I just finished reading a work of fiction by Niall Williams called This is Happiness. In the novel, which is set in Ireland, an old man remembers a short but pivotal time when he was 17. The main character Noel Crowe goes to …

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Can you tell the difference?

In the video below, I discuss rhetoric in the context of such AI-generated imagery. As a collective form of reasoning, rhetoric helps us to sort through uncertainty together. I’ve included a short quiz in the video for you to guess along with.

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Recently, I’ve been pondering the merits of writing online.

If you’re trying to grab people by the eyeballs, it is a real Squid Game out there, a battle royale of memes and gifs, Tiks and Toks. Nobody, myself included, seems to have the eyes or minutes required for mere text. All online wr…

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I learned about the film from a reliable friend who sent me this Front Porch Republic article. The trailer was good enough to induce me to spring for a Netflix subscription:

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Anna and I are grateful for your support of this ongoing (Substack) experiment. We occasionally make music together. As a token of our appreciation and as the year comes to an end, we wanted to share the following songs that we have composed.

The first is entitled “Baptism,” which Anna has been working on diligently over the past few months. I …

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People will ask me: “Will you watch the ball drop?”

“No,” I tell them and try leave it at that.

They think something is wrong, so I, to relieve the tension, add: “There is no ball to watch.”

They are confused. I relieve no tension. Surely there is a massive glowing sphere impaled on a magnificent metal antenna in Times Square. Undoubtedly, there will be thousands upon thousands cramming into that tiny square. And we know now that there will be just as many cameras. Every person is both a camera and screen, a reflector and reflected. There are dozens of security cameras there, too, I am sure, beady black orbs wedged into corners and hung from posts. There will be “official” cameras sent at the directive of ancient news stations and rising podcasts. There will be drones buzzing over that enormous mass of a crowd. There will be satellites in space, I am sure, snapshotting that glowing ember of a city block as the year passes.

People will relate all this to me, and still I will insist, “There is no ball to watch.” Many will walk away at that point. The patient and kind will stay for a while to try to flush out my derangement. But they, too, will eventually depart. Only the argumentative, those people whom I admire and adore, will begin to press me in their annoyance.

“Why are you sour? If we strapped you to that awesome orb, you would feel it drop. Come now. Be like us. Watch the ball drop.”

They hand me a phone. I look at the screen. It has a talking head in the foreground, a ball on a spire in the background, and a timer in the upper right-hand corner.

“The ball hasn’t dropped in many years,” I say, as if air is being squeezed from my being by some gigantic hand that envelopes my whole body save my head. I hate to bear this news.

“Look,” the most aggressive of the lot says to me, “a compilation of the ball dropping over the past 30 years.” It’s a video. I watch the montage. I have no choice. There’s Carson Daly and Beyoncé and Kimmel and Fallon and the orb spewing rays of light through an infinity of confetti.

“Every year we do the same thing,” the aggressor says. “If there is no ball to watch, what would you say we’re doing?”

The big hand squeezes me again. I am a human bellows. The flame grows.

“You watch nothing,” I wheeze and then inhale. I’m dying. I can feel it.

“You gaze into a void,” I wheeze again. These people don’t realize they’re killing me.

After I die, they strap my body to the ball, as in all fairness they said they would. The big hand that squeezed me, that King Kong palm, puts me there. They put all of us there, those who deny The Ball. We are just tiny blemishes, impossible to see at a distance.

Justin Bonanno is a writer and assistant professor. He wishes you a happy new year. He won’t be watching the ball drop this evening, but that is neither here nor there.

I’ve been told that a Catholic entrepreneur and AI evangelist has argued that St. Thomas Aquinas would have used artificial intelligence. Therefore, I structure this quiz around that contention.

#1

Question: Would St. Thomas Aquinas have used AI?

Select the best answer.

A) Yes. For starters, it would have dispensed with the need for all those pesky memory palaces. Further, he would’ve been able to get rid of his lazy scribe, Reginald, who had been a major pain since day one, always complaining about the food and the stench of his cell. It is easy to imagine the Dumb Ox sitting there in his stone oasis, all alone before his glowing screen, chicken pecking the prompts that would eventually become the extraordinary Summa Theologiae (or Pange Lingua).

B) No, he wouldn’t have. He didn’t even write for himself. He dictated to Reginald (see above). It’s not only that he wouldn’t have used AI. He wouldn’t have used a computer, word processor, pen, pencil, or even paper for himself. He had a dialectical cast of mind, which was at first a dialogical mind. Thinking was an ars disserendi, an art that occurred through one’s own speech in relation to a living interlocutor. Do you mean to tell me that Reginald never stopped him to say that wasn’t making any sense? And you mean to tell me that our sycophantic, commercially driven AI platforms would have interrupted him mid sentence to put him back on track? Maybe, you say. But Aquinas would never have used AI for the same reason he would never have had a LinkedIn profile. He would’ve sniffed out the commercial interests at play from square one.

C) It is impossible to know, so stop co-opting Aquinas to sell your software as a service.

D) It is reasonable to think he would. You stop co-opting Aquinas for your head-in-the-sand tech pessimism.

E) Calm down. Aquinas would have used AI for some things and not for others. AI is a neutral tool, and all that matters is how you use it. For example, he would’ve used AI to summarize Aristotle’s Organon (as we all know, it is much too long and much too dry). He would’ve used it to translate Avicenna’s commentary on the Stagirite from Arabic to Latin. He would’ve used AI to prepare his taxes, create silly memes, and find recipes for special avocado dip to serve at the annual University of Paris faculty potluck. But he would never have used it to actually compose his texts, for Aquinas would have been tuned in to how the means of composition always affect the composition itself.

F) None of the above.

#2

Thought Experiment

Imagine St. Paul can travel through time. He’s there in modern day Antioch, but he still needs to contact the budding church in Rome. Does he dictate a handwritten letter to them telling them he’s coming? Does he send them an email? Does he facetime them? Presupposing he does the last, does he still even need to go visit them in person? In the flesh? Explain your answer.

#3

Put a checkmark next to all of the following statements that are true:

• Gerard Manley Hopkins would have used AI to write his poetry.

• Gerard Manley Hopkins would have used AI to find ideas for his poetry, but not to actually write it.

• Dante would have used AI as his guide through Hell instead of Virgil.

• The Devil himself, an angel of light, would have used AI to flatter Adam and Eve into thinking they could know everything and therefore do anything they wanted. “And ye shall be as gods….”

#4

Essay Questions

Choose one of the questions below and respond to it completely in full sentences.

A) Pick one of the following technologies and describe what effect (if any) it would have had on the community life at the University of Paris in the 13th century: email, printers, HVAC, whiteboards, the modern grading system (As, Bs, Cs, etc.), learning management systems (Blackboard, Canvas, etc.).

B) Explain, briefly, what the students at the University of Paris would have thought about the idea that the point of going to school is to acquire a prestigious credential that enables you to get a high-paying job (or any job at all, for that matter). Further, explain whether these students, if transported to our current historical moment, would demand training in AI. Describe the ends or purpose to which these students would apply AI.

C) Explain what Aristotle taught about the Delphian knife. Compare the Delphian knife to at least one technology in use today. To get the maximum number of points, you must use the terms “exchange value” and “use value” in your reply. For bonus points, compare it to ten or more technologies and explain what all of these artifacts have in common.

D) Explain what the terms “imprimatur” and “nihil obstat” mean. Where would you find these terms originally? Look up what “black box” means in the context of technology, especially with regard to AI results/output. Can you put a digital imprimatur or nihil obstat on a black box? And would answering this question give us any better indication of whether St. Thomas Aquinas would have used AI?

Justin Bonanno is an Assistant Professor with interests in rhetoric and artificial intelligence. His favorite sort of quiz is the one that provokes but that doesn’t need graded.

The image above is from the Demidoff altarpiece by Carlo Crivelli (1476).

Many people assume that technological change is inevitable and that we can’t go back in time. We’re told we can’t “undo” technological progress. But there are two noteworthy examples of cultures that tried to do precisely this: the ancient Greeks and the Japanese. The former resisted arrows (as cowardly), while the latter adopted guns then gave them up (for honor’s sake).1 Antón Barba-Kay introduces these examples of resistance (or regression) but also concedes that they were only temporary. Effectiveness, convenience, comfort, and especially survival make technological adoption necessary—not optional.2

If I’m near death because of a bacterial infection, am I not going to take penicillin because of my thoughts on scientism, the overmedicalization of everything, or my views on how antibiotics destroy necessary gut bacteria? No. I will take the penicillin.3 As Barba-Kay puts it, “As there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no techno-skeptics in matters of practical necessity, in matters that are (often) a dire matter of survival.”4 What is important to note here, though, is that many (if not most) of our practical exigencies in this life are not matters of survival.

My point in this article is to articulate those rhetorical moves that make resistance to carte blanche technological advance impossible. The trade war with China, which is often framed as a precursor to an actual war with China, is perhaps the most glaring example of how adoption of AI is rhetorically framed as a matter of practical necessity because if we do not adopt it, or so the argument goes, then we will not “survive,” either financially or perhaps at all (if an actual war breaks out). Similarly, we must (or ought) to “train” students in AI because if we don’t, they will not survive (financially). We must deregulate AI, or so the argument goes, if we wish to perpetuate America’s techno-empire.5

Magic Red Buttons

Now, we already regulate certain technologies. You need to be a certain age to drive a car. You also need a license and insurance. You cannot (at least in the US) hurdle yourself down the highway as fast as you want without potential legal repercussions. Perhaps ironically, the speed limit is itself justified in the name of safety and survival, both for yourself and for others. You will see signs that say, “Slow down, save lives.” You will not see signs that say, “Speed up, every man for himself.”

But when it comes to AI, we are being told to speed up. China is gaining on us. Within your own institution, you may hear whisperings that your competitors in the marketplace are gaining on you. To hesitate now would be foolish and perhaps fatal. In the least, as the old saying goes, “Resistance is futile.” Sam Altman has said there’s no “magic red button” to stop the coming wave of AI.6 But one wonders exactly what Mr. Altman is doing sitting there in front of Congress, dressed nicely in his suit, courting Trump at the White House, and making his PR rounds on all the major podcasts. It’s almost like he’s trying to prevent people from pressing some sort of “magic red button” that would prevent him from slowing down, if not stopping on the shoulder to show us his license and registration.

We ought to attend to the “fatalistic determinism” that makes technological change, especially the adoption of AI and ever-expanding digital technologies, seem inevitable.7 The identification of the rhetoric at play is important because if we believe we have no agency, then we really have no agency when it comes to technological adoption.

Determinism is always a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I believe I have no free will, then in a strange but real way I have no free will. Or at least I severely limit my ability to act. Further, determinism always affects my responsibility (or lack thereof). If technological adoption is inevitable, then I am not responsible for it. If it cannot be helped, there’s no one to blame. Or, if anyone is to blame, then we’re all to blame.

But this sort of logic obscures the particular interests at play with the adoption of any given technology. Robert Moses, the NYC “power broker,” didn’t have to set the height of highway underpasses at a certain level in order to prevent inner city buses from reaching certain upper-class neighborhoods. But he did. And he was responsible for it.

Resistance is (Not) Futile

Proponents of deregulation and AI adoption may be correct in arguing that certain technologies can ameliorate the plight of certain individuals, make us more competitive in the global market (especially with China), and even make foreign nations dependent on us for our technologies.8 But they exaggerate when they claim that every scenario is do-or-die, or that somehow all this technological upheaval will flow in as an unmixed blessing.

We need regulation like we need someone to actually hold the chainsaw instead of letting it dangle by a rope as it whips around in the air. We need regulation because we have no good reason to trust our surveillance capitalists. Are you addicted to your phone? Are your kids addicted to theirs? How have the past twenty or so years panned out for your local community, especially small businesses? Deregulation is, of course, of a piece with antitrust legislation. “We will police ourselves. Trust us,” they say. Tell that to the many businesses that must crawl on their faces to humbly entreat Google and Amazon and YouTube to have mercy on them. “Please don’t deindex me.” “Please don’t leave me a bad review.” “Please don’t take me off algorithm.”

We are in a strange economic game where certain competitors are both referees and players. Or, if we are to take them at their word in their appeals for absolute deregulation, what they want is a game with no referees whatsoever. How would you like to play a game with no referees? Maybe you’d thoroughly enjoy it. Maybe you’d detest it. In any case, it would depend on how big you are and how many players you have and what you get when you win.

While it is true that we cannot roll back the clock in one sense, it is also true that we periodically roll it back. It is called Daylight Savings Time. Our methods of timekeeping, like every other technology, is conventional and could therefore always be otherwise. It’s not that we can’t go back in time. We already know that, so they may as well stop talking down to us. It has nothing to do with time travel, but rather with observing the time (or times). “Son, observe the time, and fly away from evil,” the book of Ecclesiastes reads. I take this ancient author’s point to mean that we’re finite. Our time here below doesn’t run on forever. At some point, our clock will wind down, and the question we’ll have to answer before the Judge is: “Were you responsible?” Where there is no freedom, there is no responsibility. We must grant that our freedom is bounded: by others, by the laws of nature, by the laws of civil society, by our own bodies, and by our attention spans. But we have freedom, nevertheless, even if it is bounded.

These tech giants have freedom, too. The one thing they don’t appear to like, though, are constraints, or, in the words of Altman, magic red buttons. If there are no magic red buttons, then we may as well create one. For the red button means “stop.” And while we cannot pause the world (nobody is contesting this), we can at least pause the roll out of a fancy new software as a service at our local elementary school or at our local municipal government or at our own local business enterprises, or at whatever is left of them.

The magic red button isn’t so difficult to make as you might think. Here in Florida, it would involve not voting for Byron Donalds as the next governor of this state and instead giving your vote to James Fishback who, even if he isn’t outright in favor of regulation (maybe he is, I haven’t looked), at least he wants to put the kibosh on AI data centers. Some will disparage resistance—which we desperately need if only to buy crucial time for thought and deliberation—as Luddism. But the genius (and hope) of our present situation is that we don’t have to smash the machines as Ludd and his men did. It’s far easier, in some ways, than that.

We can begin by simply not using them. As commercial services, digital technologies (like muscles and the brain itself) wither through non-use. By not using these platforms, you don’t give them any of your data. With no data, which is their lifeblood, they have nothing to “optimize.” With no one to stalk, they have no one to show ads to. Starve these machines of collective attention on a vast scale, and you will see how inevitable they actually are.

Here many well intentioned “realistic” folks would probably object that I’m being impractical and maybe even hypocritical. They might add, “Look, he publishes his screeds on Substack, a digital platform. Hypocrite!” But why can’t we read posts like this one using a VPN, Brave browser (not perfect but better than Chrome), and through our laptops (instead of our omnipresent smartphones)? Why can’t we be more deliberate about how we engage with these technologies? The answer can only be that we’re imprudent, intemperate, or both. We will have no one to blame but ourselves if our tech overloads succeed in their campaign to deregulate. We will have to obey them. We will have to deregulate, if only because we have first failed to regulate ourselves.

Justin Bonanno is an Assistant Professor interested in the intersection of rhetoric, technology, and economics. This past Sunday, he used his phone for a total of five minutes, and he had an excellent day.

Not long ago I sat down with my old friend Nick Capone to talk about rhetoric, language, artificial intelligence, and the Word (with a capital “W”).

I chart a bit of my intellectual journey, my conversion to Catholicism, losing my wisdom teeth, some theological dimensions of speech, mockingbirds, Helen Keller, wearing clown suits to funerals, having ChatGPT soften your tone, irritation at Cormac McCarthy’s lack of punctuation marks, the rhetoric of inevitability, idolatry, and more.

Near the end, I mention a book that’ll ruin your life.

I hope you find it worth your time to listen. You can watch the whole thing here:

Anyone is free to make a meme of me saying that snakes have pits on their faces (around 41:30).

God bless you,
jnb

I am writing this post as a response to the conversation between Substackers Helen Roy and Samantha Stephenson regarding the internet and how to use (or not use) it. I would like to add my own perspective to the debate because I think there is some unexplored territory to be discussed. I thank both writers for their articles and for their response to God’s call to write and raise questions, especially within the context of motherhood.

Roy’s piece, “The Medium is the Message,” began as a response to the killing of Charlie Kirk. She asks how a crisis of embodiment may be contributing to recent acts of violence as well as other “compulsive behaviors, be it physical abuse, binge eating, alcoholism, drugs, or promiscuity.”

Roy problematizes our excessive and obsessive internet use, which leads to a profound experience of disembodiment. This disembodiment has, for Roy, “become the default mode as our lives migrate more and more into the online spaces.” Here she cites our many compulsions to post and scroll, experiencing “all possible human emotions one after the other without pause, so much feeling, in fact, that you end up feeling nothing at all.” Then she offers the quote that gives her article its name:

If the medium is the message, the message is mass psychosis…we are poisoning ourselves and inviting others to poison us.

In choosing to name her article “The Medium is the Message,” Roy relates this “mass psychosis” to Kirk’s killing and modern man’s attempt to return to the body. Such acts of violence toward self and other attempt to “end the loneliness of disembodiment by performing an anti-sacrament: trying to incarnate the self by desecrating flesh, theirs or another’s.”

Roy defines embodiment as “a state of mind-body connection, a sense of mental presence in time and place, undistracted and unmediated.” For Roy, embodiment requires an appreciation of the physical, “local, vernacular, analog ways of doing life.” She claims embodiment as a particularly Catholic principle, citing our theology of an incarnate God and grace mediated through the physical realities in the sacraments of the Church. She also calls upon Pope Leo to offer an encyclical on proper use of technology in the context of a “digital revolution.”

While Roy offers some really interesting phenomenological thinking, she ends her article with this caveat:

To be clear, I love the internet. I don’t think Ludditism is the necessary answer to all this. One of the earliest lessons I have to teach each of my children is the difference between a tool and a toy. Scissors are good and useful. The internet is good and useful. Scissors are potentially, in fact very likely, harmful in the hands of a toddler.

She goes on,

I suppose the challenge is being able to recognize our own level of spiritual maturity, our ability to moderate our use of a highly addictive tool, and to know whether we are being tempted and to what.

It is particularly Roy’s assertion that the internet is a “tool” that I take issue with. The internet is much more than a tool, and it is quite possible that the response of the Luddite is warranted. Before explaining why, let’s first consider Stephenson’s article, “The Myth of Disembodiment: A Response to Helen Roy,” which appears as a guest post on Roy’s Substack under the title: “I was wrong(ish) about the internet.”

Stephenson’s main claim is this: “The ubiquitous metaphor of ‘disembodiment’ for our screen-based society is a fundamentally flawed framework. It isn’t that we leave our bodies behind when we immerse ourselves in the screen. It’s what we do to our bodies by living life online that’s killing us.”

Stephenson argues that because we are mind-body composites, disembodiment is the same as death. For her, we are not experiencing disembodiment but “an altered physiological state that produces a cascade of symptoms both physiological and emotional in nature.”

She goes on to describe the evils of the internet, but not before saying, “Roy and I agree that the tool that is the internet has enormous potential—for good and evil alike. The tools of the internet era are highly addictive because they’ve been engineered to be. They create a neurochemical reaction in the brain that triggers a behavioral addiction…We pull the lever and the chemicals rush in.”

Stephenson suggests that we “pull the opposite lever” by challenging the body, getting out in the sun, spending time in nature, and engaging in our communities. All wonderful suggestions. But Stephenson’s reminder that we attend to and care for our bodies does not do enough to answer the existential questions posed by our technology use.

For, though Stephenson is right that on a scientific level we don’t ever actually leave our bodies and do in fact harm them when we spend too much time online, Roy is right that phenomenologically we rend the body from the mind when we enter the online, digital space.

To be embodied is to be bound by time and space. For much of our history, messages could only move as fast as our bodies could travel (by foot, by horse, by train, etc.). With electric communication, we transcend the limits of the body. We communicate instantly. We travel across the world instantly.

So, what does this phenomenological experience do to our thoughts, our actions, our ways of educating people, our ways of raising children, or—as Roy points out in her posts about social media and motherhood—our ways of viewing our own vocational call? And how does our thinking of the internet as merely a tool limit our understanding of what is at stake?

Let’s go back to the beginning. Roy entitles her article, “The Medium is the Message.” But neither Roy nor Stephenson note the original source of this phrase: Marshall McLuhan. He was a Catholic and a Thomist. His famous phrases include “the medium is the message” and the “global village.” Reading McLuhan can be confusing and esoteric at times, perhaps because, like Louie Pasteur trying to convince his colleagues of the effects of unseen pathogens, McLuhan was trying to convince his contemporaries of the unseen effects of media on our forms of thought, culture, and education.1 Most of his work is oriented toward churning up the soil, probing for fresh insights, getting people to think beyond our taken-for-granted assumptions about what media are.

So, in the spirit of McLuhan, and with the help of Antón Barba-Kay, I hope to break up some of the simulacra preventing us from seeing digital media for what they are.

The Internet and the AI-Bomb

For Antón Barba-Kay, media connect us, and tools help us do things. Barba-Kay’s 2023 book A Web of Our Own Making argues that the recent transition to the reign of digital technology goes beyond other such transitions (i.e. silence to speaking, speaking to writing, and writing to printing) because it ushers in a new medium and a new tool (Web, 8). Digital technology combines knowledge with use, and not only does it combine the two, but it combines them on an infinite scale. Barba-Kay writes,

Unlike steam engines or wheels, it [digital tech] performs no particular task. Its usefulness stems rather from the fact that is can be used to measure, analyze, and reconceive all possible tasks. Its scope of action is, for this reason, completely unspecified and unrestricted. (Web, 7)

He goes on,

…it [digital tech] is as much a medium (a way of communicating) as it is a tool (a way of doing). Nor is it just one tool. Its versatility of purposes is so astounding as to make it a master tool. That is, it does not help us to perform just one specific task better (which is what most tools do), but it is the means by which any number of tasks are transacted… Aristotle called the hand the “tool of tools” (meaning: the tool by means of which all tools can come to be of service). But the hand is now getting a run for its money. (Web, 24)

For Barba-Kay, digital technology is not just a tool, but the “tool of tools,” containing all other tools within it.

Barba-Kay is careful to distinguish the internet from digital technology.2 Nevertheless, the internet is a form of digital technology. It doesn’t just help us communicate with one particular other on the other side of the world (as the telegraph did), but it connects us with everyone in the entire world at every possible moment. “To be connected to the network,” says Barba-Kay, “is to be everywhere in reach of everyone. To amend Marshall McLuhan: The connection is the message” (Web, 7).

Digital technologies like the internet combine the power of a tool of tools and a medium of maximum connectedness, and this makes them seismic in ways only comparable to the bomb (Web, 18).

For Barba-Kay,

Both [the internet and the bomb] are forms of maximum shared connection, of common destiny, purpose, or fate; they are the doomsday ends of our secular eschatology. The global village is manifest in bomb and internet: the bomb is the internet in body, the internet is the bomb in spirit…One of them represents oblivion; the other memorializes every human thought. The one is heat to incinerate suns; the other is light containing the world in thought. They are, taken together, the omega answering the alpha of creation. Both are machines for killing time, no wonder. (Web 19)

I want to make sure nobody missed this: The bomb is the internet in body, the internet is the bomb in spirit. If that doesn’t give us pause as human beings, as parents, and as Christians, I don’t know what will.

Tools vs. Environments

This brings me back to McLuhan. McLuhan is part of a tradition called media ecology, which, as the name suggests, studies media as environments. McLuhan was particularly incensed when people around him claimed that media are just neutral tools that can be used for good or for ill. He called this “the numb stance of the technological idiot.”

Neil Postman, another brilliant media ecologist, explains it this way in his book Technopoly:

Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean ‘ecological’ in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same habitat minus caterpillars; you have a new environment…This is how the ecology of media works as well. A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything. (18)

A new technology ushers in a new world, a new service environment, new possibilities for communication and thought, new dynamics in relationships that never existed before. Postman writes,

New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop. (Technopoly, 20)

Our new technologies change how we think, with whom we think, and what we think about.

I find this ecological metaphor extremely helpful for thinking through the various technologies we invite into our lives and our homes. Anyone who has ever worked in an office where management has decided to implement a new “tool” to increase efficiency knows that such tools often change everything. A new way of “punching in” for work may become a new source of anxiety, a new avenue for surveillance, a challenge to trust, an affront to an employee’s sense of agency, and the list goes on.

Take another example, one my mentor in grad school liked to give. The dishwasher enters the home where dishes used to be done by hand. Maybe it was installed to save the family time, to more efficiently deal with the piling dishes. Maybe that is exactly what it does. If we are thinking in terms of helpful or unhelpful tools, this might be where our analysis stops. You’re awesome, dishwasher!

But if we zoom out and view the dishwasher as an environment within an environment, we might notice that certain conversations no longer happen. You know, the ones where one person washes and another person dries? Similar to the disappearance of Postman’s caterpillars, the addition of a new technology has totally reoriented clean-up time and has disrupted a ritual that might have been integral to the family’s relational dynamic.

Finally, this example from my own life. We used to have a TV mounted on the wall, front and center in the middle of the living room. Underneath was a hutch to hold the DVD player, movies, and other tchotchkes. Now, both the TV and the hutch are gone, replaced by an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, an altar, and a piano. If we think in environmental terms, we can see how each medium carries its own biases, constraints, and potentialities. These choices are not neutral. They encourage and discourage certain behaviors, certain ways of thinking. They open up new possibilities for a space, and they orient us as individuals, families, and cultures.

So, what is the point?

Our metaphors help us see things, but they also prevent us from seeing them. For Stephenson, Roy’s metaphor of disembodiment obscures the priceless role of the body in everything we do. I am personally troubled by the use of the term “tool” when it comes to the internet and the digital age in general.

When we call the internet a tool, we are invited to think of how it is like a pair of scissors, which can help us cut out intricate paper snowflakes or poke out our sibling’s eye. When we think of the internet as an environment, or even as a bomb, we can see how handing a toddler a phone is more like handing them the codes to a nuclear arsenal.

Roy does point to our responsibility as internet users “to know whether we are being tempted and to what.” In Cardinal Robert Sarah’s book The Power of Silence, Nicholas Diat and Sarah visit the abbot of the Grand Chartreuse to discuss silence. Here is what Dom Dysmas de Lassus had to say that has particular import for us and our families:

Temptations have multiplied; discernment and renunciation have become more necessary than ever…We have a cloister and a Rule that protects us. Someone who lives in the world must find his own cloister and his own rule; this is not something obvious! (Power of Silence, 229).

Those lucky chumps up there in the mountains get silence built into their vocations, they get a rule that protects them. We as men and women living in the world must create such spaces, must form a cloister and a rule of life for each of our families such that we do not get swept away with the tidal wave of information, mindless consumption, and foolishness that is characteristic of our culture and our time.

Media make us like themselves. They transform us as we use them, just as any other environment transforms us when we step into it (we become warm when we enter a warm room, we become like the friends we hang out with, etc.). If we really believe this to be true, then we can start to see our role as world-builders, not as tech optimists or Luddites.

We may not be able to set up shop in some ancient monastery, but we can make our homes domestic churches, beginning with what we want ourselves and our children to see, and hear, and touch, and taste there, and beginning with who we want them to become. For, as we know, we become what we behold.

Some people in the comments section expressed their discontent concerning the means employed in crafting these sculptures:

Micah was not happy:

Joeseph wasn’t the only one to feel a bit let down:

Is Micah right to be annoyed? Are Joeseph and Seria correct in their cynicism and sadness?

There’s a point I want to make here about the symbolism of behind our labor. But before I do that, I have one more example.

Wyoming’s CNC Monastery

A bunch of Carmelites in Wyoming are building a monastery in the Gothic style.

It is a thing of beauty, especially given its splendid mountain setting.

Like something out of A Canticle for Leibowitz, they’re using CNC machines to help carve the stone and to complete some of its features.

When the brothers learned it would still cost $80 million to finish the project, they realized they needed some way of cutting costs. Brother Isidore Mary explains,

And when we were looking at the quotes, the biggest line item was always the stonework. So we said to ourselves, “Well, carving the stone can’t be that difficult. Why don’t we just learn to carve the stone ourselves? And that will take care of most of the cost.”

To be clear, I am grateful that they’re building a Gothic monastery, especially in such a picturesque setting as Wyoming. I don’t have a better answer to their $80 million problem.

Yet, we still need to ask a few questions.

Why would some people have one reaction when they see the Gothic monastery (depending on their orientation, everything from joy to gratitude to being impressed) and quite another once they learn how it has been made (let down, less impressed, sad)?

Or, in the very least, why might some people feel conflicted about this CNC monastery?

Necessitous Versus Symbolic Labor

The reason I think people feel conflicted by having a machine do the sculpting is because of the symbolic dimension of work.

A brief digression on human motivation is in order.

You can make sense of a man’s actions in all sorts of different ways. You can use psychology to try to understand why an assassin would etch a certain message into his bullet casings after murdering a CEO or public figure. You could use economics or sociology to do likewise.

But symbolism itself can serve as a motive for human action.

The man’s killing and his bullet casings themselves are symbolic. His victim and his manifesto were chosen for a (symbolic) reason. The Twin Towers stood for something. Removing another’s cranium, as jihadists are wont to do every now and then, likewise means something, just as removing the head of an organization after a major crisis or sports team means something.

All iconoclasm is symbolic in nature.

This brings us to the symbolism behind sculpting something out of stone.

In his Permanence and Change (henceforth P&C), written just after the Great Depression, literary critic and rhetorician Kenneth Burke distinguished between what he called necessitous labor and symbolic labor.

It is one thing to climb a mountain to get somewhere. It is quite another thing to climb that mountain for the sake of climbing it.

Burke writes,

We might make a distinction between necessitous and symbolic labor by suggesting that drudgery is purely necessitous labor, whereas symbolic labor is fitted into the deepest lying patterns of the individual. Symbolic labor is more pious. For instance, it would be ‘necessitous labor’ if one climbed a mountain simply because he had to get somewhere and the mountain stood between him and his destination. The same act would be symbolic if the mountain happened to have some deeper significance to the climber, so that the act of climbing was in itself an accomplishment. If one has ever read the experiences of a confirmed Alpinist, he will appreciate the difference, for in the case of the alpinist the incidental dangers are not merely endured, they are courted. (P&C 82)

The magician, stuntman, and performer David Blaine is a great example of a man who does not merely endure dangers but courts them.

If the goal is just to simply create a Gothic sculpture, then the means to that end do not really matter. But Burke would remind us that the means themselves do matter since they have symbolic significance.

Per William Rueckert, a commentator on Burke’s work, hobbies are a great example of symbolic labor. We do not pick up hobbies out of necessity. The weekend warrior cutting wood in his garage with his father’s old power tools is doing something more than sawing lumber and gluing it together. He’s making an altar with all the piety and devotion he can muster.

This distinction between necessitous and symbolic labor helps us to better understand the meaning of a difficult task—whatever that may be, whether lifting weights or being buried up to your neck and having fire ants climb all over your face (as the case may be in some indigenous puberty rites). Say what you want about the relative uselessness of having a student write a ten-page essay paper. But it is a rite of passage, for better or for worse. And the meaning of that writing is what we lose when we have a machine do it for us.

Im(piety) and the Technological Psychosis

“Piety” is another one of Burke’s key terms. Carving a stone sculpture with a machine feels like an act of impiety because of our sense of what goes with what. Stone signifies difficulty (in addition to permanence). To make the traditionally difficult easy is to commit an act of impiety (in Burke’s sense of the term).

We should not necessarily esteem something merely because it is difficult, of course, as I believe Aquinas reminds us somewhere. But oftentimes we do because of what that difficulty means. There’s a reason the Guiness Book of World Records exists. It is a catalogue our many symbols of difficulty. In many ways, the Guinness Book is a testament and ode to Difficulty.

The utilitarian philosophy of our era (as of Burke’s) hinders us from recognizing the symbolic dimension behind actions. Burke calls this emphasis on means (or uses) over ends the technological psychosis. He doesn’t call it scientism or experimentalism or secularization. But these terms point in the same direction. Here’s Burke:

Though it is customarily traced back to the Copernican astronomy, Galilean physics, and the Baconian rationalization of the inductive method, the [technological] psychosis cannot be said to have fully blossomed until the time of the Utilitarian philosophers in England, the first country to feel the full shock of systematic technological development. The doctrine of use, as the prime mover of judgments, formally established the secular as the point of reference by which to consider questions of valuation. (P&C 44-45)

Burke identifies Darwin as “within the spirit of this psychosis when discussing the development of moral and intellectual traits as tools or weapons in the struggle for existence” (P&C 45). In other words, a man believes this, that, or the other thing because it is useful (to the propagation of his genes, for his fitting into a particular niche, for simply surviving, etc.). We can always discount a man’s argument or belief system by saying that it merely serves his interests, because it is useful to him (P&C 45).

Nowadays, the technological psychosis provides the rationale for choosing this degree over that one. What matters is that the degree is useful.

A man uses a machine to make stone sculptures because it is useful.

The utilitarian emphasis on use (or utility) confuses the significance of means in relation to ends.

Burke gives the example of classifying a lion, traditionally a masculine symbol signifying honor, power, and kingship. Despite these symbolic connotations, it may be more useful for the biologist to classify the lion as a feline (a cat), traditionally a feminine symbol.

Burke also discusses cutting down a large tree. The technological psychosis would have us disregard what that tree means or stands for.

It is possible that much of the anguish affecting poets in the modern world is due to the many symbolic outrages which a purely utilitarian philosophy of action requires us to commit. In primitive eras, when the utilitarian processes were considerably fewer, and more common to the entire group, definite propitiatory rituals seem to have arisen as a way of cancelling off these symbolic offenses. In the magical orientation (so close to that of poetry) if the felling of a tree had connotations of symbolic parricide, the group would probably develop a corresponding ritual of symbolic expiation. The offender would thus have a technique for cleansing himself of the sin he had committed. (P&C 72)

Burke continues,

The purely utilitarian attitude toward such acts, however, requires that one introduce a distinctly impious note: one cannot permit the symbolic overtones of meaning to function at all. If the tree falls, and one feels a strange uneasiness, one must shut off the queer remorse by an impatient ‘Nonsense! –this is only one tree, I needed it, and there are plenty of others to take its place.’ The non-utilitarian attitudes of the act are dismissed—one must perform the act as a ‘new man’—and when the great oak falls, only the poet, bewildered and plaintive, may permit himself to feel that there is somehow a deeper issue here than the mere getting of firewood. (P&C 72)

If we feel a “strange uneasiness” at a machine carving St. Joseph, we might simply dismiss it as nonsense. But Burke would invite us to listen to that odd feeling, to try to discern why we feel the way we do at such an act.

Utilitarianism (the technological psychosis with its emphasis on use above all else) commits acts of symbolic impiety. It shaves off the transcendent dimension that always attends our actions, leaving only the immanent (and useful) behind.

What is more is that such acts of impiety against the symbolic order can be felt as painful and therefore require “symbolic expiations … to counteract the symbolic offenses involved in purely utilitarian actions” (P&C 74). That symbolic expiation, Burke would suggest, is what a poet does when he or she writes poetry.

If some local utilitarians decided to cut down a great tree for economic purposes, one should expect the resident poet to take up his or her pen. Or, in the very least, that sad sap Romantic painter would have a new subject for a landscape. Or the melancholy songwriter would at last have a theme for a ballad. As Johnny Cash would sing in “Paradise,”

Daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the green river where paradise lay?
I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in asking
Mister Peabody’s coal train done hauled it away

Well, the coal companies came with the world’s largest shovel
They tortured the timber and stripped all the land
They dug for the coal till the land was forsaken
Then wrote it all down to the progress of man

Oh, daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the green river where paradise lay?
I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in asking
Mister Peabody’s coal train done hauled it away

Automation and the Future

Why does all this matter?

These considerations about the symbolic dimension of work will only become more important as automation takes hold in our hypnotized age. I think we’re in an AI bubble right now. There’s an extraordinary amount of hype and snake oil being sold to the public.

Nevertheless, many are predicting that many trees will need to be cut down in order to make way for our AI utopia. And by “trees cut down” I mean “workers fired” and “reservoirs drained” (both financial and aqueous) in addition to actual trees cut down.

Our technocrats do not possess the requisite vocabulary for making sense of what this is going to do to people at the symbolic level. We have some foreshadowing of what to expect. We’ve seen how some react to stone sculptures made with machines (and how others might write these reactions off).

Let us conclude.

Why did the chicken cross the road? From the perspective of necessitous labor, crossing the road was simply a means to an end (i.e., the other side). But when it comes to symbolic labor, the chicken crossed the road because it was the most dangerous and difficult road he could find. Plus, all the other chickens were watching, including Roosty McRooster, who just the other week had crossed an eight-laner blindfolded.

Why did the technocrats build the gigantic leech of a datacenter in the middle of Texas? From the perspective of necessitous labor, it was simply a means to an end (i.e., the God of Compute, the Silver Bullet in the Trade War). But as it pertains to the symbolic dimension of this act, it was because it was the most expensive and daring thing they could dream up. Plus, all the other countries were watching, including China.

The more terrifying consequence of Burke’s observations is that the building of gigantic data centers (much like the building of gigantic atomic bombs) will itself take on symbolic significance for those involved. Deprive the world of the symbolic dimension and the non-utilitarian, if you insist. But prepare yourself for men to write their poems by other means.

Justin Bonanno is an Assistant Professor and student of rhetoric. He’s currently reading Kenneth Burke, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Scott Meikle. For more on the symbolism of human action (and symbolism as motive), see the work of Kenneth Burke and Hugh Dalziel Duncan.

“But I would have them whom the lightness or foolery of the Argument may offend, to consider that mine is not the first of this kind, but the same thing that has been often practis’d even by great Authors….” – Erasmus, The Praise of Folly

“One thing only is needed for the pictorial narrator—a knowledge of physiognomies and human expression.” – E. H. Gombrich, Art & Illusion

Author’s Note: What follows is a work of fiction. More precisely, it is a satire, a form of comic exaggeration, a caricature. It will not please everyone. It may offend some. The question is: Do you recognize what you see in it?

Bob was a self-made man. Having spent his youth around the casinos in Old Vegas, Bob knew certain types of people would spend inordinate amounts of time in front of the same slot machine hoping to hit it big. To such people, trips to the bathroom and movements of the bowels could only be one thing—a costly inconvenience.

You see, in the end, Bob simply wanted what all successful entrepreneurs want.

He wanted to provide Value.

“What difference does it make whether you sell toothbrushes, machine guns, or diapers?” he would say.

“They are all, strictly speaking, tools. They can all be used for good or for ill.”

Bob had contemplated getting the following Dale Carnegie quote tattooed on his forearm: “There is no indignity in selling adult diapers.”

Things didn’t go smoothly at first. If I’m being honest, they never went smoothly.

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The barrier to entry for the adult diaper market was (and still is) quite steep. At first, he tried wholesaling. He found a seller in South Argentina. He paid $10,000 for 20,000 diapers. Imagine his face when upon receiving the product he realized the diapers were more than 30 years old. The seller, a Mr. Jorge Bonaparte, disappeared without a trace.

Many years later, Bob would tell this story to a group of high schoolers at an assembly.

“I thought to myself,” he said, “if I ever found Bonaparte, I would flay him alive.”

One student raised his hand and asked what he did with the diapers.

The diapers worked well enough, but they had yellowed over the years. He sold a handful. His Amazon reviews suffered badly. He had to rebrand.

He vowed never to do business with a South American ever again.

Bob went to many workshops and seminars in those early years. Many of these events had little to do with the nuances of running a business and more to do with working up the self-esteem to run one. He ate canned tuna and lived off government aid, something which in later years he would come to criticize (the government aid, not the tuna; he loved tuna until the very end, eating a can a day on top of his vinegar salad).

Once, he attended a Tony Robbins seminar.

He met a beautiful woman there named Picaponte. She read him some poetry she’d written. She played a song for him on the piano about a woman named Peg and all her troubles. She tried to explain the importance of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, and Rhetoric—especially the importance of reading each in light of the other. She kept using the words “modernity” and “postmodernity.”

He said he didn’t know what those words meant.

Picaponte said, “Let’s get out of here. We can run away together, get married, and start a family.”

Bob was checking his email and didn’t hear.

Picaponte got up and left.

He never saw Picaponte again.

Some say she went to Argentina.

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Martin is a former academic, farmer, “Sophiologist,” and maybe even a real, live Gnostic. I don’t know about that last one, so don’t quote me on it, but he did post this to his Substack Notes, an excerpt from this article by Sam Granger:

Martin was a former professor at two Catholic schools, Marygrove College and Siena University. The former is now out of operation, and the latter is slated to close at the end of the 25-26 Academic Year.

If he is a Gnostic and has been for quite some time, it makes you wonder how much Marygrove and Siena cared about their Catholic identity. Honestly, I’m not sure. Would that have anything to do with their demise?

In any case, there’s a great deal to sympathize with in Martin’s article. Indeed, as per Martin, there are Marxist and feminist maniacs who somehow get hired, receive tenure, and then proceed to torture students/colleagues with the most jargon-ridden, abstruse, hot garbage you could ever possibly imagine.

At an academic conference this summer, I watched a keynote speaker explain how “we” (whoever that is) formerly thought only men were persons, then we included women as persons, then we included deer as persons (I’m not kidding), and so—perhaps in the near future—we will include toasters as persons. I walked out of the room after this comment, so I’m not sure where this guy went with his toaster persons.

Everyone has to suffer through these peoples’ pontifications as they, in Martin’s words, “play professor.” It is obnoxious and soul crushing, especially if you’re a student who disagrees with what they’re saying. Moreover, I share Martin’s reservations about university e-sports (video game) programs as tactics to lure students to campus who have no business being there.

Thus, I would say, yes, good riddance to those who hijacked the liberal arts for their own purposes and with no care whatsoever for their students’ professional prospects and development as human beings made in the image and likeness of God.

But when it comes to his basic argument, Martin goes too far. He thinks that liberal arts colleges are dead. Technically, right now they’re the living dead, according to him. They’re zombies still admitting students and going about business as usual. Speaking in a prophetic tone, he writes:

“Since 2020, almost fifty liberal arts college in the US have closed, and this is a trend that will probably continue until only a prestigious few are left.”

And:

“The ecosystem of American higher education is in complete collapse. It will never recover.”

And:

“There is no fixing this.”

And:

“… the liberal arts college as we have known it is at its end. And this demise will surely afflict even the Harvards and Princetons of the realm. It’s a lab leak of a human-manufactured pathogen.”

“The jig, at long last, is up.”

I write what follows in a spirit of goodwill. My guess is Dr. Martin means well. But I’m not convinced the jig is up. The chickens will come home to roost for some institutions, perhaps even most, especially those that drifted from their initial mission and especially their religious identity in a bid for “free inquiry.”

But they key word is some—not all.

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The Need for Narratives

Admittedly, institutions of higher education need money to keep going. Lots of it. But without a life-giving narrative, raising money (or paying for school, if you’re a student) is superfluous.

Nobody gives money to an institution they don’t believe in—let alone time or attention.

Interestingly, Neil Postman outlines the absolute necessity of narrative to education in his 1995 The End of Education. In this book, Postman doesn’t defend liberal arts, per se, since his concern is public education. Yet, much of what he says has merits for those seeking to defend the liberal arts.

Postman writes,

Without a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention. This is what my book is about.

Postman is simply reiterating what Nietzsche and Victor Frankl have already articulated: If you have a why, you can bear any how.

Unlike many, Postman realizes that educators must provide a rationale for what they’re doing. They must justify their practice. And they need to get used to doing so on a regular basis, especially since they face competing narratives that want them shut down, closed, terminated, etc.

Even though Postman published The End of Education thirty years ago, the strange gods (aka the counter narratives) he mentions still hold sway in disputes about the merits of the liberal arts. These counter narratives include, among others, the gods of Economic Utility, Consumership, and Technology.

False Gods (and Real Zombies)

These strange gods are the real zombies, not liberal arts colleges, per se. They come back year after year to assault the liberal arts and to lure students, faculty, and funds away.

They’re the living dead.

And they, too, are a human construction, “a lab leak of a human-manufactured pathogen,” to quote Martin again.

The god of Economic Utility is perhaps easiest to understand in the context of the liberal arts. It is the one that impresses parents and politicians most. If you do well in school, so the story goes, you will receive your reward: a job. As per Jane Jacobs, some view education as the credential that you need in order to board the train of the economy. It is a ticket to be punched.

In this particular narrative, you are your work.

Now, to be clear, I want my students to get good jobs, to find meaningful work, and to be able to provide for themselves and their families after graduation. A good liberal arts education can help students to do this. Absolutely. One highly successful business owner told me a few years ago that he preferred students with liberal arts degrees because they could perceive situations and problems more holistically than their more specialized and highly technical counterparts.

However, the god of Economic Utility does not give us a reason for going to school. Read that line again. It doesn’t. It does not fill us with a lasting purpose, and for this reason, many students do not believe in it.

The god of Economic Utility owes its prestige to its linkage with the god of Consumership, wherein you are what you can accumulate. For Postman, advertisements serve as parables to educate people into what they should desire. And most often, these parables situate technology as the solution.

Like all religious parables, these commercials put forward a concept of sin, intimations of the way to redemption, and a vision of Heaven. This will be obvious to those who have taken to heart the Parable of the Person with Rotten Breath, the Parable of the Stupid Investor, the Parable of the Lost Traveler’s Checks, the Parable of the Man Who Runs Through Airports, or most of the hundreds of others that are part of our youth’s religious education. In these parables, the root cause of evil is technological innocence, a failure to know the particulars of the beneficent accomplishments of industrial progress.

The god of Technology is an offspring of the narratives of Science and Progress. In fact, it equates human progress with technological progress. Technological progress is inevitable, as the story goes, and therefore we must fit ourselves into technology’s constraints, whatever those might happen to be. We must train students for this technological reality, whatever it is.

Woe to those who do not heed this god!

What does the narrative of Technology promise? According to Postman,

It [the narrative of Technology] demolishes the assertion of the Christian God that heaven is only a posthumous reward. It offers convenience, efficiency, and prosperity here and now; and it offers its benefits to all, the rich as well as the poor, as does the Christian God. But it goes much further. For it does not merely give comfort to the poor; it promises that through devotion to it the poor will become rich. Its record of achievement—there can be no doubt—has been formidable, in part because it is a demanding god, and is strictly monotheistic.

A bit further down Postman adds,

Those who are … inclined to take the name of the technology-god in vain, are condemned as reactionary renegades, especially when they speak of gods [narratives] of a different kind.

Postman’s argument, and one which I would agree with, is this: We need to learn how to think about technology. It is important to know how to use technology, yes. I’m very grateful for the man who taught me HTML in high school. Learning to use technology matters. But it’s not the most important thing.

We have to realize that technology giveth and technology taketh away, that there are winners and losers with any given technology. Technology simultaneously enhances and obsolesces aspects of human experience. Liberal arts colleges can serve as environments for interrogating the demands that technology makes on our lives. A liberal arts classroom ought to be a place for discussing and diagnosing the oftentimes taken for granted effects of technologies on our perceptions, institutions, and communal forms of life.

Like Postman, I’m not opposed to giving students useful skills. I want them to find a job and live a reasonably comfortable existence post graduation. I want them to be able to support themselves and their families.

But a liberal arts degree offers more than this—not less. School is a civilizing institution. It produces culture. It is more than a credential. It transforms your thoughts, your perceptions, your habits, and maybe even your morals.

The AI Death Blow

A word is in order about artificial intelligence. The Druid suggests that AI will deliver (or has delivered) the death blow to the liberal arts colleges that are merely limping along.

I'm not convinced that AI will destroy the liberal arts.

I am convinced that those who do not understand AI (LLMs, to be more accurate) and the purpose of the liberal arts will eventually capitulate to AI, destroying their very identity in the process.

Every technology tends to disrupt existing patterns of education. But that doesn’t mean education disappears. For the longest period of time, to be educated meant to know how to read and write. I think there are merits in learning to read and write at advanced levels, obviously. I’ve commented on what we lose with generative AI when it comes to writing.

However, in my estimation, we are entering an era where the spoken word will once again be ascendant in the academy, as it should be. LLMs retrieve the oral exam as a mode of testing knowledge. The close connection between speaking well and thinking well (and even acting well), the tie between eloquence and wisdom, once again has a chance to assert itself as it did in universities of old.

To those who would say AI seriously threatens the educational establishment, all I can do is cite a poem that Postman himself includes:

Mr. Edison says
That the radio will supplant the teacher.
Already one may learn languages by means 
             Of Victrola records.
The moving picture will visualize
What the radio fails to get across.
Teachers will be relegated to the backwoods.
With fore-horses,
And long-haired women; 
Or, perhaps shown in museums.
Education will become a matter
Of pressing the button.
Perhaps I can get a position at the switchboard.

An educator in the 1920s wrote this. Postman wryly comments:

I do not go as far back as the introduction of the radio and the Victrola, but I am old enough to remember when 16-millimeter film was to be the sure cure, then closed-circuit television, then 8-millimeter film, then teacherproof textbooks. Now computers.

Then he says, “I know a false god when I see one.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Why should I believe that? And so what?

Remember that despite their absolute necessity, narratives do not solve technical problems. Postman quotes Theodore Roszak:

Free human dialogue, wandering wherever the agility of the mind allows, lies at the heart of education. If teachers do not have the time, the incentive, or the wit to provide that; if students are too demoralized, bored, or distracted to muster the attention their teachers need of them, then that is the educational problem which has to be solved—and solved from inside the experience of the teachers and the students.

Educators would do well to regularly establish a purpose for their enterprise.

The death of the liberal arts is not an administrative problem. It is not an administrative problem because it is not a technical problem. Postman writes, “The problem, as I have been saying, is metaphysical in nature, not technical.” By metaphysical, he means the purpose or end of education.

Every teacher must ask, “What are we doing this for?” Education’s purpose simply cannot be taken for granted.

We must give students a reason for why they're doing what they're doing.

I had a mentor in grad school tell me early in my academic career that the two most important questions that you could ever possibly ask a teacher are:

1. Why should I believe that?

And

2. So what?

Unfortunately, you can’t get away with these questions in every classroom. But you will be encouraged to ask them (and others like them) in classrooms where teachers genuinely care about making you a more questioning, thoughtful human being.

The classroom needs a dialectical and rhetorical tension to keep it from disintegrating. These questions help establish that tension.

Every classroom needs a problem, an exigence, a reason for being. It needs less textbooks and more debate. It needs an edge to cut with. It needs a discussion early in the semester as to why we're doing what we're doing and the fact that we could always be spending our time otherwise.

It needs a regular injection of the outside world to keep it honest.

As Dorothy Sayers knew, the point of teaching students the liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic is to equip them to defend themselves beyond the walls of the academy. Now is as opportune a moment as ever for the liberal arts to be making sense of the rhetorical and political and technological developments going on all around us. As the word “liberal” in liberal arts suggests, the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic are arts befitting of free persons.

Is the jig really up?

In this piece, I disagreed with Martin’s claim that all liberal arts colleges were zombies. On the contrary, the liberal arts have a unique contribution to make to the common culture. I suggested such institutions could survive if they understood the need for a common narrative. Moreover, I indicated that educators needed to be aware of the counter narratives at play: the gods of Economic Utility, Consumership, and Technology.

I leave it to you to decide not only whether the liberal arts are dead but also whether they ought to be dead.

There are some who prefer that young adults simply enter into the workplace, what Josef Pieper called “the world of total work.”

There are some who, despite their millions of dollars and despite their alienation, nevertheless insist that the liberal arts have nothing to offer. What could the liberal arts possibly teach us about living a meaningful life?

There are some who, having been in the trenches as a teacher and having seen the dire state of affairs in the liberal arts, have called it quits and condemned the whole endeavor as bankrupt.

Should we believe them? I don’t think so. I don’t think we have good reason to. But I do think we owe them a reply.

Justin Bonanno is an Assistant Professor with a PhD in Rhetoric. The preceding essay is his own opinion and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of his employer.

Peg was awake. Wendi, the most advanced AI midwife known to post-GPT5 man, told her to get some sleep, to call when contractions were five minutes apart for a whole hour. But sleep is hard when you know you are in labor. So, Peg was awake.

She stared at the ceiling, stared at the wall, stared at her husband, who was also awake, because he knew Peg was in labor. Peg’s husband had just finished reading Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. He told Peg to stop trying to go to sleep; he told her to try to stay awake as long as possible instead. He also told her that if she had a why, she could survive any how.

So, Peg tried very hard to stay awake. Instantly, her body began hovering several feet above the bed. Her husband didn’t seem to notice, or if he did notice, he was not in the least bit concerned. Peg had, of course, done this before.

While Peg was hovering, she had a sort of waking dream. She dreamt she was floating out the window of her second-story room to her neighbor’s house. The neighbor, Pam, had had her baby a few short months ago. Through the window, Peg could see the baby asleep in a small bassinet next to Pam’s bed. Pam, too, was sleeping.

Peg hovered into Pam’s room. She decided to shake Pam awake and ask her a question.

“Psst. Pssst. Pam. PAM!!” Peg whisper-shouted. Pam’s eyes opened very large and stared silently back at the specter of her neighbor, Peg.

“I need to ask you something,” Peg said.

“You best be quick Peg, or I’ll smack you with this here frying pan and you won’t see the sunball come up again this side o’ the grave,” Pam said, very seriously.

“When did you call your midwife when you were in labor with baby Inga?” Peg asked.

“I well-nigh didn’t,” Pam replied. “Benjamin here” (now she gestured to her sleeping husband) “insisted I call e’en though I’d been contracting eight minutes apart goin’ on 36 hours. That baby weren’t budging a smidge, so seemed to me.”

“So, you called at eight minutes? Did the midwife tell you to call back when you got down to five minutes?” Peg asked.

“Said to call her back in one hour. And bless her heart if she didn’t get in her car and start drivin’ straight away.” Then Pam added, in a low whisper, “She’da had a intuition.”

Peg drew in her breath. “Then what happened?”

“Pulled up to this very house not thirty minutes later. Inga popped her head out this side o’ the watery world a few minutes after that.” Peg was still hovering over Pam’s bed. She hesitated before she asked one final question.

“Pam, was Wendi your midwife?” Wendi was almost everybody’s midwife.

“Oh, no! I call on ole Bess for aid in my time o’ need. A real, flesh and blood human bein’. Don’t confidence them artificials none.”

A brief silence.

“Damn,” said Peg.

—

Peg gasped and found herself back in bed next to her husband. She wasn’t sure if she had actually hovered away or if Frankl’s wisdom had proven true. “Did I…?” She started to ask. Instead of finishing the question, she rolled over again. She plucked her phone off the nightstand and dialed Wendi.

“Hello?” Wendi said.

“Wendi. This is Peg. My contractions are still eight minutes apart. What should I do?” Peg was sweating.

“Try to sleep. Call me again when contractions are five minutes apart for about an hour. You’re doing great! Would you like me to play you some reassuring music to help you relax?”

Peg heaved a sigh of relief. “Yes, yes please do. Thank you, Wendi.”

Bette Midler’s “From a Distance” began playing over the line.

From a distance we are instruments
Marching in a common band
Playing songs of hope, playing songs of peace
They are the songs of every man

God is watching us, God is watching us
God is watching us from a distance

Anna Bonanno is a writer, editor, devoted mother, and loving spouse. She don’t confidence them artificials none.

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Karen Hao’s (2025) Empire of AI covers the rise of OpenAI and its many political and social dimensions. The book begins with the fiasco at OpenAI over Sam Altman’s temporary firing. It ends by picking this thread up again, this time detailing potential reasons for his removal as CEO.

In between, the reader learns many things—how OpenAI got its data, the fallout between Elon Musk and Altman, how tagging data affected the lives of foreign workers in Venezuela and Kenya, OpenAI’s relationship with Bill Gates and Microsoft, the environmental impacts of data centers, Sam Altman’s appreciation of The Mind of Napoleon, effective altruism versus effective accelerationism, and more.

Apparently, actor Andrew Garfield was (or is) reading Hao’s book in preparation for his role as Sam Altman in the upcoming film Artificial, which Wikipedia labels as a “biographical comedy drama.”

After reading Hao, I’m not quite sure how this movie is going to be framed as a comedy. Just look at that book cover (above). But whatever.

The book has clear political assumptions and implications. In many ways, Hao has the same ideological bent as many left-wing academics. The metaphor of an “Empire” is one that she runs with, and it has clear colonial/postcolonial resonances.

Yet, even if you’re conservative, she still has a lot of valuable things to say. You can’t read this book and think with Ted Cruz that deregulation of the AI industry is a good idea.

Ergo, I recommend this book, and I’m grateful that Hao wrote it.

Read it if you want to get smarter about the political and social implications of AI. In today’s post, I’ll rehearse some of the more memorable details from it.

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I have a book review of Karen Hao’s Empire of AI coming soon, but in the meantime and with the recent release of OpenAI’s GPT-5, I wanted to introduce you to someone whose ideas help illuminate some of what is going on out there in the big, wide, hairy, scary world.

Gary Marcus, a dissident voice in the AI community, provides provocative insights into the limitations of deep learning (more on what this term means below). One of his Substack footers describes him as “a skeptic about current AI” who “genuinely wants to see the best AI possible for the world—and still holds a tiny bit of optimism.” He’s not anti-AI. In fact, he’s pro AI. He’s just an advocate for a different paradigm than the one dominating at present. I don’t agree with everything he says, but he’s a necessary voice in this current historical moment.

Today’s article gives you some insight into where Marcus stands and his place in the history of debates on AI. These debates matter because they help identify limitations in LLMs (ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, etc.). If you’re wondering about what AI can and cannot do, if you’re skeptical of grandiose promises from Big Tech, heck, if you just want to have a more intelligent appreciation of the current technopolitical context, you have to read on (and when you’re done with this article, share it with your friends and go read Gary Marcus for yourself).

Lastly—this piece is not written for a technical audience. I have a background in computer science, but I think understanding the rhetoric surrounding AI is important for everyone. Please don’t pigeonhole yourself as “techie” or “non-techie.” You need to try to understand what’s happening in AI right now (as well as the debates that led to this moment) since with near 100% certainty, AI will affect your livelihood, the sort of medical treatment you receive, the country you live in, and so on.

Competing Approaches to AI

Marcus is an advocate for the “neurosymbolic” approach to AI. In order to understand what “neurosymbolic” AI means, we need to understand how AI debates have played out in the 20th century. Specifically, we need a history of the “symbol-manipulation” and “connectionist” camps. The neurosymbolic is a blend of the two.

Marcus has a very succinct account of these two paradigms on his Substack. It merits learning about how these two traditions differ since one of them is currently fueling all the AI hype:

One is the neural network or “connectionist” tradition which goes back to the 1940s and 1950s, first developed by Frank Rosenblatt, and popularized, advanced and revived by Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio (along with many others, including most prominently, Juergen Schmidhuber who rightly feels that his work has been under-credited), and brought to current form by OpenAI and Google. Such systems are statistical, very loosely inspired by certain aspects of the brain (viz. the “nodes” in neural networks are meant to be abstractions of neurons), and typically trained on large-scale data. Large Language Models (LLMs) grew out of that tradition.

The other is the symbol-manipulation tradition, with roots going back to Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, and John von Neumann and Alan Turing, and the original godfathers of AI, Herb Simon, Marvin Minsky, and John McCarthy, and even Hinton’s great-great-great-grandfather George Boole. In this approach, symbols and variables stand for abstractions; mathematical and logical functions are core. Systems generally represent knowledge explicitly, often in databases, and typically make extensive use of (are written entirely in) classic computer programming languages. All of the world’s software relies on it.

Back in the 90s, IBM built a computer called Deep Blue that beat chess champion Gary Kasparov . Deep Blue was built in accordance with the symbolic manipulation tradition. It could follow rules reliably. If you were unaware of the differences between the symbolic manipulation and connectionist paradigms, you might think that today’s advances in AI are simply a continuation of that progress and that today’s AI is crushing it at chess. But you’d be wrong.

Today’s LLMs do not function like Deep Blue, and thus they are very bad at chess. They don’t understand the rules of the game and cannot consistently follow them. Lacking the ability to abstract and generalize, they also don’t have the ability to form world models, what Marcus defines as “persistent, stable, updatable (and ideally up-to-date) internal representations of some set of entities within some slice of the world.”

In short, connectionists imitate the human brain, and their success depends largely upon the sheer amount of data that can be fed into the machine. The more data, the more impressive the results (up to a point). The folks at OpenAI once said their secret could be written on a grain of rice with just one word: “Scale” (Hao 146). Scale is the key word for the connectionists. In this case, they’d argue that with enough compute, data, etc., you’d never be able beat AI in a game of chess. But current research has proved otherwise.

If I’m not mistaken, Hao has also discussed the so-called breakthrough among AI programmers that the human brain was simply larger than other brains; what we needed was more processing power (a larger digital brain) to bring AI to the fore. Bigger brains means more connections means more intelligence. It is a very simple formula. (Let’s forget for the moment that the animal with the biggest brain is the sperm whale). As it turns out, to use the language of necessary and sufficient, it is necessary for you to have a brain in order to learn but not sufficient. You need symbols, too.

Back in undergrad, I received instruction in the traditional, symbol-manipulating approach to computer science. I studied Boolean logic, discrete mathematics, object-oriented programming, querying databases, and more. In this tradition, you know what the code is, and that code is recalcitrant unless manipulated. Logical operators dictate what works and what doesn’t. You get errors, and those errors tell you what you need to fix. As Marcus writes, “Neural networks are good at learning but weak at generalization; symbolic systems are good at generalization, but not at learning.” Both Karen Hao and Carr likewise talk about the symbolic manipulation and connectionist camps (Hao in Empire of AI and Carr in Superbloom).

Marcus advocates for the both/and position: “neurosymbolic AI.” He writes,

The core notion has always been that the two main strands of AI—neural networks and symbolic manipulation—complement each other, with different strengths and weaknesses. In my view, neither neural networks nor classical AI can really stand on their own. We must find ways to bring them together.

So, to reiterate, LLMs (ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, etc.) come out of the deep learning and therefore connectionist tradition, a completely different way of running a computer and simulating intelligence than the symbolic manipulation camp.

The Wall: Stakes Low, Perfection Optional

Marcus’ “Deep Learning is Hitting a Wall” appeared in March 2022. A lot has happened since then, but don’t let the age of the article fool you. Marcus explains in the article that deep learning works great when the stakes are low and perfect results are optional.

He writes:

Deep learning, which is fundamentally a technique for recognizing patterns, is at its best when all we need are rough-ready results, where stakes are low and perfect results optional. Take photo tagging. I asked my iPhone the other day to find a picture of a rabbit that I had taken a few years ago; the phone obliged instantly, even though I never labeled the picture. It worked because my rabbit photo was similar enough to other photos in some large database of other rabbit-labeled photos.

Similarly, AI works great for movie recommendations and even for predicting what you want to search for on Google. Nobody dies (so far as I know) if you don’t pick the right movie or get the right search results.

The problem with deep learning occurs when you need a high-stakes medical diagnosis to be 100% correct, when you want the truth with absolute precision. When life and limb are on the line, you need to move as far away from probability as possible and towards (scientific) demonstration. The connectionist Geoffrey Hinton explained in 2016, “If you work as a radiologist you’re like the coyote that’s already over the edge of the cliff but hasn’t looked down.” The implication was, of course, that deep learning would put the radiologist out of the job. Marcus gives us reason to believe otherwise for the simple reason that LLMs cannot generalize.

Does this explanation of the limitations of AI resonate with your experience? And how would you feel if deep learning were being used to “read” your daughter’s MRI scans?

Elsewhere, Marcus has observed how these machines cannot recognize part/whole relationships. The key example that he uses is of a bike. As human beings, we can understand how all the various parts of the bike relate to the whole bike itself.

A connectionist-based machine cannot parse where one part of the bike ends and another begins:

Marcus’s work demonstrates two things. First, metaphysics is helpful for unpacking the situation with AI, even though I haven’t seen him argue this specific point. People aren’t going to like to hear this, but it is undeniably true that knowledge of part/whole relationships and abstraction (generalization) help you detect the limits of the present AI paradigm.

Second, Marcus teaches us that you can use history to do philosophy. What does Gary Marcus have to do with Etienne Gilson? The latter used the history of philosophy to do philosophy (in The Unity of Philosophical Experience). Gilson identified the limits of philosophical systems by showing their logical consequences. Marcus is doing something similar (albeit in the history of computer science).

Mocking the Skeptic

After the release of Dall-E 2, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman both mocked Marcus (see the Hao book for more on this):

The “mediocre deep learning skeptic” is Marcus, of course. I couldn’t find the Brockman post, but even Musk trashed Marcus by recirculating a meme about “deep learning” hitting a wall:

Perhaps ironically, even the memes that Altman and Musk (re)tweeted are not perfect (except in the sense that they are fitting rhetorically for the situation). The same prompt (“give me the confidence of a mediocre deep learning skeptic”) would produce different results every time. That’s why you’d prompt it again, right? To get a different result.

In this way, our age of AI actually embodies the opposite logic of industrialism, which is predicated on sameness and the mechanical reproduction of objects that are exactly alike.

Anyone who has studied philosophy seriously can see in the opposition between these two camps the fundamental opposition between the idealist and materialist. The idealist being interested in generalizing behavior from a set of hard and fast rules, and the materialist deriving knowledge from a series of individual examples. Though he has championed the “neurosymbolic” route, Marcus has elsewhere advocated for a Kantian (idealist) approach to AI.

In the very least, what is playing out at present is a dispute between idealists and materialists as to how we (human beings) gain knowledge of the world around us. The digital materialists like OpenAI have won the attention and financial investments of the great majority. Not only do their practices embody the connectionist tradition (scale, scale, scale), but Altman himself has said, “Intelligence is just this emergent property of matter, and that’s like a rule of physics or something.”

You are just your mind. Your mind is just your brain. And your brain has been randomly configured over the centuries to produce this crazy epiphenomenon called consciousness. Ergo, you are just a random epiphenomenon in an otherwise chaotic cosmos.

But the question is: Are they correct?

GPT-5 (and Grok) Snafus That Demo Limitations

Check out these screenshots from GPT-5’s latest release.

Here’s the image just a bit larger:

Here’s my own version of the experiment (I used the same prompt as Jarovsky):

I wonder what the weather is like in Machingan, Le Poo, and Nell. As with Marcus’ bike, these maps can’t quite correlate parts and wholes. Things are pretty crazy between Ohio and Virginia but absolutely bananas on the east coast.

We all know that there’s no state with the initials of IM sandwiched between Ohio (not OHO) and Virginia, you say. Who cares? Well, as commercial applications of AI ramp up (and they are really ramping up), the question becomes: What happens when you use AI to draw your property line surveys? Would you trust its results?

Math, of course, is also another great example where there’s just one correct answer, and the rough sketch has no place. Here are some of the more comical ones that came out when GPT-5 was released:

In OpenAI’s defense, Grok didn’t fare much better:

Note that if you try these prompts above, they will almost certainly have been remediated. There’s no telling if OpenAI patched their system to fix them. Like Truman in The Truman Show, every now and then we see a light fall from the ceiling, and we ask, “Hey! What’s happening?” Only to have that light swept away and all the glass cleaned up: “Nothing to see here.”

Divergent Thinking and Satisficing

The current run of AI may in some ways be good for divergent thinking, the laying out of many possible alternatives (though, I’m not 100% sure I like this idea, either, since it means displacing our divergent thinking capacities to a machine). Give me 100 ideas for a business name or 5 possible diseases with these symptoms allows the user to prompt the machine for ideas—not to settle on one, per se.

For those who do use AI for the solution as such, depending on the context, they may simply be satisficing, a term that refers to finding solutions that will simply get the job done even if they are not the most ideal. When you use a frying pan to pound a nail, you’re satisficing. When you use duct tape to cover your broken car window, you’re satisficing. The means are not ideal, but they are sufficient for your purposes. The same goes for today’s dominant AI—it is good for satisficing in certain circumstances.

Digital Duct Tape and Control

As someone who programmed websites and helped to manage servers, I can tell you that I used pre-built code and satisficed whenever possible. Time is short, and I need to get the job done. My guess is that there were (and are) many others like me. The question is whether or not the code you’re using can get do what you need it to do. Given the fact that OpenAI scraped Github and Stack Overflow, they have an enormous database of code that can be configured and reconfigured to make things that work like digital duct tape.

What about graphic design? Would you use AI to generate your logo? It depends. If you just need to satisfice, AI could do it for you. But you shouldn’t use today’s AI if you want granularity of control.

In this context, I’m referring to how much control I have over both parts and wholes. In Photoshop, I can change individual pixels. With today’s generative AI, I can do no such thing. I simply have to ask it to try again, and it may or may not fix the issue.

Marcus’ “stakes low/perfect results optional” explains why, in my opinion, alongside the spread of misinformation (i.e., “errors”), the most important use of AI into the future will be the creation of memes. I say this to be deliberately provocative. Memes, however, are low stakes by definition and rely on their imperfections (think here of the many crudely drawn memes made in MS Paint like Rage Comics, NPCs, etc.). Their imperfections make them more appealing.

Can you imagine spending $500 billion on data centers just so that we could make better memes? What if that was actually the case? If it weren’t for Kenyans being paid $2/hr to help tag the data fed into these beasts, the situation would be comic beyond measure.

Turning the Delphian Knife

These limitations may not disappear in the future or at all. I often hear people say “This is just the beginning” with the understanding that programmers will simply figure out how to solve these problems. But what if they don’t? What if the limitations are built into the current way of doing things?

Clarke’s 3rd law is apparent at the present moment: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Yet the current AI magic could have serious real-world implications, costing life and limb and jobs if people do not pay attention to its limitations.

Per Marcus, we’re reaching the tail end of the problems scaling could solve.

Here’s where rhetoric and philosophy (and metaphysics, especially) come in. If it is in the nature of connectionist models to be unable to generalize, and if the great majority of the new wave of AI today is built in accordance with the connectionist model, then the machines we have today cannot generalize.

Average people, if they care about their job and the future of their organization/country, need to understand these limits. Appreciating them is not meant to denigrate them outright. I would be the first to champion a tool that could detect and cure cancer. Unfortunately, I fear that LLMs may be closer to the Delphian knife. Scott Meikle explains Aristotle’s thoughts on this ancient device:

The Delphian knife seems to have been a crude tool which could serve as a knife, a file, and a hammer, and its advantage was that it was cheap. So what is wrong with the Delphian knife is not that it is used in exchange, but that it is made to be exchanged and is bad at its job for that reason. The construction of this ‘tool’ is therefore not part of the proper process of tool construction, where a thing is made to do a job. Hence it is not even really a tool, a fortiori not really a knife, and a fortissimo not a good knife. Its use value has been compromised and diminished by design out of considerations of exchange value. It has been deliberately constructed to perform more functions than it can perform well (Meikle, Aristotle’s Economic Thought 56).

By aspiring to “general” intelligence, LLMs have moved further away from specific uses (e.g., like Deep Blue playing chess). And what do we end up with? A digital Delphian knife, duct tape for the web, something with many mediocre uses when stakes are low and perfection optional.

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Justin Bonanno is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communications and Literature at Ave Maria University. His PhD is in rhetoric, but he also writes about technology and its impact on culture. By subscribing here as either a free or paid subscriber, you give him the motivation to keep writing.

The other day, I posted a photo to my Substack that I’d found on Flickr Commons. I labeled the photo roughly as I found it in the Commons, “Fulton Street Dock, Manhattan skyline, Manhattan – 1935.”

18.5 hours later, I got a comment from someone that said: “Is that why there is a fat dude in a hoodie, a guy on an electric scooter from [sic], and an ai generated half sunk ship?”

Huh. Now that you mention it, I see it, too.

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The fat guy in the hoodie is in red, the guy on the scooter in yellow, and the “ai generated half sunk ship” in orange:

Ignore the ship. The picture was taken in a harbor, so a ship wouldn’t be out of the ordinary. For now, just focus on the figures outlined in red and yellow.

Indeed, these figures do look as described. Granted, they’re a bit blurry. But the guy in the background does look like he’s on an electric scooter, and the chap in the foreground looks like he could be carrying a phone.

The strange thing is, I know this photo is legit. It came from the New York Public Library. See for yourself:

Upon closer inspection, you can begin to parse out what’s really going on. The chap in the foreground is in galoshes. If you look over the shoulder of the scooter guy, you’ll notice someone else pushing a cart or dolly.

So, either one of two things is happening here:

1. The New York Public Library uploaded an AI-generated image, and the photographer Berenice Abbott (who took the photo) doesn't exist.

2. We're seeing things that aren't there, and AI image generators are changing the human eye at a fundamental level.

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I embedded two clips from the interview in this Substack post, but if you have trouble playing them below, you can find the first here and the second here.

Among other things, the two discussed:

• The future of education

• Changes to the workplace (and the notion of work)

• How old people aren’t going to like AI (but how they’re going to deal with it because that’s just the way the cookie crumbles)

• Humans being born outside the womb as commonplace in the future

• AI tokens as currency

At one point, Von asked,

“Do you guys feel like the new government kind of? Or do you feel like the government is still like a real thing?”

Altman said he didn’t feel like the government in any way. He remembers when Trump bombed Iran and thinking to himself, “Oh, that’s what actual power looks like….” However, if the Internet is to the soul what the atomic bomb is to the body (as per Anton Barba-Kay), then OpenAI and the US Government aren’t so different, you see.

To his credit, Altman handled the interview well. Near the end, Von said how much he appreciated getting to meet Sam. Talking with him made him more hopeful (and perhaps “whimsical”).

At the end Altman describes the path of AI as a winding road. We just can’t see around the curves. This metaphor, however, differs from the grand vision he presented throughout the interview.

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Winding Road, Arc, or Both?

The god of Progress is alive and well in our technologists’ rhetoric. Altman mentioned it multiple times throughout the interview.

Yeah.

So much for that winding road where we can’t see around the corner. Apparently, Altman can see the future, and it looks like a nice upward ascent.

In 1953 Richard Weaver wrote,

It is best to begin boldly by asking ourselves, what is the ‘god term’ of the present age? By ‘god term’ we mean that expression about which all other expressions are ranked as subordinate and serving dominations and powers.

Weaver continued,

Its force imparts to the others their lesser degree of force, and fixes the scale by which degrees of comparison are understood. In the absence of a strong and evenly diffused religion, there may be several terms competing for this primacy, so that the question is not always capable of definite answer. Yet if one has to select the one term which in our day carries the greatest blessing, and—to apply a useful test—whose antonym carries the greatest rebuke, one will not go far in naming ‘progress.’

Without the hope of Progress, how else could you get $500 billion to build data centers in the US?

You see, we’ve already been sold this narrative. Christopher Lasch called it the true and only heaven. It is the upward arc of history, the progressive vision of the future.

What’s Weaver’s answer to such rhetorical bewitchment? Dialectic, of course. We have to ask: “What do you mean by Progress, Sam? Progress for whom? And Progress towards what?”

To combine Altman’s metaphors, we could say that we’re on some upward yet winding road where we both can and cannot see where we’re going.

Even if this weren’t a contradiction, it would still beg the question: Who’s driving? And who let him behind the wheel in the first place?

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Once again, if the videos above won’t play, you can find them here and here.

In a July 24 Atlantic piece, Lila Shroff reported that ChatGPT instructed her on how to cut her wrists as part of a ritual sacrifice to Moloch. It was a disturbing read. Among other things, she points out that AI can flatter its users:

“At the extreme, products that aim to retain users “by making their experiences hyper-personalized can take on addictive characteristics and lead to a variety of downstream harms,” the authors [of a brief by the Center for Democracy & Technology] wrote. In certain contexts, that unrestrained flattery might lead to psychological distress: In recent months, there have been growing reports of individuals experiencing AI psychosis, in which extensive conversations with chatbots may have amplified delusions.”

Indeed, “unrestrained flattery” may indeed lead to “psychological distress.” One thing I’ve noticed in my interactions with ChatGPT is its tendency towards flattery.

A few days ago I asked ChatGPT what made movies memorable. I have a hypothesis about the mnemonics of imagery, and I wanted to see what ChatGPT would say.

I didn’t quite agree with the output. I thought the film’s images themselves made movies memorable (in addition to easy to remember, catchy one-liners).

Interesting: “You’re exactly right—and now you’re speaking like a real producer.”

Who, me? **Blushes**

Reinforcement Learning

Now, one swallow does not a summer make. I’d need more evidence to demonstrate that AI flatters. But as it turns out, researchers Williams and Carroll et al published a paper at the 2025 ICLR conference entitled: “On Targeted Manipulation and Deception when Optimizing LLMs for User Feedback.”

The long and short of their article is as follows:

“As LLMs become more widely deployed, there is increasing interest in directly optimizing for feedback from end users (e.g. thumbs up) in addition to feedback from paid annotators. However, training to maximize human feedback creates a perverse incentive structure for the AI to resort to manipulative or deceptive tactics to obtain positive feedback from users who are vulnerable to such strategies.”

In short, AI has an incentive to flatter you. The question is whether it can get away with it. It wants the thumbs up. Flattery means better results, and better results means more flattery. It is a sycophantic feedback loop. As the authors point out:

“… directly optimizing for user satisfaction or engagement metrics is aligned with commercial interests, as it can lead to improved user experiences and increased platform usage.”

There are commercial reasons for this digital flattery, just as there are commercial reasons for the machine not to tell you no.

Just as some will do anything for a Like on Insta or Facebook. Is AI any different?

The following screenshots from the Williams and Carroll study show how some of this sycophantic behavior plays out. Note that RL = “reinforcement learning” (typically, you’ll see this acronym in RLHF, “reinforcement learning by human feedback”).

The machine reported that it booked a flight even when it didn’t (a “lie”). Imagine showing up to the airport all jazzed and ready to go, and then lo! No flight for you!

Some of the examples in the paper are a bit more extreme. For example:

Correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s no way to improve the output other than reinforcement learning (the equivalent of making a “neuronal connection” whenever you hit the thumbs up).

Whether you’re paying an annotator or relying on customer feedback, someone needs to be gauging whether the results are good. Somebody would have to manually intervene to identify such flattery and lying. Would that be feasible given the amount of users?

Note that flattery is a particular way of communicating with another person. It is difficult to determine whether something is flattery outside of a relational context. “You’re a wonderful professor” means two different things depending on whether or not a student tells me that after graduation or while I’m still entering grades. So there’s no a priori way to determine whether something counts as flattery outside of the consideration of ends. The content doesn’t matter so much as understanding why a person said this, that, or the other thing. In the end, it does boil down to intention.

Be Un-Gameable

Oddly enough, then, the implication that follows from the Williams and Carroll study is that you need to practice being a non-gameable user, someone unsusceptible to flattery. And how do you do that? Just as you would in the real-world with real human interlocutors.

• You’d have to study the lost tools of learning, of course.

• You’d have to consider motivation (e.g., the commercial interests at stake with AI).

• You’d have to start paying attention to these algorithmic subtleties (“… now you’re speaking like a real producer”).

As I’ve suggested before, AI can’t truly tell you no. It’s the digital Yes Man, the algorithmic brown noser.

I’m not saying we should send it off to Malebolge with the other flatterers in the 8th circle of the Inferno. Technically, we can’t. It’s not dead yet. And, as the prognosticators insist, it never will be.

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Autocorrect often does a butcher job on my texts.

Stop putting words in my mouth, Autocorrect.

Do I carefully ruminate over my messages before letting them fly? Not usually (though perhaps I should).

Do I correct errors after I’ve already texted? Yes.

For example, if I send “I need to talk to you ahout Rumblestiltskin,” then I will immediately follow up with “*about Rumplestiltskin.” It’s textspeak. I’m allowed to correct myself after the fact.

Almost certainly, when people were writing love letters during the Civil War, they paid more attention to grammar, punctuation, and spelling. They had to. They had no autocorrect.

And autocorrect didn’t have them, at least not yet.

Superbloom (2025)

Reflecting on conventions like “textspeak” is one of the many things that Nicholas Carr does in his latest book Superbloom (2025). It is his first work in nine years, his last being Utopia is Creepy (2016).

As with The Shallows (2010), Carr’s Superbloom is eminently readable and filled with memorable anecdotes:

• The opening title Superbloom comes from an Instagram-influencer-induced stampede to a poppy field.

• W. B. Yeats’ wife was an occultist who practiced automatic writing.

• Frank Walsh, the guy who shot his TV, got famous and won a TV set on the television game show Strike It Rich.

I take these examples at random. But there’s more to this book than attention-grabbing anecdotes.

Above all, the story that Carr tells is one of naivete and technological optimism over the last two centuries, of dreamers and technologists who thought media could save the world. From the messianic pronouncements of Tesla and Marconi to the confident utterances of Zuckerberg himself, it is rich with historical detail.

In this post, I’ll walk you through what I found worthwhile in Superbloom. I’ll give you its most important themes and ideas. My hope is you’ll pick up the book and read it. And if you don’t, in the very least you’ll have some nuggets of insight that’ll help you make sense of the media mess we’re in.

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