T pointed out to me the other day that in recent weeks and months, my relationship to artificial intelligence has borne quite a lot in common with my relationship to commercial sex back in the years leading up to 2009 and 2010. Once again, I often find myself huddled over my computer, riveted, consumed, unable to turn away.
I pointed out a couple of significant differences between then and now, the largest of which of course is that that obsession, that compulsion, in 2009 was destructive. It was expensive, it was secretive, it was shameful. Every minute I spent pursuing that obsession left me feeling worse about myself and was impoverishing in almost every sense.
My hours spent in Claude Code, and the Gemini command line interface, and ChatGPT’s Codex, are, in many ways quite the opposite: they’re productive, they’re generative, they’re fun. While I’m capable of a manic dissociative flight into them, even the most dissociative obsession leaves me at the end of it with something about which I can feel some pride. I’ve used artificial intelligence in the last few weeks to automate the collection of porn; to radically overhaul and improve, in my opinion, this website, including providing users and me with some nifty fun new tools.
And then, away from this portion of my life, I’ve created a number of tools and websites that have improved not just my quality of life, but the lives of literally dozens of other people, if not hundreds.
So, while I plead guilty to the addictive, manic flight and to the parallel between 2009 and today in that regard, it feels important to me to flag at least some of the differences.
