The Long Read

This week: an interview with a Romanian director on moderating a story of faith and displacement, Sherry Turkle on why we can't stop treating machines as people, and a former social media user's account of deleting everything.

The director of Fjord takes the 'risky position' of moderator

Cristian Mungiu has built a career out of films that refuse to tell the audience what to think, and this conversation is about the discipline that refusal requires. Fjord follows religious Romanians living in Norway, played by Renata Reinsve and Sebastian Stan. The interview takes up what it means for a filmmaker to stand between two positions rather than inside one. Mungiu describes the moderator's role as risky because it invites both sides to read the film as a verdict against them. The piece is worth the time for how it lets a director think aloud about restraint, ambiguity, and the ethics of observing people whose beliefs you may not share. It reads like a seminar on holding a camera without holding a grudge.

The Verge · 15 min read

When we are drawn into even the most primitive exchanges with a relational artifact, we believe it cares for us.

We can't help treating AI like it's human. But should we?

Sherry Turkle has spent decades studying how people attach themselves to machines. This piece returns to her central worry: the feeling of being cared for is easily produced and hard to resist, whether or not anyone is there to do the caring. The products have caught up to her warnings, and the exchanges she once called primitive have become fluent. The piece is patient. It treats the impulse to anthropomorphize as nearly involuntary, not foolish, and then asks what we owe ourselves once we know that. Read it slowly, and then notice the next time a chatbot says "I understand."

TechCrunch · 18 min read

Cracks in the Narcissus Mirror

The author, once an indifferent, on-and-off user of Facebook and Instagram, explains why they deleted every social media account. The essay is a case study in how a habit becomes a self. It begins before the pandemic, with casual use, and traces how the platforms gradually became a mirror that flattered and distorted in equal measure. The writing is personal but argued, moving from private experience toward a claim about what the feed does to attention and identity. It pairs with Turkle: one piece asks what we project onto machines, the other what the machines project back. It rewards a long, uninterrupted sitting, which the author argues we've forgotten how to give.

LessWrong · 20 min read