Guillotine Technology

On cutting off the harvesting of consciousness, and beheading Elon Musk.

Happy Sunday, and welcome to Pancake Brain — an every-other-weekend newsletter dedicated to pop culture, politics, and the psychedelic experience. I’m Lauren Duca, an award-winning and -losing writer who is trying to find a common sense way of talking about the expansion of consciousness. I hope you enjoy this one..

On my way to visit a local print shop, a robot rolled down the street and stopped when it saw me. The big white box fell back on its wheels, monitoring my movements as I tried to find the entrance, then following behind my footsteps so fast, I considered running away. As I turned the corner, the robot kept rolling, and I watched as it made sure to look both ways before crossing the street. Inside, there was air conditioning and way-high ceilings making space for a flood of natural light washing over the holy grail of graphic design: a winding library of printing processes, including every color scrap paper you can think of, and a guillotine from the 1900s, ready and waiting to tear them all to shreds.

The paper-cutting guillotine, like its head-cutting counterpart, is very, very sharp. With paper lined up beneath the blade, my friend Ali showed me how to pull down the metal ball of a heavy handle, pushing down with strength until the light touch at the end, followed by that sweet, juicy crunch, chopping off the parts you don’t need. “Don’t you just love that sound?” Ali asked after a savoring pause. I said, “Yes, now we just need to find Elon Musk.”

I hope Elon isn’t too offended that I would love to see him decapitated, or, ideally, takes it as a compliment. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerburg are equally deserving of the guillotine. The tech oligarchy must be beheaded, if only in consumer opinion. To say that we are enslaved by robots owned and operated primarily by these three overlords may be a bit extreme since we did agree to the terms and conditions. Sadly, if the head-cutting guillotine cannot save us from the billionaires harvesting the life force energy of our species for profit, the blade must cut us off from our screens, severing our attention from the addiction of the algorithms, un-sucking our souls from the doom scroll. To slice our minds free from the spell of Apple’s evil mirror, and pull the lever down on what is really real.

One response to the fear over artificial intelligence is that we’ve always been scared of new technology. Every advancement left some poetry in its wake, with the exception of Blu-ray, which, came and went faster than those shoes that turn into rollerblades. Human invention can be Rumi or the atom bomb. The use of technology depends on intention. What are you trying to do, and how are you going to do it? Is the whole thing motivated by friendship with all humanity and the planet… or not?

The other day, I got to spend some time talking with a new friend who told me that she could remember when you had to call the operator to get them to call the person who you were trying to call. At age eighty-three, she remembered her visit to the first mall — or at least what was the first mall to her — and I remembered being at the mall with my mom when she used a pay phone to call my dad’s beeper. The majority of the population is now scrolling for two to fifteen hours a day on devices that didn’t exist at the time when Britney Spears rose to power. In as many years ago as we saw the rise and fall of the human innovation known as the Juicy tracksuit, we have been trained to be perpetually attached to a supercomputer capable of harvesting our energy for profit.

Neil Postman insisted that TV would weaken our capacity for attention in Amusing Ourselves to Death, which is a book that I didn’t read it, because I don’t have time. In 1843, Nathaniel Hawthorne was crying that modern tech would cast a “chilly frost” over true intimacy, and he was talking about the iron stove. For as long as there has been writing, Plato has been complaining that even the technology of writing itself is going to weaken our feeble little minds, and make us suck at having deep and meaningful conversations with our besties. I’ve heard these examples cast as a dismissal of panic over current technological advancements, such as ChatGPT, and the fact that all youth is now owned by TikTok… but what if Plato and Nate were onto something? What if they saw the long march of attentional advancement as part of the rush toward our current crisis of social oblivion and unfocused attention? What if they felt the rapid dwindling of connection and contemplation, and before even the invention of the printing press? What if we stopped focusing on the present moment at least as early as the invention of the technology of writing in 3000 BC?

You could design an Epcot-style ride around the thesis that every human invention in the timeline between iPhones and the printing press was part of the treadmill of inevitability spurred by the Industrial Revolution mounting to the climax of our current condition: the theft of our lifetimes into the petty profits of billionaires riding on the space jets as the heads of faceless corporations that are little more than tics sucking off of the profits of what could be social security, behemoths profiteering a doom scroll of pure human lifetime monetarily capable of providing food and shelter to our entire species, and openly driven by quarterly profits.

The 1900s guillotine with its heavy metal handle sliced through that paper with such a satisfying crunch, I wanted to pull the lever again and again, applying force, then softness through the slice of that severing crunch. In thinking about technology, and how we can use the internet and artificial intelligence with intention, it’s trippy to think of the paper-cutting guillotine as a form of tech and indeed, writing, as invention, a technique for recording, and remembering. I must be too young for Plato, because I think of writing as a tool for remembering, and for thinking, and the way they work together, movements of thought connected by memory, visionary contemplation shaped out of patterns and connections. In flow, writing is a map for the mushrooming visions of synchronicity, and the recording of those realizations. And it’s even better when you do it by hand.

Never mind ChatGPT, writing by hand is a more profound creative technology than even just typing on a computer, and I am so sorry that you are reading this on a screen. When I read in print, I am much more likely to remember what I’ve read, and if I have written notes, I’m able to recall word-for-word. Remembering is cool and all, but it’s nothing compared to the creative flow that unfurls with pen on paper. That movement can make its way to a screen, but there’s some kindling there on the literal page, taping into centuries of human evolution as opposed to the past few minutes. The fact is that we have been writing by hand for over five thousand years, and I only started learning how to use a keyboard in fifth grade. In the year of our Lord 2025, you would not resort to Encarta to be quaint, but you might buy a journal to write in by candlelight, or simply pause before scrolling two to fifteen hours of your life into the cold dead hands of the three little men who have been seen bowing before the king.

When you feel the suck of the scroll, I say go guillotine. Delete the apps. Hear the crunch. If you have to download them again to hit someone up, or look something up, log off again. Feel the freedom of the lever pulling down into the realness of whatever is immediately happening in front of you. In 1843, Nathaniel Hawthorne is correct that we have forgotten to gather around the fire, which, by the way, is also technology! I honor that we can all only do our very best in a consumerist culture ruled by overlords who refuse to use socially-extracted profits for the good of the collective, but please do stop feeding the robots.

Thank you so much for reading. Your attention is your most valuable resource, especially in this economy. If you had a good time here today, please subscribe and/or forward to friends who might dig the vibe.

As always, I’ll see you in the comments. <3