AI is Cocaine: It Lets You Be Stupid Faster

I’m writing this, like all my writing, by hand.

The old fashioned way, one keystroke at a time, like God intended, if God had a 2021 macbook pro they bought off their ex girlfriend and probably overpaid for because they didn’t want to make it weird but she, in this analogy, had already cheated on God with a comedy show producer (which is probably not as bad as getting crucified but has to rank somewhere) and so things got weird anyway and God probably could have saved $200.

I’m writing this by hand because I like writing, and you’re reading this by eyes (probably) because you like the cocaine joke. Because man invented stories before they invented fire and invented writing those stories down shortly (relatively speaking) after fire and given the choice, and the arrogance of living life in the 21st century, I’d probably take the stories over the fire, and would prefer them written down because I like things that are meaningful and words are meaning at scale.

“At scale” is the kind of thing you write using wispr in a slack message where you (person who looks at computer for 6 figures a year) is fighting (talking to) your mortal enemy (other person who looks at computer for slightly different 6 figures a year) while you both consult the oracle (claude) on how to make your slack message less passive aggressive.

In the last 25 years or so, this is what we have come to accept as “work.”

One of my biggest frustrations with the current state of the world is the shared delusion that marketing was somehow this utopia before AI. That we were good, creative, ethical, thoughtful, moral people who worked by the sweat of our brow when we didn’t have a robot on our computer drinking billions of gallons of water to design a slide deck template for us. Marketing has always been defined by bloat. By excess. By people you cannot believe are employed. Advertising even more so. At a fundamental level, we sell opinions, then wonder why a bunch of horny, ineffectual people who disagree with each other for a living can’t seem to get anything done because they can’t figure out how to share something on Google Drive.

That last paragraph is what we would call “punching down”. An example of lazy thinking. But it’s lazy thinking that has led us here, one of the easiest, oldest forms of lazy thinking: assuming the past is better than the present.

It’s the argument the Republicans make, teary-eyed, with a flag on the front of the house, talking about how we used to be a country, how people used to respect each other, how a man used to live by the sweat of his brow without the threat of the government breathing down his neck, how things used to be great, for, well, mostly other white men, like him (and me), if you really think about it (this is also me punching down). But as easy as it is to laugh it’s an even easier trap to fall for because we fall for the reverse—the unexamined optimism that the future is going to be better, that we’re going to figure it out, that when the smoke of the revolution clears, a group of people who have done nothing but spend their lives dreaming of tearing the world down will suddenly agree on how to put it back together better.

We dream of the future and the second the dream breaks, we blame it on the glorious past we ruined.

Which brings us to cocaine.

I am not a rational, logical person. Because of that, I am willing to admit that I do not like the project of technology.

I am rational in the sense that I do not try to separate out the parts of technology I like and dislike.

I am Faust if he didn’t check the fine print. I am at a crossroads not worrying about the Devil’s APR. I am Sisyphus, pushing the boulder up the hill so that I can try to do a kickflip on the way back down. I am fully invested in a project called technology that is destroying the planet that I live on and the brains of the people in it.

It’s why I roll my eyes when people talk about AI stealing water. Not because they’re wrong, but because the problem goes so much deeper than AI. I think we signed the dotted line sometime around the first fire, the first change, the first advancement, ripping bark and logs from the cold heart of mother nature, striking her son flint against her daughter rock, Cain and Abel, a glorious, destructive runaway train that would, in time, result in locomotives, automobiles, cell phones and $1 cheeseburgers at McDonalds and project managers who worry about their slack status being green using the same neurological pathways we developed to keep us alive from Hyenas.

We are all a part of the experiment called technology, building data centers full of chips we’ll have to replace in years because we run them 24/7 so that I can get too edible high on a Tuesday and start worrying that every Instagram Reel of people playing guitar is actually AI.

I don’t do cocaine. But in general, my rule for cocaine is my rule with all drugs: if you do so much cocaine that I can tell you did cocaine, you did too much cocaine, especially if it’s at a funeral. It’s not just the jaw moving or the inability to sit still, it’s the talking. The need to talk about yourself faster than you’ve ever talked about yourself before. The text at 3am from the guy across the street asking if I had any beer because he couldn’t calm down and also really needed to tell me about his relationship with his dad.

It’s not an original line to me, but it’s true. Cocaine just lets you be stupid faster.

There are great people doing great things with technology. Great writers writing great things with technology. AI is a part of that technology. Maybe it will supersede it. Maybe I’ll be replaced by them.

But so far, at least in the corner of the world where people write words and occasionally mean them, AI mostly just reveals the people who didn’t care about the quality of the work in the first place.

The same slop of the past, just faster and more efficient.