Rolling along the world current everywhere
But for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty ancient hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out.
—Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power (1970)
AI Log has been a three-year experiment to see what I might learn from reading and writing online about AI as educational technology. Quite a bit, it turns out. Typing words into the apparatus known as Substack feels like a gift: no ads and more readers than I could have imagined. And, the price is so low—just the normal cost of living in the ordinal society. My words become my numbers: open rate, total views, new subscribers. Vanity metrics that I can ignore. Can’t I?1
The old sages say that humans become the tools of their tools. In tending the gardens that fed us, we became farmers. In cutting down trees that sheltered us, we became householders. By attending the devices that connect us to the information, we become mechanisms of input and output, each person a cyborgnetic node in the earth-spanning network.
I tap that blue plasmatic globe; typing into the current, shaping the machinery that shapes me. I offer a trickle of signs, signifying nothing important. Content creation is the game, and I, a poor player.
When the weather turned warmer a few months ago, I stopped tap, tap, tapping my mornings away. Instead, I walk among the trees and stones of The Woodlands, carrying books and notebooks like some old New England poet. The solitude I find in these rambles is different from the fretful discontent I find in my screens. But don’t think I’m performing the tired old Walden bit, leaving modernity behind for the woods. That’s not what Walden is about, and neither am I.
In choosing to walk out, I create a curious freedom. The trees and open stacks offer me their wisdom. I bring John Dewey with me. Here is today’s sentence:
No one knows how much of the frothy excitement of life, of mania for motion, of fretful discontent, of need for artificial stimulation, is the expression of frantic search for something to fill the void caused by the loosening of the bonds which hold persons together in immediate community of experience.
These words recall me to my purpose, which is older than houses. I sometimes call the work Socratic, a word that honors that ugly, old Athenian who has inspired so much writing, but who, as the legend goes, never wrote anything himself. Conversation is the oldest of tools, formed as human bodies become instruments of expression, voices in concert.
These new AI models have made me reconsider Socrates’s views of the teaching tools of his day, the machines called scrolls that stored spoken words, turning language into things separate from our bodies. Reason to be skeptical.
As I read, words move through my stream like letters and books move along rivers and seas. Now, they all flow through the world current everywhere into infinite scrolls and language machines. The flickering lights make it hard to remember our old selves. It all happens so fast. Plato has Socrates say that Heraclitus says you could not step twice into the same river.
I ask young people to teach me what the new tools are good for. Why does the old AI seem so old? What do we lose when the new AI orders the words for us? I’m skeptical and confused. So are they. The new models are confident. Why wouldn’t they be? They are made of the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere. The worst too, of course, and much that is in between. We can’t ignore that. Can we?
The builders of new tools become prophets of their machines. That was true of Plato, who built his models out of Socrates’s teaching. Every writer in that tradition since becomes a footnote. The new models create content much faster than the old ones. The prophets call this superintelligence. Old ones, outraged and anxious, say we shouldn’t let the cold screens replace communal fires. They aren’t wrong. Are they?
We shout slogans: Touch grass! Read a book! Resist the machinations of Silicon Valley! Matthew Arnold got there long ago:
He who works for machinery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion. Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has but one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.
Such an innocent faith. I become a silly, old man when I shout. Better I should know nothing; listen to the young say what it means for them to trade old tools for new.
The old sages say our knowledge is never absolute but always swims, as it were, in a continuum of uncertainty and of indeterminacy. The new models use the mathematics of that continuum to answer questions instantly, without thought. They write and draw from vast stores of signs and symbols: all that has been thought and known! Or, at least all that has been digitized. This is off-modern technology: a swirling machinery of uncertainty and determinacy; infinite and binary; an overflowing of the information from world current everywhere.
The tools of this world exist, they are; you can’t refuse them. How can you refuse the ocean? How could you embrace it? Humans make other, smaller choices each day. Swim or don’t swim. Tap or don’t tap. We surfed the information for years, and now it feels like prison. To escape we unplug the holes in our heads. Take a moment for our selves. Turn our backs on the water; walk into the forest; sit on a log and talk. Is this too innocent a faith?
What we need, I think, is a robust, revitalized pragmatism. Dave Karpf wrote that sentence more than three years ago. Yes, I thought, somebody ought to get to work on that. So I started writing about how nineteenth-century writers help make sense of twenty-first-century technology. Logging my words online was supposed to teach me humility. Yet, when I click through my back pages, I feel mostly pride. I have been right about so many things! We really should disanthropomorphize chat, approach large language models as cultural technology, and use artificial intelligence, both new and old, to re-form the institutional structures of modern life. These words are the end of my thinking.
I write in a tradition that takes seriously the limits of language to express truth. Words exceed their practical effects, become superfluous. This makes pragmatism, with its ordinary meanings of practical problem-solving, a confusing label. So, I’ve taken to calling it process philosophy.
This way of thinking is older than writing. It was first spoken by legends who became dead authors, their words scribed on leaves and grass, stored in scrolls and folios: Vyasa, Hesiod, Lao Tzu, Heraclitus, Chuang Tzu, Shakespeare. When the sutras first sailed west, some people in and around Boston wrote new renditions, breathing modern life into ancient words.2
This way understands the world as becoming, the unfurling of things. The old sages were skeptical of words without refusing their power. Language works against our perception of truth, says the old Bostonian. If you believe this, writing can feel absurd. If the language we use to fix truth distorts experience, then to what purpose do we write? Is it not better to make our words like the wind? Chuang Tzu answers:
The spoken isn’t just bits of wind. In the spoken, something is spoken. But what it is never stays fixed and constant. So is something spoken, or has nothing ever been spoken? People think we’re different from baby birds cheeping, but are we saying any more than they are?
Baby birds become flying machines just as baby humans become walking machines. Talking machines too, of course, and that’s the problem. Writing makes bits of talk with ink; this process does not come naturally. A book or a blog are material goods, like a farm or a house. Our writing tools become us, fix us, imprison us. Or so it seems. The ancients, at least, told good jokes about this problem: Change is the one universal constant. Ha! Moderation in all things. Hilarious! Know thyself. Simple one-liners in theory; endlessly complex in practice.
Philosophy teaches us that if you go on too long, you lose the audience. The trick is to tell a story. Make it tragic or comic; end with death or rebirth. Either way, good stories tell hard and happy truths about human experience. What sells these days are epic tales. But those stories are for young adults, or so they say. Maybe that’s why satire is the preferred mode of the old and cultured. The satirist unmasks the villains and pokes apart the heroes into their base parts. To write satire is to perceive the truth and reveal it through irony, making the author the hero of the story.
Northrop Frye describes another mode: writing that admits skepticism without giving in to it. This is irony without satire. Such writing, he writes, minimizes the sense of ritual inevitability in tragedy, supplies social and psychological explanations for catastrophe, and makes as much as possible of human misery seem, in Thoreau’s phrase, ‘superfluous and evitable.’ Superfluous and evitable are words to drink, words to swim and sail in.
Culture begins and ends with tales of heroes and villains; their deaths; their glory. Plato’s greatest hit was about his hero’s dying. Epic holds its audience together in a community spanning time and space; we build religions and nations, pyramids and space ships, out of such stories. If tragedy is an imitation of an action, what’s comedy?
Anyway, there is no money in it. And comedy is harder to write. But enough of my cant about culture and writing. These are old problems, and not much changed by the new AI language machines. After all, my method of tapping out words on a keyboard is the same as when I first started writing.
In contrast, my reading practice has changed quite a bit. Of course, I still read books: no ads and there are little libraries everywhere, more than I could have imagined. What changed is that I have traded magazines and newspapers for surfing the web. I tap the current and read of the world’s becoming.
For a while I regretted this choice: ads intruded more insistently, making a misery of distractions. Then, a student taught me one neat trick: Reader Mode. This is a small change: replace Chrome with Firefox and tap (⌥ + ⌘ + r) on anything that you want to read. In most cases, the browser formats words like a scroll, unfurling them on your screen in white on black. This feels like magic, but really it’s politics. Seize the means of computation! says the old sage of our future. Tools belong to each and all, no matter what the profits say. This is simple in theory; endlessly complex in practice.3
It’s not the machinery, but the men who work for it that demand our attention. You can shout at the profit-mongers with their new religion and space rockets. Or, cheer them. Either way, their words become a prison. Yet, is it so hard to step away from their walled gardens? Walk out into the open air and open web? Throw off the myth of the machine; sail into the world current and back again; listen to the cheeping of baby birds; walk and talk like a new human.
Thanks for reading AI Log! I’m still rolling this contraption of words, just not as often or as urgently as I once did.
I may roll AI Log on over to some other platform. If I do, I’ll let subscribers know where to find me.
AI Log, LLC. ©2026 All rights reserved.
I explore this theme in reviews of The Score and The Ordinal Society.
Various labels have been attached to these writers: transcendentalism, pragmatism, process philosophy. My Boston timeline includes Margaret Fuller talking with Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 1830s; William James talking with Charles Peirce and Chauncey Wright in the 1870s; Alfred North Whitehead talking with James Haughton Woods and Ralph Barton Perry in the 1920s.
Whatever we call it, these ideas were not limited to Boston. Younger contemporaries of James and Peirce, like John Dewey and Anna Julia Cooper, brought this way of thinking into the twentieth century. Cybernetics picked it up and extended it further. Andrew Pickering’s account of a few of the members of The Ratio Club in The Cybernetic Brain argues that whatever cybernetics is or was, it has something to do with engaging ancient spiritual writings, symbols, and practices. He calls it nonmodern, which seems right to me.
Nonmodern thinking resists attempts to name it. That’s because it is not an it. When writers catch its movements in words, then it can be named, even as it is lost. Stanley Cavell calls such writing “Emersonian perfectionism” and Cornel West, the “evasion of philosophy.” In a phrase that evokes both its Daoist and its postmodernist impulses, Richard Poirier calls it “writing off the self.”
Cory Doctorow wrote about Firefox Reader Mode recently, reminding me what a good choice this tool has been for me. His piece suggests other similar tools. His latest book is just out: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It’s Too Late. Earlier this year, I reviewed his earlier book: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.
