Screens, addiction, and being helicopter-parented by an LLM

FEATURE | ISSUE EIGHT | SCREENS

Written by Polly Wenlock (she/her) | @p0lly2001 on Substack | Contributing Writer 

The artistic capacity of the human brain is, sorry - WAS a marvel.

Every book, movie, show, artwork, song, recipe, blah, blah in history was born of human creativity,

Until now.

Screens are nullifying the power of the human mind: We’re getting dumber.

Like any good thing in the modern world, it was only a matter of time until the brain too was retailed to the highest bidder, then carved out, redesigned, cheapened and resold as a weakened money-making shell of its former self.

Yes, in developing a commonplace reliance on artificial intelligence, the human brain itself has fallen prey to the same kind of enshitification* happening across all consumer fields.

This new subscription-based outsourcing of thought has put humanity on the path of de-evolution.

The shirking of that basic human responsibility – of thought - forebodes an alarming regressionist crawl back up the birth passage, this time into the predictable safety of a wireless womb.

Artificial intelligence, social media, and screen-based life capably lift any expectations of basic function like some all-seeing helicopter parent.

Cyclical as ever, humans have designed, coded and been reborn to a robot mother.

“Don’t worry, little primate… fulfil your predictable routine, little drone… I will provide the gently numbing screens which greet your waking eyes and cushion your evening hours… no need to grow for ever and ever and ever.”

“Feed from the cancerously palatable filter of my poisoned placenta, hear the bedtime tales optimised to your own addiction and dream a thousand, ten-thousand 10 second robot dreams.”

Television’s been the drug of the nation since before The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy coined the iconic line back in 1992.

But back then, the full power of screen technology was merely a foetal coil, unrealised in the womb of Y2K utopian ideals.

How the student becomes the master,

the vaccine the virus,

the child the mother,

In some grotesquely fucked up way this Oedipal overthrow is animalistically natural.

Like a lion cub challenging for pack leadership, technology born of us has overthrown us.

Reducing humanity to neutered, sexless, thoughtless, brainless dependants,

cruelly fast-tracking our youngest generation’s brains to pureed retiree mush.

Hey, I’ll give you a retiree take: Get off the screens.

“The revolution will not be televised”

The revolution CANNOT be televised.

The revolution is against television.

Any televised revolution is a televised de-evolution.

By its own nature, a return - again, again, again to that freakish screen parent, tugging desperately at the pant-leg of some unembodied being.

“Look, look Mum, look what I made.

“Watch me post, repost, livestream my activism.

“How cute, how sweet, quick let’s post it on the fridge door Instagram feed.

Amongst all those other social stands, the hashtags, the abstinences, the indulgences, I’ve taken…”

… Gross…

You’re not really protesting, nor producing, you’re consuming, inflating.

A constant feed on a constant feed of artificially sweetened reel-life.

Take a digital hungerstrike and begin again to be.

* Enshitification: the deliberate, gradual degradation of quality in online platforms and services.

A three-stage lifecycle where a platform first exploits users to gain market share, then exploits business customers to maximise profits, and finally degrades the experience for everyone to benefit shareholders.