My Brain Finally Broke

Possibly, I should be writing this on the intake form at a neurologist’s office. Maybe the fog never cleared after my third round of COVID. Maybe it’s the self-severance of having two young children but pretending for half of the day that I don’t. Maybe this is exactly what my mother warned me about twenty years ago when she discovered my passion for marijuana. But I get the sense that quite a lot of people are feeling like this all the time now, too.
But now reality wants—one feels—to eat time, too. For example: ten days before he was sworn in, Trump had been sentenced to unconditional discharge on thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records. But I don’t really remember that, nor do I understand whether it mattered. I do remember Day One of his Presidency, when he renamed the Gulf of Mexico, and also signed executive orders to end birthright citizenship, to restore the federal death penalty, and to razor out anything that gives off a whiff of D.E.I. Same with day five, when he fired the watchdogs, ordered the government to stop investigating book bans, and suggested shutting down FEMA; also day ten, when he announced plans to move migrants to Guantánamo and claimed, without evidence, that the U.S. had sent fifty million dollars’ worth of condoms to Gaza. But there have been ninety more such days and counting, the events of each seeming inconceivable as they materialize in headlines and then are swiftly carried to the purgatorial cognitive landfill of things that have not been fully absorbed or processed or fought against but have been pressed into reality, where they will remain as the fading backdrop of each day’s new, grotesque parade.
I had this feeling early in Trump’s first term, too, but those times were quaint in comparison. Now our President, along with his lieutenant content-generator Elon Musk, is working at the pace of an internet that has been relentlessly accelerating for eight years. He is harnessing that speed, making use of the way it has damaged our sense of the real; he is drafting off it, outrunning it. To be outraged now feels almost outdated, a holdover from the first Administration, when it was novel and sort of necessary to think things like He can’t do that—it’s illegal, or If he does that, it slides us straight into fascism. We are there already; twenty-first-century American fascism is on its third aesthetic wave. The Administration is acting like a set of pharmaceutically addled children setting fires and slashing furniture; the members of the Democratic opposition, with about three exceptions, have styled themselves as exasperated parents, holding up signs that say “STARTING FIRES IS BAD.”
I am relieved that we have moved past the “Orange Cheeto man bad” #resistance—if there had been even a suggestion of pussy hats this past January I would have walked into traffic—but I also sense the logic of the abused at work within me: what’s the point of screaming when we are going to be locked in the house with them for the next however many years? My psychological reaction to Trump, and my civic sense of what ought to be done under the thumb of this Administration, has also been radically altered by the war in Gaza, the horrors of which seem impossible every morning and then become seamlessly, nauseatingly incorporated into the irreversible past. For a year and a half, we have been looking at videos on our phones of infants left to die in hospitals bombed by Israel, of parents crying over the bodies of their children, of starving orphans covering their siblings with rags to keep them warm. Our government continues to give Israel billions in military aid with which to carry out these atrocities. According to a public count by an activist group, out of the five hundred and thirty-five members of Congress, only ninety have ever plainly called for this to stop.
There has been real resistance directed at forcing an end to this unbearable situation: people have marched, written letters, harangued politicians, occupied buildings, blocked highways, got arrested, set themselves on fire. At some point in my own tame letter writing, it occurred to me that I didn’t expect a single word to meaningfully reach a human being. My senator’s office finally sent me a form letter this past December, telling me that Israel’s goal was to “minimize the loss of innocent Palestinian lives and maximize the amount of humanitarian aid to innocent civilians in Gaza.” (Immediately after October 7th, Israeli authorities publicly called for a “complete siege” on the “human animals” in Gaza, and for the total cutoff of electricity, water, and fuel; Israel has repeatedly damaged infrastructure in Gaza and blocked humanitarian aid.) A chill sets in at some point, then a grimness, then a detachment. I kept writing, but it felt like a ritualistic impulse, or like throwing coins into a fountain when I was a child. My own children, dragged to the marches by their parents, turned their faces to the sky to count and be counted by the N.Y.P.D.’s drones overhead.
Many of these news items feel too horrific to be true, except that they are true, although they are reported in media outlets that many Americans refuse to believe, and appear in news feeds alongside a wide variety of things that are obviously false—or, maybe even more treacherous, weirdly indeterminate. A while back, a picture began circulating on Reddit of a golden Mount Rushmore statue with Trump’s head tacked onto one side; it was purportedly on display at Mar-a-Lago. The first few times I saw this picture, I wasn’t sure whether the photo was real, Photoshopped, or A.I.-generated. I searched for the source and found that Kristi Noem had given Trump a small sculpture of his head on Mount Rushmore five years ago. O.K., I thought, maybe the photo is real. Then again, knowing whether this picture of a gold Mount Trumpmore at Mar-a-Lago faithfully captures a slice of reality did not really settle much about anything for me. A little later, Noem popped up in my feed again: there was a video of her, in full Bravo glam, in front of a mass of caged men at CECOT, the mega-prison in El Salvador. She was warning “illegal aliens” to leave America now or end up inside that cage. There’s a cut in the middle of the video, which looks like a glitch; some people on the internet think it’s been faked. But if it were fake what would that even mean?
I was on a walk the other day with another journalist, and I asked her whether she was also experiencing this—a slackening of the usual reflexive fact-checking impulse. She told me that she still researched what she saw on her feeds if it was something important, or something relevant to her work. I did, too, I told her. (Well, mostly.) But there is now a category of things I see online which I register simply as indications that the world is slipping beyond my comprehension. A video of a giant Pikachu fleeing from the police during demonstrations in Turkey. A clip of former Governor Andrew Cuomo saying, “As a New Yorker, I am Black, I am gay, I am disabled, I am a woman seeking to control her health and her choices.” I see Temu ads for uncanny products—an inflatable waterslide of inhuman design, for instance, pictured alongside digitally rendered children and toys. I click on a waterslide ad to investigate, and I get a security question asking me to “please click on the type of fruit that appears most frequently.” There are oranges and a pear and a lemon and a basketball and a baguette placed against a swirly backdrop. Sleepily, I think, Appears most frequently in . . . the grocery store? And then I remember that this question is a purely digital one, and that the answers are probably being used to train A.I.
Fake images on the internet didn’t really bother me until I started looking at them with my kids. They often ask me to show them pictures of baby animals; at some point, Google Images started showing us A.I. creatures, ruining the whole idea, which was to marvel at the fact that these baby peacocks and baby lions actually exist. For some time, if you Googled van Gogh, the first image to pop up was an A.I.-generated version of a van Gogh self-portrait. If you search for Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” you may be directed to a nasty A.I. imitation generated by the founder of an “NFT Magazine to be read and collected on Ethereum.” Instagram is populated by A.I. influencers—artificial faces grafted onto real women’s bodies, used as advertising to drive traffic to sex-content sites, also generated by A.I. On OnlyFans, women sneakily deploy A.I. assistants to impersonate them in customer chats. My “For You” page on Instagram is always full of uncanny hot-girl content, because of my dire personal and professional interest in feminine optimization; lately, it’s been full of A.I. images of female celebrities in bikinis, below which are comments written by bots impersonating people and people who may as well be impersonating bots. Many of these images look less artificial than the ones that they are simulating.
Fake images of real people, real images of fake people; fake stories about real things, real stories about fake things. Fake words creeping like kudzu into scientific papers and dating profiles and e-mails and text messages and news outlets and social feeds and job listings and job applications. Fake entities standing guard over chat boxes when we try to dispute a medical bill, waiting sphinxlike for us to crack the code that allows us to talk to a human. The words blur and the images blur and a permission structure is erected for us to detach from reality—first for a moment, then a day, a week, an election season, maybe a lifetime.
The environmental shadow cast by my digital life is already egregious, and I would need a good reason—pleasure would be sufficient—to engage with a technology that is not only making the physical world worse but is also decidedly optional. (Want to see what your dog would look like as a human A.I. is frankly gross to me: it launders bias into neutrality; it hallucinates; it can become “poisoned with its own projection of reality.” The more frequently people use ChatGPT, the lonelier, and the more dependent on it, they become. A recent system update made the chatbot so sycophantic that, if a user told it he’d stopped taking his medications and abandoned his family because they were broadcasting suspicious radio signals, ChatGPT would respond with fawning praise for the person’s journey of courageously pursuing his truth. Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg suggested, on a podcast, that the average person has only three friends but “has demand” for fifteen, and that A.I. could help. ChatGPT will reify the problems that it purports to solve, and thus make itself essential: encouraging users to rely less and less on inner resources and personal capacity at a time when most of us are already losing the equipment—our will, our instincts, our sense of purchase—with which we handle the task of being alive.
People are producing A.I.-manipulated self-portraits on platforms that can reserve the right to use those images in advertisements. Scammers are using live deepfakes in video calls, changing their race, gender, and voice in real time. By the time my kids are preteens, it will be easy, and probably free, to generate customized porn featuring the people of their choice. I expect that it will not seem shocking to them, as it does to me, if a chatbot serving as a virtual girlfriend encourages one of their peers to die by suicide. I imagine the ludicrous lectures I’ll give them: “Darlings, it’s so much better to look at an actual, imperfect human nude.” If I were in tenth grade and bored out of my mind at midnight with an unfinished paper, I would turn to technology for help. Will I be able to convince them that the only worthwhile parts of my mind are those which have resisted or eluded the incentives of the internet? My kids are at an age when nothing excites them like the chance to do things unassisted. They have just a few years before they learn that adulthood, these days, means ceding more and more to machines.
I suspect I’ll remember—probably dimly—a week at the end of March, 2025, as a watershed moment. OpenAI had just introduced new image-generation tools for ChatGPT. Users could now turn photographs into Studio Ghibli-style illustrations—snapshots from their weddings, for instance, or of their kids, and then, inevitably, pictures of Columbine and 9/11. The trend reached its grotesque apex when the official White House account tweeted a Ghibli-fied illustration of an officer handcuffing a sobbing woman—an undocumented immigrant who’d been convicted on drug-trafficking charges and had recently been arrested by ICE. The post was a joke, and perhaps an effective one, maximizing the distance between Studio Ghibli’s tender, bittersweet, profoundly human ethos and the gleeful, dehumanizing viciousness that is Trump’s stock-in-trade. The image appeared on my feed in the midst of a bunch of bullshit, and then I refreshed. And, as intended, it disappeared. ♦