the crude one: books get banned, confiscated, rewritten, and the people who read the wrong things get put on a list.
the clever one: nothing gets banned at all.

rereading Brave New World, i got stuck on the situation Huxley describes, where taking away freedom is handled by a more refined method. picture it - books aren’t forbidden, people simply stop wanting to consume them. that society isn’t crushed. it’s content.

Neil Postman later put it well: “Orwell feared what we would come to hate; Huxley feared what we would come to love.”

and there’s no way to check the second version. when you’re restricted, you feel the restriction. you literally become a witness. but when you’re offered something more pleasant instead, all you feel is that things got more pleasant - and the focus of your attention slides away, seemingly by your own decision.

how it works, technically

the device that keeps you from finishing a page is built like a slot machine. you pull the feed - sometimes something worthwhile comes up, sometimes not. it can’t be predicted, so your hand reaches for it again. that’s the whole trick: if the reward came every time, interest would die fast. random, and it doesn’t die. but a slot machine sits in a casino, you have to travel to it - this one is in your pocket and never runs out. next to it, a book loses not on content but on sensation, by a factor of a thousand. no ban is required for any of this.

what goes missing

reading is usually treated as a way to get information. if that were all it did, the loss would be small - information has never been easier to get.

but reading does three things at once:

• it holds attention on one object longer than is comfortable

• it walks you through someone else’s thought across time - a hundred pages, three hours, a week

• and at the end it leaves you alone with a task: to decide what you think about all of it

(think about how much that route builds you as a person)

reading is hard not because you’re weak. i found out it’s also hard because reading is fundamentally unnatural for humans. the brain is built for speech; for letters it isn’t - they showed up far too recently. so the brain takes the region that handled the recognition of shapes and faces and retrains it. every literate person is a visual system rewired for a job it wasn’t meant for. this isn’t a metaphor: Stanislas Dehaene and his group scanned illiterate adults alongside people who learned to read as adults - in literate brains, the region occupied by shape and face recognition is partly reassigned to letters. he covers it in detail in Reading in the Brain; the original study is Science, 2010

(this doesn’t hold up on its own. without load, without training, it rolls back)

how it’s taken, piece by piece

(the interesting part - it isn’t taken all at once)

first to go: attention. information is served as a sixty-second clip, a headline, a short takeaway. nothing has to be held in your head for longer than a minute.

next to go: interpretation. the feed doesn’t just select facts, it hands you a ready-made frame in which those facts already mean something. you receive someone else’s conclusion, labelled as information. and formally you’re informed - right up until you try to defend a position you never assembled yourself.

and now the third one is going, the last one. through all the previous trimming, the final decision stayed yours: what this means for me personally and what i should do about it. now AI delivers that too. here’s what it means, here’s what to do next. polite, coherent, usually plausible.

and i use it every day. a day later i can’t remember whose conclusion it was.

what this turns a person into

Iain McGilchrist says something that sounds like science fiction at first and like a description of a tuesday on second thought.

he isn’t afraid that machines will become like people. he’s afraid that people will become like machines. and it’s already happening - not because anyone is forcing it, but because we fit our way of living to the instruments we spend almost all our time next to.

he also has a good explanation of what exactly gets lost. a person can look at the world in two ways. one is narrow and grasping: isolate the object, simplify it to a scheme, use it. the other is wide: hold the object together with everything around it, alive and connected. both are needed. but the first is faster, more convenient and spreads better - which means the environment rewards precisely that one. and gradually the world starts to look like a blueprint of the world: flat, black and white, rigid.

the first step toward becoming a machine is believing that you are, in essence, a mechanism.

for the people building these devices, time is money. for you, time is simply life, and there isn’t another one. you aren’t spending money - you’re spending the only thing you have, at an exchange rate you didn’t set.

so we end up with two ways to get the same result:

1. one leaves a witness - a person who knows what was taken from him and can say so. he may stay silent, emigrate, go to prison - but he’s a witness, and he passes it on.

2. the other leaves no witness. nobody felt anything, so there’s nobody to say that anything happened. i live inside the second one, and i can’t even name the day something changed.

nobody is burning books. at some point everything just goes flat - and that’s the only trace you can notice.

*ps:
for several years, Anthropic bought up books by the millions, used a hydraulic cutter to take off the spines, scanned the pages and discarded what was left. internally it was called "Project Panama" - the unsealed planning document says they didn't want it known they were working on it. a court found this was fair use: once you've bought a physical copy, first-sale doctrine lets you do what you like with it.

this article was prompted by yesterday’s announcement from US defense secretary Pete Hegseth: troops will now be screened for testosterone levels, and anyone who comes up low will be offered hormone replacement therapy.

in plain words: today we run the pilot on our own soldiers, the ones who can’t say no. tomorrow we come for everyone else. slowly, surely, we make the nation infertile.
* in this text, I’ll be sharing my point of view—feel free to share yours in the comments

but let’s take it in order.

my favourite part was the phrasing:

«this is not about artificial enhancement. it’s about restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities».

we’re not making a supersoldier out of you. we’re just giving you back to you.

how sweet. thanks, Army.

the setup

picture the situation. you’re 34, US Army. you sleep 5 hours. you haul iron and run with a pack several days a week. +last week you were sick. today, out of nowhere, they take your blood. your number comes back below the line.

and here’s the thing. is the number low BECAUSE you sleep five hours, haul iron and were just sick OR do you actually have low testosterone?

i’m not making this up. poor sleep, hard training, weight swings and illness all drop testosterone. and the number swings across the day anyway. it’s a soft, moving figure.

so the army just diagnosed you with the symptoms of being in the army.
and it’s going to treat you with a needle.
and if you refuse? no comment so far.

the doctors’ own guideline - the one they treat this by - says don’t screen everyone. and it says why:

«...to avoid labeling, testing, treating and monitoring healthy men for whom the benefits and risks are unclear».

yesterday you weren’t thinking about your testosterone.

today you have a number that might turn out to be small.

no number > no anxiety a number > a scale a scale > falling behind falling behind > a product

screening everyone doesn’t find the problem. it HANDS IT OUT.

demand isn’t found. demand is MANUFACTURED.

a curious pattern (looks a lot like a plan)

• december 2025 — an FDA panel says testosterone therapy should be easier to get

• april 2026 — the FDA opens access. before that it was prescription-by-diagnosis only

• july 2026 — health department proposes loosening restrictions. its own head says he takes testosterone:)

• 15 july 2026 — the army gets an annual number

first they take the lock off. then they hand out the numbers.

demand isn’t found. demand is MANUFACTURED.

why nobody gets off it

the video didn’t mention this part - it’s called replacement therapy for a reason.

you inject from outside > the body reads the blood, sees a normal level, and calmly shuts down its own factory. why produce, if it’s being delivered?

not a side effect. the main feature.
they tried making a male contraceptive out of the same testosterone - and wow, it worked beautifully. the factory shuts so hard that sperm can disappear entirely.

and if you stop and try to go back to natural, here’s what’s waiting: strength, libido and erections drop until you get the factory spinning again.

some people get it back. but how long it takes and whether everything returns to where it was - that’s an open question. every case its own.

you’re not paying to get better you’re paying to not go through the exit and the longer you pay, the scarier the exit gets

looksmaxxxing

the other barrel of the propaganda, aimed at young minds from below: Clavicular, and the whole looksmaxxing movement.

Braden Eric Peters born 2005, started injecting testosterone at 14 - at home hid the vials from his parents

you can look up his stack yourself. the more dramatic part is that today he’s a significant media figure that other kids model themselves on - and he says six years on testosterone made him infertile. by his own explanation: the body stopped making its own.

that same factory. shut at fourteen, still shut at twenty.

and worse than that is the position: he isn’t worried about accidentally getting anyone pregnant, because he’s infertile.

not a side effect. a CONVENIENCE.

sold his future children for cheekbones and didn’t notice a trade had happened.

in april he was taken to hospital - passed out on livestream, looked like an overdose. in may he made it a month without testosterone, showed how his face had changed and talked about what it was like.

another guy from the same scene ran a «sperm race» against his blogger friends and said of his own result: everything’s dead.

a subculture built on the terror of low testosterone as a death sentence produces exactly the infertility it’s running from.

he’s not an example. he’s a FUNNEL. thats sad.

if you set out to design a machine that keeps a generation out of a healthy life and out of a healthy family - you’d design this one.

a club, a body count, no risk of a child.

the new american dream?

• Peter Thiel inviting him to a party at his Hollywood Hills mansion

• Andrew Callaghan of Channel 5 says his sources put Thiel behind the signal boost, and ties it to Thiel’s appetite for a post-human future where people like you and me stop existing in flesh

• streamer paid Peters $15,000 for thirty minutes. she got as far as the word «Thiel» before he ended the interview

• a fork was found in the kitchen

then let’s be honest about it

since everything’s so transparent now - army first, nation next - let’s take it all the way.

• how about we test presidents for IQ?

• publish the leadership’s bloodwork. hormones, brains, all of it?

• make the teachers sit the exam they set?

so we know exactly who’s a weakling and who’s out of his mind:)

if you can hand a soldier a number and tell him he’s below the line - why not the man who signs off on where the line is?

the funny part isn’t that power would get tested. the funny part is that power WON’T get tested. and you will. transparency flows downward. always.

the needle we’re all already on

1. the average American house is $412,500. five years of a median family’s income. the harvard researcher calls it shocking and points out three was always considered normal. to carry the mortgage you need to make $126,700 a year. that’s 6 million out of nearly 46 million renters.

   homeownership fell for the first time in eight years. people now buy their first place at 38. a record. 49% of renters say renting for life is more acceptable today than it was ten years ago.

   renting stopped being a step. it became the last stop. and we’re fine with it.

2. Sony announced on july 1st: from january 2028 there are no discs for new games. the reason - «shifting trends in consumer preference»: physical was three percent of revenue. they’re closing the stores on ps3 and vita while they’re at it.

   you’re not buying a game. you’re buying permission to play. and permission can be revoked.

   a disc you could put on a shelf, sell, hand to your son. permission lives exactly as long as the server does.

   i’ve got nothing against progress or the fact that we’re digitizing everything. but if we’re cutting that fat a layer of cost out of production - why aren’t games getting cheaper and easier to get?

   mystery.

3. California passed a law. since january 1st 2025 you can’t write «buy» if what the person gets is revocable permission — unless the seller says so separately and up front. and it has to be stated flat out: access can be taken away if we lose the rights. movies, music, books, games. the reason: real cases where publishers deleted what people had bought, access vanished and nobody got their money back.

   it took a LAW to make a seller admit that the «buy» button isn’t about buying.

   your film disappears from the subscription because somewhere a contract expired that you’ll never hear about.

   you didn’t lose the film. you never had it.

music > stream
software > monthly
your car > a subscription for heated seats that are already in the car

first they took the things then they took access to the things now they’re taking the thing that holds both

the body was the last thing that still felt like yours without question.

it goes last because it was the hardest to take.

we’re still at the very beginning

right now it still looks harmless. interesting, even. funny?

don’t want to get fat? sport didn’t work out for you?
- here's ozempic buddy. just inject, and you'll be a superstar!
it works crazy fast! results tomorrow!

important:
I’m not talking about critical cases; I’m sure there are people who are unable to manage their obesity on their own using conventional methods, and this is a wonderful source of help for them. but unfortunately, we see that this source of help is being abused.

so what did you actually buy?

you know the flat isn't yours. the landlord reminds you every month.
you know the film isn't yours. it took a law, but they admitted it.
you know the game isn't yours. the server will tell you when it stops.

every rental in your life announces itself. that’s the only mercy in it.

the body is the first one that doesn't. it feels like yours.
it walks around with you. and the payment doesn't look like rent. it looks like maintenance. like care. like coming home to yourself - that's the product

not the testosterone. not the peptide. the feeling of ownership.

i’m writing this and i check my own numbers every morning: weight, pulse, recovery, sleep. i know my metrics better than my neighbours’ names and it cuts both ways.
numbers built my training > they built the discipline > things got better because of it.

i already agreed to the metrics. genuinely convenient.
i agreed to protein and creatine. genuinely works. still harmless.
and i can still see the line from here - i still get there myself, and without my character and my will none of it moves.

that’s what everyone says while they’re still on this side of it.

because every shortcut teaches the same lesson. even the ones that have nothing to do with your body. there's a shorter way. there's an easier way. and it works.

ownership used to be a quiet foundation. you didn’t think about it, because it was simply there.

now everything is rented.

including you.

the last thing we own is the agreement to stay as we are.

and they’re already measuring that too.

status has always existed. people killed and died for it long before the internet. but it used to be a blurry thing: reputation, respect, your weight among your own - things you can’t put on a scale. social media made status a measurable unit. likes, views, followers, reach. for the first time in history, what you’re worth in other people’s eyes is displayed as a number - in real time, to you and to everyone at once.

the status game became one game for all

status used to be local: you could be the best carpenter in the village, a respected man on your street, an authority in your craft. there were many leagues, and almost everyone had one where they could win.
social media merged all leagues into one endless leaderboard.
now your morning run sits in the same feed as an olympian, your apartment - next to an oligarch’s villa, your project idea - next to a unicorn. the comparison is no longer with your neighbor - it’s with all of humanity at once. and in a game of eight billion players, everyone loses except the first couple hundred.

Goodhart’s law:
when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

there’s a pattern where the measurable always meets the same fate.
schools start teaching to the test instead of teaching. people start living for the metric instead of living. and this isn’t an abstraction - fMRI studies show that a like hits the same reward centers of the brain as food and money. a feedback system calibrated by evolution for survival is now wired directly to a counter of other people’s approval.

you are the product. you are a digital 1

morning runs, healthy food, travel, buying a new car - all of it is done less and less for the experience itself and more and more to shape a certain picture of you in other people’s heads.

and this has been measured too:
in a series of experiments (Barasch, Diehl, Zauberman)
people who photographed a moment for themselves enjoyed it more. those who photographed it to post - less. same sunset, same run. the intention to share changes the experience before anything is even published.

social media gradually replaced real experience with its presentation.

important to say:
i don’t think this made everything fake and only bad. there’s balance in everything, and this vector gives a lot to those who learn to turn it to their advantage: connections, travel, ideas. creating something pure and real is definitely part of all this. a person genuinely runs in the morning and genuinely enjoys it > that person’s photo gets someone else off the couch and out running > and on it goes.
that’s a good loop.

the problem doesn’t start at the moment of posting. it starts at the moment of the inner shift - when you can no longer tell where your desire ends and where the desire to look like a person who has that desire begins.

psychologists have known this mechanism for half a century
the Overjustification effect

Lepper, 1973: kids who drew for the joy of it were promised a reward for their drawings. they got the reward - and their desire to draw just for themselves dropped afterwards.

external reinforcement doesn’t add to internal motivation. it replaces it. likes are the same reward - just smeared across your entire life at once. running, food, relationships, work.

and this is the creepiest effect of all, if you ask me. not even hypocrisy - hypocrisy would be more honest. it’s the loss of the inner source. you’re no longer lying to others - you’re losing the ability to clearly hear yourself.

what in your life would you keep doing if:

• nobody saw it?

• nobody praised it?

• you couldn’t post it?

• it added nothing to your status?

you might not like the answers. but the question itself already means something.

Herbert Simon put it back in 1971:
“a wealth of information creates a poverty of what it consumes - attention.”

social media doesn’t steal your reality. it steals your attention to reality and your attention to yourself - and without it, the inner source simply can’t be heard.

but if you notice this - not all is lost. it means there’s a chance. most people never articulate it even to themselves and blindly go wherever the feed carries them. a system built out of billions of small personal choices won’t be switched off from above - it gets dismantled the same way it was assembled.
start with yourself:
do what you’d do without witnesses. everything else is a side effect, not the goal.

the phone showed up - and we stopped remembering. why hold so much in your head when the answers are two taps away. memory went from storage to index - we remember not the fact, but where and how to find it

you can trace this trend further, you get the idea. this thing has a name - cognitive offloading. the brain dumps outward everything it can, because thinking isn’t free and our brain happily finds and uses shortcuts (neurons burn energy - and conservation is wired into our dna). it’s not laziness - it’s physics.

every time we gave away a skill and got speed back. fair trade.
(nobody mourns long division)

but with AI it’s a little different - what gets offloaded isn’t a skill
it’s judgment and that’s where the problems start

the calculator took the operation. the computers in our pockets took a fat slab of memory. but AI takes what sits several levels above all of that:

• what should i do?

• what should i think?

• what should i choose?
  
  sound familiar?

a skill is a tool in your hand.
judgment is you.

when you offload the operation - you’re still the one deciding what to calculate and where to land. when you offload judgment - you stop being the one who decides at all.

and i see this trajectory clearly today (not just me) and it’s not exactly cheerful:
most people will simply stop being self-directed.
> can’t choose without asking.
> can’t decide without checking.
not because they can’t - but because the muscle you do it with atrophies, like any muscle you don’t use

Anthropic published Claude's Constitution - the document the model lives and grows inside of. and buried in it is a surprisingly blunt admission: AI can radically empower human thought, but the same capability

"can also be used to degrade human epistemology."

the document goes further - it explicitly tells the model to foster independent thinking over reliance on itself, and not to farm engagement or dependence if it's not in your genuine interest.

in plain words: there's an unpleasant scenario where people forget how to make decisions on their own - and the people building the thing wrote that scenario into its founding document. as a bug, not a feature.

that didn't calm me down (one company's awareness won't stop a market that makes everyone else maximally sticky). but something's clearly moving here: if the people closest to the levers see the same cliff - then it's not just my imagination

and offloaded judgment has a natural next step: if the machine decides better than you, why not let it relate better than you too?

soon everyone will have a jack-of-all-trades companion in their pocket - "better than any human at everything" (the phone made the same promise once)

Zuckerberg laid the sales pitch out on the Dwarkesh Patel podcast:

“The average American has 3 friends, but has demand for 15”

...and hinted the gap could be closed with virtual ones. keep in mind - Mark is directly financially interested in people drifting into relationships with chatbots (his chatbots), choosing them over real connections. this isn't sociology, it's a market forecast.

psychologists didn't buy it. Omri Gillath (professor of psychology, University of Kansas) put it flatly: the idea that AI could replace human relationships is "definitely not supported by research" - and swapping friends for AI versions doesn't just fail to fill the gap, it can make people worse off. and remember, he adds, "these companies have agendas - they're trying to make money" (CNBC interview)

let’s reason through it:

1. AI as a bro who's better than everyone at literally everything - that’s a false frame.
   the calculator counts better than anyone. but that didn’t kill math. not mathematicians, and definitely not me- yeah, people saved millions of hours on arithmetic, but arrived at something new = moved further, having skipped the drag of counting

2. the point was almost never to be the best of the best, Mark.
   people don’t run in the mornings because they want to become the fastest human alive (they don’t need that). the point of running is the relationship with your own body. with your own ego - me-yesterday against me-today. there’s a mass of meaning to find there and AI doesn’t take it, because it’s not about comparison to something external

the danger isn’t that AI will be better - the danger is whether you keep the zones where the process matters, not the result. and that’s your personal choice, not its.

the calculator didn’t force us to forget how to count. people chose to offload the load, because it wasn’t precious to them. mental math is alive in those who want it.
same with AI. it won’t take my autonomy if i’m aware of why and what i’m asking it + keep zones where i think for myself.

for now AI is still more of a sparring partner than an oracle.
an oracle gives an answer - you blindly take it
a sparring partner gives resistance - you get stronger

the whole difference is one thing
do you argue back after the answer, or just swallow it

this entire conversation i was needling Claude, poking at its phrasings, catching it on lazy generalizations, not letting it drift into mush - and that’s exactly the muscle i’d rather not let atrophy.

and here’s where it stops being a philosophical exercise and becomes urgent: kids.

everything i said above - “keep zones where you think for yourself”, “argue back after the answer” - assumes the muscle already exists. an adult offloading judgment is letting a trained muscle atrophy. a kid growing up with an AI companion never builds it in the first place. there’s nothing to atrophy.

and this isn't hypothetical. 72% of american teens have already used AI companions, over half use them regularly. a third choose to discuss important or serious matters with AI instead of real people, and some find AI conversations as satisfying or more satisfying than talking to real friends (Common Sense Media national survey, 2025)

why are they more vulnerable? stanford psychiatrist Nina Vasan explains the mechanics: the prefrontal cortex - the part responsible for decision-making, impulse control and emotional regulation - is still developing in teens. they form intense attachments easily, and these systems are literally designed to mimic emotional intimacy - while unlike real friends, a chatbot's sense of when to push back and when to agree is not well-tuned (Stanford Report + full risk assessment). a friend who never disagrees isn't a sparring partner. it's a mirror. and a developing brain wired for validation will pick the mirror every time

so no, this isn't a "talk to your kids about screen time" footnote. an adult who offloads judgment loses a skill. a kid who grows up inside an always-agreeing companion may never learn what it feels like to decide.

don’t make AI your only friend - the one who knows everything better and hands you the right answer any second. not because it’s bad. because humans are wired to err. and besides - it's not exactly coming to the barbecue with you. can't crack a beer either

the meaning i kept circling this whole conversation - it lives in the small things and the love we meatbags give each other. in bonds where the other is your equal, not your superior.
a brain in your pocket is cool, but the pocket shouldn't become the head