I’ve read OVERconnected, Derek Thompson’s “The Anti-Social Century”, and I’ve now just finished a horrifying New York Times article on people genuinely believing they’re part of The Matrix because ChatGPT told them so. Look, aren’t we adults? Aren’t you supposed to stop believing in Santa Claus? Get a fucking life. And one of these cooks was actually a married psychologist? Look, if you feel your marriage is hitting a rocky patch, maybe get a licensed marriage and family therapist to help you do couples’ counselling? Who the fuck are these people? What about their social situations makes them psychotic? You know, at least with a physical cult, you’ve got a group, all dressed in neat garb, all doing fancy rituals, there’s typically a charismatic leader—how do you get sucked up into cult shit by a chatbot? I’m not sorry when I say, you know what, we’re better off with those people cutting themselves off from society, at least a child’s imaginary friends don’t tell them to be dickwads and take ketamine.

I’m trying to keep my mind clear and unbogged by too much information. (My girl is doing the same, too.) So I’m reading this non-fiction material at a slow, steady pace… I admit that I am far more distracted these days, than I was pre-COVID, pre-smartphone. I’m trying to dig myself out of that. And I believe I’ve been making steady progress…

I can’t believe one of the problems I’m having with my smartphone is now I have too much to read. You’d think having unbridled access to a digital library might be good and convenient, but… …I find myself ignoring my apartment and spending more time and focus on reading than I should. It’s not the ebooks that are giving me problems. It’s all the online articles I have access to, too. I have to limit that. No more big Atlantic or NYT features on my phone. Strange having to block a news site on my mobile device, but…

I can’t wait for my fiancee to finally emigrate here. I don’t want to be stuck on a screen just to communicate with her.

Just wanna note this somewhere—

According to Canadian legal tech firm Clio, in 2023, 19% of North American law firms were using AI. In 2024, that number jumped up to 79%, with two-thirds reporting weekly use, and one-third reporting daily.

Not sure how accurate that is (i.e. how did they get their sample?), but honestly, I can see the upward trend being a thing. It worries me. The process of coming to justice and compromise isn’t an MadLibs where you just insert whatever noun and verb into a pre-constructed grammatical structure. That’s not how thinking works. I don’t want the equivalent of my smartphone keyboard’s predictive dictionary making my legal arguments for me. Who the fuck is happy about this? Where is this ethical? And yeah I know certain documents are fairly copy-and-paste, but we literally have Word Templates for that. Coming to the conclusion of an actual argument, via ChatGPT? Disgusting.

I want people to be honest and principled, but maybe that’s too much to ask. I don’t really feel “at home” on the Internet anymore.

The Internet has just made everything a lot faster. Too fast, there isn’t time to digest anything. To look over and question and ask if what you’re seeing and what you’re even being told makes sense, and who benefits from the story that you’re being told. I kind of wanna get away from everything. I miss the days when “the Internet”, for me, just meant playing games on Postopia, looking at art on DeviantArt, and reading way too much Wikipedia articles and discussion pages. The whole thing now just feels like an information battlefield where even the most innocuous of publications are just fights for clout.

It’s starting to come to me now, what I wanted to write about, as tired as I am (it’s just before 1 AM now)... So, John Oliver and his Last Week Tonight crew did an episode on AI slop, and its flooding of the Internet with misinformation, and sometimes active disinformation. It’s not just the wannabe-viral crap that concerns me. Because you’ve never needed AI to lie to people, you can just use lies told by real people, omission of inconvenient facts… Just because it comes out of a real person’s mouth, doesn’t mean it’s real. It sucks to look at the state of the world now, and I bet you don’t even have to go that far—you can see it in your personal lives.

I’ve finally got my new blog up an’ ready. It’s strange. I wanted to start this up for the longest time, for at least half a year now, but now that it’s up… I don’t know what to do with it. I mean, my first entry. Earlier I had all these thoughts about what I wanted to write down; maybe I took too long and I’m just too tired to think, now. Swam, chatted with neighbours in the jacuzzi, prepared the Crock-Pot, bathed… I don’t know if I want this to ever “devolve” into just a daily log of what I did on a day-to-day basis. That’s not what I want.