April 8, 2026
can you hear it too? there was once the ambient thrum of the city, internal combustion engine cylinders idling in their quiet roar as airplanes ran ramshod through turbulent air above and metal wheels ground on track below. the ever-present keen electrical wires humming at sixty hertz. insane rambling homeless men begging for money in the streets; on sundays the simultaneous roar of football and its fans echoing across the city; one would not have to watch the game to know when the team scored. all of that is still there, crying of babies in their beds, rabid barking dogs threatening passerby, car on car violence, the roar of life and capital through peoples’ ears. though a new voice emerges in the cacophony.
i hear it from glassy-eyed walkers in the street, hunched over commuters on the subway, kids in grocery carts affixed to a phone announcing captions in a new robotic cadence; this addition to the harmony generated videos capturing attention spans algorithmically with their dopamine-maxxing content. to speak of the insidious way which technology embeds itself in our spare seconds would be rehashing old ground. instead, there is an uncanniness in the way these robotic voices have hijacked our public spaces and thoughts with a novel mode of consumption. when i am standing on the corner of an intersection with other passerby, we should not be subjected to ambient consumption of conspiracism; an automaton blathering hysterically about epstein’s sex crimes. nor that alexandria ocasio cortez is going to transgenderize all the kids. and so on. humans are uniquely possessed with voice and that this ability is hijacked to feed the already fever-pitch american mode of paranoia is fuel on the fire. qanon is no longer in vogue, though this is more due to the fact that they won. there is no cultural victory for the sane here. to witness the raw anger and social mistrust which breeds such beliefs, travel to plano texas. though now this is in everyone’s hands.
in a pre-internet world, culture descended hierarchically from the cultural metropoles to the hinterlands; now everyone is both spark and tinder. anyone may generate paranoid content about how today’s snow is not of their childhoods’ and others may believe them. mimetic phenomena spreading in this way has always been possible but with increased speed of communication comes increased virality.
and these zombies shuffle eyes glued to their phones supplanting reality; it is more entertaining to believe we live in a world with plot lines and antagonists than that of random circumstance. social connection increasingly replaced by its ersatz in social media; likewise reality replaced by belief barely grounded in it with more and more convincing technology. did you know the entire population of the atlanta airport knelt at once during easter as they felt the light of the lord? voice by the automaton; language by the language model; image by generative ai. there are no mental defenses which adequately protect from such forgeries at scale. though photoshop always existed, such a magnitude of lies is hard to protect against, wading through niagara and not a stream. check with your older relatives. some will argue that intelligence plays a part in ability to distinguish the real; rather it changes what one is susceptible to. insofar that there is a link between intelligence and agency these tools are capable of lying to flatter the user. it is true that claude code, etc. can be helpful; whether all improvements these tools provide are necessary, beneficial, and of worth is another question. we could be on the hamster wheel of production instead. work for its own sake is a meaningless task – what is the higher purpose of your projects? what is the use of the facts you learn? is that which you create adding value to the world? for some, absolutely! for others, transforming the user into a mirror of the model.
zombification by media is nothing new; previous generations had their sensationalist news and satanic panics. the difference is the quantity and quality of the propaganda; the ability of new media to convince the consumer. previous generations eventually developed immune systems reactive to such tactics and i hope this will continue.
and in the meantime all i fear is hyperstimuli, that these phone worlds become more interesting than that around us, that people become so invested in their platonic pornography that they fail to value their finite lives. technology offers abundance; we can divide cyberspace into bits more effectively than space into atoms and time into nanoseconds. we live and die in this world. any grounding in what it is to live must be based upon what we can truly know and interact with. this zombification prevents that. logging off is unnecessary and impossible (the genie is out of the bottle_. but, a healthy focus on that which matters, can be confirmed, and are not the product of a demon tricking us, has never been more important.