(AI image - abstract depiction of schizophrenia)

It was an absurdly hot day in the middle of a Godless heatwave and I was home doing a familiar thing - watching a soccer game. The game itself looked like it always did. The players darting into space, shooting, passing, diving and gesturing for fouls theatrically.The crowds cheered. But the familiar spectacle was taking place within a weird framework. It was a new tournament called the Club World Club - the unholy love child of the notoriously corrupt FIFA soccer federation and notoriously corrupt big money backers like the Saudi government and their state oil company Aramco. The halftime show was sponsored by a pharmaceutical  brand whose ads were an animation of a stylish woman walking through a vaguely European-looking city presumably hoping not to have to deal with the side effects of the drug being listed in a seductive voiceover — sudden death, stroke and suicidal thoughts — stuff like that. The side effects of living in this  odd new world of ours is to feel at times completely removed from the culture surrounding you. Like a kind of out-of-body experience without the spiritual awakening.  

I watch under the loud hum of the air conditioner, the now ubiquitous addendum to Nature that's becoming a near-necessity in summer. The weather set a new record for heat in June as more money was poured into oil extraction and alternative energy grants were being ended. 

 A very expensive footballer scores a sublime goal in the sweltering heat and for that moment nothing else matters. I  still enjoy the game. The nub of the experience is as good as ever - if you can ignore all the rot surrounding it. Which is the big 'If' of modern life. Consuming media of any kind these days feels like a minefield of questionable ownership, predatory business practices and the ubiquity of AI raining down on me like an unwelcome assault.

A lot of the things I see in this suddenly AI-saturated world feel odd. A bit uncanny valley. Not quite human but human adjacent. The clips I see from movies like the new Hulk seem unbelievable to me. "Is that really what the movie looks like?" I wonder to myself. This sense of disbelief pervades a lot of what I see in American culture these days, leading to a series of cascading questions: "Is that really what he said? Is that really what people think? What did she do to her face? Who wants that? Who needs that thing? Who would buy that? Does anyone really believe that? How can anyone take that man seriously?

Within the past 6 months or so it feels as if every ad has an AI-tie in.  Smart phones, software, washing machines and cars all now come with it built in for no compelling reason except to generate new profit streams. I saw a meme that encapsulated what this feels like- a person's head was stuffed inside the horn of a tuba unable to escape the constant blast of AI propaganda.   Occasionally when I'm going through my emails I'll accidentally hover over the now inescapable little AI symbol at the top right corner of Gmail called Gemini. As the cursor makes contact with it, the icon awakens as if twinkling and does a little rotation, like an eager puppy wanting to play. For now I ignore it  and go back to what I'm doing. But how much longer can I pretend this man-made monster doesn't exist?