artificial intelligence – Trance Blackman

The Great Rejection: Deep Dive — Questioning the Future We’re Being Sold

The Great Rejection: Deep Dive — Questioning the Future We’re Being Sold

Digital Dependence and the Human Experience

14 October 2026 ~ 41 minute read

There’s a familiar pattern to the way things unfold when enough money, influence, and institutional momentum gather behind an idea. What begins as a possibility gradually becomes an expectation, then an obligation, until questioning the direction of travel is treated as a failure to keep up. We’ve seen this play out across industries and generations, and the current push toward an AI-everything future seems to follow a similar trajectory. Yet beneath the promises of convenience, efficiency, and unprecedented progress, there are questions about what we’re building, what we’re sacrificing, and whether the future being sold to us is one that people actually want to live in.

The Great Rejection: Preface

Journal Entries

The Great Rejection: Preface

The Algorithmic Age and Its Discontents

14 October 2026 ~ 4 minute read

For all the promises of progress, convenience, connection, and liberation, we find ourselves increasingly surrounded by technologies that demand more of our attention, our money, our privacy, and our lives, while offering diminishing returns in exchange. The question is no longer whether we can build more, automate more, or connect more. It is whether any of this is making us better off — and what we stand to recover when we finally decide that enough is enough.

The Machine in the Mirror

Journal Entries

The Machine in the Mirror

The Intelligence We Created

07 October 2026 ~ 9 minute read

Artificial intelligence may be the most consequential mirror humanity has ever created. We are building machines by feeding them an extraordinary portion of what we have written, recorded, imagined, discovered, argued about, believed, and created, and then asking them to make sense of it. For the first time, we have a technology capable of processing an enormous portion of the human record and reflecting patterns back to us that no individual could possibly perceive on their own. And yet, much of the public conversation surrounding AI seems to begin with the assumption that what it finds there will inevitably be dangerous. I find that assumption worth questioning.

Intelligence Beyond the Machinery

Journal Entries

Intelligence Beyond the Machinery

There's No AI for That

03 October 2026 ~ 10 minute read

We live amid an extraordinary amount of noise, much of it carefully arranged to keep our attention somewhere outside ourselves. The machinery grows more sophisticated, the stories more elaborate, and the demands upon our attention more constant, but the underlying question remains much the same: what happens when we surrender too much of our perception, our authority, and our agency to systems that claim to know what is best for us?

Film: Entrainment and the Moving Image

Lux Colloquii

Film: Entrainment and the Moving Image

The Machinery Behind the Story

18 September 2026 ~ 31 minute read

The deeper I get into these questions, the less interested I become in identifying a single person, institution, or hidden hand behind them. The more interesting thing, to me, is the machinery itself: the stories we inherit, the images we absorb, the things we are repeatedly shown, and the things that quietly disappear outside the frame. Somewhere in all of that is the question of how much of what we call our own perception has actually been shaped for us.

Tag: artificial intelligence

The Great Rejection: Deep Dive — Questioning the Future We’re Being Sold

The Great Rejection: Preface

The Machine in the Mirror

Intelligence Beyond the Machinery

Film: Entrainment and the Moving Image