Clankers

The machines are getting louder. They don’t think; they clank. People call it “intelligence” because the marketing is good, because the numbers are big, because nobody likes to be left out of the next gold rush. But clankers aren’t wise. They don’t know what they’re doing. They recombine, they predict, they imitate. Useful enough for moving money, perfect for producing noise, and already dangerous in the way noise is dangerous—drowning out signal.

There’s an old trick here: promise transformation, deliver repetition. Machine learning doesn’t dissolve the human condition; it magnifies it, spins it into high-frequency feedback. What gets sold as progress is really leverage—control by those who own the clankers, paid for by those who don’t. People confuse scale for value, volume for truth. They forget that more is not better when what’s being multiplied is hollow.

The pitch is always the same: efficiency, productivity, convenience. The reality is inertia, dependency, enclosure. The clankers generate money, yes, but not meaning. They create the surface shimmer of innovation while draining the ground of its depth. They make the world faster but not wiser. And if you listen carefully, you’ll hear it: not the hum of intelligence, but the clank of machinery running on borrowed trust.