social contract | Evening Light

It’s early and still dark when I reach the trailhead. I am reminded that my Traveling Partner has already reminded me (twice?) to replace my headlamp so I can walk safely in the dark. I take care of that while I wait for daybreak.

[No AI is used in writing or editing this blog. This is human content for human readers.]

I set off down the trail at first light. I’m glad to be enjoying real activity in the physical world. The “quality of life” online continues to degrade as enshittification pours AI slop all over basically everything. It’s super annoying. Worse, there are real signs in everyday life, and interactions with real people, that stupid may actually be taking over. I’m not exaggerating or being unkind, I’m observing a perceivable degradation in the quality of conversations, the reduced vocabulary, and the increasing apparent difficulties regular people seem to be having with the most ordinary shit. Looking things up in a library, or reading a page of text and actually understanding it – really simple, critically useful cognitive tools are becoming less well honed. It’s honestly a bit scary.

… These will be the people we hand the world to when current leaders “age out” of governance. We should probably all be quite terrified…

I sigh to myself as I walk. I’m grateful to be able to read. Grateful to be able to write and to have the opportunity to sit down and easily write a few hundred words without ever needing (or using) an LLM or relying on AI. I’m grateful to be able to comprehend what I read and to be able to interrogate the ideas of others, and to form my own opinions and original thoughts. I don’t want to lose these abilities. As with walking – I keep writing, and reading, and talking. (I could do better with the listening, for real, that’s an underdeveloped skill I work to improve every day.)

….Lacking a crystal ball, I don’t know where the world is headed, but it’s not looking good, and that is a massive disappointment…

Another work day ahead of me. I’m fine with it. My Traveling Partner has finished up the project he’s been working on in the shop for a customer. I’m incredibly impressed and proud of him; he’s made a lot of progress in a short time. (I’ll work from the library today, and give him a chance to enjoy a proper day off. I can be a bit of a distraction. 😆)

Today feels pretty good, subjectively. I breathe, exhale, and relax. I let go of my concern and frustration with the enshittification of American culture and the sad degradation of the once amazing Internet due to corporate greed and billionaire bullshit. I know to put down the connected device(s) and go outside. I smile at a bunny hopping timidly out of the underbrush alongside the trail.

“The world” drives a lot of my anxiety. War. Racism. Sexism. Misogyny. Rudeness and incivility. Hate. Greed. The breakdown of “the social contract”, generally. A lot of these sorts of things are only within my control to the extent that I manage my own behavior to avoid this toxic shit, myself. Don’t do it. Don’t encourage it. Don’t excuse it. Don’t stand around enduring it. That’s generally the best I can do, myself, and all the rest that is outside my control? Yeah, that feeds my anxiety. That’s the piece I have to manage with the greatest care. It’s not always easy (in fact, it’s mostly not easy at all). One thing that definitely helps, a lot? Log off and walk away from the screen. Pretty much any time I “put down the Internet and walk away”, my anxiety is reduced.

… I’m not telling you what to do, just making an observation about my own experience…

AI slop definitely makes my anxiety worse. AI voices put me on edge. AI writing is poorly done to the point of being a distraction that causes me considerable stress. AI videos are ugly and strangely unnatural, and in spite of improvements in quality, generally, I find them objectionable in principle; no one needs these garbage LLMs filling our feeds with slop that isn’t worth even one moment of precious, limited mortal lifetime. I’d rather listen to an awkward actual human being doing an uncomfortably amateur read on some new channel on a topic I don’t care about at all than waste one minute of my time on slop.

Not convinced? That’s okay; I’m not trying to persuade you, I’m having my own experience. If you “don’t see any harm” in AI, maybe try asking it. No kidding. Try “list three reasons using AI for [put your most common use here] is a bad idea”. It’ll tell you. 😂

I sigh to myself and look down the path. The sky takes on soft hues of pink and pale blue. There’s a new day beginning, full of wonder and promise. Choose your adventure. Choose wisely. It’s time to begin again.

I’m sipping my coffee and thinking about social contracts – those implicit, rarely stated, seemingly “universal” silent agreements about how we behave together. The thing in the background that tells us “how rude!” when someone else breaks that contract, or we find ourselves shrugging off our own behavior (“sorry, I’m just being a bitch”, “sorry, I’m a dick sometimes”), and making an excuse. The specifics vary by region, by community, by employer, by in-group, by geography, religion, even time of year… weird, right?

…Who wrote these contracts??…

Trust me, most of us signed one before we knew anything about language at all. A rare few enter one explicitly understanding it, signing with their eyes open, fully aware of what they are agreeing to… Which is weird, right? I mean… “read the contract” is even a thing we’re told to do, when we get old enough to start signing things. How is it that, as a culture, as a global community of adult, reasoning, human beings, we haven’t done a better job of setting down clear rules for conduct and society that are more broadly accepted, and more thoroughly understood?

…Maybe we just suck at this thing called free will, competing with this other thing called agency, and both all tangled up with this bullshit we call “being successful”? I mean… we’ve got a Constitution, here in the United States. The world (by way of The United Nations) has the UN Charter, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights… both sound pretty all-encompassing, with the grave exception that a great many people don’t agree with either. So… yeah.

We have local laws, county ordinances, state laws, federal laws – and lots of people employed to enforce them, change them, write new ones, and the rest of the population following or breaking any number of those laws, every day. (Maybe we’d need fewer of them, if we had a better social contract in the first place?)

Maybe the problem is… us. We aren’t the best at “getting along”, being fairly territorial, more than a little bit delusional, prone to logical fallacies, emotional, and poorly educated (yeah, you too, college degree and all; there’s just too much to know). We get hung up on bullshit assumptions and expectations that we make up in our heads. We get angry, frustrated, sad, or depressed. We wander around feeling entitled to this or that experience, person, or object. We’re all about… us.

The moth does not understand metamorphosis.

I sit sipping my coffee. I’m hard on myself on this one. How do I live up to this committed desire to become the woman I most want to be? Who is she? How does she treat other people? How does she balance her commitments to others with adequate self-care? Where does she stand on the matter of people vs. profit? How does she live her life, moment to moment? What matters most to her? What does she not understand about getting where she wants to be in life? How does she know when to let go, and when to hold on? How does she know which questions to answer, and which ones are pure, sparkling, delicious rhetoric – intoxicating, but not nourishing?

More questions than answers on a quiet morning, and already it’s time to begin again. 🙂

Don’t Settle for Slop

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The Contract

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