Writer's Diary
2/16/26
Algorithms are a drug. 1 After 15 minutes on my laptop, my brain has no choice but to care about Emerald Fennel and Clavicular and the Epstein files. I see some things that are funny or witty, but—what’s is that worth, really? I owe myself better.
Lewis Mumford called the clock the most important machine of modern culture. The clock has been replaced by the scroll.
The scroll actually has replaced time in that sense. Scrolling time feels very different than other flows of time in waking life.
The scroll is, in many ways, an intermediate stage between waking and dreaming. 2
I’m reading Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, which can’t help but provoke me. All the mid- to late-20th-century critics of industrial society & culture—Ellul, Illich, Lasch, Berry, Mumford—were all, in broad strokes… fully correct. They didn’t get much wrong, and they were never taken seriously enough.
The problem with critiques of the status quo—like the ones that I myself make in this diary—is that it’s so difficult to get outside that status quo and test the hypotheses embedded in the critique. The status quo really is that pervasive and massive and hegemonic and unmoveable.
Civilization succumbs to path dependence. Certain pathways are chosen early, and the philosophy of those pathways gets preferential treatment. VHS beats out Betamax tapes. Even if Betamax is technically superior, it doesn’t matter. More people adopted VHS first. That’s how architectonic industrial civilization is—the civilization that led to AI and the smartphone, whatever comes next: DNA and gene modification, space travel. Centralized industry and hyper organization arrived and we all got locked in.
Liberal humanism was the philosophy of wealthy farmers and well-patronized scholars. It was not the philosophy of technologists and self-styled Übermenschen. There should be some trade unionism with the spirit, one that doesn’t support technical progress but supports human progress—leisure and face-to-face decency.
There are really two AIs: the kind of AI that’s solving protein folding and Erdos problems, and the kind of AI that’s producing videos of Donald Trump hitting threes over LeBron.
What this suggests is that the future of human cognition is K-shaped. There’ll be those who peg their work to following and helping shape these profound advancements (or who use automation to allow themselves to return to an agricultural, land-based vocation). And then there’ll be those who are—most of us, the vast majority of us—chained to the walls of the cave, giddy and entertained and empty.
Because I know my plays have a deep logic to them, when someone tells me they don’t get it, I know that unconsciously there’s something more to it. It’s really a way of saying, “I do get it, but I don’t want to,” or “I don’t like that you’re the one conveying this message,” for whatever reason.
More and more it seems like a belief in demons is adaptive and practical. Perhaps nothing can help you navigate modernity better.
The major illusion is that one is the hero, that one is Harry Potter and James Bond and Aragorn and all these other phantoms from youth, that one is full of impossible possibilities. No, no, no. One is not. At all.
The algorithm does seem to be saying that the most important things in the world are psychopaths and losers and bad artists.
Maybe the superhuman demand made on the psyche by technology results in us seeking pacification by the very same technologies that create those demands…
Another edifying banger.