adriau

Here is the challenge before you: Name a famous person who is 28 years old. Go ahead. No cheating, no looking it up. Off the dome. Pure, uncut 28-year-old naming. I bet you can’t do it.

Zendaya? 29. Gracie Abrams? 26. Paul Mescal? 29. Hannah Einbinder? 30. You’re lower than dirt. You couldn’t name a 28-year-old if you tried. Look at yourself, scrabbling around in the dustiest corners of your mind for a well-known person who looks as if they contain the potent 28-year-old concoction of belief that they are never going to die with the creeping suspicion that they absolutely will die. Julia Garner, of Weapons fame? 31. Austin Abrams, of Weapons fame? 29. Josh Brolin, of Weapons fame? 57. Come on now, you’re embarrassing yourself.

If a Democratic lawmaker and her husband are gunned down, it’s an isolated incident carried out by a lone wolf.

If a right-wing activist is gunned down, it’s part of a coordinated effort by the radical left to incite violence.

Earlier today, the FBI shared two blurry photos on X of a person of interest in the shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Numerous users replied with AI-upscaled, “enhanced” versions of the pictures almost immediately, turning the pixelated surveillance shots into sharp, high-resolution images. But AI tools aren’t uncovering secret details in a fuzzy picture, they’re inferring what might be there — and they have a track record of showing things that don’t exist.

The problem is not just the rise of fake material, but the collapse of context and the acceptance that truth no longer matters as long as our cravings for colors and noise are satisfied. Contemporary social media content is more often rootless, detached from cultural memory, interpersonal exchange or shared conversation. It arrives fully formed, optimized for attention rather than meaning, producing a kind of semantic sludge, posts that look like language yet say almost nothing.

We’re drowning in this nothingness.