Maybe there’s simply nothing left to say, nothing left to write. Maybe I don’t want to tell the world — which can read and interpret without shame — anything more about myself. Because it’s probably just machines now, dutifully scraping my website.
Maybe I’m just too lazy to do the work. To take the time to liquify all these thoughts in my head and pour them into words.
I could unleash an AI agent to write something generic. It would only distantly relate to me, but it would signal to the distant ones that I’m still here. But I don’t even know if anyone’s still following, or who gave up long ago and drifted away disappointed.
Social media would make it easier for followers. But I switched that off ages ago. I’d rather live in real life, talk to real people, feel resonance. I’d rather walk with friends. That beats any online note.
And that’s probably why I haven’t published anything in so long.
Now I circle back to the beginning: Do I even want ChatGPT and Gemini and all these AI giants thoroughly processing my notes, then giving other distant people (or rather human predators) who never want to be close to me enough data and material to create a psychoanagram from these little text vignettes born of whim?
Do I want calculations based on these notes — which only represent a fraction of my thoughts from a bygone time — that make me comparable to others? I don’t know. Luckily, I don’t care either.
So I’ll take the point deduction and push this onto the data highway anyway.
First appeared in German on reinergaertner.de, my blog since 1997. AI-assisted translation — because life’s too short to translate 150 posts by hand, but too long to leave them in German.