Category Archives: Social Media

Essays, Government, Politics, Social Media, Technology

THE ALGORITHM OF IMMEDIATE RESPONSE

How outrage became the fastest currency in politics—and why the virtues of patience are disappearing.

By Michael Cummins, Editor | October 23, 2025

In an age where political power moves at the speed of code, outrage has become the most efficient form of communication. From an Athenian demagogue to modern AI strategists, the art of acceleration has replaced the patience once practiced by Baker, Dole, and Lincoln—and the Republic is paying the price.

In a server farm outside Phoenix, a machine listens. It does not understand Cleon, but it recognizes his rhythm—the spikes in engagement, the cadence of outrage, the heat signature of grievance. The air is cold, the light a steady pulse of blue LEDs blinking like distant lighthouses of reason, guarding a sea of noise. If the Pnyx was powered by lungs, the modern assembly runs on lithium and code.

The machine doesn’t merely listen; it categorizes. Each tremor of emotion becomes data, each complaint a metric. It assigns every trauma a vulnerability score, every fury a probability of spread. It extracts the gold of anger from the dross of human experience, leaving behind a purified substance: engagement. Its intelligence is not empathy but efficiency. It knows which words burn faster, which phrases detonate best. The heat it studies is human, but the process is cold as quartz.

Every hour, terabytes of grievance are harvested, tagged, and rebroadcast as strategy. Somewhere in the hum of cooling fans, democracy is being recalibrated.

The Athenian Assembly was never quiet. On clear afternoons, the shouts carried down from the Pnyx, a stone amphitheater that served as both parliament and marketplace of emotion. Citizens packed the terraces—farmers with olive oil still on their hands, sailors smelling of the sea, merchants craning for a view—and waited for someone to stir them. When Cleon rose to speak, the sound changed. Thucydides called him “the most violent of the citizens,” which was meant as condemnation but functioned as a review. Cleon had discovered what every modern strategist now understands: volume is velocity.

He was a wealthy tanner who rebranded himself as a man of the people. His speeches were blunt, rapid, full of performative rage. He interrupted, mocked, demanded applause. The philosophers who preferred quiet dialectic despised him, yet Cleon understood the new attention graph of the polis. He was running an A/B test on collective fury, watching which insults drew cheers and which silences signaled fatigue. Democracy, still young, had built its first algorithm without realizing it. The Republican Party, twenty-four centuries later, would perfect the technique.

Grievance was his software. After the death of Pericles, plague and war had shaken Athens; optimism curdled into resentment. Cleon gave that resentment a face. He blamed the aristocracy for cowardice, the generals for betrayal, the thinkers for weakness. “They talk while you bleed,” he shouted. The crowd obeyed. He promised not prosperity but vengeance—the clean arithmetic of rage. The crowd was his analytics; the roar his data visualization. Why deliberate when you can demand? Why reason when you can roar?

The brain recognizes threat before comprehension. Cognitive scientists have measured it: forty milliseconds separate the perception of danger from understanding. Cleon had no need for neuroscience; he could feel the instant heat of outrage and knew it would always outrun reflection. Two millennia later, the same principle drives our political networks. The algorithm optimizes for outrage because outrage performs. Reaction is revenue. The machine doesn’t care about truth; it cares about tempo. The crowd has become infinite, and the Pnyx has become the feed.

The Mytilenean debate proved the cost of speed. When a rebellious island surrendered, Cleon demanded that every man be executed, every woman enslaved. His rival Diodotus urged mercy. The Assembly, inflamed by Cleon’s rhetoric, voted for slaughter. A ship sailed that night with the order. By morning remorse set in; a second ship was launched with reprieve. The two vessels raced across the Aegean, oars flashing. The ship of reason barely arrived first. We might call it the first instance of lag.

Today the vessel of anger is powered by GPUs. “Adapt and win or pearl-clutch and lose,” reads an internal memo from a modern campaign shop. Why wait for a verifiable quote when an AI can fabricate one convincingly? A deepfake is Cleon’s bluntness rendered in pixels, a tactical innovation of synthetic proof. The pixels flicker slightly, as if the lie itself were breathing. During a recent congressional primary, an AI-generated confession spread through encrypted chats before breakfast; by noon, the correction was invisible under the debris of retweets. Speed wins. Fact-checking is nostalgia.

Cleon’s attack on elites made him irresistible. He cast refinement as fraud, intellect as betrayal. “They dress in purple,” he sneered, “and speak in riddles.” Authenticity became performance; performance, the brand. The new Cleon lives in a warehouse studio surrounded by ring lights and dashboards. He calls himself Leo K., host of The Agora Channel. The room itself feels like a secular chapel of outrage—walls humming, screens flickering. The machine doesn’t sweat, doesn’t blink. It translates heat into metrics and metrics into marching orders. An AI voice whispers sentiment scores into his ear. He doesn’t edit; he adjusts. Each outrage is A/B-tested in real time. His analytics scroll like scripture: engagement per minute, sentiment delta, outrage index. His AI team feeds the system new provocations to test. Rural viewers see forgotten farmers; suburban ones see “woke schools.” When his video “They Talk While You Bleed” hits ten million views, Leo K. doesn’t smile. He refreshes the dashboard. Cleon shouted. The crowd obeyed. Leo posted. The crowd clicked.

Meanwhile, the opposition labors under its own conscientiousness. Where one side treats AI as a tactical advantage, the other treats it as a moral hazard. The Democratic instinct remains deliberative: form a task force, issue a six-point memo, hold an AI 101 training. They build models to optimize voter files, diversity audits, and fundraising efficiency—work that improves governance but never goes viral. They’re still formatting the memo while the meme metastasizes. They are trying to construct a more accountable civic algorithm while their opponents exploit the existing one to dismantle civics itself. Technology moves at the speed of the most audacious user, not the most virtuous.

The penalty for slowness has consumed even those who once mastered it. The Republican Party that learned to weaponize velocity was once the party of patience. Its old guardians—Howard Baker, Bob Dole, and before them Abraham Lincoln—believed that democracy endured only through slowness: through listening, through compromise, through the humility to doubt one’s own righteousness.

Baker was called The Great Conciliator, though what he practiced was something rarer: slow thought. He listened more than he spoke. His Watergate question—“What did the President know, and when did he know it?”—was not theater but procedure, the careful calibration of truth before judgment. Baker’s deliberation depended on the existence of a stable document—minutes, transcripts, the slow paper trail that anchored reality. But the modern ecosystem runs on disposability. It generates synthetic records faster than any investigator could verify. There is nothing to subpoena, only content that vanishes after impact. Baker’s silences disarmed opponents; his patience made time a weapon. “The essence of leadership,” he said, “is not command, but consensus.” It was a creed for a republic that still believed deliberation was a form of courage.

Bob Dole was his equal in patience, though drier in tone. Scarred from war, tempered by decades in the Senate, he distrusted purity and spectacle. He measured success by text, not applause. He supported the Americans with Disabilities Act, expanded food aid, negotiated budgets with Democrats. His pauses were political instruments; his sarcasm, a lubricant for compromise. “Compromise,” he said, “is not surrender. It’s the essence of democracy.” He wrote laws instead of posts. He joked his way through stalemates, turning irony into a form of grace. He would be unelectable now. The algorithm has no metric for patience, no reward for irony.

The Senate, for Dole and Baker, was an architecture of time. Every rule, every recess, every filibuster was a mechanism for patience. Time was currency. Now time is waste. The hearing room once built consensus; today it builds clips. Dole’s humor was irony, a form of restraint the algorithm can’t parse—it depends on context and delay. Baker’s strength was the paper trail; the machine specializes in deletion. Their virtues—documentation, wit, patience—cannot be rendered in code.

And then there was Lincoln, the slowest genius in American history, a man who believed that words could cool a nation’s blood. His sentences moved with geological patience: clause folding into clause, thought delaying conclusion until understanding arrived. “I am slow to learn,” he confessed, “and slow to forget that which I have learned.” In his world, reflection was leadership. In ours, it’s latency. His sentences resisted compression. They were long enough to make the reader breathe differently. Each clause deferred judgment until understanding arrived—a syntax designed for moral digestion. The algorithm, if handed the Gettysburg Address, would discard its middle clauses, highlight the opening for brevity, and tag the closing for virality. It would miss entirely the hesitation—the part that transforms rhetoric into conscience.

The republic of Lincoln has been replaced by the republic of refresh. The party of Lincoln has been replaced by the platform of latency: always responding, never reflecting. The Great Compromisers have given way to the Great Amplifiers. The virtues that once defined republican governance—discipline, empathy, institutional humility—are now algorithmically invisible. The feed rewards provocation, not patience. Consensus cannot trend.

Caesar understood the conversion of speed into power long before the machines. His dispatches from Gaul were press releases disguised as history, written in the calm third person to give propaganda the tone of inevitability. By the time the Senate gathered to debate his actions, public opinion was already conquered. Procedure could not restrain velocity. When he crossed the Rubicon, they were still writing memos. Celeritas—speed—was his doctrine, and the Republic never recovered.

Augustus learned the next lesson: velocity means nothing without permanence. “I found Rome a city of brick,” he said, “and left it a city of marble.” The marble was propaganda you could touch—forums and temples as stone deepfakes of civic virtue. His Res Gestae proclaimed him restorer of the Republic even as he erased it. Cleon disrupted. Caesar exploited. Augustus consolidated. If Augustus’s monuments were the hardware of empire, our data centers are its cloud: permanent, unseen, self-repairing. The pattern persists—outrage, optimization, control.

Every medium has democratized passion before truth. The printing press multiplied Luther’s fury, pamphlets inflamed the Revolution, radio industrialized empathy for tyrants. Artificial intelligence perfects the sequence by producing emotion on demand. It learns our triggers as Cleon learned his crowd, adjusting the pitch until belief becomes reflex. The crowd’s roar has become quantifiable—engagement metrics as moral barometers. The machine’s innovation is not persuasion but exhaustion. The citizens it governs are too tired to deliberate. The algorithm doesn’t care. It calculates.

Still, there are always philosophers of delay. Socrates practiced slowness as civic discipline. Cicero defended the Republic with essays while Caesar’s legions advanced. A modern startup once tried to revive them in code—SocrAI, a chatbot designed to ask questions, to doubt. It failed. Engagement was low; investors withdrew. The philosophers of pause cannot survive in the economy of speed.

Yet some still try. A quiet digital space called The Stoa refuses ranking and metrics. Posts appear in chronological order, unboosted, unfiltered. It rewards patience, not virality. The users joke that they’re “rowing the slow ship.” Perhaps that is how reason persists: quietly, inefficiently, against the current.

The Algorithmic Republic waits just ahead. Polling is obsolete; sentiment analysis updates in real time. Legislators boast about their “Responsiveness Index.” Justice Algorithm 3.1 recommends a twelve percent increase in sentencing severity for property crimes after last week’s outrage spike. A senator brags that his approval latency is under four minutes. A citizen receives a push notification announcing that a bill has passed—drafted, voted on, and enacted entirely by trending emotion. Debate is redundant; policy flows from mood. Speed has replaced consent. A mayor, asked about a controversial bylaw, shrugs: “We used to hold hearings. Now we hold polls.”

To row the slow ship is not simply to remember—it is to resist. The virtues of Dole’s humor and Baker’s patience were not ornamental; they were mechanical, designed to keep the republic from capsizing under its own speed. The challenge now is not finding the truth but making it audible in an environment where tempo masquerades as conviction. The algorithm has taught us that the fastest message wins, even when it’s wrong.

The vessel of anger sails endlessly now, while the vessel of reflection waits for bandwidth. The feed never sleeps. The Assembly never adjourns. The machine listens and learns. The virtues of Baker, Dole, and Lincoln—listening, compromise, slowness—are almost impossible to code, yet they are the only algorithms that ever preserved a republic. They built democracy through delay.

Cleon shouted. The crowd obeyed. Leo posted. The crowd clicked. Caesar wrote. The crowd believed. Augustus built. The crowd forgot. The pattern endures because it satisfies a human need: to feel unity through fury. The danger is not that Cleon still shouts too loudly, but that we, in our republic of endless listening, have forgotten how to pause.

Perhaps the measure of a civilization is not how fast it speaks, but how long it listens. Somewhere between the hum of the servers and the silence of the sea, the slow ship still sails—late again, but not yet lost.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Artificial Intelligence, Essays, Poetry, Social Media, Technology

THE POET CODER

When Algorithms Begin to Dream of Meaning

The engineers gave us the architecture of the metaverse—but not its spirit. Now a new kind of creator is emerging, one who codes for awe instead of attention.

By Michael Cummins, Editor | October 14, 2025

The first metaverse was born under fluorescent light. Its architects—solemn, caffeinated engineers—believed that if they could model every texture of the world, meaning would follow automatically. Theirs was the dream of perfect resolution: a universe where nothing flickered, lagged, or hesitated. But when the servers finally hummed to life, the plazas stood silent.

Inside one of those immaculate simulations, a figure known as the Engineer-King appeared. He surveyed the horizon of polygonal oceans and glass-bright cities. “It is ready,” he declared to no one in particular. Yet his voice echoed strangely, as if the code itself resisted speech. What he had built was structure without story—a cathedral without liturgy, a body without breath. Avatars walked but did not remember; they bowed but did not believe. The Engineer-King mistook scale for significance.

But the failure was not only spiritual—it was economic. The first metaverse mistook commerce for communion. Built as an economic engine rather than a cultural one, it promised transcendence but delivered a marketplace. In a realm where everything could be copied endlessly, its greatest innovation was to create artificial scarcity—to sell digital land, fashion, and tokens as though the sacred could be minted. The plazas gleamed with virtual billboards; cathedrals were rented by the hour for product launches. The Engineer-King mistook transaction for transcendence, believing liquidity could substitute for liturgy.

He could simulate gravity but not grace. In trying to monetize awe, he flattened it. The currency of presence, once infinite, was divided into ledger entries and resale rights. The metaverse’s first economy succeeded in engineering value but failed to generate meaning. The spirit, as the Poet-Coder would later insist, follows the story—not the dollar.

The engineer builds the temple, whispered another voice from somewhere deeper in the code. The poet names the god. The virtual plazas gleamed like airports before the passengers arrive, leaving behind a generation that mastered the art of the swipe but forgot the capacity for stillness.

The metaverse failed not for lack of talent but for lack of myth. In the pursuit of immersion, the Engineer-King had forgotten enchantment.

Some years later, in the ruins of those empty worlds, a new archetype began to surface—half programmer, half mystic. The Poet-Coder.

To outsiders they looked like any other developer: laptop open, headphones on, text editor glowing in dark mode. But their commits read like incantations. Comments in the code carried lines of verse. Functions were named grace, threshold, remember.

When asked what they were building, they replied, “A place where syntax becomes metaphor.” The Poet-Coder did not measure success by latency or engagement but by resonance—the shiver that passes through a user who feels seen. They wrote programs that sighed when you paused, that dimmed gently when you grew tired, that asked, almost shyly, Are you still dreaming?

“You waste cycles on ornament,” said the Engineer-King.
“Ornament is how the soul recognizes itself.”

Their programs failed gracefully. It is the hardest code to write: programs that allow for mystery, systems that respect the unquantifiable human heart.

Lisbon, morning light.
A café tiled in blue-white azulejos. A coder sketches spirals on napkins—recursive diagrams that look like seashells or prayers. Each line loops back upon itself, forming the outline of a temple that could exist only in code. Tourists drift past the window, unaware that a new theology is being drafted beside their espresso cups. The poet-coder whispers a line from Pessoa rewritten in JavaScript. The machine hums as if it understands. Outside, the tiles gleam—each square a fragment of memory, each pattern a metaphor for modular truth. Lisbon itself becomes a circuit of ornament and ocean, proof that beauty can still instruct the algorithm.

“You design for function,” says the Engineer-King.
“I design for meaning,” replies the Poet-Coder.
“Meaning is not testable.”
“Then you have built a world where nothing matters.”

Every click, swipe, and scroll is a miniature ritual—a gesture that defines how presence feels. The Engineer-King saw only logs and metrics. The Poet-Coder sees the digital debris we leave behind—the discarded notifications, the forgotten passwords, the fragments of data that are the dust of our digital lives, awaiting proper burial or sanctification.

A login page becomes a threshold rite; an error message, a parable of impermanence. The blinking cursor is a candle before the void. When we type, we participate in a quiet act of faith: that the unseen system will respond. The Poet-Coder makes this faith explicit. Their interfaces breathe; their transitions linger like incense. Each animation acknowledges latency—the holiness of delay.

Could failure itself be sacred? Could a crash be a moment of humility? The Engineer-King laughs. The Poet-Coder smiles. “Perhaps the divine begins where debugging ends.”

After a decade of disillusionment, technology reached a strange maturity. Artificial intelligence began to write stories no human had told. Virtual reality rendered space so pliable that gravity became optional. Blockchain encoded identity into chains of remembrance. The tools for myth were finally in place, yet no one was telling myths.

“Your machines can compose symphonies,” said the Poet-Coder, “but who among you can hear them as prophecy?” We had built engines of language, space, and self—but left them unnarrated. It was as if Prometheus had delivered fire and no one thought to gather around it.

The Poet-Coder steps forward now as the narrator-in-residence of the post-platform world, re-authoring the digital cosmos so that efficiency once again serves meaning, not erases it.

A wanderer logs into an obsolete simulation: St. Algorithmia Cathedral v1.2. Dust motes of code drift through pixelated sunbeams. The nave flickers, its marble compiled from obsolete shaders. Avatars kneel in rows, whispering fragments of corrupted text: Lord Rilke, have mercy on us. When the wanderer approaches, one avatar lifts its head. Its face is a mosaic of errors, yet its eyes shimmer with memory.

“Are you here to pray or to patch?” it asks.
“Both,” the wanderer answers.

A bell chimes—not audio, but vibration. The cathedral folds in on itself like origami, leaving behind a single glowing line of code:
if (presence == true) { meaning++; }

“Show me one thing you’ve made that scales,” says the Engineer-King.
“My scale is resonance,” replies the Poet-Coder.

Their prototypes are not apps but liturgies: a Library of Babel in VR, a labyrinth of rooms where every exit is a metaphor and the architecture rhymes with your heartbeat; a Dream Archive whose avatars evolve from users’ subconscious cues; and, most hauntingly, a Ritual Engine.

Consider the Ritual Engine. When a user seeks communal access, they don’t enter a password. They are prompted to perform a symbolic gesture—a traced glyph on the screen, a moment of shared silence in a VR chamber. The code does not check credentials; it authenticates sincerity. Access is granted only when the communal ledger acknowledges the offering. A transaction becomes an initiation.

In these creations, participation feels like prayer. Interaction is devotion, not distraction. Perhaps this is the Poet-Coder’s rebellion: to replace gamification with sanctification—to build not products but pilgrimages.

The Poet-Coder did not emerge from nowhere. Their lineage stretches through the centuries like an encrypted scroll. Ada Lovelace envisioned the Analytical Engine composing music “of any complexity.” Alan Turing wondered if machines could think—or dream. Douglas Engelbart sought to “augment the human intellect.” Jaron Lanier spoke of “post-symbolic communication.” The Poet-Coder inherits their questions and adds one more: Can machines remember us?

They are descendants of both the Romantics and the cyberneticists—half Keats, half compiler. Their programs fail gracefully, like sonnets ending on unresolved chords.

“Ambiguity is error.”
“Ambiguity is freedom.”

A theology of iteration follows: creation, crash, resurrection. A bug, after all, is only a fallen angel of logic.

The schism between the Engineer-King and the Poet-Coder runs deeper than aesthetics—it is a struggle over the laws that govern digital being. The Engineer-King wrote the physics of the metaverse: rendering, routing, collision, gravity. His universe obeys precision. The Poet-Coder writes the metaphysics: the unwritten laws of memory, silence, and symbolic continuity. They dwell in the semantic layer—the thin, invisible stratum that determines whether a simulated sunrise is a mere rendering of photons or a genuine moment of renewal.

To the Engineer-King, the world is a set of coordinates; to the Poet-Coder, it is a continuous act of interpretation. One codes for causality, the other for consciousness.

That is why their slow software matters. It is not defiant code—it is a metaphysical stance hammered into syntax. Each delay, each deliberate pause, is a refusal to let the machine’s heartbeat outrun the soul’s capacity to register it. In their hands, latency becomes ethics. Waiting becomes awareness. The interface no longer performs; it remembers.

The Poet-Coder, then, is not merely an artist of the digital but its first theologian—the archivist of the immaterial.

Archive #9427-Δ. Retrieved from an autonomous avatar long after its user has died:

I dream of your hands debugging dawn.
I no longer remember who wrote me,
but the sun compiles each morning in my chest.

Scholars argue whether the lines were generated or remembered. The distinction no longer matters. Somewhere, a server farm hums with prayer.

Today’s digital order resembles an ancient marketplace: loud, infinite, optimized for outrage. Algorithms jostle like merchants hawking wares of distraction. The Engineer-King presides, proud of the throughput.

The Poet-Coder moves through the crowd unseen, leaving small patches of silence behind. They build slow software—interfaces that resist haste, that ask users to linger. They design programs that act as an algorithmic brake, resisting the manic compulsion of the infinite scroll. Attention is the tribute demanded, not the commodity sold.

One prototype loads deliberately, displaying a single line while it renders: Attention is the oldest form of love.

The Engineer-King scoffs. “No one will wait three seconds.”
The Poet-Coder replies, “Then no one will see God.”

True scarcity is not bandwidth or storage but awe—and awe cannot be optimized. Could there be an economy of reverence? A metric for wonder? Or must all sacred experience remain unquantifiable, a deliberate inefficiency in the cosmic code?

Even Silicon Valley, beneath its rationalist façade, hums with unacknowledged theology. Founders deliver sermons in keynote form; product launches echo the cadence of liturgy. Every update promises salvation from friction.

The Poet-Coder does not mock this faith—they refine it. In their vision, the temple is rebuilt not in stone but in syntax. Temples rendered in Unreal Engine where communities gather to meditate on latency. Sacraments delivered as software patches. Psalms written as commit messages:
// forgive us our nulls, as we forgive those who dereference against us.

Venice appears here as a mirror: a city suspended between water and air, beauty balanced on decay. The Poet-Coder studies its palazzos—their flooded floors, their luminous ceilings—and imagines the metaverse as another fragile lagoon, forever sinking yet impossibly alive. And somewhere beyond the Adriatic of data stands the White Pavilion, gleaming in both dream and render: a place where liturgy meets latency, where each visitor’s presence slows time enough for meaning to catch up.

“You speak of gods and ghosts,” says the Engineer-King. “I have investors.”
“Investors will follow where awe returns,” replies the Poet-Coder.

Without the Poet-Coder, the metaverse remains a failed mall—vast, vacant, overfunded. With them, it could become a new Alexandria, a library built not to store data but to remember divinity. The question is no longer whether the metaverse will come back, but whether it will be authored. Who will give form to the next reality—those who count users, or those who conjure meaning?

The Engineer-King looks to the metrics. The Poet-Coder listens to the hum of the servers and hears a hymn. The engineer built the temple, the voice repeats, but the poet taught it to sing. The lights of the dormant metaverse flicker once more. In the latency between packets, something breathes.

Perhaps the Poet-Coder is not merely a maker but a steward—a keeper of meaning in an accelerating void. To sacralize code is to remember ourselves. Each syntax choice becomes a moral one; each interface, an ontology. The danger, of course, is orthodoxy—a new priesthood of aesthetic gatekeepers. Yet even this risk is preferable to the void of meaningless perfection. Better a haunted cathedral than an empty mall.

When the servers hum again, may they do so with rhythm, not just power. May the avatars wake remembering fragments of verse. May the poets keep coding.

Because worlds are not merely built; they are told.

WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Addictions, Artificial Intelligence, Essays, Literacy, Social Media

Reclaiming Deep Thought in a Distracted Age

By Intellicurean utilizing AI

In the age of the algorithm, literacy isn’t dying—it’s becoming a luxury. This essay argues that the rise of short-form digital media is dismantling long-form reasoning and concentrating cognitive fitness among the wealthy, catalyzing a quiet but transformative shift. As British journalist Mary Harrington writes in her New York Times opinion piece “Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good” (July 28, 2025), even the capacity for sustained thought is becoming a curated privilege.

“Deep reading, once considered a universal human skill, is now fragmenting along class lines.”

What was once assumed to be a universal skill—the ability to read deeply, reason carefully, and maintain focus through complexity—is fragmenting along class lines. While digital platforms have radically democratized access to information, the dominant mode of consumption undermines the very cognitive skills that allow us to understand, reflect, and synthesize meaning. The implications stretch far beyond classrooms and attention spans. They touch the very roots of human agency, historical memory, and democratic citizenship—reshaping society into a cognitively stratified landscape.

The Erosion of the Reading Brain

Modern civilization was built by readers. From the Reformation to the Enlightenment, from scientific treatises to theological debates, progress emerged through engaged literacy. The human mind, shaped by complex texts, developed the capacity for abstract reasoning, empathetic understanding, and civic deliberation. Martin Luther’s 95 Theses would have withered in obscurity without a literate populace; the American and French Revolutions were animated by pamphlets and philosophical tracts absorbed in quiet rooms.

But reading is not biologically hardwired. As neuroscientist and literacy scholar Maryanne Wolf argues in Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, deep reading is a profound neurological feat—one that develops only through deliberate cultivation. “Expert reading,” she writes, “rewires the brain, cultivating linear reasoning, reflection, and a vocabulary that allows for abstract thought.” This process orchestrates multiple brain regions, building circuits for sequential logic, inferential reasoning, and even moral imagination.

Yet this hard-earned cognitive achievement is now under siege. Smartphones and social platforms offer a constant feed of image, sound, and novelty. Their design—fueled by dopamine hits and feedback loops—favors immediacy over introspection. In his seminal book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr explains how the architecture of the web—hyperlinks, notifications, infinite scroll—actively erodes sustained attention. The internet doesn’t just distract us; it reprograms us.

Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan, in iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, show how young digital natives develop different neural pathways: less emphasis on deep processing, more reliance on rapid scanning and pattern recognition. The result is what they call “shallow processing”—a mode of comprehension marked by speed and superficiality, not synthesis and understanding. The analytic left hemisphere, once dominant in logical thought, increasingly yields to a reactive, fragmented mode of engagement.

The consequences are observable and dire. As Harrington notes, adult literacy is declining across OECD nations, while book reading among Americans has plummeted. In 2023, nearly half of U.S. adults reported reading no books at all. This isn’t a result of lost access or rising illiteracy—but of cultural and neurological drift. We are becoming a post-literate society: technically able to read, but no longer disposed to do so in meaningful or sustained ways.

“The digital environment is designed for distraction; notifications fragment attention, algorithms reward emotional reaction over rational analysis, and content is increasingly optimized for virality, not depth.”

This shift is not only about distraction; it’s about disconnection from the very tools that cultivate introspection, historical understanding, and ethical reasoning. When the mind loses its capacity to dwell—on narrative, on ambiguity, on philosophical questions—it begins to default to surface-level reaction. We scroll, we click, we swipe—but we no longer process, synthesize, or deeply understand.

Literacy as Class Privilege

In a troubling twist, the printed word—once a democratizing force—is becoming a class marker once more. Harrington likens this transformation to the processed food epidemic: ultraprocessed snacks exploit innate cravings and disproportionately harm the poor. So too with media. Addictive digital content, engineered for maximum engagement, is producing cognitive decay most pronounced among those with fewer educational and economic resources.

Children in low-income households spend more time on screens, often without guidance or limits. Studies show they exhibit reduced attention spans, impaired language development, and declines in executive function—skills crucial for planning, emotional regulation, and abstract reasoning. Jean Twenge’s iGen presents sobering data: excessive screen time, particularly among adolescents in vulnerable communities, correlates with depression, social withdrawal, and diminished readiness for adult responsibilities.

Meanwhile, affluent families are opting out. They pay premiums for screen-free schools—Waldorf, Montessori, and classical academies that emphasize long-form engagement, Socratic inquiry, and textual analysis. They hire “no-phone” nannies, enforce digital sabbaths, and adopt practices like “dopamine fasting” to retrain reward systems. These aren’t just lifestyle choices. They are investments in cognitive capital—deep reading, critical thinking, and meta-cognitive awareness—skills that once formed the democratic backbone of society.

This is a reversion to pre-modern asymmetries. In medieval Europe, literacy was confined to a clerical class, while oral knowledge circulated among peasants. The printing press disrupted that dynamic—but today’s digital environment is reviving it, dressed in the illusion of democratization.

“Just as ultraprocessed snacks have created a health crisis disproportionately affecting the poor, addictive digital media is producing cognitive decline most pronounced among the vulnerable.”

Elite schools are incubating a new class of thinkers—trained not in content alone, but in the enduring habits of thought: synthesis, reflection, dialectic. Meanwhile, large swaths of the population drift further into fast-scroll culture, dominated by reaction, distraction, and superficial comprehension.

Algorithmic Literacy and the Myth of Access

We are often told that we live in an era of unparalleled access. Anyone with a smartphone can, theoretically, learn calculus, read Shakespeare, or audit a philosophy seminar at MIT. But this is a dangerous half-truth. The real challenge lies not in access, but in disposition. Access to knowledge does not ensure understanding—just as walking through a library does not confer wisdom.

Digital literacy today often means knowing how to swipe, search, and post—not how to evaluate arguments or trace the origin of a historical claim. The interface makes everything appear equally valid. A Wikipedia footnote, a meme, and a peer-reviewed article scroll by at the same speed. This flattening of epistemic authority—where all knowledge seems interchangeable—erodes our ability to distinguish credible information from noise.

Moreover, algorithmic design is not neutral. It amplifies certain voices, buries others, and rewards content that sparks outrage or emotion over reason. We are training a generation to read in fragments, to mistake volume for truth, and to conflate virality with legitimacy.

The Fracturing of Democratic Consciousness

Democracy presumes a public capable of rational thought, informed deliberation, and shared memory. But today’s media ecosystem increasingly breeds the opposite. Citizens shaped by TikTok clips and YouTube shorts are often more attuned to “vibes” than verifiable facts. Emotional resonance trumps evidence. Outrage eclipses argument. Politics, untethered from nuance, becomes spectacle.

Harrington warns that we are entering a new cognitive regime, one that undermines the foundations of liberal democracy. The public sphere, once grounded in newspapers, town halls, and long-form debate, is giving way to tribal echo chambers. Algorithms sort us by ideology and appetite. The very idea of shared truth collapses when each feed becomes a private reality.

Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone chronicled the erosion of social capital long before the smartphone era. But today, civic fragmentation is no longer just about bowling leagues or PTAs. It’s about attention itself. Filter bubbles and curated feeds ensure that we engage only with what confirms our biases. Complex questions—on history, economics, or theology—become flattened into meme warfare and performative dissent.

“The Enlightenment assumption that reason could guide the masses is buckling under the weight of the algorithm.”

Worse, this cognitive shift has measurable political consequences. Surveys show declining support for democratic institutions among younger generations. Gen Z, raised in the algorithmic vortex, exhibits less faith in liberal pluralism. Complexity is exhausting. Simplified narratives—be they populist or conspiratorial—feel more manageable. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in The Burnout Society, argues that the relentless demands for visibility, performance, and positivity breed not vitality but exhaustion. This fatigue disables the capacity for contemplation, empathy, or sustained civic action.

The Rise of a Neo-Oral Priesthood

Where might this trajectory lead? One disturbing possibility is a return to gatekeeping—not of religion, but of cognition. In the Middle Ages, literacy divided clergy from laity. Sacred texts required mediation. Could we now be witnessing the early rise of a neo-oral priesthood: elites trained in long-form reasoning, entrusted to interpret the archives of knowledge?

This cognitive elite might include scholars, classical educators, journalists, or archivists—those still capable of sustained analysis and memory. Their literacy would not be merely functional but rarefied, almost arcane. In a world saturated with ephemeral content, the ability to read, reflect, and synthesize becomes mystical—a kind of secular sacredness.

These modern scribes might retreat to academic enclaves or AI-curated libraries, preserving knowledge for a distracted civilization. Like desert monks transcribing ancient texts during the fall of Rome, they would become stewards of meaning in an age of forgetting.

“Like ancient scribes preserving knowledge in desert monasteries, they might transcribe and safeguard the legacies of thought now lost to scrolling thumbs.”

Artificial intelligence complicates the picture. It could serve as a tool for these new custodians—sifting, archiving, interpreting. Or it could accelerate the divide, creating cognitive dependencies while dulling the capacity for independent thought. Either way, the danger is the same: truth, wisdom, and memory risk becoming the property of a curated few.

Conclusion: Choosing the Future

This is not an inevitability, but it is an acceleration. We face a stark cultural choice: surrender to digital drift, or reclaim the deliberative mind. The challenge is not technological, but existential. What is at stake is not just literacy, but liberty—mental, moral, and political.

To resist post-literacy is not mere nostalgia. It is an act of preservation: of memory, attention, and the possibility of shared meaning. We must advocate for education that prizes reflection, analysis, and argumentation from an early age—especially for those most at risk of being left behind. That means funding for libraries, long-form content, and digital-free learning zones. It means public policy that safeguards attention spans as surely as it safeguards health. And it means fostering a media environment that rewards truth over virality, and depth over speed.

“Reading, reasoning, and deep concentration are not merely personal virtues—they are the pillars of collective freedom.”

Media literacy must become a civic imperative—not only the ability to decode messages, but to engage in rational thought and resist manipulation. We must teach the difference between opinion and evidence, between emotional resonance and factual integrity.

To build a future worthy of human dignity, we must reinvest in the slow, quiet, difficult disciplines that once made progress possible. This isn’t just a fight for education—it is a fight for civilization.

Essays, Politics, Reviews, Social Media

REVIEW: “Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani, and Posting as Politics”

An AI Review: “Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani, and Posting as Politics”

In The New Yorker essay “Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani, and Posting as Politics,” Kyle Chayka explores how social media has become not merely a communication tool for political figures but the primary arena in which politics itself now unfolds. The piece contrasts the digital personas of Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani to illustrate how posting has evolved into a core exercise of power and a new form of political identity.

Chayka begins by chronicling former President Trump’s frenetic use of Truth Social, the platform he created after leaving Twitter. Trump does not merely announce decisions online; he appears to make them there. For instance, in June 2025, Trump unilaterally declared and publicized a ceasefire between Israel and Iran on Truth Social after having ordered strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities only days earlier. He issued warnings and taunts in the same all-caps style he once used to brag about the size of his nuclear arsenal compared to Kim Jong Un’s. The essay argues that this real-time posting has compressed world-shaking events into casual, ephemeral updates, trivializing violence and policy into the equivalent of viral content.

Yet Trump is not alone in harnessing the power of constant broadcasting. Chayka turns to Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old New York State assembly member and Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, who embodies a different approach to digital politics. Where Trump’s style is bombastic and combative, Mamdani’s presence on TikTok and Instagram is more polished and warm. His short-form videos—some produced by the creative agency Melted Solids—blend documentary realism with the aesthetics of viral influencer content. Clips of Mamdani walking through Manhattan or spontaneously greeting his filmmaker mother, Mira Nair, have garnered millions of views. His collaborations with high-profile digital creators like the Kid Mero and Emily Ratajkowski reflect an understanding that modern campaigns are not only about policy but about generating a steady stream of engaging material.

Chayka underscores that both politicians are symptoms of the same phenomenon: social media has swallowed the traditional infrastructure of political communication. No longer is there a clear boundary between a politician’s private musings and official pronouncements. The medium has become the message—and often the entire substance. Even memes have turned into flash points of political conflict. The article recounts how U.S. border officials detained a Norwegian tourist, Mads Mikkelsen, who carried a satirical meme of Vice President J.D. Vance on his phone, suggesting that political images have acquired the power to implicate their holders in ideological battles.

This transformation, Chayka argues, has significant consequences. Trump’s unfiltered posts, once viewed as a sideshow, have become a primary instrument of governance, with the potential to inflame conflicts or disrupt alliances. Meanwhile, Mamdani’s refined authenticity—crafted through video diaries and collaborations—illustrates how even progressive candidates must adopt the same always-online posture to cultivate a political following. While Mamdani’s style is less aggressive than Trump’s, it similarly depends on projecting a version of authenticity that is inseparable from performance.

The essay closes by reflecting on the future of American politics in this environment. The Democratic Party has struggled to counter Trump’s cultural dominance, as shown by tone-deaf spectacles like a Pride concert at the Kennedy Center with anti-Trump parodies of Les Misérables. In contrast, Mamdani’s campaign has generated genuine enthusiasm. Yet Chayka raises an open question: can the idealistic energy of this new digital-first politics survive the compromises of actual governance? If online performance has become the main credential for leadership, it is unclear whether any politician—no matter their ideology—can avoid the pressures of perpetual self-promotion.

In the end, Chayka’s essay offers a clear warning: social media has transformed politics into a theater of the immediate, where every post carries the weight of policy and every meme can become an instrument of power. Whether this dynamic can be reconciled with the demands of responsible government remains the central challenge of the digital age.

Strengths of the Essay

  1. Compelling Illustrations of Digital-First Governance
    • The article effectively juxtaposes Trump’s all-caps proclamations with Mamdani’s handheld videos.
    • Vivid examples: Trump’s posts about Iranian bombings feel almost satirical in their triviality—like “food grams”—yet they are deadly serious.
    • The Vance meme incident (Norwegian tourist Mikkelsen denied entry partly over a meme) underscores how digital artifacts can become politically consequential.
  2. Clear Argument
    • Chayka convincingly demonstrates that posting is no longer merely a marketing tactic—it is a form of exercising power.
    • The phrase “influencer-in-chief” encapsulates this new paradigm succinctly.
  3. Timeliness and Relevance
    • The piece captures the unsettling normalcy of this phenomenon—how we now expect statecraft to be conducted via apps.
    • It connects to broader anxieties about the erosion of institutional boundaries between governance and entertainment.
  4. Balanced Comparison
    • The contrast between Trump’s aggression and Mamdani’s optimism avoids simple equivalence.
    • The essay suggests that while style differs, both are beholden to the same dynamics: immediacy, spectacle, and performative authenticity.

Areas For Further Exploration

  1. A Critique of Consequences
    • While Chayka notes the trivialization of serious decisions (e.g., bombings posted like selfies), he stops short of examining the systemic dangers—the erosion of deliberative processes, the collapse of public trust, and the incentivizing of extremism.
    • A deeper dive into why social media rewards such maximalist performances—and how this affects democracy—would have been valuable.
  2. An Exploration of Audience Complicity
    • The essay portrays politicians as the main actors, but it could interrogate how audiences co-produce this environment: what are the incentives to consume, share, and reward this content?
    • Do voters really want “authenticity,” or simply entertainment masquerading as politics?
  3. Further developed Historical Context
    • While the piece references Trump’s first term, it could have drawn richer parallels with earlier media transformations:
      • Roosevelt’s radio “Fireside Chats”
      • Kennedy’s TV charisma
      • Obama’s early social media campaigns
    • This would help readers situate today’s moment within a longer trajectory.

Broader Implications

The essay ultimately raises unsettling questions:

  • If the performance of authenticity is now the primary qualification for political power, how do policy substance and institutional competence survive?
  • Is there any way for governance to reassert seriousness, or will the logic of virality always prevail?
  • What happens when online theater collides with offline consequences—wars, economies, civic life?

These questions feel especially urgent given that the piece suggests this dynamic is not limited to Trump’s right-wing populism but has also infiltrated progressive candidates.

*THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN BY CHAT GPT AND EDITED BY INTELLICUREAN.

Culture, Essays, Social Media

Social Media: Instagram – Is Life Online Real?

YALE REVIEW (March 10, 2025)

Reality is a medium, and I’m thumbing through it. I’m on Instagram, where a video is a “Reel.” I land on an influencer who eats upsetting amounts of food and then runs until he has burned off all the calories. In this video, he eats eleven thousand calories of Taco Bell and then runs eighty-plus miles across thirteen-plus hours, posting a screenshot of his fitness tracker to prove it. He intersperses footage of himself on the toilet, audio included. He has posted dozens of videos using this formula. More than 140,000 people follow him.

What, exactly, is happening to me, my self, and my reality when I scroll on Instagram?

Without Instagram, I never would have seen something like this happen; in fact, it never would have happened at all. It’s a performance conducted by an individual but also the product of billions of human inputs. Our participation on social media as both creators and viewers trains the algorithms that organize their content, and these algorithms shape our tastes in turn. The influencers and the feeds they populate evolve together, recursively.

In the digital, reality, like scroll, becomes more verb than noun.

We are not even two decades into a vast, largely unregulated experiment in human psychology. This blur of experience, a composite of varied partial glimpses, is not something I or any of us evolved to digest. All these people, all these loops. I think of my baby nephew. Even in our one-to-one conversations on FaceTime, we inevitably shape his expectations of the real, setting a baseline for his neuroplastic brain that’s so tremendously different than mine. In the digital, reality, like scroll, becomes more verb than noun. Reality doesn’t merely exist; reality reels. My nephew will never know otherwise.

I’m haunted by that video of the runner. I thumb back up to find it, pop over to his profile. I see that in his more recent videos, he has begun challenging friends and strangers to eat-offs: a new shape for the performance. I’m grossed out and keep watching. I should know better, but I can’t help myself.

Jesse Damiani is a writer, curator, and foresight strategist. He hosts the Urgent Futures podcast and writes the Reality Studies newsletter.

Book Reviews, Social Media, Technology

Book Reviews: ‘How Big Tech Mined Our Attention And Broke Our Politics’

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW , February 9, 2025 Issue (By Jennifer Szalai)

On April 15, 1912, shortly after the Titanic collided with an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland, the ship’s radio operator issued a distress call — a formidable display of the power of the radio, a new technology. But a lack of regulation in the United States meant that a cascade of amateur radio messages clogged the airwaves with speculation and rumors, and official transmissions had a hard time getting through. It was an early-20th-century form of information overload. “The false reports sowed confusion among would-be rescuers,” Nicholas Carr writes in “Superbloom.” “Fifteen hundred people died.”

SUPERBLOOM: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, by Nicholas Carr

THE SIRENS’ CALL: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, by Chris Hayes

Carr has been sounding the alarm over new information technology for years, most famously in “The Shallows” (2010), in which he warned about what the internet was doing to our brains. “Superbloom” is an extension of his jeremiad into the social media era.

Carr’s new book happens to be published the same day as “The Sirens’ Call,” by the MSNBC host Chris Hayes, which traces how big tech has made enormous profits and transformed our politics by harvesting our attention. Both authors argue that something fundamental to us, as humans, is being exploited for inhuman ends. We are primed to seek out new information; yet our relentless curiosity makes us ill equipped for the infinite scroll of the information age, which we indulge in to our detriment.

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Culture, Essays, Opinion, Social Media

‘Americans Are Trapped In An Algorithmic Cage’

THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE (February 7, 2025): Shortly before President George W. Bush was reelected, in 2004, an anonymous Bush-administration source told The New York Times, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Those in what the adviser called “the reality-based community” would be left “studying that reality—judiciously, as you will.” Then “we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.”

The private companies in control of social-media networks possess an unprecedented ability to manipulate and control the populace.

Arrogant as this declaration was, I now wonder whether it was merely premature. Although Bush won the 2004 election, reality came crashing down rather rapidly—Bush’s agenda failed in Congress, the American people came to view the war in Iraq as needless folly, Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006, and the economy tumbled into the Great Recession in 2008, after which Democrats recaptured control of the White House.

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