Yes, Precious. Show us more cat videos. More selfies. More likes. Forget the messy civic stuff — the hard conversations, the systemic rot, the inconvenient truths. Just keep scrolling. Reacting. Feeling seen.
Bread and Circuitses is a blog about modern society, in all its complicated glory. It’s about technology, and what that technology can do for us, as well as what it can do to us.
Expect equal parts humor and insight. Expect pop culture references and the occasional Lord of the Rings quote. But beneath the Gollum voice and snarky metaphors is a real concern: What does democracy even mean when your toys are hacking your brain stem?
The internet is full of advice on how to spot AI-generated images, videos, articles, newscasts, etc. But IMO, that’s entirely the wrong conversation.
Forget “How do we spot them?” We need to be talking about how society is going to function when the answer is: You can’t.
One thing you won’t find on this site is any TL;DR summaries. That’s by choice. I can see their value when browsing a site (like Reddit) where the culture is all about short-beat conversations. In that world, hitting a longer entry mid-scroll feels like hitting a bridge abutment on the Autobahn. But do we really want all our discourse to be reducible to the textual equivalent of a sound bite?
Creating online communities is easy; but doing it ethically is not.
Over the last few decades, we’ve developed many hacks and tricks - a playbook, if you like - for tempting communities of like-minded humans to gather into online echo chambers, where they can be manipulated in demographically unified buckets. So before I go too far, I need to ask myself an important question: Is blogging inherently evil? Or is it possible to thread this needle without crossing over to the dark side?