I’ve been watching the first Matrix movie lately. That’s how I phrase it when I sip entertainment over weeks. Makes more sense when it’s a series. But a movie can be a series if you can’t sit still.
My brain buzzes these days. The static result of that vibration can be deafening when asked to care about something that doesn’t excite me.
Of course, our news lately excites me in all the worst ways.
Excitement that lay in wait, with a negative slant: that’s anxiety.
And now we’ve been given a proper endless buffet of anything and everything that might excite us. Outrage on tap. Crisis in 4K. Gripping headlines between GLP-1 ads. The feed is frictionless.
So how do we discern excitement that lay in wait?
How do we identify the slant shifting negative?
The easy answer is morality.
But morality is easily hijacked.
As I’ve said before: Baby Jessica. We’re social mammals. We care for our fellow humans, like elephants that circle their young in moments of crisis. We’re wired for it.
Children suffering will always command attention. It should. That instinct is human.
But instinct can be harvested.
Our moral energy can be metastasized into anxious attention without changing the outcome. We give money, sure. We spread awareness. We keep folks in our thoughts and prayers. The efficacy of any of that remains, at best, unclear.
And then we return to the feed.
If all we can do is scroll and grind, that attention’s energy curdles. It hums without outlet.
I shudder at the notion of discussing productivity here. Especially when AI is eating all task work with no signs of slowing. Gobbling up tasks is a surefire way to leave us immobile: no errands left, no busywork left, no distraction left.
Which means discernment becomes critical.
Our choice in focus. Our choice in conscious attention.
That’s our currency. That’s our superpower.
It’s not something to be handed to an algorithmic feed. Not something to be peddled off to the fastest, flashiest bidder.
AI has democratized spectacle. Maybe it’s just in the nick of time.
Now we can generate our own Star Warses. Our own cinematic universes. Web-slinging adamantium-skeleton witches and warlocks, mutants and cryptids.
We can conjure whatever we wish to see in whatever fidelity we choose.
We can share it.
We can believe it.
We’ve unlocked our own mass hallucination machine.
We can watch anything now.
We can belong without attending.
We can witness without entering.
We can sip community the way we sip entertainment: in fragments, on our own schedule, without friction.
For a while, that can feel like connection.
Until the window closes.
Until the daily voice goes quiet.
Until the proxy disappears.
Until the distance we’d grown comfortable with becomes visible.
We are social mammals. We circle our young. We gather. We show up.
But showing up has never been automated.
AI can generate spectacle.
It cannot initiate the room.
It cannot gather your people.
It cannot stand in your place.
It cannot walk through the door for you.
When spectacle is infinite, spectatorship becomes cheap.
Initiation remains expensive.
We’ve unlocked simulation.
We’ve unlocked adjacency.
We’ve unlocked distraction.
Initiation still takes effort.
No algorithm will move first for you.
No feed will convene your voice.
No proxy will live your life.
So the question is not: What do you want to believe?
It’s not even: What do you want to see?
It’s this:
What are you waiting for?
The machine is humming.
The universes are infinite.
The buffet is endless.
Enough waiting.
The door hangs open, the flickering light spills onto our feet.
Author’s Note
This essay was written with the assistance of generative AI.
Not as a ghostwriter, and not as a replacement for lived experience — but as a conversational partner. A sharpening stone. A room in which to test phrasing and pressure.
The ideas, metaphors, and conclusions are my own. The cadence and construction were refined through dialogue with a system trained on language patterns, not lived memory.
It feels appropriate to disclose that here.
This piece wrestles directly with spectacle, automation, and the temptation to outsource participation. In drafting it, I resisted the very thing it critiques: allowing the machine to initiate for me.
AI can help structure thought. It cannot supply conviction.
If anything, working this way reinforces the thesis of the essay itself:
Initiation remains manual.
— C.W.