Why would I? The grocery store has at least half an aisle of them – Bertoli, Ragu, Rao’s. I barely considered what was in a pasta sauce aside from whatever was on the bottle. Tomatoes, obviously. Three cheeses? Roasted garlic? Whatever the hell Garden Combo is?

WHY IS IT CHUNKY, PREGO?

Though I’ve always liked cooking, it wasn’t until the pandemic that I started questioning my own culinary blind spots. I prided myself on being a healthy, resourceful cook, but… I’d never made my own bread. Or pasta. Or broth. Or cake not from a box. At some point, every recipe dead-ended with an ingredient that someone else had already made.

It wasn’t just me. I’ve witnessed folks dump cans of mushroom soup on chicken and make whole desserts by assembling a handful of pre-made items into a Pyrex dish. Reader, I’m not judging it.

What changed my perspective was the work of food journalist Laura Shapiro and her books “What She Ate” and “Something from the Oven.” The latter, in particular, chronicles the post-World War II industrialization of food – how technological advancements around canning, freezing, and dehydrating suddenly needed a market when the war ended. The answer was an all-out campaign to convince women that cooking was a drudgery and convenience was freedom.

“What the industry had to do was persuade millions of Americans to develop a lasting taste for meals that were a lot like field rations,” Shapiro wrote.

And when that didn’t exactly work – because, uh, gross – the food industry switched tactics, marketing processed and pre-packaged food as shortcuts. Shave some of the work off that beef bourguignon by using a can of Campbell’s condensed French onion soup.

Along the way, American home cooking in the mid-century took a hit that I wonder if it ever recovered from.

Being three generations removed from all that, I exist at a point where a lot of culinary skills just died out in the intervening years, and without much ceremony.

Even with the unusually high level of from-scratch cooking my family ate at home, still, Paul Newman peers at me from the label of a jar of Sockarooni and whispers, “Shhhhhh, don’t question it.”

So, I think about mid-century cooking regularly. These days, it pops into my head more frequently in discussions of AI and skills atrophy – the idea that if we outsource everything to AI, we as humans might forget how to do certain skills or tasks on our own.

Like think.

And if we’re in these early days, how do we make sure a bunch of kids born 40 years from now care enough to learn to make a pasta sauce?

Use it or lose it

When I explained my grand metaphor to Brian Stone, associate professor in the Department of Psychological Science at Boise State University, he astutely said, “the vibe coding of food.”

Bingo.

For the unfamiliar, vibe coding refers to the practice of using an AI chatbot and natural language prompts to code software.

There’s great appeal in the democratization of a skill that’s been out of reach for so many.

Vibe coding also stands to demolish people’s motivation to learn to code the old-fashioned way. What’s the point of killing your eyesight looking for errant semicolons? But also, what happens when few actually know how to code in the future?

“I don’t know what it’s going to look like if we’re skipping or graduating a generation of students, who maybe a large number of them didn’t get the scaffolding and training and cognitive workout that they need,” Stone said.

When Stone explains the value of a cognitive workout to his students, he uses the metaphor of the gym. Imagine getting a robot to lift your weights for you.

Eventually, all you can do is press a button.

Your brain on tech (with apologies to that Rachael Leigh Cook PSA from ‘97)

To be sure, this isn’t the first time people have wrung their hands over the deleterious effect of technology on our brains. Folks fretted over the calculator, after all.

Though no substantial harm came of calculator usage, that doesn’t mean worries are misplaced.

A 2011 study talked about what’s come to be known as the “Google effect,” which holds that when we know information is available online, we don’t remember it as well. The issue with that is if we’re not training our memory, those neural networks atrophy.

Combine that with a weakened capacity to concentrate, and cognitive abilities slide.

As chatbots in the mainstream are still fairly new, research is just beginning. A growing number of studies are already making findings like:

• Participants who used AI to write essays had more trouble remembering what they had written.

• Students who used ChatGPT for learning performed worse on similar tasks later when they couldn’t use the chatbot.

• Endoscopists who used AI on radiology reports got worse at finding tumors.

As researcher Ioan Roxin, professor emeritus at Marie et Louis Pasteur University, wrote in a July 2025 “Polytechnique Insights” piece, “Generative AI have everything it takes to make us dependent on it.”

The threat of deskilling raises the question of whether humans will have the cognitive skills to recognize when AI screws up.

“Humans will not necessarily be good at that human in the loop role, because it’s so automatic for us to become complacent, to get lazy when we have automation,” Stone said.

There’s another potential effect of AI. It’s what Stone described as a “flattening,” and it’s something that actually fits well with the post-war food theme.

A study published in “Nature Human Behavior” instructed participants to brainstorm ideas for a toy. Those who used AI produced less diverse ideas than those who didn’t – 94% of ideas from folks who used ChatGPT shared “overlapping concepts.”

There’s only so good jarred pasta sauce gets.

“There’s just less art to it, or you have to work harder to add art back to it,” Stone said.

Yes, but

To be clear, I’m not advocating for going back to the studs on everything. I appreciate living in a world where the first step of sweeping the floor isn’t making the broom.

And look. No one needs to spend days boiling animal bones to make Jello. (If you want a detailed history of gelatine, WHICH I THINK YOU DO, check out this episode of the Gastropod podcast.)

I also don’t want to ignore the fact that some people just don’t like to cook, or don’t have the time. Mid-century, women were in the workforce like never before – what’s wrong with a little Chef Boyardee after a grueling day when you’re still expected to tend house?

Mmm, microwavable patriarchy.

And to state the obvious, there are a hell of a lot of people out there who know how to cook and bake. There are Michelin-star restaurants and 16 seasons of “The Great British Bake Off.”

But what do you do that one night when the pasta is almost done and you just realized you’re out of sauce?

Pasta sauce, in a pinch

As a matter of coincidence, this is exactly what happened to me one night last week. My Costco ravioli (like I said – no judgment here) was almost cooked, and I had nothing to put on it. So, I grabbed my emergency can of diced tomatoes, along with the olive oil, garlic, and a bunch of herbs, and within a few minutes had a pasta sauce.

It was tasty. Maybe especially so because 1) I’d saved myself from naked ravioli, 2) nabbed a slick closer for the newsletter.

Don’t look at me with those eyes, Paul Newman.

As is the case with so much of life, any one of us has to make choices about what’s worth our time and attention. And in the case of AI, do we let it become an easy way out, or wrestle it into something that helps us be better and more effective?

Maybe we occasionally say to ourselves – you know what? I can do this on my own.

Bon appétit.

This month’s (P)doom: < 7%.

– Erin

Jetsam: My thanks to everyone who has read, shared, commented, or reached out in some way in the past year-ish since I started Silicon Sea. It’s been a tremendous amount of fun writing about tech and culture again. I’ve been a bit down the migraine rabbit hole this fall, so I’m not making any big guarantees for my publishing cadence in 2026, but certainly I’ll be back next year.

Wishing you all a Merry Whatever. And if you don’t know how to make a simple tomato sauce, holler at me.

It’s what happens when you turn to a chatbot for help asking your roommate to pick up their dirty socks, and get this:

“Hey, sock ninja, the laundry basket is that way!”

A line like that has all the contrived enthusiasm of a dead-eyed camp counsellor who’s been working one summer too many, but just won’t move on.

At the end of August, Meta-owned messaging platform WhatsApp introduced an AI-driven feature called Writing Help, which supplies texters with possible responses to messages in a handful of styles, including professional, supportive and funny.

“Sometimes you know what you want to say, but just need a little help with how to say it,” the blog post said.

Sure. But there’s not a soul in my contacts list who would use the phrase “sock ninja.” I’d like to think no reasonable human would.

As companies rush to stuff AI into their products, WhatsApp is only the latest platform to make such an integration. Google Gemini already refines your emails, if you want. You don’t even need a devoted feature – just pull up ChatGPT whenever there’s something you need to say that you don’t know how to say on your own.

While these types of AI tools might seem like a welcome escape hatch when times get awkward or uncomfortable, they’re also another way in which tech inserts itself into our relationships – and maybe even shelters us from doing the good work of thinking and communicating.

The AI ick

Tales of suspected AI use during sensitive communications are popping up all over the internet.

Over the summer, a Redditor posed the question, “Did my mother use ChatGPT to write me a text of support on the morning of my divorce?” A screenshot of the text included such pearls as “Today is a turning point — one that leads you toward more peace, healing, and happiness.”

The Redditor wrote, “It still just makes me feel weird.”

Just a few weeks ago, “The Cut” ran a lengthy story chronicling how AI is making online dating somehow even worse, telling stories of daters who quickly realized they were having full conversations with other daters hiding behind ChatGPT.

ARE THE FISH PICS EVEN REAL ANYMORE??

There’s actually a name for what’s happening in these instances: AI-mediated communication. It’s the idea that now, between us and other people, there’s a layer of AI.

“It affects things, but how it affects is different, weird, varied,” said Dominic DiFranzo, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Lehigh University, where he studies human-computer interaction.

Even before ChatGPT burst onto the scene nearly three years ago, researchers like DiFranzo started studying the effect of AI on communication.

In 2023, DiFranzo and others published a study looking at how smart replies changed the way people not only interacted with each other, but also perceived each other. To be fair, there were actually some benefits to using the smart replies – communication got speedier, more positive in tone and conversational partners tended to view each other as more cooperative.

What was also clear from the study was that when people suspected the person they were communicating with was using AI, they didn’t like it, and evaluated them negatively – even if they weren’t using the smart replies.

It gave people the ick. DiFranzo said there are a few reasons that might be the case.

For one, there’s a transparency issue. Discomfort peaks when people think there’s a chance AI was involved, but they don’t know for sure.

In a similar 2019 study from Cornell University and Stanford University, researchers showed participants Airbnb listings created by humans, AI or a mix of the two. When participants weren’t sure which was which, they distrusted the ones they thought might be AI more.

There’s also the perception that using AI to craft a message is impersonal, which isn’t even really an issue exclusive to AI. I’m old enough to remember people complaining that e-cards just weren’t the same as receiving a card in the mail. Certain communication methods seem low on both effort and care.

It’s not just about the energy expenditure of driving to the post office to buy a stamp. There are privacy concerns, too.

In other words: Did you really just upload the gnarly details of my divorce into an LLM?

“There’s now a third party involved in this relationship or communication. We might not have felt that in the same way before,” DiFranzo said.

The subtext of texting

Technology has been worming its way into our communications for much longer than the last three years.

The study of computer-mediated communication (CMC) dates back to the 1980s and covers everything from the bulletin board systems of yore to social media.

“​​It’s not explicitly the technology,” DiFranzo said, “It’s how we’re using it, what our expectations are, how these different social norms are created, how they’re adapted, how they’re enforced and captured by people.” It’s also how they get reinforced and change over time.

Whether you’re conscious of it or not, you probably don’t text the same way you email. Your texts are probably less formal, and you might respond faster.

And you probably don’t text the same way you did when you first got a cellphone.

In high school 20 years ago, we debated whether it was OK for someone to ask you out via text. It was a resounding NOPE from me.

Years later, I heard someone make an argument for dating sites, saying they leveled the playing field for folks who didn’t have the immediate charm and obvious good looks to approach strangers and nab numbers in the wild.

A moment of silence for those with no game.

All of that speaks to DiFranzo’s point that this field is always evolving. Maybe one day, all this fretting about the value of writing your own texts might not seem so important.

Writing as thinking

Unless you’re a diehard AI fan, it’s easy for conversations about the technology to veer into the fear of loss.

You can look at AI writing help as a gift for when your own abilities fall short – or another wave eroding the experience of being a human among humans.

We crave authenticity and intimacy. But we’re also attracted to the promise of a frictionless life.

It’s hard to know what to say to a friend who has lost a parent. I’ve sat staring into the middle distance more than a few times, struggling to come up with something that would serve as even the briefest of balms.

I’d argue, though, there is value in trying to connect with that person, in peeking into the corners of your own empathy in hopes of turning up a few good words.

Even if there’s no tragedy or strife to contend with, the practice of writing is important for our brains.

“You’re clarifying your thoughts,” DiFranzo said.

Journalist Derek Thompson conveyed a similar sentiment in a Substack post this week, called “The End of Thinking.”

“The demise of writing matters, because writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking,” Thompson said.

Beyond the loss of critical thought, I imagine a world where everyone’s AI helpers talk to each other for everything, like some dark twist on the old “have your people call my people” joke. It’s a future where social distancing never really ended.

When to stop generating

To be sure, there are likely situations where having AI crank out some communication is fine. My dermatologist was jazzed about using ChatGPT for insurance pre-authorization letters. I don’t fault him for that.

Surely, there’s room for balance – maybe a suggested phrase or two spurs an idea of your own.

The answer to how far to go in using AI in personal communications might be as simple as this: “If you wouldn’t like AI messages from others, maybe you second-guess yourself. The Golden Rule should always apply,” DiFranzo said.

If you’re super keen on using AI responses, maybe it’s worth asking your friends and family how they feel about them. Establish some rules and guidelines.

For example, please never let AI call me a sock ninja.

Features like AI writing help come at a time when it’s increasingly tempting to outsource… everything. Once again, we’re faced with deciding what is actually worth our time and attention.

Not only that, but when and how we choose to move through the world without an insulating barrier of AI around us.

Chatbot cringe is everywhere, but as DiFranzo put it: “Even if your voice or your writing isn’t good, it’s still you.”

This month’s (P)doom: < 8%.

– Erin

Can’t a gal fantasize about running away into the woods without having to stare at mangled light fixtures and physics-defying staircases inside what would otherwise be a delightful little A-frame?

In a cruel twist, the algorithm understands I’m looking for peace, privacy, and pines, and it serves the opposite, disguised as forested escapism.

We’ve all encountered AI slop, whether we know it or not. It’s low-quality, meaningless AI-generated content that’s taking over the internet like an invasive weed – the videos of cutting glass fruit and pictures of Blake Shelton rescuing children from floodwaters.

Slop pops up everywhere. And while I fret about its implications for misinformation and disinformation, I also hate how it’s eroding the casual experience of the internet.

“[It’s] almost antithetical to what the web used to be,” said Paul Booth, associate dean at DePaul University’s College of Communication, and usually my first call when I want to talk about internet stuff. “It used to be very much user-directed.”

You’ve likely heard complaints about how Pinterest is crawling with slop. Folks freaked out over that AI band, The Velvet Sundown, that racked up 1 million plays on Spotify. On Facebook, you might have seen slop images of movie posters or recipes – shit so improbable, you can hardly fathom anyone believes it. And yet, someone’s aunt is on the loose, typing “looks good!” under a recipe for a Northern Lights Cheesecake Candy Glow.

Brenda, the damn cheesecake is GLOWING.

Nowhere is safe. One analysis suggests that about 54% of long-form LinkedIn posts are likely AI-generated.

Here’s what fully losing my mind taught me about B2B marketing.

A few weeks back, my TikTok FYP was filled with people unnerved and uncomfortable because they’d seen a slop video of bunnies on a trampoline, and they didn’t question it. They didn’t think they had to.

Real enough

As we muddle through the AI revolution, some of the philosophical conversation revolves around the value of human-made works, be they poetry, music or whatever else.

It’s an extension of a long-standing argument about the role of intent in art.

With slop like the bunnies video, it might be amusing for a minute, but it’s also pointless. It feels dangerous to have reality-bending content constantly washing over us, unwittingly, partly because we are accustomed to consuming so much of the internet that way – passively, casually, uncritically. And sometimes, just for distraction.

Booth pointed out that it’s in these moments that we ignore or turn off our critical brains. Constant vigilance is exhausting, but perhaps increasingly necessary.

“Spotting errors in AI images requires noticing small details, but the human visual system isn’t wired for that when you’re casually scrolling. Instead, while online, people take in the gist of what they’re viewing and can overlook subtle inconsistencies,” wrote Arryn Robbins, associate professor of psychology at The University of Richmond, in an April piece in The Conversation.

Robbins, like me, ran into tiny home slop.

If you’re a halfway savvy person, you probably know to watch out for inflammatory political posts – content that’s designed to elicit an emotional reaction, that clouds your judgment and drives you to share in a red-eyed rage.

But the bunnies? Does it matter if you don’t realize the bunnies are fake?

I say yes, and that it has to matter to us because it doesn’t seem to matter to the folks running the AI platforms.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life on the internet, face down in a trough of AI slop.

In an August interview with the show “Huge if True,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made an argument that all media is a little real and a little not real. We know there’s all kinds of processing happening on our phones when we take a photo, but we count our photos as real anyway.

“I think the threshold for how real does it have to be to be considered real will just keep moving,” Altman said.

Lol wut

Reality on a sliding scale? A societal acceptance of “real enough?”

Look. It’s been a rough decade for truth, but this feels like the final boss of the deterioration of our shared reality.

Who wants this?

One of my persistent questions about AI slop is just: why?

The answer is, in part, money. There’s an economy tied to generating income from slop.

NPR recently interviewed a 21-year-old slop creator in the Philippines who earned $9,000 in May from Google’s AdSense program for making videos about a kitten and his dad. For the creator, $9,000 is more than a year’s salary at an entry-level job.

There are scams afoot, too.

But there’s another, more insidious theory.

“I have said that the AI slop endgame, for social media companies, is creating a hyper personalized feed full of highly specific content about anything one could possibly imagine,” said 404 Media cofounder Jason Koebler in a July piece.

It’s a nauseating thought. We already know social media creates algorithmically-bound echochambers. It’s often hard enough for people to break out of their bubbles. What if you could waste away under the opiate effect of whatever endlessly regenerating niche content the algorithm knows you can’t resist?

That water pooling at your feet is the tears of legions of journalists and disinformation researchers.

Shrimp Jesus, take the wheel

At the risk of sounding entirely unserious and naive, I want a dumb, human-made internet where I don’t have to be hyper vigilant all the time. One of the great joys of the early days of platforms like YouTube was that they were a window into the creativity and the genuine weirdness of the people posting – of their idiosyncratic humanity.

The internet was never a safe place, but you could find your comfortable corner.

To be fair, there are selections of slop that can be entertaining. I still don’t really understand 2024’s Shrimp Jesus, but I thought it was funny. And my students explained to me that certain AI memes are intentionally inscrutable – I can accept that times have changed from the era of Socially Awkward Penguin and Condescending Wonka.

Still, it feels like the casual scroll will never be the same.

Living offline, again

If the internet does turn into an uninhabitable wasteland, the best option might be leaving. A July article in The Atlantic titled “AI Slop Might Finally Cure Our Internet Addiction” posited exactly this – that people frustrated by AI and AI-mediated experiences will have no choice but to pursue in-person, human interactions

“Tech companies may assume that the public is so habituated – or even addicted – to doing everything online that people will put up with any amount of risk or unpleasantness to continue to transact business and amuse themselves on the internet,” writer Emma Marris said in the piece.

If you don’t like AI slop, where can you go so that you either don’t see it or see it less?

Booth looks for opportunities not to be online. It’s about deciding to be alone with your thoughts while your pasta boils – or at least firing up an audiobook instead of TikTok.

“Having more digital detox time is a good thing, because it allows us to recharge and maintain our critical facilities,” he said.

A colleague of mine wrote a piece about how to get rid of AI overview summaries on Google, including by typing “-AI” at the end of your search.

In July, the browser DuckDuckGo launched a setting that lets people excise AI images from their search results. At a time when every company is seemingly stuffing the technology into its products, someone is offering a way to opt out.

It’s a small bit of ground to reclaim, but in the end, what are we if not the sum of a million little decisions?

I took enough of a break from Facebook that I’m not seeing the AI cabins anymore. I’m sure they’re on someone’s feed, warped kitchen faucets and all. If I look up from my laptop and out my windows, I can see woods in the distance. They’re fuzzy at first, but if I focus, my eyes adjust.

Maybe that’s the point.

This month’s (P)doom: < 10%.

Frutiger Aero was a design language common from roughly 2005 to 2013. It was why the first iPhone icons looked like they were encased in resin bubbles, or why Windows operating systems favored translucent window borders, even if no one was using the name at the time. In fact, the internet speculates the look was actually derived from Windows Vista and Windows 7.

The tracks on “dreamOS” have titles like “home menu” and “offline forever,” and share a similar verve as Wii music. It’s inoffensive. Calming, even. Every song is engineered for floating through the wide, easy turns of a glassy, digital river.

Chiefly, it caught my attention because on TikTok the hashtag #FrutigerAero has nearly 100,000 posts, many of which simultaneously drip with nostalgia and reinterpret something that was…software packaging… into an eco-futurist promise that never came to fruition.

The saturated greens and blues, the blending of imagery like grass and clear skies with technology – for so many of these TikTokers, it’s what 2005 felt like. Never mind, 2005 gave us “My Humps” by the Black Eyed Peas. They weren’t there, but they’ve pinpointed an era before everything went to shit, when someone (corporate marketing teams?) sold a future where nature and tech played peacefully in the rolling hills of a Windows desktop background.

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“I think a lot of the adherents of this Frutiger Aero subculture we're seeing pop up are actually not very excited about the way things are currently,” said Sofi Xian (formerly Sofi Lee), co-founder of the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, and the person who coined the term Frutiger Aero.

That ache for Frutiger Aero, with its rally cry of “the future we were promised,” illustrates the seduction of nostalgia, with an algorithmic twist. But as easy as it is to fall into the absolute quicksand of the past, it might also be a tool to reappraise the present and reach for something better.

The psychology of nostalgia

“The way we think about the past matters,” said Andrew Abeyta, assistant professor in the department of psychology at Rutgers University.

Abeyta and other researchers think there are different forms of nostalgia.

One type is personal nostalgia. Personal nostalgia is what you feel for your own life and experiences. And believe it or not, it can actually have psychological benefits – it makes you feel like your life has meaning and that you’re connected to loved ones. It can even create a stable sense of self over time – that, despite everything you might go through, at your core, you’re more or less the same person, Abeyta told me over the phone this summer. Any of these can create a grounding experience when everything else feels chaotic.

“Nostalgia, in many ways, is like our greatest hits,” he said. “It's reliving times when we were supported and felt loved, and this gives us the confidence that we need to go out and pursue goals that are important to us.”

While that type of nostalgia can feel harmless, researchers point out the dangers of other forms, like historical nostalgia, a subset of the more group-oriented collective nostalgia.

Persuading people that some point in the past was better than the present is a tired old trick of propagandists and political opportunists. It’s something that’s played out over and over, sometimes embroidered on hats. Historical nostalgia hands a disgruntled populace rose-colored glasses without asking that critical question: better for whom?

“It can really be a tool to bring people together, or a tool to tear people apart,” Abeyta said.

On the internet, the intersection of nostalgia’s natural intoxicating qualities and the magnetism of the algorithm makes for a heady mixture. While nostalgia is nothing new, arguably it’s available like never before. TikTok has 15.7 million posts with the hashtag #Nostalgia, built around nostalgia, both real and manufactured.

If you’re susceptible to this particular bend of the algorithm, there are plenty of accounts to serve you reminders of the toys and school supplies you owned in the ‘90 or the inflatable furniture you begged for in the early 2000s. POV videos recall some lost morning in the summer of ‘98 when you woke up in bed to the sound of the lawnmower and chirping birds. It never occurred to you to check your phone for overnight notifications because you didn’t have one.

Looking back to look ahead

While you might think of people who dwell in the past too much as being stuck, that doesn’t have to be the case. To me, Frutiger Aero has the potential to buck the trend.

Nostalgia can actually have a motivating effect, Abeyta said.

“When people were feeling a little bit worried and uncertain about their future or the future of the country or society, [researchers] found that not only were historical ideas comforting, but maybe, inspirational,” he said, “We could use older ideas to help manage some of these concerns and uncertainties.”

Frutiger Aero, as the internet views it today, went viral in 2023. Interest has bloomed at a time when a lot of people aren’t feeling optimistic about the future. Instead of sitting in a verdant meadow, folks are worried about big, society-shifting issues like climate change, AI upending the job market and what the hell, exactly, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman means by the “gentle” singularity.

It’s easy to look at the soothing water droplets in Frutiger Aero imagery and pine for a time when tech billionaire Peter Thiel wasn’t equivocating on whether humanity should endure.

So, if people feel that the promise of Frutiger Aero – that bright future where nature and technology existed harmoniously, where tech enhanced their lives and they didn’t lose too much of themselves to it – is compatible with their values, there’s no reason not to pursue it again.

Greener grass

To be sure, I don’t necessarily think 20-year-olds decorating their rooms with blue LED lights and faux fish tanks translates into some broad-scale realignment of values. There’s only so much you can expect from the aesthetic of a Cricket Wireless store 20 years ago.

“I don’t think any consumer aesthetic is consciously created,” Xian said, “I think people just thought, ‘what can we do to represent the beatific experience of using Windows Vista?’”

And like Abeyta suggested, it’s important to take an honest look at the past and what it’s come to represent. The year 2005 was a golden age for fun, cheap, drugstore lip glosses. Lip Smackers. Caboodles. Sparkly shit from Bath and Body Works with swirls. On the other hand: the Iraq War.

In the last few months, I’ve replayed a conversation I had in class with some students about whether everything that’s happening in tech, particularly with AI, is inevitable. Some days it feels that way. Change is unsettling. It’s hard not to see it all as a boulder gaining momentum rolling downhill. There are massive questions we don’t have answers to, like what happens to creative and critical thought? What happens to our conception of our own humanity in a world where people fall in love with chatbots and we’re not sure if what we see with our eyes is real?

One student offered that it is not, in fact, inevitable. I’d like to think there was an inherent optimism in that – and an optimism that didn’t spawn from a dolphin leaping out of a computer screen.

Weirdly, when Apple introduced its new Liquid Glass design at WWDC in June, which will be rolling out across OSes, with its see-through design, I couldn’t help but think of Frutiger Aero. Was that a twinge of hope?

At the very least, if someone had the gumption to create a whole album inspired by a better future, maybe we’ll get to frolic in the hyper green grass one day after all.

This month’s (P)doom: < 7%.

– Erin

I hit about 30 and stopped. But for the past few months, TikTok’s been insisting I buy a 320-set of alcohol markers. In one of my recent favorite corners of the internet, mostly adult women explain the hyper-detailed, intricately patterned pages they’ve completed in coloring books with words like “cozy,” “cute” and “friends” in the titles.

Since there remain some shards of joy in my soul, I find it delightful that these folks can mimic wood grain and tile and even glitter as they color scenes of animals like hippos and rabbits watching TV or camping.

And yet, I recognize this as one more moment where TikTok is trying to get me to buy something I don’t need, by making my brain feel like I do.

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Similarly, TikTok regularly serves up shopping videos that typically trumpet the same message: RUN to Target. Or Costco. Or wherever. These POV videos show people holding shit from the dollar sections up to their camera, rotating it, and insisting that you HAVE to buy this SUPER CUTE vase shaped like an avocado but also a cat (?) before they’re all gone.

My reptile brain lurches: “Wait, do I need to go to Target? Right now? For the avo-cat-o vase?”

The answer is rarely yes. And by and large, when I’m looking at any of these items IRL, I have zero urge to buy them. (FYI, I am not going to Target at all these days.)

Granted, the fact these videos are on my feed probably says something about me that I’m not in the mood to unpack. But I’m not alone. There’s no way to track the conversion from RUN TO COSTCO video to sale, but Americans spend about $32 million each day on the TikTok Shop, according to data from Capital One, out in March. Though you might think of it for the dance trends, TikTok has become the fourth most popular social commerce site in the U.S.

What is that lurch, though? That siren call, whether it’s more markers than you could possibly ever need, or the trinkets galore in the Target Bulleyes Shop?

“The human brain was not designed for this world,” said Pamela Rutledge, ​​director of the Media Psychology Research Center, a nonprofit that studies media technologies and their effects. As much as any of us might think we’re immune, the media we consume, even passively, can influence us.

Someone who colors

It turns out, you can separate these types of videos into two buckets.

On the alcohol marker front, it’s all about aspiration.

These videos often feature soothing lo-fi music and the neatly organized, aesthetically pleasing desks of people who SOMEHOW find time to sit and color.

Maybe you sit there on your phone, in the dark, surrounded by empties of lo-mein and that little twinge in your heart says, “I want to be someone who colors.”

“It’s sort of like watching a cat sleep,” Rutledge said, “I wish I could relax that much.”

The other bucket of videos plays right into our caveman impulses.

“We are hardwired to react if we think something is scarce,” Rutledge said. So when an urgent voice in a video tells you to rush out and grab something, you might believe it, if only for a split second.

In his 1984 book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,” psychologist Robert Cialdini identified six principles in human behavior that drive people to say “yes.” In addition to scarcity, there’s the idea of social proof or validation.

“Taking advantage of social validation, requesters can stimulate our compliance by demonstrating (or merely implying) that others just like us have already complied,” Cialdini wrote in a 2001 “Scientific American” piece called “The Science of Persuasion.”

Perhaps seeing someone sweep through HomeGoods, pleased with the purchase of a set of Anthropologie drinkware dupes motivates us to go out and get them too.

Another factor might be that so many of these videos are shot in a POV style. It’s easy to feel like we’re there, and Rutledge suggested they might activate the mirror neurons in our brains, which fire in the same way when we perform an action or observe someone else performing the action. Most of the time, this is a good thing – it lets us learn by imitating and understanding what other people do. In the context of a shopping video, if they’re shopping, we are also kind of shopping, too.

Caveman + wallet

Understanding how these videos affect our brains is crucial, but it’s hard to ignore how they fit into a wider landscape of unbridled consumerism fueled by dopamine and nestled snuggly in the attention economy.

Think of the crush around Stanley Cups. The wildness of buying tens of something that’s supposed to be sustainable drinkware. Two years ago, a student asked me to look into #WaterTok, a universe of videos of folks combining flavored drink packets to create their “waters of the day.” I am STILL thinking about #WaterTok. Not because of the killjoys pointing out the sugar content of the drinks (live your lives, people!), but because of how many creators seemingly bought hundreds of packets and bottle after bottle of syrup.

How much of anything do you need at one time?

And for the RUN videos, for each one that legitimately points to an interesting product (hello, Trader Joe’s Maple Butter), there are countless others indiscriminately highlighting whatever the newest inventory is.

It’s not curation or informed recommendation driven by experience or expertise. If you feature EVERYTHING in the aisle, there’s no point – except to rack up views from people hoping the next holiday decor drop at Michael’s will make the days pass a little easier.

These videos earn creators money. I don’t begrudge anyone trying to survive, but it’s another content type to gird your primal impulses against.

A win for landfills

Comedian George Carlin did a bit in the ‘80s about how we all need our stuff. Even when we travel, we’re just pairing down stuff from our main collection of stuff so we can feel better and maybe more secure.

Quarter zip Sherpa pullovers. Seasonal candles. Plastic bathroom organizers. A planter shaped like a disco ball.

“Many people aren't savvy enough to stop and ask, ‘who's, who's benefiting from this? Why are they showing me this? What is the appeal?’” Rutledge said.

The point will never be to hide – though I’ve taken to aggressively scrolling past anything I want less of on my FYP, including the RUN videos – it’s to stay engaged and keep asking the kinds of questions that keep us from caving into our brains, which still just want to store what feels scarce in order to survive.

Marigold. Vermillion. Mauve. I’m barely at 10% of that 320-marker set. Admittedly, I’m curious about just how many ways you can name a blue. But for now, at least, the only scarcity I’m interested in is seeing fewer of those videos.

This month’s (P)doom: < 6%.

– Erin

On a trip to Ireland in May, my friend and I visited the ruins of Menlo Castle in Galway.

The stone structure dates back to the 16th century, and after surviving some 400 years, the damn thing burned in 1910. So, it sits on the bank of the River Corrib and the remaining walls endure 30-somethings machine-gunning photos bound for Instagram.

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The ruins of a castle are so tangible. They seem wholly permanent in their decay. More than a few times, I’ve Googled to find photos of what the building used to look like when it had, uh, floors.

In the last few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about ruins, but in the context of social media networks – those other places humans live their lives, digitally, at least. There’s been so much discussion around the transformation of Twitter into X (what veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher refers to as a “Nazi porn bar”), and now 170 million American TikTok users are waiting to see if their beloved app will brick at midnight.

The quirk about ruins is we tend to think about them in the binary of before and after. When I look at Menlo Castle, I don’t really visualize the fire that ripped through the building. But in this moment, particularly this weekend, I think we’re all on the banks watching social media burn.

Social media’s cow pasture era

It turns out, I’m not the only one who’s stood in the middle of ruins and hummed “It Could Happen to You.”

Jamie Cohen is a digital culture expert and associate professor at CUNY Queens College. We chatted in December about social media ghost towns – what they might look like, how they could come to be, and the wildness of watching it happen.

“We’re good with ruins. We’re good with going to Pompeii, we’re good with going to Rome, but we’re not good with watching the town turn into a cow pasture,” Cohen said.

You can visualize the Roman Forum in 44 BC in the wake of Julius Caesar’s assassination, and you can stand near the crumbling pillars now, but you probably don’t think much about the hundred of years in between when the Forum was buried and used as, yes, a cow pasture.

Social media is in its cow pasture era. Another way to think about this: Journalist and Sci-Fi writer Cory Doctorow’s delightful term, enshittification – the deterioration in the quality of online platforms and products.

“We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying,” Doctorow explains on his site.

It is genuinely weird to witness.

We’ll meet again. Maybe?

By necessity, there’s a decision to be made, even through inaction, about whether to let a place fully deteriorate.

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, hoards of users packed their wares and left. And after the election, yet another exodus unfolded – some reports said 115,000 people deleted their accounts on Nov. 6. If TikTok does shut down overnight, the effect will be more eviction than departure. Even before TikTok’s fate drew so near, creators were hurriedly trying to shepherd their followers to other platforms – their backup accounts — the Reels and YouTube Shorts of it all.

Ask any sheepdog, getting a flock from point A to B isn’t easy. I suspect many haven’t or won’t move from one platform to the next. Therein lies some of the consequence.

For better or worse, something will be lost along the way. Online communities, tenuously rallying around some guy who posts videos about the cats he meets on his mail route, will take a hit. For every individual who perhaps found some camaraderie in talking to strangers about fantasy romance novels, some small void will form in the periphery of their brain.

Or maybe it’ll be the shattering revelation that any of our social networks (in the literal sense) is smaller and thinner than the follower counts on our profiles.

Can the paint and plaster chip off a comments section?

What to leave behind

The creation of a social media ghost town doesn’t have to be tragic, though. (Even if Hank Green singing the fish song in the dark makes you want to weep.) Cohen pointed out that in the proliferation of Twitter clones, old familiar problems like hateful behavior also get replicated, instead of left in the dust to disappear.

“We go through these architectural styles throughout history, but underneath it are these beams and structures,” he said.

And look, there are some baller reasons for using beams. They’re a classic. We stan structural integrity. Everything built on top of them – the beliefs, attitudes, moods, styles, and aesthetics are designed by people, he explained. Any community can decide “yes” to the beams, “no” to the shag carpets.

All that requires some collective stance, one that Cohen says he hasn’t really seen. The nostalgia is heavy right now for the TikTok dances of yore. Never mind the way the algorithm (like so many other platforms’ algorithms) has reportedly driven teenagers to eating disorder content, self-harm and God knows what else. For those kids, the app’s been a pile of rubble. Amid the emotional goodbyes and migration to Instagram or RedNote, there doesn’t seem to be much talk of how to improve. And to some extent, it’s beyond the control of any one creator.

Ruined, already

To be sure, social media networks have already passed into obscurity in the last 15 years. Remember Ping from Apple? Or Peach?

MySpace, once a cultural and social force, a driver of rank-based social dynamics, bad HTML and high-angle selfies, once sold for $580 million and was the fifth most-visited site on the internet.

The MySpace era was short-lived though. By 2009, Facebook racked up more monthly users, and it felt like MySpace was a stepping stone to some larger destination. Now, the average site visit lasts about 1 minute and 25 seconds, according to Similarweb.

It feels eerie to visit the MySpace for a band I loved in college. Aside from a handful of tracks on the page, almost everything else is blank.

There’s an unease to being in a place where the structures stand but the people are gone. Cohen talked about ghost towns having two qualities: The brokenness has to be maintained. Also, no one can move back in.

Whether there will ever be any novelty in roaming around what’s left of Twitter as it moves farther and farther to the fringes remains to be seen, as Cohen noted.

For TikTok, the surrealness will come from the fact that there’s a big gate with all the Americans on one side and a still-hopping platform on the other. It’s like getting banned from the mall in the ‘90s. It won’t so much be that TikTok is the ghost town, but rather the Americans are the ghosts.

Back home in Nashville, I know Menlo Castle is still there. I also know that within a few decades, no one would build such a structure without smoke alarms and a sprinkler system. In the right circumstances, tech and regulation like building codes can be forces for good.

For now, we’re stuck weathering the ruins as they happen. Maybe on the other side, there will be something to look at and learn from.

This week’s (P)doom: < 8%

– Erin

Jetsam: Many thanks to Jamie Cohen – be sure to check out his newsletter, New Media Homework. He’s also just published the book, “Critical Internet Literacies: Reconsidering Creativity, Content, and Safety Online.”

Had I known Apple switched to a USB-C port? Surely. A few years ago, I definitely would have known. In fact, I would have been on the radio telling drivetime Miami about it. I might have even written a story on it, at the behest of a frenzied Slack message midway through the tech giant’s September iPhone event.

I couldn’t remember, though. Like I said – adrift.

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If you’re reading this inaugural send of Silicon Sea, I suspect you already know me. (Hello, college friends, former co-workers and people I met at a conference eight years ago.)

To those who don’t, here’s some background: I was a tech reporter for nearly a decade. During most of that time, I wrote for the venerable tech site CNET, a publication I started reading at 18 because it came bookmarked in my 2007 MacBook’s Safari browser.

For years, I worked this wild job where I got to write just about whatever I wanted, and it took me from the Johnson Space Center to that preposterous Area 51 “raid,” in 2019. I shoved handfuls of crickets into my mouth and reported on internet Nazis, all the while combing through tech companies’ so-called diversity and inclusion reports and writing some very CAPS-Y online dating advice.

Recently, someone told me my old job sounded magical. It was. Imagine getting paid to eat cheese on camera.

But it was also a job. By 2023, after lots of stuff and things happened, I had a goodbye email saved in my drafts with the subject line EXIT, PURSUED BY A BEAR.

When the layoffs came, I took my severance, stuffed all my branded hoodies in a trunk and strolled off without blinking.

In one of the biggest record-scratch moments of my life, I ended up teaching journalism at a university. These days, I answer to “Professor Carson,” and it is unceasingly weird. (But like in a good way, hellooo students!)

It’s only recently that I’ve started to think about everything that happened back before I subscribed to emails from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

That whole era of my life ended as if I’d stepped through a portal in a Sci-Fi film that immediately closed behind me with a soft whoosh and a pop.

Every time I try to explain what I used to do, it gets farther away. Increasingly, I realize moving on from CNET felt like leaving home for the first time again.

So, I clean my kitchen counters and listen to other people talk about tech.

If any of this sounds maudlin, it’s not supposed to. For the first time in almost a decade, I got to take a damn break. I have an office with a door! And with zero obligation to do anything but consume tech news like a civilian, I’m ready to write about it again.

Hence this newsletter.

That brings me to the name. I picked Silicon Sea for a couple of reasons. One, it represents my relationship with technology. Tech is vast and awe-inspiring, but the waters are choppy as hell. And as hard as I try, I can’t THE SAILORS SAY BRANDY IS A FINE GIRL

Sorry. You see what I’m getting at.

Another reason: there’s no peace in the Valley, babes.

I always explained my beat as sitting at the intersection of science, technology, the internet and how we live our lives – the ways that we not only use tech but tech uses us. I explain to those who ask that tech like generative AI isn’t something to fear (lol maybe?), but we can’t outsource our creative and critical thought. We’ve got to use it or lose it.

And then I mutter to myself, “What an unhinged time to dip out of tech journalism.”

Tech touches everything, but it’s moving at a breakneck speed, unchecked. The internet sheds its skin and starts over every few weeks. While no one’s ever won a medal for navel-gazing, I do believe there’s something to be said for taking the time to process just what exactly the [comical honking noise] is going on.

So in the parlance of the tech bros, this is my value proposition to you: Once a month I’m going to send you a (hopefully) well-written, well-thought-out piece about how tech is changing us. I want to do interviews and make obnoxious pop culture references, and occasionally hit the capslock key a little too liberally.

And if I miss a send, just know I’m trying very, very hard to teach a flock of youths how to write, and sometimes the deepest thought I can muster is whether the salmon will be on sale at Costco this week.

Maybe, there’s a way to stay buoyed in the Silicon Sea.

This month’s (P)doom: < 5%.

– Erin

Jetsam: Silicon Sea will kick off in earnest with an actual piece around the first of the month, before settling into a monthly cadence. Also, my thanks to all of you for subscribing right out of the gate. (Out of port? Let’s not lean too hard on the sea puns.) Talk soon!