On this rainy Memorial Day Weekend I find myself moving from my laptop next to my chair to the couch where I have two books I am reading. One is Cyberlibertarianism, The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology by David Golumbia and The Burning God by R. F. Kuang. It is common for me to be reading one piece of fiction and one non-fiction—it is how I balance.
The reading on the couch is pretty straightforward, but the laptop next to my chair is running Claude, accomplishing a variety of side hustles on API Evangelist, APIs.io, Central Park Guide, and Poppy R Lane. Running Claude is much like the rest of the Internet, or more appropriately like a casino in Vegas, in that I am perpetually sucked into the forward motion and possibilities of what I can make happen spinning the LLM wheel.
Switching between reading fiction and non-fiction, spinning the LLM wheel, and now writing a personal story on Kin Lane, reveals the schizophrenia of my digital existence, and how the frame rate of my life is being conditioned. I find it hard to read the words in my books after being on Claude. I find it hard to stay focused on writing these words of this story as I sit down with my notebook. Words operate at an entirely different frame rate than Claude does, or my social media. You can really feel the schism between my physical and digital self in these moments.
I don’t think your average person realizes this, as they don’t read books regularly, or write about the world around them on a regular basis. The Internet is why we don’t read. Claude is why we’ll never read again. The words returned by Claude ARE NOT the same as words in my books, or even the words I write here in this post. They operate at a different frame rate. Claude is overclocked and move at a digital rate. My books and my fingers on the keyboard writing into my notebook are much slower, thoughtful, and human. Claude is not human. Social media is not human or social.
We are being conditioned. Our behavior is being changed over time. For many of us there will be no going back. For many others there will be no back to go to. I can feel what Claude is doing to me, not because I am addicted to it (it’s the wrong word). It is because I feel more comfortable using Claude than laying on the couch reading a book. And that is wrong. I can feel what Claude is extracting and taking from me. I love reading books. I love writing in my notebook, and Claude is taking that from me bit by bit, frame by frame. OK, back to reading my book. I just needed to get that out of my head.
