a less noticeable apocalypse. Culture following the same collapse as community on the back of a whirring compute surplus of imitative power provided by Silicon Valley. An oversupply that satiates us at a cultural level, until we become divorced from the semantic meaning and see only the cheap bones of its structure. Once exposed, it’s a thing you have no relation to, really. Just pixels. Just syllables. In some order, yes. But who cares?

This semester I assigned two reflective papers in Philosophy of Technology. In the first, my students wrote about the experience of taking a weekend off of screens. Beforehand, they hated the very idea of it. But many rediscovered themselves. They took walks. They lost track of their friends but had fun on their own. They read. They cooked. They sat outside and watched the natural world and the social world move around them. Without the distraction of a phone while waiting in line, a startlingly sizeable minority of them admitted to imagining the personal stories or the inner lives of the people waiting around them—instead of phubbing, they people-watched. And the writing was honest, and self-aware, even wistful in some places over what they felt they’d lost, or hopeful about what they might yet be able t

The danger of generative AI is not its occasional hallucinations, nor is the crisis simply that AI makes mistakes. Mistakes can be corrected. The crisis is that AI produces fluent coherency - text that follows the rules of argument and structure so well that it bypasses skepticism altogether. We are entering a world where knowledge is no longer built through struggle and debate, but assembled through statistical prediction. A world where what seems credible replaces what is true.