I Saw Something New in San Francisco (AI horror)
In his classic book “Understanding Media,” Marshall McLuhan dwells on the Greek myth of Narcissus. If it’s been a while since you’ve read it, the story, in Ovid’s telling, goes like this: Narcissus is born gorgeous, the son of the river god Cephissus and the nymph Liriope. He is desired by many but is callous and indifferent in response. He is cursed to love what he cannot have, and finds that love when he stumbles across a reflection of himself in a pool and wastes away, staring into his own shimmering eyes. (In other versions of the myth, he leans forward to kiss his reflection, falls into the water and drowns.)
It is, McLuhan says, a reflection of our own “narcotic culture” that we have come to talk of narcissism as a love of oneself. But that’s not what the tale reveals. “The Narcissus myth does not convey any idea that Narcissus fell in love with anything he regarded as himself,” McLuhan writes. Its real point is that “men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves.”
I think about McLuhan roughly as my fellow men reportedly think about the Roman Empire — which is to say, a lot. But he’s on my mind now because I have been exploring the deepening relationship so many people have with their A.I.s. The protean nature of these systems means they are never just one thing, but among the many things they are is the one McLuhan warned of: an extension of our self in a material that is not our self.
I spent last week in San Francisco talking to people on the frontier of the A.I. age. I try to do that every few months, but my conversations on this trip felt different than my conversations on previous trips. In the past, what I saw was how the technology was changing; this time, what I saw was how the people were being changed by the technology.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/opinion/ai-claude-chatgpt-gemini-mcluhan.html?
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The writer describes how we're becoming unable to think or function, as we become mesmerized by the AI extensions of ourselves.
It's a good, if frightening read!
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