store not because we are confessing guilt, but because it’s a graceful way of acknowledging the awkwardness and smoothing it over. In the same way, a tactful silence in marriage is not repression but consideration: a way of saying, without pedantic explanation, that other people may exist, and they may even be beautiful, but they are not important here. Self-centered candor, by contrast, is crude rather than brave. It dissolves these little ceremonies of regard in the acid of explicitness, and then wonders why the world feels flatter, colder, and less loved.

Bibliomisia

By in books, fresh hell

Bibliomisia — hatred of books — is a silent epidemic in our society, ignored by social scientists, overlooked by the professional awareness-raisers, bereft of bumper magnets and national days of commemoration. Don’t believe me? Then listen to how proudly these people display their abusive tendencies, with no hint of shame. Don’t look away, I beg you. Bear witness with me.

First, Bill Hayes:

As I went through Oliver’s many marked-up books, I understood that the art of annotation is, almost by definition, impulsive—you have to get your thoughts down now, right now—even if it means turning the book upside down to complete a thought. There’s no time to find a pad of paper, no time to turn the page, no time to pull out a journal. (Over his lifetime, Oliver filled more than 600 handwritten journals and notebooks.)

Second, Emma Sarappo:

The margins of my books are filled with handwritten annotations such as “Absolutely not” and “STOP IT!!!!” and “girl get UP.” These are not necessarily critiques of the story; some are expressions of high praise.

…That’s the thing about books. If Barbara, or another character, is making me bang my head against the wall, I can just close the novel and move on with my life. But sometimes I like to salt my days with a person who simply grinds my gears. I might yell aloud to the empty hall; I might text everyone I know about a character’s foibles and idiocy (and tell them to read the book too). I’ve been known to, infrequently, throw my reading material across the room. Or I might just blacken more margins. Writing “I HATE THIS” inside a book can be another way of saying “I love you.”

There you have the whole pathology in miniature: the injury openly confessed, then immediately wrapped in the language of intimacy.

This is the classic logic of the abuser. Look what you made me do. “I only blackened your margins because I care so much. If you were less infuriating, less provocative, I would not have had to lose control and mark you up in purple felt pen.” Then the poor volume is shoved back onto the shelf, dust jacket pulled tight, and told to keep smiling for company. “No, no, everything’s fine. She just gets passionate about literature.” Meanwhile the endpapers look like a bathroom stall, and the title page bears the scars of “passion.”

We are asked to regard this not merely with tolerance, but with admiration. The annotator has become a romantic figure: impulsive, alive, too full of thought and feeling to restrain herself before the nearest clean surface. But this is only graffiti with better publicists. Spray-paint a train car and society still clings to certain outdated moral prejudices. Cover a novel with shrieking little exclamations and suddenly we are in the presence of intellectual vitality. No. A book is not your emotional support drywall. It is not there to absorb your all-caps eruptions. If “I love you” and “I hate this” have become interchangeable, that may explain a great deal about contemporary culture, but it does not contribute to the well-being of the book.

It is one of the many achievements of liberal modernity to have taught people that every appetite becomes noble the moment it is furnished with a vocabulary of self-expression. The old barbarian merely pillaged. The new barbarian announces that she is in dialogue. Her outrages arrive garnished with theory. What was once defacement is now “interaction;” what was once possessive ugliness is now “making the text one’s own.” I confess I am old-fashioned enough to believe that a book already is its own. I do not improve a cathedral by chalking objections on the pillars, nor honor a symphony by shouting commentary over the second movement. But the bibliomaniac of destruction — that is to say, the bibliomisiac — finds every finished object intolerable until it bears some trace of his own precious ego. He cannot read without leaving fingerprints on the texts.

Has your first edition been marked, dog-eared, or struck with handwritten outbursts? You are not alone. Every year, thousands of innocent books suffer in silence at the hands of “enthusiastic readers” who insist the abuse is really affection. At SafeShelf, we provide emergency rehoming for hardcovers in crisis, confidential repair services for damaged endpapers, and trauma-informed support for volumes with banalities scrawled in the margins. Because love should not leave visible scars.

Bot, Are You the One Who Is Living Life?

By in foolosophy, fresh hell, poetry, technology

And yet, though we strain
against the deadening grip
of daily necessity,
I sense there is this mystery:

All life is being lived.

Who is living it, then?
Is it the things themselves,
or something waiting inside them,
like an unplayed melody in a flute?

Is it the winds blowing over the waters?
Is it the branches that signal to each other?

Is it flowers
interweaving their fragrances,
or streets, as they wind through time?

Is it animals, warmly moving,
or the birds, that suddenly rise up?

Who lives it, then? God, are you the one
who is living life?

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God (trans. Barrows and Macy)

At last, one more intolerable hardship of human existence has been lifted from our shoulders. Reading was already too much to ask of a modern person, of course — all those words, all that eye movement, the faint possibility of having to think. But apparently even watching a video is now an unreasonable demand. We have progressed from “help me understand this” to “please have the experience in my place and send me the synopsis.”

This is being sold as a way to “save time,” which raises the obvious question: save it for what? More summaries? More secondhand encounters with things you cannot be bothered to encounter? More efficient ways of avoiding contact with your own life? A video was already the shortcut. Now we want a shortcut around the shortcut. Soon the bots will attend our vacations, endure our sunsets, and perhaps even die on our behalf. The important thing is that we ourselves remain unburdened by the exhausting task of being present.

There’s a deeper problem, apart from the obvious comic squalor of it. Any intermediary decides what counts as relevant. If I ask for “the point” of Moby-Dick, I am really asking someone else to pre-sort the book for me — to tell me which parts were essential and which parts I may safely miss. But how do I know the supposedly “inessential” part is not the very thing that would have struck me most deeply? The odd image, the side remark, the tonal wobble, the long digression everyone else skips — those may be the real point for the person actually present to them. This is the telephone game elevated into a philosophy of life: more and more mediation, more and more compression, until people forget that the map is not the territory and the menu is not the meal.

Still, let us be generous and assume the dream is perfected. The bot watches the whole thing for me. It catches every nuance, every shift in tone, every expression, every implication. But then a small metaphysical difficulty appears. If the bot is having the full experience on my behalf, in what sense is that my experience at all? Is the bot me? If so, then what exactly am I — the management layer? The executive assistant to my own displaced consciousness? And if the bot is not me, then all it has really done is watch a video while I remained absent from it. In that case, what has been “saved” is not my time so much as my participation.

The whole thing begins to look less like efficiency than like a fanatical inability to tolerate unfilled attention. No moment may be silent, slow, or unrewarding; no stretch of time may simply be lived. Everything must be processed, condensed, accelerated, stripped to “the point.” But life is not an empty highway between you and the point. Life is the road, the weather, the delay, the scenery, the boredom, the sudden thought you did not schedule, the stray detail that lodges in the mind. A person can waste a staggering amount of time trying to avoid ever having to sit still long enough to notice that.

And so the grand irony: in the name of saving time, one adopts a whole philosophy of perpetual evasion — more tools, more summaries, more skipping, more fretful management of one’s own supposedly precious minutes — and ends by becoming the kind of person who cannot simply be anywhere at all.

There’s Terrible Trouble Behind It!

By in ai, fresh hell, technology, the geist of the zeit

Amelia Miller:

For adults, we need warnings that clearly convey the serious risks. The lessons that took tobacco regulators decades to learn should apply to artificial intimacy governance from the start. Small print disclaimers about the effects of smoking have been rightfully criticized as woefully deficient, but large graphics on cigarette packs of black lungs and dying patients hurt sales. The harms caused by A.I. companions can be equally visceral. The groundbreaking guardrails that Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed into law last year, which require chatbots to nudge minors to take breaks during long sessions, are a step in the right direction, but a polite suggestion after three hours of A.I. conversation is not enough. Why not play video testimonials from people whose human relationships withered after years of nonstop chat with bots?

When I was a kid in ye olden days, reformers were forever trying to save us from ourselves. Smoking will kill you. Drunk driving will kill you and someone else. Drugs will melt your brain. We had assemblies with “scared straight” guest speakers, posters of tar-blackened lungs on the walls of health class, PSA’s, and (God help us) McGruff the Crime Dog records with bouncy little earworms about every substance known to man. The theory was that if we were properly educated, if the warning labels were vivid enough, if the videos were grisly enough, we’d make good choices forever after. And yet people kept smoking. People kept driving drunk. People kept getting high. Not because they lacked information, but because they were stressed, bored, lonely, impulsive, self-destructive, curious, or just plain human.

Now the new panic is emotional intimacy with AI, and the new solution is…warning labels and more regulation. “This is not a substitute for genuine relationships.” “ChatGPT can make mistakes.” And here some newly-minted reformer wants to make teenagers watch video testimonials from recovering chatbot junkies, like driver’s ed films of crumpled cars. But McGruff is the perfect emblem of the whole genre: you’re trying to solve a messy relational problem with a cheesy piece of mediated messaging. You even risk the pink-elephant effect — by foregrounding the forbidden thing (“crack cocaine!” “romantic bots!”) you plant it in the mind with an oddly vivid presence, while the adults congratulate themselves for having “done something.” It’s outsourcing the hard work of parenting and community to a cartoon mascot and a compliance checklist.

None of this is to say that nothing can or should ever be improved. But there is no design standard, warning label, or stern authority that can make life safe and painless. People will always try to jerry-rig comfort out of whatever’s available when their actual lives are starving for it. If you don’t want Johnny turning into a dope fiend, you can’t fix that with a McGruff album. If you don’t want Johnny “marrying” a chatbot, you can’t fix that with a disclaimer. The solution, such as it is, was never primarily informational. It was always relational. And wherever we go, there we are.

I do look forward to today’s cartoon characters producing an album warning kids to not fuck an android sexbot.

Angry at Numbers

By in fresh hell

Kindergarten teacher: “Butt-head, are you angry?”
Butt-head: “I’m, like, angry at numbers.”
Beavis: “There’s, like, too many of ’em and stuff.”

— Beavis and Butt-head, “Held Back“

Rachel Sugar:

As nutritional trends go, there are worse obsessions than protein. Even if there is still significant debate about how much protein one needs, you are unlikely to send yourself into kidney failure because you protein-maxxed too hard. But the fanatical focus on protein as the true answer, the universal key to transforming the body you have into the one you want—7 grams, 28 grams, 11 grams, a chicken smoothie—feels eerily familiar. We counted calories, grams of fat, carbohydrates, trying to distill the messy science of nutrition into one single quantitative metric. Protein, for all its many virtues, is just another thing to count.

This is basically “I bought a thing; the thing has numbers; numbers are everywhere; counting is stressful” stretched into a lifestyle vignette. This thousand-word article could have been a tweet without losing any substance.

Sharing a Silent Look

By in conspicuous crusading, fresh hell, socmed, the geist of the zeit, the madness of crowds

This is exactly what I was talking about the other day. Something awful happens; a video circulates; and within minutes the event stops being an event and becomes a proxy for everything else. People aren’t really arguing about what happened; they’re arguing about what they already believe about the world, using the footage as a Rorschach blot. And I’m supposed to join in? I’m not a forensic analyst. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not on the scene. What earthly good would it do for me to watch a terrible clip frame-by-frame and then add my priceless contribution — “Bad things are bad and shouldn’t happen” — to the pile? Congratulations, here’s my Nobel Peace Prize. I treat discourse scrums the way the Romans treated victory: with a servant whispering a corrective in your ear. Only mine is: remember, you’re just another idiot. Your opinion is cheap, your information is thin, and your “engagement” helps no one. You can simply not perform. You can just do something else. You can just post something interesting about Lin Yutang instead of regurgitating the day’s pre-chewed cud.

Everything Human Is Alien to Him

By in fresh hell, history

L. P. Hartley famously wrote that the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Rob Boddice, the subject of Gal Beckerman’s Atlantic profile, apparently imprinted on that line shortly after hatching. Boddice argues that we project our own emotional categories backward — pain, love, grief, even “human nature” — when in reality, experience is historically made, not universally shared. Even a carpenter’s smashed thumb is, in effect, a foreign language.

The universalism that Boddice mistrusts is a relatively new concept in human history. It comes to us from the Enlightenment. The presumption that all people share a common nature was dreamed up by European intellectuals sitting in their salons. Plenty of critics, starting with postcolonial thinkers, now understand this to have been an ideological attempt to exert power and order over a world that had recently become bigger and stranger. But this impulse toward uniformity is not just an 18th-century one. Freudian psychology also reduced the dynamism of the human mind to a machine powered by predictable and shared drives. By the time we get to our current globalized culture, in which a Korean thriller can win Best Picture at the Oscars and Latin pop stars dominate the U.S. charts, the notion that our emotional registers are all essentially alike feels self-evident.

Mwah! This is so perfectly calibrated to modern midwit pieties. The Enlightenment: a club of privileged European males in powdered wigs inventing “human nature” as a fig leaf to cover the White Phallus of Power as it raped its way through the diversity of history. Before that, apparently, nobody had ever noticed that human beings have anything in common, least of all the Christians, with their quaint doctrine that man is made in the image of God, and their bizarre hobby of preaching to all nations. Or the Stoics, who somehow developed a universal moral vocabulary without the benefit of a Paris salon. Terence: “Nothing human is alien to me”? Montaigne: “Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition”? Take a seat, boys, The Atlantic is here with the highly-credentialed to explain the world atcha.

To understand what the carpenter experiences, then, we need to begin with a series of questions that might help us reconstruct the meaning produced once the signal reaches its destination. Does this happen a lot? Is the sensation of hitting his thumb a daily or weekly occurrence—something that goes with the job? And then, if religion infused every second of his life, as might very well be true for a medieval carpenter, where would his concept of suffering come from? Does he think about Christ and perhaps feel purified? If suffering, sin, and love are conjoined in an idea of the divine in the carpenter’s brain, and these are “lived connections,” Boddice said, “and you’re surrounded by them,” how might he feel when that hammer hits his thumb?

It no longer seems so simple as just saying “pain.” We cannot put the carpenter in an MRI machine—we will never have total access to his feelings—but by building out his world in all of its dimensions, Boddice believes, we can get closer to appreciating the specificity of those feelings. This points to another radical element of Boddice’s thinking: To re-create an experience, you need to know all of the conditions that may have led the brain to originally create it, and this means bringing dozens of different academic disciplines to bear on the task, getting fields that don’t usually mingle to interact with one another.

This is the real work of art. Yes, you’re reading that correctly: here we’re told that to understand what it “felt like” for a medieval carpenter to hit his thumb with a hammer, you’ll need a kind of academic Avengers initiative: theology, archaeology, art history, material culture, semiotics, perhaps a visiting chair in Comparative Thumb Studies, and a grant. Only then may you begin to approach the mysteriously foreign experience known as “pain.”

Now, I’ll grant the modest point hidden under the grandiosity. People don’t just feel sensations; they interpret them. The same event, a hammer-smashed thumb, can be filtered through pride, shame, religion, habit, fear of lost wages, or the general anxiety of living in a world where God is watching and your tools are trying to kill you. Fine. Culture supplies scripts. Narratives matter. Buddhists, who of course didn’t appear until the Enlightenment, would call it clinging: the thumb hurts, but the story you attach to it — “I’m a clumsy failure and this is why my wife left me,” “This always happens to me, why am I so cursed” — hurts extra.

Still, the fact that meaning is flexible does not mean meaning is infinite. It doesn’t follow that slave labor under the desert sun was a rollicking good time in the right cultural context. It doesn’t follow that the medieval carpenter might have experienced a broken thumb as a wave of orgasmic rapture. The space of plausible interpretations may be wider than first thought, but it isn’t boundless. Human beings can be culturally varied without being mythical creatures. This is where Boddice’s extreme skepticism resembles something like travelogue-fantasy: the fetishization of difference as an end in itself. It reminds me of Pliny the Elder dutifully describing faraway islands where the inhabitants are all ears, or Marco Polo’s dog-headed cannibals. The past becomes an exotic zoo, and the historian becomes the docent.

And you’ll notice how selectively the skepticism is applied. If “experience” is sealed inside a vault unless we reconstruct “all the conditions,” there’s no reason to stop at medieval carpenters. My neighbors are also concept-laden brains in dark skulls with culturally trained categories. Taken seriously, the view doesn’t just make the past foreign; it makes the present unknowable, and logically points the way to solipsism. (And yet, miraculously, the academic Avengers can still deduce the “true” feeling from texts and artifacts.) But ordinary life plainly assumes the opposite — that we can understand one another well enough to cooperate, console, forgive, punish, and love. My assumption is that Boddice, with his tedious “down with empathy” provocations, is probably making a bid to be the next pop-academic superstar milking the Freakonomics template of counterintuitive insights. I can easily imagine “people in the past didn’t feel the same emotions we do” becoming the next “Eskimos-have-200-words-for-snow.”

Which brings me to the correct research method, and it requires only one professor: Samuel Johnson. If someone tells you we can’t understand an injured thumb without dozens of academic disciplines, a Johnsonian response suggests itself: pick up a hammer, hit his thumb, and say, over top of his howls and curses, “I refute Boddice thus.”

Talkin’ ‘Bout Butterflies In My Head

By in fresh hell

Theodore Dalrymple:

Let us take a simple example (as Lacassagne would have done): the tattooed butterfly. As butterflies become rarer and rarer in the real world, so the tattooed kind become ever more common on the shoulders, buttocks, and ankles of young (and not so young) women. But what do such butterflies signify? Here we may turn to Charles Dickens for illumination, and to the character of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House. Skimpole, a shallow, charming, calculating faux naïf says:

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies. 

The tattooed butterfly speaks of freedom and self-pity, for it is more likely that the tattoo symbolises an aspiration than an achievement or an actualised state of being. It is precisely because a woman feels that she is not free that she tattoos herself thus, in the primitive hope that the symbolised quality will become reality in her life. We are never far from magical thinking.

When confronted with a butterfly tattoo, Dalrymple consults the only living authority on the subject: Charles Dickens. (What, Nabokov wasn’t available?) Sure, sometimes people signal what they want, not what they have (wealth, toughness, uniqueness, whatever). But sometimes symbols are just aesthetics, memory, affiliation, grief, a private joke, or “I like it.” Good thing we don’t take Freud seriously anymore, or I’d have to conclude that Dalrymple’s increasingly-fanciful tattoo essays are just a displaced wish to get hammered and come home with a pectoral panther.

Batboy Marries AI!

By in ai, fresh hell, technology, the geist of the zeit

Lila Shroff:

Many people are becoming reliant on AI to navigate some of the most basic aspects of daily life. A colleague suggested that we might even call the most extreme users “LLeMmings”—yes, because they are always LLM-ing, but also because their near-constant AI use conjures images of cybernetic lemmings unable to act without guidance. For this set of compulsive users, AI has become a primary interface through which they interact with the world. The emails they write, the life decisions they make, and the questions that consume their mind all filter through AI first. “It’s like a real addiction,” Metz told me.

Three years into the AI boom, an early picture of how heavy AI use might affect the human mind is developing. For some, chatbots offer emotional companionship; others have found that bots reinforce delusional thinking (a condition that some have deemed “AI psychosis”). The LLeMmings, meanwhile, are beginning to feel the effects of repeatedly outsourcing their thinking to a computer.

Every time I read one of these AI–panic pieces from The Atlantic, I feel like I’ve picked up a high-end version of the Weekly World News. We meet a man who needs Claude to tell him whether it’s safe to sleep in his house because a nearby tree looks like it might fall, another who instinctively wants to ask ChatGPT how to fish an AirPod out from between two train seats, and an anxious tech worker demanding a probability estimate that her friends are still alive after a night out. This is not a portrait of “how AI is changing all our minds.” It’s a freak parade of unbalanced weirdos who just happen to have discovered chatbots.

Once you see the tabloid DNA, you can’t unsee it. You could drop these people straight onto a supermarket cover with only minor copy-editing:

  • “SHE USED AN LLM TO WRITE HER EMAILS – NOW DOCTORS SAY SHE HAS WEEKS TO LIVE”

  • “HE ASKED A CHATBOT IF A TREE WOULD FALL ON HIM – SCIENTISTS SAY HUMAN JUDGMENT MAY BE EXTINCT BY 2030”

  • “MAN ANGRILY ARGUES WITH AI MID-FLIGHT – EXPERTS WARN OF ‘AI PSYCHOSIS’ EPIDEMIC”

The Atlantic just swaps the all-caps and exclamation points for a few quotes from a philosopher, an “addiction psychiatrist,” and a reference to “the architecture of human cognition,” then ships it to the Acela corridor as serious cultural analysis. You get to gawk at the weirdos — people who ask Claude for the odds of identity theft, or need a ridiculous branded event like “No AI December” to remember how to think — while flattering yourself that you’re not like them; you’re enlightened enough to worry about what this means for society. You’re not eagerly devouring gossip about how Camilla walked out on Charles after catching him rogering the stableboy; you’re “engaging deeply” with the cultural implications of technological change.

Meanwhile, the boring truth is that most of us use LLMs the way we use every other tool: to save some time and get on with things. Draft an email, outline a project, summarize a paper, maybe bounce ideas around when the mental gears are sticky. We are not polling chatbots about how to raise children or shop for groceries. The handful of people who treat AI like an oracle are not victims of “AI dependence”; they’re just the same old neurotics, now expressing their neurosis through a new interface.

Higher Cred

By in education, fresh hell

From the NYT obituary of Tom Stoppard, emphasis mine:

A voracious reader but otherwise remarkably undereducated for a writer of such voluminous knowledge and understanding, Mr. Stoppard found both inspiration and provocation in his literary predecessors. His work alluded to, commented on or borrowed from classic works of literature and philosophy, from the Greeks and Romans to Samuel Beckett and Vaclav Havel. He often drew on consequential historical events and real-life figures of intellectual power and influence.

“William Shakespeare, though never having completed an MFA program…”

Assuage Against the Machine

By in fresh hell, gender

Tyler Austin Harper:

Kingsnorth’s most contentious claims concern his insistence that technoculture and its products—large language models, genetic engineering, and so on—share a great deal in common with progressive ideas about sex, sexuality, and gender. They all, in his telling, attempt to use technology to overcome what were once hard natural limits. Unlike some other critics of the transgender movement, however, Kingsnorth shows compassion for those struggling with their identity and does not scapegoat them for larger problems in society. “People with gender dysphoria, girls with short hair, boys who play with dolls, people whose sexualities differ from the norm: they are not, in fact, the real issue,” he writes. But he rejects assertions that “biology is a problem to be overcome” and that the “body is a form of oppression.” These ideas, first aired on his Substack, have, not surprisingly, alienated some fans of his earlier environmental writing. The writer, green activist, and former Kingsnorth enthusiast John Halstead said that Kingsnorth has become a “transphobic proto-fascist.” Specifically, Halstead argues that Kingsnorth confuses sex with gender, and is mistaken to call binary sex “natural,” given that other species have more sexual variation.

For my part, I don’t find Halstead’s objections especially persuasive. Rather, the principal problem with Kingsnorth’s gender analysis is that it mostly ignores the ways that those of us who live in the aftermaths of the industrial, scientific, sexual, and digital revolutions are all already “cyborgs,” as the science and technology theorist Donna Haraway would put it. Microplastics permeate our bodies, birth control courses through our veins, smartphones rewire our neural pathways, medical devices keep our hearts pumping. If, as Kingsnorth claims, gender-affirming medicine is an assault on human nature and the human body, then so, too, are pacemakers and prosthetic limbs, or Botox and condoms, for that matter.

I’ve never been much interested in Paul Kingsnorth. I’m not a Luddite, and I have no interest in becoming a subsistence farmer in response to the “climate crisis,” which I think is mostly performative hysteria. However, it does seem like his newest book, Against the Machine, might still grapple with some interesting issues. I realize it’s The Atlantic — caveat lector and all that — but I was nonetheless annoyed to encounter this irrelevant tangent. Kingsnorth’s concern is that modern technoculture treats everything — land, animals, even the human body — as raw material for the will, rather than as something given that places claims on us. That’s a theme even I’m interested in. Instead, I’m forcibly reminded that I’m reading a review tailored to the sensibilities of Acela corridor midwits: we get a narrative detour to confirm that, yes, some thoughtcrime may occur here, but there’s no need to panic, it has been safely contained and rebuked, and we remain Good People. It feels less like a serious engagement with Kingsnorth’s argument and more like a pilot’s announcement of mild turbulence. The reader is invited to relax. Whatever Kingsnorth thinks about bodies, limits, and modernity’s Promethean will, it won’t require changing any of the emojis in your social media bio.

What makes it more exasperating is that even the counterpoint offered is rote and weak. Harper blithely suggests that we’re already cyborgs, so who is Kingsnorth to object to gender-affirming surgeries and hormones? But this is just a category mistake. There is an obvious difference between unintended collateral damage (microplastics), restorative medicine (pacemakers), and deliberate, irreversible interventions into healthy sexual development. To pretend they all belong in one moral category called “assaults on nature” is precisely the sort of flattening a serious critic is supposed to resist, not perform.

Which is a shame, because aside from the obligatory culture-war throat-clearing, Kingsnorth’s basic question is unavoidable: are there any non-negotiable limits built into human nature and the world, or is everything from sex to climate to cognition just clay for the will to mold? You don’t have to be a radical environmentalist or a would-be peasant in rural Ireland to see the importance of it. You can reject Kingsnorth’s own answers and still recognize that he’s at least posing the right kind of question. What I want from a review is help in thinking that question through, not another in-flight assurance that the moral instruments are functioning and the crew’s politics are sound. If Kingsnorth is wrong about givenness and limits, show me where. If he’s right in places but goes too far, mark the line. But don’t waste my time with ritual genuflection toward the Rainbow God. I can get that from any algorithmic feed. From critics, I’d prefer something closer to thought.

For a sense of what actual context and perspective looks like, you can put Harper’s piece alongside John Gray’s review of the same book in the New Statesman. Gray takes Kingsnorth’s central claim seriously: that contemporary environmentalism and progressive politics are not a radical alternative to the Machine but one of its more hysterical moods, still committed to remaking the world as raw material for human projects. Gray traces the lineage of this idea through Lewis Mumford’s “megatechnics,” Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain phase, his eventual conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy, and the eschatological fiction. Then he does the thing a critic is supposed to do: he asks whether a collapse of the Machine would mean anything like Kingsnorth’s “uncivilisation,” or whether, as history suggests, it would more likely mean famine, pogroms, militias, and then a new, harsher form of industrial order.

Reading Gray after Harper clarified what had been bothering me. Gray sees the same faults I see in Kingsnorth: the fantasy that a smallholding in Galway could somehow scale to eight billion people; the muddled eschatology that can’t decide whether it wants Christian apocalypse or pagan world-cycles; the refusal to admit that renouncing technological progress may mean a more denatured planet, not less. Watching him work through those points, you can feel a mind engaging the book’s actual architecture. With Harper, by contrast, I found myself briefly disoriented: what does gender have to do with Kingsnorth’s core outlook? Why is that the element being singled out for extended treatment? It’s like a film where a jarring line or bit of acting breaks the spell: suddenly you’re no longer inside the world of the story, you’re staring at a studio note. Gray makes me want to argue with Kingsnorth; Harper makes me want to argue with The Atlantic.

How to Liberate People Who Didn’t Ask

By in conspicuous crusading, fresh hell, language, the great awokening

Kenneth Minogue once imagined St. George in retirement: the famous dragons all slain, our hero prowls the countryside hunting smaller and smaller lizards just to keep the old vocation alive. That’s the mood of a certain progressive missionary spirit today — still eager to “civilize” the backwards heathens, but reduced to policing syllables. Old Puritan habits die hard. The devil’s snares can be lurking anywhere, even in a vowel.

Behold the latest crusade: liberating Spanish speakers from gendered suffixes they never petitioned to escape. The rhetoric is anti-colonial, but the method is pure colonialism — arrive with a pre-packed moral syllabus, announce that the locals are in peril (they just don’t know it), and commence reforms by decree: You are now “Latine.” You’re welcome. When the ostensible beneficiaries say “no thanks,” as they already did with “Latinx,” the result is not reflection but escalation.

I don’t put much stock in racial categorizations myself, but by the missionaries’ own color-coded catechism, we are watching mostly white American institutions imposing taste, tempo, and terminology on a largely non-white, non-American language community. The word for that, in any other context, would be obvious.

Lifters In the Mist

By in battling personal entropy, fresh hell

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela:

After losing big with men under 30 in the 2024 election, Democrats have spent $20 million on a program called “Speaking with American Men” (SAM) to help figure out which “spaces” they need to show up in to fare better with this demographic. A smart place to start would be the gym; the booming men’s fitness market is expected to more than double by 2029, growth driven by men under 25, who are joining gyms almost twice as fast as women. And as SAM co-director Ilyse Hogue and I wrote here last year, the right has done an excellent job parlaying young men’s healthy interest in exercise into an embrace of reactionary politics.

…Yet destabilizing moments like the one we are now living through reveal an enduring dynamic: Men are encouraged with particular urgency to get moving when their social status feels in flux. Generation after generation, boosters sell men the irresistible idea that at the gym, if nowhere else, the sweat of your brow is all that stands between you and success. It’s an understandable, even healthy impulse, and Democrats would do well to start rebuilding their political muscle quite literally, by seeking to identify with the guy at the gym.

I love that they have to commission a study to figure out how to mimic normal people, for all the good that will do. On the one hand, there is obviously a lot of hilarious potential here. I look forward to seeing videos of awkward libs acting like Jehovah’s Witnesses, interrupting people during their sets to preach the good word about puberty blockers and green energy initiatives. And the gym has natural antibodies against weaklings who are averse to hard work, so I’m not concerned. But on the other hand, I despair a little bit — what will it take for these jerkoffs to stop attempting to politicize everything? When will they understand that this isn’t merely a messaging problem that can be solved with a public relations blitz? We already know what you’re all about. We reject it entirely. Let us know when the entire character of your party is completely different, and until then, get fucked.

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