The Who Cares Era
Earlier this week, it was discovered that the _Chicago Sun-Times_ and the _Philadelphia Inquirer_ had both published an externally-produced "special supplement" that contained facts, experts, and book titles entirely made up by an AI chatbot. There's been a lot written about this (former _Chicago Reader_ editor Martha Bayne's is the best), and I don't need to rehash it all. But the thing that is most disheartening to me is how at every step along the way, nobody cared.
The writer didn't care. The supplement's editors didn't care. The biz people on both sides of the sale of the supplement didn't care. The production people didn't care. And, the fact that it took _two days_ for anyone to discover this epic fuckup in print means that, ultimately, the reader didn't care either.
It's so emblematic of the moment we're in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.
AI is, of course, at the center of this moment. It's a mediocrity machine by default, attempting to bend everything it touches toward a mathematical average. Using extraordinary amounts of resources, it has the ability to create something _good enough_ , a squint-and-it-looks-right simulacrum of normality. If you don't care, it's miraculous. If you do, the illusion falls apart pretty quickly. The fact that the userbase for AI chatbots has exploded exponentially demonstrates that _good enough_ is, in fact, good enough for most people. Because most people don't care.
(It's worth pointing out that I'm not a full-throated hater and know people—coders, mostly—who work with AI that _do_ care and have used it to make real, meaningful things. Most people, however, use it quickly and thoughtlessly to make more mediocrity.)
It's easy to blame this all on AI, but it's not just that. Last year I was deep in negotiations with a big-budget podcast production company. We started talking about making a deeply reported, limited-run show about the concept of living in a multiverse that I was (and still am) very excited about. But over time, our discussion kept getting dumbed down and dumbed down until finally the show wasn't about the multiverse at all but instead had transformed into a daily chat show about the Internet, which everyone was trying to make back then. Discussions fell apart.
Looking back, it feels like a little microcosm of everything right now: Over the course of two months, we went from something smart that would demand a listener's attention in a way that was challenging and new to something that sounded like every other thing: some dude talking to some other dude about apps that some third dude would half-listen-to at 2x speed while texting a fourth dude about plans for later.
Hanif Abdurraqib, in one of his excellent Instagram mini-essays the other week, wrote about the rise of content that's designed to be consumed while doing something else. In Hanif's case, he was writing about _Time Machine_, his incredible 90 minute deep dive into The Fugees' seminal album _The Score_. Released in 2021, Hanif marveled at the budget, time, and effort that went into crafting the two-part 90 minute podcast and how, today, there's no way it would have happened.
He's right. Nobody's funding that kind of work right now, because nobody cares.
(It's worth pointing out that Hanif wrote this using Stories, a system that erased it 24 hours later. Another victim of the Who Cares Era.)
Of course we're all victims of the biggest perpetrators of this uncaring era, as the Trump administration declares "Who Cares?" to vast swaths of the federal government, to public health, to immigrant families, to college students, to you, to me. As Elon Musk's DOGE rats gnaw their way through federal agencies, not caring is their guiding light. They cut indiscriminately, a smug grin on their faces. That they believe they can replace government workers—people who care an _extraordinary_ amount about their arcane corner of the bureaucracy—with hastily-written AI code is another defining characteristic of right now.
I keep coming back to the word "disheartening," because it all really is.
Without getting into too many specifics, I recently was involved in reviewing hundreds of applications for something. Over the course of reviewing, I was struck by the nearly-identical phrasing that threaded through dozens of the applications. It was eerie at first, like seeing a shadow in the distance, then frustrating, and ultimately completely disheartening: It was AI. For whatever their reasons, a bunch of people had used a chatbot to help write their answers to questions that asked them to draw from their own, unique, personal experience. They had fed their resumes or their personal websites or their actual stories and experiences into the machine, and it had filled in the blanks, Mad Libs-style. I felt crushed.
Until.
Until I read an application written entirely by a person. And then another. And another. They _glowed_ with delight and joy and sadness and with the unexpected at every turn.
They were human.
They were written by people that cared.
In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care.
In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.
At a time where the government's uncaring boot is pressing down on all of our necks, the best way to fight back is to care. Care loudly. Tell others. Get going.
As the culture of the Who Cares Era grinds towards the lowest common denominator, support those that are making real things. Listen to something with your full attention. Watch something with your phone in the other room. Read an actual paper magazine or a book.
Be yourself.
Be imperfect.
Be human.
Care.
