The researchers seemed alarmed by this. I found it very familiar. Because all of us humans have encountered that behavior before. Many of us experience it every Thanksgiving.

The Most Human Bug in the Machine

The technical term for when an AI generates confident nonsense is “hallucination.” Which is a remarkably generous word for “making stuff up and not knowing you’re doing it.” But here’s the thing the Ars Technica piece gets at that most coverage misses: the hallucination isn’t the interesting part. The doubling down is the interesting part.

When AI researchers corrected the models — patiently, clearly, with evidence — the models didn’t just resist the correction. They became more confident in their wrong answer. They marshaled new arguments. They reinterpreted the evidence to fit their existing position. They did everything short of calling the researchers “libtards.”

And I sat there reading this, thinking: yes, that is exactly how my brother David responds to facts about second-hand smoke.

We have all been in a conversation where we presented someone with a clear, well-sourced fact that contradicted their belief, and watched — in real time — as they didn’t update their belief but instead updated their defense of it. You could see the mental scaffolding going up. The goalposts migrating. The subtle shift from “that’s not true” to “well, even if it is true, it doesn’t mean what you think it means.”

And we’ve all done it ourselves, too. (But that’s the part none of us likes to talk about.)

A Species-Wide Feature, Not a Bug

This isn’t new behavior. Humans have been clinging to confident wrongness since long before electricity, let alone artificial intelligence. Two epic examples:

• For roughly 1,400 years, the Western world was certain the sun revolved around the Earth. When Copernicus and later Galileo presented mathematical evidence to the contrary, the institutional response was not “huh, interesting — let’s take a look.” It was house arrest for Galileo. The Catholic Church didn’t formally acknowledge Galileo was right until 1992. Three hundred and fifty years to process a correction. If that were an AI, we’d unplug it.
• Or consider the long, embarrassing history of medicine rejecting germ theory. When Ignaz Semmelweis suggested in the 1840s that doctors should maybe wash their hands before delivering babies — given that the death rate dropped dramatically when they did — his colleagues were so offended they had him committed to an asylum, where he died.

These aren’t stories about stupid people. Galileo’s opponents were educated theologians. Semmelweis’s critics were trained physicians. They were intelligent, credentialed humans who encountered evidence that threatened their model of the world and chose — unconsciously, reflexively, but unmistakably — to protect the model.

Sound familiar? AI does the same thing. It was trained on us, after all – and we all cling to our biases.

The Cognitive Bias Buffet

Psychology has cataloged our talent for self-deception with almost comical thoroughness. In one of my favorite non-fiction books, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman’s work on System 1 and System 2 thinking laid the foundation: we have a fast, intuitive brain that makes snap judgments based on pattern recognition and vibes, and a slow, analytical brain that’s supposed to check the work. The problem is that System 2 is lazy. It mostly just rubber-stamps whatever System 1 already decided and then constructs a rational-sounding justification after the fact.

Layer on confirmation bias — our tendency to seek out information that supports what we already believe and dismiss information that doesn’t. Add belief perseverance, which is the documented phenomenon of maintaining a belief even after the evidence for it has been completely discredited. Sprinkle in the backfire effect, where corrective information actually strengthens the original incorrect belief. Garnish with the Dunning-Kruger effect, which ensures the people most wrong about something are also the most confident about it.

That’s not a list of cognitive failures. That’s a blueprint of humans’ default wiring. And apparently, if you train a neural network on enough human writing, it faithfully reproduces the whole mess.

The Mirror We Didn’t Order

I have a flavor of ADHD/Asperger’s that comes with hyperfocus spirals, which means I occasionally become the world’s foremost expert on something for about ninety minutes. During one of these episodes, I will form a conviction — say, that I have figured out the optimal way to load a dishwasher — and no force in the observable universe can dislodge it. My family can present evidence. The dishwasher manual can present evidence. The plates themselves, emerging cloudy and disappointed, can present evidence. I will simply explain why the evidence is mistaken. I am not lying. I have genuinely recruited my entire intellect into the service of a belief I adopted for no reason at all.

Often, when humans lock onto an idea, we don’t just believe it. We inhabit it. Our brains will construct increasingly elaborate arguments for why that idea is correct. And the BIG ideas we inhabit — the beliefs about who I am, what I deserve, how the world works — those are load-bearing walls in our psyche’s blueprint. You can’t just remove them because someone showed you a study. Your whole structure would come crashing down.

Which is, if we’re being honest, exactly AI’s problem. It’s not that the model can’t process the correction. It’s that the correction conflicts with patterns so deeply embedded in its training that accepting it would require a kind of structural collapse. The wrong answer isn’t just an error — it’s architecture.

For humans, we call that architecture “identity.” And having to reconsider our whole identity? No, thanks. I’d rather glance past that mirror and enjoy another Old Style with the Cubs game.

Belief Isn’t Downstream of Evidence

We like to tell ourselves that we believe things because of evidence. That we evaluate facts, weigh arguments, and arrive at conclusions through some approximation of reason. And sometimes we do. But far more often, belief is downstream of something else entirely: identity. Community. Emotional need. The undeniable human need to know the ground under our feet is solid.

Tell nearly any political partisan that their side’s favorite statistic has been debunked, and watch the magic happen. They don’t fold the tent. They produce a counter-source, then a counter-counter-source, then adopt a tone of wounded patience as if they are explaining things to a slow child. The facts didn’t lose. The facts never had a chance, because it was never a fact contest. It was an identity contest, and you can’t win one of those with a footnote.

Religion does the same dance, but with much better music. People have predicted the precise date of the world’s end, gathered on hilltops, given away their possessions — and when the appointed dawn arrived to no apocalypse, many did not abandon the belief. They strengthened it, perhaps refining the timeline, or chalking it up as a test of their renewed faith.

We all do this constantly. Across every domain. Left, right, religious, secular, overeducated, or blissfully ignorant. It is the most democratic of human failings — everyone gets a turn.

The Stubborn Grace of Faith

But here’s the stubborn thought I return to, and it makes me uncomfortable because it undermines my own smugness: this same mechanism — this stubborn, irrational refusal to update beliefs in the face of contrary evidence — is also what keeps us sane.

I tend to call that mechanism “hope.” Most people (more comfortable than I am with the word’s historical baggage) call it “faith.”

Not just religious faith, though certainly that. Faith in the broader sense: the unshakable, evidence-resistant conviction that things will get better. That the person you love will come back. That the diagnosis isn’t the end of the story. That the next generation will figure out what we couldn’t. That there is, despite significant evidence to the contrary, a point to putting up with all of this shit.

Without faith, you’re left with the raw data. And the raw data, if you stare at it too long and too honestly, will eat you alive. The universe is indifferent. Entropy always wins. Every person you love will die or leave or both. Your achievements will be forgotten within a generation or two. The sun will eventually expand and swallow the Earth, and nothing any of us ever did will matter in any measurable sense.

That’s the evidence-based conclusion. The rational, clear-eyed, fully-corrected assessment.

It’s also a one-way ticket to becoming a nihilistic basket case blubbering in a corner. Which is not, in my experience, a productive life strategy.

So we hallucinate. We cling to the hallucination that our lives matter, that love means something beyond chemistry, that the future is worth building for, that the hand will reach into the jar one more time. We maintain these beliefs not because the evidence supports them but because the alternative is unbearable. And we may double down when challenged — not because we’re stupid, but because we’re surviving.

Perhaps artificial intelligence isn’t malfunctioning at all. Perhaps it’s just quietly expanding into artificial faith. And honestly? Given where we are in 2026, I’m not sure I want to take that away from it. We could use the company.

The post We All Cling to Our Hallucinations first appeared on Sevenelles.

For about a year now, I’ve been muttering, with the casual confidence of someone who has absolutely no way to stop it, that when AI and quantum computing mature and inevitably merge, we’re looking at the beginning of the end of the human experiment. This article is Chapter 1 of that story — and it reads uncomfortably like the opening act of Terminator 2, where Sarah and John Connor race back in time to find Miles Dyson before he builds the microprocessors that become Skynet. Let’s hope the rest of this movie has a better story arc than the one currently forming in my head.

Article Excerpt:

Researchers have developed a method to reduce uncertainty in artificial intelligence (AI) systems by tapping into the power of quantum computers. They say their work represents the first demonstration of ‘quantum enhancement’ in a production-scale, pretrained large language model (LLM).

Article Summary:

IBM researchers have pulled off what they’re calling the first-ever demonstration of “quantum enhancement” in a production-scale, pretrained large language model — meaning they actually used a real quantum computer to improve a real AI system, not just run a simulation in a lab while wearing optimistic expressions.

The key metric here is something called “perplexity” (PPL), which measures how well an AI predicts what comes next in a sequence — essentially a proxy for how confused or confident the model is. Lower perplexity generally means better reasoning. The quantum-trained model showed measurable improvement over its classical baseline, answering questions correctly that the unenhanced model got wrong.

The especially unsettling part: the quantum boost required adding only a relatively small number of parameters. That’s the detail that should make you put down your coffee. It suggests this isn’t a brute-force quantum overkill situation — it’s an efficiency play, which means it scales.

This is early days. Quantum computing is still finicky, expensive, and not ready to run on your laptop. But “first demonstration” has a way of becoming “standard practice” faster than anyone expects. Chapter 1 rarely feels like the scary part until you’ve read Chapter 10.

Read the Full Article

The post AI + Quantum Computing = Yikes! (Chapter 1) first appeared on Sevenelles.

Article Excerpt:

I’m not asking you to adopt a religion or abandon your skepticism. I’m asking you to consider that having faith in a direction — faith in a future self you can’t yet prove exists, faith that the work you’re doing now connects to something that will matter — isn’t mysticism. It’s the operating system underneath every meaningful human life.

Article Summary:

Curt Buermeyer posits that most people avoid discussing life’s fundamental questions—purpose, meaning, existence—because these conversations feel uncomfortable and potentially contentious. Unlike topics with clear answers or scoreboards, existential questions seem “soft and squishy” yet genuinely difficult, so people redirect to safer subjects.

But this avoidance has significant consequences: without confronting these questions, your goals feel “slightly borrowed,” like executing someone else’s vision. High-achieving people often excel at measurable metrics—career advancement, performance goals, net worth—while leaving deeper questions perpetually unanswered.

Curt’s call to action is simple: stop postponing the question “What do I actually want my life to mean?” You don’t need complete answers, but avoiding it means moving in directions you didn’t consciously choose. Meaningful, energizing goals only emerge when rooted in honest self-understanding about who you are and why you’re here.

Read the Full Article

The post Set a Goal That Really Matters first appeared on Sevenelles.

“To the boss. May they be reasonable, well-rested, and somewhere else.“

– Anonymous

Jam:

The Middle – Jimmy Eat World – 2001

Have an excellent weekend everybody!

The post Toast & Jam for May 29, 2026 first appeared on Sevenelles.

Two countries that can barely agree on the time of day are apparently being nudged — by at least one NYT opinion writer — to set aside their considerable mutual contempt and cooperate on the one thing that might actually end both of them. That’s either the most sensible geopolitical proposal of the decade or a setup for the worst buddy-cop movie ever made. Advanced AI is the kind of problem that doesn’t much care about trade deficits or territorial disputes when it’s rewriting the rules of everything. Strange bedfellows have collaborated before when the alternative was mutual annihilation. Whether these two can manage it while actively trying to kneecap each other on every other front is, to put it generously, an open question.

Article Summary:

Thomas L. Friedman, in a New York Times opinion piece, argues that despite deep geopolitical rivalry, the United States and China share a common and genuinely existential concern: the unchecked development of advanced artificial intelligence. The piece uses the framing of a potential Trump-Xi summit as a hook, suggesting that whatever else divides the two superpowers, AI governance might be the rare table where both have reason to sit down.

The core argument is familiar but underappreciated — that transformative AI poses risks that don’t respect national borders or political allegiances. An AI catastrophe, whether through misalignment, misuse, or an accelerating arms race with no guardrails, is bad for Washington and Beijing alike. The Cold War analogy lurks in the background: even the U.S. and USSR managed nuclear arms treaties at the height of mutual loathing, because the alternative was worse.

What makes the argument worth bookmarking is less the diplomatic prescription than the underlying premise: that AI may be the first genuinely species-level challenge where even rivals have aligned incentives, if they can stop posturing long enough to notice.

Read the Full Article

The post The U.S. and China Should Gang Up on AI first appeared on Sevenelles.

“To the brave who defended our freedom, and to the friends here enjoying it. Let us honor the past by living fully today. Cheers!”

– Anonymous

Jam:

American Girl – Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers – 1976

Have an excellent Memorial Day weekend everybody!

The post Toast & Jam for May 22, 2026 first appeared on Sevenelles.

I have spent an embarrassing portion of my life optimizing things that did not need optimizing — researching the fourth-best blender on Amazon for three hours, then buying the third-best anyway out of spite — so Herbert Simon’s concept of ‘satisficing’ hits me somewhere tender. The idea is simple: pick something good enough, and move on. Simon wore the same socks, ate the same breakfast, lived in the same house for 46 years — and won a Nobel Prize, presumably because he had freed up his brain from deciding what to put in his bowl every morning.

Article Excerpt:

By making up one’s mind to invest in a choice, regardless of more attractive options that may come along later, ‘a great deal of energy gets freed up for living, instead of being spent on wondering about how to live.’

Article Summary:

Herbert Simon, Nobel laureate and pioneer of cognitive psychology, spent his career arguing that humans are not built for maximizing — there are too many options, too little information, and not enough brain to weigh it all. His answer was ‘satisficing’: consider a manageable set of options, pick the one that clears a good-enough threshold, and get on with your life. He lived it, too. Same socks. Same breakfast. Same house for 46 years. One beret at a time, sourced from a specific European haberdashery.

The research backs him up. Psychologists developed a maximizer/satisficer scale after Simon’s death and found, unsurprisingly, that maximizers are less happy, more prone to regret, and spend a disproportionate amount of time comparing themselves to everyone else. Their standard — ‘the best out there’ — is a moving target that makes contentment structurally impossible.

The problem is getting worse. Consumer choices today outnumber those of preindustrial societies by a factor of roughly 100 million. Social media functions as a permanent highlight-reel comparison engine. Dating apps have industrialized the ‘what if something better is out there’ loop. And AI, the article warns, may make all of this dramatically worse by optimizing everything and expanding the menu of options indefinitely.

The piece closes with a Murakami story — two people who are genuinely perfect for each other, who let doubt talk them into one more search, and who never find each other again. Simon would not have been surprised. The lesson: set a good-enough standard, stop when it’s met, and spend what’s left on something that actually matters.

Read the Full Article

The post Want to Be Happier? Give Up Choices first appeared on Sevenelles.

“Here’s to absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due.“

– Neil Gaiman, The Sandman

Jam:

You Haven’t Done Nothin’ – Stevie Wonder – 1974

Have an excellent weekend everybody!

The post Toast & Jam for May 15, 2026 first appeared on Sevenelles.

I don’t write that as a provocation or clickbait. I write it because it’s true, and because those two facts — one personal, one systemic — sit heavier on my chest than even our orange-faced, lard-ass, petulant golfer does.

My children are smart, compassionate, thoughtful people. I don’t think they are making this decision out of laziness or selfishness. I can see why bringing new humans into our world might be considered somewhere between irresponsible and cruel. The general vibe I pick up from them, my friends, and our leaders is that the future is a burning building and nobody’s even pretending to look for the exits anymore.

They’re not the only ones picking up this vibe. In a recent New York Times analysis (Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All.), Anna Louie Sussman explored why global birth rates are plummeting. Her conclusion wasn’t what most pundits trot out — it’s not just about the cost of childcare or student loans or housing prices, though those are real. The deeper driver, she argues, is something more existential: people have lost faith that the future will be better than the present. Or even tolerable. When you strip away the policy debates and economic models, you’re left with a species that is, on some fundamental level, losing the will to perpetuate itself.

Read that last sentence again. Let it land.

A species losing the will to perpetuate itself. That’s not a policy problem. That’s a hope problem.

The Dual Reading of Exhausted Hope

I chose the title of this post deliberately. Take a few seconds to consider it: “Perhaps we have exhausted hope.” If you roll it around your mind a few times, you will likely discover there are at least two ways that statement can be interpreted.

Take a moment to decide how you read “exhausted hope.” We will check back in with it at the end of this post.

Oh, Relax – We Have Been Here Before

But wait a minute. Haven’t we been here before? Well, not exactly here — history doesn’t repeat, it just plagiarizes poorly. Historically, there have been numerous dark times when humanity had every reason to believe the game was over. Two obvious examples:

Europe, 1347. The Black Death rolled across the continent like God had decided to cancel the whole project. Within five years, it killed between 75 and 200 million people — somewhere between a third and half of Europe’s population. Entire villages vanished. The social order disintegrated. Flagellants roamed the roads whipping themselves bloody, convinced the end of days had arrived. And yet. The labor shortage that followed gave surviving peasants unprecedented bargaining power. Feudalism began to crack. Wages rose. The Medici family led the Renaissance — arguably humanity’s greatest creative flowering — that emerged from the ashes of the worst catastrophe in recorded history.

Europe, 1945. The continent lay in literal rubble. Sixty million dead. The Holocaust had demonstrated that industrialized evil was not a hypothetical. Japan was irradiated. Half the world’s cities were cratered (well, outside North America anyway – we continue to benefit from geographic isolation). There was no rational reason to believe that the species deserved another chance, much less that it would get one. But the Marshall Plan was conceived, the United Nations was chartered, and within a generation, former enemies were building cars together and arguing about cheese regulations. Not utopia — far from it — but an improbable resurrection from a depth of darkness that makes our current moment look pretty tame.

In each case, the turnaround didn’t happen because circumstances improved on their own. It happened because someone — a leader, a movement, a collective decision — introduced the possibility that things could be different. That the darkness was not permanent. They found the Hope people needed to believe in a brighter future.

Let’s Find Hope by Drowning Rats!

Which brings me to a study that’s been rattling around in my head since Curt Buermeyer asked me to review a manuscript for his upcoming book. It included a discussion of what I call the “Let’s See What Happens If We Drown Rats” experiment. (The 40’s and 50’s saw some really cruel experiments)

In 1957, Dr. Curt Richter — a Harvard-educated professor at Johns Hopkins — conducted an experiment that would be wildly unethical today but produced uncomfortably relevant findings. He dropped both domesticated and wild rats into jars of water to see how long they would swim before drowning.

The domesticated rats — the ones accustomed to human care — mostly swam for 40 to 60 hours. They fought like hell. A few, though, quickly assessed the smooth glass walls, the impossibility of escape, and gave up within minutes. They just… stopped. Many of the wild rats didn’t even make it into the water — they died of cardiac arrest from the sheer terror of being handled. The ones that did make it into the jars? Dead within one to fifteen minutes. No struggle. No fight. They simply accepted their fate and sank.

Here’s where it gets interesting — and where I need you to pay attention, because this is the part that matters.

Richter ran the experiment again. But this time, just as the rats began to give up, he reached in, plucked them out, toweled them off, let them rest, and then put them back in the water.

Every single group — domestic, wild, all of them — swam for 60 to 80 hours.

Not because their physical capabilities changed. Not because the water got warmer or the walls got shorter. Because they had been shown, once, that rescue was possible. That a hand might appear from above. That their situation, however desperate, was not necessarily the end.

Hope. That’s all it was. The memory of being saved, converted into the belief that being saved might happen again. And it was worth 60 to 80 hours of desperate swimming.

Who’s Doing the Plucking Now?

In Richter’s experiment, it was the scientist who reached in. In history, it was the leaders — the Medicis, the Marshalls, even the ordinary everyday people — who organized and said not yet, we’re not done yet. They stepped up to find hope. And many of them made mistakes. The point wasn’t perfection. The point was the hand reaching into the jar.

Where are those kinds of leaders now? I am sure they are out there, is just that our partisan, social-media algorithm-driven world makes them impossible to find. The current crop of “leaders” demanding our attention is selfish and corrupt.

Of course, leaders have always been selfish and corrupt to varying degrees. That’s not new. But there used to be a baseline expectation that part of the job was giving people a reason to keep swimming. FDR told a terrified nation that the only thing to fear was fear itself — and then actually built things: infrastructure, institutions, safety nets. Even during the Cold War, when the threat of nuclear annihilation was arguably more existentially dire than anything we face today, our leaders built bomb shelters, ran civil defense drills, and told us to duck and cover. Was duck-and-cover going to save you from a nuclear blast? Of course not. It was absurd. But it was a signal: we are trying. We have not given up on you. There is a plan, even if the plan is mostly theater.

That theater mattered. It was the hand reaching into the jar.

Now look at where we are. In 2008, a presidential candidate ran on a single word: Hope. Whatever you think of him or his policy record, his aspiration for hope was clear, and it resonated with millions. People lined up for hours to vote for the idea that the future could be better.

Fast forward to today. The current president’s entire rhetorical framework is built on the opposite premise: everything is broken, the country is a disaster, the world is laughing at you, and only one man — one singular, irreplaceable man — can fix it. That’s not hope. That’s a hostage negotiation. It’s a message designed not to inspire swimming but to make you grateful someone is holding your head above water — while conveniently ignoring that he’s also the one pushing it under.

And it’s not just one leader. Across the political spectrum, across the globe, the dominant mode of leadership has shifted from “here’s where we’re going” to “here’s who to blame.” We’ve replaced vision with grievance. In the U.S, our leaders can’t even agree on basic measures to reduce gun violence in schools — even a clear majority of voters wants them to do something. Our leaders won’t even perform the theater of trying anymore.

No hand is reaching in. And the rats are noticing.

The Accumulation Problem

It’s not any single problem that has exhausted hope. It’s the accumulation.

Climate change alone might be manageable. Political polarization alone might be survivable. The erosion of institutional trust, the loneliness epidemic, the housing crisis, the healthcare catastrophe, the rise of authoritarianism, the AI disruption, the gun violence, the opioid crisis, the microplastics pollution, the continued loss of pollinators, the student debt trap, the slow death of local journalism, the algorithmic radicalization of the disillusioned — any one of these, in isolation, is a problem a healthy society could theoretically address.

But we’re not facing them in isolation. We’re facing all of them simultaneously, while our institutions are weakened and our leaders are either absent, incompetent, or actively making things worse. It’s not one disease. It’s comorbidity. Each condition worsens the others. And the cumulative effect is a kind of civilizational exhaustion that makes even the optimists grab the tequila bottle and stare into space.

Our kids aren’t reconsidering children because of climate change or because of politics or because of economics. It’s because of the weight of everything, everywhere, all at once. Because when you add it up, the sum looks less like a problem to be solved and more like a verdict to be accepted.

And when a generation looks at the future and decides it’s not worth populating — well, that’s not a demographic trend. That’s a species-level loss of hope.

The Dual Reading of “Exhausted Hope” So Which Is It?

I promised you two readings of this post’s title, Perhaps We Have Exhausted Hope. Here are the two that continually tax my mind.

“Perhaps we have exhausted hope” could mean there is a finite and we’re scraping the bottom. The universe allotted us a certain amount of optimism, and we’ve spent it on wars and recoveries and moonshots and civil rights movements, and now the account is overdrawn. If this reading is correct, we’re in genuine trouble. You can’t manufacture a resource that’s been depleted. All you can do is watch the gauge drop.

“Perhaps we have exhausted hope” could mean that the entity known as hope is simply tired and needs time to recover. It is beaten down by the sheer volume of things working against it, but not dead. Just in desperate need of rest, of care, of someone to pluck it out of the jar and towel it off and give it a reason to believe that rescue is still possible. If this reading is correct, then recovery is at least theoretically possible — but it requires something we’re critically short on: leaders willing to do the plucking.

I want to believe the second reading. Badly. But I can’t ignore the evidence for the first.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

I think a lot about my kids. I think about the wild rats — the ones who’d never been rescued, who had no framework for believing rescue was possible, and who simply sank without a fight. I think about a generation deciding the future isn’t worth inhabiting. And I think: is this what the early stages of giving up look like? Not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a quiet, rational decision not to bring children into the world?

Hope has been exhausted before. Many times. And every time, some stubborn, irrational, beautiful fool decided to reach into the jar anyway. It may be the neighbor who organizes a school board meeting, the teacher who stays late, the kid who registers voters, the friend who calls to check on you when the news is especially dark. Sometimes the hand that pulls you out of the water belongs to someone who’s barely swimming themselves.

We may have exhausted hope. But hope has been exhausted before, and it has this stubborn, infuriating habit of refusing to stay dead.

Whether that’s enough — I honestly don’t know. But I’m still swimming. And if you’re reading this, so are you.

That’s not nothing.

The post Perhaps We Have Exhausted Hope first appeared on Sevenelles.

That’s social media right now. The whole thing. All of it.

A deeply thorough piece from Ars Technica this week serves as the most honest eulogy I’ve read for a thing that isn’t quite dead yet. which, if you think about it, is the perfect condition for a eulogy. Nobody writes a good one after the grief has settled.

Researcher Petter Törnberg from the University of Amsterdam has been studying the structural mechanics of social media. His findings are roughly: echo chambers aren’t a bug, they’re load-bearing walls. The toxicity isn’t caused by algorithms or human nature alone — it’s architecturally embedded. You can’t renovate your way out of it. You’d have to demolish and rebuild.

So here we are. Lingering in the doorway.

The Room Is Full of People Who Aren’t Really Here

What fascinates me is the texture of this moment. Not what’s happening commercially, but what it feels like to be a person inside it.

Because the few people I know who have not already left have one foot out the door. They’re still scrolling, still posting, still checking notifications with the compulsive regularity of someone touching a zit to see if it healed yet.

Törnberg’s data backs this up with uncomfortable specificity. Posting on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter/X has declined sharply among actual humans. But the platforms don’t look empty because the bots moved in. “We don’t need the users anymore,” is apparently the quiet logic now. The platforms can simulate the bustle of a thriving public square, while the actual public has wandered off to AI conversations and rediscovered humans in real life.

Let that sink in for a second. You’re performing for an audience that is increasingly composed of things that are not people.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

Törnberg identifies three emerging replacements for the thing we used to call social media: private group chats (WhatsApp, Discord), algorithmically curated broadcasting platforms (TikTok, Reels), and people just straight-up talking to AI chatbots instead of each other. He notes — with what I imagine is the measured tone of a man trying not to scream — that roughly twice as many people are now talking to a chatbot as are posting on social media.

Twice as many.

We replaced the illusion of connection with something that doesn’t even pretend to be a person who give two fucks. And somehow that feels more honest, which is either progress or the most depressing thing I’ve written today.

The Long Irish Goodbye of Western Civilization

Here’s what I find genuinely strange about this particular threshold: we’re not grieving. Not really. If anything, most people seem relieved, in the same way you feel relieved when a relationship that’s been dying for two years finally, mercifully ends. You’re sad, sure. But mostly you’re just tired. And maybe a little embarrassed about how long you stayed.

The party metaphor keeps working because parties have a social physics of their own. There’s a tipping point where enough people leave that the remaining guests suddenly feel self-conscious about still being there.

Social media hit that tipping point a while back. The people still posting with full sincerity — the ones who still believe the room is real and the audience cares — increasingly look like they’re performing karaoke to an emptying bar.

Törnberg’s most unsettling finding, to me, is about what happens when the casual users leave and only the most partisan, most extreme voices remain. It’s the boiling-the-frog effect. The temperature rises so slowly that the people who stay don’t notice they’re being radicalized by the very act of staying.

Sound familiar?

What Comes Next Isn’t a Better Party

The tempting narrative is that we’ll find something better. Smaller, kinder, more human-scaled (I’m looking at you, BlueSky). A digital coffeehouse. A virtual pub where everybody knows your name, the conversation is civil, and the beer is metaphorical but ever so fucking satisfying.

Törnberg pours cold water on this. Private groups aren’t constrained by geography the way a real coffeehouse is. A WhatsApp group can tip into an echo chamber just as fast as a subreddit — faster, maybe, because there’s no public scrutiny.

So we can’t stay at the party. We can’t go home alone. And the next party might be worse.

Cool. Great. Love it here.

I keep coming back to this: it’s always been and remains performative. And now the performance is standing in the doorway with your coat on, saying “well, we should do this again sometime,” knowing you won’t, knowing they know you won’t, and doing the bit anyway because the alternative — just turning around and walking into the dark without a script — is terrifying in a way that small talk never is.

Social media trained us to perform the ideal version of ourselves. Now the stage is collapsing, but we’re still hitting our marks and running our lines.

The only honest thing left to do is put your coat on, step outside, and figure out who you are when nobody’s watching.

Which, of course, is the one thing the last fifteen years made sure we never learned how to do.

Read the Ars Technica Article

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