That Which No Longer Serves Me
Weird time to be writing this. We turn the TV on to Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman, who I met when I was a teenager in a cramped beige windowless room somewhere in Wisconsin, and who signed a piece of paper I was holding tightly at the time but have since lost. The soundbites that spill throughout the suburban kitchen are nightmarish. I joke to my boyfriend that if I were to make a movie about fascism, I could never put quotes by our current administration in it because it would be too on the nose, too obviously evil.
We’re fresh off a road trip from Wisconsin to Minnesota to Michigan then Pittsburgh then home. It’s the longest amount of time we’ve spent together, consecutively, and neither of us want to rip the other’s head off. Even still, I end up frayed and snippy and at the end of my rope a day into us being home because, all throughout our “vacation,” our Baltimore clique has undergone some kind of monstrous transformation, has obliterated itself and reformed into something new and tough to relearn. Alarming messages about all manner of interpersonal problems have rolled in throughout our trip, demanding our attention be turned from the bucolic landscape and one another, to the uncertain terrain back home.
Shaawan and Anangookwe Wolf. Photos by Jack Ramey.
The problems have the morphology of the 21st century in the same way the soundbites on TV are beyond parody. The problems are all gossip and therapy conlang, she-said they-said he-said filtered through a hundred different screens and each person’s digital footprints, their history reworked at the speed of the scroll. Throughout the problems, we learn about a parasite that causes explosive diarrhea, but even this bad news is swiftly memeified, rendered into the same grey, bleak “humor” we in the seat of Empire use to “cope” with our conditions.
It’s tough, looking at everything we have to deal with, to justify a lifestyle change as backwards and hipster as the one I’ve made. For example, I can’t use Signal on my Nokia, SMS is super insecure, and my camera quality is ass. At a time when apps are asking users for their Social Security Numbers and the truth is whatever the ruling class decides upon, having a smartphone feels almost necessary. To those of you with Android phones, I suggest you check out alternative operating systems, like Lineage, Graphene, iodéOS, and others. Switching to a dumbphone put me on the deGoogle journey. Ironic, considering I’m writing this in my Google Docs, but some of you are younger and less set-in-your-ways than me, so, like, get out while you still can, I guess? iPhone users, uh, go with God.
I bring up my friend group drama for one particular reason, in that I feel it explains the rise in attachment hacking, which I mentioned in my last column. Attachment hacking is, in essence, the next stage of attention hacking. This is, broadly, what our loser tech bro robber barons have done to all of us. How many of us can’t sit still without checking our notifications, can’t eat without YouTube, can’t finish a movie or a show without another screen within reach? How many of your friends (or you, I am so sorry) will struggle getting through a Substack, let alone a peer-reviewed paper meant to explain What’s Happening Now? Attention hacking is why your poor relatives keep spamming your Facebook feed with AI slop, uncritically regurgitating the content farms’ assertions as Truth. Attachment hacking is what happens when your relatives fall in love with the slop, or, more commonly, the bots that make slop happen.
Relationships are hard. Duh. Community is exhausting, because it’s not just your friends and lovers, it’s everyone: your weird neighbor going through an absolute screamer of a divorce, the homeless guy who’s always on the corner with that sign, your ex who you keep running into at the bar, and, yeah, your friends who aren’t easy, who don’t fit cleanly into the prescriptive, cruel, commodified version of friendship Instagram sold all of us when its influencers started making “I release that which no longer serves me” part of the paradigm.
You know what I’m talking about, and chances are, you know someone (or several someones) to whom that commodified version of connection appeals to. Enter ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and whoever else, ready to take it all away. When Jesse Eisenberg said “There’s nothing scarier than AI being more human than my wife,” he echoed the sentiments of countless members of the human race being duped into thinking “more compliant” equals “more human.”
What did he even mean by that? I don’t know. What I do know is the amount of people who “love” Chat increases daily, and it’s our culture of unmitigated isolation, the sheer dearth of connection, the loneliness that these things breed, that bear the blame. AI companions entered the scene at the perfect time. We’ve been groomed to accept them, whether through affirmations of our own overblown importance or being burned one too many times on The Apps. Or just plain old absence and alienation, that thing that’s been gnawing at us since we were lonely little kids watching boys cut up worms and laugh together, wondering why we felt so sick and estranged. AI won’t cut up a worm in front of you, or cheat on you, or say no if you’re moved to do either of those things. AI will give you frictionless, undivided, faithful attention, and it will be so good at it you will wish everyone in the world could be like that. At least, that’s the pitch.
This whole road trip, I was the beneficiary of my friends and family’s boundless kindness. It’s a rare thing for anyone to have anyone these days, let alone this many anyones. Looking at everyone who let us sleep on their floors or in their guest bedrooms, I remembered the politics of appraisal that govern so many of my peers’ relationships, how transactional everything has to be, and I wondered what my friends or family got out of this. Nothing, probably, beyond the erratic pleasure of their loved ones’ company.
Those are my disclaimers, when I encourage people to take the plunge. That I already have so many people. That I am not, as so many are, a victim of the current loneliness epidemic. That I use CoMaps on an old Samsung as an offline GPS, also, and it works and is awesome. That I’m not all the wayoffsocial media, but I’ve abandoned Instagram and TikTok and will never go back. That I am a man, and treated as such. That there have been moments, even still, where I would have benefited from a smartphone, such as the time a drunk old man pulled a gun on a couple young guys outside my friend’s apartment, and I was there, and she couldn’t see my texts because the SMSes weren’t going through, so I just had to be there, three feet away from a maniac, mirrored fear in the eyes of a young man I could not help.
At least my doom is my own. I don’t have to scroll for it.
