The very fact that AI is painting the future, singing the future, and shaping the future shows we have lost touch with the ground we tread. We prefer artificial hands to human and we continue on this path with glee. Wendell Berry believed how we treat the earth is an indicator of how we treat people and we see it all encompassed in one small, cruel, dehumanizing, minute of a video.

Branding will always win out unless you tear past the brand and ask the hard questions about whether the person holding up the brand is actually embodying the brand they claim to value.

Some of my peers, of course, defended the idea that a class dedicated to the Western canon was valid—a point I don’t necessarily disagree with. However, when ‘Western civilization’ has disrupted, reshaped, and inserted itself into far more than it acknowledges, it is willfully ignorant to pretend that Western civilization does not include people of color, women, and the lower classes—or that their writings and ideas have not been integral to its cultural and literary development.