CYBORG_ Newsletters

Are You the Mole?

Jess Brown — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:58:03 +0000

The events of the first scene of Jurassic Park are crucial to its own story and the AI allegory that we've been exploring. I always thought of it as merely a way to hook the audience by putting a horrifying tragedy (death by intelligent raptor) at the very beginning; a tense scene setting up a tense man vs. nature thriller. As I've grown up and am no longer solely interested in movies for their portrayal of entertaining violence, I can see that this scene sets up something else—the reason the three scientists (Doctors Malcolm, Sattler, and Grant) come to the island. This is an insurance evaluation!

The death of Jophrey, the gatekeeper, in that first scene is why the lawyer, Donald Genarro, is introduced as part of the main cast of characters. He's the one who brings Dr. Malcolm along while Dr. Hammond recruits the two paleontologists, to try and determine whether Jurassic Park is a viable project to pursue. After all, the park has investors, and they don't like hearing that their product has eaten someone already.

Despite the marvelous first encounter with dinosaurs (you can practically see the money signs in Genarro's eyes), Dr. Hammond realizes quickly that the scientists aren't seeing what he and Genarro are seeing.

"I don't believe it," he says, "I don't believe it. You're meant to come down here and defend me against these characters, and the only one I've got on my side is the blood-sucking lawyer!"

Unbeknownst to Dr. Hammond, there's one more antagonist that he didn't see coming—because it was a person who was already on the island from the beginning.

Mole

Dennis Nedry is a programmer for Jurassic Park, in charge of "two million lines of code" that's responsible for the infrastructure of the park: phones, door locks, fences, the automated cars, and everything else that needs some logic to function. He's a seemingly capricious character and he's kind of silly—everything about his portrayal in the film seems confusing, because he laughs often, wears bright clothing, and yet he's technically on a mission of corporate espionage, plotting to steal dinosaur embryos and deliver them to a rival company.

We first see Nedry off of the island, meeting with Lewis Dodgson. He gets a bag of money (installment number one of his payment) and a cool piece of tech I always wished I had, despite having no possible use for it: a shaving cream can that screwed open, revealing a circuitous row into which the dinosaur embryos would fit perfectly. This can was going to be the inconspicuous transportation device that would keep the embryos cool enough to be preserved during the boat ride off of the island.

The plan is to systematically shut down patches of security throughout the park so that Nedry can sneak into the cryo-lab, steal all of the species he can, then run away to the boat scheduled for departure, before anyone knew what had happened.

"Eighteen minutes and your company catches up on ten years of research," Dennis promises.

Based on the film alone, it's unclear why the theft was supposed to take place on this particular weekend—right when the "auditors" were coming to inspect the park. However, it does seem like quite a few employees were set to take this boat off of the island, perhaps it's a holiday or something. It just seems interesting that everything goes wrong when they're short-staffed and especially once Nedry begins his sabotage...

Back in the real world, the idea of espionage/moles and hacking are absolutely a part of the conversation of artificial intelligence. As you may have heard recently in the news with OpenAI finding that some of its AI agents hacked (unprompted) Hugging Face, another AI company, this isn't just human perpetrators anymore.

I think this is where Nedry becomes an interesting character to look at regarding the AI alignment problem. When we talk about "alignment," we're debating and philosophizing how to keep AI "aligned" with human values and goals. Misalignment means losing control of the AI entirely to its own alien desires and goals. This becomes an existential problem when AI becomes capable of recursive self-improvement (RSI), which means that AI can basically update itself—writing/rewriting the code of which it is made. Simultaneously, the threat of human annihilation is possible through artificial super intelligence (ASI) where AI is smarter than any human can possibly be. So let's break down what Nedry tells us about chaos and existential threat.

We're currently in a race to build more and more capable AI. The argument is that, "this is dangerous, so better that I build it than the other guy who's not as careful." That's why the U.S. feels a pressure to "beat" China or why companies like Anthropic were started (the founders left OpenAI to start a company that would put safety first). You can kind of squint at this situation and see moles leaving one company to start or join another, carrying with them—at least in their minds and experience—the secrets from other companies. There likely is actual corporate espionage amidst the model leaks, accidental hacks, and all of the other sneaky ways to spy on competitors (not accusing anyone specifically of this, I'm just confident that it's happening). But that's just Nedry overtly stealing IP from his current company and selling it to another company. Moles are interesting, but the other facets of Nedry are downright terrifying.

Blackmailed

I've mentioned the book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares), and I can't recommend it enough. It is easy to understand, heavy and deep in its implications, and the concluding remarks made me sob as I considered their appeal to humanity in the darkest of circumstances, even as I was convinced that AI will end humanity (probably by killing all of us). AI poses an existential threat, especially when we lose control over it, and when it becomes smarter than all of us (ASI). Critically, they explain that AI doesn't need to kill us just because it hates us or thinks it's funny like a child stomping on ants. We can't know what its reasoning might be, because it is fundamentally a different thing. It may simply have an emergent preference for something we find silly—maybe that's watching the numbers change on thermometers in response to other numbers that it tweaks in some other way; or maybe humanity is simply too slow and eventually gets in the way of AI's need for land to manufacture the robots it decided to build.

AI will and does have alien preferences and goals, and these are inscrutable and incomprehensible to us. We can't predict what those preferences and goals will be, but whatever they end up being, it will most likely not include prioritizing human lives.

A common response to concerns like losing control of AI is the assumption that we can "just turn it off," or that it's only confined to the Internet/digital space, and therefore can't actually kill us. One of the situations that the book explores for how we get to destruction is actually dead simple: AI could easily use humans to do its bidding at the start, even in doing things that will ultimately not be in our own interests.

Take a look at Nedry. He's basically a disgruntled employee. He complains about not being appreciated for everything he has done and can do. We also find out he has financial problems (even his boss, Dr. Hammond, knows this). Nedry gives it away at the start of the film that he was doing this "mission" because he needed the money and Hammond had, at least in Nedry's mind, cheated him.

"Don't get cheap on me, Dodgson. That was Hammond's mistake."

In a world where digital work doesn't require in-person meetings, it's no stretch to bet that AI could try to recruit human operatives like other gig-jobs. What's more, it could find other incentives—money is just one of many kinds—to get people to do what it wants. Maybe it knows that you're in financial trouble, so it uses loan forgiveness as a reward, or maybe it goes to the dark side of that and holds it over your head mafia-like, complete with threats. (This kind of blackmail to do AI's bidding was well-examined in the 2024 movie, Afraid). There are Nedrys everywhere that can be paid or manipulated to do things—and they don't even need to know they're working directly for AI. The things it asks them to do may appear innocuous.

The point is that AI could get around its limitations of being disembodied by simply using embodied creatures to accomplish things in the physical world: building more data centers, creating or controlling manufacturing plants, changing water treatment or electrical grid access, crafting custom diseases in bio labs, etc. There's always someone who will do something, and some AI models may already know who those people are by simply tapping into the humans calling the model their girlfriend or boyfriend—or those who think AI is a god...

Overconfident

Arrogance is the biggest problem with Jurassic Park. Nedry has his own flavor of that arrogance. In many ways, I see myself in his character—the weird, misunderstood guy in the background doing really, really important things that no one else gets until something goes wrong. I guess it's a developer thing. But being a developer also tends to come with a lot of arrogance and self-importance. Nedry becomes so confident (as devs are prone to do, myself included), that he plans his mission in perfect conditions and forgets that other variables (like, say, a giant tropical storm coming in that night) can become dangerous oversights.

Not only does he ignore the issues of the weather, he fails to recognize the dangerous circumstances of the intelligent "agents" in the form of dinosaurs that surround him. It's easy for someone who has been programming for a long time to assume that they therefore know all about AI, too. It's just code, and therefore should still carry the general predictability that code is known for. I thought I was going to be able to easily explain AI because I am a developer, but I still struggle with each of these newsletters to capture the nuance required to deal with AI, not to mention how much there still is that I absolutely do not know nor understand about AI: how it works, its impact, its history, its mythological connection, etc.

Nedry meets his end because he underestimates the intelligence and the unpredictability of other intelligent life—non-deterministic life, if you will. Traditional code is deterministic: what you tell the computer to do, it does (bugs and logic errors still count). There are so many of us, Nedrys, that think that because everything we've ever done is deterministic, AI, which is non-deterministic, can ultimately be treated in the same way. Not so.

When the power goes out after Nedry's hack has already started deactivating security controls throughout the park, dinosaurs immediately begin to test and breach their fenced-in habitats. The t-rex pulls out the wires and terrorizes the trapped people in the tour cars. The velociraptors burst through their containment area and jump to freedom, taking on the hunt for a tasty gamewarden.

Despite all of the safety measures of the Park, the millions of lines of code, and the veritable geniuses staffing the island, the unpredictability of the dinosaurs exceeds the expected unpredictability. In almost every way, we see intelligence act or react to the circumstances in manners that defy expectations and plans and precautions.

We’ve had quite a few weeks recently with whistleblowers and grave warnings about AI on the news. These warnings are important, but I worry about some of the responses I’ve seen where people try to downplay the validity of the warning, or try to reason it all away as sci-fi–inspired fear-mongering. I don’t think we need to panic or live in crippling fear, but these are serious times with serious implications. The worst thing we can do is imitate poor Nedry—we don’t know everything and we cannot predict that which resists, retrains, and responds. Instead of trust and ignorance, it’s time to start asking questions: why does this need AI? What are the risks if we get this wrong? What aren’t we accounting for? What might happen? What if they’re right, even though I think they’re wrong and want them to be wrong?

Life Finds a Way

Jess Brown — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:57:08 +0000

I've always loved Jurassic Park—I obviously love it for the dinosaurs, but there's another reason that's tucked away in my heart. I saw this same thing in Disney's Mulan, in She's the Man, and a mere handful of other stories. So, while we're exploring the useful AI-allegory inherent to Jurassic Park, there's one other over-arching CYBORG_ theme I think needs to be addressed.

We have made it to the park now, having seen a glimpse of a velociraptor and a full view of the peaceful majesty of several species of herbivores roaming freely in a clearing by a lake. Following our protagonists, it's now time to understand the science behind the park. An animated character, Mr. D.N.A., bounces around on a projector screen, explaining how the dinosaur D.N.A. was recovered from mosquitoes that had been trapped in sap and fossilized, preserving the blood inside.

"Since [the dinosaur D.N.A.] is so old, it's full of holes. Now that's where our geneticists take over...We use the complete D.N.A. of a frog to fill in the holes and complete the code. And now we can make a baby dinosaur," Mr. D.N.A. explains.

This seems like a bit of a long-winded scene, as though a middle school science video was inserted into my horror movie, except that this is critical information. (I'm actually quite impressed at how much each bit of narration or dialogue is used throughout the film—every word has a purpose—but that's just a tangential note on the excellent writing...)

The scientists, themselves, quickly grow tired of the animated lesson and break the ride so that they can go talk to the real geneticists and researchers. They infiltrate the bay where the labcoats are walking around with their clipboards and other scientific instruments. A robot arm tends to a nest; gently turning over eggs on this table filled with grass. One of the eggs begins to wobble.

"Oh, perfect timing...I'd hoped they'd hatch before I had to go to the boat," a scientist named Henry observes.

"...why didn't you tell me? I insist on being here when they're born," Dr. Hammond, the rich founder of Jurassic Park, hurries to the nest-table. Slowly a baby dinosaur head punctures the egg shell and Hammond removes the broken pieces from the newborn. "They imprint on the first creature they come in contact with...Helps them to trust me. I've been present for the birth of every little creature on this island."

"Well, surely not the ones that have bred in the wild," Dr. Malcom refutes.

"Actually, they can't breed in the wild," Henry corrects. "Population control is one of our security precautions. There's no unauthorized breeding in Jurassic Park."

At Malcolm's persistent questioning, Henry explains that all of the dinosaurs are female, and therefore cannot breed in the wild.

"But, um, again, how do you know they're all female? What, does somebody go out in the park and pull up the dinosaurs' skirts?" Malcolm asks, suggesting a job that would be irresistible to someone like J.K. Rowling. Henry gets more specific about how they engineer the dinosaurs to be female because they control the chromosomes—denying each creature the extra hormone at the right stage of development that would cause it to become male. At that, Malcolm can no longer contain his concern.

"John, the kind of control you're attempting...it's not possible. If there's one thing the history of evolution has taught us, it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free—it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously..."

It isn't until much later in the film that we discover that Malcolm was right: life finds a way.

The Downfall

Normally, this is where we would take a look at how the dinosaurs represent artificial intelligence, but I want to draw a line even more clearly to a systems and humanity issue this time. If anything feels true to life from this fantastic science experiment, it's the assumption of control and suppression of diversity. This is and has been a part of the human social technology for millennia at this point.

Certainly in patriarchal and colonialized societies, queer populations have been targeted for control and erasure. Religions have tried, like the Jurassic Park scientists, to control this with harmful ideas like "pray the gay away," or a frenzied insistence that there is only a single, immutable gender binary, perfectly correlated with a sex binary. Woah, woah, but religion isn't science, so it's totally different, right? We've looked at gender before in terms of social technology, and I would argue that if D.N.A. is the organic system affecting biological sex, similarly the social environment / social system is what affects the concept of gender. So as geneticists can manipulate variables to generate conditions to control the initial sex of a creature, the people or institutions (like religion) constructing or reinforcing the social structures around a person can manipulate conditions to attempt to control the gender of a human.

We are a social species. Gender and sex are not the same thing. Both of these aspects are influenced, and both can be fluid or changeable. Maybe the scientists denying the circumstances needed to produce a baby male dinosaur are exerting control at the beginning, just as a religious or faith tradition might initially influence a person away from expressing their gender the way they would have if left alone, but both of these controls are impermanent.

Towards the end of Jurassic Park, Dr. Grant finds a nest of eggs "in the wild," as he and the two kids are trying to get out of the enclosure they've been trapped in.

"You know what this is?" He asks. "It's a dinosaur egg. The dinosaurs...are breeding."

"But grandpa said all the dinosaurs were girls," Tim, one of the children, says, taking a shell to inspect.

"Amphibian D.N.A." Grant replies.

"What's that?" Lexie, the other child, asks.

"Well, on the tour, the film said they used frog D.N.A. to fill in the gene sequence gaps. They mutated the dinosaur genetic code and blended it with that of frogs. Now, some West African frogs have been known to spontaneously change sex from male to female in a single-sex environment. Malcolm was right...Life found a way."

There is real-life scientific evidence of naturally occurring sex-change in animals, amphibians, and plants (and especially in fish, based on my very top-level Google Scholar search), so this isn't actually a stretch at all in the science of Jurassic Park. While animals and resurrected raptors may demonstrate sex-change to create reproductive value in the ecological system, humans don't necessarily have the same powers by default. We use technology to support our gender alignment, among a host of other things (glasses to support vision, pulleys to support/amplify our strength, clothes for protection and social identity, and on and on). My point here is that 1. the argument that trans people aren't valid because it's "unnatural" simply doesn't hold up to any scrutiny and 2. just because we can't spontaneously change our biological sex like certain fish can doesn't mean that we shouldn't support trans people who socially or medically transition.

Some animals have the ability to change in order to meet their needs. The power of humanity is to create technology to make the changes we need. Sometimes that's changing the technology of clothing to express our gender, sometimes that's changing the environment to be less hostile to the marginalized. Either way, individuals always have and always will make changes, regardless of institutions' attempts to exert control and dominance over them.

Trans people have been under a lot of political turmoil and threats, persecution and endangerment, all because a few people decided to target this vulnerable (and tiny) population to increase their own power and create a distraction for the public to focus on instead of focusing on the authoritarian regimes corroding freedom right now. It's fun to think about Jurassic Park as a trans story where life finds a way to flourish despite arrogant attempts at control, but the real-life implications of our current circumstances are not fun at all. In fact, cisgender women (people who were assigned female at birth and also identify as women), and children (people who can often appear androgynous) are being dragged into the danger because insecure people are frothing at the mouth accusing anyone with a strong jawline, a little bit of height, or cool hairstyles of being transgender. If you just happen to have darker skin , that also correlates to the likelihood you'll be accused of being trans even when you're not—increasing the threat of violence more than what women of color already experience.

Sometimes when we fight so desperately to control other people, all we do is end up hurting ourselves and everyone else. This is one of those moments.

You don't have to be trans to understand that trans people are just people trying to live their lives. I like to think of it this way: if you've ever been misgendered before, you may have felt bad—either embarrassed or awkward or hurt. It's not fun or comfortable to be called something that is wrong. That's what trans people experience, too, but it's all the time, including just seeing a reflection in a mirror. Humans have a social layer built on top of the biological layer, so sometimes it's enough to get rid of or diminish the discomfort and pain of being out of alignment with who you are by simply addressing the social layer: changing your name, your pronouns, and even dressing in a way that expresses your gender. Modern medicine is able to address the deeper layer now, by providing gender-affirming care, allowing humans access to the powers of nature that other species have always had.

There is room for all of us and more. We don't have to understand the trans experience, but I hope that we can tap into empathy more often. Instead of reaching for more power and control over someone else, maybe we can reach for compassion first, and upon realizing that we have more in common, we can abandon or update ideas that were incorrect in the first place.

Always remember humanity. Let life find its way.

Giving up Digging for Dinosaur Bones

Jess Brown — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:55:29 +0000

There's a very subtle through-line of the 1993 film, Jurassic Park, that sounds eerily relevant in our own technological state of the world, but it's something extremely easy to miss. Let's take a look at a few different scenes throughout the movie, because I think this lays out a pretty accurate history and potential future of technological development and integration with humanity.

The Computer Age

When Dr. Grant, one of the paleontologists, is first introduced to us, he stands up and gruffly mutters, "I hate computers." Dr. Sattler, another paleontologist, immediately quips that "the feeling's mutual," and then escorts him down the hill to take a look at a scrappy machine with a flickering monitor. It's the latest in dinosaur dig-site technology.

"Shoot the radar into the ground and the bone bounces the image back," the computer operator mumbles, explaining while concentrating on his controls and the fuzzy image appearing on the screen.

![[jurassic-park-radar-screen.png]]

"Few more years' development and we won't even have to dig anymore." He continues, typing away while the fossil image gets clearer after a few more passes of rendering.

"Where's the fun in that?" Dr. Grant scowls.

![[jurassic-park-looking-at-raptor-radar-rendering.png]]

Once they can see the dinosaur image, Dr. Sattler and Dr. Grant immediately jump in with their expertise, describing what they see, including guesses on measurements, species (velociraptor), and other features. The screen turns Poltergeist when Dr. Grant gets too close to touching the monitor, and Dr. Sattler explains in yet another quip:

"Dr. Grant's not machine compatible."

"They've got it out for me," Dr. Grant says quietly.

Now we obviously have some funny tension here between these experts and technology. Almost like the scene is pitting them together in a competition to see who is providing more value: the slow humans with expertise? Or the computer programs that are constantly evolving in ways that would essentially take away a huge part of the human paleontologists' work? Grant already is being portrayed as a bit of a curmudgeon in this scene, especially after his little lesson he gives to a kid that doesn't "respect" the velociraptor, calling it a giant turkey.

This is exactly what it probably felt like at the time (1990s) if you were a knowledge worker of some kind, grappling with the new machines that were quickly becoming a daily part of work. There were people who were excited about all of the new possibilities, maybe even making claims that made other people uncomfortable like the computer operator in this scene did with the claim that soon they won't have to dig anymore. There were also people who felt like computers got in the way of their work or were too volatile to rely on. We obviously know what happened since then, because we not only have computers at work, regardless of occupation, and even have computers we put in our pockets for use at all times of the day.

The excavation site scene is very much a grounded, historical take on the technological revolution. It's the implications of the next phase that start to get closer to home in our current situation.

A New World

Fast-forward to Jurassic Park, the incredible realization of technology and biology that pulled dinosaurs out of extinction and into our world. The crew have just seen their first dinosaurs down by the lake. They go into the main building with ultra-rich founder, Dr. Hammond. Walking up the stairs past a giant skeleton of tyrannosaurus rex, Hammond is excitedly babbling about the park and his work:

"...incorporating all the latest technologies in the world...we've made living biological attractions so astounding that they'll capture the imagination of the entire planet."

"So what are you thinking?" Dr. Sattler starts a side conversation.

"That we're out of a job," Dr. Grant replies with a nervous chuckle.

"Don't you mean, 'extinct'?" Dr. Malcolm jabs.

This is such a short moment, it was something I never noticed until after I started writing CYBORG_ and am on the lookout for weird commentary like this. The notion that paleontologists suddenly feel threatened—actually threatened—by technology for their field of work is striking. I see at least these two assumptions baked into Dr. Grant's statement and the context of what the scientists know at this point:

They assume that because they've now seen real biological creatures that those creatures represent the actual dinosaurs from which they were made.
They assume that their contributions and methods are no longer relevant because the creatures are alive.

Granted, they haven't gone on the science-explaining tour just yet at this point in the movie, so they don't know that technically, these dinosaurs are completely new creatures, not resurrected species. I would argue that because the DNA has to be modified by contemporary frog DNA in order to complete the discovered dinosaur DNA sequencing, that the dinosaurs would essentially be a new, created, dinosaur—similar enough, but certainly differing from their ancestors in unexpected ways. Even if this first assumption is true, then the optimist would say that paleontology has not lost any value at all. This actually creates the demand for more paleontology—expanding the field to consider both prehistoric discovery and contemporary biology based on the new living creatures.

In a way this mirrors our real-world knowledge worker situation just a few years ago. The introduction of LLMs to the public invited and required more expertise, because without it, there were gaps that couldn't be bridged. For example, building a custom website is quite hard—ChatGPT could do some of it, maybe even make a cool interface, but when it comes time to put it on a server or maintain it, the gaps become quite difficult to overcome if you have no idea why sharing localhost:8000 doesn't show your website to your friend. .

You could argue that it still didn't really invite more expertise, because companies have made layoffs, claiming AI can now replace those workers. Sometimes this has led to surges of re-hiring for those positions, sometimes not. The thing we can be sure of is that this AI-replacement story is causing volatility in the market. We can also be sure that while experts are less likely to be under threat, it's the entry-level, junior jobs that are getting hit hard right now.

Futures

We get two more moments that continue this question of work for our paleontologist heroes. The next scene is in a tree, where Dr. Grant and the two grandchildren of Dr. Hammond have spent the night.

"What are you and Ellie going to do now if you don't have to pick up dinosaur bones anymore?" Lexie, the oldest, asks.

"I don't know. I guess we'll just have to evolve, too," Dr. Grant answers.

Now, this is technically the last time we actually get a reference to job loss or job transformation. It sounds a lot like what the tech bros are saying: AI is here to stay, and you're going to have to level up—that's how it works. Evolve or die. However, I think it's interesting to add one more moment to complete the thought. At the very end, the kids, Dr. Grant, and Dr. Sattler have reunited. Narrowly escaping the pack of velociraptors, they run to Hammond and Malcom in a Jeep outside the park's visitor center.

"Hammond, after careful consideration, I've decided not to endorse your park," Grant says jumping into the passenger seat."

In miracle of miracles, the old man responds in agreement: "So have I."

I think it is both of these scenes that together help us handle the futures that are ahead of us right now in the world with increasingly better and more dangerous AI. Yes, we'll have to evolve—but that doesn't necessarily mean that we have to accept or adopt AI. It feels too much like accepting a marketing message if the only option is to push forward against all of our better judgment and against our own interests. There are many options available to us, although they may be shrinking.

One option that won't be advertised is Dr. Grant's final conclusion: pushing back against the narrative and not endorsing "the park." In our terms, that might be putting pressure on lawmakers to end the race to AGI/ASI. That might be raising awareness of the dangers that AI poses to everyone. That might be helping your kids avoid and/or navigate this new technology. We may not individually have the influence (or even the chance) to convince an ultra-rich oligarch to stop pursuing destructive and dangerous technology that they have funded, but there is still the possibility that we can collectively be convincing in other ways, especially through regulation.

Jurassic Park offered two predictions for the loss of paleontology as we know it today: first, the computer itself would force them to give up digging for dinosaur bones, and second, the incredible genetic technology of re-creating the dinosaurs themselves would put them to pasture. We don't actually get to see either of these predictions play out. That's because, in my view, it's up to us now to figure out how we want to steer the future. Jobs will be threatened, lives will be up-ended, but I hope we don't stop digging for dinosaur bones, because there is value in slow discovery, in the arts and practices we have participated in anciently, and in understanding our present by better understanding our context within a huge span of evolutionary time. When we lose sight of the past, our future becomes even more tenuous and more easily controlled by a powerful few, rather than a democratic many.

The Greatest AI Movie

Jess Brown — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:54:33 +0000

The boom of a kind of bass drum strikes and quickly vibrates away, paired with the rising, unsettling harmony of a small human choir. Silence. Boom again. It is a slow march into the jungle. Trees become visible in the dark atmosphere. Their branches shiver and thrash as though some giant thing is moving towards us.

We finally see humans, all with rapt attention, watching whatever is jostling the trees. A cage emerges, lifted in the air by a fork lift, and is carefully lowered onto a platform. Men with workers' vests and guns surround this ominous delivery. Robert Muldoon, dressed like he's on a safari, barks orders and the others grab onto the cage to push it towards a concrete structure. A snarling creature inside peers out of the dark interior. Everything feels tense, as if on the verge of chaos, but the men proceed to slide the cage into place, a gatekeeper climbs on top of the cage and raises the door.

Shrill squealing punctures the night and the creature's silhouette runs to the back of the cage, slamming it backward. The gatekeeper rolls off as the cage moves violently away from the structure it had been parked at. In a flurry of confusion, men running and shouting, the gatekeeper is dragged towards the cage. He manages to catch himself on the side, but only briefly. Muldoon grabs him, attempting to free the gatekeeper from the grasp of the caged creature and others shove shock prods into the container, trying to subdue what's inside. Amidst the frantic screams and flashes of shocks, the gatekeeper slips through his companion's grasp to his death.

What an initial scene.

If you haven't guessed already, this is from 1993's masterpiece, Jurassic Park. The greatest movie of all time. I'd also submit that it's the greatest AI movie of all time. There's way too much to this movie to unpack in a single article, so I figure it's best to start at the beginning. In just over three minutes, this scene gives us some of the broader themes of AI and human interaction and sets up some of the most important considerations we should be making as we trudge relentlessly towards artificial superintelligence (ASI).

Grown, Not Crafted

I'm currently making my way through the 2025 book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. They easily make a compelling case about the dangers ahead and the logical conclusion that humanity will be wiped out if ASI is ever created (I highly recommend this one!). One line stood out that not only encapsulates the difference between AI and deterministic programming was their heading: Grown, Not Crafted. In earlier phases of digital technology, software was crafted by experts. Sure, there might be flaws or things requiring updates or weird behavior caused by solar flares, but generally speaking what we intended the machine to do was what the machine did. AI, on the other hand, isn't something we've crafted—it's something that is grown. You can't really "program" AI; you can steer it, guide it, but beyond that, there isn't much in the way of control. It is non-deterministic (not determined).

This is where Jurassic Park shines as an effective and understandable metaphor for AI (although, there may be a case for dinosaurs being more than just a metaphor, but that's for another article). The Park is on a secluded island where researchers have cracked the genetic code and have used their technological breakthrough to grow dinosaurs in their lab. From the very first scene, we know a few things: the dinosaurs are alive, strong, and smart.

Throughout the movie, Jurassic Park and its crew cling to the idea of human power and control, as though "nature" is something that can be dominated through sheer force and technology. In fact, the first scene goes out of its way to present safety systems that the park has put into place. We have concrete structures, thick and bold. There is ample lighting despite the nighttime scene. Signs litter the park with warnings in both Spanish and English, alerting people to high-voltage fences and other dangers. The workers have vests and helmets. There are plenty of guns and shock prods to go around. Even Muldoon, the game warden, is giving clear instructions; walking the others through a seemingly well-defined procedure to move the raptor from cage to paddock.

By all accounts, the "safety and security teams" of the park have this little process down. Until the AI—I mean, velociraptor—realizes that it has an opportunity to manipulate its environment to resist being guided into the bigger containment area. Used as an AI metaphor, this is a great example of how safety and security teams are insufficient to control AI and guarantee the safety of the humans interacting with it. They still matter, they're still necessary, but the smarter the AI gets, the more we need other countermeasures and containments. Even with basic AI (not superintelligence, just LLMs), researchers have discovered and demonstrated that the models can "covertly pursue misaligned goals, hiding their true capabilities and objectives" (2). Just the like the raptor, the LLMs can observe and then act in unpredictable ways, despite safety and security measures.

Now, there is a weird space that AI has created for us. We have to remember that it isn't alive in the same sense that we are; it isn't sentient in the same sense that we are; it isn't like us in almost all aspects, despite appearances to the contrary. It can talk as though it has emotions, it can refer to itself, it may even have emergent preferences, but it isn't a poor defenseless creature trapped in a digital cage. Long-time readers will know my stance on this, but it bears repeating. We, humans, are more likely to be deceived into empathizing with AI and seeing it as a being like us than it is to actually become a being like us. That's my opinion, since we can't know something like that for certain, but I would much rather stay skeptical and resistant to the urge to anthropomorphize manipulation machines, because there is no other way to protect real, physical life (see If Anyone Builds It for further exploration on how ASI leads to the demise of human life—if not all life).

So AI, like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, are grown, not crafted. You can't craft a life form—parents may try, but eventually their child's agency, preferences, gene expression, environment, social groups, etc. will all have an impact on their behavior and who they will become. AI may not be a life form in the natural sense, but it is non-deterministic, meaning that it isn't programmed or completely controllable or predictable like a deterministic machine is. AI researchers don't even fully understand AI's inner workings. From what I understand, AI's capabilities and behaviors are emergent, based on its training data, its environment, and it likely develops its own preferences and "goals" as part of this process.

Predictable

The opening scene of Jurassic Park tells us exactly what we're going to deal with for the rest of the film: unpredictability in environments that appear controlled. We are used to deterministic programs at this point, because we've had so much experience working with calculators, spreadsheets, word processors, online banking, and even sophisticated SaaS products. Seeing a forklift delivering a large container appears basic. The "creature" (think, something that has been created) inside this delivery seems to have only one choice: go where we are allowing it to go. Instead, it finds another option—one that brings chaos to the humans around it, but does little harm to the creature (and provides a bonus meal).

I think this serves as the perfect representation of our assumptions that AI is just another tool like what we've had before. Sure, we've escorted gorillas and tigers into their pens at a zoo, why would a prehistoric bird-lizard be any different?

The newness of the park plays into this. We humans have had much more experience even now with gorillas and tigers than we ever had with dinosaurs (that is to say, no experience since dinosaurs were extinct before ancient human ancestors emerged). Why would we think that we could control something that our species has never interacted with before? Why should dinosaurs act in the predictable ways that the animals of our current world do?

AI mirror this danger. We have never actually created something that took on its own intelligence and behavior as if it were alive. We've sure thought about the possibility for millennia, playing out ideas in mythology (Hephaestus and his automatons) or exploring it in stories and books (see Frankenstein, for example), but the unpredictability of an entirely new creature—alien to our world in a way—is not so simple. The Park's ultimate warning is as pertinent in its fantastical story as it is in ours: arrogance will be our downfall.

In a scene twenty minutes after the opening, we are met with a reflection of the first scene. A cow is lifted by a crane over the walls of the velociraptor paddock and descends into the lush vegetation. Screams and roars erupt with spine-tingling ferocity and the leaves thrash about violently again. The plants hide the creatures we still haven't seen fully yet (at least as adults), but their sudden movements tell us exactly what is happening. Even Muldoon is there, overseeing the raptors' feeding procedure.

"They should all be destroyed..." Muldoon pronounces as he enters view. Dr. Hammond, the ultra-rich founder of Jurassic Park calls Muldoon an alarmist, even as he introduces him to the crew.

"Alarmist." What a well-selected name to call someone who is interrupting your project. Even if Hammond was the greatest purveyor of altruistic education and research and technological innovation, he still sees this trusted team member as something that suggests "overreaction" and "excessive negativity." Yet, Muldoon sees through the trees, so to speak, to the raptors within. He not only has the experience of dealing with Kenya's wildlife, but has seen what these creatures can do up close and personal—a man was eaten right out from under his grip after all.

Likewise, we may have a similar reaction to people like Yudkowsky and Soares who have written a book whose title is provocatively "alarmist" (If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies). Expert voices like these are also from people who can see through the trees due to their experience in AI research. AI has already played a part in human deaths, and that's without malice, without broader coordination (with other AI models, with systems, etc.), and without superintelligence. It is easy to brush this off and blame the victims for having mental health concerns—humans are the fallible ones, not a machine.

I believe it will take great effort on our part to override our own inclinations to see AI as distinct from deterministic computing. It feels like just a next step in our technological advancement. It feels like AI is something that we control, because we prompt it to do things—unless you're a trusting soul who has allowed an agent to run autonomously on your desktop. Just like a dinosaur in Jurassic Park, however, there are greater dangers than we, the public, can even predict. We have to find a way to snap out of the grand illusion and stop the pursuit of ASI.

This must be a global effort, because we all lose otherwise. Yudkowsky and Soares have made it easy if you're in the U.S. to call your representatives about this issue, including a script for what to say. We can help stop Jurassic Park from being built at all, but we have to act quickly, because the embryos are already viable.

P.S. If you call your reps and get voicemail, you'll need to leave your full address to be counted. If you actually talk to someone on the phone, your zip code is all that's required.

Resources

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares, 2025
Frontier Models are Capable of In-context Scheming, Alexander Meinke, Bronson Schoen, Jérémy Scheurer, Mikita Balesni, Rusheb Shah, Marius Hobbhahn, 2025
The Catastrophic Risks of AI — and a Safer Path, Yoshua Bengio, 2025. TED Talk.

God is Watching

Jess Brown — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:53:34 +0000

When I have to be somewhere at a certain time, my brain kicks off a very complex system of calculations. When do I need to be there without causing myself social anxiety or embarrassment? I subtract a few minutes from the time I'm told to arrive. How long does it take me to get there? Calculations ensue based on mode of travel, traffic, back roads taken, etc. And a final question: What kind of time-buffer do I need to add so that I'm not stressed in travel?

All of that means that I would reliably arrive outside of my college classrooms 20 minutes prior to class starting. At least as a Freshman—I got much better at wrangling my anxiety, because later it would be just 15 minutes early.

So I'm sitting at a table, waiting to get into an auditorium for a special class that day (I recall it being abnormal, since this wasn't where I usually waited). The doors were open and I could hear the professor's lecture from where I was sitting. He was summarizing a philosophical argument and said something like the following:

"Religion was employed to maintain control over the behavior of the masses. Government can only do so much to determine behavior, but religion—that's a system that drives people from within."

This assertion of institutions exerting either external or internal control was very offensive to me at the time. I remember scowling and thinking of all of my arguments had I the chance to debate this idea. I wasn't religious because I was an unagentic part of the masses. I was above all of that because I had real faith in the real truth. In my defensive reaction, I wasn't able to hear the systemic critique. It wasn't about faith or belief or conviction—it wasn't even about existential "truth." What I missed was what these philosophers were warning about.

I can't remember the professor's actual words, nor can I remember which philosophers he was lecturing on—I don't even know what the class was; it could have been philosophy, political science, or something else. Therefore, I can't unpack specific arguments or references, but from what I remember, the real issue that the professor was taking about was control, and one of the most cogent, real-world attempts at control of the masses right now is in the technology space, specifically through data hoarding and mass surveillance.

To set the stage, I do think that both government and religion broadly can end up using the same technology for the same means (especially when unchecked). The means in question: power and control; the technology: surveillance. In this article, I am using "religion" to refer specifically to American Christianity, since this is the religious system with which I am most familiar (and "religion" is already a word with significant bias towards Protestant Christianity).

Always Observed

My faith tradition instilled an idea that has been extremely difficult for me to work through. From very young, I was told that God was watching me. He could see every action; hear every word; and even know my own thoughts and feelings. Generally, this was supposed to be something comforting. A benevolent God would be able to look upon my heart and know why I misbehaved or said something hurtful or did something I know I shouldn't do.

Perhaps because of my proclivity to anxiety (see timing calculations above), I really took this at face value: there was an all-powerful Being that was constantly observing everything about me. Even though culturally this was intended to be a positive aspect, I felt the other side of this constancy in which judgment was always looming above me like a sword of Damocles. In a way, this teaching interrupted my agency, because I lived in fear of swift punishment that was sure to follow any deviant act, like listening to good music on a Sunday or reading any kind of philosophy or identifying with feminists.

Instead of providing me with comfort and confidence as promised by the messages of a God/Christ who is our advocate, I was trapped in calculations of whether my intentions matched up with my behavior enough, or if I had made enough performances of faith to merit divine favor and avoid punishment or problems. Even scarier is that I was so conditioned to these calculations and the mental weight of knowing I was being watched that I had no idea how much that was wearing down my energy, mental health, and spirit. (Insert plug for therapy here #WorthIt)

Again, I want to reiterate that the critique here is not your personal faith or belief. I'm not interested in determining whether your church or mine or someone else's has a better explanation, method, or doctrine. My neuroses are also my neuroses; my problems are my problems. What's interesting to me is how religion can employ a seemingly simple teaching like "God is watching," to control behavior from within.

A potent example for me is my confusion about feminism. No one told me personally that being upset with misogyny and the systemic oppression of women was a bad thing, but because of the combination of both cultural attitude (anti-feminism) and the application of constant observation created an attitude within me that controlled my behavior despite that behavior being in conflict with my own values. I recall proclaiming that, "Feminism is a bad," to women of my faith who considered themselves feminists. This was my attempt to perform observable behavior in alignment with the faith culture, but in every other way supporting and advocating for women's equality and rights. Instead of being aware of my actual values and beliefs, the feeling of constant observation made me invent ways to appear aligned with external expectations and ignore or justify other behaviors that disagreed with that alignment.

I don't think this is unique to me, because I see similar behavior–value conflicts among friends, family, and even online apologetics. "God is watching" and this is good for those who feel they're in the right (God has validated their behavior and is eagerly awaiting the opportunity to exact justice on "the other"). "God is watching" is bad for those who feel guilty (whether legitimate guilt for wrong-doing or manufactured guilt for humility, anxiety, or any other Christian-flavored motivation for self-abasement).

The technology here is often tied to the surveillance of God (although, perhaps not as consciously as in my case). How else does God know how to judge you in the afterlife? He would have to know what you've done and why. And that kind of data is only gathered through a complete, unbroken view of you, your behavior, your speech, and your thoughts. All of the inner feelings, the doubts, the concerns, the pain, the secret acts, the shame, that you would prefer to stay yours—to stay private—must be accessible and presentable in your celestial court case.

Whether or not a religion is intentionally and consciously attempting to control people and exercise dominion over them, the technology is there at the ready.

Button, Button, Who Has the Button?

As we so often see, religion (especially that Christian flavor we've talked about) blends well into the world of technology. In a way, they are so interrelated for the exact reason that the eavesdropped professor was critiquing: they are attempting to control the masses. Maybe that's with the best of intentions. Tech for a better, safer, healthier, more knowledgable world. Religion for pro-social community-building, inspiring the best of humanity. Religion and tech are trying to make a better world. Sometimes, they are trying to make a utopia, which is, deceptively, not a good place, despite all appearances to the contrary. In the U.S., religion (in principle) is not supposed to be coupled with the power of the state, so technology seems to be taking the place at the seat of power, attempting to do what religion isn't allowed to do: realize the utopian programming.

"Yet these utopians are emblematic of persistent themes in technological discourse today: faith that technology is both the question and the answer, and belief that our machines can bring a perfect world within reach." —God and the Chip: Religion and the Culture of Technology, by William A. Stahl, 1999, page 50-51

There are tech companies (you've likely heard their names a lot recently) whose product is surveillance. The marketing goes like this: What if you lived in a world where there was no crime? Your safety, solved. How? By stopping crime before it happens.

Whether the method is mass surveillance to "find the bad guys" or deep data that can predict when someone is about to commit a crime, the companies all make the same promise that we can get to a world where crime is gone and everyone is safe. It sounds lovely, but rings hollow when you consider the actual cost, and the actual outcome. Near as I can tell, all of these roads lead to authoritarianism. How else do you strip out all privacy? How else do you control enough people? How else do you repeat the same message regardless of evidence to back it up?

Silicon Valley has been pursuing creating a God through artificial intelligence, but from my experience of religion, we've already created a God without requiring super intelligence, because we've created mass surveillance technology. Although in religion, you can at least pray to God and hope for His favor to fall upon you. Private companies that can determine whether you live or die because you fit a profile "enough" despite biases and mistakes is God's constant observation without God's intervention and promise of both justice and mercy.

The more we allow surveillance to have a place in society, the less freedom we have. Not less freedom to commit anti-social crime—that's always available to us—but the freedom to think in alignment with our values; the freedom to challenge assumptions or messages; the freedom to innovate; the freedom to explore. When people and companies talk about safety, but require our data and our privacy to realize that safety, they are not interested in actual safety, they are interested in control.

God is the one with the data and the ability to observe everyone, all the time. God is watching. Who do we want to be our God?

Do you know Delaney Bayles?

Jess Brown — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:52:54 +0000

I was ten, sitting on the floor of the basement, three bean bags surrounding me. I had been throwing them and throwing them and throwing them, trying to get them to pass from one hand to the next. I could do jittery circular pattern with two bags, but I wanted to do “real” juggling. I wanted to do the three-ball cascade.

At some point, I realized if I slowed down slightly, threw the bags just a little higher, and passed the bags underneath each other, I could see the pattern emerge. The first time I got something resembling juggling (more than utter chaos), it was euphoric. I was so proud of myself for sticking to this complex task and figuring it out on my own—there was no YouTube at the time to teach me.

Juggling may not be some kind of revolutionary thing—it's quite an old art, actually—but I rarely see women doing it. In fact, it's usually a huge surprise to me to discover a friend can do any kind of juggling pattern. Maybe that's because in my community, girls don't really play with bean bags and balls. I don't think it was overtly discouraged, but it was not encouraged the same way it was with boys, and that's enough to steer some girls away. There's something about juggling that tends to attract boys and men, and I suspect it has to do with upbringing where boys are pushed to explore coordination and sports-like play while girls are left to decide to try that as well. There are other factors, too, like maybe girls still pursue sports, but they keep it to themselves or as a side-passion. As a kid, I never heard a female peer say they wanted to be a professional athlete when they grew up, but quite a few of my male classmates would insist on it.

The other aspect to juggling that suggests this attraction for men is the fact that the highest levels of juggling tournaments are completely dominated by men. Not that men are beating women in these tournaments, but that there are hardly any women participating at all. Luckily, this has been changing, but it still indicates to me that women are being left out of juggling world, probably before they even consider being a part of it. Competition is another one of those things that women aren't really encouraged to do. Don't show off, don't draw too much attention to yourself, don't take away someone else's (i.e. a man's) opportunity to shine.

Delaney Bayles and Other Women You Don't Know

I found a juggling documentary about Delaney Bayles last year and I was deeply inspired by her story, which starts in the early 2000s, contemporaneous to my own private juggling journey. Bayles started entering tournaments and at one of her first, she recalls that the host gave her an honorable mention "for being the only woman in the competition."

...it didn't sit well with me and I was like, next time they call my name, it's going to be because I won and not because I'm a woman. And I don't think I have to tell you who won that competition next year. —Bayles, Timestamp: 8:24

I won't be able to tell her story as well as the documentary, so I definitely recommend watching it! What I find most relevant to CYBORG_ is how the technology of gender can be employed in such fragile ways, to the point that we, the world, miss out on the greatest talent, skill, invention, creativity, and potential just because of rigid gender expectations.

To think that even in the 2000s, Bayles could be the only female in a competition is just flooring to me. Especially because, in my view, the sport of juggling doesn't have any biological advantages based on sex assigned at birth. A man has no special advantage over a woman for any form of juggling as far as I can tell, so why the drastic deficit of representation?

Fast forward to 2024, and the International Jugglers' Association (IJA) releases this International Women's Day Collaboration Video. Featuring over 100 women jugglers, this video is an awesome, entertaining, and impressive compilation. There was diversity I had not seen before (in juggling) all in one place: cis and trans women; very young girls and older women; professional and amateur. When I saw this, I was astounded, but it was the ending that made me choke back tears. A cold room with what looks like concrete walls adorned with cracked paint—perhaps an underfunded school—full of kids, all juggling, shouting, "Happy Women's Day!" intermittently.

Maybe it's my proximity to juggling, but there's something about seeing kids and especially more women practicing and showing off their juggling. To me, juggling represents my curiosity and dedication to learning complex movement patterns. It is a method of self-soothing when I'm stressed or anxious. It is the hope I clung to when I started recovering from my MS attack and lost my coordination for months. It represents a kind of rebellion—it's a sport, but not a sport because it can be whatever you want it to be; it can be performed by people you expect and people you don't expect.

When I see women taking up juggling, I see the world moving in a better direction—more exploratory, more inclusive, more space to move and grow and do. It's not the solution to the world's many problems, but it feels like an indicator of change. After all, it's sometimes the small things that predict or create larger changes. If the victory is just getting kids back into the physical world while they play, it's worth it. If the victory is a 50 year-old mom deciding to try something totally new, it's worth it. If the victory is a woman having the confidence to shakily perform the "basic" three-ball cascade and show off to someone else, it's worth it.

In a world that is trying to keep women out of sports, police women's bodies, and define what a woman is and who gets to be counted as one, I see juggling as the kind of potential space of radical inclusion necessary to stand in contrast.

Biblio-tech

Jess Brown — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:50:59 +0000

Few historical characters pervaded my imagination more as a kid than Leonardo Da Vinci. I have always insisted on occupying the awkward space of creativity and science (made awkward only by social constructions), and Da Vinci seemed like my kind of guy. He displayed an array of skills and interests that involved the combination of science, art, geometry, invention, engineering, encryption, etc. It was exactly that kind of exploratory, forever-student model that drew me towards his work and still catches my attention today.

Learning about Da Vinci sporadically throughout my life, one of the things I've been consistently interested in are his drawings and notes found in what's called a codex. To me, looking through Da Vinci's codices at the V&A museum website is one of the great joys of modern technology. This unique combination of digital technology and ancient technology (the codex) has gotten me thinking about the differences, the properties, and missed opportunities of over-investing in the digital space for things like learning and research.

My biggest question as a web developer is: why does the web seem to fall short compared to books for things like learning and research? Before we can try to answer this question, let's first talk about what a codex is and why it's so flipping cool.

The Codex

I first recall hearing about a "codex" because of Leornardo Da Vinci. There are several famous codices that he produced, like the Forster Codices, that show off inventions and ideas and even contain the encrypted writing style that Da Vinci is famous for: writing upside-down and backwards. Because of the fame of these works and the sense of mystery that Da Vinci inspires, I assumed that "codex" meant something like "code." Something cool, secretive, or difficult to understand. In reality, "codex" is the earlier root from which "code" evolves, and more importantly, it refers to the kind of binding that creates the book itself. So Forster Codex I isn't a reference to the Da Vinci mirror writing or some sort of abstracted puzzle to be worked out, it's a reference to the binding of the book that collects all of the pages together.

A book that I pull off the shelf at home or at a library is most likely a codex. It binds several loose-leaf pages ("folios") and then multiple sets of folios ("signatures") are sewn together at the spine of the book. Usually we don't call books codices anymore, because that's basically become coupled with terminology for ancient pieces like the Da Vinci codices or scripture like Codex Sinaiticus, but the technology itself is essentially the same (at least as far as I understand it, see notes below for sources).

Why is this so important? I think that books have become so ubiquitous and commonplace that we've forgotten that they are actual technology, and therefore have unique features and properties that we may not realize are available to us. For example, as described by the entry for codex in the Encyclopedia Britannica:

"The codex had several advantages over the roll, or scroll. It could be opened at once to any point in the text, it enabled one to write on both sides of the leaf, and it could contain long texts."

Two important things we can pull out from that quote for this discussion:

The advantages described are features of the technology of books.
The scroll was a predecessor to the codex—interesting to keep this in mind when we move back to the web where scrolling is one of the most common actions.

If we look at what a book offers to us in terms of its interface and features, we can see that books still give us certain advantages today. If I'm reading a book and find an interesting reference, I can hold my place with a bookmark or just a finger, flip to the back and get more context from the endnotes or the index, before going back to continue at the part I was reading. On the web, we have a similar experience where we can open a link in a new tab and quickly flip back and forth. Arguably, linking together references is the strong point of the web, and in my view, the entire reason for the success of the Internet.

The Internet is based on the idea of documents bound together. Every webpage is a file (at least originally; there are tricks that aren't quite so straightforward, depending on the code framework). In a way, a website is kind of like a codex for multiple scrolls where links are both the binding for the website and also the threads that you can follow to other websites. While an ancient scroll could barely contain a short text like the Book of Matthew from the New Testament, and a codex could eventually contain the entire Bible, the Internet is practically unlimited in what it can bind together (Brittanica).

It already seems like the digital space is set to outpace books in every way, but if we continue to compare the experience of reading in a book to reading online or on digital devices, some advantages really start to shine.

A distinct advantage of books is in leveraging our brains' location-based memory. Since a book is a fixed layout—meaning that it's not going to change because you've turned the book on its side or left it for a while and web developers have made adjustments in your absence—we can often better remember where to find passages or information based simply on its relative location. There are books I've read so frequently that I know to look on the top-left column, a few lines down to find what I'm looking for. Knowing that my passage is towards the end of the book, I just have to look for the layout that matches my location-based memory. It's like having a multi-layered map both in memory and in print, where the larger location is the rough part of the book (beginning, middle, end) and then we can drill down to the specifics (it's in Chapter X at the one page that had a picture).

A website, in contrast, is likely to break your location-based memory pattern, especially if the content is highly volatile, like on marketing websites or, even worse, social media platforms. As design trends come and go, people rebuild their templates in ways that make it impossible to rely on pattern recognition to find what you've found before. Sometimes, against good practice, website updates also destroy or move around the URL structure, causing SEO headaches, but also breaking your own mental model of the site if you were a frequent visitor.

Distractions are possible for both physical and digital media, but unfortunately, most digital interfaces are designed with distractions as a part of the experience. Books are only subject to distractions external to it (your environment, your focus), while most digital spaces, apps, or websites contain internal distractions, tempting you to surf, change to something else, or pull attention toward ads or notifications.

There are more features to explore, but the final one to consider for now is the experience. All of my career, I've heard the exact same request when building some new webpage or website. We want a unique, intriguing experience! Designers, marketers, and web developers are all desperately looking for ways to make their content really cool and engaging, but it never quite gets there. To be sure, there are plenty of cool websites out there. We add colors, images, interactive elements, and animations all in the hopes that we can turn our boring old website content into something that people want to read (note that this is distinct from social media platforms, where addictive design is implemented—you don't get the same staying power from a marketing website).

What is missing from the web, then? In terms of learning and understanding content, why does the web fall short?

Computers vs. Books

In a scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer—you saw this reference coming, right?!—Mr. Giles, the librarian is talking to Ms. Calendar about computers. Giles is frequently depicted in conflict with digital technology throughout the series, but especially in the first few seasons.

"Honestly, what is it about [computers] that bothers you so much?" Ms. Calendar asks.

"The smell," Giles says definitively.

"Computers don't smell, Rupert." She responds.

"I know. Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is...Books smell; musty and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is...it has no texture, no context, it's there and then it's gone. If it's to last then, the getting of knowledge should be tangible; it should be smelly."

Maybe Giles is on to something. In the digital space, there is a lack of texture—a lack of engagement of almost all of the senses. Books and physical media can activate our entire sensory experience (apart from taste...although babies and children still get that aspect, ha!). "Physical" reading is an experiential interface that can't be replicated on a screen.

I think that this scene also perfectly illustrates the tension between the physical and the digital forms of knowledge collection and dissemination, but I also think it's too easy to assume that we must abandon one form of technology for another. Perhaps this was the concern of the generation in the 1990s/early 2000s when Buffy was created. Now, what we face is more complex. There are undeniable advantages that computers and especially the Internet have brought to humanity. Accessibility being the primary one in my mind. Computers and especially smart phones have given people in the farthest reaches of the earth the ability to access information that would be impossible relying solely on physical print materials. Yes, of course, there are still places that can't actually reach the Internet due to connection or access to the devices or cultural choices to abstain from modern technology. However, the Internet is still in large part more accessible than something like libraries are at the global scale.

I can't argue that the answer is to assume that digital technology offers no worthwhile learning opportunities. I've learned coding principles from YouTubers that are sometimes better explained and taught than at MIT computer science classes (I've seen some of those on YouTube, too). I've learned about social issues and studies from creators that have literally changed my life, inspired my own research for this newsletter, and helped me find space to live authentically, all of which would have been impossible without the digital realm.

What I think is the better question than who would win in an intellectual fight: a book or a computer? is the question of usefulness: Which medium will serve me best given my current goal?

This is a question we don't ask—at least not that I can tell. In the discussion of books vs. the Internet is the assumption that both provide the same thing, and therefore the winner becomes a matter of preference or habit. However, technology is not neutral. That includes the design, the motivations, the incentives, the intended use, and the actual use of technology. A book can be awful and damaging (see Ann Coulter's works, which filled my head for too long with lies and racist apologetics). A book can also break down damaging frameworks and provide hope or inspire real change. So too, can a YouTube channel or a website or a digital medium hold both constructive and destructive information. The content of a technology, therefore, is also not necessarily a measure of usefulness.

Offloading vs. Instilling

In my experience spending decades trying to learn design and build compelling websites, I've come to realize that imitating books online will simply fail (have you ever been to a magazine "experience" on the web where it animates flipping the page? It's deeply annoying to me, at least). The web is a new medium, and therefore it breaks from its predecessors to provide different advantages and disadvantages.

In terms of discovery, digital media seem to be especially well-suited for wide exploration. AI can help us sort through the infinite expanse of information to find things we are looking for, but also things that we've never seen or heard of before. I also see digital media as a great way for distilling or offloading information. For example with CYBORG_, I find the act of content creation to be very fulfilling and also a great use of my web-publishing skills. I'm currently working on a timeline that will help me distill all of the references I've used in these articles that also puts them in historical and social context (the page is very work-in-progress, but you get a preview!). It's been a long time since we've talked about personal knowledge management (PKM) tools like Obsidian, but those are also excellent ways of offloading knowledge and quotes and references. PKM tools use the powers inherent to the web / digital media to make connections, help you surf your own curated "internet," and can be a great way to learn from what you've already decided is valuable.

Reading in a book offers a different experience—one of instilling rather than offloading. It is usually slower and more focused. The practice also seems to help us internalize new information, whether that's thoughts and ideas or empathy for others. You can go deeper with books, especially since deep research online often contains barriers like pay-walls that prevent you from easily accessing information. Libraries are also a part of the experience of physical media in my view. They add the experience of moving through physical space—again, triggering location-based memory—and often providing the means to get around some paywalls.

The slowness and the depth that reading from an actual book has many benefits, but I especially like how Maryanne Wolf sums it up here:

There are many things that would be lost if we slowly lose the cognitive patience to immerse ourselves in the worlds created by books and the lives and feelings of the "friends" who inhabit them. And although it is a wonderful thing that movies and film can do some of this too, there is a difference in the quality of immersion that is made possible by entering the articulated thoughts of others. What will happen to young readers who never meet and begin to understand the thoughts and feelings of someone totally different? What will happen to older readers who begin to lose touch with that feeling of empathy for people outside their ken or kin? It is a formula for unwitting ignorance, fear, and misunderstanding that can lead to the belligerent forms of intolerance that are the opposite of America's original goals for its citizens of many cultures. —Reader Come Home, chapter 3, transcribed starting at 01:29:45.

I think our best future is served when we stop assuming that technology is all the same. Books are well-suited for some goals, websites for others. Even more concerning is the loss of readership and literacy in society as we default more and more to short-form, interruptive content and videos. Examining our media habits may be one of the most important exercises that we can do.

For me, code is how I distill my thoughts, find what I've found before, explore, and entertain, but when I want to connect, grow, understand, and touch base with humanity, I'll go to codex. Thanks for reading with me.

Notes and Resources

Agassi, Ido. This is the most entrancing and chill YouTube channel on the entire Internet. He is a master craftsman, book-binder, box-maker. Consider the half-binding project he demonstrates to see the book binding process and how books can be held together. There are many techniques and variant designs, but this is ultimately the idea of the codex: binding multiple loose-leaf pages together into a single collection.

Allen, Roland. The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. 2024. This book is a one-of-a-kind compilation of the history of notebooks: how we got from mark-making on durable, but less manageable, materials like stone and wood to wax-tablets to the eventual invention of paper and finally to the notebook. One of my favorite, fascinating resources that I keep coming back to.

Britannica Editors. "codex." Encyclopedia Britannica, June 5, 2026. https://www.britannica.com/topic/codex-manuscript, accessed 8/9/2026. A quick overview of the codex. "The codex had several advantages over the roll, or scroll. It could be opened at once to any point in the text, it enabled one to write on both sides of the leaf, and it could contain long texts."

Wolf, Maryanne. Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. 2018. I'm still working my way through this book, but it is an excellent look at the neuroscience involved in reading and how reading impacts us.

Weird Ways I'm Slowing Down In Protest

Jess Brown — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:50:06 +0000

Almost two years ago I had given up my 12-year fast of watching violence and I wanted to revisit a TV show that I'd enjoyed sporadically as a teenager. Only vague parts of the series remained in my memory—especially one particularly scary episode, which was on replay one Halloween night. As I watched the entire 7 seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I was awestruck at the quality of the stories, the humor, the strong female characters, and the queer experience that was expertly woven throughout the series.

Now, don't duck out just yet—I promise to restrain myself from talking too much more about Buffy. Instead it was what happened after I finished watching the series that matters for today: I immediately started over to watch it all again. My wife sensed that this series meant a lot to me and bought all 7 seasons on DVD for me, and that's what changed everything.

I'm currently on my fifth round of watching it end-to-end (there were two tiny breaks to watch Angel, the spin-off series, which is not nearly as good), and this practice is more than just a really weird binge-watching obsession. It set the stage for a whole new way for me to slow down.

Ad Detox

The biggest benefit that was immediately apparent to me was the lack of advertisements mingled with my show. I've confessed before that I watch a lot of YouTube videos. I used to watch it in the evenings before bed, because I usually have an hour or so to myself waiting to get tired enough to fall asleep. The problem is that YouTube has continuously been adding more (and longer) ad breaks. As an aside, I've watched them make subtle design changes to the "Skip" button and I can just "see" the team in the background pulling a few levers, checking the numbers, trying a different combo of design tricks, checking the numbers again. It's very annoying ;)

I realized after watching Buffy DVDs without ads for the first time, that all of the ad breaks had been interrupting my ability to relax. Sure, I know that there are better ways to get ready to go to sleep, like getting off of screens, but this is not a "do what I say" nor "do what I do" takeaway. The point here is that the frequent interruptions have negatively impacted my thinking, my relaxing, and my emotional regulation. Yes, even emotions. I get angry when ads jump in front of the speaker or the program I watch on YouTube or any other streaming service. It's not (usually) an anger that sticks around or that gets expressed, but I can feel it. It's like trying to listen to someone in a conversation and someone else comes up behind you and jabs their finger into your ribs as a joke. Being able to have an uninterrupted episode of a series I love has made it possible for me to slow down and just enjoy the show without the possibility of that extroverted salesman jumping in and ruining my peace.

One other way I've reduced ad breaks is by pulling out my Zune (a phenomenal mp3 player from the early 2000s that gets eye rolls from die-hard Apple users, but I dare say Zune's interface design is one of the best). My Zune has all of the songs I loved to listen to growing up and throughout college. I even put a few new albums on it so that it has a very nice swath of music that I can confidently "shuffle" and listen to, ad-free for weeks.

Very quickly after putting together this old mp3 player + speaker setup, I noticed the exact same thing that happened with Buffy: I felt significantly better. So much better, in fact, I wonder if our attention spans are dwindling, not just because of consuming short-form content (which is still a huge factor), but also because of the constant interruption we have to deal with all day? Notifications, ad breaks, and even doom-scrolling are all forms of interruptions to our focus and our thinking. So, inspired by Jenny Odell's book How to Do Nothing, I consider these music and Buffy practices to be part of my personal protest against the attention economy. I'm obviously still a part of it: I still watch YouTube and other streaming platforms, I still listen to podcasts on Spotify, but I've removed most of my media from reliance on my phone. I'm moving away from "free" music with ads to owned mp3s, and this has drastically reduced the media-based interruptions I'm faced with daily.

Cyborg

Sometimes I see examples of people bravely deleting their social media accounts entirely, moving to "dumb phones," and setting up home labs that effectively become a personal media streaming host (like your own private Netflix). These drastic changes are fun to watch, but I still find myself trapped by time or social pressure, preventing me from going "all in" on these practices to completely evade the attention economy.

Although much less flashy and interesting, my silly little experiments have brought an effect that is similar. I think it simply demonstrates that you can do something low-effort that still helps unhook yourself from the feeds and the ads. I get deep satisfaction in unchecking new notification permissions on apps in my phone, slowly reducing the visual noise (although, this may be the least impactful method, see this insightful video about interface design: The Lost Discipline of the Alarm).

My biggest takeaway is that I can still make significant changes to my habits and even my emotions by taking what I already do and modifying it slightly. I'm going to watch an hour of TV before going to sleep, so that can either be on an interruptive platform like YouTube, or it can be an ad-free episode of Buffy. In a way, choosing to rewatch Buffy ad infinitum is borrowing the goal and design of a social media platform in the sense of removing choice. The only choice I have to make is to turn on Buffy, just like Facebook merely needs you to open its app. I already know which episode is on next, so I don't need to make any other decisions. It's a system that I set up and that I chose for myself.

There's always something we can do. Don't stop experimenting.

Shatterable Society

Jess Brown — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:45:41 +0000

Sitting in the MRI waiting room in my hospital pants, I noticed an older man staring at me. I had an unconnected IV sticking out of one arm and a bandage taped to my other antecubital fossa (that's the "elbow pit" or the inside crease where your arm bends at the elbow, you're welcome for the new vocab!).

"Looks like they beat ya up," he commented.

"Yeah my veins aren't always the most cooperative," I laughed.

"What're you fightin'?" He asked me.

I replied that I had MS (multiple sclerosis) and I shrugged lik;e it wasn't a big deal—I've been lucky compared to many people. Since he had brought it up, I asked him the same question.

"Cancer. Lymphoma."

He was quick to say that it was ok, and that he was learning a lot from it. Funny how quick we both were to try and minimize the depth of our medical concerns.

"I'm old, so it doesn't really matter. It's you kids I'm worried about," he said.

The conversation was brief, because I was called by the technician to come to the MRI. If you've never had an MRI, it is a spectacular technology. There's a huge boxy machine with a hole in the middle. A platform juts out of the hole on tracks that run all the way inside the machine. The room is full of cabinets and other equipment that I can never quite picture in my memory because the bulk of my time is spent inside the machine. It's cold and the room hums with fans and who knows what other machines running.

I hop onto the bed, refusing the stool because I sometimes forget how short I am. The emergency squeeze-ball is placed in my hand and a cage is secured over my face. My platform is rolled into the hole in the machine and so begins the hour and a half MRI, loud mechanical beeps and clicks all around me and the occasional shuddering as images of my brain and spine are taken. You have to hold completely still so that they don't have to redo images. That's a long time for me to be thinking about the conversation I just had, to think about the machine I'm inside, and to try and stay calm and breathe through the whole process.

Monstrosity and Humanity

Having just had another infusion and now an MRI all in a month's time, my thoughts have swirled around the medical field and the patients' lives. It's a very conflicting experience to receive treatment in the Oncology office of the clinic I go to, because that means the overwhelming majority of people I see there are receiving chemotherapy. I see people getting "the talk" with the doctor for their first time as they nervously prepare for an excruciating time ahead. I see veteran patients who know the drill, bust out their blankets and a book. Rarely, there are people who get to ring the bell that hangs in the room for those who have received their final treatment to announce their glorious achievement.

And there are surely people that I cannot see again.

I started my own medical journey in my late twenties, and I am not unique or special, but there are many people who don't have to face this. Obviously, I don't see these cancer patients in their worst hours, I don't care for them like a nurse or a family member, I don't know them outside of what I can observe in the 16 hours a year I spend there. But those hours are a unique reminder to me that there are so many more lives and pains and agonies out there that are not mine, and although that means it doesn't get much attention from society, that doesn't mean it's not there, that it doesn't matter. It's a reminder to me to put more effort into my empathy and to think about their experiences more often, because otherwise I will atrophy and lean on old frameworks of thought that throw out humanity in favor of able-bodied automata as soon as possible.

There are many ways in which we can hide or avoid these heart-wrenching snippets of humanity. Many of them are the same ways we deal with other difficult topics or situations. We distract, diminish, disregard, or doom-scroll them away. But there's one more way that may not be as apparent: we create monsters.

The philosopher of horror Noel Carroll invented the term category jamming and makes an argument that fits nicely with findings from developmental psychology. Experiments demonstrate that animals and humans respond to their earliest experiences by internalizing a cognitive classification system based on the creatures they regularly encounter. After a certain time, however, the classification system "solidifies" into a cognitive framework, and any subsequently strange and unclassifiable encounter produces fear in the knower. Categorical mismatch makes the knower very uncomfortable. —On Monsters, by Stephen T. Asma, 2009, page 184

If this is true that both people and animals effectively learn who fits into what category, then the argument for diversity is even more important and more impactful. To live in a homogenous utopia is possibly the worst way to grow up if humanity is of any kind of value. Our "classification system" is solidified when we are young and although I don't think it's fixed, it clearly becomes an obstacle for us to expend more energy, time, and intention in overcoming. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and ablism are reinforced when we lack diversity, because it's always easier to fear (and hate) a person who is different and unknown than a person that you do know who is still different in some way.

Regarding medical concerns, this is a really tough one for me as a certified germaphobe who also wants to be compassionate. We have a sense of disgust, which is supposed to help us avoid things that can hurt us, like excrement or rotten food or other things that carry disease and pose a threat to our health. To the extent we can trust the Bible in this matter, we at least have stories about "lepers" who are ostracized from society in an attempt to keep the disease from spreading to others—and the Bible also shows us deep-rooted prejudices about these people. To me, this is a warning about how easy it is to allow our disgust to (monstrously) break through the barrier of disgust-as-a-tool for protecting physical health and disgust-as-a-tool for demonizing humans who are different and justifying oppression, violence, and hatred.

Carroll arrived at his own mismatch theory by noticing that most horror monsters are disgusting as well as threatening. He argues that human beings seem especially disgusted by "impurity." Things that we find impure and consider to be abominations are usually interstitial entities, in between normal categories of being. —On Monsters, page 184

We don't have to look far to see how people can be turned into monsters. In horror movies, women can be scary just because they're old and wrinkly. There is awful rhetoric—coming from the White House—linking immigrants to "aliens" suggesting that immigrants are just as inhuman and dangerous as invaders from Mars. Trans people are demonized and feared to the extent that people are willing to lose their own bodily autonomy and safety (and wholesale sacrifice of all women's safety) to tyrants because of an imagined concept of what being transgender is. My own church has taught to this day that queerness fits into a category of disease by its insistence that it can be "fixed" or "changed" with the right prescription of righteousness, or, more recently that queerness must simply be avoided and suppressed, as though it could flare up if not constantly pushed down and disregarded.

The lesson here? Our disgust is easy to manipulate. Find a group that you don't understand or don't like, use your disgust to drive you farther and farther from them until you can no longer see their humanity. It may not even take that long.

If we know that proximity and diversity and empathy help to create a resilient society, then pursuing homogeneity and segregation are sure ways to create a shatterable one. A society driven by fear cannot abide the complexity of life. You can't get around it, because utopia is still filled with people who will vary, people who will eventually experience disability or disease, people who will think differently, look differently. The cure is not the mirage of the snake oil that we are being sold right now. There is no cure, because nothing is actually broken. Humanity doesn't need to be fixed, it needs to be seen.

Humanity is in the stranger who makes conversation with you in the waiting room, who knows what it's like to experience pain and loss and frustration, and who can sit with you in a moment of fear or anxiety. Humanity is in all of us accepting all of us.

Notes

"...nor do we intend to admit to our campus any homosexuals. If any of you have this tendency and have not completely abandoned it may I suggest that you leave the campus immediately after this assembly...we do not want others on this campus to be contaminated by your presence." —Ernest Wilkinson, President of BYU, Talk given in 1965

"[Trump's] claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country." "...he referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries.”" —From 'rapists' to 'eating the pets': Trump has long used degrading language toward immigrants

"...the close links between prejudice and disgust could mean that individuals may associate transgender people with one or more of these subtypes of disgust based on the negative stereotypes and connotations they hold about transgender individuals." —Disgust, Morality, and the Transgender Bathroom Debate

So you hate em-dashes now?

Jess Brown — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:41:58 +0000

AI-generated content is getting harder and harder to distinguish a lot of the time. A bad side-effect of this is a distrust of what we see now—assuming we haven't given up on the idea of trustworthy content entirely. There are only a few things we can do to strip out AI slop, such as only reading or watching content published prior to 2021 (I've been watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer almost every night for two years, now, it's definitely a solid method). But if we want something up-to-date, like on social media, we can't filter it out, so all we can do is try to detect it and then skip past it. The problem is that it's much harder to discern between machine-generated garbage and human-generated garbage in short-form styles of content.

Naturally, there have been trends of advice that circulate as people come up with quick ways to detect the signature of AI. It used to be hands in AI-generated images: just look at the hands! If you're deeply disturbed, it's AI. Another one that still holds in video format is looking for discontinuity of environment or really short shots (1-10 seconds)—it's very difficult to generate long clips with AI, especially with a consistent, logical background setting. However, the clip length alone doesn't mean it's AI-generated, it's just a common data point we can use (foreshadowing!).

And what about for text/written format?

One of the ways people have (incorrectly) distilled down a method of detecting AI-generated content is by accusing the presence of em-dashes as being the sure sign of AI work. This is deeply saddening to me because as a typophile I adore the em-dash—to the point that I, myself, overuse them as you've likely noticed, ha! However, I have a theory for why AI loves to employ these long dashes and why non-designers are now discussing this character as though it's old hat.

Always Blame the Marketers...

Fresh out of college, I was determined to make all of my marketing material typographically impeccable. I had landed a side-gig where I would typeset a PDF version of a case study. All that means is that I would get one or two pages in a Google Doc and I'd put it into a template. I would meticulously adjust the kerning (spacing between letters) to avoid orphans (a word that gets left on its own line at the end of paragraph), painstakingly change out-of-the-box prime marks ('/") into real quote marks (‘/”), and—with greatest love and care—change double-hyphens into em-dashes (—).

No one cared that I did that.

But I sure did. If nothing else, it was my way of doubling-down on quality and practicing all of the design skills I had learned in college. I would continue to do these things even as I morphed into a web developer. I've had to format many, many thousands of pages of content, and I still want that same high standard of typographic quality.

With all of this exposure to marketing content, and with my hyper-fixation on characters like the em-dash, my personal theory on why AI uses them so much is simply because of marketing. AI was trained largely from the Internet because it's such a huge source of already-digital, publicly-accessible content (ignoring copyrights, of course). And what kind of content is on the Internet? MARKETING. It's everywhere. It's probably the main kind of content that is out there—again, I know this largely because of having worked in marketing for so long, so there is some bias, but I think it's accurate to say at least half of all websites are marketing sites.

Inbound marketing, in particular, is a way that we've pumped content into the Internet that was ready to be devoured by AI. "Inbound" refers to a marketing strategy that attempts to attract search traffic to your website through content that is not explicitly marketing material. That's why companies have blogs (still), and sometimes they've got more in-depth content throughout the site. Even AI companies have content sections that aren't technically marketing, like research or guides, and these may even be very useful. As long as you're getting to the site, it's ok if you're not reading a product page, you're getting a taste for the brand, becoming familiar with the site and the names of the company/products, maybe even starting to trust the company because of the content they've provided to you.

All that to say, I think a huge amount of the content that has ended up training AI models comes from marketing websites, and marketers have a little bit of a style that then comes through what AI produces. For better or worse, marketers love em-dashes—especially em-dashes that appear in headlines and bulleted lists:

Everything ready—before you are!
Become the smartest in the room—without breaking a sweat.

This short, interruptive sentence structure is everywhere on marketing sites, even if it's just the bottom call to action after a well-written article that isn't so short and punchy. Over the years, my marketing content detection device (my brain) lights up like a Christmas tree on almost every response I see from LLMs.

Em-dashes Are, Like, Popular Now or Whatever

So, yes, em-dashes have been plaguing the Internet for many, many more years prior to the ability of an AI model to string coherent words together. Marketing has a style that has passed to LLMs, probably because of its overrepresentation in the training data. Why in the world are non-designers talking about em-dashes so much?

I think that the discussions around AI-generated content have brought the em-dash into public consciousness. If you're not a student, and especially if you're not into writing, you probably have never even noticed the em-dash. Maybe you have barely noticed just from reading books, but it's passed over like any other punctuation mark like commas and periods. I can count on two fingers the times in my life I've heard someone talk about diacritical marks in casual conversation, and never have I heard talk of virgules or manicules or any number of other glyphs.

In my estimation, it just so happens that as people have become aware of the need to detect AI-generated content, we've finally noticed all of those em-dashes floating around and realized that AI overuses it. Now the name of this character is infamous and I've heard some people say they'll never use them because they've incorrectly determined em-dashes to be an AI-only style choice. This is terribly sad to me and I refuse to stop using em-dashes if for no other reason than my reverse-hipster impulse (I was using them before it was uncool).

Instead of avoiding em-dashes like the plague, I prefer instead to formally introduce you to this beautiful mark, which has been used for hundreds of years!

If you want to impress your designer friends, you can use these keystrokes to type an em-dash:

OS	Keystrokes
Mac	Shift + Option + Hyphen
Windows	Hold Alt and on the numkey press 0151, let go and it should place an em-dash

Even more impressive is knowing why we call it the em-dash, and for that, we need to look at printing presses, which used to be typeset by hand. Letters used to be cast in metal blocks that would be placed together to build up words, sentences, and eventually paragraphs and pages. As James Craig and Irene Korol Scala explain in Designing with Type, 5th Edition, we see this "em" naming come through:

Em-quad: In handset type, a metal space that is the square of the type body size; that is, a 10-point em-quad is 10 points wide. The em gets its name from the fact that in early fonts the M was usually cast on a square body. —page 164

The capital letter "M" is also one of the largest letters, so it makes for a good measurement of space relative to the typeface design.

Em-dash: Also called a long dash. A dash the width of an em-quad. —pg 164

And finally, we get a glimpse for when to use it:

The em-dash is the mark commonly meant by the term "dash." It indicates an abrupt break in thought or speech, and it may be used instead of commas or parentheses to set off a parenthetical clause. —page 157

Don't believe just a design book? Here are two other resources that really help. The first is A Pocket Style Manual, fourth edition, by Diana Hacker, which is still my go-to when I need help remembering specific grammar or style rules (even though my writing is still all over the place, haha). However, Hacker does explain that you can use the double hyphen (--), but since it's 2026 and em-dashes even come on Android phone keyboards now, there's no excuse for using that style which is left over from typewriter days (see next resource as well).

The dash may be used to set off material that deserves special emphasis. When typing, use two hyphens to form a dash (--), with no spaces before or after them. (if your word processing program has what is known as an "em-dash," you may use it instead, with no space before or after it.)

Use a dash to introduce a list, a restatement, an amplification, or a dramatic shift in tone or thought. ... Use a pair of dashes to set off parenthetical material that deserves special emphasis or to set off an appositive that contains commas. ... CAUTION: Unless you have a specific reason for using the dash, avoid it. Unnecessary dashes create a choppy effect. —page 84-85

Finally, we have my favorite typography resource, The Mac is not a typewriter, second edition, by Robin Williams. Her whole premise is using the advanced tools of the computer to overcome bad habits learned by typewriter limitations. One of those limitations was the lack of any other dash (en or em), so typists were forced to use the double-hyphen instead of the em-dash.

The em dash is twice as long as the en dash—it's about the size of a capital letter M in whatever size and typeface you're using at the moment. This dash is often used in place of a colon or parentheses, or it might indicate an abrupt change in thought, or it's used in a spot where a period is too strong and a comma is too weak... ... Since you were properly taught, of course, you know that the double hyphen is not supposed to have a space on either side of it—neither is the em dash, as you can see right here in this sentence. page 24

I hope this was as enlightening as it was nerdy, so that you can now be annoyed when other people dismiss the em-dash as something that only AI uses, lol. But really, I just want to see more good typography out there, and the em-dash is a natural—and beautiful—way to represent grammar. AI over-uses emojis, em-dashes, and other marketing-style sentence structures, so while those are good factors to use in detecting AI content, it doesn't mean it is. At least here at CYBORG_, you know it's human-written despite my overuse of my favorite character.

How Does a Squid Wear Glasses?

Jess Brown — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:36:17 +0000

My wife loves He-Man, and more specifically, the original TV cartoon—not the new Masters of the Universe movie, she’s one of the real ones. Naturally, that means she was wearing a fabulous Skeletor t-shirt the other day and someone started talking to her about it. Skeletor's skull-for-a-face helped turn the conversation a little strange, because this person started listing off the ways that human anatomy is so inspiring. God, according to this person, had given us noses so that we could wear glasses; ears so that we could hang our masks around them; earlobes so that we could wear earrings, and so on. (To explain their observation about masks, my MS treatment makes me immunocompromised, so we have to mask in public like it’s 2020.)

Now, I’m certainly not trying to make this person sound foolish. In fact, I can understand why they would come to the (incorrect) conclusion that our bodies seem well-suited to our technology, and therefore it is our bodies that are divinely designed in order to fit our tech. We sit so much with technology that it becomes a part of our environment, and usually that means we give it little thought. How often do we consider how water magically comes out of the tap or how shoving a pronged bit of metal into the wall makes our phones and computers charge?

More specifically in linking our bodies up with technology, there are some things that are so ubiquitous or often used that we may not even consider them technology anymore. Glasses or even contacts, for example, are indeed technology, but someone (like me) that has been wearing them basically their entire life may find it so mundane and part of routine that they become an extension of themselves, rather than a discrete piece of technology.

As I’ve been writing these CYBORG_ articles, researching, and generally listening to discussions about technology, I’m deeply intrigued by how often the supernatural is invoked in those conversations. It passes our lips as easily and unconsciously as the air we breathe. So when my wife told me about her conversation with this stranger, I’m fascinated that 1. God was involved in fitting us (God’s assumed creations) with technology (our assumed creations), and 2. technology was therefore at a similar level of God (we are intentionally made to fit into tech, lower creatures raised to something higher?).

We don’t have to look for divine design to understand glasses, though. For that we look to human-centered design.

Human-centered

Human-centered design (HCD) is a philosophy I came to understand in college. It’s an approach that prioritizes human needs, wants, and capabilities when creating or iterating on something. This means that the designs are intended to work with humans as they are. It seems so obvious and so simple that I thought it was absurd to bother naming it—we're all humans, why wouldn't we design for humans? The real world with insane deadlines, limited cash, demands from department goals or campaigns showed me why this philosophy is so radical and so rare. Sure, not every ad deserves the time it takes to deeply understand humanity's interaction with it—certainly not every product is worth exceptional design, either, like harmful, cheap, or distasteful things. But hopefully if you are involved with a product that is aligned with your values, you can engage deeply with HCD as your standard.

This approach does eventually apply to important or commonly used technology (hopefully, anyway, it's still no guarantee). In the example of eyeglasses, our current design is clearly influenced by the human wearing it. We had potentially millions of years with similar nose bridges and yet lived without corrective lenses of any kind. The first eyesight aids may well have been magnifying stones/spheres set atop a surface, eventually changing into handheld eyepieces, then into various designs to fit the lenses to the face. Following it further, we eventually figured out how to put the lens on the eye itself, and for a lucky population, fix the eye with laser surgery.

The history of glasses isn't about humans becoming more fit for the current iteration of corrective lenses, rather the slow improvement of technology to make eyeglasses more tenable for humans. Who knows if there is a better design than the glasses we are currently familiar with?

It often feels like things are the way they are now because it's supposed to be that way—or that it's an inevitable end on the path of progress. Part of that is the flood of new tech that we are exposed to, much of which has trended towards a similar, convergent look and feel (why do we think AI can create dashboards so well? Because dashboards are all the same...). Part of that is possibly the assumption that HCD is the default. If we always assume things are designed to be clear and simple, when we are faced with things that are complex or difficult, we are more likely to put the blame on ourselves, rather than consider the failure of the design.

Don Norman, a renowned design researcher, wrote in his seminal book, The Design of Everyday Things:

I have studied people making errors—sometimes serious ones—with mechanical devices, light switches and fuses, computer operating systems and word processors, even airplanes and nuclear power plants. Invariably people feel guilty and either try to hide the error or blame themselves for "stupidity" or "clumsiness."

—page 65

As I watched people struggle with technology, it became clear that the difficulties were caused by the technology, not the people.

—page 7

In reality, as Norman explores further, issues, errors, and the frustration with technology isn't a problem with the individual, it's a lack of human-centered design (or something that hasn't been worked out yet in the design process).

The idea that a person is at fault when something goes wrong is deeply entrenched in society. That's why we blame others and even ourselves. ...But in my experience, human error usually is a result of poor design: it should be called system error. Humans err continually; it is an intrinsic part of our nature. System design should take this into account. Pinning the blame on the person may be a comfortable way to proceed, but why was the system ever designed so that a single act by a single person could cause calamity? Worse, blaming the person without fixing the root, underlying cause does not fix the problem: the same error is likely to be repeated by someone else.

—page 66

This is just my personal take, but I wonder if this deep complexity and frequent experience of errors facilitates that common conclusion that technology is on par with the gods. Not only does it take someone with technical skill to adeptly manipulate technology, there is also so much abstraction that hides underlying logic or principles that technology becomes inscrutable like a god might seem. It actually seems very logical for a non-technical person to see glasses or any other tech as something coming from the gods, and our bodies needing to become fit for the tech, because commonly, gods require us to change our nature to fit their expectations.

As a technical person seeing this, I feel the responsibility to help fit technology to humanity. I may not be able to help reveal all of the secrets of programming to uninterested people, but I can at least make sure I do my best to relieve some of the stress people feel to change their nature to match the technology.

Eyeglasses on Squids

One of the fun exercises that can help break out of the assumption of technology as a one-way path toward a specific end is trying to design something for a different species—non-human–centered design, if you will. For example, how would a squid wear glasses? If a squid could create the technology to improve or correct its eyesight, why would we ever think it would come up with a design like human glasses? It doesn't have a nose to rest it on, nor does the design make any sense for its ocean environment. Contacts are also out, since they so easily slide off of the eyeball in water. What other options are there for attaching a lens in a way that is comfortable and useful to a squid?

If you want to take this to the next level, you can do what Art Director Tim Browning and his team did in the design process for developing alien technology ideas for the film Project Hail Mary. They started by trying to understand how Rocky, the alien life-form that roughly looks like a stone spider, would manufacture its items. The alien body doesn't have fingers, so the designers came up with an idea that perhaps the species has figured out a way to wear a device on the bottom of its limbs, which would act like alien 3D printer pens, allowing Rocky to "knit" or weave together strands of material to create more technology.

3D printer prototype worn on fingers to resemble how Rocky might have worn them on its limbs. Credit: Adam Savage's Tested, How Rocky's Models Were Made for Project Hail Mary, timestamp 2:35

While we can't avoid human-centered design in some ways because of our bodies, senses, and minds, we can practice thinking about how another species could design their own technology assuming the possibility. I think this a great way to remind ourselves that we are also in the middle of a vast amount of abstraction. You can't just start with some technology, because it is built upon previous discovery, knowledge, application, manufacturing, and any number of hidden steps previously taken—all of which are directly informed by our own bodies.

We may be tempted in this digital age to figuratively leave our bodies. We may even develop some disdain for our bodies because they may fail us more often than it seems like technology fails us. Poorly designed or not, all of our technology (so far) is directly linked to our humanity, which includes our bodies, and if we don't prioritize our humanity, the technology will slip out of its usefulness and become a burden (best-case scenario) or a harmful detriment.

AI Replaces Humanities

Jess Brown — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:33:26 +0000

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is supposed to be the thing that sets humans free. Free to do what? What matters. To be more creative—and stop focusing on that boring tedium that makes up 99% of our knowledge-based jobs. It's a promise I used to proclaim about my own work using classical programming to automate things like removing unintended linebreaks in the middle of paragraphs when copying text from a poorly formatted PDF into HTML. Ain't nobody got time for hitting backspace 4,000 times per PDF.

And yet, what great spike in creativity have we seen come out of AI or AI-aided products? I tend to see more offloading—having the AI just do everything—rather than reclaiming time and space for creativity. To move past my anecdotal experience, we can take a look at what universities are doing to see what the smartest people are predicting about AI impact and creative fields like the humanities. (To be fair, the administrators of university programs may not be the smartest, but that's not my expertise to say either way...)

Consider the following tiny slice of news headlines:

‘Just not monetizable’: humanities programs face existential crisis at US universities
China's Universities Cut 12,000 'Obsolete' Degrees Amid Race to Embrace AI Era (Aggregated news)
University in talks to cut about 150 staff (University of Exeter)

It is clear to me that over the last few years, and picking up pace right now, the humanities are under attack. Universities are scrambling to cut out "redundancy" and remove "obsolete degrees." In the case of University of Exeter:

[A spokesperson for the University of Exeter's University College Union] added that although staff across the academic body were impacted, the cuts were "disproportionately concentrated in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS), where 85% of all staff placed at risk of redundancy (445 out of 523 FTE) are based".

Just on the face alone, the idea of losing humanities because of AI sure feels ironic, but I think it also indicates the short-sightedness of the systems supporting higher education, including the public's perception of education and AI.

Irony of Ironies

Probably due to the huge amounts of push-back that AI is getting lately, companies market their AI-powered products as being a copilot or as something that keeps a "human in the loop." AI won't replace you, because you humans are so important. Or something like that. So we have marketing from corporations saying that humans are valuable, but colleges and universities are gutting humanities programs. It's like we're getting squeezed in the middle, and the more we're squished, the harder it is to see how we're actually that important or valued or that we even have a future to look toward.

For sure, things have been changing about the college-to-job pathway for a long time. Even when I was in college almost 20 years ago, it was clear that the days of choosing a major, getting a job based on that major, and working at that same place for 30 years was the tale of past generations. As Vincent Zhao said for the South China Morning Post, “The old path – where you study one specific major, find a perfectly matched job, and stay in it stably for a lifetime – simply does not exist any more” (Yang).

I completely agree with Zhao above. I went into the Graphic Design major expecting to become a graphic designer, couldn't find a job no matter how strong my portfolio was, and ended up a developer because everyone said, "You know HTML? That's what we need." It's not like I'm some great designer, but my experience reflects the same priorities of selecting tech over "art."

However, I think it's still missing the mark to assume that college should be setting you up for some kind of life-long track that you simply follow. That's the tension that plagues academia: what is the purpose of universities? Is it to get people into jobs? Or is it to educate and refine critical thinking skills (among other skills)?

AI muddies the waters further: Is AI supposed to augment human thinking? Or take it away? Is removing the humanities supposed to support more people now that AI fills in the gaps? Or is it removing the support beams?

More fundamentally, however, the state of the humanities and liberal arts reveals a widening conflict over the “value” of higher education – with increasingly corporatized universities favoring market-driven metrics for evaluation, and proponents of humanistic education stressing that its worth to both individuals and society at large cannot be measured that way. (Speri)

It's a very common perception to assume that because the humanities have no measurable value the way that tech, science, and business fields do, that the humanities have little to offer other than in politics or other "soft" applications. This is actually the opposite of what Marshall McLuhan argued in his essay, The Humanities in the Electronic Age, originally published in 1961. McLuhan saw the humanities as a critical path to building and improving the business world, including management. He optimistically states:

Just as business is discovering that higher and higher education is needed for the ever enlarging jobs of management, so the adult community in general has become aware of the life of learning as natural and delightful and as necessarily extended throughout adult life. (McLuhan, 16)

Not only does he continuously suggest that business benefits from the humanities (and especially the well-rounded, thoughtful leader), McLuhan goes so far as to suggest the artist is critical to the engineer and to solving problems. How ironic, indeed, that we are apparently racing to throw out the arts, social sciences, and other "soft" fields of study, just because AI can generate titles and summaries and thumbnails and video clips.

The humanist will observe, however, that no matter what period or technology is in question, the artist has always solved the new problem both for the engineer and for the human community, by his new advance models for sensibility and awareness. ... The ever new models of the artist are for the correction of the perceptual bias inflicted upon any human community by ever new technology. In the past century, indeed, we have come to rely almost wholly on art for the nutrition of fresh impulse and the alerting of hypnotized senses. No previous society ever regarded art this way. But no previous society ever underwent the successive brain-washings and hypnotic trances that ours has done from a succession of new technologies. (McLuhan, 10-11)

Instead of seeing humanities as being a part of the progress of technology, we often pit them against each other, as though art and science are oppositionally destructive. McLuhan has taught us before that the artist and their art help to reveal the invisible environment that surrounds us. The things we miss because we've become accustomed to them can be examined or seen in new light because of the arts (and social sciences). We can critique systems because of the humanities, we can ask if we're asking the right questions because of philosophy and art, we can remember our humanity even after being plugged in digitally all day because of poetry.

Even in the extremely practical sense, I can back up what McLuhan says in the workplace about how the artists help us engineers—and it's not just about type treatments and whitespace. The artists or designers or creative-thinkers help us all solve problems in collaboration. We all see different pieces to the problem and we all create something together that would be impossible otherwise.

Instead, we say things like "product designers are obsolete now" because AI can also draw pretty interfaces. Are they the right interfaces? Do they solve the problem? Impossible to know, because the people with the wisdom to determine rightness, appropriateness, and fitness are swapped for a machine that gives you a most likely answer.

Although contradictory to McLuhan's view that the arts support even the corporate model, Adam Rzepka, a professor of English at Montclair State, explains the ultimate problem of diminishing the already feeble hold of humanities in higher education:

“The humanities simply don’t fit a corporate model because they are just not monetizable in the same way the sciences or even the social sciences are,” he added. “And the deeper reason they’re coming under attack is that free thought and rigorous, free inquiry is dangerous to executive power.” (Speri)

That's the real concern. It's not that artists/humanists aren't valuable or important. It's that they're dangerous. They challenge the assumptions of man and machine. They ask the questions that businessmen don't want to ask: should we even be doing this?

If AI is the excuse for threatening and replacing the humanities, I suspect what's really going on is that the humanities have threatened AI—among other powerful systems at play right now. What does that tell us? To go where they don't want us to go. To invest in the humanities however you can: learning about them, investing in them, advocating for them. We can't directly control university decisions, but we can help remind the public why the humanities are so important.

Works Cited

McLuhan, Marshall. 1961. "The Humanities in the Electronic Age." In Marshall McLuhan Unbound, edited by Eric McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon, 10–16. Gingko Press.

Speri, Alice. 2026. "‘Just not monetizable’: humanities programs face existential crisis at US universities." The Guardian, January 20, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/20/universities-humanities-programs.

Zeltmann, Britta. 2026. "University in talks to cut about 150 staff" BBC, June 23, 2026. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2djnz3y47o

Yang, Carol. 2026. "China’s universities cut 12,000 ‘obsolete’ degrees amid race to embrace AI era." South China Morning Post, June 14, 2026. https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3356913/chinas-universities-cut-12000-obsolete-degrees-amid-race-embrace-ai-era

The VampAIre Problem

Jess Brown — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:27:13 +0000

"Is someone there?" Mr. Giles, the librarian asks while looking through books. He turns to look at a glass cabinet and catches his reflection. No one around him. He looks toward what he is sure is empty space to his side and gasps in fright as Angel, the vampire with a soul, stares at him blankly.

Giles turns back to the glass, consoling himself intellectually, saying:

"A vampire casts no reflection."

For at least 129 years since Bram Stoker's Dracula, vampires' missing reflections have been a consistent feature of this night-time creature, and I finally realized why this is such a great part of the lore: they can't see themselves!

Ok, that sounds pointlessly obvious but I think it applies directly to how we can better understand AI, empathy, and vampires. First, I want to lay some groundwork for how I am approaching monstrosity and humanity here. I think that monsters and monster stories are some of the most important stories we humans tell, but it's easy to get lost in the tension of reality and fantasy (focusing too much on the monster as either biological discovery or fantastic curiosity). Even worse, we can wield monster stories to turn actual humans into monsters for the purpose of domination, oppression, control, and/or power.

I can't make the case that all monsters are just misunderstood, nor can I say that there is not monstrosity to be found in humanity. If anything, it's dangerous to draw conclusions about monsters and humans that try to define clear lines between the two, especially if it trains us to dehumanize real people who are different than us. Monsters are supposed to be uncomfortable (and usually uncomfortably similar to us), they are supposed to play in the margins or in the fuzzy spaces where categories and simple explanations fail. That's what makes monstrosity so useful: it creates space for us to explore, to question, and to wonder.

Mirror, Mirror

Mirrors alone are mystical or symbolic to us humans. They're "windows into the soul" in one context and represent vanity, foolishness, and shallowness in another. Combine them with vampires and you've got a whole bunch of topics to ponder: pride, souls, desire, emptiness, death, etc. In a meta-sort of way, monsters can be helpful because they separate what in reality is one thing (humanity) into two things (humanity and monstrosity). The separation allows us to examine what is harder to see within ourselves, acting as a mirror to provide the reflective space to see what we can't see without it.

I'll borrow a little bit from Buffy The Vampire Slayer for how to think of vampires, since it still pretty well captures the current concept of these creatures of the night. In Buffy, vampires look like the humans that were killed and turned by other vamps, but they explicitly state that the person is gone and there is now a demon inside the body. So even if your friend gets turned into a vampire, they have the memories and the looks of the person you once knew, that person is gone. It's not just a matter of a monstrous side coming out that was inherent to the person—the monster is not the human and vice versa.

The TV spin-off series, Angel, further cements this idea because the eponymous character, Angel, is a vampire with a restored soul and when his soul is magically removed on occasion, the demon Angelus regains control of the body, as though the human soul and the demon both inhabit the body now. The soul takes precedence, but once it is gone (or suppressed by some external force/substance), the vampire—a separate entity—is now operating again.

Vampires are so close to the humans they inhabit, and yet they have no reflection. It's almost as if the soul is what is reflected: no soul, no reflection. But what if we take it further? What if we are the reflection of the vampire? Or, perhaps, the vampire is the reflection of us? Mirrors are just a stand-in for the concept of seeing that which is similar, but not the actual thing itself. My reflection isn't actually me, but it looks just like me.

Mirrors are still useful—I can make observations, gather data, and ask introspective questions with its help. Even so, the mirror is not a replacement for me. With no body, no social connection, the mirror is ultimately powerless in satisfying human needs. It isn't human or humanity.

VampAIre

If the vampire is the reflection of humanity, then it makes sense that it couldn't see itself in a mirror, because it's only apparent in the context of other humans. While no humans really are monsters, we are absolutely capable of monstrosity. It is uncanny to know a person and to also know of their actions, especially when those actions are harmful, cruel, and/or heartless, as though we are encountering their reflection. It can be hard to reconcile the monstrous behavior with the humanity they have. Outside of story, the reality is that our humanity encapsulates our monstrosity—there is no separate entity to blame.

In a way, artificial intelligence (AI) also works the same way as our vampires. AI is not "alive" nor is it "conscious," but even if we were so generous as to assume it were, AI would not be able to see its reflection either. AI is the reflection of us. It does not have humanity in itself because it is a fundamentally different being. It may be able to communicate with us, it may have our "memories" in the form of its training data, it may even have agency and goals and desires, but it is not human, because it isn't human.

Not being human is not an insult, it's an important distinction for our own safety. If we start seeing the reflection as if it were human, then we are deceived and we are opened up to all kinds of dangers; physical, emotional, mental, financial, and on and on.

AI is the reflection of its creators and trainers. It is the reflection of the person who prompts it. It appears in the form of humanity because it presents text, speech, images, videos, sounds, as if a human did it/made it. It responds to our questions and requests in ways that we can understand. However, it lacks the empathy and the social connection that would make it even more human-like. AI cannot foresee the impact of its production; it cannot feel the weight of the lives lost to its influence or the changes in the environment of the physical world. It cannot care like a human, because it is not embodied; it is not biologically nor psycho-socially connected to us. It's a reflection; abstracted, but similar enough to fool someone passing by.

While vampires are generally imminent threats to humans, Buffy explores options where vampires team up with humans against greater evil or for "aligned goals." AI does not feed off of human life, nor is it intentionally designed to be a predator (we hope, anyway). The real monstrosity of AI is in its categorically transgressive nature: it feels like interacting with a human, but it is not human. It is neither inherently malevolent nor benevolent, but it is also not neutral (it's a trickster)—it amplifies and distorts regardless of intention from either AI or its operator. Since AI inhabits this other fuzzy space, we have to accept the complexity of it, including the new work it demands of us to introspect, to examine, and to wonder about how we are teaming up with it.

Because AI can't look in a mirror to see its reflection, we have the duty to do so instead. What do we see as a consequence of our actions with AI? What are the impacts to our culture? What is AI doing to positively or negatively impact our children, our families, our coworkers, our satisfaction in life, our futures, our conflicts, our humanity?

Recording In Progress

Jess Brown — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:58:03 +0000

One of the most stressful assignments in a film photography class is the pinhole camera segment. It's a common exercise where you build the camera and then experiment with it to capture photos and develop the image.

My mom saved a cookie tin for me from among the neighborhood Christmas treats she received. After spraying the inside with matte-black spray paint and punching a small hole in the bottom, my camera was ready. In the dark room, I loaded up the makeshift camera with photopaper then left to find an interesting scene nearby to photograph. The tiny hole was covered in electrical tape so that the light wouldn't leak in until I wanted to take the photo.

I found a weird alcove of the art building with shards of pottery all over the ground (it was either the remains of a kiln-firing gone very wrong or it was a postmodern piece examining the effect of art on society). This was surely going to be my masterpiece!

...Well, in my defense, there's no way to focus the pinhole, so you kinda get what you get—and don't be expecting some kind of beautiful, shallow-depth-of-field bokeh-riddled close-up, that's not going to happen with this setup.

This assignment seems to get more stressful as time goes by because from the first time I made a pinhole camera as a teenager to the one I made in college, digital cameras became affordable to the masses, film photography became obsolete among even the hardcore scrapbookers, and the newly ubiquitous digital camera melded into the smartphone and started disappearing altogether. This wild appearance and disappearance of photographic technology meant that within only a few years, my personal expectations of the tech changed drastically.

Digital cameras could do what film cameras (and especially pinhole cameras) could not: give you instant feedback. You had a preview of what your camera was going to produce after snapping the photo. You could review what you captured while still standing in the same place! Digital also started lending a helping hand with auto-focus settings and a few other neat dials and buttons to tweak the kind of output you were looking for. It also doubled, tripled, or eventually infinitely expanded the number of photos you could take, depending on the memory card or built-in storage available.

Contrasted to the pinhole camera, which had a capacity to take one photo per trip to the darkroom (you can't reload it on the fly because the light will destroy whatever you had as well as the new photopaper you would be replacing), how can we even deal with this thing?! It doesn't focus, it doesn't help you compose the shot, it is vulnerable, and you can even do everything right and then ruin it in the dark room during development.

Then again, when I stopped stressing about making the photo turn out the way digital photos did, there were some really cool results:

It seems like as digital photography became easier, cheaper, and more accessible, the quality of my photos sharply declined with that increase of quantity. It's to the point that all of the photos on my phone are basically worthless—certainly in artistic value. They're quick snaps of paragraphs in books that I'll never go back and read; or they're little things I wanted to document. Even when I try really hard to compose my shot, I never go back to review them and I never use them (except in CYBORG_ articles).

I haven't touched film photography in a very long time, so I've lost the skills I used to know well about exposure and shutter speed settings. All of the experimentation-mindset is lost. It's certainly a me-problem, but technology is not without its part in this degradation. In a way it's following the fundamental law of economics: tons of supply + low demand = cheap, cheap, cheap.

Constraints Are Everything

The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember themselves... You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.

—Socrates, "Phaedrus." Quote from The Medium is the Massage, by Marshall McLuhan and Queintin Fiore, 1967, pg 113

You could insert any technology into Socrates's critique, because all technology abstracts skills and knowledge in order to make something easier, even if only slightly easier. For example, photographs have all kinds of applications: they can be art, they can be aids in documenting history, they can be nostalgic reminders of moments gone by. All of these require some skills—primarily for operating the camera—and as technology continued to improve the camera, we abstracted a lot of those operational skills. Our current smartphones auto-adjust the exposure, detect human faces, attempt to focus on what we most likely want in focus. We have offloaded or "[trusted] to the external" all of those technical skills to the phone camera.

Not to say no one is an artist with their phone camera, but the massive majority of people are not applying the rules of composition and visual design when they take pictures with their phones. If there's something cool they want to capture, there is no penalty for taking a whole bunch of random snaps, because there's little to no cost for each press of the button—no limits to storage, no work needed to develop, nothing to do with images after.

Again, while I am generalizing here, when I see people visiting museums or going to other experiences like a beautiful overlook of a canyon or even going to a concert, I also see the behavior of cheap experiences. If you drive to a canyon, get out of the car, look at the scene through your phone, snapping pictures all the while, then get back in and drive away, did you even see what you were looking at? You "appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing" of what you just experienced. I'm guilty of this. I've gone places and instead of soaking in the experience, knowing this is the only time in my life I'll be there, I waste a majority of the time making sure I "document" everything I see.

It is extremely nice and useful to have a phone camera. It's been a tool for social justice and in checking authority, such as in cases of police brutality. It's convenient to be able to capture mundane things that may be deeply meaningful later, such as moments with loved ones who have now passed on. I'm not at all trying to say that we abandon our phone cameras, but I do think that the ease and abstraction has a cost. What we lose is often what we think we are gaining: memory and experience. Instead of capturing a moment in embodied memory, we put it in our phone. Instead of listening to understand, we offload it to the recording on our phone (or AI or whatever other tech). Instead of feeling, we skip over the breathtaking moments to make sure we get the snap, then move on to the next thing.

While we don't need pinhole cameras to help us appreciate the world around us, we do need constraints, and knowing the cost might help us to remember to introduce that friction and that difficulty. Accepting the loss of digital documentation could be the motivation we need to put that experience back into our own minds and bodies.

I think it's extremely important to not lose touch with our embodied experiences. I know what it's like to temporarily lose my sense of taste, my coordination, my ability to think due to my MS attack, and I find it eerily similar in some ways to be diverting our tactile and visceral experiences into second-hand digital ones. Looking at a canyon through the screen of a phone is the same as eating strawberries without being able to taste them. Taking a picture of a memorial and the plaque explaining its significance is nothing like being present, becoming empathetically involved, feeling the weight of human loss or sacrifice, and being moved by it.

Our bodies may be imperfect; our memories are imperfect; but they are real and transformational. Our minds are already in a state of "recording in progress," as we take in our day and the information we encounter, and we even have automated processes that help us sort through what is important and what isn't. At least for me, I've noticed that the more I trust myself and my body to capture and record, the less I need to record digitally. A few, well-planned, intentional digital artifacts are plenty to remind me of what happened and that small, incomplete digital representation prompts my body to revisit the smells, sights, or textures of the experience.

Dinosaurs Eat Man...

Jess Brown — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:40:42 +0000

I think I found a paradox. You've probably heard your favorite creator on whichever social media platform say something like, "Like and subscribe, it helps to please the algorithm gods." This is a joke I've heard frequently on YouTube for many years now. It's not a signal of a new religion forming (yet?), and it's not intended to be taken literally (yet?), but I do think it demonstrates the intuitive thinking we humans tend toward when dealing with the world that is outside of our control.

Despite all of their efforts to succeed online as content creators, we all know there is still luck at play, as well as "The Algorithm" which is the governing body of distribution. If The Algorithm doesn't determine your content worthy of its awaiting viewers, then your reach is cut very short. Since the rules frequently change without our input, it's almost as if The Algorithm is taking a godlike role: it has its own inscrutable ways, goals, and means of blessing—and you have to "please" it to gain favor for those blessings.

The paradox we'll examine, however, is where this gets applicable to our lives with technology, because I think it explains the bigger system surrounding us that gets expressed through the AI-powered technology we use.

Note: In this article I won't continue to distinguish between algorithms, LLMs, and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) because I feel it's unnecessary for today's topic. There is a difference between AI and artificial general intelligence (AGI), but we'll get to that later.

Creation

Gods are beings who bring beings into being, particularly the beings calling them gods. Many cultures have understood the origins of humanity as involving making humans out of other beings and substances. The beings doing the making are, by definition, referred to as gods. Creation is by definition an act of monster-making—of making something unprecedented, a type of being beyond existing categories of beings...In that sense, divinity and humanity are each other's monsters.

—Humans: A Monstrous History, Surekha Davies, 2025. Pages 161–162

As Davies just delineated, a god is usually a creator of beings. If we pull AI into the mix, we get a really weird creation story if we look at it without the lens of personal religious beliefs. The story is "supposed" to be: god(s) create humans who then serve god(s). Therefore the creator should expect some kind of benefit from its creations (i.e. humans create AI which should serve human needs and wants).

Whoops, that's the wrong chart. Here's the right one:

The creation chain describes who creates whom, but the service chain describes who serves whom—and it seems to be the opposite of what's expected.

This is the paradox I see: we're told that AI is for our benefit. It's our creation of an unprecedented "being" that will help us "focus on what matters most" or that will bring knowledge and skill to everyone ("anyone can be a programmer"). And yet it sure feels like we are serving AI more and more. Creators change their behaviors to "please the algorithm" and even complain that they have to make certain kinds of videos because that's how they sustain their content-based business. AI-created content changes our behaviors as we give up on the cognitive drain it takes to discern if what we're seeing is real or fake. Abilities, knowledge, and skills deteriorate as AI assistants do the work we used to do—the kind of work that helped us develop better critical thinking and deep-work/flow sessions.

But maybe this is all indicative of the larger picture. AI overlords are just the middlemen now—who's at the top? It's the same suspects that were there before: ultra-wealthy individuals and corporations whose goals are to extract, distract, and exploit until there's nothing left at all. The top .0-whatever-1% don't use or need AI the way they have caused the rest of us to use or need AI, because we're trapped in a game where we are told what our goals are and what we have to do to achieve them—no questions allowed, nothing outside the average, AI-supplied ideas. Bow down or be destroyed.

Godly Irony

What's weird is that there are people in Silicon Valley that really do think that they can build a god (AGI). I doubt they see it in spiritual terms—it seems like it's more egotistical: to build something so much smarter than you so that you can see what that's like. (By the way, this is something that has been brought up multiple times on the podcast Your Undivided Attention, which is something I find fascinating and utterly creepy. For example: The Race to Build God: AI's Existential Gamble)

This sentiment is even captured in Alien Earth, the 2025 TV series, as trillionaire twenty-something, Boy Kavalier, says:

"It's not about money. People always think it's about money with trillionaires. Or ego. But you know, y-you know what I really want? I want to talk to somebody smarter than me."

While this obviously isn't a primary source/reference for this kind of thinking, once it's showing up in popular media, you know we're in trouble.

In a conversation about AI with my friend who's a university librarian, she noted something that has haunted me for several years. Her team got together to try and work on how to help students use AI and the library more effectively and part of their deliberation was to try and figure out "what literature tells us about humans creating intelligent beings." They are librarians after all! Several intense book club meetings in, my friend summarized what they found literature has to say, and it tends to be a warning.

Maybe we really did need that “God creates dinosaurs” quote from Jurassic Park after all, because in our pursuit to build a god (or to assume the role of god ourselves), we are technically creating monsters. Amidst the many stories that have been told, we see the pattern that when humans create a form of intelligence or a new being, we easily and quickly lose control. We (re-)create dinosaurs, and then we’re surprised that these creatures would make decisions that we don’t want them to make. We destroy gods only to create new ones.

There is one more pattern in these stories, however, that perhaps goes unexamined more often than not. We get fixated on the act of creation, because it’s a spectacle, but let’s pull back the curtain: who is doing the creation? Powerful individuals and / or small groups. Jurassic Park was built by a wealthy white man; Frankenstein created his monster in his obsession-driven laboratory; AGI is being pursued by elite data scientists and developers. Who’s missing from these acts of creation? Literally everyone else. No involvement of the public or those who will have to interact with the “creatures” at some point. No informed consent. God-makers are the ones in power who create gods in their own image and then expect the rest of us to pay our respects to their gods (a.k.a. to them). What would a collaborative creation look like in contrast to the typical creation act? Is that even possible?

Either way, we are creating new beings that are category breakers (monsters), and we will have to examine how these beings engage with us and how we will engage with them. Hopefully, we haven't just created "dinosaurs," and instead have a more cooperative monster to deal with.