“I’m on Mythos” reminds me of the proud Google Wave announcements.

People who love how a velvet rope now runs around their sense of self, are stumbling towards an old philosophical landmine.

Since at least the 1700s, thanks to Hume, humans contemplated when a mirror has no source image it will reflect whatever stands in front of it. The aspiration of an empty person operates as a mirror, such that to stand in front of a VC-fueled speculative software velvet rope makes a user proud to reflect that rope as their existence.

Anthropic built Mythos as Rousseau built Sophie, to be valued through the eyes of others, and called it education. Wollstonecraft turned that education into a verdict against the source:

Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

Now that Wave failed, has Mythos become your prison yet for adornment?

It should surprise exactly nobody that the American market turns on McDonalds and Coca-Cola instead of a rare steak with a glass of wine or even clean water. Likewise, if you are asking students if they want to be a skilled chef or a fast-food worker, it maybe misses the point entirely, dear MIT lecturer in fiction and nonfiction writing.

Playing the AI-detection game drags me into a surveillance mindset that undermines the workshop environment. If you use AI, it reveals your orientation toward writing. Do you want to make art, or just turn in text? Do you want to actually learn how to write, or just pretend to do so?

Even if you actually learn how to write, what billionaire is going to hire you? You learn the humanities and the billionaire suddenly doesn’t have an iron grip. Which one of the billionaires wants more than waves of desperate disposable humans who just turn in their text and go die? Do you think that’s how Putin or Hegseth plans to win their wars?

Teaching skills, independent thought and capable minds, becomes a revolutionary act in Trump’s dumb vision of America. You will will need then to also prepare kids to be called frustrated, angry, and any number of emotive terms by the coin-operated MAGA machine that pushes the no-skill labor meat grinder market run by the emotionless AI oligarchs. Don’t feel, kneel.

Related: Trump spirals into AI slop and FOX news now calls him the AI president.

…forever this administration and Trump will be the AI president. [The harms to humanity] all came on his watch.