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95 essays · Since 2023 · By Charles Wilke
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2026
40 essays
What Hope Do We Have?
Making a creative life in the age of AI
Situational Awareness
The role of communal intelligence in the AI era
God shuffled his feet
We may have some catching up to do
Reckless Intelligence
On memory, belonging, and who gets to shape what we become
Strap in
Welcome to the everything era.
Incantations
On language, abstraction, and knowing what you want
Slopulism
The exaggerated death of human creativity
Baby Steps
On putting 27 billion parameters in a tiny box and immediately wanting more.
Crowd Work
The global village is breaking back into a million little pieces.
Are We Ready for the Mirror?
The first look makes us flinch. This essay is about the second.
The Stuff of Fairy Tales
A wish with a footnote.
Surviving Salem
Vilify and Deny
Scarce
Chasing Cool
Misdirected.
Where's the snooze?
The [blank] pocalypse
The apparatus feeds.
Creative Spirits
We're all mediums now
Fits and Starts
The taste of things to come
Singular Intention
Everyone gets to be the whole band now
Your Right
To the graduating class of 2026
Know Thyself
We're All Kinda Losing Our Shadows
The New Survivalism
The end game in an algorithmically optimized world
Phase shift
Alignment as Attitude
Last-Mile Thinking
Mistaking Artifact for Artistry.
Taste the toil
Welcome to the AI party
The Foundation of Craft
A Saturday morning in the noise.
Scattered Thunderstorms
Perspective is a bitch, sometimes
The Narrower Path
A Love Letter to the Holdouts
Accumulated Velocity
The treadmill didn't start with AI
Staccato. Again.
Pauses eliminated.
Stop, Collaborate and Listen
What if the monopoly on speed is cracking?
Salve for the Algorithmic Rash
Refusing the frequency in a world engineered for irritation
When Doctrine Slips
How does impunity operate in the era of revealed motives?
Waiting for Something
Sorry kid, you got the gift, but…
Dearly Beloved
We are fractured here today
our future begins
What do we do in a frictionless world?
Emotional Triage
Running circles in a world of straight lines
Confusing Clarity
What happens when the image gets so crisp that we struggle to recognize it?
After Normal
What Silence Extracts
What’s next?
On clarity, urgency, and resisting narrative acceleration
Our Loss of Discernment
On attention, consent, and choosing what we carry
2025
23 essays
What Passes Through Us
Grief Metabolized
Protect the Hollow
Our undefined luxury
The Future Starves without Wonder
But it will punish naïveté
Love at Machine Speed
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust AI
The Gods of Quiet Work
A mythic examination of satisfaction, erasure, and emotional navigation.
Hypnotic Crimes
Enter The Era of Revealed Motives
Allow, Then Define
The economics of empathy
Agency w/o Agenda
The luxury of indifference
The Hum of Humanity
Coherence dissolves conformity
Be Careful What You Wish For
A century-old fable about cursed wishes, newly relevant in the age of algorithmic fulfillment.
The Monolith Creaks
Rebuilding in the Shadow of Scale
Flattery Flatlined
The copy blinked first.
The Asking
Inquiry's intrinsic gravity
Terminal Uniqueness
Our superpower. Our eternal wellspring in the AI age.
Sharper than Cyclical
Mass market sentiment is a tricky apparatus to wrangle.
Treasure in the Mess
Become the Algorithm
Rehearsing Tomorrow
World Models, False Certainty, and the Dance of Work
The Quest for Data Dignity
Is it just pure imagination?
All the World's a Stage
So, let's make AI the Stage Manager.
Compounding Fuzziness
Acceleration does not necessarily mean optimization.
Respect the Exhale
Trust the tide of interest.
AI’s Ginsu Moment
GPT-5 Marks the Start of AI’s Artisan Era
Rubicon'd
The legend of John Henry foretells mankind's dwindling economic utility against automation.
2024
15 essays
G(ai)ve it away
The internet was never for us.
Futuristic Snake Oil
It’s always the same.
Shame to see it
Lazy, uneven adoption of advanced AI tooling only hurts those you serve.
Our return to active discovery
For the past two decades, we’ve siphoned joy from the effervescent glow of our content-delivering algorithms.
Cherish your confident ire
Don’t blink - or you’ll miss this brief window of time where you can confidently identify AI-generated work.
Is Generative AI fact or fiction? Yes.
I admit that all these tech hype cycles have been exhausting.
Value is myth
We orchestrate our lives around myths of all sizes.
The space between
Generative AI's goldmine lay in the hands of generalists.
Human excellence evaporated. What now?
As GenAI approaches generalized intelligence, we’re overdue for an introspective reckoning.
Conjured impunity
Will AI rebuke or reinforce the ethics of righteous deception?
Certainty’s whimpering end
Can we seek truth without boundary between fact and fiction?
The siege of social atomization
Commoditizing community was capitalism’s greatest theft.
Be the inquisitive imbecile
I’ve never particularly liked being clumped in with smart folks.
Our brains' storm
We are the dataset for AI.
System to honor the right copy
Human creativity is intrinsically tied to technology - the level of wizardry merely depends on the medium.
2023
17 essays
Hope for '24
I firmly believe in the transformative utility of a multimodal, invisible internet.
Jubilant compliance
Memories beat in the heart of every society.
Revel, rebel
My self-conscious social existence got trained on a fraudulent, yet simple truth: It’s easiest to fade into the background and just skate by.
Deliberate, unrelenting growth
In the lush greenery of nature, growth has a rhythm – a seasonal ebb and flow that harmonizes with the environment.
Our crossroads of community and individuality
Each week represents a computational eternity for Generative AI to dig its tendrils deeper into our everyday lives.
Letter to the Editor
For the better part of three decades, my letters to the editor have become a staple with morning coffee, I’m told.
Theater's Last Stand
As Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) raps on our door, what’s to become of our stalwart human tradition - live theater?
The Treat is the Trick
'tis the season for that technicolor parade of pop protagonists, plastic pails and polystyrene pigtails to come knocking on your door with the same basic ultimatum.
Chasing decimals in a world of endless wheels
It's tragically ironic...
Exploiting Representation
We’ve come pretty far from the early days of mass marketing.
Multitudinously Messy
Have you ever considered how long a weed lives after you pull it from the ground?
The heartbreak of the passionate employee
The corporate world calls to those with passion like a siren's song, promising fulfillment and recognition.
A dance of chemistry and physics
To the uninitiated, the multiplayer video game Rocket League might appear as a straightforward match of car soccer.
Humanity's quirky obsession
Humans are a peculiar species.
The Curious Case of our AI VP
In a turn of events that has left the nation and indeed, the entire world, flabbergasted, the United States of America has elected an Artificial Intelligence as its Vice President.
Computerized Cannibalism
The world of artificial intelligence continues to reach new and exciting horizons.
Shareholder Schadenfreude
In the glamorous world of global corporate excess, where CEO salaries often resemble phone numbers, Artificial Intelligence (AI) enters the room like an uninvited but long overdue …
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