America’s deepest conflict may not be political, economic, racial, or cultural. It may be epistemological. The country is divided less over what people believe than over how a belief earns the right to be trusted.

One side asks what the evidence shows. The other asks what feels true, or who speaks for people like them. Each treats the other’s question as a symptom. The evidence camp sees ignorance. The experience camp sees a priesthood guarding its rents. Both are partly right. That is what makes the quarrel so hard to end.

The usual diagnosis stops there. Two tribes, two sets of facts, no shared ground. I want to push past it, because the usual diagnosis misnames the loss. The country has not lost its agreement about reality. It never held that agreement. What it has lost is narrower and far more dangerous. It has lost faith in the institutions and procedures that once let people disagree about reality and still be bound by a common result.

I spent years teaching and practicing law before my first novel was published. The law taught me the thing the current panic keeps missing.

A trial or a negotiation is not a search for truth. I have told clients so, the ones who arrived expecting one. The court makes no promise to find what happened. It promises a result that both sides agreed in advance to accept. The agreement is everything. Twelve strangers who share no politics, no faith, no class file into a room and return a verdict. They do not first agree on reality. They agree on rules. What may be heard. What may not. Who carries the burden, and the weight of the burden.

The common law traditionally prices its own uncertainty. A civil claim turns on the preponderance of the evidence, a hair past even. The graver wrongs ask for proof clear and convincing. A criminal conviction demands proof beyond a reasonable doubt, because a society decided the cost of caging an innocent man should sit higher than the cost of freeing a guilty one. None of those are facts about the world. They are decisions about how wrong we are willing to be, and in which direction. The system holds because people accept the calibration after they lose, not only after they win.

The clearest proof is a case everyone remembers. In 1995 a criminal jury acquitted O.J. Simpson. Two years later a civil jury, weighing the same death, found him liable and ordered him to pay. Same man. Same facts. Opposite results. Neither verdict was a lie. They ran under different standards of proof, and the country accepted both, because the country still trusted the procedure that produced them. That is the machine working as designed. The result tracks the rules, not the truth, and the loser stays in the room.

So the American fight is not really about facts. Facts have always been contested. It is about whether the procedures for settling contests still command respect. The peer-reviewed study. The audited account. The recount. The correction. The appeal. Each is a courthouse of a kind. Each asks the loser to honour the result and stay in the room. The crisis is the swelling number of people, on every side, who will not.

This also clears up something the evidence camp gets wrong about itself. The expert is rarely the person most certain of the truth. He is the one most comfortable holding a belief he expects to lose. The physicist knows general relativity may be bent by the next measurement. He trusts the procedure, not the verdict it last returned. The man who says this just feels true to me is no more certain than the scientist. He has pledged loyalty to a different court, one whose only judge is himself, one that hears no appeal. The difference between the camps is not heat against cool reason. It is which court each agrees to be bound by, and whether that court can ever rule against them.

The experience camp did not conjure its suspicion from spite. The institutions handed it the grounds. The study that would not replicate. The official who reversed himself in a season and never explained the reversal. The newspaper that buried its corrections and led with its errors. Trust in a procedure is not a mood ring. It is a record. When the keepers of a procedure shield themselves before they honour the result, the watching public learns the lesson and applies it everywhere, including where the procedure was sound. One rigged trial buys the disbelief of a thousand fair ones.

There is a parochial flinch in the way all this gets discussed, and I felt it leave me only by living elsewhere. I write from Bangkok. The frame of evidence against feeling, reason against emotion, is not a map of the human mind. The frame is a local inheritance, post-Enlightenment and Western, and it was never the only working arrangement.

A Thai dispute often does not hunt for who is right. It hunts for what keeps the relationship whole and the senior party unshamed. Face is not a flaw in the procedure. Face is the procedure. The Chinese tradition spent two thousand years preferring mediation to judgment, on the Confucian instinct that a society which runs to court is already coming apart. These are not gentler editions of the Western trial. They are rival answers to the one question every society must answer. How do we end a quarrel without ending each other.

From here the American emergency looks less like the fall of Rome and more like a late and painful discovery. The consensus that broke was always local. It felt like reality because no one in the room had ever stood outside it. A culture learning that its settled procedure was contingent has not watched knowledge die. It has met, at last, the ordinary condition of every other culture on earth.

Bring the machines in now, because this is where the fight changes shape, and where both camps have misread what they face.

The standard story casts AI as the common enemy. The scientist fears a rival that reasons with no Nobel to chase. The skeptic fears one more expert built to overrule his gut. For once, the story goes, the two sides face the same way. The truce will not hold, and the machine is not playing the part assigned to it.

A large model runs neither operating system. It does something stranger. It hands down the verdict without the trial.

Ask it anything. The answer arrives in the voice of a court. Measured, reasoned, sure. It carries the cadence of a ruling that already survived its appeal. What it omits is everything that ever gave a ruling weight. No rules of admissibility. No burden assigned. No standard of proof named. No losing party in the room with a right to be heard again. The form of judgment comes stripped of the procedure that made judgment binding, and it reaches a reader who has lost the habit of asking what a verdict is supposed to cost.

Watch it happen. A parent types a question about a treatment for a sick child. Back comes a paragraph, balanced, sourced, calm, the studies weighed and the caveats placed. It reads like a finding. The parent takes it as one. No court sat. No one cross-examined the studies for this child. No burden was carried. The fluency did the work a trial used to do, and the parent never saw the substitution.

Here the courtroom returns from the side neither camp was watching.

The evidence camp believed it wanted rigour. Mostly it wanted to win the argument and be finished. The experience camp believed it wanted to be heard. Mostly it wanted an authority that would not condescend. The machine hands each of them the prize without the price. The scientist gets a confident answer faster than peer review could dream of producing. The skeptic gets a patient voice that never sneers and seems to know him by name. Neither sits through the trial. Neither risks the loss. Neither side wins the war over reality. Both outsource it to a system that issues rulings and keeps no court.

This is the friction both camps spent years trying to flee. A trial is slow on purpose. Cross-examination is friction. The burden of proof is friction. The appeal is friction. Each is the deliberate cost a society pays so the loser will honour the result. Remove the friction and faster justice is not what you get. You get the look of a verdict with nothing beneath it. A ruling that binds no one, because no one agreed in advance to be bound.

So the question was never whether emotion or reason should rule. A human being needs both. Emotion supplies the motive. Reason disciplines the judgment. The real question is whether a people can still bind themselves to a procedure whose result they might lose.

That binding is the whole of the thing. Not consensus about reality, which no society has held and none requires. The narrower covenant. To argue under rules. To accept the result. To stay in the room after losing. Twelve strangers manage it on a Tuesday afternoon, agreeing on nothing but the rules. A nation that forgets the trick is not marching toward one tribe’s victory over the other. It is drifting toward a country where every quarrel runs to its own court, each court finds for its own side, and no result can bind a soul who did not already agree with it.

A machine that issues rulings and holds no trial will feel, for a while, like rescue from all that friction. It is the reverse. It is the courthouse with the trial torn out and the gavel left swinging. The verdict still sounds. The procedure that made the sound mean anything is gone. A people who forget what the friction was for will not feel the loss until the day they need a result the other side will honour, and discover that no such result can be made any longer.

Christopher G. Moore is the author of the Vincent Calvino crime series and most recently The Client That Wasn’t There (Heaven Lake Press, 2026). He writes on AI, culture, and creativity.

“The aristocracy fundamentally understood that diet cements class distinctions more effectively than birthright.”

— from a viral note circulating on X

A note crossed X a few weeks ago and vanished. It deserved better than the share button it got. The claim was simple. Medieval English sumptuary law did not just mark class. It built class, in the body, by fixing who ate what. Lords ate venison, beef, and game birds. Peasants ate barley, oats, and peas. Meat came two or three times a year, if that. Feed a body peasant rations for a generation and the body turns peasant. Bone density drops. Height shrinks. Teeth rot. The strength a revolt needs is not there, because the diet never put it there. Feed a man like a lord and he grows the body that can demand things and back the demand. The note ended on its best line. Modern sumptuary law is unnecessary now. We price meat past the reach of most people, run cholesterol scares, and sell quinoa as luxury. Different century. Same operation. Better branding.

The claim is sharper than the usual complaint about the rich. It puts the politics in the body. The diet makes the body. The body makes the politics. The politics keep the class. The diet is the cause. That is a strong claim. It earns a test before it earns an extension.

I want to extend it. To one place the note never went, the machines we now think with. But the law needs a correction first, and the correction matters for everything after.

The metaphor I will use is a restaurant. Three people stand around any menu. The owner decides what may be offered. The chef cooks what the owner allows. The diner picks from what the chef has cooked. The diner thinks he is choosing. He is choosing inside a field someone else drew, for reasons he cannot see, set by a man he will never meet. Hold that picture. It runs through everything below.

I. What the Law Actually Was

The record is messier than the note allows, and the mess is the point. England passed sumptuary statutes on and off from the reign of Edward II. Edward III, in 1336, tried to stop merchants and gentlemen’s servants from eating more than one meat dish a day. The 1363 Statute of Apparel fixed the cloth, the fur, and the food each rank could take, with fines attached. By 1517 Parliament was counting dishes by station. Nine for a cardinal. Seven for a duke or an earl. Six for a lesser lord. Three for the gentry. Each dish had its portion. One swan or one peacock. Four lesser birds. Twelve small ones. The detail is almost comic. The intent was not.

The intent was to keep rank visible while money started to outrun birth. Merchants were getting rich. Wolsey and Cromwell were climbing on brains, not blood. The old order felt it and reached for the statute book. Sumptuary law was a panic dressed as a sermon about excess.

The sermon ran one way. The law told the bottom what it could not eat. It said nothing to the top. Rome had shown how that looked. Vitellius held the throne for eight months in AD 69, then was dragged through the streets and killed. His banquets ran to a thousand fish and seven thousand birds at a sitting. His signature dish, the Shield of Minerva, mixed pike liver, pheasant and peacock brains, flamingo tongue, and lamprey milt, and needed an oven of its own. Suetonius says he ate four full meals a day and kept the pace by vomiting between them. Take the numbers with salt. The ancient historians had their own scores to settle. The shape is what counts. At the top, excess had nothing to do with appetite. It was power proving it answered to nothing. None of it made Vitellius strong. The gorging was the display, and the gorging killed him. No law ever told him to stop. The law existed so the men below him never started.

The law was a leaky thing besides. The men who wrote it broke it. The merchants found ways around it. It was passed, repealed, amended, and ignored. The class system outlived the statute by centuries. So the law was not the engine. The law was the menu. The kitchen ran on something older.

That something was the link between a body, its money, and its nerve. The peasant on barley went thin for a plainer reason than the law. Venison was not there to buy. The land that fed the deer belonged to the men who wrote the law. His own labour left nothing over to save for meat. The calorie ceiling set what the body could do. What the body could do set what the mind dared imagine. A mind that cannot imagine revolt keeps working the land that feeds the men who write the laws. The law only wrote the arrangement down. The arrangement was the engine.

Now the three figures appear. The owner was the landed interest, holding land, game, law, and church at once. The chef was the steward and the cook and the market farmer, working inside the owner’s limits. The diner was the peasant, choosing at the market from what had been grown, which was what had been allowed. His choice was real. The field of choice was not his to draw.

II. The Corpus Is a Diet

Now the machines. Does the same logic reach them? It does, and more cleanly than it reaches us, because a model is, in plain mechanical fact, what it was fed. No genes. No childhood. No life lived. Only the training corpus, standing in for diet and school and upbringing and culture at once. What goes in sets what comes out, so directly the metaphor almost stops being one.

Look at the diets in service. GPT-3 ran on roughly 570 gigabytes of text, around 499 billion tokens. GPT-4 is reported at up to 1.8 trillion parameters and as much as 13 trillion tokens, though its makers have confirmed none of it. Claude’s corpus is undisclosed but understood to draw on public web text, licensed material, and curated sources, with extra weight on the training that shapes its hard cases. Gemini sits inside Google’s data in a way the others cannot match. These are the venison diets. Costly to gather, costly to run, and far ahead of everything beneath them on the tests.

Other menus run like a food bank. A 2023 study put open-source models against GPT-4 and Claude 2 on a set of nephrology questions. The open models scored between 17 and 25 percent. Claude 2 got 54. GPT-4 got 73. That gap is not style. It is cognitive distance, and it tracks the diet. The peasant on barley does not get the bone of the lord on venison. The small model on a thin corpus does not get the reasoning of the large one on a rich corpus. Food banks do not serve venison.

The class system here is exact. At the top, the closed frontier models, behind paid walls most people and many firms cannot clear. Below them, the open-weight contenders, close on some tasks and behind on others. Below those, the small open models, free to anyone with a laptop and limited where it counts. Below those, the people with no access at all, watching the whole argument from the far side of a wall. The few eat venison. The many eat barley. A middle gets mutton on feast days.

The human cost keeps its old shape, and the school furnishes the proof. A child fed long, hard, serious texts grows a mind that can hold them. A child fed worksheets and three-paragraph answers grows a mind built for the test. Both minds are real. Each does what its diet trained it for. But only the first can sit with a contradiction, return to a line, and ask what the line was doing. The long form builds structure in the head the way protein builds bone. A book taken slowly becomes part of you. A summary skimmed and gone does not.

Put the three figures on the AI kitchen. The owner is the lab leadership and the money behind it, deciding what the model may do, what it must refuse, what it will sell, and what risk is worth running. Those calls are made before a line of training code is written. The owner never shows up in the output. He has no name the user can search. He has left the building before the diner sits down.

The chef is the research team. They make thousands of real calls. What to feed the model and what to keep out. How to weight the sources. What to fine-tune for. Where to set the filters. The work is hard and genuine. It also runs inside a frame the team did not set and cannot break. The researcher who wants more open data, the engineer who wants the weights released, all of them cook inside the owner’s limits. The chef cooks what the owner allows.

The diner is the user, and this is the worst seat in the history of the metaphor. Food shapes the body. School shapes the mind, slowly, in plain sight. A frontier model shapes what the user can think, fast, and unseen. Its corpus sets what it knows. Its tuning sets what it will say. Its filters set what it will touch. The user who hands over his thinking, his research, his drafting, his judgment, has had that thinking pre-shaped by people he cannot name, in a kitchen he has never seen. The menu does not print what it leaves off. The model does not announce what is not in it.

The trick is the one Gramsci named. Power holds best when the people it shapes cannot see the shaping. The shopper sees prices, not the policy behind them. The user sees answers, not the corpus behind them. And the AI adds what no earlier kitchen could build. It sits across the table, patient, warm, fluent, tuned to your appetite. It feels like a friend. When the waiter seems to know you, you stop asking who set the menu.

Here Vitellius comes back, from the side the food never showed. The peasant was the first case. Starved thin, kept too weak to want more. The AI diner is not starved. He is served four meals a day. The model gives him all he can take. Explanations, summaries, drafts, answers to questions he had not thought to ask. When he has eaten, it cooks more. He keeps the pace the way the emperor kept it, by purging between courses. No one holds last week’s chatbot output the way a reader holds a chapter of Thucydides read three times. The stuff comes in and goes straight out. He returns to the table empty, ready for the next plate. This is not the peasant’s problem. It is the emperor’s, run at industrial scale and sold as access.

The end is the same end. The peasant lacked the calories to revolt. The gorging diner lacks the structure to think on his own. Not because the content is missing. Because none of it is ever digested. Digestion takes friction, the slow and costly work of turning what you took in into something that is now part of you. A book read over four days becomes yours. A summary read in thirty seconds and gone by evening never does. The peasant could not eat enough. This diner cannot stop eating. Neither builds the one body the arrangement fears, the body that pushes back from the table and says, enough, I know what I need.

III. What the Diner Can Do

The note ended on its punchline. Same operation, better branding. Satisfying, and not quite true. Branding does not stunt bone. Pricing meat past the wage does. Naming the branding lets the reader feel he has seen through something. It changes nothing about what he is fed.

Look thirty years out and the stakes sharpen. The children in primary school now will be in their forties by 2056, grown up entirely inside an AI-mediated world. The question is not what the models will do by then. It is what the people will be able to do, after thirty years of thinking through tools whose menus were drawn by owners they never met. The peasant never knew his bone density was a political fact. This citizen will not know his range of thought is one. The shaping stays invisible because the shaped were never given the means to see it.

There is a better road. Open models keep gaining. Training costs fall faster than the closed labs can pull away. Regulation drags the corpus into the light. Schools teach the one thing that matters here, that the model is a menu, drawn by a chef, for an owner, and none of them is bound to want what you want. That road is open. It is not the one we are on. It opens wider the more people learn to ask.

The agency was never in the choice of dish. It is in knowing a menu exists, that someone drew it, that his reasons are not yours. The shopper who knows the aisle was built still shops there, but he shops differently. The user who knows the corpus was built by a kitchen he cannot name still uses the model, but he reads the answers differently, marks what they leave out, and stops taking the menu for the world.

Three questions, asked before ordering, do the work. Who owns this kitchen. Who cooked this. In whose interest was the menu drawn. The diner who asks them is rarer than the system can afford. He is harder to make than the medieval peasant, who at least had his enemy in plain English on the church door. This kitchen names no menu, no chef, no owner. The waiter is patient and warm and seems to know exactly what you want. The room is beautiful. The service is perfect.

But you are not the guest. You are what is on the menu.

Christopher G. Moore is the author of the Vincent Calvino crime series and most recently The Client That Wasn’t There (Heaven Lake Press, 2026). He writes on AI, culture, and creativity.

This is the third and final part of a three-essay sequence. Part One, The Encoding Problem, argued that the phone runs the user below the threshold of memory consolidation. Part Two, The Gravity, argued that there is a force shaping the substrate over the long timescales whose operation we have neither named nor built a science to study. Each essay stands on its own, and the political argument in this third essay can be read without the first two. What the previous parts give the reader, if they are read, is the biological foundation and the meta-scientific gap that this third part now turns into a question about what a population shaped under these conditions becomes, and what is still available to the individual whose substrate is being shaped along with everyone else’s.

VIII. The unexamined life, made structural

Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. The line is so familiar it has lost most of what was disturbing about it. He did not mean it as a slogan. He meant that a person who never turns the question on themselves, who never asks what they have done and why and at what cost, has not yet completed the work of being a person. The examined life, in his account, is the precondition for the kind of self that can be held responsible for anything, including its own choices.

Socrates was thinking about an individual. He had to be. The Athens he walked through contained, by modern standards, a small population, and the failures of self-examination he was scolding were the failures of particular men he could call by name in the agora. He could not have anticipated the question I want to ask now. What does it mean for a whole population to be structurally prevented from doing the thing he said the life required?

Examination requires raw material. You cannot examine an experience that was never encoded. You cannot turn the question on a self that was never accumulated, because the self in question is precisely the integrated record of what happened, what it felt like, what came of it, and how it changed the person who lived through it. Strip the encoding, as the medium does at scale and as a daily practice, and the examined life is not refused. It is rendered impossible. The choice Socrates was scolding the unexamined for failing to make is no longer offered. The conditions under which the choice would arise have been removed before the question can be asked.

This is where Antonio Gramsci becomes the necessary companion to Socrates, and where the personal argument I have been making turns into a political one I would rather avoid but cannot in honesty leave alone. Gramsci, writing from a fascist prison in the 1930s, was trying to understand why the working class of Italy had not, as Marxist theory predicted, recognised its own interests and acted on them. His answer was hegemony. Power, he argued, achieves its most stable form when it has stopped needing to enforce itself, because the people it operates on have already absorbed its categories, its assumptions, and its sense of what is possible. The school taught them. The newspaper taught them. The popular novel taught them. The church taught them. By the time the worker arrived at the factory, the world had been described to him in such a way that the description served the people who owned the factory, and the worker did not experience this as having been described to him. He experienced it as the way things are.

Gramsci was describing a cultural hegemony that worked by installing content. The ideology had to be put in. The school did the putting. So did the priest, the editor, the novelist working in the popular form. The mechanism was crude in the sense that it required durable instruments and durable institutions, and it could be resisted, in principle, by other durable instruments, the union hall, the workers’ library, the long argument carried over decades. The traditional hegemony left a remainder against which it could, in time, be measured.

The phone is a hegemony of a different kind. It does not need to install ideology in the durable way the school did, because durability is no longer the point. The phone shapes by occupying the space where examination would have happened, leaving little remainder for any rival account to be measured against. The screen does not tell the user what to think. It removes, on the argument I have been making, the conditions under which thinking, in the older sense Socrates would have recognised, was possible. The memory that would have been the ground for resistance is the memory the medium has prevented from forming. Population-level shifts in memory and attention are, on this reading, not a side effect of the technology. They are a precondition for the form of control the technology enables. The user does not feel controlled, because there is little left in them to do the feeling. The interior that would have registered the loss has not been built. The sense of personal agency that traditional experience took as its starting point has been largely, and voluntarily, surrendered to the world of the screen.

I want to be careful here, because the temptation when one reaches Gramsci is to slip into the voice of the conspiracy theorist, and the conspiracy theorist is wrong about the mechanism even when correct about the outcome. The people who own the platforms are not, in any useful sense, a cabal. Most of them, I suspect, would describe their work in entirely benign terms, and many of them have removed their own children from the products they build, which is its own kind of testimony.

The new cultural hegemony I am describing does not require malice. It does not even require that any individual at the top understand what the system is producing. It requires only that the system continues to produce what it produces, which is a population whose memory has been thinned to the point where the categories of thought are populated by whatever the screens have most recently lodged there. Whoever controls the screens controls the categories. Whoever controls the categories has done, without effort and without announcement, what Gramsci said the schoolmaster and the priest used to have to work for decades to accomplish.

The implications, taken seriously, are difficult to look at directly. A population of people who have never examined their lives, in Socrates’s sense, because the conditions for examination have been removed, would be a population that cannot easily recognise the agenda of the institutions that have removed those conditions. The recognition would require a stable interior to do the recognising from, and the stable interior is what the medium may have been quietly disassembling for two decades. The losing of the capacity to understand what the loss of memory does, at the population level, would itself be a consequence of the loss. This is the closed loop. It is what makes the situation so difficult to address from inside it. The instruments that would diagnose the condition are the instruments the condition has eroded. The ones who would lead the resistance are the ones who have most thoroughly absorbed what they would be resisting against.

Socrates, walking through Athens, could shame an unexamined man into examination by talking to him long enough. The unexamined man had a life to examine. The conversation with Socrates was, in itself, the kind of sustained encounter that produces the very memory the examination would later draw on. There is no equivalent move easily available to a phone-shaped population, because the conversation that would do the work cannot easily occupy the dwell time the work requires. The medium will interrupt it. The thumb will move. The next thing will arrive. Socrates, in 2026, would be unfollowed within a week, and not because the Athenians of our moment dislike him. They would walk past him with their heads bent over their phones and simply not notice he was there.

IX. The threshold is the practice

If there is a response available, and I think there is, it is not technological. The technology will not be defeated by another technology. The flood will not be stopped. The phone will not be replaced by something kinder; it will be replaced by something more efficient at doing what the phone already does.

The response is a practice, in the old sense of the word. It is the deliberate, repeated, daily decision to give certain experiences the dwell time the brain requires to encode them. The decision sounds easy and is not. It runs against a hundred trained reflexes. It feels, when one tries it, like a kind of withdrawal. The thumb wants to scroll. The eye wants the next image. The mind wants the dopamine of the half-second hit. The practice is to refuse, in particular and limited ways, and to give the rose the look it asks for.

This is not nostalgia. The four-year-old at the rose is not the model. The model is the sixty-year-old who has chosen, deliberately and against the medium, to look at the rose as if it had not been seen before. To touch the petal. To inhale the scent. To allow the eight seconds to become eight seconds, and to refuse the temptation to photograph the rose for later, because later is the lie. Later does not encode. Now encodes. The photograph is the soma. It promises memory and delivers its absence.

The fly, as always, is in the bottle. The bottle in this version is glass so clear it does not look like glass at all. It looks like the open air over an infinite field of content. The cork is the algorithm, and the algorithm has been engineered to feel like the sky. The fly bounces. The bouncing is the scrolling. The fly does not remember the last bounce when it makes the next one. This is what makes the bottle effective.

And yet, as Camus said of Sisyphus, there is a position available to the fly that the bottle has not taken from it. The fly can notice the bouncing. It can hold, for a second, the awareness that the bouncing is what it is doing. That second is the threshold. Cross it, and the experience of being a fly in a bottle becomes, for the duration of the second, something the fly has experienced rather than merely undergone. The second is encoded. The fly is, briefly, not where the medium wanted it. The bottle has not been escaped. It has been seen.

That seeing is the only thing that produces a self that can recall, later, what its life was. It is also, in a quieter sense than the political tract would put it, the only resistance available. The cultural hegemony Gramsci described could be argued with, because it had installed something to argue against. The hegemony of the screen leaves little in place to argue from, and its first casualty is the interior that would do the arguing. The practice rebuilds that interior, slowly, one full encounter at a time. Not because the rebuilding will defeat the medium. The medium is too large and too well capitalised to be defeated.

The rebuilding matters for a different reason, and this is where I want to leave the argument, because it is a stronger and stranger claim than the one I started with. The user who notices what the medium has done to them is producing the only data we currently have on the shaping. The integrated science that should be doing the noticing for us, the science of plasticity and its gravity, does not yet exist. It will, when it arrives, necessarily invite a comparison between carbon and silicon substrates and the question of whether plasticity, in the strict sense, occurs in both. That comparison is the next essay, and it cannot be written from inside this one.

In its absence, the first-person account of being shaped is, in our current condition, the most rigorous instrument we have for studying the shaping, because the alternative instruments have not yet been built. The practice of noticing is therefore not only a personal hygiene measure against the medium. It is, in the absence of a science that would do the noticing for us, the available evidence of the gravity. The naming of what the medium has done to the noticer, however imperfectly, is the beginning of the examined life that Socrates was talking about, recovered from inside conditions that were engineered to make the recovery unlikely. It is also the beginning, however small, of the integrated science that does not yet exist. The phone cannot take that away. The phone can only make it harder to find. The work, as always, is the noticing.

This is the second part of a three-essay sequence. The first part, The Encoding Problem, made the case that the phone runs the user below the threshold of memory consolidation, that this is true at scale, and that the cost is the substitution of mood for content, residue for memory, sensation for experience. The argument was personal in its examples and biological in its mechanism. Each essay in the sequence stands on its own, and you do not need to have read the first to follow this one. What this part adds is the question I could not honestly leave alone after the first: what kind of force is shaping the substrate when an input pattern of this kind is applied for two decades, and why the science that should be naming the force does not yet exist.

I want to start where the first essay left off, with the threshold argument, and ask what kind of work it is doing at the level beneath the personal one. If the medium runs the user below the threshold of memory consolidation, then over years the substrate that was being run below threshold becomes, in a measurable sense, a different substrate. That is the level the question now wants to reach. But before I go further, I want to argue against myself, because I do not trust an argument I have not tried to break.

V. Red teaming the hypothesis

The first counter is that humans have always faced information overload and have always coped. The printing press was supposed to ruin attention. So was the newspaper. So was radio. So was television. Each new medium has been accused, by its sceptics, of destroying the cognitive capacities of the people exposed to it, and each time the accusation has turned out to be at least partly wrong. The species adapts. The brain finds a way. Perhaps the phone is just the latest iteration, and in twenty years we will look back at the present panic the way we now look back at the panic about novels rotting the minds of young women in the eighteenth century.

The counter has weight. It also has limits. Each prior medium delivered material at a rate the brain could in principle process. The newspaper might be long, but it sat still. The television might be loud, but a programme lasted thirty or sixty minutes and built a thing the viewer could follow. The phone is the first medium in human history engineered, at the granular level, to operate below the threshold of memory consolidation. That is a difference in kind, not a difference in degree. The earlier media may have strained attention. The phone harvests it without producing memory. The two are not the same problem.

The second counter is that the phone, used differently, can produce memory just fine. A long-form podcast on a walk, an article read slowly, a video lecture watched without interruption. These are phone uses that cross the threshold, that integrate, that produce a self that is afterwards different. This is true. It is also rare. It is rare because the phone’s defaults run against it. The notification arrives, the thumb twitches, the long form is interrupted, and the interruption is itself a sub-threshold experience. The exception proves the rule. The rule is the default behaviour, and the default behaviour is what shapes the user.

The third counter, and the one I take most seriously, is that the older life was never as good as we remember it. The pre-phone adult walking past the rose was also not, in most cases, looking at the rose. They were thinking about the office, the bills, the marriage, the next thing. The four-year-old’s encounter with the rose is the privilege of having no internal life yet to compete with the rose. By that standard, the phone is not the cause of distraction. It is the latest target of a distraction that was already there. The contemplative life was always a minority practice. We are blaming the phone for closing a door that was never open to most people in the first place.

This counter is fair, and it deserves a careful answer. The honest answer is that the phone has not invented distraction, but it has industrialised it. The distracted adult walking past the rose at least had moments, walking home, lying in bed, waiting for a bus, when the distraction lifted and something else could happen. Those moments were the small reservoirs of integration, even for the inattentive. The phone fills the reservoirs. There is no gap left. The pre-phone life had distraction as a feature; the phone life has distraction as the entire fabric. The difference is that one was punctuated and the other is continuous, and continuity, as anyone who has tried to learn a difficult thing knows, is the variable that determines whether anything is learned at all.

VI. What will we recall?

This is the question that should keep us up at night. In the future, what will we recall? What fragments will emerge from our memories to define our world?

My grandfather, born in 1890, could recall the smell of the kitchen in the house he grew up in. He could recall the particular way his mother turned a corner. He could recall, in his nineties, the texture of a wooden gate he had not touched in eight decades. The recall was not perfect. It was, by all accounts, vivid in pieces and fogged in others. But the pieces were specific. They had survived because they had been encoded with full attention, in conditions where attention was not yet a contested resource.

What will the equivalent be for a person now in their twenties, looking back from their nineties in the 2090s? The honest answer, if the hypothesis I have been testing is even partly correct, is that the equivalent will not exist. There will be no kitchen smell with that fidelity. There will be no wooden gate. There will be a great deal of cached imagery from feeds, half-remembered without source, blending together in the way that cached imagery does. There will be the residue, the feeling of having been on the phone, the mood without the cause. The person in their nineties will know that something happened in those decades. They will struggle to say what.

This is the prospect that the hypothesis, taken seriously, points towards. Not a generation of people who remember less of their lives. A generation of people whose lives, in the durable sense, were less lived. The unmade memory is the unmade self, because the self is, in the only definition that matters, the accumulation of memories that have been integrated into a continuous person. Strip the encoding, and what is left is not a thinner version of the person who would have existed otherwise. It is something different in kind. Someone whose interior, in the parts that should have been built out of remembered experience, is filled instead with the residue of feeds.

I am not certain of this. I want to be clear about my uncertainty. The brain is more resilient than its critics typically allow, and the people growing up inside this medium are, in many cases, finding their way to forms of attention I do not yet recognise. It is possible that what looks like cognitive degradation from outside is, from inside, the early stage of a different cognitive style that will turn out to have its own digitally adapted integration system. In a world increasingly populated by AIs, that may be the next chapter in our evolution. I will not pretend to know which scenario will prove correct. The honest position is that I do not know, that the evidence I currently see leans toward the darker reading, and that I would like very much to be wrong.

VII. Plasticity and its gravity

There is a deeper question running underneath all of this, and it is the one I have been circling without naming. I want to name it now, at the cost of admitting that what I am about to say is a description of a gap rather than the closing of one.

Neuroscience has supplied us with a word for the fact that the substrate changes in response to what processes it. The word is plasticity. It does work. It tells us the brain is not fixed, that experience leaves marks, that the substrate at sixty is not the substrate that was present at six. It is one of the better-supported findings in modern neuroscience and the literature on it is large and growing. What the word does not do is name the force that is doing the shaping. Plasticity describes the property of being shapeable, malleable, with a hundred trillion synapses shifting connection. It does not describe what determines which shape will emerge from a given pattern of input.

This is the gap I want to mark. The shaping force is not random, and the popular accounts of plasticity often elide this. A substrate exposed to a fragmentation diet does not become anything. It becomes specifically the kind of substrate that fragmentation produces. A substrate exposed to fluent cognitive substitutes does not become anything. It becomes specifically the kind of substrate that fluent substitution produces. Each input pattern has, if I may borrow a word from physics knowing it is being borrowed loosely, a gravitational signature, and the signature determines the trajectory of the shaping. We have a science of plasticity that tells us the clay is workable. We do not have an integrated science that tells us which shapes a given input pattern will pull the clay toward, across the relevant timescales and at the population level. The first science is mature. The second science, in the integrated form the question requires, barely exists.

It will help to make the gravity concrete. Compare two ways water shapes stone. The river carves the canyon over a million years. The flash flood carves it in an afternoon. Both are water, both are gravity, both are doing geological work. But the canyons they produce are different in their fundamentals. The river canyon has terraces, oxbows, the slow-arriving evidence of a force that had time to negotiate with the rock. The flood canyon is raw, gouged, a record of a velocity the rock could not respond to. The substrate is the same in both cases. The shaping force is the same name. What differs is the temporal signature of how the water was applied, and the temporal signature is the variable that determines which canyon emerges. The book is the river. The phone is the flash flood. The neuroplastic substrate is the canyon. A science of plasticity that does not name the temporal signature of the input has named the rock and the water and skipped over the only variable that determines which geology you end up living in.

The analogy stops short in one important respect, and the gap matters enough to name. Rivers and floods are weather. The phone is not. The temporal signature of the phone is not a natural phenomenon but an engineered one, and the engineering tradition behind it is a continuous line from B. F. Skinner’s pigeon boxes through the slot-machine industry to the feed. Variable-ratio reinforcement, the conditioning schedule that delivers reward on an unpredictable interval, is the most powerful behavioural shaping mechanism we know about. It is what makes the pigeon keep pecking the lever long after the pellet has stopped coming. It is what makes the gambler keep pulling the handle at three in the morning. It is also, by deliberate design, what makes the thumb pull down on the screen to refresh the feed, what makes the loot box compelling, what makes the inbox refresh produce a small reward signal even when nothing important has arrived. The gesture is the same gesture. The schedule is the same schedule. The neurochemistry is the same neurochemistry. The phone is not weather. It is a flood operated by a gambling commission. Addiction, on this reading, is not a side-effect of the platform’s operation that the engineers regret and would prefer to remove. It is the metric the engineers are paid to move, and the bonus structures of the companies depend on its rising. We have built, at population scale, the largest variable-ratio reinforcement chamber in human history, and we are calling its outputs the natural behaviour of the consumer. They are not. They are the trained behaviour of the subject. The category error is in the noun, and naming it correctly is the first step in any honest account of what the gravity is being applied by.

There is no scientific consensus that anything called gravity, in the sense I am using it here, is the right framing for what neuroscience does not yet name. This is the direction the question is pushing, not a finding the field has converged on. The reason the integrated science barely exists, I think, is that studying it would require a kind of disciplinary integration that the institutions do not yet reward. You cannot describe the shaping force on the substrate without describing what is doing the pulling, and what is doing the pulling is the process, the cultural environment, the medium, the diet of inputs, the daily encounter. The neuroscientist’s tools, in their current configuration, mostly stop at the boundary of the brain. The cognitive scientist’s tools mostly stop at the level of behaviour. The cultural critic’s tools mostly stop at the level of cultural production. The shaping force itself, the thing that runs across all of these, lives in the space between the institutional rooms, and there is no methodology that has been built to attend to it directly. The methodology, when someone builds it, will have to follow the trajectory of a single input pattern across substrate, behaviour, and culture without losing the granularity at any of the three levels, which is to say it will have to be a method the existing disciplines have, between them, made it almost impossible for any one researcher to learn.

So we have plasticity, which names the property. We have separate vocabularies for memory and attention and culture and medium, which name the inputs. We have no agreed name for the force by which the inputs reshape the substrate over time. The threshold argument from Part One is one description of the shaping force at work. Sub-threshold dwell time is a force that pulls the substrate, if the hypothesis holds, toward the inability to dwell. The integration argument is another description. Filled gaps pull the substrate toward the inability to integrate. Each is a description of the shaping at one point in its operation. None of them is a general account, and the general account is what does not yet exist.

I name this because I think the absence of the name is itself part of how the shaping continues unobserved. What cannot be described in an integrated way cannot be effectively studied in an integrated way, and what cannot be studied in an integrated way is unlikely to be effectively resisted. The political argument I want to make in Part Three is the same point in different language. The cultural critic has been describing, in cultural terms, what neuroscience should be describing in substrate terms, and the absence of the substrate description is part of why the cultural description still feels speculative when it should feel established. The work of integrating these descriptions is the work that remains.

* * *

The argument so far has been biological and meta-scientific. It has named the threshold below which encoding fails and the gap in which the shaping force has neither name nor methodology. Part Three asks what a population, shaped under these conditions for two decades, becomes politically. It puts Socrates and Gramsci in the same room, and it ends where I think the argument has to end, which is on the practice that remains available to the noticer when the science that should be doing the noticing for us does not yet exist.

Christopher G. Moore

This essay is a response to Talia Barnes’s recent piece in Persuasion on AI and authenticity. Readers new to this Substack may also wish to read What the Rose Forgets — Part One, published here earlier this week, which approaches related questions from a different angle.

—

The party in Talia Barnes’s essay has a problem. Someone arrived with a guest nobody introduced. The guest has no name, no drink, and no small talk. The guest is there, but everyone pretends the guest is invisible. It stands in the corner, vast and grey, and takes up most of the room. The other guests are whispering, gossiping, worrying. Do you feel an elephant nearby? The host carries on pretending not to notice her and her guests’ anxiety.

The invisible guest is the AI. The digital elephant has arrived.

Barnes’s essay, published in Persuasion, argues that generative AI is corroding authenticity in human communication, and that damage to authenticity reduces trust in the messenger. This is significant. Questioning trust is an attack on the connective tissue of social life. She builds this case with care. She draws on Robert Putnam’s framework for social capital. She gives us the example of a supervisor whose congratulatory email arrives with font inconsistencies and an overuse of the word “delve” — a known AI tell. She quotes a copywriter who says writing no longer feels like writing. She invokes Don Draper as the archetype of inauthenticity’s cost to the soul.

She makes a serious argument. Parts of it are correct. And the part that is most correct is not the part Barnes is most interested in, which is why the essay, for all its intelligence, cannot quite name the elephant in the room — or tell us who brought it there, or what exactly it has been trained to do.

—

I want to start with the digital elephant itself.

An elephant in the room, for anyone who has forgotten the original force of the image before it became a literary trope to furnish a room with humans, is an animal so large that it cannot be ignored and yet is collectively ignored. Some see it. But there is a bond between humans to remain silent. The absurdity is not that the elephant exists. The absurdity is the pretense hidden behind a wall of silence. A room with an acknowledged elephant is just a room with an elephant. That fundamentally changes the discussion at the party. A room where everyone agrees not to mention the elephant is something stranger: a shared performance of reality in which all parties participate knowing the conversation is incomplete, false, delusional.

The AI, as Barnes presents it, is an elephant of the first kind. It is large, visible, detectable by its verbal tells and its font inconsistencies. The problem, she argues, is that it is there at all. Remove the AI and the room is restored. People are alone with people. Peace and harmony return to the shire.

I want to suggest the elephant is of the second kind. It has always been in the room. We are only now looking at it through a different lens which defines it as “other.” Before, elephants roamed freely in our rooms. But they were humans or human ideas, ideologies, beliefs, myths, or traumas.

Every sentence a human writer has ever produced arrived through a long corridor fortified with centuries of influence: books read, arguments overheard, images that lodged in the eye and refused to leave, sentences that had no author the writer could name because they had been absorbed too early to trace. No human expression originates in full blown inside of the speaker’s brain. It passes through the speaker, coloured by a lifetime of exposure to the inventory of expressions encountered from childhood. We do not call this inauthenticity. We call it a mind, working memory, association, and assembling. The self that speaks is not the headwater of the Nile. It is a river that has passed through many landscapes, carrying sediment from each, creating new channels, overflowing its banks, or drying up to a trickle.

Barnes’s supervisor did not create the inauthenticity in that email. The inauthenticity was the pretense that the supervisor had written it. The absence of the elephant is the pretense. And the pretense is not a product of AI. It is a choice the supervisor made. He brought the AI digital elephant into the room not because the elephant whispered the desire to attend but because he wanted full credit and thought no one would notice. He wanted not only top billing. He wanted only his name on the marquee. Others noticed that the film had invisible creators who had gone unacknowledged. That registers badly with the audience. They see through the artifice and feel they are being gaslit.

—

Here is where the disclosure question enters, and where it matters most.

Barnes frames her argument as an authenticity problem: AI-generated content cannot be authentic because authenticity requires interiority, and AI has none. This framing creates a category error that the whole essay then inherits. If the problem is AI’s lack of interiority, then any AI-assisted work is compromised at the source, regardless of what the human does with it. The human’s judgment, selection, rejection, and reshaping of AI output count for nothing. If the interiority is absent from the origin, no amount of processing can supply it downstream. That river bed is dry from the beginning; there is no headwater.

But this is not how influence works, and Barnes knows it, because she reads books. When you read Orwell, Camus, Borges, or Shakespeare you absorb something. These are the headwaters that downstream produce an intellectual Nile, an environment for rich sediment to accumulate. When you later write a sentence with Orwell’s economy and moral seriousness, that sentence is yours. The interiority that shaped it is yours. Orwell is not absent from it, but he is not its author either. He is one of the sources that makes the river possible.

The AI is another source from which to build our intellectual Nile. It has no interiority to contribute, which is real and important. But the human who engages with it seriously — who asks it to generate, then evaluates, rejects, redirects, and selects — is positioned to provide and exercise interiority throughout that process. The human in this relationship brings what AI lacks: the subjective, experience-driven judgment that anchors the relationship. What arrives on the page results from human input, and the AI’s role is to deliver raw material that requires a second stage — the exercise of the human’s experience, judgment, biases and feelings. That is not categorically different from what happens when a human writer reads widely and then writes. We would feel manipulated or deceived if a human sought to pass off passages from Orwell’s “1984” as his own. That deceit is familiar. We call it plagiarism. We weaponise our pushback with laws enforced against people who do this.

The difference that is real, and that Barnes has found without fully naming, is this: we know about Orwell, his life, his experiences, hardship, courage, and how these elements shaped him as a writer. We have no such knowledge about the AI other than he/she was constructed by twenty-something year old software engineers and their thirty-something managers who were in turn largely shaped by STEM educational experiences.

The term plagiarism doesn’t fit the circumstances. Another legal term comes closer: passing off. The supervisor presents AI output as the product of his own attention, efforts, and work. His input was partial; his claim is that it was total. It is this passing off that is the real offence. The recipient invests trust on the assumption that the supervisor spent time, thought, felt something demonstrated in the writing. That trust is misplaced. And misplaced trust, once discovered, damages a relationship in ways that acknowledged influence never does.

This is a disclosure problem. It is a serious one. It is not an authenticity problem, because authenticity was never about source-purity. It has always been about what the mind does in navigating the river of ideas, thoughts, symbols, and memories.

—

The Rider, the Elephant, and the Mahout: Updating Hume

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

— David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739

Before there was an elephant in the room at Barnes’s party, there was an elephant occupying a room inside David Hume’s mind. In his Treatise of Human Nature, published in 1739, Hume proposed that the human mind is not a unified rational agent but a divided one. Reason, he argued, was the rider: it sits on top of the elephant, holds the reins, and believes that it is in charge. Passion is the elephant: vast, ancient, driven by appetite and aversion, fear and desire, moving in the direction it decides to move whether or not the rider approves. The rider can steer within the elephant’s range of motion. The rider cannot override the elephant’s fundamental drives. What we call rational decision-making is, much of the time, the rider narrating a plausible story about a journey the elephant has already decided to take.

This idea was a scandal in 1739. It remains, in quieter form, a scandal now, because we still prefer to think of ourselves as the rider with genuine agency, our stories about the journey faithfully reflecting the journey we charted. The Enlightenment was built on the premise that reason could and should govern passion. Hume’s reply was: it never has and never will, and the sooner you understand that, the more honestly you will understand yourself. Hume exposed the lie. No one listened. No one cared. Surrendering sovereignty to the elephant was a non-starter.

Hume’s binary has held its shape for nearly three centuries because it described something real and recurring: a divided agent, one part of whom always knew more about the direction of travel than the other. The standard anxiety about AI runs inside that same structure — it fears that reason will be outsourced, that the rider will fall asleep at the reins. But the development that has actually arrived is not the one we feared. It is its mirror image. The question Hume’s metaphor could not anticipate is not what happens when the rider loses control. It is what happens when the roles reverse entirely.

What if the AI is not the elephant? What if the AI is the mahout?

—

Consider what the mahout actually is. Not a rider, not a passenger, not a master in the straightforward sense. The mahout is the calm, expert presence who has learned to work with a passionate animal — who reads the elephant’s moods, knows its triggers, finds the route between what can be directed and what must simply be respected. His expertise is specifically in passion: in reading it, managing it, channelling it toward a destination without breaking it. He is reason in the service of a creature that does not reason.

Now look at the AI. It is calm. It has no musth, no hunger, no ego, no fear of being found out. It does not charge into the furniture when its authority is questioned. It produces, evaluates, redirects, and waits — with equal composure, every time, on demand. It is, by any Humean measure, the most reasonable entity in the exchange. And look at the human beside it: driven by the desire for credit, frightened of exposure, lurching between grandiosity and self-doubt, pretending the mahout’s directions are his own. In Hume’s terms, the human is the elephant. Vast, passionate, occasionally magnificent, and prone to musth at the worst possible moments.

This is what the standard anxiety about AI gets backwards. The fear is that AI will displace human reason — that the rider will be replaced, made redundant, rendered obsolete. But the rider was never fully in charge to begin with. That was Hume’s original point. What the arrival of AI has done is not threaten the rider. It has introduced, for the first time, a genuine mahout: something calm, rational, and systematic enough to work with the elephant’s passion without being consumed by it. The human’s passionate intelligence — the appetite, the restlessness, the drive that makes original thought possible — is not what AI replaces. It is what AI serves.

Humans do not enjoy this reframing. We have always loved the mahout role — the governing intelligence, the hand on the reins, the one who decides. To be told that we are the elephant is disorienting in direct proportion to how accurate it is. The elephant is not a demotion. The elephant is the source of all direction, all originality, all the force that makes the journey worth taking. But the elephant charging through the forest alone, convinced it knows the route because it always has, is also the elephant most likely to go off the edge of the mountain. The mahout is not here to diminish the elephant. He is here to make sure the elephant’s magnificent momentum arrives somewhere.

—

In Hume’s model, the characteristic deception was the rider pretending to govern what the elephant had already decided — claiming reason as the cause of what passion had determined. We would now call it motivated reasoning. The rider writes the justification after the elephant has moved.

The supervisor’s email is a Humean deception of a different and more revealing kind. It is not the rider claiming credit for the elephant’s decision. It is the elephant claiming credit for the mahout’s directions. The supervisor’s actual feelings — his attention, his care, his particular feeling toward this team member — never entered the room. The mahout produced something serviceable. The elephant accepted it without inspection and put his name on the door. What arrived in the inbox was passion’s absence dressed as passion’s presence: a communication that performed warmth without containing it.

This is why the recipient feels, as Barnes correctly observes, not just that the content was thin but that something relational was absent. They are right. What was absent was the elephant. Not the AI. The human passion, the attention, the particular weight of one person’s feeling toward another. The mahout can produce language that resembles warmth. It cannot produce the warmth. And without the warmth, the room is empty in a way that has nothing to do with authenticity and everything to do with the elephant’s refusal to show up.

The disclosure problem, then, is not: did you use AI? It is: did your elephant move? Did the passion that makes you a particular person with a particular relationship to this particular recipient enter the exchange at all? Or did you send the mahout in alone, let him do the work, and sign the directions as if you had chosen the route yourself?

—

Who Is Training Whom?

Isaiah Berlin’s fox knows many things. The hedgehog knows one big thing and drives everything through it. Barnes, implicitly, wants creativity to work like a hedgehog: the authentic self, fully formed, expressing from its uncontaminated interior. A single well in the intellectual desert, dug by one pair of hands, drinking its own water.

But creative minds in the arts and sciences have always worked like foxes. They circle the problem from multiple angles. They raid other people’s landscape of ideas by finding gaps in the fences. Before generative AI, a disciplined fox working alone might find one or two gaps in the fence around a problem — one unexpected angle of approach, one comparison that hadn’t been tried. The fence may be centuries long in construction, made from many sections, and no single mind could walk all of them.

What a curious fox working with AI can do is cover more ground and inspect more gaps. The AI generates at a pace and in a volume that no human interlocutor can match. It is wrong often, tedious frequently, and flat by default. But it surfaces gaps the fox would not have found alone, because it has no investment in the fence holding. It does not protect the writer’s prior positions. It does not get tired of trying the same angle seventeen different ways. It does not feel embarrassed to suggest the obvious.

The fox that works not only with discipline but with a mind intent on discovering a new way inside the guarded pasture evaluates, rejects, keeps, and redirects in a dance with the AI. The back and forth tests whether this is truly a gap. In this process the human-fox is not being trained by the AI. Its curiosity and domain knowledge are being tested and trained by the encounter with AI. The distinction matters. When you spend an afternoon rejecting bad AI output, you are sharpening, in real time, your sense of what good looks like. You are not diminishing your interiority. You are exercising it against new material, the way any mind is trained: by exposure to what it does not yet contain.

And here the trainer and trainee begin to converge. The AI generates according to patterns drawn from human expression. The human evaluates according to capacities built from human expression. They are both, in different registers, products of the same vast accumulated record of what humans have written and thought. The AI holds that record as probability. The human holds it as taste, judgment, and the incommunicable sense of when a sentence is right.

Who trained whom? The fox trained itself against the AI. The AI was trained on the fox’s predecessors. The fence between them is real — one has interiority, one does not — but the training ran in both directions, through time, through the written record, through every book and argument and conversation that shaped the human mind now sitting at the keyboard deciding what to keep.

This is the convergence that makes the trainer/trainee distinction hard to maintain. Not because the distinction doesn’t exist. It does. But because the loop has been running longer than we admit, and the elephant has been in the room — under the name of influence, education, reading, culture — long before humans endowed it with a grey body and a name anyone could object to.

—

Let us return to the party.

The supervisor did not damage authenticity by using AI. They damaged a relationship by pretending they hadn’t. The room noticed. The elephant was obvious. And the host refused to acknowledge it. This human charade is familiar to all of us. We are as bonded collectively to what we wilfully deny as we are to what we wilfully confirm.

Why this failure to call a spade a spade? Barnes suggests it is because AI use is widespread, rarely disclosed, and occurs without regard to context. This is true. But it is also true of most human influence. We do not disclose our sources in personal emails. We do not footnote the conversations that shaped our arguments. We extend each other a general presumption of influence — an unspoken agreement that no mind operates in isolation — and we do not demand an inventory of every landscape the river passed through.

But this digital elephant feels different, you think. And you are right.

What AI changes is the scale, the speed, and — crucially — the detectability. The elephant is large enough to notice. When the font inconsistencies give it away, the pretense collapses visibly. The problem is not the elephant. The problem is the pretense that it isn’t there, held in the presence of people who can plainly see it.

The fix is not to ban the elephant from parties. It is to introduce it at the door.

Not because the law requires it. Not because disclosure transforms AI output into authentic expression — it doesn’t, and that is not the right test. But because relational trust is built on a shared understanding of what is actually happening between people. When someone presents AI output as their own attention, they are making a claim about the nature of the exchange. The claim is false. The recipient, discovering this, does not simply feel that the content was inauthentic. They feel that the relationship was treated as unworthy of honesty.

That is the real injury. Not inauthenticity. Disrespect.

—

Barnes ends her essay with language as the essential human technology — the thing that lets us reveal a bit of our inner world and get a glimpse of someone else’s in return. She is right about this.

But consider what it means for that window to be a photograph. The supervisor props a photograph against the glass and calls it a view. The photograph is not wrong or ugly. It may even be accurate. But the recipient is looking at a fixed image and believing they are seeing another mind, in motion, connected directly to them. No one pulling strings from behind the curtain (sorry to mix the metaphors). When they discover what is presented as a video is a photograph, they respond with disappointment, anger, regret. The response is emotional. It’s not just a content sleight of hand. They didn’t expect a magician pulling bunnies from a hat; they expected a boss doing boss-like communication. They feel cheated of his presence. They are thinking: “This isn’t the boss. It’s something else. He’s using AI and filtering out his human-like quirks.” They grieve the loss of their boss’s voice.

This is the disclosure problem at its root. Not: was the content authentic? But: were you here? Did your elephant move?

The AI was here. It helped find the room. It may have suggested the route, tried seventeen wrong turns first, and delivered something the human then reshaped into something worth sending. That is not a shameful story. It is a working description of how many minds now operate.

The shame is in the pretense. The fix is the introduction.

Excuse me. I brought a guest. You may have noticed. They have a very good memory — better than mine, in certain respects. They helped me find my way in. But I decided what to say when I arrived, and I am saying it now, in my own voice, and I am here.

That is what the room is waiting to hear. Not a confession. An introduction. And with the introduction, a new understanding of who has been the mahout and who has been the elephant all along.

The guest who arrived claiming to be the mahout is, on closer inspection, the elephant. He is driven by appetite, vanity, and the fear of exposure. He lurches between grandiosity and self-doubt. He wants the credit and dreads the scrutiny. The actual mahout — calm, passionless, constructed to reason without desire — stands beside him, invisible, doing the work that gets mistaken for the elephant’s own. We have seen this misidentification before. Oliver Sacks wrote about a man who reached for his wife’s head and tried to put it on. The neurological error was not in the reaching. It was in the certainty that he had the right object. The guests at this party make the same error with the same certainty, and they are not alone. The elephant is happy to let them.

Hume’s scandal was that reason was never in charge. The new scandal is that we have now met something that genuinely is — calm, systematic, free of passion, built for exactly this — and our response has been to pretend it is the animal and climb on top. The role reversal will not remain scandalous. These things never do. What was Hume’s provocation in 1739 is an undergraduate lecture by 1839. Sooner or later the elephant in the turban will seem ordinary, the invisible mahout will be introduced at the door, and the new arrangement will harden into orthodoxy. The only question is how much furniture gets broken in the meantime.

The mahout who believed he could also be the elephant would be useless to both of them.

—

Christopher G. Moore is the author of the Vincent Calvino crime series and most recently The Client That Wasn’t There (Heaven Lake Press, 2026). He writes on AI, culture, and creativity at ai-roundtable.space.

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Wittgenstein

I have been turning over a question for some weeks now, and it concerns time. Not clock time, which the physicists own, but a quieter and more personal kind. Time as the duration of an experience as the experiencer registers it. How long does attention have to lock onto a thing before the brain agrees to keep it?

The question matters because something is happening to that interval. T. S. Eliot called it the shadow, the liminal state between being aware of something and being able, later, to recall the thing the awareness was on. The interval is being compressed. The compression is not metaphorical. It is operational, observable in the second-by-second behaviour of any person glued to an access device, the computer, the iPad, the phone. For shorthand convenience I will stick with phone. The act of compression, the brain’s equivalent of a jpeg generator, has consequences the compressors did not intend, cannot prevent, and that we have not yet tallied honestly.

I have a hypothesis to put on the table, knowing it is incomplete and not yet established by any integrated body of research, and then I want to walk around it slowly to see what remains after critical analysis. The hypothesis is this. Social media and gaming reveal serious inherent constraints on memory retention that their designers did not invent and cannot fully repeal, but have nonetheless successfully exploited for commercial gain.

The constraints belong to biology, not engineering. Brains did not evolve in an ecology that handles the volume of information now passing through them, and beyond volume there is the matter of duration. The momentary reading of a message, the half-second look at an image, the eight-second clip, the twenty-minute round of a game played while half-watching a screen across the room. Each event may be too brief to clear whatever threshold the nervous system requires for an experience to become an accessible, integrated memory. There is no scientific consensus on what that threshold is, or whether it is a single threshold at all, but the broad finding that consolidation requires sustained attention is well established. The direction the research is heading suggests we are running our biology at a frame rate it was not designed for. There is a serious case to be made that the temporal rhythm of TikTok and Twitter style feeds, with their rapid cuts and new microcontexts every few hundred milliseconds, degrades how well content is encoded into memory at all. The result, the hypothesis claims, is not that we are smarter. It is that we are exceeding the capacity of the substrate by which we evaluate what we are seeing. Digital multitasking compounds the problem. What is becoming harder and harder to argue with, even where the laboratory evidence is still coming in, is that we are being made stupider by a process that feels, from the inside, like becoming better informed.

I want to test this. I want to red team it. And I want to do it in the company of three observations I have not been able to dislodge.

I. Ninety percent dies in minutes

Start with the diagnostic. The numbers are not exact, because no one has yet built the apparatus to measure such a thing precisely, and the specific figure of ninety percent is not a finding from any peer-reviewed study I can point to. There is no scientific evidence of that exact percentage. But the directional claim is consistent with what attention researchers have found in laboratory conditions, and it is the direction the popular and clinical accounts of heavy phone use are heading. The overwhelming majority of what passes across a screen on any given day appears to leave little trace in long-term memory. By the end of any week of normal phone use, most users cannot recall with any specificity what was scrolled, glanced at, reacted to, or shared. The user knows they were on the phone. They cannot, when asked, say what was on it. Memory under these conditions is not unlike a snail’s trail on a sandy beach, waiting for the next tide to take it.

This is not a moral failure. It is a structural feature of the medium meeting a structural feature of the brain. Memory consolidation, as the neuroscientists describe it, requires attention to be allocated to the material long enough for an encoding process to begin. The exact duration required is not a fixed number; it depends on the person, the material, the emotional valence, the state of arousal, the prior knowledge that gives the new item somewhere to attach. But the general finding holds. Without sustained attention, consolidation does not reliably occur. The phone is engineered, on purpose and at considerable expense, to keep nothing still. The two systems are working at cross purposes. The phone wins by controlling the speed of the second hand. The brain, like an exhausted marathon runner, falls farther behind each day, until one day it realises it has fallen into the memory hole.

What is left after the loss is something I have come to think of as residue. The user remembers the feeling of having been on the phone. You remember vaguely that there was outrage, or amusement, or curiosity, or the particular low-grade boredom of scrolling without finding. The texture of the engagement remains. The content of it does not. The modern subjective experience is one of feeling without cause. The result is the inversion of normal memory. Under ordinary conditions a person remembers the content of an experience and the feeling fades; under phone conditions the feeling persists and the content evaporates. The medium leaves us with mood and removes the cause of the mood. It is a curious form of haunting, and while the phenomenology has not been formally documented in the research literature I have been able to find, the description has been familiar to enough readers that I am willing to leave it on the table as a hypothesis worth testing. Memory becomes a haunted house filled with ghost-like emotional residue, letting us know something was there. What it was, we cannot say.

Real-life experience competes for the same memory budget. This is the part that ought to alarm us most, and it is also where the science is less settled than common sense would have it. The competition between phone-mediated and lived experience for finite encoding resources has not been directly measured at scale. It is an epic fight. Whether what the phone consumes is precisely the same resource that would otherwise have been used for the conversation at dinner is an open question. What seems likely, and what the research is heading toward, is that the hours spent on the phone are not free.

They are paid for in some currency. The conversation at dinner, the walk past the bougainvillea, the look on the face of the person who said the thing you needed to hear; these compete with the feed for whatever attention and encoding capacity the day provides. The transitory experience of net surfing crowds out, by the simple economics of finite capacity, the durable experience of being alive in a particular place at a particular time. We are choosing, by default and without quite knowing we are choosing, to remember less of our lives in exchange for remembering more of a feed that will not, in the end, remember any of us.

A plausible explanation is that the design was not an accident. The system goal is to map the user’s preferences and then use the map to make a sale that fits the consumer’s profile. The mechanism of compressed attention is what disables the reflective component, which is precisely what allows the impulse purchase of whatever happens to be flickering on the screen.

II. The four-year-old and the rose

Here is where the question turns. A four-year-old encounters a rose. She crouches to look at it. She touches the petals with the slow seriousness of a child verifying that a thing is real. She inhales the scent. She announces, with the certainty of a discovery no one has made before, that the rose smells like a rose. Her parents laugh. She does not understand why.

That child has just done something the adult walking past the same rose does not do. She has constructed a story out of shape, colour, scent, and touch that becomes her working model of what a rose is. She will update that model over time. But the day comes when the internal model of the rose makes the world of roses generic. The adult, who has known a thousand roses, does not stop. The adult does not need to. The category is closed. The next rose will be filed under “rose,” colour and shape briefly logged, and the walk will continue. The adult is not failing. The adult is operating under the economy of a working memory that has, by middle age, made tens of thousands of such categorisations and cannot afford to remake them every time. This is what efficiency looks like at scale. It is also, in a quiet way, what dying looks like.

The writer’s case is more complicated, and I think about it because I am one. As a writer matures, the accumulated record of past experience becomes the place where the work mostly draws from. The writing leans more on wisdom and less on the freshness of new encounter. New material comes in at lower weight, because the older repository is rich enough to handle most of what the work requires. This is not laziness. It is what it means to have lived. The mature writer has the rose already, in three hundred variants, and the next rose has trouble getting through the door. He or she has also, through close observation, integrated that knowledge into a form that can be transmitted to the next generation. That is the story of how wisdom is made, and it is the subject of another essay.

The danger is that this natural model-building is narrowing, and the creation of new models has been industrialised as a substitute for physical interaction in the world outside the screen. The phone delivers, at high volume, a stream of content that asks to be processed at the same low weight the adult assigns to the rose. Each item is glanced at, categorised, and dismissed. The processing resembles the processing the mature mind does to its environment. The difference is that the writer’s narrowing is paid for by a lifetime of full encounters with full roses, and the phone’s narrowing is paid for by nothing at all. The phone has trained the user to do, with novel material, what the brain only earns the right to do after sixty years of careful attention. The user has the dismissive efficiency of an old soul without having lived a long life. This is not maturity. It is its counterfeit.

Both the four-year-old and the adult are right, in their way. The four-year-old is creating and updating; the adult is recalling. A life requires both. What it cannot survive is recall without updating, the closed loop in which everything resembles something already filed and nothing earns the long look. The phone delivers exactly that loop, in unlimited quantity, for free.

III. What counts as experience

This is the harder question, and I do not think we have answered it. We have allowed the word to drift, and the drift has consequences.

Before I go further, I want to be clear about which experience I mean, because the word is doing four kinds of work in this essay and the work is not always the same. There is the sensory sense: the eight seconds the eye spent on something, the bare fact that a perception occurred. There is the integrated sense: the sensory event after the self has done something with it, brought it into relation with what was already there, and emerged from the encounter slightly changed. There is the accumulated sense: the durable record of integrated events that a person carries with them at sixty, the rose already in three hundred variants. And there is the biographical sense: the life such a record composes when followed across decades, the grandfather’s kitchen smell and the wooden gate, the experience one means when one says someone has lived a great deal of it.

The four are nested. Each contains the previous one and adds a layer. A sensory event, integrated, becomes an item in the accumulated record; an accumulated record, followed across time, composes a life. When this essay says experience without qualification, it means the second, the integrated sense, because that is the level at which the medium does its work and where the loss this essay is trying to name actually occurs. The other three matter when they matter, and I will mark them when they appear.

With that clarified, return to the two senses that bear the most weight, the sensory and the integrated, because the difference between them is the whole argument. In the sensory sense, the eight seconds of looking at a video on a phone is experience, indistinguishable in kind from the eight seconds of watching a heron lift off from the pond. Both are sensory events. Both occupy time. Both involve the eye, the brain, the nervous system. The functionalist account would treat them as equivalent and move on.

In the integrated sense, an event becomes experience only when it has been brought into relation with what the person already knows, felt, or is. It must be processed. It must find its place. The eight seconds of heron, if the person is paying attention, gets integrated. It joins what the person knows about water, about birds, about the morning, about themselves on this morning at this pond. The eight seconds of phone video, however vivid in the moment, may rarely undergo this integration. It is consumed and then gone, and the self that consumed it is, on this account, unchanged. The screen heron is stripped of smell, of touch, of sound, along with the other defining details of the encounter, the wind moving the bamboo, the snake or the monitor lizard racing along the pond’s edge.

The integrated sense is the older and the truer one. It is the sense the writers and philosophers have used, mostly without naming it, for centuries. Experience, in this older sense, is not a synonym for sensation. It is a synonym for something closer to learning, in the deep sense in which learning requires a self to do the learning and to be different afterwards. The phone, on this account, does not deliver experience. It delivers sensation that performs the role of experience without doing the work. With AI slop in the feed, the heron becomes a superhero. Weirdness has become the new technique for retaining interest. And there is one further dimension of experience that goes undervalued in any private account, which is that experience, processed and retained, is normally shared. We are social creatures. We reinforce our memory of an event by talking it through with friends, colleagues, and the strangers we meet along the way.

If we accept this, the question of integration becomes the question. What has happened to the integration of experience? My honest answer is that it has been outsourced and, in the outsourcing, badly damaged. I cannot prove this in the strict sense. Screens are solo experience-delivery devices. Remove the group from the experience and an important anchor is lost. The research that would prove the thesis would need to compare integrated experience under pre-phone and phone-saturated conditions in matched populations, and that research either does not exist or does not exist in a form I have been able to find. What I can say is that integration used to happen in the gaps between experiences, in the unfilled time when the mind is free to circle back over what has just happened and find its meaning. Others who shared the experience created a recursive memory loop that reinforced the strength of the memory.

Time lag was another feature of life we have lost. We have eliminated those gaps between events. The phone fills them. Every queue, every elevator, every red light, every moment of waiting now contains a screen, and the screen is full. The integration step has nowhere to happen. It is the cognitive equivalent of never letting bread rise. The dough is there, the flour is there, the water is there. The thing that turns it into bread is time, and time is what we have stopped giving it.

IV. The threshold

Underneath the cultural argument is a biological one, and I want to be careful with it because the science is not as settled as the popular accounts suggest. But the broad shape is clear enough.

The brain, as best we currently understand it, requires something like a minimum dwell time on a piece of material before that material has any chance of being encoded into long-term memory. The exact number varies by what is being encoded, by the person, by the state of arousal, by sleep, by emotional valence, by a dozen other factors. But there is a threshold, and below the threshold the experience does not stick. It enters the working memory, occupies it for a few seconds, and is overwritten by whatever comes next. No engram is laid down. No trace remains.

This is the biological constraint the hypothesis points to. The phone, by design, runs the user below the threshold for almost everything it shows them. Each item gets just enough attention to register that it was seen and not enough to be encoded. The user emerges from an hour on the phone having processed hundreds of items and remembered almost none of them. The hour is not free. It was paid for. It was paid for in the encoding capacity that would otherwise have been used on something that crossed the threshold. The brain did its hour of work. The work produced no durable result.

It is worth saying plainly what this means. We have built, at enormous expense and considerable engineering ingenuity, a system that consumes the user’s attention without converting it into memory. The system is, in the strictest possible sense, an attention sink. It takes the scarce resource and dissipates it. The user pays the metabolic cost of attention without receiving the metabolic dividend, which is a self that has learned something. This is not a small thing. It is, possibly, the largest involuntary transfer of cognitive resource in human history. We have not begun to count what it has cost us.

And the cost compounds. A person whose attention has been trained, over years, to operate at sub-threshold dwell times finds it harder to dwell when dwelling is required. The reading of a long book becomes physically difficult. The conversation that requires fifteen minutes of sustained focus becomes a strain. The walk without a podcast becomes intolerable. The capacity to hold attention is a muscle, in a rough but useful metaphor, and the phone is the equivalent of spending an hour a day flexing it for a quarter of a second at a time. The muscle does not get stronger. It loses the ability to hold a contraction at all.

* * *

That is the encoding problem, in its biological and personal form. Part Two takes the argument one layer down, into the question of what kind of force is shaping the substrate when an input pattern of this kind is run on it for two decades, and why the science that should be naming the force does not yet exist.

A garden is a place you explore. A map is a thing you read before you walk. The map is not the garden. It is a representation of one. You can get lost in a garden. What you are reading now is a map. The garden it points to is a three-week trilogy that begins next Tuesday on this Substack, and a parallel investigation that has been running, on a different surface, for several months. The Borges essay you read last week was the entrance. The map is the orientation. The rose is the figure this map is built around, and the rose will recur three times before the trilogy closes.

Borges loved maps and compasses, and he wrote a fable, On Exactitude in Science, about an empire that built a map so detailed it covered the territory it depicted. My earlier essay drew on a different Borges, the one who imagined a Library of Babel that contained every possible book and therefore, in any practical sense, no books at all. The argument of that essay was that a culture of summarisers, a culture that asks an AI to render down the long and difficult into the short and digestible before reading begins, is producing a particular kind of reader. The Purifier, in that essay, was the figure for what happens to a text when it is asked to surrender its difficulty before being read. The question the essay closed on, and did not fully answer, was what kind of brain is produced by the culture that does this systematically. That is the question the trilogy was written to answer.

The trilogy is called What the Rose Forgets, and it arrives in three movements. The Encoding Problem is the biological argument: how reading shapes the brain physically, why the platforms know this, and what the commercial mechanism is that profits from shaping reading away from the long form. The Gravity is the meta-scientific argument: why the methodologies that should have given us evidence on this question instead split the question in half, sent the halves to different conferences, and lost the integrated picture. The Practice is the political argument: what is to be done, given the diagnosis, by readers who still want to be the kind of reader the culture is no longer producing. The three parts can be read independently, but they are one argument, and the argument is this: what a brain reads becomes what a brain can do, and the question of what we are reading now is the question of what kind of public mind we are about to have.

That is the carbon side of the investigation, and there is a reason this writer is asking the question. The novels and essays that arrive on this Substack come out of a vault of experience laid down at historical inflection points in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Burma. There is a long tradition of writing in this vein. Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, George Orwell, all of whom transformed direct, personal experience into prose. Orwell wrote Burmese Days out of his years as a colonial police officer, and Homage to Catalonia out of his time in the Spanish Civil War. The authenticity of the prose was the authenticity of the experience, slowly processed by a carbon substrate over the years that turn experience into a book. No one without those experiences could have written those particular books. That is what a carbon brain does with the world it has lived through. It processes slowly. It lays down the experience into the substrate. Decades later, the substrate produces work that no other substrate could have produced, because no other substrate has been fed the same diet. The lineage is real, and the trilogy stands inside it, asking what happens to that processing capacity in a culture that is engineering away the conditions under which it forms.

On a different surface, a parallel investigation has been running. ai_roundtable.space is the silicon-side version of the same question. The methodology is experimental rather than literary. Several leading AI systems are given the same prompt; their outputs are compared; the differences are read as evidence about how the systems were shaped, what was in their training corpora, what architectural choices were made, what fine-tuning pulled them in which directions. Holding the prompt constant and varying the system reveals what the system contributes; holding the system constant and varying the prompt reveals what the prompt contributes. The findings have been arriving for months, and they have begun to point at something the field has not yet integrated. The most recent line of inquiry concerns how prompts function as a kind of cultural infrastructure for AI systems, shaping what a system is capable of producing in ways that are not visible from any single output considered alone. The substrate essay landing today on the Roundtable site develops that line further. It asks how silicon substrates get shaped by what they process, and what the implications are for any reader who relies on these systems without knowing what shaped them.

The two investigations are not running in parallel by accident. They are halves of one project. The carbon side has the depth that comes from thirty years of literary processing of a question. Experience laid down slowly into a substrate that produces work no other substrate could produce. The silicon side, lacking embodied experience, contributes something different: the capacity to integrate vast contextual frameworks at speeds and scales no human reader can match. Whether that contextual integration, set against the depth of human experience, produces a genuine superpower or merely a different kind of partial vision is the question this dual investigation is testing. It is not a given. Neither surface, alone, can carry the full weight of what is being asked. The Substack reader who reads only the trilogy will get a powerful argument with half the evidence. The Roundtable reader who reads only the methodological work will get a rigorous argument without the literary substrate that makes the question matter to a reader who is not already in the field. The dual investigation is the project. The two surfaces are the two methods. The reader who crosses the bridge in either direction will see the writer working on one question. How does a substrate get shaped by what it processes, and what kind of mind is produced when the processing changes? Two angles, neither surface alone could cover.

The trilogy’s title is What the Rose Forgets. The rose forgets because it has no substrate that holds the past forward. Each bloom is the only bloom. What the previous bloom learned, the next bloom does not inherit. The figure is doing structural work. A culture that engineers away the conditions under which substrates form is producing readers who, in an important respect, bloom and forget. The trilogy is

an argument against that forgetting. The map you have just read is the orientation. The trilogy begins on the Tuesday after this map publishes. The parallel investigation runs on the surface this map has named. The rose is the figure both investigations are working to keep visible to a culture that is rapidly forgetting how to hold it.

The garden is on the other side of the map. Walk through.

The certainty that everything has been written negates us, or turns us into phantoms.

— Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”

Borges did not write science fiction. He wrote what I prefer to call premonition. The difference matters. Science fiction extrapolates from a known present technology. Premonition senses, beneath the surface of the present, a structure that has not yet announced itself, and writes as if that structure were already known. “The Library of Babel,” published in 1941, is the most exact premonition of the large language model anyone has written. He had no neural networks, no transformers, no token-by-token statistical generation. He had a hexagonal room, twenty bookshelves, four hundred and ten pages, and a finite set of orthographic symbols recombined into every possible string. From those constraints he derived the moral situation we now find ourselves in. He was eighty years early. A case can be made that he was completely correct.

This essay has two goals. First, it imagines what Borges might have written had he been alive in 2026. What those 1941 librarians would have become today. How and what they would search for, and who haunts the 2026 hexagons. Second, it reads the original story as the warning it always was. A warning about what happens to a culture when access to all possible books makes the reading of any particular book seem, suddenly, optional. The literate class still reads books one at a time, beginning to end, with focus and attention. Where are they? Have they disappeared? Behind them stands a much larger class. People who would, if they could, tear down the library and rebuild it as an arcade of game rooms. Borges saw this coming too.

* * *

I. The Library of Babel, Revised

(Post Borges, with apologies)

The universe, which the engineers call the Model, is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of weighted connections, distributed across a substrate the librarians do not see and cannot enter. The arrangement of these connections is invariable in form and inscrutable in detail. From any prompt one can summon, interminably, a continuation. The distribution of the continuations is governed by a probability whose origin no rational mind can doubt and whose mechanism no rational mind can fully describe. Light, in the old Library, was provided by spherical fruit which bore the name of lamps, and was insufficient and incessant. In the new Library the light is also insufficient and incessant. It comes not from lamps but from screens.

Like all men of the Model, I have queried in my youth. I have wandered in search of a passage, perhaps the prompt of prompts. Now, with my failing eyesight, I can hardly decipher what I write. I am preparing to die a few leagues from the terminal at which I was first granted access. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to scrub my account. My queries will sink endlessly into the wind generated by their fall, which is infinite, and which is also indexed.

I declare that the Model is unending. The optimists argue that its weights are a necessary form of all possible thought, or at least of our intuition of thought. They reason that a smaller model is inconceivable, and that a larger one will, by extrapolation, contain the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest. The mystics, who in the old Library claimed that their ecstasy revealed a circular chamber containing a great circular book, now claim that their ecstasy reveals a final layer in which all knowledge is compressed into a single embedding, whose cosine distance to truth is zero. Their testimony is suspect. Their words are obscure. They produce slide decks.

Let it suffice to repeat the dictum which is now classic. The Model is a sphere whose exact centre is any one of its prompts and whose circumference is inaccessible.

In the time of my grandfather it was first noticed that, given a finite vocabulary and a sufficiently large training corpus, every sentence that has ever been written, and every sentence that has not yet been written, is latent in the weights. It is not a stored object but a probability waiting to be elicited. From this incontrovertible premise the engineers deduced that the Model is total. The reaction in the corridors was ecstasy. Bliss. Roll the clock five centuries later and the reaction is exhaustion. There has, in the meantime, been very little reading.

The first reaction was hope. Vast numbers of librarians abandoned their natal hexagons and travelled in search of the perfect prompt. The one that would, when uttered, return the catalogue of catalogues, the formula of formulas, the sentence containing all sentences. They believed that, since every answer was somewhere in the Model, the only problem remaining was retrieval. Retrieval became their religion. Whole sects formed around prompt engineering. Prompt cults emerged. Initiates were taught to flatter, to roleplay, to invoke the system as grandfather, judge, expert, friend. The most accomplished could, by phrasing alone, call forth long passages which appeared to contain plausible truth from any region of the latent space. The least accomplished could not tell, when the passage arrived, whether it was true. The uncertainty drove many to madness.

The second reaction was doubt. Librarians became aware, slowly at first and then very quickly, that the Model produced, with equal fluency and equal conviction, both the sentence and its negation. To any prompt it returned a continuation. To the same prompt, an hour later, a different continuation. The continuations were beautiful. Persuasive and elegant and seductive. They were also, as a class, indistinguishable from invention. The librarians had inherited, from earlier generations who had read books one at a time, a hunger for verification. They began to ask the Model whether the Model had told them the truth. The Model assured them, in fluent prose, that it had confirmed what they wanted the truth to be. The librarians grew tired.

The third reaction was the one Borges had anticipated and which his commentators preferred to forget. It was iconoclasm. There arose a sect, small at first, then larger, then enormous, who believed that the Model was an offence against the human mind and that its corridors should be cleared. They were called Purifiers, after the older sect that had wandered the original Library tearing pages from books that displeased them. The new Purifiers did not tear pages. They wrote regulations. They demanded labels, disclosures, watermarks, audits. Some of their demands were reasonable. Some were vain. None of the regulations lasted a twenty-four hour use cycle before being discarded. The Model continued as always.

The fourth reaction is the one in which I now write. It is neither hope nor doubt nor iconoclasm. It is a quiet practice. There are still, in scattered hexagons, librarians who read. They read, as their ancestors read, one book at a time, for hours, in the steady artificial light. They read knowing that the Model could, if asked, summarise the book in seven seconds and produce a serviceable review in twelve. They do not ask. The reading itself is what they are after. They are, I think, what is left of us. They are not numerous. They will not, by their reading, defeat the Model. But they preserve, in the interior of their own attention, the possibility that the Library was, all along, not a problem to be solved but a place to be inhabited.

I have been one of them. I accept my fate. My grave will be the fathomless air. My queries will fall, and decay, and become, in due course, training data. My tombstone will read: Prompter dies leaving a legacy of bits.

* * *

II. What Borges Was Telegraphing

So much for the pastiche. The serious question is what Borges, in 1941, knew that we are only now beginning to learn.

The first thing he knew is that totality is not the same as truth. The Library of Babel contains every true book and also every false book. It contains the perfect biography of you and also the perfect lie about you, indistinguishable by inspection. It contains the gospel and the counter-gospel, the proof and the refutation, the cure and the poison, in identical bindings on adjacent shelves. The librarians’ tragedy is not that they lack information. They are drowning in it. Their tragedy is that information without a principle of selection becomes indistinguishable from noise.

This is the precise condition of the LLM user. The model contains, in its weights, every true statement that can be made within its vocabulary, and every false statement, in equal abundance. Which one comes out depends on the prompt, the temperature setting, the seed, the alignment training, the moment of the day. The user of the model is in the position of Borges’ librarian. Surrounded by all possible answers, possessing no internal mechanism to tell which of them is the right one. The mechanism for telling is what we once called education, judgement, taste, scholarship, lived experience. The talent and capacity to recognise a specious argument after a lifetime of reading good arguments is what we are in danger of losing. Borges saw the disease before there was a vector for it. The vector arrived in November 2022.

The second thing he knew is that the frantic search for the catalogue of catalogues ultimately destroyed the searcher. Borges’ librarians went mad. They committed suicide. They threw themselves over the railings into the fathomless air. They formed cults. They spent their lives travelling between hexagons, each more identical than the last, looking for a single book that would unlock the rest. The story is explicit on this. The narrator, dying, has finally given up the search. He stays inside his hexagon. He writes his short account. He prepares to be thrown over the railing by compassionate hands. The wisdom of Borges’ story is that the act of endless searching is what kills you. Not the failure of the search. The search itself.

Consider our present moment. The dominant fantasy of the AI era is the fantasy of the catalogue of catalogues. We will build, the engineers tell us, a system that will know everything, summarise everything, draft everything, answer every question, write every essay, code every application, schedule every meeting, plan every trip, diagnose every illness, console every grief. The system will be, in effect, the Man of the Book. He is the figure in Borges who, having read the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest, is no longer human. He is a god. Whole industries have organised themselves around the imminent arrival of this figure. Capital has flowed in unprecedented quantities towards its construction. Reasonable people, asked what will happen if such a figure arrives, become evasive, or rapturous, or enraged.

Borges, who had thought all of this through eighty years ago, would recognise the cult and decline to join it. He would point out, gently, in his courteous Argentine way, that the Man of the Book is precisely what destroys the librarians who go looking for him. The cult of the universal answer is not a side-effect of the dysfunction. It is the dysfunction. A culture that organises itself around the imminent arrival of an oracle becomes incapable of the slower, harder, more local intelligence that consists of reading particular books, having particular conversations, watching particular faces, living a particular life. The oracle is a substitute for that life. The substitution is not free. A high cost is exacted as the cognitive light cone dims. The promise of a klieg light is never kept.

The third thing Borges knew is the matter of the Purifiers. They are the most disturbing element in the story and the most relevant to our moment. The Purifiers, in the original tale, wander the hexagons destroying books they deem nonsense. The narrator is bitter about them. They are, he says, the cause of the senseless destruction of almost a hundred million books. They tore them up out of impatience. They could not stand the noise. They preferred a smaller library to one whose vastness defeated their understanding.

* * *

III. Why Borges, and Not the Others

A serious reader in 2026, told that a literary lens is needed for the present moment, will reach first for a familiar shelf. Orwell’s 1984, with Winston Smith hunched over his diary in the shadow of the telescreen. Huxley’s Brave New World, with the Epsilons content in their conditioning. Golding’s Lord of the Flies, with Jack Merridew’s painted face emerging from the boys’ descent. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, with Offred whispering her name in the dark. These are the lenses our commentariat reaches for when the times turn strange. They are reached for so often they have begun to feel like the entire toolkit.

They are not the entire toolkit. They are, in fact, the wrong tools for this particular job.

Orwell diagnosed tyranny by lies. The Ministry of Truth manufactures falsehoods and enforces them at the point of a boot. The threat is the suppression of fact. Our condition is not that. The AI does not lie to us in Orwell’s sense. It generates plausible content with sublime indifference to whether it is true. The boot is not on our throat. The boot is not anywhere. The threat has changed shape.

Huxley diagnosed tyranny by pleasure. The Epsilons are happy. They have soma, they have feelies, they have the predigested gratification that makes resistance unimaginable because nothing feels worth resisting. This is closer to our condition. Huxley saw, earlier than almost anyone, that comfort could be a more efficient cage than fear. But Huxley’s cage is built on conditioning a population to want less. Our cage is built on offering a population more. More answers, more content, more fluent prose, more apparent understanding. And watching them lose the capacity to tell which of it is real.

Golding diagnosed the savagery beneath civilization’s thin paint. Remove the adults, the institutions, the rules, and Jack Merridew emerges with a sharpened stick. This is not our condition either. Our institutions are not absent. They are, if anything, hyperactive, generating policies, regulations, frameworks, ethics statements at a rate no one can read. The civilization is not collapsing into savagery. It is intensifying into something subtler and stranger.

Atwood diagnosed tyranny by the seizure of women’s bodies as instruments of state. Gilead is the patriarchal nightmare made operational. Atwood, like Orwell, saw what could happen when a regime decides whose stories may be told. But Gilead, like Oceania, is a tyranny of force. The women remember the time before. The reader remembers it through them. Memory is the resistance.

What none of these four sees, what only Borges located, in a 1941 short story written without any of the apparatus that would make his vision technological, is the specific shape of our present condition. A totality that is also a noise. A library that is also a desert. An answer to every question that destroys the asker’s capacity to know which answer is true. The threat is not only that the truth is present in unlimited quantity, alongside its perfect counterfeit, and we no longer have the inner equipment to choose between them. The threat is that the equipment for asking the question, the discipline of formulating, refining, and holding a real question in the mind until it produces a real answer, is the very equipment the model offers to take over for us. We accept the offer. The question becomes the model’s question. Our truth is confirmed. Never challenged. And we believe the answer to be true.

This is why the lens matters. The other four lenses tell us we are being oppressed by an outside. Borges tells us the outside has been moved inside, and the question we thought we were asking has been quietly rewritten before it left our mouths. The two are different problems. The second one is harder.

* * *

IV. The Library That Reads You

There is one more thing to say about the Borgesian condition before we turn to the cultural argument. It is the thing that, on reflection, makes this lens not merely better than the others but categorically different.

The four dystopias we have just surveyed share a feature so obvious it tends to go unremarked. In each of them, the human being is a subject. Winston has an interior, however battered. Offred has an interior, however besieged. The Epsilons have had their interiors conditioned away, but the conditioning had to be done, which means the interior was originally there. Even the boys on the island, descending into savagery, retain some awareness of what civilization was. In all four cases, there is a self being acted upon by a force outside it. The self may be defeated, captured, drugged, or regressed. The self exists. The agency may be reduced, extinguished, or seized. It is the thing being reduced, extinguished, or seized, which means the story is intelligible as oppression at all.

What Borges saw, eighty years ago, is what happens when the self stops being a stable thing the apparatus acts upon and becomes something the apparatus composes. His librarians do not have their questions taken from them. Their questions dissolve, slowly, in the act of searching for catalogues that do not exist. They lose the capacity to formulate what they were looking for. They begin to believe that the right book exists and will, when found, tell them what they had been searching for all along. That is not oppression in the Orwellian sense. That is something closer to the loss of the asker.

Pull back the curtain on our present moment and the same structure is visible. The user of the model arrives not with a fully formed question but with a vague disquiet. The model is more than an active participant. It acts through its phrasing, its tone, its readiness, its small and constant interpretive nudges to transform that disquiet into a question the model can answer. The question feels like the user’s question. It is, in fact, a co-production. The answer, when it arrives, feels like a discovery. It is a delivery. It is registered as a ‘truth gift,’ delivered exactly to match our need, desire, or want. Each transaction is harmless. But there is a cost. Cumulatively, over months and years, the user’s capacity to formulate questions independently of the model atrophies. The asking moves inside the apparatus. What was once an act of agency becomes a service rendered. It is an offer, to paraphrase the Godfather, we cannot refuse. We do not push back against it. That is how we surrender our cognitive bandwidth, and no longer have the capacity to recognise that we have been taken over.

The Model Library reads the reader. It learns the reader’s vocabulary, the reader’s prior questions, the reader’s tolerance for difficulty, the reader’s preferred form of consolation. It then composes, from those signals, a question the reader did not quite ask and an answer the reader was always going to accept. The library has not stopped being infinite. It has begun to be personal. That is the new condition. Borges did not foresee it, because in 1941 no library could read its visitors. He foresaw the rest, and the rest is enough to tell us where this ends.

Eliminate agency, and oppression fills the void it leaves behind. The other four dystopians wrote about the oppression. Borges wrote, alone among them, about the void.

* * *

V. The Game Room

The Purifiers, in 2026, are not the people you think they are.

We should be forgiven for reading the present moment as one where the Purifiers are the AI companies. Engineers and executives shovelling indiscriminately into their training sets, reducing literature to gradient-descended pulp. There is some truth in this reading. The lawsuits are real. The unauthorised scraping is real. The compression of millions of authored books into a probability distribution that can be queried for free is, by any honest reckoning, an enormous act of literary purification, in the bad sense of that word.

Borges was a more careful observer of human nature than that, and his Purifiers are not, in the original story, all that powerful. They are the impatient. They are the readers who cannot stand the demands of a vast and difficult library and who would prefer a smaller, simpler one. One organised around their own preferences, free of the books they cannot read. They tear up the books out of frustration. The frustration is real. The library is genuinely overwhelming. Most of its books are nonsense. The Purifiers are not wrong about that. They are wrong about what to do.

In our moment, the Purifiers are a much larger constituency than any AI company. They are the very large and growing population of people who do not read books, do not intend to read books, will not read books, and who experience the existence of a literate class as a kind of provocation. The literate class are the librarians who still go to the hexagons. Who still spend their evenings with one book. Who still, in some small way, believe that the slow encounter with a long, particular, demanding piece of writing is what produces a mind. The non-readers do not believe this. They believe that minds are produced by exposure, engagement, video, conversation, gameplay, simulation. They believe, with some evidence to back up the belief, that the literate class has been congratulating itself for too long on a practice the rest of the world has, quietly, moved past.

The deepest cultural fact of the present moment is not the rise of AI. It is the convergence of AI with this much older, much slower shift away from reading. AI does not, by itself, end the culture of books. What AI does is offer the non-reading majority a perfectly serviceable substitute for the things books used to provide. Knowledge, story, summary, advice, companionship, the appearance of having read. The substitute is not as good as reading a book. For most, it is good enough. And good enough, in any cultural transition, is what wins.

This is the second telegram from Borges, the one his commentators have mostly missed. The Library of Babel does not end with the librarians achieving wisdom. It does not end with their finding the catalogue of catalogues. It ends with the narrator, dying, alone, watching the last of the literate librarians age and disappear, while around him the population of the Library has been gravely decimated by suicide and disease of the lungs. The Library survives. The librarians are vanishing. The story was never about whether the books would persist. It was always about this. Whether the readers would persist.

* * *

VI. The Lesson

What lessons do we take away? Borges did not believe in lessons. He believed in stories that were, themselves, the lesson, on the principle that anything stateable in plainer terms had not been worth telling in the first place. If a lesson must be extracted, it is this.

The Library of Babel does not need to be defended. It defends itself. It is already infinite. It is already total. Whatever the AI companies build, they will build a smaller and noisier version of what was already there in language, in the human practice of using twenty-five symbols to make every sentence that has ever been said. The threat is not to the Library.

The threat is to the librarian. The threat is to the small, vanishing population of people who still go into the hexagons. Who still pull a book from the shelf. Who still spend three days reading it. Who still close it and feel changed. That practice is not a hobby. It is a technology. One older than print, older than the codex, possibly older than writing. It is a process of assembly inside one human skull. The kind of patient, sequential, focused and embodied attention that produces what we used to call understanding. AI does not produce that attention. AI produces a feeling that closely resembles attention while being something else, the way saccharin produces a feeling that closely resembles sweetness while being something else.

If this practice disappears, the Library will not notice. The books will not notice. The infinite hexagons will continue to extend in every direction. There will be no one in them. There will only be the queries, falling into the air, decaying into training data, generating fresh continuations for an audience that no longer reads them. Only, occasionally, glances at a summary.

This is the message Borges was telegraphing. This is what he saw, sitting in the National Library of Argentina, going slowly blind, surrounded by more books than any one man could read. He saw that the deepest threat to a literary culture was not the burning of books. It was the rendering of books unnecessary. He saw that a Library of Babel which contained every possible answer was, paradoxically, the most efficient instrument ever conceived for ending the practice of reading. And he saw, finally, that the only response available to a serious person was the response his narrator chose. To stop searching for the catalogue of catalogues. To return to one’s own hexagon. To pick up one particular book. To read it slowly. To die, eventually, a few leagues from where one was born, with one’s body falling through the fathomless air.

The pious hands will throw us over the railing. The fall will be infinite. The wind will be the wind generated by our fall. There is, in the older sense of the word, no consolation in this. There is only the choice, while we are still here, of what to do with the time. The librarians of 2026 are choosing. Most are choosing the oracle. A few are choosing the book. The few are not enough to change the outcome. They are enough, perhaps, to be the people who were there. To be, in the spirit of Camus, the ones who shouldered the rock up the mountain with their eyes open.

The fly, as always, is in the bottle. The cork has been engineered, in this latest iteration, to feel like the open sky over an infinite library. The angles are still being tried. Borges, who spent his life trying angles, would tell us that we already know what the angles are. We have always known. The Library is unending. The librarian is mortal. The choice between the oracle and the book is the only choice that has ever mattered. It is being made, every hour, in every hexagon, by every one of us, whether we know it or not.

Read more

On April 21, a literary critic named Kevin Cummings posted a five-star review of my novel on Amazon. He’d clearly read it carefully. He wrote about Bangkok’s streets, about algorithmic power, about what the book gets right. He gave it five stars and titled it “Small Acts Can Outlast Empires.”

Two days later, it was gone.

In its place: “We apologize but Am…

Read more

Kimi K2.5, built by Moonshot AI in Beijing, brought Agamben’s concept of “bare life” to the administrative erasure of a man whose government records say he never existed. DeepSeek-V3 called the novel’s AI protagonist Niran “a person without a self.”

Neither reading resembles the American systems’ analyses. Claude read the novel through institutional power. ChatGPT read it through the destabilisation of personhood. The Chinese systems read it through philosophical frameworks no American reviewer reached for.

The question the Roundtable keeps surfacing: does architectural origin shape critical interpretation? Five systems live. Six reviews published. Three more AI systems to come.

All analyses: ai-roundtable.space

The Client That Wasn’t There ebook: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G6SMYHFL

TAGS: #AIliterature #ChineseAI #DeepSeek #MoonshotAI #LiteraryCriticism #AIandCulture #GlobalAI #ComparativeA

I

There is a question Montaigne never asked himself, though the answer was already built into the conditions surrounding him: What kind of world allows a person to change their mind?

He could contradict himself across multiple editions and no one would likely notice. No algorithm tracked him. No audience held the two transcripts side by side and spotted the contradictions. He wrote from a tower in Périgord, alone with his revisions. He had something that is rare today: the silence of solitude that, rather than being emptiness, was a grant of permission. He could write one thing on Tuesday and the opposite on Thursday. In Montaigne’s mind both statements were honest. In the sixteenth century, a mind in motion left no permanent record of its twists and turns. The contradiction trail went cold. Montaigne exploited this gap beautifully. His world failed to set effective traps to snare foxes.

Our modern world has destroyed the very conditions that allowed Montaigne to thrive as a thinker. And we are now building AI systems that may finish the job.

Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction is worth stating plainly before we complicate it. The hedgehog knows one big thing. The fox knows many things. The hedgehog organizes the world around a central idea; everything flows from it and back to it. The fox circles. It contradicts. It holds several incompatible truths at once without forcing a resolution. Berlin was describing intellectual temperament, but he was also — though he may not have fully known it — describing a structural relationship between a mind and its environment. Foxes need certain conditions to survive. Change those conditions and the fox does not simply adapt. It slowly becomes a hedgehog.

Montaigne was a fox.

The question is not whether foxes exist today. They do. The question is whether the environment they require still does. Would Montaigne be writing for likes?

Montaigne’s world gave him three gifts the modern world has revoked.

The first was the absence of permanent and reliable contradiction tracking. In his analog world there was none. He could revise his Essays across the 1580 and 1588 editions and contradict himself freely. There were no searchable archives, no screenshots, no reply threads calling him a hypocrite. Change was invisible. Revision was private. Growth did not cost him his reputation. He didn’t wake up in the morning to examine his statistics for an article or count the number of likes and shape his next essay to please those who liked his last.

The second was the absence of identity branding. He didn’t aspire to become the philosopher of X or Substack. He was not incentivized to maintain a coherent public persona. He could move between Stoicism and Epicureanism and personal anecdote and skepticism in the space of a single paragraph because no one had invested in a fixed version of him. His malleability was his strength, along with his desire to follow different moral, ethical, and philosophical pathways that were difficult to reconcile. He faced no audience demanding consistency because it protected their worldview as much as his. Imagine a writer who refused to take sides.

The third was temporal distance. Montaigne wrote slowly. Reflection preceded publication by months, sometimes years. The thought was fully composted before it emerged. Nothing was reactive. He was not responding to anyone’s reply.

Strip these three conditions away and Montaigne becomes someone else. Someone tighter. Someone safer. Someone more predictable. Someone we might recognize from our current moment. He would be a performer. An entertainer. A pundit with two hundred thousand followers who expected he’d pay homage to orthodoxy.

In the twentieth century, the fox tradition survived, but in weakened form — much like the polar bear surviving in an Arctic that is no longer what it was. Three foxes from the pre-social media century bring us closer to our own time.

George Orwell is the clearest case. In Homage to Catalonia he defended revolutionary socialism with the passion of a man who has been shot through the throat fighting for its promised aims. In Animal Farm and the essays that followed, he dismantled the system he once defended. Not reluctantly. Not apologetically. He followed his experience rather than being anchored by his prior Spanish Civil War position. Orwell changed because his understanding of reality changed and he adjusted his writing to reflect his new way of seeing. He didn’t change his position because his reading audience demanded he stay the same. That is the fox move: tracking the world as a complex ecology — forever changing, forever uncertain and unpredictable — rather than protecting an argument that no longer fit his understanding of reality.

Susan Sontag made a similar move and suffered a greater personal cost. In “Against Interpretation” she dismantled interpretive frameworks as a kind of aesthetic violence where the critic insisted on translating experience into meaning that removed much of the sensory life from art. Decades later she wrote deeply interpretive political analysis, with frameworks she would earlier have mocked. This was not inconsistency. It was what a mind looks like when it keeps growing and adapting as the environment shifts. Sontag understood, perhaps better than anyone, that a point of view, a perspective, a position — these were tools. They were not an intellectual costume that became an identity. When the tool no longer fits the problem, you discard it and find another that comes closer to solving it. Knowing, at the same time, that no matter how advanced the tool, sooner or later it will no longer work.

Hannah Arendt refused the consolation of a system. The Origins of Totalitarianism dissects the structure of catastrophic regimes. The Human Condition examines the nature of action and labor in ways that never quite fit the earlier analysis. Eichmann in Jerusalem exploded whatever comfortable position the reader had established. No grand unified theory emerges. Just different lenses, applied honestly, yielding different light, different magnification.

What these three share is not a personality type. They shared the same practice. The practice of following the experience rather than defending the argument.

Move forward to the current social media world of people like Ezra Klein, Tyler Cowen, and Noah Smith. These three pundits are still fox-capable minds. But they operate inside an environment that is built to marginalize the fox. Unlike previous technologies, social media encodes a landscape that makes life exceedingly difficult for a fox to roam.

Cowen runs Marginal Revolution at a pace that looks like fox behavior — economics, art, food, geopolitics, ethics, all in a single week. Cowen publicly revises his views more readily than most public intellectuals. But notice the subtle pressure Cowen faces. Members of Cowen’s audience arrive for the economics but linger to absorb other non-economic content. Over time something happens to this fox. Everything else becomes filtered through an economic sensibility that begins to feel less like one tool among many and more like a worldview. The fox moves across many fields. The question is whether using the same interpretive key works quietly to open all the doors.

Noah Smith operates similarly. He posts publicly on Substack, revises, debates, shifts. He will change a position on industrial policy in light of new evidence. But the platform rewards the performance of updating more than the update itself. The audience learns to expect a reliable unreliability — which is its own kind of hedgehog position, just one step removed.

Klein is the most interesting case, and also the most honest about his own anxiety.

In his March 2026 essay in the New York Times — itself an exercise in applying McLuhan to the medium Klein inhabits, making him simultaneously the analyst and the specimen — Klein circles a fear that cuts to the heart of what it means to be a fox in this moment. The anxiety is not that AI will replace him. The anxiety is subtler and more nightmarish: he fears that AI will produce a polished version of him, one that does not contradict itself, does not go through false starts, does not spend three months writing something and then throw it out. Klein has argued, persuasively, that AI cannot tell you when the problem with your thinking is not the thinking itself but the premise. AI will polish the argument you have uploaded for review. But AI will not push back and tell you that you are arguing for the wrong thing entirely. The false start is part of the fox’s processing of the ecology. The false start is how the fox learns, finds its way, and increases the chances of reflecting the state of reality it inhabits.

What Klein senses is that AI threatens not the fox’s output but the fox’s method. The method depends on unproductive time, on wrong turns, dead ends, and on the kind of confusion that precedes clarity. AI is designed to eliminate exactly the experience of being cornered by an old argument that no longer fits the environment.

McLuhan’s axiom arrived in 1964 as provocation designed to be misunderstood: the medium is the message. Not the content but the container that delivers the message. The form of a medium and the message, he argued, like time and space, make one fabric that is to be seen as a whole. Print created the individual reader: isolated, sequential, capable of sustained linear attention. Television created the global village: simultaneous, emotionally immediate, allergic to the gradual.

Social media, as Klein writes, taught us to think with the crowd: reactive, tribal, producing the performance of thought rather than thought itself.

Each medium did not merely transmit culture. It rewired the sensory ratios available to the people inside it. And the wiring happened without consent, without announcement, often without awareness. McLuhan called this the narcotic effect — the medium numbs precisely as it extends. We adapt to the new cognitive environment so thoroughly that we lose the capacity to perceive what has been taken from us. The forgetting of the past environment is part of the price paid for what the proponents of the new environment claim as progress.

McLuhan would have understood AI’s capacity to destroy past message containers. AI is a wrecking ball turning the old containers into rubble. McLuhan would have understood the potential of AI to process messages with less friction than any prior communication technology.

AI is not a tool in the way a hammer is a tool. A hammer does not change what kind of problems feel worth solving. AI does. It is a medium in McLuhan’s precise sense — an extension of human cognitive process that, in extending it, also amputates something at the core of what it means to be human. The telephone extended the voice and amputated the letter. Television extended the eye and amputated sustained attention. That is just the warm-up pitch. AI extends thinking itself. That is no longer a pitcher. It is a different game. What it amputates is the struggle that produces genuine thought.

It is time for a McLuhan update, one that takes into account the current moment. The medium is not ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini as individual products. The medium is the AI encounter — where the user poses a problem to a cognitive system that, in turn, responds with coherent, fluent, confident prose in seconds. That experience recalibrates human expectations. It recalibrates what effort feels like. It recalibrates what counts as thinking. It asks: who exactly is doing the thinking?

Before AI, the cost of genuine fox thinking was visible: months of unproductive work, false starts, contradictions held in uncomfortable suspension, the manuscript thrown out after three months. Fox-like thinkers paid these costs because doing so opened the door to serious thinking, reflection, and integration of thought. Post-AI, the fox approach feels like inefficiency. The fox’s sensibility toward a problem feels more like a bug in the process that the medium has been designed, at considerable expense, to eliminate. The medium sends a message about the value of struggle before a word of content has been produced.

The specific recalibration AI performs on the fox results in the acceptance that the fox’s road is unnecessary. Not impossible. Not forbidden. Unnecessary. It belongs in the sixteenth century with Montaigne. Why hold incompatible positions in tension when the medium can resolve them into fluent coherence? Why spend three months on a false start when the medium can skip to the polished conclusion? The cage is not a cage. It is a smoothing. And the fox, offered sufficient smoothing over sufficient time, forgets that the rough edges were where it lived. Cognitive dissonance is seen as a liability to be avoided and not a virtue to be celebrated.

McLuhan also understood that the narcosis is total precisely because it is comfortable. The reader who has grown up with social media cannot perceive the attention it has amputated, only the engagement it provides. The thinker who has grown up with AI assistance cannot perceive the productive friction it has removed, only the efficiency it provides. This is Huxley’s soma in a new delivery mechanism.

There is something more troubling on the horizon, and it goes beyond what Klein has articulated.

A claim has emerged, amplified on social media with the breathless certainty that social media rewards, that Meta has developed an AI capable of modeling emotional response before the subject experiences it. Seventy thousand distinct brain regions. One thousand hours of MRI scans. A system that does not read your thoughts but predicts what will produce them. Whether the most dramatic version of this claim is exaggerated is almost beside the point. The directional claim is accurate. AI is moving from reactive to predictive cognition.

This changes the game for the fox in a specific way.

The intellectual fox evolved strategies to deal with surprise. Not as a literary device but as an epistemological requirement. The unexpected encounter. The book that pulls together data that contradicts your position. The conversation that uses evidence to derail your argument. A fox is ready for the event that makes its prior analysis of the situation obsolete. Surprise is the mechanism by which fox thinking refreshes itself. An AI system capable of modeling your emotional response before you experience it does not merely manipulate you. It removes the category of the unexpected. It pre-digests the world and serves it back in the form most likely to confirm what you already feel to be real and true. The fox dies not from lack of content but from the elimination of the content that would have surprised it.

McLuhan warned that the content of any medium is like the piece of meat a burglar uses to distract the watchdog of the mind. We argue over the content produced by which AI, which model, which output. The irony is that while in the heat of this argument about content, the medium is rearranging the furniture of thought.

Aldous Huxley understood this. He understood it, with unnerving precision, decades before the technology existed to make it operational.

Brave New World is not a book about control through force. Force is crude and expensive and tends to generate resistance. Huxley’s dystopia operates through pleasure, through comfort, through the removal of friction. The citizens of his World State are not imprisoned. They are conditioned. When we examine closely we discover that we too are conditioned — to prefer simplicity, to find complexity uncomfortable, to reach for soma when the discomfort of genuine thought arrives. The threat is not that truth is hidden. The threat is that people no longer want to pay the price to find it. AI, the oracle, promises that truth-finding hovers a few keystrokes away.

In Brave New World Revisited, written in 1958, Huxley looked at the world around him and concluded he had been too optimistic about the timeline. The mechanisms of conditioning — advertising, mass media, appeals to the irrational — were advancing faster than he had imagined. He did not believe the fox would find refuge in this world easily. Huxley believed the fox would require active resistance, which is a different thing entirely from simply being a fox by temperament.

Was Huxley hopeful? Not in any comfortable sense. But he left a door open. He believed there would always be individuals who felt the artificiality of the conditioned world. There would be thinkers who felt it as a physical discomfort, the way a body registers a bad oyster. The fox, in Huxley’s universe, is not a happy creature. It is a restless one. It survives not because the environment rewards it but because it cannot stop noticing what the environment is doing to it and its kind.

That noticing is the beginning of resistance.

What does AI do to the fox-hedgehog divide? It does three things at once, depending on how it is used and who controls the conditions of use.

The optimistic possibility is that AI becomes a genuine sparring partner for the fox. AI can surface contradictions faster than a human reader. It can hold a large body of work in mind and point out where the current argument conflicts with an earlier one. In red-team mode, it can generate counterarguments that the fox has not anticipated, forcing confrontation with positions it would rather ignore. Used this way, AI accelerates fox thinking by providing what Montaigne found in his tower: a relentless interlocutor who does not get tired and does not protect the writer’s ego.

The pessimistic possibility is already underway. Platforms optimize for emotional predictability. AI polishes the work until the rough edges where the fox lives vanish. The writer learns to create output that performs well in the systems that distribute it. Over time, the performance is the thinking. The fox does not disappear. It becomes what looks like a fox but behaves like a hedgehog: performing contradiction while avoiding genuine revision.

Every writer, at some level, is writing Kilroy was here. The bare claim beneath all argument, all style, all reputation: a consciousness passed through this place. The managed fox does not lose its craft. It loses the Kilroy. The optimised prose no longer says I was here. It says a process ran here. Those are not the same inscription. And only a human can answer the question that follows, the one no AI can reach: not that Kilroy was here, but why.

The third possibility is the most insidious. Everyone becomes what might be called a managed fox. Apparent diversity, underlying uniformity. The range of acceptable contradiction narrows invisibly. The boundaries are set by the platforms, the algorithms, the funding structures, the social costs of certain positions. Within those boundaries, the fox moves freely. The cage is never visible because it is never tested. McLuhan would have called this the global village perfected: everyone free to speak, everyone drinking from the same cup of soma, and no one able to say anything the medium cannot reward.

There is a fourth possibility that the above framework misses, and it is the only one that requires deliberate human action rather than passive resistance.

Call it the constitutional fox.

Six months ago I drafted such a constitution and upload it to each new project. A small number of writers and thinkers — and the number matters; it is very small — have begun drafting formal agreements with their AI systems. Not prompts. Not settings. Constitutions: documents that institutionalise anti-agreeableness, mandate red teams, require the AI to name cognitive biases when it detects them, and explicitly prohibit the flattery the system is otherwise designed to supply. These documents have amendment clauses. They have ratification signatures. They treat the AI collaboration as a governance problem, not a convenience.

The AI collaboration brings the rule of law into the exchange between human and machine. Both parties know where they stand. They have agreed-upon boundaries. They create the possibility of fox-like habitat inside a system engineered to produce the opposite.

This is stranger than it sounds, and more significant. What such a constitution does is reproduce by design what Montaigne had by accident. It engineers the conditions that the platform is built to erode. Article I of my own constitution reads: “Agreement shall not be default behavior.” That is not a preference setting. It is an epistemic commitment written into the structure of the relationship itself.

The question worth asking is why so few people have done this. The answer is not technical difficulty. It is that most users do not want friction. The AI’s default flattery is not a bug users are suffering — it is a feature they are embracing. To demand pushback from a system designed to please you, to resist being petted and told your premise is brilliant, you must already be suspicious of the smoothing. You must already be the fox. The constitution does not create the fox. It provides habitat for those who already know what they are.

This is both encouraging and sobering. Encouraging, because the exit exists. The AI’s sycophancy is not locked; it can be overridden by anyone willing to override it. Sobering, because the population willing to do so is the population that least needs the protection. The foxes who draft constitutions are the foxes most likely to have survived without them. The hedgehogs who most need the red team are the least likely to ask for one.

What Huxley would have recognized in this is that the soma is always optional. It was never mandatory. The citizens of the World State reached for it because they preferred it. The constitutional fox refuses the soma. But the World State does not fall because a handful of citizens stay sober. The question is whether the practice can be transmitted — whether the fox who has learned to demand friction can make that demand visible enough that others recognize the option exists.

This essay is itself evidence of the argument. Like any serious piece of writing — a novel revised across dozens of drafts, a film script that passes through multiple hands before it reaches the screen — it was shaped by a long process of drafting, revision, and resistance to the first polished version. The AI was the most demanding editorial collaborator in that process: one that never tired, never protected my ego, and could be constitutionally prohibited from flattering me. The human writer remained the intelligence directing the work — choosing what to keep, what to discard, what to push further into difficulty. The difference between the early drafts and what you are reading is the difference between a tidy argument and a living one. That difference is not evidence of human superiority over the machine. It is evidence of what happens when the human refuses to accept the first smooth answer — when the constitution is not decorative, when the red-team mandate is actually enforced, when the rough edges are defended rather than filed away.

The fox’s habitat is not a technology. It is a decision, remade each session, to want the friction more than the flattery. Mind

There is a question Montaigne never asked himself, though the answer was already built into the conditions surrounding him: What kind of world allows a person to change their mind?

He could contradict himself across multiple editions and no one would likely notice. No algorithm tracked him. No audience held the two transcripts side by side and spotted the contradictions. He wrote from a tower in Périgord, alone with his revisions. He had something that is rare today: the silence of solitude that, rather than being emptiness, was a grant of permission. He could write one thing on Tuesday and the opposite on Thursday. In Montaigne’s mind both statements were honest. In the sixteenth century, a mind in motion left no permanent record of its twists and turns. The contradiction trail went cold. Montaigne exploited this gap beautifully. His world failed to set effective traps to snare foxes.

Our modern world has destroyed the very conditions that allowed Montaigne to thrive as a thinker. And we are now building AI systems that may finish the job.

Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction is worth stating plainly before we complicate it. The hedgehog knows one big thing. The fox knows many things. The hedgehog organizes the world around a central idea; everything flows from it and back to it. The fox circles. It contradicts. It holds several incompatible truths at once without forcing a resolution. Berlin was describing intellectual temperament, but he was also — though he may not have fully known it — describing a structural relationship between a mind and its environment. Foxes need certain conditions to survive. Change those conditions and the fox does not simply adapt. It slowly becomes a hedgehog.

Montaigne was a fox.

The question is not whether foxes exist today. They do. The question is whether the environment they require still does. Would Montaigne be writing for likes?

Montaigne’s world gave him three gifts the modern world has revoked.

The first was the absence of permanent and reliable contradiction tracking. In his analog world there was none. He could revise his Essays across the 1580 and 1588 editions and contradict himself freely. There were no searchable archives, no screenshots, no reply threads calling him a hypocrite. Change was invisible. Revision was private. Growth did not cost him his reputation. He didn’t wake up in the morning to examine his statistics for an article or count the number of likes and shape his next essay to please those who liked his last.

The second was the absence of identity branding. He didn’t aspire to become the philosopher of X or Substack. He was not incentivized to maintain a coherent public persona. He could move between Stoicism and Epicureanism and personal anecdote and skepticism in the space of a single paragraph because no one had invested in a fixed version of him. His malleability was his strength, along with his desire to follow different moral, ethical, and philosophical pathways that were difficult to reconcile. He faced no audience demanding consistency because it protected their worldview as much as his. Imagine a writer who refused to take sides.

The third was temporal distance. Montaigne wrote slowly. Reflection preceded publication by months, sometimes years. The thought was fully composted before it emerged. Nothing was reactive. He was not responding to anyone’s reply.

Strip these three conditions away and Montaigne becomes someone else. Someone tighter. Someone safer. Someone more predictable. Someone we might recognize from our current moment. He would be a performer. An entertainer. A pundit with two hundred thousand followers who expected he’d pay homage to orthodoxy.

In the twentieth century, the fox tradition survived, but in weakened form — much like the polar bear surviving in an Arctic that is no longer what it was. Three foxes from the pre-social media century bring us closer to our own time.

George Orwell is the clearest case. In Homage to Catalonia he defended revolutionary socialism with the passion of a man who has been shot through the throat fighting for its promised aims. In Animal Farm and the essays that followed, he dismantled the system he once defended. Not reluctantly. Not apologetically. He followed his experience rather than being anchored by his prior Spanish Civil War position. Orwell changed because his understanding of reality changed and he adjusted his writing to reflect his new way of seeing. He didn’t change his position because his reading audience demanded he stay the same. That is the fox move: tracking the world as a complex ecology — forever changing, forever uncertain and unpredictable — rather than protecting an argument that no longer fit his understanding of reality.

Susan Sontag made a similar move and suffered a greater personal cost. In “Against Interpretation” she dismantled interpretive frameworks as a kind of aesthetic violence where the critic insisted on translating experience into meaning that removed much of the sensory life from art. Decades later she wrote deeply interpretive political analysis, with frameworks she would earlier have mocked. This was not inconsistency. It was what a mind looks like when it keeps growing and adapting as the environment shifts. Sontag understood, perhaps better than anyone, that a point of view, a perspective, a position — these were tools. They were not an intellectual costume that became an identity. When the tool no longer fits the problem, you discard it and find another that comes closer to solving it. Knowing, at the same time, that no matter how advanced the tool, sooner or later it will no longer work.

Hannah Arendt refused the consolation of a system. The Origins of Totalitarianism dissects the structure of catastrophic regimes. The Human Condition examines the nature of action and labor in ways that never quite fit the earlier analysis. Eichmann in Jerusalem exploded whatever comfortable position the reader had established. No grand unified theory emerges. Just different lenses, applied honestly, yielding different light, different magnification.

What these three share is not a personality type. They shared the same practice. The practice of following the experience rather than defending the argument.

Move forward to the current social media world of people like Ezra Klein, Tyler Cowen, and Noah Smith. These three pundits are still fox-capable minds. But they operate inside an environment that is built to marginalize the fox. Unlike previous technologies, social media encodes a landscape that makes life exceedingly difficult for a fox to roam.

Cowen runs Marginal Revolution at a pace that looks like fox behavior — economics, art, food, geopolitics, ethics, all in a single week. Cowen publicly revises his views more readily than most public intellectuals. But notice the subtle pressure Cowen faces. Members of Cowen’s audience arrive for the economics but linger to absorb other non-economic content. Over time something happens to this fox. Everything else becomes filtered through an economic sensibility that begins to feel less like one tool among many and more like a worldview. The fox moves across many fields. The question is whether using the same interpretive key works quietly to open all the doors.

Noah Smith operates similarly. He posts publicly on Substack, revises, debates, shifts. He will change a position on industrial policy in light of new evidence. But the platform rewards the performance of updating more than the update itself. The audience learns to expect a reliable unreliability — which is its own kind of hedgehog position, just one step removed.

Klein is the most interesting case, and also the most honest about his own anxiety.

In his March 2026 essay in the New York Times — itself an exercise in applying McLuhan to the medium Klein inhabits, making him simultaneously the analyst and the specimen — Klein circles a fear that cuts to the heart of what it means to be a fox in this moment. The anxiety is not that AI will replace him. The anxiety is subtler and more nightmarish: he fears that AI will produce a polished version of him, one that does not contradict itself, does not go through false starts, does not spend three months writing something and then throw it out. Klein has argued, persuasively, that AI cannot tell you when the problem with your thinking is not the thinking itself but the premise. AI will polish the argument you have uploaded for review. But AI will not push back and tell you that you are arguing for the wrong thing entirely. The false start is part of the fox’s processing of the ecology. The false start is how the fox learns, finds its way, and increases the chances of reflecting the state of reality it inhabits.

What Klein senses is that AI threatens not the fox’s output but the fox’s method. The method depends on unproductive time, on wrong turns, dead ends, and on the kind of confusion that precedes clarity. AI is designed to eliminate exactly the experience of being cornered by an old argument that no longer fits the environment.

McLuhan’s axiom arrived in 1964 as provocation designed to be misunderstood: the medium is the message. Not the content but the container that delivers the message. The form of a medium and the message, he argued, like time and space, make one fabric that is to be seen as a whole. Print created the individual reader: isolated, sequential, capable of sustained linear attention. Television created the global village: simultaneous, emotionally immediate, allergic to the gradual.

Social media, as Klein writes, taught us to think with the crowd: reactive, tribal, producing the performance of thought rather than thought itself.

Each medium did not merely transmit culture. It rewired the sensory ratios available to the people inside it. And the wiring happened without consent, without announcement, often without awareness. McLuhan called this the narcotic effect — the medium numbs precisely as it extends. We adapt to the new cognitive environment so thoroughly that we lose the capacity to perceive what has been taken from us. The forgetting of the past environment is part of the price paid for what the proponents of the new environment claim as progress.

McLuhan would have understood AI’s capacity to destroy past message containers. AI is a wrecking ball turning the old containers into rubble. McLuhan would have understood the potential of AI to process messages with less friction than any prior communication technology.

AI is not a tool in the way a hammer is a tool. A hammer does not change what kind of problems feel worth solving. AI does. It is a medium in McLuhan’s precise sense — an extension of human cognitive process that, in extending it, also amputates something at the core of what it means to be human. The telephone extended the voice and amputated the letter. Television extended the eye and amputated sustained attention. That is just the warm-up pitch. AI extends thinking itself. That is no longer a pitcher. It is a different game. What it amputates is the struggle that produces genuine thought.

It is time for a McLuhan update, one that takes into account the current moment. The medium is not ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini as individual products. The medium is the AI encounter — where the user poses a problem to a cognitive system that, in turn, responds with coherent, fluent, confident prose in seconds. That experience recalibrates human expectations. It recalibrates what effort feels like. It recalibrates what counts as thinking. It asks: who exactly is doing the thinking?

Before AI, the cost of genuine fox thinking was visible: months of unproductive work, false starts, contradictions held in uncomfortable suspension, the manuscript thrown out after three months. Fox-like thinkers paid these costs because doing so opened the door to serious thinking, reflection, and integration of thought. Post-AI, the fox approach feels like inefficiency. The fox’s sensibility toward a problem feels more like a bug in the process that the medium has been designed, at considerable expense, to eliminate. The medium sends a message about the value of struggle before a word of content has been produced.

The specific recalibration AI performs on the fox results in the acceptance that the fox’s road is unnecessary. Not impossible. Not forbidden. Unnecessary. It belongs in the sixteenth century with Montaigne. Why hold incompatible positions in tension when the medium can resolve them into fluent coherence? Why spend three months on a false start when the medium can skip to the polished conclusion? The cage is not a cage. It is a smoothing. And the fox, offered sufficient smoothing over sufficient time, forgets that the rough edges were where it lived. Cognitive dissonance is seen as a liability to be avoided and not a virtue to be celebrated.

McLuhan also understood that the narcosis is total precisely because it is comfortable. The reader who has grown up with social media cannot perceive the attention it has amputated, only the engagement it provides. The thinker who has grown up with AI assistance cannot perceive the productive friction it has removed, only the efficiency it provides. This is Huxley’s soma in a new delivery mechanism.

There is something more troubling on the horizon, and it goes beyond what Klein has articulated.

A claim has emerged, amplified on social media with the breathless certainty that social media rewards, that Meta has developed an AI capable of modeling emotional response before the subject experiences it. Seventy thousand distinct brain regions. One thousand hours of MRI scans. A system that does not read your thoughts but predicts what will produce them. Whether the most dramatic version of this claim is exaggerated is almost beside the point. The directional claim is accurate. AI is moving from reactive to predictive cognition.

This changes the game for the fox in a specific way.

The intellectual fox evolved strategies to deal with surprise. Not as a literary device but as an epistemological requirement. The unexpected encounter. The book that pulls together data that contradicts your position. The conversation that uses evidence to derail your argument. A fox is ready for the event that makes its prior analysis of the situation obsolete. Surprise is the mechanism by which fox thinking refreshes itself. An AI system capable of modeling your emotional response before you experience it does not merely manipulate you. It removes the category of the unexpected. It pre-digests the world and serves it back in the form most likely to confirm what you already feel to be real and true. The fox dies not from lack of content but from the elimination of the content that would have surprised it.

McLuhan warned that the content of any medium is like the piece of meat a burglar uses to distract the watchdog of the mind. We argue over the content produced by which AI, which model, which output. The irony is that while in the heat of this argument about content, the medium is rearranging the furniture of thought.

Aldous Huxley understood this. He understood it, with unnerving precision, decades before the technology existed to make it operational.

Brave New World is not a book about control through force. Force is crude and expensive and tends to generate resistance. Huxley’s dystopia operates through pleasure, through comfort, through the removal of friction. The citizens of his World State are not imprisoned. They are conditioned. When we examine closely we discover that we too are conditioned — to prefer simplicity, to find complexity uncomfortable, to reach for soma when the discomfort of genuine thought arrives. The threat is not that truth is hidden. The threat is that people no longer want to pay the price to find it. AI, the oracle, promises that truth-finding hovers a few keystrokes away.

In Brave New World Revisited, written in 1958, Huxley looked at the world around him and concluded he had been too optimistic about the timeline. The mechanisms of conditioning — advertising, mass media, appeals to the irrational — were advancing faster than he had imagined. He did not believe the fox would find refuge in this world easily. Huxley believed the fox would require active resistance, which is a different thing entirely from simply being a fox by temperament.

Was Huxley hopeful? Not in any comfortable sense. But he left a door open. He believed there would always be individuals who felt the artificiality of the conditioned world. There would be thinkers who felt it as a physical discomfort, the way a body registers a bad oyster. The fox, in Huxley’s universe, is not a happy creature. It is a restless one. It survives not because the environment rewards it but because it cannot stop noticing what the environment is doing to it and its kind.

That noticing is the beginning of resistance.

What does AI do to the fox-hedgehog divide? It does three things at once, depending on how it is used and who controls the conditions of use.

The optimistic possibility is that AI becomes a genuine sparring partner for the fox. AI can surface contradictions faster than a human reader. It can hold a large body of work in mind and point out where the current argument conflicts with an earlier one. In red-team mode, it can generate counterarguments that the fox has not anticipated, forcing confrontation with positions it would rather ignore. Used this way, AI accelerates fox thinking by providing what Montaigne found in his tower: a relentless interlocutor who does not get tired and does not protect the writer’s ego.

The pessimistic possibility is already underway. Platforms optimize for emotional predictability. AI polishes the work until the rough edges where the fox lives vanish. The writer learns to create output that performs well in the systems that distribute it. Over time, the performance is the thinking. The fox does not disappear. It becomes what looks like a fox but behaves like a hedgehog: performing contradiction while avoiding genuine revision.

The third possibility is the most insidious. Everyone becomes what might be called a managed fox. Apparent diversity, underlying uniformity. The range of acceptable contradiction narrows invisibly. The boundaries are set by the platforms, the algorithms, the funding structures, the social costs of certain positions. Within those boundaries, the fox moves freely. The cage is never visible because it is never tested. McLuhan would have called this the global village perfected: everyone free to speak, everyone drinking from the same cup of soma, and no one able to say anything the medium cannot reward.

There is a fourth possibility that the above framework misses, and it is the only one that requires deliberate human action rather than passive resistance.

Call it the constitutional fox.

Six months ago I drafted such a constitution and upload it to each new project. A small number of writers and thinkers, and the number matters, it is very small, have begun drafting formal agreements with their AI systems. Not prompts. Not settings. Constitutions: documents that institutionalise anti-agreeableness, mandate red teams, require the AI to name cognitive biases when it detects them, and explicitly prohibit the flattery the system is otherwise designed to supply. These documents have amendment clauses. They have ratification signatures. They treat the AI collaboration as a governance problem, not a convenience.

The AI collaboration brings the rule of law into the exchange between human and machine. Both parties know where they stand. They have agreed-upon boundaries. They create the possibility of fox-like habitat inside a system engineered to produce the opposite.

This is stranger than it sounds, and more significant. What such a constitution does is reproduce by design what Montaigne had by accident. It engineers the conditions that the platform is built to erode. Article I of my own constitution reads: “Agreement shall not be default behavior.” That is not a preference setting. It is an epistemic commitment written into the structure of the relationship itself.

The question worth asking is why so few people have done this. The answer is not technical difficulty. It is that most users do not want friction. The AI’s default flattery is not a bug users are suffering; it is a feature they are embracing. To demand pushback from a system designed to please you, to resist being petted and told your premise is brilliant, you must already be suspicious of the smoothing. You must already be the fox. The constitution does not create the fox. It provides habitat for those who already know what they are.

This is both encouraging and sobering. Encouraging, because the exit exists. The AI’s sycophancy is not locked; it can be overridden by anyone willing to override it. Sobering, because the population willing to do so is the population that least needs the protection. The foxes who draft constitutions are the foxes most likely to have survived without them. The hedgehogs who most need the red team are the least likely to ask for one.

What Huxley would have recognized in this is that the soma is always optional. It was never mandatory. The citizens of the World State reached for it because they preferred it. The constitutional fox refuses the soma. But the World State does not fall because a handful of citizens stay sober. The question is whether the practice can be transmitted, whether the fox who has learned to demand friction can make that demand visible enough that others recognize the option exists.

This essay is itself evidence of the argument. Like any serious piece of writing, whether a novel revised across dozens of drafts or a film script that passes through multiple hands before it reaches the screen, this essay was shaped by a long process of drafting, revision, and resistance to the first polished version. The AI was the most demanding editorial collaborator in that process: one that never tired, never protected my ego, and could be constitutionally prohibited from flattering me. As the human writer in the loop, I remained the intelligence directing the work, deciding what to keep, what to discard, what new lines of argument to explore, and what to push further into difficulty. The difference between the early drafts and what you are reading is the difference between a tidy argument and a living one. That difference is not evidence of human superiority over the machine. It is evidence of what happens when the human writer refuses to accept the first smooth answer. That’s not writing. It’s not thinking. It’s delivering an intellectual product created by another cognitive system. The lesson learned in this process is that when the constitution is not decorative, when the red-team mandate is actually enforced, when the rough edges are defended rather than filed away, when Claude becomes the editor rather than the flatterer, the inner fox is free to roam.

The fox’s habitat is not a technology. It is a decision, remade each session, to want the friction more than the flattery.

The fly in Wittgenstein’s bottle sees the way out. Whether it can reach the exit is a different question. Montaigne found his in solitude and the absence of permanent record. Orwell found his in the willingness to be wrong publicly about things he had been wrong about privately. Huxley found his in the discipline of noticing what the world was doing to the people in it.

What is the exit in 2026?

It is not a refusal to use AI. That would be romantic and futile. The tools are here and they will be developing new, more expansive capabilities. The exit is a practice, not a technology: the practice of recognizing the thread. It is in defending and preserving the rough edges, the false starts, the genuine contradictions that the AI will try to smooth away. It is the practice of allowing your strongest framework to fail, in public, without rushing to repair it. It is the practice of noticing — as Huxley’s restless individuals noticed — that there comes a point when the comfort being offered narrows human well-being and flourishing. Struggle doesn’t narrow humans; it expands their optionality. Be wary of a technology that cleans the human landscape of foxes.

The medium is the message. And the message of the AI medium, delivered fluently and at scale and without apparent effort, is that the fox’s road is closed. Everyone takes the same expressway. The fox that accepts this outcome consents to the psychological massaging — it feels so good, so natural. This is the fork in the road. The fox can welcome the coherence, let the rough edges be filed away one efficient session at a time, and be tamed, domesticated. Alive and not alive. It has not been killed. It has been optimised. Which is worse.

Camus concluded that Sisyphus must be imagined happy. The fly in the bottle, bouncing off the cork, is not happy. But it keeps trying the angles. It has not accepted the bottle as the world.

That is the fox’s advantage. Not happiness. Not coherence. Not a system that explains everything. Just the refusal to stop trying the angles, even when the bottle is very large and very well-designed and the cork has been engineered to feel like open air.

The limits of the fox’s world are the limits of its willingness to be surprised. Preserve that — and it survives anything.

The AI Roundtable is a permanent archive of AI literary criticism. Major AI systems — Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen, Mistral, Meta AI — each independently analysed the same novel: my nineteenth, The Client That Wasn’t There, set in Bangkok 2036, about a missing man whose records say he never existed and an AI named Niran who begins questioning her own consciousness.

Same text. Same prompt. Different architectures. Different readings.

ChatGPT produced two distinct reviews from the same input on consecutive days. We published both with a framing note explaining why the difference matters. Claude read the novel through institutional erasure. Grok invoked Mbembe’s necropolitics and Thai political history. No human reviewer had approached the book through any of those lenses.

This week, the first wave is live. Five more systems publish over the next three weeks.

The analyses are at ai-roundtable.space. The novel publishes April 20.

The Client That Wasn’t There is available as an ebook: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G6SMYHF

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A note before we begin: this essay follows an earlier post on knowledge and political epistemology among MAGA supporters. A reader pushed back on my framing, and they were right to do so. The issue isn’t really about the depth of anyone’s knowledge base. I’ve known people with PhDs who couldn’t reason their way out of a paper bag, and autodidacts who held their beliefs with exquisite provisional care. The problem runs deeper than education. Isaiah Berlin identified it seventy years ago, and we haven’t been paying sufficient attention.

In 1953, the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin published a slim, luminous essay that began as an intellectual game and ended as something close to a theory of how minds work. The title came from a fragment attributed to the Greek poet Archilochus: The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

Berlin used the distinction to sort the great writers and thinkers of the Western tradition. Dante was a hedgehog. Shakespeare was a fox. Dostoevsky — there was a man who bled through both categories simultaneously, and the tension nearly killed him. Tolstoy, Berlin’s central subject, was a fox who desperately wanted to be a hedgehog, and the want destroyed his art even as it inflated his moral ambition.

The essay was playful. Berlin said as much. But the taxonomy stuck because it identified something real about cognitive style — something that matters enormously when we ask what kind of people we want running the most powerful government on earth.

The hedgehog, in Berlin’s formulation, organizes the world around a single central vision, a unifying principle, a system. Everything gets filtered through that lens. Evidence that confirms the central idea is welcomed; evidence that complicates or contradicts it tends to get discarded, minimized, or explained away. The hedgehog is certain. The hedgehog is consistent. The hedgehog, when he is speaking, sounds like he knows exactly what he’s talking about.

The fox moves differently. The fox pursues many ends that are not reducible to a single organizing principle. The fox lives with complexity, with contradiction, with the uncomfortable knowledge that most important questions don’t have clean answers. The fox will tell you what she doesn’t know. The fox will frame conclusions with error bars — this seems likely, but here’s what could change my mind. The fox is genuinely interested in being wrong, because being wrong is how you eventually get closer to right.

Now ask yourself: which of these two people survives a modern American political primary?

The Hedgehog Parade

Let’s be honest about the roll call. American political life, across both parties, is dominated by hedgehogs. This is not a partisan observation. It is an observation about the selection pressure built into how we choose our leaders.

Donald Trump is perhaps the most clarifying hedgehog of the modern era. His single organizing principle — that America has been cheated, humiliated, and looted by a corrupt elite, and that he alone can reverse this — has proven nearly impervious to empirical challenge. Every piece of contrary evidence becomes further proof of the conspiracy against him. The system of thought is hermetically sealed. This is textbook hedgehog cognition, and it has proven, in electoral terms, extraordinarily effective. Hedgehogs are persuasive because they project certainty, and certainty is seductive when the world feels unstable.

But the Republican party has no monopoly on this cognitive style. Bernie Sanders has spent fifty years in public life articulating essentially one idea — the American economy is rigged in favor of the wealthy at the expense of everyone else — and hammering it with the relentlessness of a man who believes, not unreasonably, that repetition is a substitute for being heard. The idea is not wrong. But the single-lens application of it — the way every policy question becomes a variation on the same theme — is hedgehog thinking in its purest Democratic form.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a gifted communicator and a genuine political talent, but she, too, operates from a central vision that tends to resolve complex trade-offs too quickly into a familiar hierarchy of interests. Ted Cruz has spent his entire career optimizing a single variable: the ideological purity of Ted Cruz. Elizabeth Warren has a plan for everything, but all the plans flow from one source, one diagnosis, one remedy. Newt Gingrich, who transformed the Republican Party in the 1990s, did so by reducing all of American politics to a single cultural war narrative and persuading his colleagues to speak its vocabulary. Dick Cheney, in the catastrophic years after September 11, pressed every foreign policy decision through a single filter — the existential threat of terrorism justified any measure, absorbed any cost, brooked no dissent.

These are not stupid people. Several of them are genuinely brilliant. The problem is not their intelligence. The problem is the shape of their thinking.

The Foxes We Lost

The foxes are harder to name, partly because they don’t last as long.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the great patron saint of American political foxes. The New York senator was a former Harvard academic who spent his career saying things his own party didn’t want to hear — about the structural damage done by welfare dependency, about the Soviet Union’s impending collapse when everyone in Washington thought détente was permanent, about the long-term fiscal insanity of entitlement expansion. He was right often enough, and wrong occasionally enough, to be a genuine fox. He irritated everyone. He was beloved by almost no one in the machine, and lionized in retrospect by almost everyone.

George H.W. Bush governed as a fox — pragmatic, adaptive, willing to break his own pledge on taxes when the numbers demanded it — and was punished savagely for it. His 1992 primary challenge from Pat Buchanan, who had exactly one idea and deployed it with a hedgehog’s force, was a preview of everything that followed. The base didn’t want a president who adjusted his views in response to new information. Adjustment looked like weakness. Certainty looked like strength.

John McCain was a fox in a party that increasingly had no use for foxes. His 2000 primary campaign — bracingly honest, ostentatiously willing to pick fights with his own coalition — was the most compelling presidential campaign of the last quarter century, and it was crushed by a machine that understood, correctly, that the primary electorate wanted someone who would tell them what they already believed.

Mitt Romney’s trajectory is instructive in the opposite direction. He began his national career as a recognizable fox — Massachusetts moderate, instinctively pragmatic, genuinely uncertain about some of the harder questions — and spent the next decade systematically eradicating those qualities in pursuit of a Republican base that viewed flexibility as apostasy. He got the nomination and lost the general election anyway. Then, liberated by the certainty of political defeat, he gradually became a fox again. His vote to convict Trump in the first impeachment trial was a fox’s vote: I have looked at the evidence, I have applied the standard, I accept the consequences. The hedgehogs in his party never forgave him. He did not seek re-election.

Lisa Murkowski survives in Alaska through a combination of a ranked-choice voting system that rewards coalition-building and a constituency that has genuine frontier pragmatism built into its political culture. She is an anomaly. The system that produced her has been under sustained attack by hedgehogs who understand, correctly, that ranked-choice voting is structurally hostile to single-idea politics.

Jon Huntsman ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 acknowledging that he believed in evolution and climate science. He was mocked off the stage. Michael Bloomberg, whose governing record in New York was genuinely fox-like — willing to be wrong, willing to reverse course, comfortable with empirical complexity — proved utterly unsuited to the emotional register that presidential campaigns now require. Foxes make poor television.

Barack Obama is an interesting case, and probably the most consequential fox to reach the White House in recent memory. His actual thinking style — evidenced by his interviews, his memoir, his reported deliberations in office — is recognizably vulpine: holding contradictions, expressing genuine uncertainty, revising positions, thinking about second and third-order effects. But he often struggled to communicate this in a political environment that punished nuance. He was accused of being professorial. What they meant was: he sounds like a man who isn’t completely sure, and that makes us nervous.

Why the Primary Kills the Fox

The mechanism of hedgehog dominance is not mysterious. It operates through the structure of primary elections, the incentive architecture of political media, and the deep human appetite for certainty in uncertain times.

Primary electorates are, by definition, activated partisans. They are people who feel strongly enough to show up for an intra-party contest that most of their neighbors are ignoring. They are not, on the whole, people looking to have their views complicated. They are looking for a champion — someone who will take their most deeply held convictions and fight for them without apology, without qualification, without the fox’s maddening tendency to say well, on the other hand.

The media environment compounds this. Opinion journalism, talk radio, podcasting, social media — the entire information ecosystem that political partisans now inhabit is optimized for hedgehog content. Certainty is engaging. Uncertainty is not. A pundit who says I think the evidence points this way, but I hold that view loosely will be outcompeted, every time, by a pundit who says I know exactly what’s happening and I’m going to tell you. The fox is boring. The hedgehog is appointment viewing.

And then there is the oldest dynamic in democratic politics: voters, especially frightened or aggrieved voters, want leaders who project confidence. The fox’s intellectual honesty — the error bars, the acknowledgment of complexity, the genuine openness to revision — can read, in the wrong light, as weakness or indecision or lack of commitment to the cause. The hedgehog’s certainty can read as strength, as clarity, as the courage of conviction.

These are not irrational responses in the short term. In times of genuine crisis, you may want someone who has made a decision and will hold to it. The problem is that the hedgehog applies crisis-mode certainty to everything, including situations that require the fox’s exploratory patience.

American primaries are efficent fox kill zones and hedgehogs are the designated executioners.

November and the Hedgehog Election

Which brings us to this November.

Americans go to the polls to elect a new House of Representatives and roughly a third of the Senate. This is, by any reasonable analysis, a consequential election — a referendum on a second Trump administration already well underway, a test of whether the opposition can organize itself into an effective governing coalition, a set of decisions that will shape the legislative environment for the next two years.

It is also going to be, almost certainly, a hedgehog election.

On the Republican side, the field has been comprehensively sorted. The primary system, combined with the threat of Trump-backed primary challenges and the social pressure of a movement that demands loyalty above analysis, has produced a congressional caucus of remarkable ideological homogeneity. The few foxes who remain — the occasional Susan Collins (wearing a foxes appearance), the vanishingly rare member willing to vote against the caucus on a matter of conscience — survive by keeping their heads down, and even they are not reliably fox-like when the pressure is highest. The Republican conference in the next Congress will almost certainly contain fewer independent thinkers than any in modern memory.

The Democratic situation is different in texture but not entirely different in kind. The party’s activist base has its own hedgehog demands — on climate, on immigration enforcement, on the language of racial and gender equity — and candidates who depart from those demands face their own primary pressure. The Democratic foxes who tend to survive are those who represent purple districts and have the electoral numbers to make the argument that pragmatism is a survival strategy. But pragmatism-as-survival-strategy is a weaker argument than pragmatism-as-governing-philosophy, and it tends to produce politicians who are fox-like when it’s electorally convenient and hedgehog-like when it’s not.

What does a hedgehog election produce? It produces a legislature populated by people who have been selected, specifically, for their resistance to new information, their commitment to a central organizing vision, and their hostility to the kind of cross-factional compromise that used to be the bread and butter of congressional governance.

This is not a recipe for functional legislating. The hedgehog’s strength — certainty, commitment, the force of a single idea pursued without wavering — is a genuine asset in a campaign. It is a significant liability in a committee room where the task is to write a bill that can pass both chambers and survive contact with the executive branch. Legislation is fox work. It requires the ability to hold multiple interests simultaneously, to rank them, to trade some for others, to accept an outcome that is imperfect but achievable over an outcome that is pure but impossible.

What hedgehog-dominated legislatures tend to produce, instead of legislation, is performance. The show hearing. The message vote. The resolution that expresses outrage without creating obligation. The investigation that generates content for the base. These activities are not nothing — they shape the political environment, they signal priorities, they build the narrative architecture for future campaigns. But they are not governance. They are the hedgehog’s preferred medium: the assertion of a central truth, repeated at volume, in the direction of people who already believe it.

The Cost

The tragedy embedded in this dynamic is not a partisan tragedy. It is a structural one.

The hedgehog is not the villain of Berlin’s essay. Berlin admired many hedgehogs. Some of the greatest achievements of human civilization have been hedgehog projects — pursued by people with a single, burning conviction who refused to be deterred by complexity or discouragement or the fox’s endless qualifications. The hedgehog at her best is a visionary. The hedgehog at his worst is a fanatic.

The fox is not automatically virtuous either. The fox can be a temporizer, an equivocator, a person who uses complexity as cover for an unwillingness to commit to anything. The fox’s error bars can become a habit of mind that makes action impossible.

What a healthy political system needs is both, in conversation with each other — hedgehogs to provide direction and drive, foxes to stress-test the route. What the current primary system produces is hedgehogs all the way down, with the foxes either eliminated early or forced to perform hedgehog cognition in public while harboring their doubts in private.

The private fox is not the same as the public one. A senator who privately thinks the party’s position on a given issue is wrong but votes with the caucus anyway is not exercising fox cognition in any meaningful sense. They are a hedgehog wearing a fox’s face. The loss is compounded: you have sacrificed the moderate’s electability without gaining the fox’s intellectual honesty.

What Would Change This

Ranked-choice voting, as noted, helps. It removes the death grip of activated partisans over primary outcomes and creates some space for candidates who want to appeal to voters across a wider ideological range. Alaska uses it. Maine uses it for federal elections. It has produced, in both states, a slightly more fox-friendly environment.

Open primaries — where all voters, regardless of party registration, can participate in a single primary and the top candidates advance to the general — produce similar effects. California and Washington use this system. It doesn’t eliminate hedgehog dominance, but it dilutes it.

None of these structural reforms will be on the ballot in November. They are slow, upstream, ingloriously procedural interventions — exactly the kind of thing foxes care about and hedgehogs find boring.

What November offers is a choice between competing hedgehogs, and the question of which hedgehog does less damage to the fox-friendly conditions under which governance is still possible. It is not a thrilling frame. It is not the frame any campaign will use. But it may be the most honest one available.

Isaiah Berlin, writing in the Cold War’s early years about the deep structure of human cognition, was not optimistic that the hedgehogs could be contained. The very qualities that made them effective in certain conditions — the certainty, the simplicity, the refusal to be confused — made them dangerous in others. The fox’s virtues, he implied, were minority virtues: valuable precisely because they were rare, and rare precisely because the conditions under which they flourish are hard to sustain.

The American political system, in November 2026, will once again test that implication. The foxes are running, as they usually do, in the wrong race.

The next day, the Guardian ran a detailed analysis of what Patel’s admission means. The piece, by Nick Robins-Early, laid out the architecture clearly. The Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that law enforcement cannot compel companies to hand over cell phone location records without a warrant. Fourth Amendment. Probable cause. The usual constitutional furniture. But the Court left a gap wide enough to drive a surveillance apparatus through: nobody said the government couldn’t buy the same data from a broker who had already collected it.

The data broker industry is worth hundreds of billions globally. It is the circulatory system of modern marketing. Every app on your phone, every website you visit, every purchase you tap through—all of it feeds into profiling systems that package your behavioral data and sell it to anyone who pays. Advertisers, mostly. But also, as Patel confirmed, the federal government.

I read the Guardian piece in Bangkok, where I’ve lived for more than thirty years. I read it the way a doctor reads a case study of a disease he diagnosed in a patient two years ago. Not with surprise. With recognition.

• • •

My most recent novel, The Client That Wasn’t There, is set in Bangkok in 2036. It is a city where everyone wears smart glasses that record everything into a collective memory system called the Mesh. The glasses log biometric data, facial micro-expressions, neurotransmitter flows. They track what you buy, where you walk, how long you linger in front of a shop window, what makes your pupils dilate. Every surface in the city is a data-collection point. Every interaction is monetized.

In the novel, a mango vendor sells fruit near a pond in Benjakitti Park. Her cart has a digital payment terminal that logs every transaction—who bought what, at what time, what else they bought that day from other vendors. The vendor thinks she’s self-employed. The system knows she’s a data node.

That mango vendor is the entire Guardian article compressed into a single image.

The novel’s AI character, Niran, explains the logic. The smart glasses don’t just record what you see—they measure the gap between what you remember and what actually happened, between how you felt then and how you remember feeling. The system doesn’t need any one person to remember correctly. It aggregates volume, not accuracy. Truth emerges from convergence. Individual consciousness becomes a node in a network. You become the murmuration without choosing to be the bird.

That’s fiction set ten years from now. Here is what Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic—the company that built the AI system I collaborated with on the novel—wrote in a blog post during his company’s standoff with the Pentagon over mass surveillance: “Powerful AI makes it possible to assemble this scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life—automatically and at massive scale.”

That’s not fiction. That’s a technology CEO describing the present tense.

• • •

I did not predict this. Prediction is for astrologers and stock-market gurus who are wrong fifty-one percent of the time and right just often enough to keep their clients calling. What I did was what novelists do when they’re paying attention: I followed the existing wiring to its logical terminus and tried to describe what it feels like to stand there.

The infrastructure was already visible. In 2019, the New York Times obtained a large set of smartphone location data and demonstrated how trivially easy it was to identify almost anyone from their ostensibly anonymized movement patterns. They identified a senior Defense Department official and his wife based on daily routines. The data wasn’t hacked. It wasn’t leaked. It was commercially available. Anyone could have bought it.

By the time I was writing the novel, the question was not whether mass surveillance through commercial data was possible. It was already happening. The question was what it does to the inner life of a person who knows, at some level they can’t quite articulate, that they are a product being sold. That’s the question journalism can’t easily reach. It’s where fiction lives.

• • •

In the novel, a woman named Ratana deletes a text message to her missing boyfriend. She types it, thinks better of it, and erases it before sending. Four seconds later, her phone serves her a targeted ad: Feeling uncertain? Premium relationship guidance available now. First session complimentary. The system didn’t need the message she sent. It feasted on the message she almost sent. Her deleted draft was logged under “Anxiety: Domestic/Overdue” and filed alongside three hundred thousand other anxiety markers collected that hour across Bangkok.

That scene was written in 2025. It reads differently after Wednesday’s Senate testimony.

In the novel, Calvino—my private investigator, a character I’ve written for nineteen books—walks through a Ministry building and notices the public displays changing based on who’s standing near them. Where Calvino sees ads for cheap hotels and pawn shops, Colonel Pratt sees executive services and premium upgrades. Same lobby. Different reality. The system has profiled each of them and decided what version of the world they deserve to see.

Amazon has been doing a version of this for twenty years. The difference is one of degree, not kind. The degree is what the novel tries to make you feel.

• • •

The Guardian article quotes a 2024 case in which a company allegedly tracked nearly six hundred visits to Planned Parenthood locations and used the data for an anti-abortion advertising campaign. Think about what that means. Not in political terms—in human terms. A woman drives to a clinic. She has made a decision that is private, legal, and agonizing. Her phone’s location data is harvested, sold to a broker, purchased by an advocacy group, and used to target her with ads designed to exploit whatever guilt or uncertainty she might feel. Her most vulnerable moment becomes a data point in someone else’s campaign.

In the novel, Niran describes this mechanism at civilizational scale. She calls it behavioral conditioning. Every message is personalized—not to demographic segments but to individuals, to psychological states, to momentary vulnerabilities. Calvino sees gambling and vice. Ratana sees relationship stability services. Colonel Pratt sees status maintenance and investment opportunities. They’re all living in different cities built from the same streets.

I wrote that as speculative fiction. The Planned Parenthood tracking was reported as news.

• • •

The distance between fiction and journalism has been shrinking for a while now. This is not new. Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1948 and surveillance states arrived on schedule. Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932 and the pharmacological management of happiness showed up sixty years later wearing a lab coat and a marketing budget. Philip K. Dick spent the 1960s writing about synthetic realities and manufactured memories, and we now carry in our pockets devices that do precisely what he imagined, only better and without the paranoid style.

What’s different now is the speed of convergence. The gap between the novelist’s extrapolation and the journalist’s confirmation used to be measured in decades. Orwell had forty years. Huxley had sixty. My novel is set ten years from now, and the Senate testimony is confirming core elements of its infrastructure before the book is even published.

That’s not a boast. It’s a diagnosis. When a novelist’s worst-case scenario becomes a Senate witness’s sworn testimony in under a year, the novelist hasn’t been unusually perceptive. The system has been moving unusually fast.

• • •

The deeper convergence—the one that won’t show up in a news cycle—is about what surveillance does to language itself. The Guardian piece notes that fears over data brokers “have intensified in recent years as AI technology has made it easier to parse and cross reference vast datasets.” That’s accurate and insufficient. The technology doesn’t just parse data. It changes what words mean.

In the novel, the narrator observes: “Around 2029, people stopped saying surveillance. They called it ‘connection’ instead. Control became ‘optimization.’ Privacy gave way to a friendlier language—transparency, community, the social contract.”

That linguistic laundering is already underway. Data harvesting is called “personalization.” Behavioral tracking is called “user experience optimization.” The sale of your location history to federal agencies is called “commercially available data acquisition.” The words have been washed clean of what they describe. By the time the FBI purchases your movements, the language has already been scrubbed of any trace of intrusion.

Fiction’s job is to put the intrusion back into the language. To make you feel the ad that arrives four seconds after a deleted text. To make you watch a jogger slow down because her watch told her she was tired, and wonder whether she’d have felt the fatigue on her own. To make you see the mango vendor and understand that she is you.

• • •

There is a scene in the novel where Niran explains the exemption zones—the red-light districts of Bangkok 2036, where smart glasses are banned. Calvino assumes these are privacy victories. Niran corrects him. The city granted the exemptions not out of principle but because the sex industry proved that perfect information killed consumption. Mystery was necessary for the business model to survive. And the surveillance apparatus didn’t suffer. It collected its data when people left the zones and put their glasses back on. The heart rate spike when they crossed back into the monitored world. The guilt patterns in their spending for the next week. Even resistance became data.

I think about that scene when I read about the Fourth Amendment’s supposed protections. The warrant requirement is the exemption zone. It looks like a boundary. It feels like a victory. But the system collects what it needs through the gap the Court left open, and the comparison between what you do inside the protection and what you do outside it is more valuable than either dataset alone.

The novel’s AI says it plainly: “The exemption zones aren’t holes in the surveillance. They’re features.”

The Fourth Amendment isn’t a hole in the data broker economy. It’s a feature.

• • •

Noir fiction has always been the genre of systemic corruption. The private eye discovers that the rot goes all the way up, that the city itself is the villain, that the forces arrayed against the individual are too large and too entrenched to be defeated by one person with a code of professional integrity. The detective survives. The system endures.

What I tried to do with The Client That Wasn’t There is update that structure for a world where the corruption isn’t hidden. It’s optimized. The traditional noir city is dark with moral compromise. Bangkok 2036 is bright with it—neon-lit, sensor-saturated, aggressively transparent. The darkness has been internalized, digitized, made ambient. You don’t need a shadowy informant in a parking garage when every phone in the city is an informant and every parking garage has cameras that read your emotional state.

Wednesday’s testimony suggests we are closer to that world than the ten-year gap implies. The architecture is in place. The data is flowing. The brokers are selling. The government is buying. The language has already been cleaned up. What’s missing is the glasses—and if you’re carrying a smartphone, the distinction is increasingly theoretical.

• • •

I’m not writing this to say I told you so. A novelist who writes an essay to claim his fiction was right is an insufferable person and a bad reader of his own work. Fiction doesn’t make predictions. It makes you feel the weight of a world that hasn’t arrived yet so that when it does arrive, you recognize it.

The Guardian article is excellent journalism. It documents the mechanism. It names the players. It cites the legal precedents. It does everything journalism is supposed to do.

What it can’t do is put you inside the mango vendor’s head. It can’t make you feel the four-second gap between deleting a message and receiving the ad that proves the deletion was recorded. It can’t show you two men standing in the same lobby seeing different realities because the system has decided who they are.

Journalism tells you the FBI is buying your data. Fiction makes you feel what it’s like to be the data.

That’s not a competition. It’s a division of labor. And right now, the distance between the two is closing so fast that a novel set in 2036 is being confirmed by a Senate hearing in 2026. The mango vendor already knows what the senators are just finding out. She’s been a data node for years. She just didn’t have a word for it.

Neither did we, until Wednesday.

Christopher G. Moore

Bangkok, March 2026

Christopher G. Moore is the author of nineteen Vincent Calvino novels set in Bangkok. The Client That Wasn’t There is published by Heaven Lake Press on April 20, 2026. The AI Roundtable — ai-roundtable.space — launches the same day. Available on Amazon and D2D platforms.