Reality Bytes
So-called ‘AI,’ performative ignorance, and old-fashioned human assholery are degrading reality as we know it.
In the late ’90s, I spent several miserable weeks digging myself out from under high school rumors that I had made a sex tape (!) for my 15-year-old boyfriend. It was an awful, lonely experience that seemed to drag on endlessly. I remember thinking, at just 16 years old: Will my life ever be different from this? Will this crap follow me forever?
At the time, I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me that the terrible winter of my sophomore year would fade almost entirely from my memory. That it would retreat so thoroughly from my brain that, 25 years later, I would struggle to remember the details. But that’s what happened. I forgot—really, really forgot—about the whole thing.