Tea Leaves

always reading, making meaning

I have become a nag about AI. I go out dancing, I go to a birthday party, I’m trying not to think about the annihilation of everything, but inevitably someone says, “I asked ChatGPT” and I’m on them like a lesser Aaron Sorkin character. I tell them about all the books that were stolen to train the models. “A person did that research. They spent years in school, they spent hours upon hours in libraries. And they didn’t even get paid enough then.” I pile up the details even though I know this doesn’t work, people don’t change their minds in response to a harangue. I tell them about the class action suits, about Meta calling copyrighted books worthless, the authors who are still waiting for compensation from Anthropic—this on top of the low hum from data centers driving people out of their minds, the bottle-of-water-per-query estimate. Later, I imagine, they’ll ask ChatGPT for advice on how to respond, but for now I hold their eyes, trap them through social niceties.

At home, I read a New York Times piece about people who are hooked on food delivery with a feeling of terrible dread. We had once been a delivery-happy family, but not long ago I deleted all the apps because I couldn’t square the circle anymore, and everything that came clad in plastic or that weird is-it-really-biodegradable packaging started to taste sad and sweaty and wan. I want to tell you that it was all the stories about the exploitation of delivery workers that did it, but the truth is that the final straw came in the form of this new VC-backed delivery service called Wonder that purports to deliver dishes from the best restaurants in the country. Pizza from Di Fara, chicken from Barbuto. We tried it when it first arrived in our neighborhood, giddily ordering four dishes from four different “restaurants.” All the food tasted the same. The pasta tasted the same as the butter chicken. It was clear that the restaurants involved had done nothing but license their names to the venture, and it grossed me out even more than the food itself, that these chefs who had worked so hard to create something iconic—imagine how extraordinary you have to be to get famous for roast chicken—taking cash to become mimetic garbage.

I read, feeling sorry for the people in the article who have not yet freed themselves. At the same time, I am hit by a sudden, desperate craving for a good burger, a restaurant burger; my thumb swipes over my screen looking for what is not there, I want the delivery so bad.

Sometimes the culture I consume turns into tea leaves. Everything seems like a code or an omen. In the same sit I read the Times piece and then a newsletter by Casey Johnston in which she uses the phrase “mimetic desire,” and which, upon googling, leads me to this quote from the French philosopher René Girard:

Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.

We used to call it peer pressure. As then, there lingers the sense that someone could break it if they were brave enough and popular enough and could angle their message in just the right way. A supreme influencer rising from the oceans to tell us the truth about things.

I would like them to tell me exactly how often I need to eat out to keep my neighborhood small businesses alive. Because balanced against the health and ecological and budgetary stuff is the constant guilt, watching storefronts shutter. I want to know exactly how I’m supposed to buy secondhand when I live in a city where the thrift stores are more expensive than the regular ones, and they never have my size, and they smell terrifyingly of someone’s aunt’s attic. I want to know what to do, if I ever do manage to live a more offline life, with all the emails that pile up, all the two-factor tasks and alerts; do I give one ADHDish day a week over to them, or what?

After that, I read “The Empties,” a short story by Jess Row in which near-future people argue about whether they’re living in a dystopia or post-apocalypse. In the story, America has collapsed, and people are living off the land again, but only after having to figure out what to do with all their trash. There is no trash anymore, no empties, nowhere for the used things to disappear. Row’s protagonist, J., is trying to write a town history: “We were working so hard to get back to the land, then the land got us back and won’t let go.” The story comes to me via Rachel Kong’s newsletter, in which Kong recounts her own recent encounters with waste (or what we now call abundance) and pointless technology, like when ordering a sandwich at the airport. “I’m aware that working in fast food isn’t particularly life-giving,” she writes. “But are the machines not making a grim task even grimmer?”

Are we turning a corner? We know so much about what causes our unhappiness. We know that we, human beings, are no longer in charge. We are being harvested for our attention, for our desires. We feed a beast. J. thinks, “Remember that song, back in the nineties? she wants to ask someone. In case she imagined it. The one that goes, We’ll make great pets?”

How should we fill our days, and to what purpose? Never has this question felt closer to the skin to me, and yet I acknowledge that it’s perpetual. It’s the question I suppose everyone asked after World War II, when the soldiers who survived came back, and the borders changed and people who were one thing were now another, and the people who were still the same couldn’t take it. Revolution, because nothing else made sense. Revolution because the only thing certain is that everything must change.

I leave the house. I have an appointment with a new dermatologist. Before I leave, I intend, but ultimately forget, to unbrick my phone. I bought a Brick because I’m on a desperate quest to regrow my attention, my only cash crop, and so far it has been really helpful, especially at night and in the morning, when I’m most likely to get derailed by the news or checking the cost of flights for spring break or researching how to patch a cashmere sweater. The only problem is what to do with all the emails that accumulate when I’m not looking at them. And still not knowing how to fix that sweater.

But in any case, I forget to unbrick my phone and then I’m on my way to the dermatologist and I realize I never finished filling out the forms they sent me to fill out. I started to fill them out, but then the forms insisted I upload photos of my ID and insurance card, and I didn’t have them on hand, so I figured I’d do it later. Then I got seventeen reminder emails, texts, and calls about the appointment, which made me so annoyed I actively avoided thinking about the dermatologist—the dermatologist was trying to steal my attention!—and so then, consequently, I didn’t finish filling out the forms. The eighteenth reminder comes through as I am walking to the dermatologist and I would fill while walking except for the part where my phone is bricked. I get to the office and the receptionist immediately asks, “did you fill out the forms?” and when I explain, she looks at me like I have brought a communicable disease into her space. “You can’t use your phone?” she asks incredulously. I present my real, material ID and insurance cards, and she recoils. “You can take a photo of them with the iPad,” she says, handing me the company clunker with its big black rubber bumpers. I try my best, holding the iPad up with one hand while hovering each card with the other, then stretching the thumb of the hand holding the iPad until I can just reach the take photo button. The photo previews are not promising. A few minutes after I give the receptionist back the iPad, she asks to see my cards.

I want to believe we are turning a corner but if we are, it won’t be easy or linear. No matter how many times someone shares that Kurt Vonnegut quote about mailing a letter, not everyone is going to get on board with friction-maxxing. There is the part where you will upset the receptionist and annoy your friends. There is also that worry, isn’t there, in the back of the mind, that the land is coming for us anyway. That one way or another, this will all have to end.

As I write this, I click over to my browser, because I don’t yet have the courage to brick my laptop, and see that Walmart, famous for paying such low wages that their employees have to go on SNAP, hit a record trillion-dollar market valuation. I see that the primary reason for this is the company’s “push into automation and artificial intelligence.” I see the reporter’s chipper note about Walmart’s same-day delivery service and its Silicon-Valley-esque corporate headquarters in Arkansas and not a word about the state and local subsidies it receives. And how we’re paying for this, we’re all paying for this, one way or another.