Tag: technology

The Lake of Honey

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

Lara was aware she was doomscrolling. Part of her wanted to throw her phone away, but she couldn’t stop watching those short videos that were made to grab her attention and keep her wanting more. Her eyes were stuck to the screen, and her thumb was programmed to ceaselessly swipe up. “I don’t want to do this anymore,” she wanted to cry. “Why can’t I do anything about it?”

It was 1:04 AM. She was in her spacious, fashionably furnished bedroom, sunk in a plush velvet sofa by the window. The sheer alabaster linen curtains were open, allowing the moonlight to invade her bedroom unimpeded. Everything in the bedroom seemed to be in its rightful place, except her. She was lying on the sofa when she should have been in bed, sleeping, dreaming, resting.

The more she scrolled, the angrier she became at herself, but every video postponed that anger another minute. Every last video she planned to watch was followed by another video, each more unfulfilling than the last. She kept wanting to watch one more, and she did. She scrolled.

Then, in the split second between the video she had just watched and the video she was about to watch, she imagined herself drowning in a lake of honey. The new video started playing, but her attention had now turned inward, and she saw herself sinking deeper into honey, and she wondered whether she could swim in honey if she were ever thrown in such a lake. She then thought, “Are the videos I’m watching supposed to be the honey I’m drowning in? I’m more like a fly stuck to a sticky flypaper.” But that thought was short-lived. She started imagining pulling herself out of the lake thanks to a rope that a good-looking stranger threw her way. The stranger looked like he was in his mid-twenties, five or so years younger than her. He was a muscular man with broad shoulders, wearing only swimming shorts. Thick veins ran down from his biceps and forearms and disappeared only when they reached his wrists. His whole body shone in the moonlight. And in that darkness, he was like the light a dying person saw at the end of the tunnel. Lara held on to the rope he threw and pulled herself out of the lake. When she reached the lakeshore, the sun replaced the moon in the sky. The moon seamlessly faded out as a hot Mediterranean summer sun faded in. The good-looking stranger extended his hand to help her stand up. “Thanks,” she said. “Welcome,” he said. She gazed into his ice-blue eyes. His face… she did not know what face to give him yet. But standing there in front of him, she felt the honey trickle down her body, and she realized she was naked, and she was naked because at that moment she desired to be… She made the man with the ice-blue eyes fulfill her wish. Her lust was the puppet master. She made him pull her towards him, made him lick all of the honey off her, and then she made him… Her phone rang, and she was pulled back into the real world where she was lying on the sofa by the window with her phone, which was now vibrating, in her right hand. Her left hand was in her underwear. The call was from an unknown number, and it was 1:09 AM, which meant it was either someone calling a wrong number or a call she did not want to answer. She wanted to return to the arms of the stranger with ice-blue eyes. She longed to go back. Before declining the call, she wondered whom it could be. She waited a minute to see if the same number would call again, but no call came. So, she allowed herself to drift back into her fantasies, and this time she gave the young man a face, the face of the bartender with the nice smile and ice-blue eyes who served her drinks two nights ago.

The Outsourcing of Thought

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

We can now outsource thinking.

For those who have never thought a single thought in their whole lives, this means they finally have access to convenient, hassle-free thinking. But even if thinking is now commodified (or made absolutely free), it’s safe to assume that a significant percentage of people will still not make use of it. Whether it’s an organic mind or an artificial one, it doesn’t matter because they intend to use neither. For these individuals, thinking is like a tool forgotten in a toolbox forgotten on a dusty shelf in the garage. It’s enough for them to know that it’s there somewhere if they ever need it, (but as long as nothing is broken, no fixing will be done). These individuals were never meant to produce thoughts, and (honestly) (by the end of the day) that’s absolutely fine. We were not all born to become theoretical physicists or philosophers. Why pretend? Nevertheless, there’s a problematic category of idiots we do need to talk about (albeit briefly) before we tackle the more substantive matters. This category of [self-made?] idiots includes the ones enjoying their newfound access to thinking, and we see them producing and sharing generic thoughts they are proud of on every online platform imaginable. What they’re sharing, however, is thought pollution, aka AI slop. And although there isn’t much we can do about it, this type of (tasteless) (public) “thinking” isn’t fine at all. These garbage producers have filled the digital universe with platitudes. Because of them, going online has become like being sucked into an intellectually sterile black hole, from which nothing escapes, not even [thoughts?]. And as a fisherman of exotic thoughts, I am bothered by this very deeply. It has become excruciatingly hard to find thinking creatures that produce original thoughts.

“In an information-rich world, most of the cost of information is the cost incurred by the recipient. It is not enough to know how much it costs to produce and transmit information; we must also know how much it costs, in terms of scarce attention, to receive it.”1 In other words, as the readers (or the consumers of content), we are the ones paying the real price. We have limited attention-credits. And as the number of formulaic and hackneyed posts on the internet increases exponentially, our precious (and finite) attention is wasted on addictive, trite, platitudinous garbage. Of course, we know there are still original posts out there somewhere (and sometimes we really want to find them), but our optimism of actually finding them keeps dying a little more every day. For instance, is it worth reading hours of empty prose until we find one good essay, story, or article? (Is infinite scrolling anything more than “attention gambling” where we gamble our attention until we come across something really worth our attention? Let us remember, fellow gamblers, that the house always wins. Life is too short to have an average screen time that exceeds two hours a day.) “Hence,” as we can see and feel, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information that might consume it.”2 Ideally, a considerate algorithm would filter the garbage and give us the gold; however, the reality is disappointing: what the algorithm thinks is gold is the garbage, and what the algorithm thinks is unworthy of our attention is more likely to be gold than what it thinks is gold. Our best option, therefore, is to limit our time online, but doing that may slowly phase us out of what Adorno and Horkheimer called the culture industry. So, it’s a catch-22.

In Schopenhauer’s time, a big but disordered library was not as useful as a small but well-arranged one because “only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power.”3 Today’s world, however, is a little different. All of us have access to the biggest (and also well-arranged) library. Like a knowledge genie who lives in your pocket, an LLM can give you whatever answer you desire (as long as you prompt it properly). At the workplace, for example, your “organic” knowledge no longer has real value; what is valuable is your knowledge-retrieving skills. If you have the skills that allow you to retrieve the right information at the right time or prompt the right action at the right time, then you are, for the time being, in a really good place. Nonetheless, Schopenhauer is not only speaking about the organization of books (aka knowledge), but about how we engage with knowledge itself. The act of thinking breaks down, stress-tests, undermines, translates, and, most importantly, records its traces in your mind, so that by the time you’re done learning, the knowledge stays with you (not as mere information, but also as a tool, which means you can now use it outside the field it was born in). Conversely, if you are merely retrieving thoughts (or information) and copy-pasting them elsewhere, the thinking process, and therefore the spirit of thought, is not being recorded in your mind. What you have, then, is a simulation of thought. “Thinking has to be kindled, as a fire is by a draught, and kept going by some kind of interest in its object, which may be an objective interest or merely a subjective one.”4 Thinking is a subject that is held in the mind and constantly revisited (until it is consumed and transformed). To outsource thinking is to give up exactly this “process”. You cease being a thinking entity and turn into an entity that merely retrieves, receives, and transmits information. Simply put, you become a body through which information passes and nothing more. At best, the information that passes through you prompts you to take certain actions and rewards you when you complete those actions. Traditionally, we used to call this mind control.

[1] Herbert A. Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” in Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, ed. Martin Greenberger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), 41.

[2] Ibid. 40-41.

[3] Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 68

[4] Ibid. 68.

This piece was first published on my Substack on March 23, 2026.

The Landfill of Knowledge: How Prompting LLMs Turned Thinking into Scavenging

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

If anything, we’ve become dumpster divers, rummaging through the garbage produced by LLMs.

Does this not tastefully describe how we’ve been generating content lately, ladies and gentlemen?

What’s a prompt? It’s a fishing net we throw into the sea of processed human knowledge.

And after the prompt comes the statistically assembled answer, which is the fishing net pulled out of the water, filled with … what? Synthesized trash (perceived as treasure by some) and mutated sea creatures.

An LLM’s answer, is it anything more than a heap of fragments probabilistically woven together to resemble an intelligible reply? No. It is just that.

Every prompt tears open a trash bag in the landfill of knowledge and spills its contents. We are scavengers, and we pick what we like and make it ours. We eat what’s edible, i.e., whatever isn’t rotten, spoiled, wilted, rancid… We’ve been “already eating from the trashcan all the time.” Of course, it may no longer be the (force-fed) ideology that we’re used to. But it’s a statistical remix of existing ideological material, compressed, processed, customized, regenerated. It tastes familiar, however, so… whatever.

Much of what we consume online today is, in fact, the work of ragpickers of ideas. They gather fragments from everywhere (most of which come from LLMs these days) and nail them together into something that resembles a thought. Every post is a shanty built from intellectual debris.

(In a world where content is produced endlessly by machines, the thinker is no longer the architect of ideas but a scavenger of fragments. Perhaps the ragpicker is the thinker of an age drowning in excess.)

Our homeless minds have embraced sloth, the most addictive drug of all (the one that is often confused with satisfaction), and now live comfortably on the spare change dropped into their paper cups. Why think?

The machines replaced us, we accepted it, we’re still pretending it hasn’t happened.

And those of you who haven’t been replaced by machines should think twice before you laugh at us. Ask yourselves why. It’s because you work for the machine.

This piece was first published on my Substack on March 4, 2026.