Djibo Artificial intelligence was pitched as the great connector. Algorithms would bring together ideas, products, and people that might otherwise remain hidden.
In practice, though, its most potent effect has been insulation. We are learning to live in capsules of our own making: curated realities arrive not through friction but through code.
The clearest example is news. You don’t need to face a morning paper with stories that unsettle or bore you. Instead, feeds generated by AI-curation systems that hand you headlines most likely to keep you engaged.
The cost of that convenience is obvious: when everyone reads a different paper, shared reality becomes a rarity. One person’s newsfeed may be thick with celebrity gossip, another’s may focus on conspiracy, another’s may read like a political action memo.
None of them, however, offers the messy sprawl of a front page that forces you to glance at events beyond your interests.
That same narrowing logic applies to socializing. Apps once promised to broaden horizons, connecting people across geography and social groups.
Now they rely on AI-matched algorithms that filter potential partners based on preloaded preferences. You may scroll past dozens of faces, but the underlying system has already decided which ones fit the capsule you’ve constructed; your type, your politics, your humor profile, your consumption patterns. Instead of chance encounters across difference, dating becomes a mirror gallery of what you already know you like.
Entertainment only deepens the cocoon. Streaming services no longer just provide access to a library; they nudge viewers toward what their past behavior predicts.
“Because you watched…” has become the cultural tagline of our era. You binge a show, and the system offers five nearly identical shows to keep you in orbit.
AI ensures you rarely stumble onto a foreign classic, an odd documentary, or a genre outside your norm unless you fight your way past the recommendation engine.
Discovery used to happen by wandering aisles at Blockbuster, judging covers, or taking a flyer on a random pick. Now the act of stumbling itself is rare.
Daily life has followed suit. Why go to a restaurant when Uber Eats delivers? Why push a cart down a grocery aisle when Instacart can stock your fridge from your phone?
Convenience has become the enemy of contact. Where once you might have struck up conversation with a waiter or discovered a fruit you’d never tried by seeing it in a bin, the algorithm ensures your order is filled with the familiar. You don’t even need to greet a delivery driver—notifications and tip buttons make the exchange frictionless.
This insulation carries cultural consequences. Democracy depends on common ground: a shared set of facts, a minimum level of interaction across differences.
If AI creates a world where you can tune out news you dislike, avoid neighbors you don’t know, and bypass stores and restaurants entirely, then the rough edges that make society possible smooth away into solitude. Political divides harden not only because people disagree, but because they literally no longer see the same world.
Tthis effect isn’t accidental. AI systems are designed for retention. They feed you more of what you’ve already proven you’ll click, because that maximizes engagement and profit.
And the isolation is profitable. A person who never leaves their house orders more. A viewer who never leaves their lane binges longer. A voter who never challenges their worldview is easier to mobilize.
There are benefits, of course. For the elderly, disabled, or geographically isolated, delivery services and online curation can mean access to necessities and connection otherwise impossible.
But the ease of insulation makes it tempting for everyone. The capsules are cozy.
The question is whether we can build systems that encourage porousness rather than enclosure.
For now, the trend points to the hermetic. Encapsulation is easier than ever, and AI refines it with each click. The paradox is sharp: we have more access to the world than at any time in history, and yet fewer reasons to step into it.
The future will depend not only on how well AI can insulate us, but on whether we find the will to crack open our capsules.
You can’t look away from a train wreck, but Netflix keeps making you wish you could.
The latest entry in Ryan Murphy’s Monster franchise, this one centered on Ed Gein, is the purest kind of TV turd: slickly produced, hopelessly sensationalistic, and about as thoughtful as a Halloween haunted house. It’s billed as a “story,” but there’s nothing here resembling storytelling. What you get is voyeurism disguised as television art.
Charlie Hunnam, cast as Gein, delivers his lines in a bizarre falsetto, the kind of false softness that makes you wince rather than shiver. Gein’s real voice was quiet, even childlike at times, something unsettling because it was natural.
The performance here sounds like an actor putting on a skin mask he doesn’t quite understand. If Hunnam has a naturally soft voice, it doesn’t come through. It plays like a gimmick, one more piece of borrowed creepiness that turns campy instead of chilling.
Then there’s the mother. Laurie Metcalf plays Augusta Gein, a role that should’ve been layered with nuance. Gein’s mother was famously domineering, a towering religious fanatic whose shadow loomed over his entire life.
In this series, she arrives straight from central casting as Demon from Hell, dripping venom in every line, scowling like an exorcism in a ratty dress.
It’s unsubtle, and worse, it’s unimaginative. Real horror comes from the everyday. By making her a cartoon monster, Murphy robs the story of its only real psychological core.
This is the problem with the whole enterprise. Rather than digging into the questions Gein still raises — how does small-town isolation incubate violence, how does obsession curdle into depravity, why does true crime still grip us — the show is obsessed with surfaces.
The series paints Gein as a horror mascot, not a human being warped by circumstance. The camera lingers on corpses, on skin, on grave-robbing like a kid showing off his goriest comic book.
Murphy has made a career out of excess, and sometimes it works. American Horror Story thrived on spectacle. The Assassination of Gianni Versace found real drama in flamboyance.
But here, excess feels cheap. There’s nothing new to say about Gein, nothing undiscovered. The show doesn’t try. Instead, it doubles down on lurid images we’ve all seen before.
There’s no denying the production looks expensive. The sets are suitably grim, the lighting all shadows and menace.
The polish, however, only sharpens the cynicism. You feel like you’re being sold a wax figure in a freak show. This feels more like exploitation than exploration.
The true crime boom has given us enough to know the difference. Mindhunter wrestled with the banality of evil. Documentaries like The Jinx and Making a Murderer pulled apart the systems around crime. Even Dahmer — Murphy’s previous monster — found angles about race, policing, and media complicity. The Ed Gein Story has no such aim. It just wants you to squirm.
And squirm you will. Not from terror, but from the sheer awfulness of it all.
One day, someone will tell Ed Gein’s story with clarity and restraint, with attention to the horror of his past, his crimes and the humanity of the world he destroyed.
This isn’t that day. This is another Murphy sideshow, another exercise in television taxidermy.
Netflix calls it Monster. They got that part right.
