While I love writing, I struggle to begin every time. I am told openings have to be catchy in an economy that competes for attention, where the abundance of choice is only a swipe away. Hooks become provocations, tending toward outrage in order to grab the reader with a firm hand and elicit a reaction, whether a like or a comment, either way so long as it feeds the algorithm. Strangely, what foments reaction is as insipid as the moment we scroll to another text, another comment, another article of cognitive merchandise.
In this moment of writing, the digital page is white, the orange cursor blinking tauntingly. The blank page and the blinking cursor are the marks of disappearing conditions the holding of an idea and not knowing where it will take me, the friction of formulating phrases elegant yet clear, and the tenseness I feel inside as I wonder whether this article will resonate with anyone or simply be swiped away. Ideas take time to grow, nourished by the infinite ideas of others and other encounters. Slowness invites contemplation and interrogation, diffracting ideas through different conversations and texts.
After fast food and fast fashion, fast thinking. Making cheap food or clothing quickly is not new, and when considering ideas, Plato distinguished between the philosopher with leisure and those scurrying around the agora with their sense of urgency. The insipidity of ideas is not new, but the means through which ideas are rapidly produced, commodified, and consumed are.
Fast thinking answers to conditions the economy itself produces: the need to move faster than our to-do lists can be written, the demand to be productive so that we might be able to consume, and to tend to the necessary yet uninteresting. We continue to scurry in the agora because slowing down is a luxury1.
Bourdieu wrote about fast thinkers, those television personalities who are wheeled out whenever producers need commenting on specific issues, personalities who “think faster than their shadows.” This is the culture of soundbites and 24-hour news cycles. While this has created the terrain, I am talking about something else: ideas produced and distributed at scale, not by TV pundits, but anyone with access to social media.
I want to be clear. The means to distribute and access ideas through social media has the potential to weaken the hold of media conglomerates and dominant narratives. Social media gives voice to many who had no means to express their opinions and conditions. Social media is the panopticon turned on itself, capturing scenes of brutality and injustice on a phone. George Floyd was the camera shot seen around the world.
Social media is a pharmakon for the propagation of ideas: both a cure and a poison, having the capacity to heal or harm depending on context and dosage.
Because the same apparatus (social media) that gives voice and access drowns us in content. The internet gave us access to the world without having to leave the house, shifting value away from memorization toward what can be done with the entirety of human knowledge at your fingertips. Now value shifts again because what can be done is offloaded to AI: production loses its value when it can be done at scale and speed.
AI is nothing more than a response to the economy of fast thinking, and it accelerates the production and propagation of ideas, but the appropriation and application of these ideas render them pre-processed. They are assembled from averaged inputs of the machine and optimized for the scroll, calibrated to land and cause reaction in the moment.
You type a short prompt in a chatbot and out comes a fabricated text, ready to copy/paste onto a post. Distribute. Done.
A mass production of ideas that leave no trace either on the thinker or the reader.
Fast thinking is no longer unilinear, where pundits relay received ideas that land because they have already been received. Fast thinking in the age of social media is more than multilinear, more than multidirectional. As it accelerates, it is unbound by lines. It spreads within expanding spaces. It infects and contaminates. It is viral.
Don’t get me wrong, using AI to edit or tighten text is as acceptable as asking your spouse to take a look at what you wrote (thank you, Charlotte). The ideas are yours, it’s just that every text can benefit from another pair of eyes, to see how ideas land or to notice where friction happens. Even Faulkner had a copy editor.
The risk is thought laundering: presenting AI-generated judgments as your own to gain authority.
AI fills a need in an economy that rewards fast thinking. Thought laundering is the predictable event that follows this economy.
Plagiarism is a precursor to thought laundering, and will increasingly disappear with AI. There is no need to pass someone else’s ideas as your own when you can pass something else’s with impunity. Plagiarism will be a relic going the way of the typewriter. No one but schools will notice, until they give up, because no one has the time or the need for plagiarism anymore.
There is a cost to fast thinking, just like there is a cost to fast food. Without friction, without struggle, without openness, without sharing, without reciprocity of exchange, without reflection, without originality, thought is hollow. And sometimes this is necessary. We don’t have the time, inclination, or resources to go deep everywhere. Nomadic beings become sedentary beings when they’re not on the move.
But that’s not the cost that I want to talk about.
The hidden cost of fast thinking is paid by those who take their time. Thought laundering is rewarded; those who take the time, punished.
Content that is produced in spiraling quantities, homogenized, pasteurized, and repetitive, produces enormous noise that crowds out the signal, that which is worth attending to. Those who take the time are both drowned out and drowned in. They cannot make themselves heard, and they cannot find the others who are also taking the time.
The power of social media to spread and catch ideas is both a cure and a poison, the pharmakon, for those who take the time. The cure is that they can be heard at all; voices that would never have reached anyone now can. The poison is that being heard is no longer enough, because the channel is saturated, and the very thing that made being heard possible (the frictionless distribution of SoMe platforms) is the thing that makes being attended to impossible. This is the double cost that needs to be named.
This is what happens when thinking starves, when the thinker is lost in the crowd, with no interlocutors, no resistance, no community of those who take the time to think with. AI will never replace the experience of thinking with humans (or other life forms) because its thinking will always be asymptotic to thinking. Thinking is more than cognitive. It is an embodied experience that draws on the senses. It’s not that there is no value in exchanging with AI, but it does not nourish enlivened reciprocity and understanding. It does not weave in non-verbal cues, or the shifts noticed at the unconscious levels that can occur with another. It does not strengthen bonds of community and love.
And it is specifically the infinite ideas of others and other encounters that make us alive, this process of growth, not as relays who punch in prompts to spew out posts to feed the fast thinking economy. Rather as imperfect creations, never completed, where a phrase that remains unpolished is as lived an experience in itself as the layer of dirt on hiking shoes.
The irony is that thinking that is not fast thinking is not meant to be perfect. Just because it slows and goes deep does not mean it is complete. On the contrary; it is specifically because it can be awkward, clumsy, and at times stylistically ugly that it is valuable. In its slowness it has time to collect others’ ideas, preserving its energy, nourished and becoming nourishing.
Whether anyone still has the time and the relations to do it is the question.
1 Fast thinking, as I mean it, is not the cognitive shortcut Kahneman describes. It is a mode of production.
Coconut Thinking 
