Month: April 2025

Image created by Gemini AI

My wife, son, and I have been watching “The Righteous Gemstones” on HBO Max – the series was an algorithm-based recommendation after we finished “The White Lotus.” The Gemstones are a family of Christian televangelists led by Walter… uh, sorry (he’ll always be “Walter” from “The Big Lebowski” to me), Eli Gemstone, played by John Goodman. The show exposes the hypocrisy of some of this ilk, but takes it to an extreme, blending the worst of Jim and Tammy-Faye Bakker with scenes out of “The Sopranos.” That’s where “shock value” comes in. The show has so many interesting characters and storylines that the gratuitous violence, while absurdly funny at times, isn’t necessary.

Which brings me to the fawning promotion of Generative Artificial Intelligence on LinkedIn. The constant breathless use of the term “game-changer” by “influencers” every time an AI vendor comes out with their newest “o3 x-squared y-axis” is tiresome. I prompted Google’s Gemini AI, “Please provide me 10 variations of the term ‘game-changer’ that are not already cliche.

Okay, here are 10 less cliché variations of “game-changer”:

1. A fundamental recalibration: This emphasizes a significant adjustment or re-evaluation of existing systems.
2. The linchpin alteration: This highlights the change as a crucial element that fundamentally alters the whole.
3. A tectonic realignment: This suggests a deep and structural shift in the landscape.
4. The pivotal disruption: This focuses on the critical and unsettling nature of the change.
5. An epoch-defining moment: This positions the change as something that marks the beginning of a new era.
6. A categorical departure: This emphasizes a clear and distinct break from previous norms.
7. The keystone advancement: This highlights the change as essential and supporting everything else.
8. A generative upheaval: This suggests the change will create significant new possibilities and developments.
9. The operative pivot: This emphasizes the practical and decisive nature of the change.
10. A transfiguring innovation: This highlights how the change fundamentally alters the form or appearance of something.

The point is, most AI “news” is simply regurgitated PR and does not rise to the level of being “game-changers,” “tectonic realignments,” or “epoch-defining moments,” yet I always see it. Why? I think it concerns something called “the attention economy.” Again, Gemini AI can describe it better than me:

“The attention economy describes the current state where human attention is a scarce and valuable resource, much like traditional commodities. In a world saturated with information and constant digital stimulation, individuals and businesses fiercely compete to capture and retain our focus. This has led to various strategies, often employing persuasive technologies and content designed for maximum engagement, shaping not only how we consume information and entertainment but also impacting our social interactions, mental well-being, and even political discourse.”

The attention economy is why everything is “BREAKING NEWS” and why the algorithms of social media platforms promote shocking content. They need to keep your eyeballs looking at them for as long as possible to 1. Learn what interests you most, and 2. Serve you ads based on that knowledge.

The last three words of Gemini’s description got my attention, too. The attention economy also helps explain the current shock-and-awe political strategy. While the daily firehose of outrage keeps us rapt, I wonder what worse scenarios are occurring behind the scenes creating an epoch-defining moment, and not in a good way.

Part 1 was twenty years ago, just after a trip to Manhattan. “What makes your life worth living” was posed at the end and recent events have me wondering again. This year has been a motherfucker, but this post isn’t even about Trump. In mid-January, my mom fell at home, thus beginning an odyssey of overcrowded, brightly-lit emergency room hallways, nursing home rehabs, and drugs – for pain, twitching muscles, infection, water retention, and pain. Did I mention pain? How much pain could you endure before you’d want to tap out?

My life has been so damned easy relative to most. Some of the faces Beth and I saw while walking the concrete canyons of NYC this week were etched with pain or some hard-living equivalent. We wondered about their stories. For those more fortunate, there was hard work and likely low pay. Beth noted, “It takes a lot of workers to run this city.” When I began working in 1974, the minimum wage was $1.60. Fifty-one years later it’s $7.25. Just to keep up with inflation, my ’74 rate should now be $12.29. As I interacted with or observed the hotel front desk clerk, men carrying racks of produce, others digging a hole on 7th Avenue, guides at the Empire State Building, and a man sweeping up trash in the gutter fronting a hotel, I wondered where they lived and how they survived. If they received a medical death sentence, would they fight for their life? Would their life be worth living?

My oldest cousin visited my mom in February. We chatted in the hospital room. As she prepared to leave, a phone call summoned her to her sisters where the younger was experiencing some kind of seizure. Hours later my text was responded with, “She died.” Five weeks later, the male sibling of the family died. On March 8th, he checked himself out of the hospital after a diagnosis of liver cancer. Three days later he was gone. He was ashen and frail at his sister’s services, so the news of his illness wasn’t surprising, but the swift end was. It seems he may have concluded, “Fuck this. I’m out.” I don’t know.

My mom got her Nursing degree while I was in high school. A paper she wrote back then was on euthanasia. She was a proponent. I think Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s book, “On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families” influenced her position. At the darkest point in January, and while delirious from an infection, Mom pointed at something she saw above her and in a shaky whisper said, “This is hell.” She couldn’t tell me what. I researched assisted suicide. It’s not legal in Massachusetts. It is in Vermont, but you must be a citizen. As recovery progressed, I sensed a reset from her view on assisted suicide. Despite the chronic pain, my mother finds life worth living. For what? Her children? Grandchildren and great-grandchildren? Watching the Masters? Cooking shows? Chatting with her daughter-in-law? The tomato plant we’ll bring in May? The Maple Walnut ice cream we’ll take her for in July?

Yeah. All of it.