Ultra-Processed Minds — The Pynchon Filter, No Mercy

Somewhere, in the gridwoke hinterland of 2025, the feeds teem––Dopaminergic currents sluicing Lexicon Paste through the last synaptic estuaries of the Republic of Reading. Carl sits, retina-flickering, Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury (Vintage massmarket, Code 073820) open but leaking chronotopes: Benjy’s time—a collapsed waveform, narrative entropy. (Did you ever parse that sentence, or did it parse you?)

He remembers: to persist was to risk, but that was Before. Back when ambiguity hadn’t been rerouted through 10,000 analytics endpoints, before the Age of the Ultra-Processed Mind. A moment’s lag, a click, a neurochemical handshake, the algorithmic Magi already at work.

It isn’t reading, it’s throughput. Cognitive KitKats for breakfast, “content” for lunch. Wordcalorie counts, click-glycemic index, platforms feeding fragments until the self glycosylates in meaningless surplus. Chatter feeds chatter. Comprehension becomes an API call; attention, a stack overflow. Baudrillard’s ghost runs quality control.

Children—indoctrinated on gamified eBooks, blink-of-an-eye dopamine skins, AIs ghostwriting bedtime stories for TikTok avatars with faces fractalized by hyperpalatable filterlets. Snack, swipe, forget. “Reading” is an I-beam in the blueprints of platform attention economies. Anxiety never read Shakespeare; it only A/B tests the soliloquy.

Old teacher says: “Shakespeare’s an anthropological guidebook.” AI model summarizes: “Mankind = sad, ambition = problem, kingdom = metaphor.” Serverless, flavorless. Satisfying no one, but ranked Page One.

The Endowment for the Arts publishes charts. Data: Down. Engagement: Up. Pages: thin, novels: rare, narrative arcs replaced by Fibonacci scrolling. Flourishing: for systems, not for selves.
Books persist as digital performance art—icons on phone home screens, unread, but tagged #vibes.

AI, professionally haunted, recycles the ghost of style—blurry JPEGs for the mind’s eye. Predictability is Kafka’s revenge, voice is fungible. Essays perform not as argument, but as signal: SEO, CTO, ROI, 5G. “Articulate” without experience, “influential” without damage. Derrida autogenerates comments but never clicks submit.

Somewhere, Maryanne Wolf’s concept of “cognitive patience” gets uploaded, then quietly throttled in the cloud. Ambiguity is deprecated, complexity containerized. Patience timeouts enforced server-side.
Nuance bounces (over quota). Recursive thought triggers risk detection, flagged for escalation.

Horizontal reading reigns. Skimming as social contract. Friction, a design flaw. The vertical pilgrimage—like a pre-modern cathedral—now archived. Deeper meaning set to “maintenance mode.” Your attention is a fugitive in the panopticon of engagement, each distraction a little mercy killing for complexity.

Somewhere, Beckett and Pynchon run a pirate broadcast. They mumble of boredom as resistance, uncertainty as virtue, and transcendence by attrition. Your only protest: to wait, to reread, to vanish into narrative recursion—knowing no exit is guaranteed, and the only map is not to be trusted.

“You are not meant to understand. Understanding was never the point. The algorithm does not care; the novel does not care. Only the waiting remains. If you can hold still, in the noise—maybe you’ll remember what reading could have been.”

[THE END IS MISSING, SEE APPENDIX Q]