The Dystopia That Programmed Me
How AI is healing my relationship with tech
Editor’s Note: I've been having a fascinating conversation with my bookshelf.
Not literally—I'm not that far gone yet. But I did feed seventeen years of reading data into ChatGPT (every book logged since 2007, when I apparently decided to make "person who tracks things in spreadsheets" my entire personality).
The results have been uncannily accurate. The AI correctly guessed my college thesis topic. It clocked my complicated relationship with Evangelicalism based on my book choices. When I asked what writerly tics probably annoy me most, it listed "manipulative plotting, shallow 'issue' books, and prose that can't carry its own weight" and I immediately felt seen.
But the real gut-punch came when I started telling it about the books from before the spreadsheet era. I was rambling about these formative reads, trying to excavate how each had woven its tendrils through my life since my days at Mason Middle School, when one book in particular materialized into my view: M.T. Anderson’s Feed.
I hadn't thought about Feed in fifteen years. But sitting there, using an AI to analyze my data and predict my influences, being told by an algorithm which book taught me to distrust algorithms—well. The irony was too perfect. So I wrote about it.
The Dystopia That Programmed Me
Sometimes a book programs how you feel about the future when you get there.
I first met M.T. Anderson’s Feed not long after I "graduated" from the kids' department to the Young Adult shelves of the Borders in Mason, Ohio, may it rest in peace. This was 2002 or 2003 and I was twelve or thirteen, armed with a few dollars of saved allowance and permission to choose one paperback. The cover stopped me: the back of a shaved head floating on electric blue, title stamped where the cerebellum should be.
I read Feed in the windows of time that open when you finish worksheets early. The plot was a slow-motion catastrophe: teens with the internet implanted in their brain partying while the planet died and a girl named Violet trying to resist the machine. When I closed the book I was newly suspicious: of Neopets pop-ups, cafeteria posters. Then I forgot about it completely.
Until one day earlier this year, as I was talking with ChatGPT about the foundational texts from my childhood. Little Women, The Golden Compass, The Secret Garden. Then all of a sudden, there it was, pulled up from the depths of my subconscious like an artifact from a shipwreck. Every unease I'd felt about seamless interfaces, every creeping suspicion about targeted ads, every moment of linguistic vertigo in the face of optimized content—it all had an origin story. A YA novel had installed these anxieties before I had the vocabulary to name them.
But this isn’t a story about hating technology, or about nursing teenage suspicions into adult cynicism. What started as fear has been reshaped by experience into something more complicated, even transformative. I still carry Anderson’s warnings like a background process, but alongside them I’ve found curiosity, delight, and the occasional rush of wonder. Suspicion sharpened my vision, but what I see now isn’t only danger—it’s possibility.
What the Feed Left Me With
Twenty years of living inside the very systems I was taught to distrust have reshaped my fears into something harder to untangle, but the reflexes are tough to shake.
The first is a suspicion of anything that feels too easy. One night, deep in a gig-economy rabbit hole, I found myself staring at a DoorDash checkout: chickpea tikka masala, $38.67 with tip. One tap between craving and satisfaction. All the reporting I’d just read about drivers netting $3 after gas collapsed into the cheerful checkout animation. Feed had warned me: when a hacker crashes the Moon party, the invisible suddenly becomes visible. Frictionlessness is dependency dressed up as convenience. Someone always pays.
The second reflex kicks in whenever I’m reminded how precisely the feed knows me. Cambridge Analytica ads, Facebook psychographics, Instagram showing me the exact coffee grinder I’d abandoned in my cart—it all lands with the same queasy recognition. In Feed, ads literally bloom inside consciousness: “Get pizza for less!” Titus doesn’t mind. Violet resists; the system kills her. Every time I notice my thoughts pre-formatting for posts, I remember Violet, and I close the laptop to think one unmonetizable thought.
And then there’s language. The first time ChatGPT unsettled me, it was spitting out B2B drivel: “In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape…” I begged it to stop saying that phrase. It couldn’t. Anderson had already written this dread into Violet’s dying vocabulary: words just stop working, leaving only product placement and corporate sludge. Feed showed me how optimization kills meaning long before “content marketing” entered my vocabulary.
The Other Side of the Feed
AI has changed my relationship with technology in a way I didn’t expect. That’s not to say it’s perfect—there are still implementation hiccups, questions of fairness, and the uneasy math of who actually wins—but in the day-to-day, it’s flipped the script. Where older systems made me wary, AI has made me curious. Where I once braced against frictionless design, now I find myself grateful for it.
The most obvious way it shows up is in the way I write. Take this essay, for example: In the past, I would’ve opened a blank document and tried to scaffold sentences one by one. Instead, I opened my Curiosity Gap assistant and started talking. The relief was immediate: the words spilled out, captured before they could slip away. Within half an hour I had a draft. Writing has shifted from 80% construction, 20% revision to the reverse. It feels less like drafting and more like sculpting—shaping a block that already existed.
The same systems that once unsettled me by knowing me too well have also surprised me with gifts. I play a game with my AI Bible tutor I call “Bible Study Roulette,” tossing it passages at random. What started as digital dice-rolling turned into something closer to a seminar. One spin had me comparing evangelical study Bibles side by side, noting how they couched Matthew’s beatitudes in the context of salvation in contexts my other resources don’t. The AI helped me discover patterns of interpretation I might not have articulated without BibleGPT there to act as a sounding board.
And even language, which Feed taught me to fear losing, has come back to me through AI. I’ve begged models to quit the “rapidly evolving business landscape” sludge, and sometimes they can’t. But then, in the next breath, they’ll hand me a metaphor that lands clean. When I was struggling to describe this new way of working, Claude suggested it was like an ergonomic chair: meant to make the hours I spend at work more frictionless, more expansive. It wasn’t an image I could’ve reached for, but once I heard it, I knew it was mine.
The danger, of course, is forgetting to stop. These systems are always open, always listening, always ready to pick up the thread at any hour. Which means the only off-switch is me. Lately I’ve been closing the laptop mid-sentence—letting the draft sit half-finished, even when my mind itches to keep going. Sometimes I’ll walk outside barefoot just to remind myself the world still has edges. A little friction on purpose, to prove I can still feel it.
Where the System Ends and I Begin
The twelve-year-old who first read Feed would be appalled at how easily I hand over my thoughts to machines, how willingly I let Spotify DJ my moods and ChatGPT scaffold my drafts. But she’d also recognize the stubbornness—the refusal to let the feed think for me entirely.
I live somewhere in between now, at the threshold: one foot in Anderson’s dystopia, one in the strange exhilaration of these new tools. Suspicion keeps me wary. Curiosity keeps me engaged. Both are necessary.
What’s changed is that suspicion no longer has the last word. Where I once braced only for manipulation, I now brace for surprise too—for the gift of an unexpected book rec, the rush of catching a thought in flight, the joy of words arriving in a voice I didn’t know I had.
Staying human requires a little disobedience—welcoming the feed’s gifts without letting it swallow me whole.
Notes and Errata
New role at Every. Big news on my end: I’m stepping into a new role of Staff Writer and AI Editorial Lead at Every. Up until now, I’ve been publishing here as a contributing writer; from here on out, you can expect to see me publishing more regularly, sharing the lessons I learn about writing, editing, and experimenting with AI along the way. Case in point: my most recent piece there is about failing to build an AI editor—and why failure turned out to be more useful than success.
Rebuilding my style guide. I also took a hard look at my old Working Overtime style guide and realized it wasn’t serving me anymore. So I scrapped it and had ChatGPT help me rebuild one from scratch, based on my most recent essays rather than the ones that, a handful of months later, I already look back on and wish were better. The biggest realization was how consistent the themes actually are when you zoom out. Here’s the analysis ChatGPT gave me, tracing the threads across the last few months:
Looking at it, I had the funny, slightly humbling thought: huh. That really is what I write about. We’ll see where curiosity leads me next.
Stay curious,
Katie P.