What feels different this time isn’t hypocrisy. Capitalism has always been happy to sell us our own anger back at retail. What feels different is that the ads no longer presume a shared reality at all.

Advertising once depended on ambient trust. Not belief, exactly, but a background assumption that words meant roughly what they said, that fear was proportional to risk, that reassurance implied some intention to follow through. That layer is gone. Now the ad doesn’t ask to be believed. It just asks to be noticed.

When companies openly dramatize the harms of the systems they profit from, they aren’t confessing. They’re signaling that truth has become optional. The message isn’t “we see the problem.” The message is “nothing means anything long enough to matter.” Anxiety becomes just another raw material, interchangeable with humor or nostalgia or menace.

This is where the information economy starts to eat itself. If every message arrives pre-saturated with irony, critique, and self-awareness, then no signal can rise above the din. Warnings, reassurances, satire, and sales pitches collapse into the same register. The audience isn’t persuaded or misled so much as numbed.

AI accelerates this collapse because it removes the last residue of intent. When the thing soothing your fear of replacement is itself replaceable by a cheaper, faster version, trust doesn’t break. It evaporates. There’s no betrayal because there’s no relationship left to betray.

And that erosion reaches even here. A reply like this would once have felt like an intervention, or at least a refusal. Now it lands as another object in the stream. Legible, maybe even accurate, but easily skimmed, quickly metabolized, and just as quickly forgotten. The critique doesn’t fail because it’s wrong. It fails because the conditions that once gave critique traction are gone.

At that point advertising stops functioning as communication and starts functioning as weather. It happens around us. We endure it. We don’t argue with it because there’s nothing there to argue with.

That feels new. And it feels brittle. Societies can survive a lot of lies. They don’t do well when meaning itself becomes non-durable.

(I write fiction and essays about witnessing systems as they fail quietly rather than spectacularly. If this kind of erosion, of trust, meaning, and shared signal, is something you’re thinking about too, my work lives here: https://tover153.substack.com/)

This is harder to type than it probably should be. Back in 2015, because of the way I was raised in an extreme conservative evangelical household as a preacher’s kid, I was a Republican. I had already broken with that world in every meaningful way, but I had not actually sat down and examined what I believed. So there I was, still actively involved in politics. I helped campaign for Romney. I made more than three thousand phone calls, which I am pretty sure qualifies as a minor war crime. I was on the election staff of a representative who, for the record, had not been elected yet when I worked for her. I was a special elector. I was on the county central committee. I worked every election since 2011 with an R behind my name.

And then they picked the orange man. I wrote the Chairwoman a very long letter explaining, in polite terms, that this was not going to work for me. I switched my affiliation to Independent. Unfortunately, I still had not figured out where the world was heading, so I voted for Gary Johnson. The less said about that period of my life, the better.

When the Senate Election Committee decided to finance Roy Moore, I walked directly to the courthouse, changed my registration to Democrat, and started working elections for that party instead. There is a point where a person realizes the boat is not just sinking, it was built upside down to begin with.

Anyway, based on the tone of that old letter, I find myself hoping I ended up on a list somewhere for Pam Bondi. It would be nice to feel important for a moment. Besides, what a spectacular waste of resources it would be to track down one Army veteran who lives in an RV in the middle of nowhere.

I'd really like to know what illegal order he wouldn't follow that got up whiskey Pete's nose. Maybe it will all come out at the trials that will eventually have to happen.

Before anything else: whether the specific story in the linked post is literally true doesn’t actually matter. The following observation about AI holds either way. If this example were wrong, ten others just like it would still make the same point.

What keeps jumping out at me in these AI threads is how consistently the conversation skips over the real constraint.

We keep hearing that AI will “increase productivity” or “accelerate thinking.” But in most large organizations, thinking is not the scarce resource. Permission to think is. Demand for thought is. The bottleneck was never how fast someone could draft an email or summarize a document. It was whether anyone actually wanted a careful answer in the first place.

A lot of companies mistook faster output for more value. They ran a pilot, saw emails go out quicker, reports get longer, slide decks look more polished, and assumed that meant something important had been solved. But scaling speed only helps if the organization needs more thinking. Most don’t. They already operate at the minimum level of reflection they’re willing to tolerate.

So what AI mostly does in practice is amplify performative cognition. It makes things look smarter without requiring anyone to be smarter. You get confident prose, plausible explanations, and lots of words where a short “yes,” “no,” or “we don’t know yet” would have been more honest and cheaper.

That’s why so many deployments feel disappointing once the novelty wears off. The technology didn’t fail. The assumption did. If an institution doesn’t value judgment, uncertainty, or dissent, no amount of machine assistance will conjure those qualities into existence. You can’t automate curiosity into a system that actively suppresses it.

Which leaves us with a technology in search of a problem that isn’t already constrained elsewhere. It’s very good at accelerating surfaces. It’s much less effective at deepening decisions, because depth was never in demand.

If you’re interested, I write more about this here: https://tover153.substack.com/

Not selling anything. Just thinking out loud, slowly, while that’s still allowed.

I spent more than two years volunteering in the National Park system. Swore in thousands of Junior Rangers. Stood in gypsum dunes, Civil War battlefields, and a lot of places where kids looked at the world with the kind of hope adults forget they once had.

So hearing that MLK Day and Juneteenth were dropped from the fee-free calendar and replaced with Trump’s birthday just knocked the wind out of me.

MLK Day is a day of service. Juneteenth marks freedom. These days mean something.

Trump’s birthday does not.

I cannot imagine looking a kid in the eye after that oath and explaining why the end of slavery no longer counts but a politician’s birthday does. I will not volunteer under that. Not for one more hour.

The land will outlast whoever did this. The dunes will still glow white. The mountains will still hold their shape. But the values behind the Park Service only survive if we protect them.

If you want the longer version of why this hit me so hard, I wrote about it here: https://tover153.substack.com/p/when-the-parks-stop-belonging-to

Thanks for the summary. Your version is definitely easier to type, but I still prefer the line I wrote earlier: “There is a point where a person realizes the boat is not just sinking, it was built upside down to begin with.”

Still, I appreciate the reply.

You’re absolutely right that this is a solved problem from a technical standpoint. Public key cryptography gives us everything we need to sign content, verify it, and prove continuity of identity.

But that’s how we solve it in technology. It’s not how my 82-year-old father solves it.

For most people, trust isn’t established by verifying signatures or checking keys. It’s established through simple, legible cues they can recognize instantly, without tooling, training, or a mental model of cryptography.

That’s why the fruit works.

It’s a human-scale authentication signal. No UI, no standards, no explanation required. “If you see the fruit, it’s him.” That’s something almost anyone can understand and apply.

The real problem isn’t that cryptographic solutions don’t exist. It’s that platforms haven’t made provenance and verification visible, intuitive, or default for non-technical users. Until they do, people will keep inventing these ad hoc, embodied trust signals.

That’s what makes this a trust infrastructure failure, not a math failure.

I grew up in an extreme conservative Christian home. Preacher’s kid. The kind of childhood where dancing was suspicious and playing cards was basically a gateway drug. So believe me when I say this: offering free beer in exchange for turning in your neighbors is not a conservative Christian value. It is not even close. It is a saloon owner LARPing as a moral authority.

If any of the church elders I grew up with had seen this promotion, the first question would not have been about ICE. It would have been, “Why does this man own a bar, and why is he handing out alcohol like it is communion for tattletales.”

Heterosexual Awesomeness Month. Ladies’ I’m Telling Tuesdays. MAGA cocktail menus. None of this is righteousness. This is dinner theater with cheaper costumes.

And the idea that people criticizing him are “showing their wickedness” is rich. If anything is showing its true colors, it is a business model that treats turning in immigrants as a loyalty rewards program.

You do not get to wrap yourself in “Christian values” while running Whistleblower Wednesdays. Jesus did not say, “Blessed are the snitches, for they shall inherit a free domestic draft.”

If this guy wants to talk about Christian morality, then he can start with the basics. You know, the parts about loving your neighbor instead of calling ICE on them for a drink discount.

Until then, it is not faith. It is a theme bar with a persecution complex.

Reading this article gave me the same feeling I get when someone tries to fix a server with what a former trans coworker of mine proudly called percussive maintenance. You can tell right away that somebody in Washington thinks they are offering farmers a real solution, even though they seem unclear about what the actual problem is.

A little background, since my political history has taken more turns than a loose extension cord. I grew up in an extreme conservative evangelical home as a preacher’s kid. That meant I carried around beliefs I had not really inspected up close. So yes, for years I showed up and did the Republican work. I made thousands of campaign calls for Romney. I worked for someone running for the state house who did not get elected while I was on her staff, though she later squeaked out a win by six votes, which felt like watching a progress bar creep from 99 percent to complete. I checked all the boxes. Special elector. County central committee. If there was an election from 2011 on, I was probably standing in a school gym with an R next to my name.

Then the party hitched itself to President Mango Unhinged. I wrote the county Chairwoman a long, weary letter explaining that I could not pretend this was normal. I switched to Independent and then, in a moment of questionable judgment, voted for Gary Johnson. Let us call that a corrupted file in my political directory.

Later, when the Senate Election Committee decided Roy Moore was still an acceptable investment, that was it. I went to the courthouse, filled out the form, and became a Democrat. There comes a point when you realize your operating system has too many vulnerabilities to patch.

During the last presidential election, I worked as the precinct chair in a rural county. My grandparents all farmed, and I spent plenty of childhood summers walking beans, putting up hay, and roguing corn with a hoe sharp enough to qualify as a safety violation. But I have been an IT guy for decades now, and even I could see what was coming when the final tally came in and sixty six percent of the precinct voted for Mango Unhinged. That was the moment I knew the whole system was about to crash.

So reading this article about a twelve billion dollar aid package funded by tariffs that Americans are actually paying feels like watching someone reboot the wrong machine. Farmers do not need giant checks mailed out after a political fire. They need stable markets, predictable trade, and equipment that does not cost the same as a mid range server rack.

And when I see a promise to cut environmental rules to make machinery cheaper, all I hear is the unmistakable sound of someone deleting files they should not delete.

At this point I half hope Pam Bondi has my name in a folder labeled Formerly Cooperative, Now Suspiciously Reasonable. It would be the most attention the federal government has ever given a middle aged Army veteran living quietly in an RV.

This twelve billion dollar relief package is not a solution. It is the equivalent of taping over a warning light on the dashboard. Farmers deserve real fixes, not another round of political tech support from people who keep unplugging the wrong cables.

Exactly. Lampshading is the right word for it.

Once acknowledging the problem becomes the whole move, relevance replaces responsibility. The ad doesn’t promise to fix anything. It just proves it knows the vibe. That awareness is treated as absolution.

“AI is scary, but trust our AI” “Work sucks, so automate yourself out of it” “There’s a wealth gap, here’s a checkout button”

None of it is persuasion anymore. It’s alignment theater. The point isn’t to convince you. It’s to make sure you don’t recoil.

And yeah, the He Gets Us ads are a whole separate category of grim. When even moral language is reduced to brand-safe tone, you’re not being spoken to. You’re being processed.

I’ve got a few essays in the drafting stage on moral coercion, how systems use shared values to narrow choices without looking like force. This ad cycle feels like a case study.

Fair point. Although in a poem I wrote recently, I put it this way: “You learn to read the sky when you cannot trust the roof.”

Still feels about right for the situation.

More of my writing is here, if you’re curious: https://tover153.substack.com/

Thank you, I really appreciate that.

Yes, I’ve read The Machine Stops, and it’s hard not to feel it hovering over moments like this. Forster saw the danger early. What he couldn’t have known is how normalized the machine would become, or how willingly we’d narrate its failures and keep feeding it anyway.

My instincts tend to run a bit later. More Pat Cadigan, a little J.G. Ballard. Less catastrophic collapse, more systems that keep functioning long after they stop making human sense. I’m interested in the quiet failure modes, the ones that don’t trip alarms but slowly change how people trust, notice, and relate.

If this landed for you, that’s probably the overlap.

Yes, that’s a really good pull.

Hypernormalisation gets at the same feeling from a different angle. Everyone knows the system is strained, maybe failing, but the performance continues because nothing else feels imaginable. So the pretense hardens into reality.

At that point, the lie isn’t even that things are fine. The lie is that there’s no alternative to continuing exactly like this.

That’s the part that feels brittle.

Thank you. That really means a lot, and I’m glad it gave you something to sit with, even if there’s no clear next step yet. I think that uncertainty is honest.

I also understand the pushback against Substack, whatever your reasons are. I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about how I relate to corporations in general, including continuing to write there. For now my line is simple. I don’t ask for subscriptions, I don’t gate content, and everything I write is free. That may change someday, but it’s where I’m comfortable at the moment.

I’ve made other small adjustments too. Leaving Reddit after years, dropping a couple streaming services, shopping more carefully. None of it feels heroic. It just feels like paying attention and trying not to lie to myself about tradeoffs.

I don’t think any of us knows exactly what to do yet. But if we keep thinking about it, and keep being honest with each other instead of performing certainty, my optimistic side still hopes we can find our way through.

This article is mostly useless. It states the problem, but doesn't have anything new to add.

That’s a fair question, and you’re right that it isn’t foolproof.

The reason it works at all is that the fruit isn’t known in advance. He posts the video first, then updates his site with the correct fruit for that video. Viewers can check after the fact. If someone deep-fakes him, they either have to guess the fruit correctly or regenerate the fake once the real fruit is known.

That doesn’t make impersonation impossible, but it does make it more expensive and slower.

And that’s really the point. This isn’t perfect authentication, it’s friction. It raises the cost just enough that casual fakes, reposts, and automated scams stop being worthwhile, even if a determined attacker could still get through.

Which is also why this is such a telling example. Instead of platforms providing provenance, creators are inventing human-readable ways to increase the cost of lying. Not secure, but legible and effective enough for most people.

That’s the ambient trust problem in a nutshell. We’re not aiming for mathematically perfect truth, we’re trying to make deception harder than honesty.

That’s fair. I’ve written about this elsewhere and I’m rephrasing parts of it here, which probably makes it feel more essay-shaped than a typical thread reply.

I wasn’t trying to pad anything. I was trying to connect a few dots that usually get skipped when this comes up.

My doctor was very glad when I adopted a new dog after mine had died 18 months before. I have a good doctor.

I’m tempted to propose a small experiment, if anyone wants to try it.

Hold this frame in mind, then go watch a live walk through any major downtown. Tokyo is a good example, but anywhere dense works as long as you can see people’s faces. Don’t analyze yet. Just watch the ads, the screens, the signage. Then watch the faces moving past them.

Last week in Shibuya I noticed something that stuck with me. People wearing large electronic ad boards on their bodies, moving in coordinated packs through the crossings. Literal walking billboards. It felt like escalation. Not confidence. Desperation.

What I keep noticing isn’t outrage or engagement so much as flattening. The ads are louder, more animated, more self-aware. The delivery systems are becoming more intrusive and physical. But the faces moving past them are tired, inward, already elsewhere. It doesn’t feel like persuasion happening in real time. It feels like two systems passing through each other with minimal contact.

There’s a long-standing observation that societies can look healthy right up until they aren’t. Japan is undergoing a severe demographic contraction, and yet the surface still looks immaculate, hyperfunctional, optimized. The signals say vitality. The underlying trajectories say something else.

I don’t think this is about Japan specifically. It just makes the contrast easier to see. When meaning thins out, systems get very good at looking alive. Ads keep acknowledging the problem. Infrastructure keeps humming. People keep moving.

What struck me in Shibuya was the sense that advertisers already know this. The escalation feels like an admission. If the old signals worked, they wouldn’t need to strap screens to human bodies and march them through crowds.

And it didn’t look like it was helping.

What’s harder to spot is where imagination, trust, and shared future quietly step out of frame.

My daughter in family chat said the same thing this last week. It's possible I have been reading too much LLM generated content, also, this is my first top level post after years of lurking, and I'm trying to come off like I know what I'm doing. If the argument doesn’t land, happy to talk about that. The style I can adjust.