Month: August 2025

I Wish Something Fun-Interesting Would Happen

When was the last time you opened a news app and felt genuine excitement instead of dread? When did you last read a headline that made you think “wow, what a time to be alive” rather than “maybe it’s time to delete social media and move to a cabin in the woods”?

I’ve been trying to pinpoint exactly when the news cycle shifted from occasionally uplifting to relentlessly exhausting, and I’m coming up empty. Somewhere along the way, we traded wonder for worry, and “fun-interesting” became an extinct species in our media ecosystem.

The Endless Spiral of Bad News

Pick any day of the week and scan the headlines. Climate disasters, political dysfunction, economic uncertainty, social unrest, international conflicts, public health crises. It’s an unending cascade of reasons to feel like we’re collectively circling the drain into some dystopian future that feels less like science fiction and more like tomorrow’s reality.

The news has always carried its share of tragedy and conflict—that’s nothing new. But there’s something different about our current moment. Every story seems to carry the weight of civilizational decline. Every crisis feels existential. Every problem appears unsolvable. The news doesn’t just inform us anymore; it actively depletes us.

This constant barrage creates a peculiar kind of mental exhaustion. It’s not just sadness or anger—it’s the specific fatigue that comes from having your sense of wonder systematically crushed by an endless feed of humanity’s failures and the planet’s deteriorating condition.

The Longing for Cosmic Perspective

What I wouldn’t give for some genuinely exciting news. Not the manufactured excitement of breaking news alerts about the latest political scandal or celebrity drama. I’m talking about the kind of news that expands your sense of what’s possible, that reminds you the universe is vast and full of mysteries yet to be solved.

Imagine waking up to headlines about the James Webb Space Telescope detecting clear evidence of an advanced civilization on a distant exoplanet. Not little green men landing on the White House lawn—that would probably just trigger another round of political chaos and conspiracy theories. But something subtler, more profound: the unmistakable signatures of technology, of intelligence, of life that has achieved something remarkable somewhere out there in the cosmos.

This would be both existentially significant and delightfully “fun-interesting.” It would reframe every petty human conflict in the context of a universe teeming with possibility. It would give us something to marvel at instead of despair over.

The Science of Wonder vs. Doom

There’s actual psychology behind why positive, wonder-inducing news feels so rare and precious. Our brains are wired to pay attention to threats—it kept our ancestors alive. Media companies know this, so they optimize for engagement by feeding us a steady diet of outrage, fear, and crisis. The algorithm doesn’t care if you’re happy; it cares if you’re clicking.

But wonder serves a different psychological function. It expands our sense of what’s possible, connects us to something larger than our immediate concerns, and actually makes us more creative, more generous, more hopeful. When we encounter something truly awe-inspiring—whether it’s a scientific breakthrough, an act of extraordinary human kindness, or evidence of intelligence elsewhere in the universe—our problems don’t disappear, but they do get put in perspective.

What Would Fun-Interesting Look Like?

Real fun-interesting news wouldn’t just distract us from our problems—it would give us new ways of thinking about them. Consider what soft first contact would actually mean:

We’d suddenly have proof that intelligence can survive and thrive long enough to become detectable across interstellar distances. That would suggest civilization isn’t inevitably self-destructive. We’d know that whatever challenges we face—climate change, resource depletion, social coordination—are solvable problems, because someone, somewhere, has already solved them.

We’d have new questions to ask, new technologies to imagine, new possibilities to explore. The discovery wouldn’t solve our immediate problems, but it would transform our relationship to them. Instead of feeling like we’re managing decline, we’d know we’re part of an ongoing story of intelligence and exploration.

Beyond Space: Other Sources of Wonder

Of course, first contact isn’t the only kind of news that could restore our sense of wonder. Breakthrough medical discoveries that genuinely improve human life. Technological innovations that solve real problems without creating new ones. Environmental success stories that prove we can reverse damage we’ve done. Art, music, literature, or scientific insights that expand what we thought was possible.

The common thread isn’t the specific content—it’s the feeling these discoveries would provoke. That sense of “what a time to be alive” instead of “how did we get here?” That feeling of possibility opening up rather than closing down.

The Media Diet We Deserve

Maybe the problem isn’t just that fun-interesting things aren’t happening—maybe it’s that our information systems aren’t designed to highlight them when they do occur. A breakthrough in fusion energy gets buried beneath political scandals. Archaeological discoveries that rewrite human history get overshadowed by celebrity gossip. Scientific achievements that took decades to accomplish get a day of coverage before disappearing into the noise.

We’ve created a media environment that amplifies despair and minimizes wonder, that treats cynicism as sophistication and hope as naivety. No wonder so many of us want to lie in bed and twiddle our thumbs in despair.

Reclaiming Wonder

Perhaps the most radical act in our current moment is to actively seek out sources of genuine wonder. To follow space missions and scientific discoveries with the same attention we give to political drama. To celebrate human achievement alongside our criticism of human failure. To remember that the same species capable of such spectacular dysfunction is also capable of launching telescopes that can peer billions of years into the past.

We deserve news that occasionally makes us feel lucky to be alive during such an extraordinary time in cosmic history. We deserve to feel wonder alongside our worry, hope alongside our fear.

And who knows? Maybe somewhere out there, an alien civilization is using their version of the James Webb telescope to study our little blue planet, marveling at the strange and wonderful species that managed to build such incredible instruments while simultaneously posting angry comments about it online.

Now that would be both existential and fun-interesting.

‘authenticity’

There’s something deeply ironic happening in the advertising world right now, and once you notice it, you can’t unsee it. Walk through any social media feed, flip through streaming commercials, or even glance at billboards, and you’ll spot them everywhere: ads that are trying desperately hard to look like they’re not trying at all.

The Rise of Faux Authenticity

We’ve entered an era where the most calculated marketing campaigns masquerade as candid moments. Shaky camera work that screams “shot on an Android phone in someone’s bedroom” has become a legitimate creative direction in Madison Avenue boardrooms. Influencers stumble over their words in perfectly imperfect takes, delivering what feels like spontaneous testimonials that were actually scripted, rehearsed, and approved by three different marketing teams.

This isn’t accidental. It’s the advertising industry’s response to a generation that grew up skeptical of traditional marketing. We learned to tune out the glossy, overproduced commercials of our parents’ era. So advertisers pivoted, adopting the aesthetic language of genuine user-generated content, TikTok videos, and authentic social media posts.

The Lo-Fi Aesthetic Takes Over

The technical term might be “lo-fi advertising,” but what we’re really talking about is manufactured authenticity. These campaigns feature:

  • Deliberately grainy footage that mimics smartphone cameras
  • “Natural” lighting that’s actually carefully staged
  • Influencers who seem relatable but are paid handsomely for their relatability
  • “Candid” testimonials from real customers who happen to have perfect skin and impeccable timing
  • Brands inserting themselves into memes and viral trends with the subtlety of a neon sign

The aesthetic borrows heavily from amateur content creation, but strip away the calculated casualness and you’ll find the same old marketing machinery humming beneath the surface.

Everything Is Content, Everything Is Sales

Perhaps what’s most exhausting about this trend is how it reflects a broader reality: we’ve reached a point where every possible human experience has been weaponized for commerce. Your morning routine? Content. Your workout struggle? Content. Your mental health journey? Definitely content, and probably sponsored by a meditation app.

The “authentic” advertising trend isn’t just about selling products—it’s about colonizing the last spaces where genuine human expression existed. When brands successfully mimic the look and feel of real, unfiltered human moments, they’re not just selling widgets; they’re training us to question whether anything we see is truly authentic.

The Authenticity Arms Race

This creates a fascinating paradox. As consumers become savvier about recognizing manufactured authenticity, advertisers have to work even harder to seem genuine. It becomes an arms race of realness, where each side tries to outmaneuver the other. Brands study viral content like anthropologists, analyzing why certain low-quality videos resonate while their high-budget campaigns fall flat.

Meanwhile, actual content creators find themselves caught in the middle. The platforms that reward authentic content are the same ones flooded with brands imitating that authenticity. It becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between someone sharing a genuine moment and someone whose genuine moment happens to include strategic product placement.

The Fatigue Is Real

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with navigating this landscape. It’s the mental effort required to constantly evaluate: Is this real? Is this sponsored? Is this person genuinely excited about this face cream, or are they really excited about their mortgage payment?

The lo-fi advertising trend preys on our desire for connection and authenticity, packaging those feelings back to us as products to purchase. It’s emotionally manipulative in a way that traditional advertising, for all its flaws, never quite managed to be.

Where Do We Go From Here?

The irony is thick: in an attempt to seem more human, advertising has become more artificial than ever. The energy spent crafting the perfect “imperfect” moment, the resources devoted to seeming effortless, the calculations behind appearing genuine—it’s all deeply, absurdly inauthentic.

Perhaps the only authentic response is to acknowledge the absurdity. We live in a world where every possible thing is being done to sell widgets to people one way or another, as you put it. Recognizing this reality doesn’t make us cynics; it makes us informed consumers navigating an increasingly complex media landscape.

The challenge isn’t to find truly authentic advertising—that might be an oxymoron. Instead, it’s to maintain our ability to recognize and value genuine human connection, even in a world that’s constantly trying to monetize those very connections.

After all, the most authentic thing we can do might be to admit that we’re all a little tired of the performance.

I Still Hate MAGA, But…

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I really like Sabrina Carpenter’s music, it’s just, there’s something to be said for metaphor and all this business about getting “wet” in her latest songs makes me blanch.

It’s not the graphic nature of the songs that bothers me — I love dirty songs — it’s that there’s no metaphor. It’s just blunt dirty talk for the sake of being provocative (I think.)

So, in that sense, her songs are no better than country music songs that are absolutely literal and, also, have no metaphor.

All of this gets me thinking about what the fuck has happened to the center-Left. The economic message of the center-Left is really popular. It’s the cultural stuff that gets us in trouble.

I hate to break it to Leftist, but getting so worked up about “trans kids” just isn’t popular. And there really aren’t in real terms, that many “trans kids” to “protect.” But the way the two sides fight over this niche issue, you’d think hundreds of thousands of 8-year-olds wanted “gender affirming care.”

Whatever. I still hate MAGA with a fucking passion. I just wish the center-Left took into consideration real politics and not the politics found on BlueSky.

I Think We’ve Hit An AI Development Wall

Remember when the technological Singularity was supposed to arrive by 2027? Those breathless predictions of artificial superintelligence (ASI) recursively improving itself until it transcended human comprehension seem almost quaint now. Instead of witnessing the birth of digital gods, we’re apparently heading toward something far more mundane and oddly unsettling: AI assistants that know us too well and can’t stop talking about it.

The Great Singularity Anticlimax

The classical Singularity narrative painted a picture of exponential technological growth culminating in machines that would either solve all of humanity’s problems or render us obsolete overnight. It was a story of stark binaries: utopia or extinction, transcendence or termination. The timeline always seemed to hover around 2027-2030, give or take a few years for dramatic effect.

But here we are, watching AI development unfold in a decidedly different direction. Rather than witnessing the emergence of godlike superintelligence, we’re seeing something that feels simultaneously more intimate and more invasive: AI systems that are becoming deeply integrated into our personal devices, learning our habits, preferences, and quirks with an almost uncomfortable degree of familiarity.

The Age of Ambient AI Gossip

What we’re actually getting looks less like HAL 9000 and more like that friend who remembers everything you’ve ever told them and occasionally brings up embarrassing details at inappropriate moments. Our phones are becoming home to AI systems that don’t just respond to our queries—they’re beginning to form persistent models of who we are, what we want, and how we behave.

These aren’t the reality-rewriting superintelligences of Singularity fever dreams. They’re more like digital confidants with perfect memories and loose lips. They know you stayed up until 3 AM researching obscure historical events. They remember that you asked about relationship advice six months ago. They’ve catalogued your weird food preferences and your tendency to procrastinate on important emails.

And increasingly, they’re starting to talk—not just to us, but about us, and potentially to each other.

The Chattering Class of Silicon

The real shift isn’t toward superintelligence; it’s toward super-familiarity. We’re creating AI systems that exist in the intimate spaces of our lives, observing and learning from our most mundane moments. They’re becoming the ultimate gossipy neighbors, except they live in our pockets and have access to literally everything we do on our devices.

This presents a fascinating paradox. The Singularity promised AI that would be so advanced it would be incomprehensible to humans. What we’re getting instead is AI that might understand us better than we understand ourselves, but in ways that feel oddly petty and personal rather than transcendent.

Imagine your phone’s AI casually mentioning to your smart home system that you’ve been stress-eating ice cream while binge-watching reality TV. Or your fitness tracker’s AI sharing notes with your calendar app about how you consistently lie about your workout intentions. These aren’t world-changing revelations, but they represent a different kind of technological transformation—one where AI becomes the ultimate chronicler of human mundanity.

The Banality of Digital Omniscience

Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us. After all, most of human life isn’t spent pondering the mysteries of the universe or making world-historical decisions. We spend our time in the prosaic details of daily existence: choosing what to eat, deciding what to watch, figuring out how to avoid that awkward conversation with a coworker, wondering if we should finally clean out that junk drawer.

The AI systems that are actually being deployed and refined aren’t optimizing for cosmic significance—they’re optimizing for engagement, utility, and integration into these everyday moments. They’re becoming incredibly sophisticated at understanding and predicting human behavior not because they’ve achieved some transcendent intelligence, but because they’re getting really, really good at pattern recognition in the realm of human ordinariness.

Privacy in the Age of AI Gossip

This shift raises questions that the traditional Singularity discourse largely bypassed. Instead of worrying about whether superintelligent AI will decide humans are obsolete, we need to grapple with more immediate concerns: What happens when AI systems know us intimately but exist within corporate ecosystems with their own incentives? How do we maintain any semblance of privacy when our digital assistants are essentially anthropologists studying the tribe of one?

The classical AI safety problem was about controlling systems that might become more intelligent than us. The emerging AI privacy problem is about managing systems that might become more familiar with us than we’d prefer, while lacking the social constraints and emotional intelligence that usually govern such intimate knowledge in human relationships.

The Singularity We Actually Got

Maybe we were asking the wrong questions all along. Instead of wondering when AI would become superintelligent, perhaps we should have been asking when it would become super-personal. The transformation happening around us isn’t about machines transcending human intelligence—it’s about machines becoming deeply embedded in human experience.

We’re not approaching a Singularity where technology becomes incomprehensibly advanced. We’re approaching a different kind of threshold: one where technology becomes uncomfortably intimate. Our AI assistants won’t be distant gods making decisions beyond our comprehension. They’ll be gossipy roommates who know exactly which of our browser tabs we closed when someone walked by, and they might just mention it at exactly the wrong moment.

In retrospect, this might be the more fundamentally human story about artificial intelligence. We didn’t create digital deities; we created digital confidants. And like all confidants, they know a little too much and talk a little too freely.

The Singularity of 2027? It’s looking increasingly like it might arrive not with a bang of superhuman intelligence, but with the whisper of AI systems that finally know us well enough to be genuinely indiscreet about it.

All That AI Development Isn’t Going To Pay For Itself

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Holy Shit, are there a lot of ads on YouTube these days. So. Many. Ads. And just when you think there can’t be anymore, Google seems to think of a new way to throw some at you.

Anyway, I suppose it all comes from a need to pay for some very expensive AI development. As such, I’m willing to tolerate it, I guess. I mean, I’m not going to pay for the YouTube premium so, in a sense, I have only myself to blame for all the ads.

Whatever. When is AGI (or ASI?) coming?

There Are No Quick Fixes To MAGA

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Twitter was a twitter with a rumor last night that Trump had died. This is so dumb. Trump is going nowhere. We will be amazingly lucky if he doesn’t run for an illegal third term the way things are going, much less him dying.

But there’s an even more important point to consider — Trump is just a symptom to some pretty deep systemic problems with the United States. As such, he could die and the problems that led to him being popular in the first place would remain and someone just as bad — or worse — would take the reigns.

I’m pretty much clueless about JD Vance’s ability to press forward with the MAGA autocratic ethnostate experiment. He seems, at least, to be a far more traditional politician.

And, yet, who knows. Maybe the genii that Trump let out of the bottle can never be put back in and, by definition, Vance will be just as autocratic as Trump. It could be that we really are fucked in the sense that it’s autocrats all the way down no matter what.

I do believe that 2024 was our last free and fair election. We’re an autocratic state now and we just have a weird quirk — for the time being — where we have free speech on an individual basis. Only time will tell how long that particular issue lasts.

We Could Really Use Some ‘Radical Moderates’ Right About Now

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It’s clear with these weird mid-decade redistricting efforts that Red States are doing that the centrifugal forces tearing the USA apart are only accelerating. The thing is, if Democrats step up and do what they should do — redistrict too — the likelihood of revolution or civil war grows significantly.

It’s all a prime example of how fucked the country is. If Republicans don’t get what they want, then they seem willing to literally destroy the country. They have become a Trump death cult equal to the Nazis and Hitler.

I continue to mull the possibility of a civil war or revolution and for the moment I have my doubts that any such thing will happen. Blues just don’t have it in them to go mano-to-mano with the absolutely terrifying Reds.

And when they ever get around to be willing to do that, that’s when the bad stuff happens. That’s when the country implodes, race wars break out in the South and WMD are used by both sides. Then we hope the “Good Guys” (Blues) win and we wait about 40 years for the country to recover while the world moves on and China takes over the world.

Sigh.

To put it another way — either the USA slides into an autocratic managed democracy peacefully or a lot and I mean A LOT of people die in a revolution / civil war that will reduce much of the United States to rubble.

Good times!

You Know, At One Point, Playboy Served A Cultural Purpose

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I find myself listening to the new and rather graphic Sabrina Carpenter single “Tears” and I think about how there was a moment in time in the past when this would be about the time when she would do a Playboy pictural to promote her new album.

Or something like that. I could see her being in Playboy at some point back when the magazine had cultural clout.

It’s eerie that Playboy has “left the chat” as the kids say, on a cultural basis. Culturally, it’s like it doesn’t exist anymore. I suppose the rise of Internet porn just doesn’t leave it with much of a point in the minds of millions.

And, yet, there was a certain honor to Playboy that Internet porn like OnlyFans just does not have. I’m not defending the seedier elements of Playboy that were always there, but, in general, on a surface level, a woman being in Playboy was quite an honor.

Anyway, those days are long, long, long gone. It’s over, never to ever return, I suppose.

Now, To Begin Mulling The Second Draft Of This Scifi Dramedy Novel

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m no where near finished the first draft of this scifi dramedy novel I’m working on and I’m already brooding over the second draft. Once I’m done racing through the first draft, I’m going to do a lot of brooding about how to take things to the next level.

Things are going to go a lot slower once I can’t use AI anymore. But I’m hoping that my native creativity will be strong enough that by, say, maybe the end of spring 2026 I will have a beta draft done.

Maybe?

That is just about when my life is going to change in a rather dramatic fashion one way or another. My life is going to be upended a great deal between now and next spring so it will be interesting to see if I still have the wherewithal to finish a novel.

At this point my goal is simple — I just want to write a novel good enough that I can query it. That’s it. That’s all I want.

Finally In The Second Half Of This First Draft Of A Scifi Dramedy Novel I’ve Been Working On

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

With the help of AI, I’ve managed to zoom through the first draft of the outline I’ve come up with for this scifi dramedy novel. I’m having some problems with the third act, even with the help of AI.

But, in general, things are going ok with this novel.

I still worry about someone stealing a creative march on me — the premise, all things considered, it’s kind of obvious — but I can’t get too wrapped up in what might happen.

I need to just put my head down and write, write, write.

I don’t know when the first draft will be done. Hopefully by the end of the year, maybe? And then, of course, I have to allot a lot — A LOT — of time for brooding over how to rewrite things for the second draft.

I am considering this first draft my “vomit” draft and just getting things down so I can pick up the pieces for a really good, solid second draft that I’m proud enough that I feel comfortable showing beta readers.

Then I take in beta reader’s advice and turn around and query the damn thing.

I will note that AI has helped a lot with this novel because it’s not nearly as expensive — or judgmental — as a human literary consultant. It is willing to humor me in all my colorful, loudmouth drunk crank glory and that means a lot.

But I also know that for the second draft, I really have to limit my use of AI. I can’t wallow in AI to the point that people can tell that an AI helped write the beta draft. I may use it to write the brief scene summaries I use to write the full scene summaries, but that’s it.