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There’s a magical thing that happens when you pick up a fantastic story created by a master artist. It doesn’t happen right away. At first, you look at the words and your mind recognizes them as ink marks formed into the familiar shape of letters. Then, slowly, your awareness shifts and you start to recognize the meaning.

You read on for a moment longer, still aware of who you are as a person and the room you occupy. The separation between you and the text lingers, but it slowly begins to fade.

If the words are true, within a relatively short amount of time, something wonderful happens. The lines blur. You lose yourself in the moment. Your mind links up with the text and suddenly you’re not looking at ink marks on paper. Instead, you’re walking through an exciting new world with a group of people you will come to see as friends.

When you reflect on this experience, it will be with the awareness that it was something that happened to you, not something you observed.

We care for the people we meet in books. We feel real emotions when tragedy befalls them. We laugh from the depths of our soul. We cry actual tears.

Authentic human writing can make you forget that you’re reading. That’s the difference between work of human origin and artificially created slop. The human work has a soul. AI work does not.

The real tragedy of our age is that the tech oligarchs have come to recognize they cannot compete with legitimate brilliance. So, rather than try, they instead sabotage your ability to engage. Tech oligarchs are the usurpers and the book burners.

No matter how gifted a writer might be, it still takes a few minutes to complete the link up. Those of us who are readers have come to regard the link as precious. We are provoked to anger when we’re interrupted. It’s like being awakened from a pleasant dream.

“Can’t you see that I’m reading?” That simple question illustrates how much of an intrusion it is to disturb somebody’s gentle connection with the written word.

The tech oligarchs know this all too well. In order to prevent us from having genuine moments of soul sharing, they’ve created an endless tidal wave of distractions.

They haven’t taken the books, they’ve clouded our ability to see them.

Today, our children are captured by scrolling services. These represent AI curated options that, although offered under the illusion of choice, are really not that distinguishable from one another. The scroll is eternal. It operates on the promise that there will eventually be some sort of reward, but the truth is that it’s designed to render any form of link-up impossible.

The scroll keeps us in that perpetual state of promise without any hope of reward. Perhaps the whole point of the mechanism is to entice the human race to reject reading as a concept. We’re deliberately denied access to alternative perspectives, and eventually we become frustrated. Is it the expectation of our digital overlords that we’ll eventually become conditioned to cast learning aside so we might occupy ourselves with productive labor?

That seems overly malicious, but it’s not a theory I would discount without proof.

We live in a society that’s built on distraction. The competition to steal your attention is fierce, and there’s no longer any expectation that promises must be fulfilled. We live in an era of clickbait. The authors of this digital vomit don’t want your mind, they only want to compel your finger to tap the button on your mouse. That’s the end of the interaction. Wham, bam, don’t let the search engine door hit you on the way out.

Attention is the only objective. They don’t want to convince you. They don’t want to interact with you. They don’t want to share anything with you. All they want to do is distract you for a moment before you make your way on to the next distraction.

We’ve been tricked into living like this because the tech overlords fear the link up more than anything. They know they can’t compete once human beings communicate. Communication creates community. From community people derive their power.

Therefore, the ruling class has come to view quiet reflection as the enemy. They’ve become highly effective at stamping it out.

There are still a few old codgers like me rolling around. I’m of the class that remembers making my selection at video stores rather than on streaming services. I still go to libraries. I enjoy the sensation of being overwhelmed by all the diverse perspectives that have been created by the glorious human race.

But I’m fearful for a generation of kids that’s grown up with curated streaming services that are the equivalent of the doom scroll. The only difference is that streaming service menus go from left to right, social media goes from top to the endless bottom.

Notice that we have no tools to curate these lists. We can’t designate what actors we don’t want to watch. We can’t set dates. No, the era of personal choice is over. We have to sit and accept what the AI entity thinks is best for us. We’re not allowed to contemplate whether that AI might have a nefarious objective.

We’re not allowed to contemplate anything anymore. Contemplation is the enemy of control. The oligarchs know that better than anyone.

There are some mornings when I come downstairs and I see my children captured by screens. In those moments I feel as if I’ve failed as a parent. Their eyes, their ears, their very being has been condemned to a prison. The worst part is that the door is open, and yet they remain there willingly. We haven’t yet cultivated our evolutionary warning about this kind of trap. It’s a prison formed by banal diversion. It’s easier to scroll than it is to think, so we end up scrolling forever.

Adults have to be reminded that thinking is beautiful. They must be compelled to teach their children. Scrolling is an abomination. It’s killing us. We’ve traded a beautiful life for a fortress of solitude.

Recently, I had a task for my daughter. I discovered her sitting on the couch in the living room. Much to my delight, she wasn’t holding a screen connected to some malicious oligarch whispering sweet words of deceit. Instead, she held a book.

She held a real, physical book that she’d checked out from the library.

In that moment, I experienced a surge of affection for that book. In my vision, it was almost as if she was curled up on the sofa with a puppy. It felt very much like a living thing to me, not cold and digital and dead like the bright light of a toxic screen. The pages were as organic as leaves. She seemed so connected to the Earth and life and her basic humanity that I became emotional.

She hadn’t noticed me entering even though I walk with a heavy foot. She’d escaped the distractions and discovered the link. My soul recognized this as a rare and beautiful thing. I stopped myself from calling out to her, and instead I slowly backed away. There’s no task more important than allowing your children to revel in the beautiful connection to another mind that only a work of human origin can provide.

There is still hope.

But we also must recognize that we’re surrounded by danger. The distraction is false. The beauty of this life comes from making true connections. Tell your friends. Tell your kids. Tell everyone.

It’s time to recover the power and the joy of making your own choice.

This newsletter is free now and forever thanks to you. It’s also OF HUMAN ORIGIN (no AI). I worked too hard for too long to start cheating now. 🤣🤣

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