--- L. M. Sacasas, in Your AI Is Not a Tool, The Convivial Society, Jun 2026
Excerpts
Your AI is not a tool. It is an environment, and you are in it.
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While there appears to have been a shift in the last 15 years or so in popular assumptions about the purported neutrality of technology toward at least the suspicion that our devices, etc. are not, in fact, merely neutral instruments at our command but rather frustrate, resist, or otherwise evade uncomplicated mastery by their users, such that their users might be properly said to be used in turn by their devices, it is nonetheless true that the myth of technological neutrality remains broadly entrenched.
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I confess that I am astounded by how blithely some insist that it is all as simple as learning to use AI well, as if we had not just undergone a nearly 20-year, society-wide experiment showing that a so-called “tool,” say a smartphone or a social media platform, will (mal)form even the most vigilant and virtuous user into its own image and shape. This is the blindness at the heart of modern technological hubris. It is the firm but misguided conviction that our “tools” exist entirely outside of us and thus, if taken up with requisite skill, can be “safely” deployed.
But AI is not a tool in this sense, it is an environment which envelops the user and works on us from the inside out while we naively think that we remain unchanged by our use so long as we are using it carefully and intentionally. The care and intentionality is beside the point, and our confidence in such vigilance probably works against us in the long run.
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I can pick up a tool and put it down, but the environment absorbs me into itself.
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This is partially why I have been playing with the idea that one way of framing AI is as a denial-of-service attack on the human psyche.
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I’ll draw things to a close by posing the following thesis for your consideration: the best response to emerging technologies, perhaps especially AI, is not media literacy in a cognitivist mode. Rather, what is required is the training of our perception in an ascetical mode.
