Vibe Thinking
Part 1 - The Twitch-ification of Thought
“I wrote this by hand”.
Grief and the desire to be multitude are the same feeling. I’m writing a digital theater piece about the grief the desire to be multitude begets. It’s called “I’ve always wanted to become everyone.” It’s a longer story. For now, know that, as part of the exercise, this was the LLM prompt I was about to hit send on:
“Complete this sentence uttered by the mother in a monologue: If you are everyone then no one can abandon you. You won’t need anyone anymore. You can’t be a widow because”
We abandon what we can’t afford to slow down for. The strangest analogy that comes to mind is that of a parent leaving their child in a sandbox alone. Other parents find the child playing with theirs. They cajole the little one for a while until they realize the parent is not there. The parent left. Not out of negligence, cruelty, or malevolence. They were in a rush. They had other priorities. There were emails to send and keyboards to bang on somewhere else. Parenting, caring, seemed too taxing. I was about to outsource the most tender part of the work (the grief, the widowhood, the cave my mother and I laugh inside of) to the next-token predictor. The imperative of efficiency (what Tim Morton might call the agrilogistics knack) rendered feeling superfluous.
The mental math of thinking is changing. The arbitrage between doing it yourself and letting the machine do it is becoming so acute that every sentence is a negotiation. Writing by hand is slower, worse in some measurable ways, and “nobody’s reading” it anyway. The LLM fills the context window faster than I fumble through the toolbox of sentence construction. The screws fall. The hammer’s too blunt. The wood breaks when I hit too hard or not enough.
Every few centuries, we learn we’re just another instance of something we thought was ours alone. Copernicus taught us we’re not the center of the universe. Darwin explained we’re not the pinnacle of evolution. Post-humanists made clear our values are not the paradigm life articulates around. Materialist philosophers are driving home the fact consciousness is nothing special. Just another planet. Just another species. Just another set of beliefs. Just another epiphenomena. LLMs are teaching us we’re just another intelligence. I’ve been using the term “dethroning” to refer to this new humbling. Benjamin Bratton refers to it as a new “Caupernican trauma”. I suspect our feelings, or whatever we umbrella into the phrase “emotional intelligence,” is next.
We’ve been here before: every era gets the spectator sport it deserves. Here’s the bit I want to sit with. The same way gamers - and many non-gamers - enjoy watching proficient players finish a game level or drive a campaign on Twitch, we’re watching LLMs complete thoughts. The headline writes itself: intelligence is becoming a spectator sport. I’ve been calling it the “Twitchification of thinking.” We prompt. We watch. We nod or wince. We prompt again. The rhythm is not that of a thinker. It’s that of an audience.
The Twitchification thesis is incomplete. But I’ve been sitting with this framing for months now and I think it’s incomplete. It describes the surface - the posture, the passivity - but misses the thing growing underneath. The way a callus forms not from injury but from repeated use. Something is thickening in the hand that prompts, in the eye that scans the output, in the part of the mind that decides whether the machine got it right or merely got it done.
Passivity and oversight feel identical from the outside. When I watch a Twitch streamer, I’m idle. When I evaluate an LLM’s output - really evaluate it, not just skim and hit accept - something else is happening. I’m not spectating. I’m overseeing. I’m reading the way a doctoral supervisor reads a draft: not to be entertained but to feel where the argument buckles, where the sentence betrays a shortcut, where the thinking flatters itself. Prompt and probe. The Twitch analogy breaks down precisely where it matters most. The streamer doesn’t need my input. The LLM does. I am not watching intelligence. I am managing it.
The question is not what we’re losing but what we’re becoming. And if that’s true - if what looks like spectating is actually a new kind of cognitive labor - then the question becomes: what are we turning into? Not what are we losing. What are we becoming? The grief narratives are loud and easy. The replacement narratives are louder. But underneath both there’s a quieter shift happening - a redistribution of what the mind does with its hours.
Feathers were for warmth before they were for flight. I think the answer is not Twitchification. I think it’s something closer to exaptation. The cognitive machinery that used to produce the thoughts is being repurposed - haltingly, imperfectly, maybe dangerously - for overseeing thoughts. Feathers were for warmth before they were for flight. Maybe this is what’s happening to thinking. The same prefrontal architecture that composed sentences is learning to supervise their composition. Not a loss. A gear change.
No one asks the feather for consent. But exaptation in biology just happens. No intention. No awareness. What’s happening to us requires something else entirely. It requires that we notice the shift while it’s shifting. It requires that we choose what the new function serves. Biology exapts blindly. We have to do it with our eyes open.
I’m choosing to fire my neurons by hand. Choosing to fire my neurons by hand. That’s a sentence now. But it might also be a practice - the practice that keeps the new function honest.
More on that in Part 2.