I live in a town of about five thousand in rural Arkansas where I work part-time at the local library. I’m the only male staff member, and, at 57, I’m the second oldest person working there. The director is one year my senior, and one of the full-time librarians is in her 40s. Everyone else is Millennial or Gen Z.

Our book-reading patrons skew older; Boomers and Silent Generation. When they bring their books to the circulation desk, they chat with staff. Men in particular, perhaps trying to charm the young ladies on the other side of the desk, drop what they think are witty references that I recognize but which are Greek to the twenty-something women who are my co-workers.

My fickle memory refuses to provide a specific reference just now, but I remember one instance in which a cantankerous Vietnam vet made some clever reference involving X. Once he was out the door, I turned to my co-worker and said, “You have no idea what X is, do you?”

She did not.

Except for a period of about a year around the turn of the century when I wore heavy mutton chops, I’ve been clean-shaven, or nearly so. I would often go a week or two between shaves, but I didn’t deliberately cultivate facial hair until 2017 when I grew a Klingon-style beard to protest the Klingon re-design in Star Trek: Discovery. I made a video about it at the time:

I’ve tamed the beard so that it’s more Anabaptist than Klingon these days, but I still have it. The topic of facial hair came up in a conversation at the library and I told a 28-year-old co-worker about the Klingon origin of my beard. She didn’t know what a Klingon was.

Oh, God. The Gen Xer is shaking his fist at clouds again. “The kids today don’t get the references of my youth!”

Yeah, yeah, but here’s the thing: When I was in my teens, I had a head full of references from the previous four decades. They mostly came from television and, in particular, cartoons.

In the 1970s and 80s, I would walk home from school and turn on a local network affiliate TV channel and watch an hour-long grab bag of cartoons from the 1930s through the 70s. This format juxtaposed lavish animated shorts meant for adults who had paid to see films like Casablanca or Gone with the Wind in a movie theater with ultra-low budget affairs animated in foreign sweatshops that were just meant to fill air time.

If you’re Gen X, it’s quite likely that you first heard Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries in the 1957 Chuck Jones classic, “What’s Opera, Doc?” featuring Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. That was an example of a big budget production with lavish art direction created with an adult audience in mind. Over the next 15 years, the major Hollywood studios all closed their animation studios, and the practice of showing animated shorts before theatrical movies died out. That left the studios with a catalog of hundreds of animated shorts that weren’t generating revenue. The answer was to bundle that material into TV syndication packages.

Kids, it turns out, like animation even when they don’t understand the content. Local TV stations had afternoon hours to fill, so a mishmash of cartoons in different styles from different decades filled with out of date references and adult-oriented material available on the cheap was an attractive prospect. We didn’t understand that we were watching cartoons from the Depression, World War II, the post-war boomtimes and the psychedelic late 60s and early 70s, and it didn’t matter.

Making animation, even comparatively low-effort animation, is very time and labor-intensive, so it wasn’t practical to generate a lot of new animation that was appropriate for children. It was practical to just shovel unfiltered adult fare from the archive to them for an hour a day Monday through Friday. So what if that material was made for adults, some of it before children’s television was even a settled concept. We didn’t recognize caricatures of Jack Benny or Bing Crosby. We didn’t grok the references to classic literature. It’s probably for the best that we didn’t understand the sexual innuendo or racist tropes in a lot of those old cartoons. All that mattered to the rights holders of that old material and to the managers of the local network affiliate stations was that we turned on the TV every weekday afternoon to watch the stuff.

The fact that we absorbed the images, music, voices, and references of the previous forty years of American cultural history was an unintended side effect, but it mattered. It wasn’t just cartoons. We listened to the same radio stations and read a lot of the same magazines as adults.

Remember magazines? We have a few magazines in my library. I don’t recall ever seeing a teenager pick one up, but when I was a teenager, I read a lot of magazines. So did my friends. As a kid, an issue of Playboy purloined from a friend’s father’s collection was an object of wonder, and even though our primary interest was the photos of “naked ladies,” we also read the articles. Some of those issues of Playboy were years old by the time we got our larcenous little hands on them, so again, we were sampling the adult world of the past.

Now, ask yourself, what happens when creating an animated short goes from taking a team of dedicated professional artists months of hard work to being created almost in real time by AI? What happens when the production of that material is so cheap and frictionless that every individual can have a personalized infinite scroll of it to consume, entranced, for hours on end? What happens to shared references? What happens to cultural coherence?

I read a Substack post over the weekend comparing ritual to gooning. Gooning originally meant using pornography to substitute for actual sexual contact, but the definition has expanded, and Piotr Pachota has expanded it to mean any activity that one does in private, that requires no effort or risk and which produces nothing of value. Ritual, by contrast, is costly and effortful. Even rituals that are performed alone are usually part of some shared canon of belief, e.g. prayer or ritual magick.

Ritual requires effort, involves other people, and embeds you in a communal structure of some sort. Gooning is low-effort, low-friction, and isolates you from your community. Losing yourself in the infinite scroll of TikTok or Instagram, even non-sexual material, is gooning. I don’t engage with those platforms often, but when I do, I’m shocked and appalled at how much time slips away while I slide my thumb up the screen to bring the next potential dopamine trigger into view. Generative AI didn’t create gooning, but it’s pouring fuel on a pre-existing fire.

One of the most insidious aspects of gooning is that it’s cheap. A Netflix subscription costs about as much as two drinks at your local bar. Most users of generative AI don’t pay the monthly subscription fee, but for those who do, it costs less than you pay for a meal for two at McDonalds. I’m an AI extremist. I have paid monthly subscriptions for ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini and multiple image generation platforms. If I went to the local bar and burger joint, had a meal and then lingered in the bar area talking to people, I could easily spend as much for that one night out as I would on all of my monthly AI subscriptions.

Going out is brutally expensive. Staying home approaches economic necessity, and being home along with the infinite social media feeds and use-maxing AI models is like trying to pause midway down an icy slope. At the bottom is the gooner equivalent of K-hole1.

When the rituals that used to be compulsory become prohibitively expensive, what binds communities? What defines a people or a nation?

When I was in public school, intellectuals would bemoan how school was behaviorist conditioning for industrial production. Bells would ring throughout the school on a rigid schedule, and when the bell rang, we all sprang into motion to scurry through an institutional maze to our next station. How terrible.

But at least we all heard the same bell. It was a common feature in our experience. Sometimes I watched after-school cartoons with friends. Often I watched alone, but my friends saw the same cartoons. There were a lot of animated shorts in those old syndication packages, but we saw a lot of repeats. Even if my friends didn’t see the same cartoons on the same afternoons that I saw them, we all saw them sooner or later. They were both a shared reference for my age cohort and a multigenerational time capsule.

Is YouTube? Is TikTok? Is X or Bluesky?

Is Substack?

Two previous posts, The Mask of Familiarity and The Nothing Burger that Ate the World, describe how the familiarity of user interfaces and control surfaces mask geologic shifts taking place below the surface.

The titular Black Mirror of the dystopian, near-future anthology show created by Charlie Brooker is the smartphone. It is a nearly featureless rectangle that, when not lit up, appears as a slab of dark, reflective glass. That show premiered in 2011. Since then the show has had multiple seasons, multiple long hiatuses, and moved from the British Channel 4 network to Netflix. It has run long enough for some of its early warnings to have been vindicated and for it to re-hash its own classic episodes. The functionality of smart phones and the services to which they connect users have evolved since 2011, but today’s iPhones and Androids look pretty much like they did back then.

The device, the interface, the control surface is familiar, but the functionality it supports, the algorithmically curated stimuli it delivers, has evolved. It has its claws dug more deeply into our brains now, but the device looks the same. That’s the mask of familiarity.

Transformer-based large language and diffusion models didn’t exist in 2011, so there was no AI slop. Now it’s everywhere; by which I mean that it’s on our televisions, laptops and tablets and, most of all, our phones. It’s pouring through these familiar portals.

Right now, at the end of 2025, video slop still isn’t quite as good as the best output from professional human artists, actors, musicians and animators. But it’s a lot better than it was last year. We’re passing through a monumental phase change, the transition from AI-generated content being cheap, abundant but still inferior to the best human-generated content to being basically free, ubiquitous and beyond the best efforts of the most talented human professionals. We’re not there yet, but when the transition is complete, in all likelihood, you’ll have watched it happen through your familiar black mirror.

Maybe you swear you’ll never talk to an AI like a friend, much less an intimate partner. If that’s you, I say, “Good luck to you. Hold the line.”

That stance will get harder and harder to maintain. You’ll be like Carol reisting the hivemind in Pluribus, the new series from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan. Resisting the offerings of an omnipresent, seemingly beneficent, non-human intelligence will become increasingly difficult and costly. AI will know more about you than any human. It will observe your scrolling behavior and understand better than anyone what sorts of images, sounds, faces and cadences you respond to, and it will be able to present them to you via the familiar control surface you carry with you and look at all day.

You say you plan to resist? You intend to stay at the top of the slippery slope engaged in meaningful ritual activity in meat space with other humans, not down in the AI K-hole with the atomized gooners?

Seriously, I wish you success.

Qapla’!