Dumpster Fire

People online confuse shamelessness with strength and authenticity. And the internet rewards it with increased exposure. 

Every week someone proudly broadcasts behavior that should've inspiresd a quiet moment of self-reflection and maybe a long walk. Now it gets posted ... and monetized.

Cruelty gets rebranded as “telling it like it is.” Refusing nuance becomes “standing your ground.” Public humiliation passes for entertainment. Meanwhile, basic self-awareness is treated like weakness ... which is unsettling considering civilization more or less depends on people occasionally feeling embarrassed by and stifling their worst impulses.

I’m not supporting toxic shame or repression. I’m just suggesting that more attention be paid to the small internal voice that says, “Maybe don’t turn every selfish thought into content.” That voice used to help people coexist. Now we train ourselves to ignore it because algorithms prefer confidence over reflection.

Everything now is performance. Outrage is content. Ignorance has a Patreon tier. People treat accountability like it’s an attack on creativity instead of the bare minimum requirement for living among other humans without turning every interaction into a public crisis.

But the algorithms love it because frictionless vanity scales beautifully. Thoughtfulness does not. Reflection doesn’t trend. Nobody goes viral for quietly reconsidering their opinion after reading a book and taking a walk.

We’ve built machines that reward visibility over wisdom, then act surprised when culture turns into a nonstop competition to say the most emotionally charged thing with the least amount of thought behind it.

I still think people are capable of better. I’m just no longer convinced the internet is particularly interested in helping.

Messiah or Villain

The reaction of writers to AI is interesting. One crowd treats it like a messiah. Another treats it like a villain.

For me it boils down to that, for effective writing, the fundamentals still matter. Probably more than ever. Good ideas are still rare. Taste still matters. Judgment still matters. 

A machine can produce a thousand sentences before breakfast ... but most of them still need someone who knows the difference between finished and merely generated. Because AI doesn't magically make a mediocre writer brilliant. It just lets a good writer spend less time pushing the wheelbarrow and more time deciding where the bricks belong.

Most technologies are far less dramatic than the people arguing about them. In my experience, technologies tend to be multipliers: They make good habits more productive and bad habits more obvious. So, when I think about AI, I keep coming back to the same conclusion I reached with other transformative technologies: 

Learn to think. Learn to write. Then learn the tools.

Not because the algorithm demands it. Because your time is worth more than pretending the clock stopped in 2018.

Overthinking

 

Along with checking for proper spelling, my editing process includes double-checking words to make sure they mean what I think they mean.

Recent examples: 

Panacea. I used it to mean "cure-all." I was right, but I felt compelled to double-check.

Same thing with proscribe. It looked wrong. Did I mean to use the word prescribe? 

And the same overthinking had me arguing with myself about infer. Was I confusing it with imply?

 

NOTE:

Proscribe means to forbid or outlaw while prescribe means to recommend.

The writer implies (hints), and the listener or reader infers (draws a conclusion).

 

Upscale Oops!

The upscale restaurant had an upscale bathroom.

An interior decorator made it feel comfortable and welcoming. More like a living room than a bathroom.

But as the restaurant soon learned the designer lamp and lampshade that were perfect for the design aesthetic were a failure for installation in a bathroom.

Oops!

"Please do not throw trash in the lampshade." Just a few words on a Post-It note tell a full story.