The Daily: 14 August 2026

I just wanted to get your thoughts on something…

Yesterday, I woke up to multiple headlines saying that Wednesday’s total eclipse was a “once in a lifetime experience” for those who spent a long lunch hour watching the skies go dark. And yes, an eclipse is stunning, magnificent, humbling and thrilling and totally worth headlines… But it is not once in a lifetime — as any cursory investigation will show. There is an eclipse in southern Spain again next August, though the best of it will happen south of the Mediterranean. (And peak totality, more than six whole minutes of darkness, will be over Luxor, Egypt! Which… the witch cannot resist!) Two years ago, there was a total eclipse that travelled over much more densely populated land, from Mexico to Newfoundland. There is a spectacular total eclipse on July 22, 2028, that drifts slowly along a wide band of Australia and then covers half of New Zealand. Australia will be under eclipse from 9 in the morning to nearly 4 in the afternoon — a whole day! And the peak will pass right over Canberra.

Okay… I’ll stop there… But the point is I could keep on going and going and going. While it is not often that a total eclipse will happen directly over your backyard, even that is not as once in a lifetime as all the morning headlines were proclaiming. I’ve had two over my home and been to several more that didn’t require more than a few hours of travel to experience. And this was true for most Europeans. Totality mainly passed over Spain. Anyone outside that narrow band had to hop on a train to see it… And they could just as easily hop on a train again next year… Also, there was an even bigger eclipse path through Europe in 1999. Yes, social media doesn’t remember the things that predate it, so I’ll jog your human memory. The total eclipse of 1999 travelled a path over France, Germany, Austria, the Middle East and then India, passing over the wide-eyed, uplifted faces of hundreds of millions of people, most of whom are still alive today. For many Europeans in 1999, it was the same short train ride to view totality as it was on Wednesday. So… thrilling, amazing, wonderful, totally worth the trip… but not exactly once in a lifetime.

I think these headlines were largely AI slop being regurgitated by irresponsible journalists. Which is sadly all too common in digital media right now (if you’ll pause to remember, this is a very recent trend). Maybe it’s the shiny object syndrome. Maybe it’s an increasing pressure to produce something that will stand out in an ocean of noise. Maybe it’s just laziness. But so much writing now seems to be barely-edited chat-bot barf with all the quirks, blind-spots, and outright falsehoods that flow from a million machines correlating the near infinity of words online into some semblance of communication. It should be the job of a scrupulous writer using such a shotgun tool to fact-check the slurry… or at least make sure the word salad has some cohesion and relevance. But, in recent months, that no longer seems to be the default case.

This is not the fault of AI (except inasmuch as the existence of AI is sort of universally faulty). AI is only doing what it is programmed to do. AI is not programmed to be correct. AI is programmed to tell us what we want to hear. It filters the web’s worth of facts and data points — data that other humans have entered into machines, not data that has been gathered independently by the AI out in the real world — and then it serves up what will most likely earn more views through engaging the querent’s limbic system — ie delivering the portion of the data set that will mostly likely generate fear or rage. In this case, the slop was trying its other favorite tactic — telling users how special they are. (Because pathetically, that, too, reliably earns clicks.) And the editors or writers that got served this slop just lapped it up… And then went to press with it…

But all they needed to do was ask Google…

Oh… right… we can’t do that anymore… not without using the extra keystrokes “-ai” to keep the slop out of the search results.

Do you remember when a search engine actually delivered useful information — and only useful information? Do you remember, not that long ago, when a search would yield up actual links that were directly related to your topic of interest? When was the last time that happened? And why have we not revolted at the replacement!

The AI search system is not even a search engine. It doesn’t generate a list of search results. It answers questions. Badly. Remember, old search engines delivered, not canned and completely unverifiable “answers”, but huge lists of links that you could use to corroborate information, tools that refined your investigation and stimulated new avenues of exploration, hours of rabbit holes to keep your voracious curiosity humming with joy. The primitive Ask Jeeves was infinitely more helpful than today’s theoretically advanced average AI search. And early Google, before it became saturated with marketing and surveillance, was nearly miraculous. Do you remember that? You typed in a key word or two and a cascade of research was but a click away. Now, you’re lucky to find one factually correct link — or even any links at all. Have you, like me, noticed how many random social media posts count as “answers” to AI queries? If I wanted a questionable and likely bigoted opinion on, say, voting machines, I’d ask my 80-year-old uncle… I don’t need an AI bot digging up some other schmuck’s Facebook pontification for that bullshit… Truly, I don’t need that bullshit at all… And neither do you…

Unfortunately for the world, early Google did not make billionaires. I’m not even sure it made money at all. For a brief and blissful window of time, we could use it, for free, without advertising or data gathering, to conduct reliable and verifiable research on any topic in the universe — because it connected each of us to experts in the field, to people with practical experience, to reality. Now, there is no connection. It is all the fever dream of a computer program that is designed to do nothing else but make billionaires by holding your eyes and draining your brain.

And drained brains are definitely a rapidly growing concern. If it is now possible that an editor would type a headline for world consumption that reads “once in a lifetime” about something that happens once or twice a year somewhere on this planet, and if it is also now possible that many people will read that headline and not ruefully shake their heads at the navel-gazing idiocy, then our brains are now well and truly drained of any capacity for critical or reasoned thought. And this happened so fast! AI proper — not the search engines, but what is more accurately called large language models — has only been widely available to average people for just a year or two. In just a couple rounds of the sun, just a couple total eclipses, we have already forgotten how to remember that eclipses happen nearly every damn year.

And look what it is doing to the generation that will take care of us in our old age. Now that is truly alarming! Kids who are raised on screens, the so-called Gen Alpha, can’t even imagine not trusting the slop. Or imagine much of anything at all. Teachers routinely express dismay at the many behavioral issues that flow from screen use at a young age. These are not only children who don’t want to sit at a desk and do math worksheets and read inane saccharine sentences about puppies. These are children who are profoundly incurious and unintellectual. These are children who do not know how to figure out anything on their own. These are children who are utterly unable to navigate reality. Recently, I heard a tale from one elementary school teacher that her students could not manage something as simple as moving a backpack out of their path. Nor did they think to just go around it. Having that thing in their way provoked meltdowns. Can you even imagine having so little imagination? It breaks my heart! And reading? Most can’t. Most graduating teens this year could not read this simplistic essay, never mind determine the applicability and truth of it in their own lives.

This does not bode well…

But still, it is not the fault of the machines. It is not machines taking over our lives. It is our fault. More specifically, it is the fault of those who are using these machine products to rake in billions of dollars. But it is also our fault for going along with it.

AI, screens, data gathering… none of this is inevitable. None of this is even desirable. None of this helps any human body live a better life. It is all harm — from the energy costs, water waste, mining and land use all the way to the fact that you and I can’t turn on a computer now without worrying who will be stealing our identity or bank card information. And then consider those kids who can’t figure out what to do about a backpack on the floor in front of them. This is indescribable destruction for no good whatsoever! So why are we going along with it?

Mostly because it is presented as inevitability by the people who are making money off of it. As scammers will do… That we’re falling for it is evidence that our brains are already being turned to jelly. We did not succumb so readily to print media or radio or even television advertising because all that marketing rode on the back of actual information sharing. Legacy media provided some content, usually of fairly high quality, because we didn’t waste our time watching crap and advertisers didn’t pay the production costs of something that nobody would watch. Now, the medium is the product. It is all marketing and data gathering. Content is an afterthought, if it exists at all. It is certainly not correct or good or interesting or based in any sort of reality other than the minds of a very small number of rather mindless humans. It is toxic marketing devoid of any actual media. But worse, any contact with this slop turns off your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that can actually reason, and triggers the lizard brain, the part that responds to dangerous stimuli. Any contact with this slop is, therefore, quite literally draining your brain — and making you all the more susceptible to it in the process. It makes itself inevitable… and that’s it’s only goal. To make us all screen zombies devoid of any rational response to the screens…

All the more likely to allow “once in a lifetime” to be printed about an annual event on this globe…

But don’t let my pet-peeves drive the conversation. Let’s look at the big picture of AI. Where is this taking us? Is this just the early-adopter, beta-testing phase? Are great things are yet to come?

Do you want the AI answer?

Or the real one…

AI fluffers will tell you that we’re on the first steps of the rainbow bridge to paradise. That all good things will flow from these machine programs. That humanity’s destiny is to meld our consciousness into digital space and sail off into eternity…

Except who then keeps the machines running?

And that is the central point. These are machines. These are inanimate tools made by humans, using real-world resources (quite a lot of resources!). These are programs, which are nothing but orders given to the machines by humans, not mysterious ghosts that emerge from digital code. These are decisions made by humans, work done by humans, and vast amounts of information gathered by humans into a form that the machines can access. What happens when the electrical power goes out?What happens when resources dwindle? And most importantly, what happens when the humans are no longer intellectually capable of manufacturing, programming, and gathering data for the machines?

Poof! No more eternity…

But before we get to that extremity, it will all fall apart. Because there is a paradox in this project. At its very core lies its own unmaking. The whole project will fail, is failing already by many markers, and it will take our whole economic system with it.

(So… we’ll still have our brains, but everything else is toast…)

Think about it for ten seconds (without AI interference). If this project succeeds, it has the primary goal of doing the work that currently earns billions of humans a paycheck. If AI succeeds, then all those paychecks will evanesce. At that point, if humans still have jobs at all, those jobs will be of the sorts that AI can’t do, mainly care-work and manual labor, tasks that do not earn economy-supporting and tax-revenue-generating paychecks. So if AI succeeds, the economy fails through demand destruction. Because none of us will have any money.

However, now that we’ve entangled so much stock and bond market debt into this AI build-out, if AI fails… well, money is toast. We are sitting on the edge of, not so much a bubble, but an economic black hole. If AI does not quickly deliver sufficiently on its revenue-generating promises, there will come a crash the likes of which humanity has never experienced. Because never has so much been invested in so little actual material capital. This fiction is driving something like 90% of the market right now. And there is, at this time, no actual return on any of that investment. Indeed, people are losing money hand over fist… even as they keep shelling it out (as addicted gamblers will…). There is no capital supporting any of this debt. A rational actor would not make these loans… but these are human minds on AI slop. Rationality has nothing to do with it.

So if it succeeds, we lose because employment ceases to work. If it fails, we lose because money ceases to work. And what are we getting out of this! Where is the win!

“Once in a lifetime…”

I tend to think that the bubble is going to pop, because there isn’t any return on this investment, because there isn’t any real path to a viable product. It simply is not materially possible. A replacement for human labor is just not a thing in a system predicated on human consumption. So I think AI is going to fail and take the financial system down with it. And I don’t know how to feel about that.

For one thing, because of the many nefarious index fund plots from Elon Musk et al, any money you have in a retirement account is invested in this slop. When it goes, there goes your retirement. There, too, goes a substantial portion of pensions and insurance policies (because insurance does not just take your money, it invests… largely in dubious, high-yield financial instruments). In short, when AI goes, there goes much of the financial system. And while many of us would not lament its demise in theory, we do, in practice, rely on it for just about everything from buying a home to managing the system of debits and credits that enable us to go buy groceries with a simple swipe of a card.

On the other hand… The financial system needs to go. It is sucking up all our resources for so little return. It breeds harm. It breeds harmful humans. It breeds harmful idiocy… like leveraging AI into a few more billionaires for this planet to endure for the brief window of time before it — inevitably — fails. One way or another…

So what do you think? Do you think there is a path out of this that does not involve economic chaos? Do you think there is a utility for AI if it could be delivered to the right hands? (And whose hands are those? And how are they paying the costs?) Or do you, like me, feel a little frisson of terror every time another headline reveals the damage already done? With ever more looming over the near horizon…

Once in a lifetime? Not the eclipse. This AI madness is the thing that will only come once. And there is nothing worthy about it… though it is almost equally stunning… in a catatonic sort of fashion…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2026