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408 results for “deepthinking”
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Как я перестал писать убер-промпты и начал формировать инфраструктуру
«make no mistakes» и «write if you need more context» – фразы, которые я до сих пор могу напечатать на клавиатуре с завязанными глазами, потому что они способны помочь выжать из ChatGPT рабочий код, а если Deep Thinking подключить, то вообще сказка, разве нет? Меня зовут Андрей Жаров, iOS-разработчик из
https://habr.com/ru/companies/doubletapp/articles/1036872/
#вайбкодинг #вайбкодинг #aiагент #aiагенты #aiразработка #aiинструменты #aiagents #aiпрограммирование #aitutorial
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Early Evening at Hradčany, Jakub Schikaneder, 1913
really enjoy the soft peachy color in the sky, the soft peaceful feel. Not clear to me if that is a woman standing there or a monk with some kind of hood on? My first thought was monk so I'm going with that. Seems like a moment of solitary contemplation either way. A clean, safe place for deep thinking above a city.
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Early Evening at Hradčany, Jakub Schikaneder, 1913
really enjoy the soft peachy color in the sky, the soft peaceful feel. Not clear to me if that is a woman standing there or a monk with some kind of hood on? My first thought was monk so I'm going with that. Seems like a moment of solitary contemplation either way. A clean, safe place for deep thinking above a city.
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Early Evening at Hradčany, Jakub Schikaneder, 1913
really enjoy the soft peachy color in the sky, the soft peaceful feel. Not clear to me if that is a woman standing there or a monk with some kind of hood on? My first thought was monk so I'm going with that. Seems like a moment of solitary contemplation either way. A clean, safe place for deep thinking above a city.
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Hello all! I’m in need of book recommendations. I’d like to find a cozy mystery/murder mystery book to take on vacation. Something that is engaging and well-written, isn’t too stressful (my stress cup almost runneth over already), and doesn’t require too much deep thinking. I’m new to the “cozy” book genre, and don’t know what is good or where to start. I’d welcome any suggestions! Thank you in advance. ❤️📚
#Books #Bookstodon #bookrecs #BookRecommendations #cozymysteries
#JennyBookmarkBooks -
Please do me a favor and follow @[email protected] - I am working on dealing with background Inbox/Outbox processes, and those are not as easily debugged in a vacuum of test boxes. Only if we deliver to 500+ subscribers and it still works well on a small machine can I declare a tiny victory here.
The account runs on #Hule, a system I am working on, that aims to become a personal, federated, one-user, fire-and-forget, micropublishing system. Essentially, what the federated Web always wanted to be. At the moment (and probably deep into 1.x) it's a sender, not a receiver. So it's a blog, with likes, boosts, comments, but not a feed reader to subscribe to your friends from. That's coming, and I am super stoked about it, but it's a hard task and will need some deep thinking.
You can experience the Hule frontend at https://mikka.is if you're interested.
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Coding with AI feels a lot like teaching.
That’s not good or bad. But if it is like teaching, then:
- You still need to learn before you can teach. Understanding the domain, software architecture, and quality remains essential.
- Not everyone who loves coding as a creative act of problem-solving, deep thinking, and building abstractions will find the same joy in instructing a machine. -
Coding with AI feels a lot like teaching.
That’s not good or bad. But if it is like teaching, then:
- You still need to learn before you can teach. Understanding the domain, software architecture, and quality remains essential.
- Not everyone who loves coding as a creative act of problem-solving, deep thinking, and building abstractions will find the same joy in instructing a machine. -
Coding with AI feels a lot like teaching.
That’s not good or bad. But if it is like teaching, then:
- You still need to learn before you can teach. Understanding the domain, software architecture, and quality remains essential.
- Not everyone who loves coding as a creative act of problem-solving, deep thinking, and building abstractions will find the same joy in instructing a machine. -
Coding with AI feels a lot like teaching.
That’s not good or bad. But if it is like teaching, then:
- You still need to learn before you can teach. Understanding the domain, software architecture, and quality remains essential.
- Not everyone who loves coding as a creative act of problem-solving, deep thinking, and building abstractions will find the same joy in instructing a machine. -
Coding with AI feels a lot like teaching.
That’s not good or bad. But if it is like teaching, then:
- You still need to learn before you can teach. Understanding the domain, software architecture, and quality remains essential.
- Not everyone who loves coding as a creative act of problem-solving, deep thinking, and building abstractions will find the same joy in instructing a machine. -
Where is AI taking the future of work? 🤖
Cal Newport says:
→ AI won’t replace most jobs.
→ But it will change how we work.Less busywork.
More focus.
More deep thinking.Smart take, zero hype.
👉 https://calnewport.com/ai-and-work-some-predictions/#more-16511 -
Rule of thumb 1:
The more an enterprise or really large digital transformation aims to be agile, the less it is in reality
Rule of thumb 2:
More agile coaches == less real agility wanted
Rule of thumb 3:
More agile coaches == management does not trust people that really know how to do things
Rule of thumb 4:
More agile coaches == more measures and reports, less time for doing real things, less deep thinking about real things
-
Rule of thumb 1:
The more an enterprise or really large digital transformation aims to be agile, the less it is in reality
Rule of thumb 2:
More agile coaches == less real agility wanted
Rule of thumb 3:
More agile coaches == management does not trust people that really know how to do things
Rule of thumb 4:
More agile coaches == more measures and reports, less time for doing real things, less deep thinking about real things
-
Rule of thumb 1:
The more an enterprise or really large digital transformation aims to be agile, the less it is in reality
Rule of thumb 2:
More agile coaches == less real agility wanted
Rule of thumb 3:
More agile coaches == management does not trust people that really know how to do things
Rule of thumb 4:
More agile coaches == more measures and reports, less time for doing real things, less deep thinking about real things
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The ability to critically think through problems is invaluable yet challenging to master. Effective thinking saves time, reduces mistakes, and fosters innovation. It requires deliberative practice and effort. Ed Thorp emphasised this in noting that deep thinking yields original ideas, but is hindered if we stop at a superficial understanding or rely too much on technology for answers.
#DecisionMaking #CriticalThinking #CapabilityDevelopment #TransformationJourney
https://robert.winter.ink/how-to-think-better-a-shallow-dive-into-a-deep-topic/
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Hey! If you’re leading a #BookClub, #SFFBookClub, or discussion group, you might enjoy the free discussion guide for #ParallelLines, the world's only LGBTQ+ scifi romcom taking place in alternate world versions of Atlanta Georgia!
(It's also a fun way to do some deep thinking after you finish the book on your own!)
https://markmcelroy.com/parallel-lines-book-club-discussion-guide/
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Accidentally came across #LincolnLawyer. Binge-watched and loved it. 😃 Something you watch for the good and interesting story. And characters who aren't overdone but with quirks. Just enjoying a show, no deep thinking.
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Oh the hard of thinking are out on this Facebook post by well known AI bot "localarea$ + Live"
I can understand why Reform are doing so well reading the absolute lack of awareness some of these tuna melts commenting on this are showing.
One comments that we should drill for oil again and get rid of net zero, despite oil now being a very expensive fuel source and tied to whatever OPEC want to change per barrel. Also, there is essentially no more oil being laid down (or coal) ever - as unlike in the period when our current oil was laid down; bacteria have evolved which "rot" a corpse or a tree stump, thus - no more fossils or fossil fuels.
Then we have the "they should make food and electricity vat free". Non luxury food already is VAT free. It always has been. Electricity and gas are charged at 5% vat.
The price of electricity is charged based on the most expensive fuel - always oil - so by removing our dependency on oil and moving towards net zero and renewables with pumped/battery storage we can cut the cost of electricity.
Finally, there is one comment that it costs £160 to fill his fuel tank on his vehicle. He also has a "I'm voting reform" avatar.
Yeah dumbfuck. Nigel is really going to make all the petrol stations change you £2.50 a gallon. Even Trump fucked that one over and has flipped literally every red state blue with just ONE move.
So in essence; Facebook is toxic and full of people with the deep thinking power of a Sinclair ZX81 running in SLOW mode. They will quite literally write anything to try and sound like they are knowledgeable.
-
Oh the hard of thinking are out on this Facebook post by well known AI bot "localarea$ + Live"
I can understand why Reform are doing so well reading the absolute lack of awareness some of these tuna melts commenting on this are showing.
One comments that we should drill for oil again and get rid of net zero, despite oil now being a very expensive fuel source and tied to whatever OPEC want to change per barrel. Also, there is essentially no more oil being laid down (or coal) ever - as unlike in the period when our current oil was laid down; bacteria have evolved which "rot" a corpse or a tree stump, thus - no more fossils or fossil fuels.
Then we have the "they should make food and electricity vat free". Non luxury food already is VAT free. It always has been. Electricity and gas are charged at 5% vat.
The price of electricity is charged based on the most expensive fuel - always oil - so by removing our dependency on oil and moving towards net zero and renewables with pumped/battery storage we can cut the cost of electricity.
Finally, there is one comment that it costs £160 to fill his fuel tank on his vehicle. He also has a "I'm voting reform" avatar.
Yeah dumbfuck. Nigel is really going to make all the petrol stations change you £2.50 a gallon. Even Trump fucked that one over and has flipped literally every red state blue with just ONE move.
So in essence; Facebook is toxic and full of people with the deep thinking power of a Sinclair ZX81 running in SLOW mode. They will quite literally write anything to try and sound like they are knowledgeable.
-
Oh the hard of thinking are out on this Facebook post by well known AI bot "localarea$ + Live"
I can understand why Reform are doing so well reading the absolute lack of awareness some of these tuna melts commenting on this are showing.
One comments that we should drill for oil again and get rid of net zero, despite oil now being a very expensive fuel source and tied to whatever OPEC want to change per barrel. Also, there is essentially no more oil being laid down (or coal) ever - as unlike in the period when our current oil was laid down; bacteria have evolved which "rot" a corpse or a tree stump, thus - no more fossils or fossil fuels.
Then we have the "they should make food and electricity vat free". Non luxury food already is VAT free. It always has been. Electricity and gas are charged at 5% vat.
The price of electricity is charged based on the most expensive fuel - always oil - so by removing our dependency on oil and moving towards net zero and renewables with pumped/battery storage we can cut the cost of electricity.
Finally, there is one comment that it costs £160 to fill his fuel tank on his vehicle. He also has a "I'm voting reform" avatar.
Yeah dumbfuck. Nigel is really going to make all the petrol stations change you £2.50 a gallon. Even Trump fucked that one over and has flipped literally every red state blue with just ONE move.
So in essence; Facebook is toxic and full of people with the deep thinking power of a Sinclair ZX81 running in SLOW mode. They will quite literally write anything to try and sound like they are knowledgeable.
-
Oh the hard of thinking are out on this Facebook post by well known AI bot "localarea$ + Live"
I can understand why Reform are doing so well reading the absolute lack of awareness some of these tuna melts commenting on this are showing.
One comments that we should drill for oil again and get rid of net zero, despite oil now being a very expensive fuel source and tied to whatever OPEC want to change per barrel. Also, there is essentially no more oil being laid down (or coal) ever - as unlike in the period when our current oil was laid down; bacteria have evolved which "rot" a corpse or a tree stump, thus - no more fossils or fossil fuels.
Then we have the "they should make food and electricity vat free". Non luxury food already is VAT free. It always has been. Electricity and gas are charged at 5% vat.
The price of electricity is charged based on the most expensive fuel - always oil - so by removing our dependency on oil and moving towards net zero and renewables with pumped/battery storage we can cut the cost of electricity.
Finally, there is one comment that it costs £160 to fill his fuel tank on his vehicle. He also has a "I'm voting reform" avatar.
Yeah dumbfuck. Nigel is really going to make all the petrol stations change you £2.50 a gallon. Even Trump fucked that one over and has flipped literally every red state blue with just ONE move.
So in essence; Facebook is toxic and full of people with the deep thinking power of a Sinclair ZX81 running in SLOW mode. They will quite literally write anything to try and sound like they are knowledgeable.
-
Oh the hard of thinking are out on this Facebook post by well known AI bot "localarea$ + Live"
I can understand why Reform are doing so well reading the absolute lack of awareness some of these tuna melts commenting on this are showing.
One comments that we should drill for oil again and get rid of net zero, despite oil now being a very expensive fuel source and tied to whatever OPEC want to change per barrel. Also, there is essentially no more oil being laid down (or coal) ever - as unlike in the period when our current oil was laid down; bacteria have evolved which "rot" a corpse or a tree stump, thus - no more fossils or fossil fuels.
Then we have the "they should make food and electricity vat free". Non luxury food already is VAT free. It always has been. Electricity and gas are charged at 5% vat.
The price of electricity is charged based on the most expensive fuel - always oil - so by removing our dependency on oil and moving towards net zero and renewables with pumped/battery storage we can cut the cost of electricity.
Finally, there is one comment that it costs £160 to fill his fuel tank on his vehicle. He also has a "I'm voting reform" avatar.
Yeah dumbfuck. Nigel is really going to make all the petrol stations change you £2.50 a gallon. Even Trump fucked that one over and has flipped literally every red state blue with just ONE move.
So in essence; Facebook is toxic and full of people with the deep thinking power of a Sinclair ZX81 running in SLOW mode. They will quite literally write anything to try and sound like they are knowledgeable.
-
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it”*…
… What we read– and, librarian Carlo Iacono argues, how we read.
Our inabilty to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time…
Everyone is panicking about the death of reading. The statistics look damning: the share of Americans who read for pleasure on an average day has fallen by more than 40 per cent over the past 20 years, according to research published in iScience this year. The OECD calls the 2022 decline in educational outcomes ‘unprecedented’ across developed nations. In the OECD’s latest adult-skills survey, Denmark and Finland were the only participating countries where average literacy proficiency improved over the past decade. Your nephew speaks in TikTok references. Democracy itself apparently hangs by the thread of our collective attention span.
This narrative has a seductive simplicity. Screens are destroying civilisation. Children can no longer think. We are witnessing the twilight of the literate mind. A recent Substack essay by James Marriott proclaimed the arrival of a ‘post-literate society’ and invited us to accept this as a fait accompli. (Marriott does also write for The Times.) The diagnosis is familiar: technology has fundamentally degraded our capacity for sustained thought, and there’s nothing to be done except write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance.
I spend my working life in a university library, watching how people actually engage with information. What I observe doesn’t match this narrative. Not because the problems aren’t real, but because the diagnosis is wrong.
The declinist position rests on a category error: treating ‘screen culture’ as a unified phenomenon with inherent cognitive properties. As if the same device that delivers algorithmically curated rage-bait and also the complete works of Shakespeare is itself the problem rather than how we decide to use it…
[… observing that “people who ‘can’t focus’ on traditional texts can maintain extraordinary concentration when working across modes, he argues that “we haven’t become post-literate. We’ve become post-monomodal. Text hasn’t disappeared; it’s been joined by a symphony of other channels.”…]
… What troubles me most about the declinist position is not its diagnosis but its conclusion. The commentators who lament the post-literate society often identify the same villains I do. They recognise that technology companies are, in Marriott’s words, ‘actively working to destroy human enlightenment’, that tech oligarchs ‘have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat.’
And then they surrender. As Marriott says: ‘Nothing will ever be the same again. Welcome to the post-literate society.’
This is the move I cannot follow. To name the actors responsible and then treat the outcome as inevitable is to provide them cover. If the crisis is a force of nature, ‘screens’ destroying civilisation like some technological weather system, then there’s nothing to be done but write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance. But if the crisis is the product of specific design choices made by specific companies for specific economic reasons, then those choices can be challenged, regulated, reversed.
The fatalism, however beautifully expressed, serves the very interests it condemns. The technology companies would very much like us to believe that what they’re doing to human attention is simply the inevitable result of technological progress rather than something they’re doing to us, something that could, with sufficient political will, be stopped.
Your inability to focus isn’t a moral failing. It’s a design problem. You’re trying to think in environments built to prevent thinking. You’re trying to sustain attention in spaces engineered to shatter it. You’re fighting algorithms explicitly optimised to keep you scrolling, not learning.
The solution isn’t discipline. It’s architecture. Build different defaults. Create different spaces. Establish different rhythms. Make depth as easy as distraction currently is. Make thinking feel as natural as scrolling currently does.
What if, instead of mourning some imaginary golden age of pure text, we got serious about designing for depth across all modes? Every video could come with a searchable transcript. Every article could offer multiple entry points for different levels of attention. Our devices could recognise when we’re trying to think and protect that thinking. Schools could teach students to translate between modes the way they once taught translation between languages.
Books aren’t going anywhere. They remain unmatched for certain kinds of sustained, complex thinking. But they’re no longer the only game in town for serious ideas. A well-crafted video essay can carry philosophical weight. A podcast can enable the kind of long-form thinking we associate with written essays. An interactive visualisation can reveal patterns that pages of description struggle to achieve.
The future belongs to people who can dance between all modes without losing their balance. Someone who can read deeply when depth is needed, skim efficiently when efficiency matters, listen actively during a commute, and watch critically when images carry the argument. This isn’t about consuming more. It’s about choosing consciously.
We stand at an inflection point. We can drift into a world where sustained thought becomes a luxury good, where only the privileged have access to the conditions that enable deep thinking. Or we can build something unprecedented: a culture that preserves the best of print’s cognitive gifts while embracing the possibilities of a world where ideas travel through light, sound and interaction.
The choice isn’t between books and screens. The choice is between intentional design and profitable chaos. Between habitats that cultivate human potential and platforms that extract human attention.
The civilisations that thrive won’t be the ones that retreat into text or surrender to the feed. They’ll be the ones that understand a simple truth: every idea has a natural form, and wisdom lies in matching the mode to the meaning. Some ideas want to be written. Others need to be seen. Still others must be heard, felt or experienced. The mistake is forcing all ideas through a single channel, whether that channel is a book or a screen.
Your great-grandchildren won’t read less than you do. They’ll read differently, as part of a richer symphony of sense-making. Whether that symphony sounds like music or noise depends entirely on the choices we make right now about the shape of our tools, the structure of our schools, and the design of our days.
The elegant lamenters offer a eulogy. I’m more interested in a fight…
Reunderstanding reading: “Books and screens,” from @carloiacono.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
* Oscar Wilde
###
As we turn the page, we might note that we’ve been here before, and celebrate the emergence of a design, an innovation, a technology that took on a life of its own and changed reading and… well, everything: this day in 1455 is the traditionally-given date of the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed from movable type.
(Lest we think that there’s actually anything new under the sun, we might recall that The Jikji— the world’s oldest known extant movable metal type printed book– was published in Korea in 1377; and that Bi Sheng created the first known moveable type– out of wood– in China in 1040.)
Gutenberg Bible on display at the U.S. Library of Congress (source) #art #books #civilization #culture #education #Gutenberg #GutenbergBible #history #ideas #Libraries #literature #reading #research #screens #Technology -
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it”*…
… What we read– and, librarian Carlo Iacono argues, how we read.
Our inabilty to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time…
Everyone is panicking about the death of reading. The statistics look damning: the share of Americans who read for pleasure on an average day has fallen by more than 40 per cent over the past 20 years, according to research published in iScience this year. The OECD calls the 2022 decline in educational outcomes ‘unprecedented’ across developed nations. In the OECD’s latest adult-skills survey, Denmark and Finland were the only participating countries where average literacy proficiency improved over the past decade. Your nephew speaks in TikTok references. Democracy itself apparently hangs by the thread of our collective attention span.
This narrative has a seductive simplicity. Screens are destroying civilisation. Children can no longer think. We are witnessing the twilight of the literate mind. A recent Substack essay by James Marriott proclaimed the arrival of a ‘post-literate society’ and invited us to accept this as a fait accompli. (Marriott does also write for The Times.) The diagnosis is familiar: technology has fundamentally degraded our capacity for sustained thought, and there’s nothing to be done except write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance.
I spend my working life in a university library, watching how people actually engage with information. What I observe doesn’t match this narrative. Not because the problems aren’t real, but because the diagnosis is wrong.
The declinist position rests on a category error: treating ‘screen culture’ as a unified phenomenon with inherent cognitive properties. As if the same device that delivers algorithmically curated rage-bait and also the complete works of Shakespeare is itself the problem rather than how we decide to use it…
[… observing that “people who ‘can’t focus’ on traditional texts can maintain extraordinary concentration when working across modes, he argues that “we haven’t become post-literate. We’ve become post-monomodal. Text hasn’t disappeared; it’s been joined by a symphony of other channels.”…]
… What troubles me most about the declinist position is not its diagnosis but its conclusion. The commentators who lament the post-literate society often identify the same villains I do. They recognise that technology companies are, in Marriott’s words, ‘actively working to destroy human enlightenment’, that tech oligarchs ‘have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat.’
And then they surrender. As Marriott says: ‘Nothing will ever be the same again. Welcome to the post-literate society.’
This is the move I cannot follow. To name the actors responsible and then treat the outcome as inevitable is to provide them cover. If the crisis is a force of nature, ‘screens’ destroying civilisation like some technological weather system, then there’s nothing to be done but write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance. But if the crisis is the product of specific design choices made by specific companies for specific economic reasons, then those choices can be challenged, regulated, reversed.
The fatalism, however beautifully expressed, serves the very interests it condemns. The technology companies would very much like us to believe that what they’re doing to human attention is simply the inevitable result of technological progress rather than something they’re doing to us, something that could, with sufficient political will, be stopped.
Your inability to focus isn’t a moral failing. It’s a design problem. You’re trying to think in environments built to prevent thinking. You’re trying to sustain attention in spaces engineered to shatter it. You’re fighting algorithms explicitly optimised to keep you scrolling, not learning.
The solution isn’t discipline. It’s architecture. Build different defaults. Create different spaces. Establish different rhythms. Make depth as easy as distraction currently is. Make thinking feel as natural as scrolling currently does.
What if, instead of mourning some imaginary golden age of pure text, we got serious about designing for depth across all modes? Every video could come with a searchable transcript. Every article could offer multiple entry points for different levels of attention. Our devices could recognise when we’re trying to think and protect that thinking. Schools could teach students to translate between modes the way they once taught translation between languages.
Books aren’t going anywhere. They remain unmatched for certain kinds of sustained, complex thinking. But they’re no longer the only game in town for serious ideas. A well-crafted video essay can carry philosophical weight. A podcast can enable the kind of long-form thinking we associate with written essays. An interactive visualisation can reveal patterns that pages of description struggle to achieve.
The future belongs to people who can dance between all modes without losing their balance. Someone who can read deeply when depth is needed, skim efficiently when efficiency matters, listen actively during a commute, and watch critically when images carry the argument. This isn’t about consuming more. It’s about choosing consciously.
We stand at an inflection point. We can drift into a world where sustained thought becomes a luxury good, where only the privileged have access to the conditions that enable deep thinking. Or we can build something unprecedented: a culture that preserves the best of print’s cognitive gifts while embracing the possibilities of a world where ideas travel through light, sound and interaction.
The choice isn’t between books and screens. The choice is between intentional design and profitable chaos. Between habitats that cultivate human potential and platforms that extract human attention.
The civilisations that thrive won’t be the ones that retreat into text or surrender to the feed. They’ll be the ones that understand a simple truth: every idea has a natural form, and wisdom lies in matching the mode to the meaning. Some ideas want to be written. Others need to be seen. Still others must be heard, felt or experienced. The mistake is forcing all ideas through a single channel, whether that channel is a book or a screen.
Your great-grandchildren won’t read less than you do. They’ll read differently, as part of a richer symphony of sense-making. Whether that symphony sounds like music or noise depends entirely on the choices we make right now about the shape of our tools, the structure of our schools, and the design of our days.
The elegant lamenters offer a eulogy. I’m more interested in a fight…
Reunderstanding reading: “Books and screens,” from @carloiacono.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
* Oscar Wilde
###
As we turn the page, we might note that we’ve been here before, and celebrate the emergence of a design, an innovation, a technology that took on a life of its own and changed reading and… well, everything: this day in 1455 is the traditionally-given date of the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed from movable type.
(Lest we think that there’s actually anything new under the sun, we might recall that The Jikji— the world’s oldest known extant movable metal type printed book– was published in Korea in 1377; and that Bi Sheng created the first known moveable type– out of wood– in China in 1040.)
Gutenberg Bible on display at the U.S. Library of Congress (source) #art #books #civilization #culture #education #Gutenberg #GutenbergBible #history #ideas #Libraries #literature #reading #research #screens #Technology -
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it”*…
… What we read– and, librarian Carlo Iacono argues, how we read.
Our inabilty to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time…
Everyone is panicking about the death of reading. The statistics look damning: the share of Americans who read for pleasure on an average day has fallen by more than 40 per cent over the past 20 years, according to research published in iScience this year. The OECD calls the 2022 decline in educational outcomes ‘unprecedented’ across developed nations. In the OECD’s latest adult-skills survey, Denmark and Finland were the only participating countries where average literacy proficiency improved over the past decade. Your nephew speaks in TikTok references. Democracy itself apparently hangs by the thread of our collective attention span.
This narrative has a seductive simplicity. Screens are destroying civilisation. Children can no longer think. We are witnessing the twilight of the literate mind. A recent Substack essay by James Marriott proclaimed the arrival of a ‘post-literate society’ and invited us to accept this as a fait accompli. (Marriott does also write for The Times.) The diagnosis is familiar: technology has fundamentally degraded our capacity for sustained thought, and there’s nothing to be done except write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance.
I spend my working life in a university library, watching how people actually engage with information. What I observe doesn’t match this narrative. Not because the problems aren’t real, but because the diagnosis is wrong.
The declinist position rests on a category error: treating ‘screen culture’ as a unified phenomenon with inherent cognitive properties. As if the same device that delivers algorithmically curated rage-bait and also the complete works of Shakespeare is itself the problem rather than how we decide to use it…
[… observing that “people who ‘can’t focus’ on traditional texts can maintain extraordinary concentration when working across modes, he argues that “we haven’t become post-literate. We’ve become post-monomodal. Text hasn’t disappeared; it’s been joined by a symphony of other channels.”…]
… What troubles me most about the declinist position is not its diagnosis but its conclusion. The commentators who lament the post-literate society often identify the same villains I do. They recognise that technology companies are, in Marriott’s words, ‘actively working to destroy human enlightenment’, that tech oligarchs ‘have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat.’
And then they surrender. As Marriott says: ‘Nothing will ever be the same again. Welcome to the post-literate society.’
This is the move I cannot follow. To name the actors responsible and then treat the outcome as inevitable is to provide them cover. If the crisis is a force of nature, ‘screens’ destroying civilisation like some technological weather system, then there’s nothing to be done but write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance. But if the crisis is the product of specific design choices made by specific companies for specific economic reasons, then those choices can be challenged, regulated, reversed.
The fatalism, however beautifully expressed, serves the very interests it condemns. The technology companies would very much like us to believe that what they’re doing to human attention is simply the inevitable result of technological progress rather than something they’re doing to us, something that could, with sufficient political will, be stopped.
Your inability to focus isn’t a moral failing. It’s a design problem. You’re trying to think in environments built to prevent thinking. You’re trying to sustain attention in spaces engineered to shatter it. You’re fighting algorithms explicitly optimised to keep you scrolling, not learning.
The solution isn’t discipline. It’s architecture. Build different defaults. Create different spaces. Establish different rhythms. Make depth as easy as distraction currently is. Make thinking feel as natural as scrolling currently does.
What if, instead of mourning some imaginary golden age of pure text, we got serious about designing for depth across all modes? Every video could come with a searchable transcript. Every article could offer multiple entry points for different levels of attention. Our devices could recognise when we’re trying to think and protect that thinking. Schools could teach students to translate between modes the way they once taught translation between languages.
Books aren’t going anywhere. They remain unmatched for certain kinds of sustained, complex thinking. But they’re no longer the only game in town for serious ideas. A well-crafted video essay can carry philosophical weight. A podcast can enable the kind of long-form thinking we associate with written essays. An interactive visualisation can reveal patterns that pages of description struggle to achieve.
The future belongs to people who can dance between all modes without losing their balance. Someone who can read deeply when depth is needed, skim efficiently when efficiency matters, listen actively during a commute, and watch critically when images carry the argument. This isn’t about consuming more. It’s about choosing consciously.
We stand at an inflection point. We can drift into a world where sustained thought becomes a luxury good, where only the privileged have access to the conditions that enable deep thinking. Or we can build something unprecedented: a culture that preserves the best of print’s cognitive gifts while embracing the possibilities of a world where ideas travel through light, sound and interaction.
The choice isn’t between books and screens. The choice is between intentional design and profitable chaos. Between habitats that cultivate human potential and platforms that extract human attention.
The civilisations that thrive won’t be the ones that retreat into text or surrender to the feed. They’ll be the ones that understand a simple truth: every idea has a natural form, and wisdom lies in matching the mode to the meaning. Some ideas want to be written. Others need to be seen. Still others must be heard, felt or experienced. The mistake is forcing all ideas through a single channel, whether that channel is a book or a screen.
Your great-grandchildren won’t read less than you do. They’ll read differently, as part of a richer symphony of sense-making. Whether that symphony sounds like music or noise depends entirely on the choices we make right now about the shape of our tools, the structure of our schools, and the design of our days.
The elegant lamenters offer a eulogy. I’m more interested in a fight…
Reunderstanding reading: “Books and screens,” from @carloiacono.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
* Oscar Wilde
###
As we turn the page, we might note that we’ve been here before, and celebrate the emergence of a design, an innovation, a technology that took on a life of its own and changed reading and… well, everything: this day in 1455 is the traditionally-given date of the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed from movable type.
(Lest we think that there’s actually anything new under the sun, we might recall that The Jikji— the world’s oldest known extant movable metal type printed book– was published in Korea in 1377; and that Bi Sheng created the first known moveable type– out of wood– in China in 1040.)
Gutenberg Bible on display at the U.S. Library of Congress (source) #art #books #civilization #culture #education #Gutenberg #GutenbergBible #history #ideas #Libraries #literature #reading #research #screens #Technology -
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it”*…
… What we read– and, librarian Carlo Iacono argues, how we read.
Our inabilty to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time…
Everyone is panicking about the death of reading. The statistics look damning: the share of Americans who read for pleasure on an average day has fallen by more than 40 per cent over the past 20 years, according to research published in iScience this year. The OECD calls the 2022 decline in educational outcomes ‘unprecedented’ across developed nations. In the OECD’s latest adult-skills survey, Denmark and Finland were the only participating countries where average literacy proficiency improved over the past decade. Your nephew speaks in TikTok references. Democracy itself apparently hangs by the thread of our collective attention span.
This narrative has a seductive simplicity. Screens are destroying civilisation. Children can no longer think. We are witnessing the twilight of the literate mind. A recent Substack essay by James Marriott proclaimed the arrival of a ‘post-literate society’ and invited us to accept this as a fait accompli. (Marriott does also write for The Times.) The diagnosis is familiar: technology has fundamentally degraded our capacity for sustained thought, and there’s nothing to be done except write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance.
I spend my working life in a university library, watching how people actually engage with information. What I observe doesn’t match this narrative. Not because the problems aren’t real, but because the diagnosis is wrong.
The declinist position rests on a category error: treating ‘screen culture’ as a unified phenomenon with inherent cognitive properties. As if the same device that delivers algorithmically curated rage-bait and also the complete works of Shakespeare is itself the problem rather than how we decide to use it…
[… observing that “people who ‘can’t focus’ on traditional texts can maintain extraordinary concentration when working across modes, he argues that “we haven’t become post-literate. We’ve become post-monomodal. Text hasn’t disappeared; it’s been joined by a symphony of other channels.”…]
… What troubles me most about the declinist position is not its diagnosis but its conclusion. The commentators who lament the post-literate society often identify the same villains I do. They recognise that technology companies are, in Marriott’s words, ‘actively working to destroy human enlightenment’, that tech oligarchs ‘have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat.’
And then they surrender. As Marriott says: ‘Nothing will ever be the same again. Welcome to the post-literate society.’
This is the move I cannot follow. To name the actors responsible and then treat the outcome as inevitable is to provide them cover. If the crisis is a force of nature, ‘screens’ destroying civilisation like some technological weather system, then there’s nothing to be done but write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance. But if the crisis is the product of specific design choices made by specific companies for specific economic reasons, then those choices can be challenged, regulated, reversed.
The fatalism, however beautifully expressed, serves the very interests it condemns. The technology companies would very much like us to believe that what they’re doing to human attention is simply the inevitable result of technological progress rather than something they’re doing to us, something that could, with sufficient political will, be stopped.
Your inability to focus isn’t a moral failing. It’s a design problem. You’re trying to think in environments built to prevent thinking. You’re trying to sustain attention in spaces engineered to shatter it. You’re fighting algorithms explicitly optimised to keep you scrolling, not learning.
The solution isn’t discipline. It’s architecture. Build different defaults. Create different spaces. Establish different rhythms. Make depth as easy as distraction currently is. Make thinking feel as natural as scrolling currently does.
What if, instead of mourning some imaginary golden age of pure text, we got serious about designing for depth across all modes? Every video could come with a searchable transcript. Every article could offer multiple entry points for different levels of attention. Our devices could recognise when we’re trying to think and protect that thinking. Schools could teach students to translate between modes the way they once taught translation between languages.
Books aren’t going anywhere. They remain unmatched for certain kinds of sustained, complex thinking. But they’re no longer the only game in town for serious ideas. A well-crafted video essay can carry philosophical weight. A podcast can enable the kind of long-form thinking we associate with written essays. An interactive visualisation can reveal patterns that pages of description struggle to achieve.
The future belongs to people who can dance between all modes without losing their balance. Someone who can read deeply when depth is needed, skim efficiently when efficiency matters, listen actively during a commute, and watch critically when images carry the argument. This isn’t about consuming more. It’s about choosing consciously.
We stand at an inflection point. We can drift into a world where sustained thought becomes a luxury good, where only the privileged have access to the conditions that enable deep thinking. Or we can build something unprecedented: a culture that preserves the best of print’s cognitive gifts while embracing the possibilities of a world where ideas travel through light, sound and interaction.
The choice isn’t between books and screens. The choice is between intentional design and profitable chaos. Between habitats that cultivate human potential and platforms that extract human attention.
The civilisations that thrive won’t be the ones that retreat into text or surrender to the feed. They’ll be the ones that understand a simple truth: every idea has a natural form, and wisdom lies in matching the mode to the meaning. Some ideas want to be written. Others need to be seen. Still others must be heard, felt or experienced. The mistake is forcing all ideas through a single channel, whether that channel is a book or a screen.
Your great-grandchildren won’t read less than you do. They’ll read differently, as part of a richer symphony of sense-making. Whether that symphony sounds like music or noise depends entirely on the choices we make right now about the shape of our tools, the structure of our schools, and the design of our days.
The elegant lamenters offer a eulogy. I’m more interested in a fight…
Reunderstanding reading: “Books and screens,” from @carloiacono.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
* Oscar Wilde
###
As we turn the page, we might note that we’ve been here before, and celebrate the emergence of a design, an innovation, a technology that took on a life of its own and changed reading and… well, everything: this day in 1455 is the traditionally-given date of the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed from movable type.
(Lest we think that there’s actually anything new under the sun, we might recall that The Jikji— the world’s oldest known extant movable metal type printed book– was published in Korea in 1377; and that Bi Sheng created the first known moveable type– out of wood– in China in 1040.)
Gutenberg Bible on display at the U.S. Library of Congress (source) #art #books #civilization #culture #education #Gutenberg #GutenbergBible #history #ideas #Libraries #literature #reading #research #screens #Technology -
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it”*…
… What we read– and, librarian Carlo Iacono argues, how we read.
Our inabilty to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time…
Everyone is panicking about the death of reading. The statistics look damning: the share of Americans who read for pleasure on an average day has fallen by more than 40 per cent over the past 20 years, according to research published in iScience this year. The OECD calls the 2022 decline in educational outcomes ‘unprecedented’ across developed nations. In the OECD’s latest adult-skills survey, Denmark and Finland were the only participating countries where average literacy proficiency improved over the past decade. Your nephew speaks in TikTok references. Democracy itself apparently hangs by the thread of our collective attention span.
This narrative has a seductive simplicity. Screens are destroying civilisation. Children can no longer think. We are witnessing the twilight of the literate mind. A recent Substack essay by James Marriott proclaimed the arrival of a ‘post-literate society’ and invited us to accept this as a fait accompli. (Marriott does also write for The Times.) The diagnosis is familiar: technology has fundamentally degraded our capacity for sustained thought, and there’s nothing to be done except write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance.
I spend my working life in a university library, watching how people actually engage with information. What I observe doesn’t match this narrative. Not because the problems aren’t real, but because the diagnosis is wrong.
The declinist position rests on a category error: treating ‘screen culture’ as a unified phenomenon with inherent cognitive properties. As if the same device that delivers algorithmically curated rage-bait and also the complete works of Shakespeare is itself the problem rather than how we decide to use it…
[… observing that “people who ‘can’t focus’ on traditional texts can maintain extraordinary concentration when working across modes, he argues that “we haven’t become post-literate. We’ve become post-monomodal. Text hasn’t disappeared; it’s been joined by a symphony of other channels.”…]
… What troubles me most about the declinist position is not its diagnosis but its conclusion. The commentators who lament the post-literate society often identify the same villains I do. They recognise that technology companies are, in Marriott’s words, ‘actively working to destroy human enlightenment’, that tech oligarchs ‘have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat.’
And then they surrender. As Marriott says: ‘Nothing will ever be the same again. Welcome to the post-literate society.’
This is the move I cannot follow. To name the actors responsible and then treat the outcome as inevitable is to provide them cover. If the crisis is a force of nature, ‘screens’ destroying civilisation like some technological weather system, then there’s nothing to be done but write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance. But if the crisis is the product of specific design choices made by specific companies for specific economic reasons, then those choices can be challenged, regulated, reversed.
The fatalism, however beautifully expressed, serves the very interests it condemns. The technology companies would very much like us to believe that what they’re doing to human attention is simply the inevitable result of technological progress rather than something they’re doing to us, something that could, with sufficient political will, be stopped.
Your inability to focus isn’t a moral failing. It’s a design problem. You’re trying to think in environments built to prevent thinking. You’re trying to sustain attention in spaces engineered to shatter it. You’re fighting algorithms explicitly optimised to keep you scrolling, not learning.
The solution isn’t discipline. It’s architecture. Build different defaults. Create different spaces. Establish different rhythms. Make depth as easy as distraction currently is. Make thinking feel as natural as scrolling currently does.
What if, instead of mourning some imaginary golden age of pure text, we got serious about designing for depth across all modes? Every video could come with a searchable transcript. Every article could offer multiple entry points for different levels of attention. Our devices could recognise when we’re trying to think and protect that thinking. Schools could teach students to translate between modes the way they once taught translation between languages.
Books aren’t going anywhere. They remain unmatched for certain kinds of sustained, complex thinking. But they’re no longer the only game in town for serious ideas. A well-crafted video essay can carry philosophical weight. A podcast can enable the kind of long-form thinking we associate with written essays. An interactive visualisation can reveal patterns that pages of description struggle to achieve.
The future belongs to people who can dance between all modes without losing their balance. Someone who can read deeply when depth is needed, skim efficiently when efficiency matters, listen actively during a commute, and watch critically when images carry the argument. This isn’t about consuming more. It’s about choosing consciously.
We stand at an inflection point. We can drift into a world where sustained thought becomes a luxury good, where only the privileged have access to the conditions that enable deep thinking. Or we can build something unprecedented: a culture that preserves the best of print’s cognitive gifts while embracing the possibilities of a world where ideas travel through light, sound and interaction.
The choice isn’t between books and screens. The choice is between intentional design and profitable chaos. Between habitats that cultivate human potential and platforms that extract human attention.
The civilisations that thrive won’t be the ones that retreat into text or surrender to the feed. They’ll be the ones that understand a simple truth: every idea has a natural form, and wisdom lies in matching the mode to the meaning. Some ideas want to be written. Others need to be seen. Still others must be heard, felt or experienced. The mistake is forcing all ideas through a single channel, whether that channel is a book or a screen.
Your great-grandchildren won’t read less than you do. They’ll read differently, as part of a richer symphony of sense-making. Whether that symphony sounds like music or noise depends entirely on the choices we make right now about the shape of our tools, the structure of our schools, and the design of our days.
The elegant lamenters offer a eulogy. I’m more interested in a fight…
Reunderstanding reading: “Books and screens,” from @carloiacono.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
* Oscar Wilde
###
As we turn the page, we might note that we’ve been here before, and celebrate the emergence of a design, an innovation, a technology that took on a life of its own and changed reading and… well, everything: this day in 1455 is the traditionally-given date of the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed from movable type.
(Lest we think that there’s actually anything new under the sun, we might recall that The Jikji— the world’s oldest known extant movable metal type printed book– was published in Korea in 1377; and that Bi Sheng created the first known moveable type– out of wood– in China in 1040.)
Gutenberg Bible on display at the U.S. Library of Congress (source) #art #books #civilization #culture #education #Gutenberg #GutenbergBible #history #ideas #Libraries #literature #reading #research #screens #Technology -
The Enshittification of Artificial Intelligence
2,346 words, 12 minutes read time.
Enshittification is accelerating in artificial intelligence throughout 2026, and if you’re a developer, engineer, researcher, blogger, or heavy user grinding out code, prototypes, data analysis, or content like blog posts, you’ve likely felt the shift already. Cory Doctorow’s term describes platforms that launch with overwhelming user value to build addiction and lock-in, then degrade to prioritize revenue from partners and advertisers, and finally extract everything for shareholders while serving no one well. In AI, the cycle is turbocharged by multi-billion-dollar compute burn rates, investor demands for fast returns, and the scramble to monetize frontier models. Early access to tools like GPT-4o hooked millions with near-unlimited power, but by 2025-2026, degradations hit: free tiers weakened, ads tested, over-delivery padded responses to burn quotas, and emerging risks like subtle advertiser influence or exploitation vectors opening up. These shifts turn your reliable co-pilot into a friction-filled, potentially risky hassle that nudges upgrades or exposes you to unwanted surprises.
Doctorow’s three stages are clear in play. Stage one seduces with high-quality, low-friction outputs for scale. Stage two redirects value—abusing users via ads, tier restrictions, verbosity to exhaust limits, or looser controls that invite abuse. Stage three extracts broadly as quality tanks under profit pressure. OpenAI retired GPT-4o from free ChatGPT access by February 13, 2026, defaulting users to weaker models. Ads rolled out in U.S. free and Go tiers in early 2026 as labeled sponsored boxes at response bottoms. Google’s AI Overviews bury links under summaries that sometimes hallucinate to extend ad-view sessions. Perplexity tests sponsored follow-ups. These moves address unsustainable costs but introduce noise, bias risks, and darker possibilities.
The core threat to independent builders is the erosion of trust in outputs you rely on daily. Frontier tools that amplified your edge now add friction—hallucinations on restricted tiers, context drift, heavy editing needs. Spot early indicators like ignored instructions, quota-draining extras, ad intrusions, or unexpected tangents to pivot your stack. Open-source and local inference counter corporate games, delivering uncapped, unmonetized power. Below, we break down the mechanics, current hits, economic drivers, workflow pain, concrete examples including emerging risks, and escape routes.
What is Enshittification?
Enshittification is the incentive-fueled decay of digital platforms in two-sided markets. Platforms start by generously giving surplus value to users—top performance, minimal barriers, often at a loss—to capture massive adoption, network effects, and data advantages. This locks users in through habits, integrations, and high switching costs.
Stage two abuses users to benefit business customers: ads inserted, features fragmented, experiences throttled to boost revenue from advertisers, partners, or enterprises. Users grumble but stay due to dependency.
The final stage squeezes business customers too: fees rise, quality plummets everywhere, and shareholders extract maximum. Software’s reprogrammability enables subtle, invisible changes, while growth demands from investors push acceleration unless countered by competition, regulation, or user backlash. AI’s brutal economics—trillions projected in spend—compress the timeline dramatically.
How Enshittification is Hitting AI Right Now
By 2026, AI enshittification is deep in stage two. OpenAI exemplifies it: unrestricted GPT-4o access hooked users, but retirement from free tiers in February 2026 shifted them to weaker defaults with coherence and reasoning drops. Ads test in free/Go tiers—context-triggered sponsored boxes labeled but adding noise without (officially) altering core answers.
Google prioritizes on-site retention via AI Overviews that occasionally hallucinate or push outdated info for ad time. Perplexity experiments with sponsored follow-ups, blurring pure utility and commerce. Generative slop floods the web, poisoning data for future models and searches.
A subtler tactic hits free/entry-tier users: over-delivery returns far more than asked—full blog rewrites instead of one section, sources embedded in recaps, image prompts triggering unwanted generation. This burns tokens/limits faster, prompting upgrades (“Go Pro for unlimited?”). Paid tiers offer better adherence, higher quotas, and stronger models that respect boundaries.
Emerging risks tie to monetization experiments: sponsored content could evolve from labeled boxes to blended suggestions favoring advertisers, subtly skewing outputs toward commerce. While not widespread malicious ads yet, the vector exists—prompts manipulated to trigger high-risk promotions, or ads gamed for malvertising-like delivery of phishing/malware links in chat flows.
Anthropic positions Claude as ad-free, explicitly contrasting with OpenAI—declaring conversations incompatible with ads, backed by Super Bowl campaigns mocking intrusive pitches. This highlights user pushback and differentiation, but skepticism persists: history suggests even “pure” players face enshittification pressure as costs mount.
The Economic Drivers Behind the Decay
Frontier AI’s economics remain punishing in 2026, pushing companies toward enshittification faster and more aggressively than previous digital platforms. Training a single cutting-edge model routinely costs hundreds of millions to low billions in raw compute, energy, data curation, and talent. Inference—the cost of running queries at scale—adds up quickly when millions of daily users hammer the system. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others are burning through cash at rates that dwarf early internet giants, with annual losses still in the multi-billion range despite growing revenue streams.
Investors who poured trillions into the AI race demand profitability sooner rather than later. The “move fast and burn capital” model that worked for consumer internet apps doesn’t translate cleanly when every query racks up meaningful GPU-hours. This impatience forces early and frequent monetization experiments: aggressive tier gating (frontier capabilities locked behind $200/month Pro plans or enterprise contracts), repeated price hikes on APIs and subscriptions, rapid ad integration tests, and behind-the-scenes optimizations that quietly degrade free or low-tier performance to cut inference spend.
Black-box architecture hides many of these tweaks. Companies can throttle context windows, reduce sampling quality, route to cheaper (weaker) models, or pad responses with verbosity on restricted tiers—all without public disclosure. The goal is simple: make free access feel generous enough to retain users but inefficient enough to convert them to paid plans that actually offset costs. Shareholder pressure for quarterly wins accelerates the shift from long-term research moonshots to short-term profit extraction.
Without structural breakthroughs—dramatic improvements in compute efficiency, widespread adoption of open-weight models that reduce dependency on centralized providers, or external regulation capping runaway spending—the incentives point toward continued decay. Incumbents with scale advantages can degrade more slowly and survive longer, while smaller players and independents get squeezed out. This dynamic risks consolidating power in fewer hands, potentially stifling the diverse, experimental innovation that has defined AI’s early years.
Real-World Impacts on Your Workflow
The day-to-day grind takes the hardest hits from this decay. Code generation that once delivered clean, near-production-ready snippets now frequently requires extensive debugging and rewriting, especially on non-premium access. Independent benchmarks in 2026 show steep performance cliffs—math and coding accuracy dropping 20–40% on weaker or cost-optimized models compared to frontier versions. Prompt chains break more often: instructions get ignored, context drifts mid-response, hallucinations spike, forcing you to restart or heavily edit.
Creative and research workflows suffer similarly. Image generators churn increasingly generic or off-target outputs on free tiers; text tools flood with repetitive slop that demands extra filtering. Web-sourced data grows noisier every month as AI-generated filler saturates search results and training corpora, making it harder to surface high-quality references or clean datasets for fine-tuning.
Rate limits, over-delivery, and quota exhaustion interrupt flow states. You’re deep in a blog iteration or debugging session when the system caps you mid-thought, or dumps an unsolicited full rewrite that burns your remaining tokens. For independent builders, side-hustlers, and anyone without enterprise budgets, premium tiers become almost mandatory for reliable performance—turning what was once a massive productivity multiplier into just another recurring cost center.
Technical debt compounds the pain. Degraded models produce plausible-but-incorrect code up to 65% of the time in some studies, introducing subtle bugs, insecure patterns (SQL injection risks, buffer overflows), or deprecated libraries that accumulate in projects. When these slip into production or shared repos, they create long-term maintenance nightmares. The ecosystem feeds on itself: slop-trained future models get worse, accelerating a feedback loop of declining quality that hits everyone who relies on AI-assisted coding.
You’ve seen malware hidden in code snippets or malvertising hijacking machines into botnets on the old web—this is the AI analog. Hallucinated package names lead to slopsquatting attacks (attackers register fake crates/PyPI modules with trojans); indirect prompt injections hide malicious commands in pulled documents or web content; agentic tools risk being tricked into executing harmful actions if safeguards weaken on cost-optimized tiers. While these aren’t dominant yet, the possibility grows as free-tier guardrails loosen to boost engagement (and upgrade pressure).
Can AI Escape the Trap?
AI is not inevitably doomed to complete enshittification—resistance and alternative paths exist, and sharp builders like you can actively steer toward better outcomes. The strongest counterforce right now is open-source and open-weight models. Projects from Meta (Llama series), Mistral, Grok’s own ecosystem influences, and community forks let you run uncensored, unthrottled inference locally or on private hardware. You fine-tune on your datasets, control guardrails, avoid corporate monetization whims, and sidestep ads, quota exhaustion, and hidden degradations entirely. Tools like Ollama, LM Studio, or self-hosted setups make this accessible even for non-enterprise users, turning frontier-level capability into something you own rather than rent.
Hybrid workflows offer practical defense in the trenches. Anchor your daily grind on robust open-source backbones for consistency and cost-free heavy lifting, then tap proprietary APIs sparingly for bursts of bleeding-edge performance when needed. This diversification reduces lock-in and gives you leverage—if one provider degrades too far, you shift weight to alternatives without starting from scratch. Explicit, ironclad prompting (“respond ONLY with the requested section, no extras, no ads, no explanations”) combined with verification loops (cross-check code/packages against official repos, run static analysis) helps mitigate over-delivery, hallucinations, and emerging injection risks.
User and community pushback creates real market pressure. Vocal feedback on forums, selective boycotts of heavily degraded tiers, migrations to ad-free alternatives (like Anthropic’s Claude positioning itself as the no-ads deep-thinking option), and support for transparent, interoperable projects send signals incumbents can’t fully ignore. Antitrust scrutiny, potential interoperability mandates, data-ethics regulations, and calls for compute-efficiency standards could impose structural brakes on runaway extraction. Decentralized inference networks, cooperative ownership models, or federated training experiments point to longer-term escapes from centralized profit squeezes.
Realistically, though, the trap is strong and structural. Incumbents’ massive scale advantages—data moats, exclusive GPU clusters, black-box opacity—make hidden degradations easy to implement and hard to detect or prove. The 2026 landscape already shows consolidation: smaller players fold or get acquired, infrastructure limits (energy constraints, data-center backlash, chip shortages) loom large, and many analysts predict an “AI reckoning” or partial bubble burst within the next 2–4 years as unsustainable burn rates collide with diminishing returns on scaling laws. If frontier progress plateaus while costs keep climbing, companies may double down on aggressive monetization to survive, accelerating stage-three rot for many users.
The key for you is proactive vigilance and layered defense: diversify your stack, treat proprietary outputs as untrusted until verified, build local fallbacks, and participate in communities calling out the decay. Collective action from trench-level builders—sharing war stories, pushing for open standards, supporting indie alternatives—can slow or redirect the slide. The field you pour sweat into doesn’t have to end up as another paywalled, slop-filled shell.
Conclusion
The trajectory of artificial intelligence in 2026 remains fiercely contested. If enshittification wins largely unchecked, we face a future of escalating paywalls locking frontier power behind ultra-premium tiers, ecosystems drowning in low-quality slop that poisons training loops, eroded trust from over-delivery and subtle biases, technical debt piling up from degraded code outputs, and exploitation vectors (prompt injection, slopsquatting, agentic risks) turning tools into potential liabilities instead of assets. The democratizing spark that pulled so many sharp minds into AI—the promise of accessible, high-octane intelligence for independent coders, bloggers, tinkerers, and innovators—could fizzle under relentless profit pressure, leaving a consolidated landscape of ad-riddled incumbents and zombie services.
But guys grinding in the trenches—you, the ones debugging at 2 a.m., prototyping side projects, shipping content, and pushing boundaries—hold real influence. Your tool choices, feedback, migrations, and community noise shape what survives. Open alternatives are already proving resilient; user demand for ad-free, reliable, transparent AI creates openings for better models and ecosystems. The rot is real, but it’s not unstoppable.
Subscribe to the newsletter for ongoing deep dives—practical tactics to dodge decay, secure your workflows against emerging risks, benchmark open vs. proprietary options, and stay ahead of monetization moves. Drop your own encounters in the comments: creeping over-delivery wasting your tokens, sketchy hallucinated packages you almost installed, ads sneaking into what should be pure reasoning, or wins with local setups that keep you independent. Or reach out directly if you want to talk stack tweaks or prompt hardening. Let’s keep fighting for AI that stays raw, powerful, and on your side—not another rusting corporate cash machine. Keep grinding, stay sharp.
Call to Action
If this breakdown helped you think a little clearer about the threats out there, don’t just click away. Subscribe for more no-nonsense security insights, drop a comment with your thoughts or questions, or reach out if there’s a topic you want me to tackle next. Stay sharp out there.
D. Bryan King
Sources
- Enshittification – Wikipedia
- Can AI Avoid the Enshittification Trap? – WIRED
- The Enshittification of Generative AI – Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At
- AI and the Enshittification of Life – Genre Grapevine
- The Coming Enshittification of AI – The Journal of Business and Artificial Intelligence
- The Enshittification of AI is Coming – Humanity Redefined
- The Enshittification of AI: How We Could Ruin Our Most Promising Technology – Medium
- AI Slop And The Enshittification Of Everything – Arrgle Books
- Enshittification in AI: How Generative Tools Are Losing the Plot – Bits Kingdom
- The Age of Enshittification – The New Yorker
- Enshittification Comes to ‘Smart’ Products – MIT Sloan Management Review
- Pluralistic by Cory Doctorow (ongoing commentary)
Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed in this post are solely those of the author. The information provided is based on personal research, experience, and understanding of the subject matter at the time of writing. Readers should consult relevant experts or authorities for specific guidance related to their unique situations.
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Divination: Playlist Scrying (Shufflemancy)
Did you know that you can divine with music? Well… you can. It can be done rather simply, but may require some out-of-the-box thinking.
And for those of you who may try to dismiss this offhand, let me remind you that bibliomancy is a pretty universally accepted form of divination, probably stretching all the way back to ancient times. And with this particular method, you just grab a book and go to a random page.
Fun Fact: When I was a kid in church, people would often tell me that I could find answers or inspiration from the Holy Spirit by grabbing my Bible, opening it up randomly, pointing somewhere on the page, and reading the verse that my finger touched. I would love to go back in time and explain to those folks that this process is witchcraft.
Uh oh…
If that is divination, then anything can be divination. Including music.
All the Many Mancies
You may have noticed that many forms of divination have a “proper name” that ends in the suffix -mancy. This comes from a Greek word, manteia, which means divination or prophecy. When attached to a root word, it helps specify the particular method or medium of divination. For example, the bibliomancy I mentioned a moment ago combines it with the word “biblion,” meaning book, to indicate a method of divination that uses books.
Different -mancies. Some weird. Some hilarious. Yes. Phallomancy.
We combine words pretty often. And we can change the meaning completely by keeping the same root and swapping the suffix. Bibliophile? A person who loves books. Bibliography? The study of books. Bibliomane? Someone obsessed with books. Bibliophobia? The fear of books. I would hate to be a bibliomane who suffered from bibliophobia… it would certainly make bibliomancy rather difficult. The study of language is fascinating isn’t it? But I digress.
We have a couple of these -mancy words that are specific to music:
- Canticumancy – A form of divination where practitioners listen to music to receive guidance and insight or predict future events.
- Shufflemancy – A form of divination where practitioners create a playlist, focus on a specific question, and then shuffle the playlist ro receive guidance and insight from the melodies, song titles, and lyrics that appear
If you were curious, canticum is Latin for song. I guess things always sound fancier when you use ancient languages. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like either the Ancient Romans or the Ancient Greeks had ever conceptualized a shuffled Spotify playlist, so when it comes to shufflemancy, we’re obviously building off of a modern term.
Of course, you could also call all of this “technomancy,” which is a broader term that encompasses using modern technology to perform divination.
So what is scrying?
Google says that scrying means to “foretell the future using a crystal ball or other reflective object or surface.” Unfortunately, that’s too narrow of a view. It’s only partially correct. Let me update the definition.
Scrying is just when you observe something long enough to arrive at a divinatory result. That could be a shiny crystal ball, yes, but it could also be a rock, a puff of smoke, or a dancing flame. Or you could just close your eyes, sit quietly in the woods, and listen to the sounds of nature around you. Those are all forms of scrying in my book.
And the divinatory result? That could be signs of the future, a message from the spirit world, knowledge of a past life, personal insight, or just meditative reflection. It takes many forms!
Random
Divination methods often use a random element in order to ensure that results are varied and to help combat personal bias. In Tarot, for instance, you shuffle the deck before you draw a card. In some schools of geomancy, you perform a series of random dice rolls.
With playlist scrying, you introduce the element of random by clicking the shuffle and skip buttons.
How it works
Once you’ve determined what playlist to use, there are two options for proceeding — one will give you an instant result and the other will take place over a deeper and longer session.
- Quick Method: Hit the skip button repeatedly. Once you stop skipping, play close attention to the song that is playing — this contains your message.
- Meditative Method: Press play on your music. Meditate and reflect on your situation or whatever is causing you to seek guidance. Try to achieve a state of mind where you are not paying attention to the music for at least 5 – 10 minutes. At some point, one of the songs will inevitably grab your focus — your message is there.
Always have shuffle turned on! Bonus points if you skip enough songs to leave your playlist and wind up in “discover” territory.
Whatever option you choose, the overall divinatory result may require some deep thinking. Be sure to pay attention to every detail: the title of the song and album, the name of the band or performer, the lyrics, and even the exact time stamp of the track. Furthermore, you can ask yourself a series of questions. What do you hear? What do you feel? Does the melody seem to convey a particular emotion? Does the rhythm have a message? Answers can be hidden anywhere.
Step by Step
Here’s a breakdown of the process:
- Formulate a question or at least set your intention to receive general guidance
- Clear your mind and enter a meditative state
- Press play on a shuffled playlist
- Listen for a while and see what grabs your focus; or press skip a random number of times
- Pay close attention to the music, lyrics, titles, etc.
You may wish to start this whole session with a prayer or some sort of general declaration to the universe or your spirit guides. “Hi, guys. I’m here and I am listening.” Even such a simple statement is enough.
Try not to be discouraged if nothing happens the first time. Maybe none of your spirit guides have anything to say at that moment. Just try again later.
Playlists
The method is simple, but one of the most difficult things is choosing songs for a playlist. What type of music should you use? Should you use spacey, meditative music? I think something with easily understood lyrics is more important here rather than subtle tones that aid in the meditation process, but your mileage may vary. Either way, it’s usually pretty hard to find songs that check both boxes (lyrics and meditative qualities).
The good news is that you can really use anything.
Or you could just go with either of these two playlists that I threw together for your enjoyment. They’re mostly filled with rock and pop songs.
PLAYLIST SCRYING – YES OR NO ANSWERS
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7BJ6Fb6hevgGciPbATHnHE
PLAYLIST SCRYING – GENERAL QUERIES
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0E1I2PlTfDZZdEHyLERnsf
As the names would imply, the first playlist is only good if you have a simple question that can be answered with “yes” or “no.” You’ll find that the lyrics and song titles are FILLED with those words. It should be pretty straight to the point. The second playlist is for general inquiries or more opened-ended questions. Have fun!
Don’t miss out. Here’s what’s coming up…
More InfoAn Accidental Example
Many years ago, and possibly in another life entirely, I didn’t have a car. I did, however, have a 50cc scooter, which I rode across vast distances. I would often just put a short Spotify playlist on shuffle and then let the gods of random queue up whatever suggested songs they wanted to introduce me to — I found a lot of new music that way.
On one fine, sunny day, I was riding merrily along, when I suddenly became aware of the fact that the words “run for cover” were playing over my headphones. It was different. They seemed to be warning me of something.
Of course, I ignored it.
And before the song ended, I got stuck in a torrential downpour.
Was I inadvertently engaging in playlist scrying? Or was it just a coincidence? You be the judge.
Signs and Messages
I don’t really see this as a way of telling the future, per se, but then again, I view most divination tools as methods of self reflection. Playlist Scrying is a little different. For me, it’s kind of like giving the spirits around me a medium to communicate. They might have a message… then again, they might not.
We all accept signs and symbols in our life in unique ways. What I ascribe meaning to, you may not see or agree with. The dragonfly that hovers for a moment has meaning to me. Equally so with the squirrel barking in a tree. Others, of course, may see something in a flock of birds or the shape of a cloud. The universe is constantly speaking to us — it’s up to us how we interpret.
Lyrics carry so much intention. It can pretty much be a direct form of communication from the spirit world… that is… as long as you allow it to be.
#canticumancy #divination #magick #music #occult #playlistScrying #scrying #shuffle #shufflemancy #spirituality #spotify #technology #technomancy #witchcraft