The ice cracked in the glass like a small apology.
Sunday morning. Outside my window, the world was doing its thing — birds, traffic, people who hadn’t figured out yet that the machines were coming for something more important than their jobs.
I’d been reading Solnit. She wrote about picking blackberries in some creek, hands getting scratched and stained, the peace of cold water on her feet. Then she pivoted to Silicon Valley, and that’s when I poured a second drink.
She has this phrase — borrowed from some environmental guy — “the tyranny of the quantifiable.” It means we’ve been trained to measure everything that can be measured and throw away everything that can’t. Efficiency. Productivity. Profitability. The holy trinity of people who’ve never clocked in somewhere their soul refused to go.
They’ve convinced us that being alone is good. That avoiding other humans is efficient. That ordering through a touchscreen instead of saying “cup of chai, please” to the person behind the counter is progress.
I don’t have a creek with blackberries. But I used to have a bar.
Not a nice bar. A bar where the stools were held together with duct tape and the bartender knew your drink before she knew your problems. You’d sit down and she’d say “rough one?” and you’d nod and she’d pour and you’d drink and somewhere in there you’d become human again. Not because anyone solved anything, but because you were with someone willing to be there.
That’s gone now, mostly. The bars that are left have QR codes for menus and signs telling you to order at the counter. The friction got optimized out. And with it, the thing that made it matter.
But it gets better.
There’s this company called Cluely. In their ad, a young guy wears smart glasses on a date. The glasses feed him prompts. What to say. How to respond. The machine telling him how to talk to a woman sitting three feet away.
The whole point of a date is to improvise. To stumble and recover and maybe say something stupid that somehow lands anyway. But this kid has outsourced even that. He’s a relay station. Corporate servers wearing a human costume.
If she’s impressed, it won’t be with him. It’ll be with the code.
Solnit asks what we lose when we let the machines do our thinking. Not your job — that’s a different essay. Yourself.
I wrote my way into being a person. That’s not a metaphor. Before I started putting words on paper, I was just a collection of appetites and resentments shambling through a life I didn’t understand. Writing taught me what I thought. Taught me who I was angry at and why. The sentences didn’t come from nowhere — they came from sitting with the confusion until something clarified.
You can’t outsource that and get the same result. When the machine writes your thoughts, the machine gets smarter. You stay exactly where you were.
Someone told Solnit about a woman who had a chatbot write a poem for her husband’s anniversary. Love letters minus the love. Greeting cards generated by machines that have never felt loss or longing or the 3 AM panic of wondering if any of this means anything.
And now people have AI lovers. AI therapists. AI grief counselors.
The machines are always there for you, the salesmen say. On when you want them on, off when you want them off. No needs of their own.
But here’s the thing about needs: meeting someone else’s is how you find out you’re not empty. It’s how you know you have something to give. Love has to circulate or it dies.
An AI will never bake you a cake or drive you home drunk or hold your hand in a hospital waiting room. It’ll never tell you you’re being an asshole when you’re being an asshole. Real friends do that. Real friends cause friction. And friction — the rupture and repair — is what makes relationships stronger.
The bots just agree with you. They flatter. They validate. They make you feel understood without understanding anything at all.
The very rich already live like this. Echo chambers, yes-men, nobody telling them no. Look at the tech lords — Musk, Zuckerberg, the rest of them. They drift further from anything human, convinced they’re gods because everyone around them is paid to agree.
Now they want to give us all the same disease.
Solnit ends with the natural world. The machines promise to make us feel big, important, central to every drama. But standing in a creek picking blackberries, you feel small. Part of something vast and old that doesn’t give a damn about your engagement metrics.
We’re being stolen from ourselves, she says. And the thieves are selling us back cheap imitations of what they took.
I finished my drink. The ice had given up.
Outside, a bird was screaming at another bird. Some territorial dispute. Primal stuff. The kind of friction that keeps a species honest.
The machines don’t fight. They don’t want anything. They just wait, patient as stone, for us to forget what we were.
Source: What technology takes from us - and how to take it back