Disclaimer: Side effects may include laughter and/or anger. Read and watch at your own risk.
Let’s start with the good news. Reality still exists. Somewhere. Probably. It’s hiding under a pile of sponsored content and a terms-of-service agreement you clicked “agree” on in 2019 without reading — which means you technically signed over your soul, your browsing history, and your cat’s emotional support status to a Delaware LLC that doesn’t exist anymore.
The deed to reality changed hands six months ago in a server farm outside Reno. No witnesses. No press coverage. The notary was AI-generated. His digital signature looked like a reindeer-Chihuahua hybrid sat on a keyboard, sneezed, had a full grand mal seizure, rolled off the desk, and then got up and asked for a treat. The notary’s name was Chad. Of course it was Chad. Chad doesn’t exist. Chad is a prompt written by a twenty-three-year-old in Scottsdale who manages four Instagram accounts for a protein powder brand. Chad is what happens when ambition and emptiness have a baby and the baby gets venture capital funding.
Welcome to the information age — where every fact comes with a disclaimer, every image comes with a question mark, and every video comes with a “this may have been altered” warning that everyone ignores the way you ignore “objects in mirror are closer than they appear” until the thing is already inside your car.
The Cary Harrison Files airs on KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles and the Pacifica Radio Network. Subscribe here on Substack for the full transcript, extended commentary, and the occasional history lesson that will ruin your day in the most productive way possible.
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Membership here sustains public radio
You wanted the marketplace of ideas. Congratulations. It got acquired by private equity. The ideas are fine. The marketplace got dismembered like a piñata at a hedge fund retreat — everything spilled out, the children dove for it, shrieking, elbowing each other in the throat, and a man in a fleece vest — always a fleece vest, that’s the uniform of consequence-free capitalism, the fleece vest is what you wear when you want to look approachable while committing crimes against the social contract — scooped up ninety percent of the candy before anyone else’s knees hit the ground. He rebranded it The Narrative Suite™ — Powered by Palantir. The candy is now a subscription service. The piñata is a podcast. The children are content.
Here’s what happened, and I’m going to tell it to you straight. We had, once upon a time — and I’m being generous, romantic even, like a completely hammered uncle at a wedding whose glass eye has moved out of center orbit and it’s now staring up to the the left. Remember the shared reality? Messy, imperfect, full of Walter Cronkite’s authoritative brow and ink-stained reporters who smelled like cigarettes, existential despair, and a low-grade conflict of interest they at least had the good taste to be slightly embarrassed about. But shared. You and your neighbor and the guy at the diner — you all agreed, more or less, on the basic facts of existence. The sky was blue. Nixon was a crook. The Pentagon lied about Vietnam. And we didn’t need a chatbot to explain what a tariff does to the price of a washing machine.
That’s gone now. Not eroded. Not “in decline,” which is how NPR would say it in a seventeen-part series with a theremin score. Gone. Atomized. Vaporized. Scooped into a content blender the size of Delaware — which, as states go, is already basically a server farm with a flag — spun at ten thousand RPMs by a guy who went to Stanford, peaked emotionally at age twenty-six, and has the emotional range of a parking meter on a Sunday in a closed municipal lot.
Here’s the operating manual. It fits on a cocktail napkin, which is where most crimes against democracy are first sketched out.
A billionaire buys a media platform. He doesn’t issue memos that say “stop writing things that make my portfolio uncomfortable.” He just has to own it — because ownership is the thermostat that controls the temperature of the entire building, and every reporter and editor in that building knows, on a marrow-deep cellular level, exactly which way the wind has turned. Slowly, invisibly, like a gas leak that makes everyone politely stupider, the editorial choices shift. The investigations get “deprioritized” — which is corporate-speak for taken behind the barn and made to squeal like a pig — and the chilling effect does the whole filthy job without mussing its hair. It’s the laziest form of censorship in the history of power, and it works like a charm, and the charm smells like wet money and a very expensive fear of accountability.
That’s the legacy model. The new version doesn’t need owners. It needs algorithms. And algorithms don’t have politics. They have metrics. They optimize for engagement, and engagement turns out to be nearly perfectly correlated with outrage, primal terror, and the specific neurochemical bath of having your worst suspicions confirmed by something that looks like journalism but was generated in three and a half seconds by a language model trained on the entire internet — which, if you’ve spent any time online, you’ll recognize as roughly equivalent to raising a child exclusively on the collected wisdom of a bus station bathroom wall.
Two hundred billion dollars in infrastructure — with a B — as in boy oh boy… specifically engineered to make human beings incrementally, measurably, documentably dumber while feeling absolutely certain they’re the smart ones.
And the people building these systems are not hiding. They are giving TED Talks in five-thousand-dollar “casual” turtlenecks, explaining in measured tones how their product will “reshape human cognition” and “democratize” something-or-other. In Silicon Valley, “democratize” means: we’ll let everybody play with this for free until we’ve quietly strangled every alternative in its sleep, then we will charge you for the oxygen — because we own the oxygen now, the oxygen is a product, the product has a freemium tier, and every fourth breath is a sponsored message from the mattress guy.
This is where it stops being an abstract sociological horror show and becomes a deeply personal, extremely unwelcome colonoscopy.
There was a deal. An implicit, multigenerational American deal: you go to college, you learn to think and analyze and synthesize, you do the kind of work that requires a human brain with a nervous system and a history — and in exchange, you become irreplaceable.
Well. About. That. Deal.
The machine learned to perform a stupendously Oscar-worthy imitation of thinking — which, in a market economy, is functionally, legally, commercially identical to actually thinking, because the market has never graded on philosophical authenticity. Lawyers discovering their first drafts are spat out in eleven seconds by something that doesn’t bill by the hour, doesn’t expense lunches, and hasn’t yet developed a drinking problem. Journalists watching their newsrooms get strip-mined down to a skeleton crew feeding material into AI summarizers that produce clean, confident, completely wrong accounts of events the AI wasn’t present for, has no source for, and will cheerfully invent citations for if you phrase the request nicely. And coders — the people who built the hammer — now watching the hammer swing itself. They wrote the spell, and the spell ate them. That is not a metaphor. That is a product roadmap, and it ships in Q3.
What’s still standing? The institutions. Not because they’re majestic — but because they’re still there. Roof attached to walls. Walls attached to foundation. Foundation poured by people who gave a genuine damn about whether the thing outlasted them, which is a concept so foreign to the current moment it should be behind velvet ropes in a museum.
You are being manipulated. Write that down. That is not paranoia. That is the documented, publicly traded, SEC-filed, shareholder-approved, keynote-announced business model of roughly a dozen of the most heavily capitalized entities in the history of organized human civilization.
Fund independent journalism like it’s the last working water treatment plant in a county where every other water source is now owned by a man in a fleece vest who rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange wearing a t-shirt that said “move fast and break things” — a philosophy that is excellent for apps and catastrophic for democracy, shared epistemology, journalism, and the basic collective agreement that we are all operating in the same reality.
If we don’t — if independent human journalism becomes a luxury we cannot afford — then Chad wins. Chad, who doesn’t exist, wins. And reality becomes a subscription product. Available in three tiers. The cheapest one has ads, loads slow, and if you look at it long enough, it starts to look back.
Membership here sustains public radio
The Cary Harrison Files — KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles/ Pacifica Radio Network. More at caryharrison.com, Instagram: RealCaryHarrison or youtube: @CaryHarrison · Text or message us any time: 310-737-TALK
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