from the outside, you look great

on AI and the dehumanization of the Internet

Happy Liberty playoff season! The Lynx (esp Napheesa Collier) will not make it easy for us, but I have total faith in our team. I’m writing this newsletter from Key West, Florida, where I’m currently on a writing residency for the month of October. I am very grateful that Milton did not significantly impact the island, and I’m also wishing everyone affected a safe recovery.

This edition is a dive into AI and the dehumanization of the Internet, as always, the juiciest bits from around the Web.

some housekeeping!

The legendary Chris Gayomali interviewed me about my feelgood routine for his incredible Substack where we talked about sobriety and the necessity of getting laughs off on TikTok.

I contributed a very small piece on Alvin Ailey’s relationship (read: obsession) to water for the stunning show at the Whitney Museum in New York, now through February. You can read it in the gorgeous exhibition catalog, which is also on sale in the museum’s store.

I made a cameo in Selena Gomez’s new documentary “Louder” about women in music that airs on Max later this month.

I also got to chat my friend Zaina Arafat in the next issue of Blackstar’s Seen Journal, which is curated by the visionary artist Ja’Tovia Gary. Zaina is a Palestinian-American author who is working on a nonfiction essay collection called “Our Arab,” and we talked about the dissipation of empathy online and staying motivated to write in a disintegrating media landscape.

from the outside, you look great

Earlier this week, I was trying to find time to connect with a very dear friend who lives in Paris. He couldn’t wait to hear what was new, he said, but “from the outside, you look great!” “It’s true, some things have been good,” I replied.

I knew what he meant: My September, according to social media, was a deeply delicious month. It was a flashy whirlwind of dinners, fashion week shows and parties, art openings and courtside basketball games. It’s always more fun to show that side of my life online. The knottier parts of everyday existence – the rage, endless grief, the self-doubt, the loneliness, the existential spirals, the uncertainty – I work through other places, because I know those are my most vulnerable parts. I don’t trust the opaque algorithmic entities to handle them with care, especially since I know Meta is using everything it can to train its own artificial intelligence. (There’s no way to opt out of this, btw, despite those blocks of texts you may have seen people post to their pages/stories). 

As someone who came of age online and on social media, learning how to comport myself into legibility is a familiar act. Lately, it’s more of an uncomfortable act. (There’s probably an entire essay on The Internet We Lost to write some day.) There has never been more distance between who I appear to be online and who I am in my actual life. I relish in the distance. I’m simply unwilling to try and capture the tensions, frustrations, delights, complexities of my exquisite human life on these apps. They don’t deserve it.

And it’s not even a priority anymore. The rise of Grid Zero has prompted Meta to turn its focus to DMs, and one of their new features is an AI assistant to “help” send messages. It’s a horrifying concept to me. The app already mediates our existence, reducing it to branding, professionalism, activism or some combination of those three. One of the few pleasures left are the semi-private interactions you can have with your social network – why would I want to turn over any of that to a chatbot? 

My pals Max Reade and John Herrman at New York Magazine have both been digging into the way AI is re-shaping our relationships to the Internet and social media. John writes about the intrusion of AI-generated materials into our everyday lives, from restaurant signs to background movie posters. Max writes about the rise of “slop,” which he defines as “low-rent, scammy garbage” and the low-grade economy of “sloppers,” people who flood platforms with knockoff books, articles, images and videos that they try to monetize in whatever way they can. Both efforts drown our feeds and our senses in dumb, nonsensical materials. I haven’t noticed much of it, save for this one work of staggering incomprehensibility – an AI video of Tr*mp taking ayahuasca — causing me to get curious about how the invisibilized hierarchies of the Internet are affecting the way different groups of people experience the arrival of AI.  (Of course, the tilt towards AI goes way beyond social media - as the tech industry becomes “the planet’s dominant economic force,” it is seeping into all of our systems and infrastructures, in ways we are only beginning to grasp.)

At the very heart of all of these conversations, including my own conundrum, is the larger question of what it means to be a human online. And beyond that, maybe there’s a deeper fear about the inevitability of a completely dehumanized Internet. (As Max points out, the “dead-Internet theory,” or the idea that much of the Internet is soon to be made up of bots and non-human entities, is still a ways off because generative AI still needs people to prompt it. For now.) 

Sometimes I feel embarrassed when I think about early social media. Am I remembering it right? It didn’t feel this estranged, like constantly consuming information about other people. It felt somehow more connected, more like a tool for expanding my understanding of the world and the people in it. There were more blueprints for survival, rather than my experiences of it now, which tends toward a constant reinforcement of all the ways I could be better, but aren’t.

What happens when the spaces where the vast majority of people (in the US, at least) get their news, spend time online, working and socializing starts to feel less human and perhaps as a result, less humane? There’s already evidence of the way social media normalizes hate speech and the dehumanization of large groups of people, and we can see how rampant it is in the current political landscape. The way Tr*mp talks about undocumented folks, how the relentless torrent of images of horrifically suffering Palestinians still don’t seem to register in a meaningful way. The war in Sudan, which gets zero airtime. Congo. Haiti. The execution of Marcellus Williams by the state of Missouri felt like another example of the slow leaching of humanity from our modern world. How will this get exacerbated as the digital world turns more artificially mediated and generated? Digital technology always promised the possibility of improving our reality and our ability to connect with each other by re-creating reality and consequentially adding more value to it. But has the opposite happened? Perhaps the dissociative and aspirational nature of technology is only adept at keeping us in a state of perpetual and spinning longing and desire, making it hard to care about anyone beyond ourselves because all we notice is the perceived lack within ourselves. “In what ways are we mutilating ourselves when we dissociate to cope?” asks Isabella Hammad in “Recognizing the Stranger.” “To remain human at this juncture is to remain in agony.”

It’s also interesting to notice that as the services provided by Meta start to feel less human, Mark Zuckerberg shifts his appearance to attempt to seem more so. Brendon Holder wrote a great essay on this recently, noting that while it doesn’t always work, “for a founder determined to find a way for his products to show up in the way we live, via the metaverse, a cursory understanding of people and culture — or a posture of an understanding  — is required.”

That’s where the thoughts end for now, but I’m sure I’ll come back around to these ideas soon - they’re all rippling so close to the surface.

only in 2024

The controversial 2025 Met Gala (theme - Superfine: Tailoring Black Style) will land on the exact same date that Diddy’s sex trafficking trial is scheduled to begin.

the pan drippings, aka the best bits from around the Web

Two great pieces about the meteoric rise of the W aka the League aka the WNBA. First, by ace Emma Carmichael, who writes that “the warp-speed acceleration has brought in a legion of new fans, along with an attendant carelessness—both about the league's storied and complicated past, which looks already like a shrinking image in the rearview, and its current and future crop of stars, who are being forced to adapt to new pressures and charged discourse in real time.” The second, by Tommy Craggs, deftly and accurately outlines the Caitlin Clark effect as a racial and class polarization that has led to the minimizing and absolutely horrific (but not surprising) harassment of Black players in the league. 

A spreadsheet of mental health professionals who are offering pro bono services to folks dealing with the aftermath of the hurricanes (via Julia Métraux, a reporter for Mother Jones).

Several members of my beloved kink community are offering up a hybrid offline/online series called the Power of Leather, an exploration of leather culture through the lens of art, academia, erotica and embodied knowledge. Not to be missed. 

During the first wave of the pandemic, I took a candle making class with Alysia Mazzella and learned a tremendous amount about the magic of bees and the practices of burning and renewal. She’s recently re-opened her shop and her sumptuous hand-dipped beeswax tapers are now also offered on a subscription basis. You can also send in your leftover beeswax scraps to her studio upstate and get recycled candles in return.

New GloRilla! The album is called – wait for it – GLORIOUS. danez smith gave it a glowing review on X: she “want the girls to throw ass and leave these men and change their lives and treat themselves good and hold they heads high and praise The Lord.”

As a closing meditation and thanks for reading, let me offer you the best giggle I got from TikTok this week, which was the following comment underneath a deeply unserious and hilar riff on America’s Next Top Model.

Till next time!

Channeling is a semi-regular cultural dispatch about the intersections of creativity, wellness, technology and spirituality. If you enjoyed this, consider becoming a paid subscriber, which allows for the expansion of offerings like audio and upgrades like new design features and editors. Reply to this email if you have suggestions for dream topics or feedback. As always, thank you for your energy and time.