An exploration into tools, purpose, and identity, how the current story of AI is more Edward Scissorhands than Frankenstein, and what it means to think (and live) inside/outside man-created machines.

Tools + Purpose = Identity

THE THOUGHT THAT KICKED THIS OFF: Tools aren’t meant to be attached to bodies.

When us humans invented the microscope or telescope, we didn’t invent them to be strapped to our face. We didn’t invent hammers as a substitute for hands. We didn’t replace the weather lady’s fingers with thermometers.

There is usually distance between tools and users and this is intermediated by purpose.

When the connection between a tool-user and a purpose is strong, this naturally forges identities. The blacksmith was both a tool-based service and a person. I’m a musician, and this identity is strongly linked with my use of instruments for the purpose of making music.

But I haven’t replaced my face with a saxophone. Yet.

Back in the day (still happens this way) you could step away from the lab equipment and still be a scientist and person, shut the machine down, you remained a worker, walk away from the canvas, you could remain an artist.

AI, with its broad reach into all aspects of our lives, personal, professional, and societal – is different from the tools of the past, though it’s confusingly compared with them.

Why confusing? Well…

A pervasive and always-on tool/service that connects you to actions that provide purpose, AI is designed to have zero separation; the hope is, you won’t be able to walk away from it.

I’m not just making this up. Take a look at this LinkedIn post…I removed the poster identity, but this is the interchangeable party line;

The fusion of purposeful tool-as-identity would be hard to avoid in this arrangement, indeed most AI proponents are busily finding any and every task and barrier, professional and personal and even spiritual, to bring the clean-thinking and rational, problem-solving powers of AI to finally optimize and overcome them.

But the full-AI fix requires everything to happen in the AI, within its tools.

AI is gunning to be always on and in use for every use case, so then, if we accept that identity easily fuses with tools, we don’t really have a purpose (or identity) other than being an extension for this all-in, always-on tool.

It isn’t the other way around like it used to be with all the other tools of the past.

That’s because we followed the wrong story about a man-made man….man.

Forget Frankenstein

The discourse around AI has centered around a Frankenstein-ish, promethean core – it’s a time of powerful men, grave robbing and appropriated piecemeal creation, technology bringing gothic obsessions to life, and grappling with the concept and inner-life of new forms of intelligence.

Most all-in AI enthusiasts fancy themselves as an interlocutor between the monster and the creator, an intermediating and highly literate force capable of translating the selfish terrors of technology into something that benefits all of mankind. A techno poet threading a new narrative of purpose-bound history onto outdated legends, anchoring grand visions to admittedly dead weight, harnessing external and omnipotent forces to animate the most internal aspects of our souls.

Yeah, sure, ok.

I think we skipped over another man-created-man cautionary tale, one that happens to slice right through the Franken-nonsense and dissects this tool-based, misperceived moment in the timeline for analysis.

Focus on Edward Scissorhands

Tim Burton’s “Edward Scissorhands” is just an astonishing movie, in itself and for this moment in AI. It’s a story about non-conformity at the base, but there is an interesting tool/purpose/identity connection to AI’s power of cognitive capture on users that I think the movie makes accessible and palpably real.

“Edward Scissorhands” is the story of a lonely technologist, who makes a companion out of ONE of his tools that performs a singular task in his cookie-making laboratory, and dies before giving the creation a heart and hands, leaving behind an unfinished lifeform that only has the tool-based sentimentality of his creator, and all the consciousness of a pair of scissors.

The way the Community reacts to Edward connects to how our culture initially responded to AI. It (named Edward by Diane Weist’s Peg) shows up out of nowhere, does amazing imaginative things people have never seen, what can’t it do?

When Alan Arkin’s character Bill finds out all Edward knows about is making cookies, he admonishes and informs him that you can’t buy the finer things in life with cookies. Edward needs to apply himself, and his tools, one and the same, toward a purpose.

The use cases for Edward go from mundane, like hedge trimming and haircutting, to romantic with ice carving, to overtly sexual, when he is trapped in the backroom of a salon with Kathy Baker’s character, Joyce.

Edward is extremely simple-minded and will do whatever you tell him, even to the point of picking locks, and as a scapegoat for human crimes.

In the end, pushed to the brink, Edward commits murder, but with a cover story from Winona Ryder’s Kim, ends up as he started, sequestered away from mainstream society.

When I was writing this, I came across some critical dives into the movie that have teeth, but I also recently finished Edward Said’s “Culture and Imperialism” and there’s a critical concept in that book that requires unpacking for us to continue and for me to land the concept of Edward AI Hands.

A Quick Note About What Edward Said Said

I’m not going to get into all the paradigm shifting insights in this book, but one of the heaviest is that literary study of cultural products FROM empires, like novels, have largely ignored critically viewing the originating brains and audiences for these works, as products OF the empire.

Said articulates that we can make a closed-off, westernized observation of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” or Melville’s “Moby Dick” as psychological trips into the mind of man’s obsession, or we could view them as direct products of a societal acceptance of colonialism and whaling. “Mansfield Park” by Jane Austen is a social romp about high-class conformity, but it’s also silently reliant on exploits of colonial capitalism in far-off Antigua.

I thought, and was raised in a system which still believes, that the western canon and all its works were/are simply ‘great’ (and they are, even Said admits this) because they speak to themes common in all men.

They do not.

The most poignant thing in my westernized mind about Said’s insight, given that I’ve spent/wasted a lot of intellectual dollars on these abstract critiques, is that an imperial audience is extremely hampered in their ability to critically see outside a system that created their perspective and worldview.

And, an imperially captured audience and professional class of practitioners contained therein, are probably gonna take cultural products and extract the wrong ass lesson from them, like, thinking they are temporarily embarrassed, genius Frankenstein Gods, and not a bunch of Edward AI-Hands sticking their poindexters into everything not boarded down.

Making Edward AI-Hands Visible

Given the model of Said’s impairment of imperial mindsets to critically view or examine themselves while trapped inside the same empire, the AI tool-turned-human cannot see he’s ceased being a real man, similar to the way Edward’s existence as a tool-turned-human prevents him from becoming real himself.

While we were enthralled in critical examination of AI’s Promethean powers, we failed to see that, rather than the romanticism of Frankenstein, which places the seat of god-like power in man’s twisted hands, this tool around has turned its own user base into scissor-minded simplicants, whose development cannot help but be arrested in the cardiac mishap of their factory-adled modelers/creators that left a cookie where a heart should be, and a sandbox for a brain.

I’m writing because reflection and critical thinking require distance, and there’s no pause button with this latest tool, and the distance between us and it is shrinking. We aren’t giving ourselves any space to think or reflect, and without that grace period, we’re falling from it faster and faster.

If we can’t live or think outside of a machine, but only expressly through it, then is it real life or real thinking?

Where Do I End, and The Tool Begins?

THE THOUGHT THAT KICKED THIS OFF: Tools aren’t meant to be attached to bodies.

Technology extends usefulness, but it typically does more to abstract us away from the source material, which in turn makes all our bids for increasing and optimizing tech toward usefulness, more abstract and more useless.

The invention of electric lights extended illumination capabilities. You could deeply study lightbulbs and still not know how light works. Railroads extended commerce. You could deeply study industrial transportation and still not know how economies work. Stethoscopes, microscopes, extended our senses. You could deeply study optics and soundwaves in a lab and still not know how to properly listen or look at the world.

If AI is a singular tool that’s promising to extend the usefulness of every purposeful aspect of humanity, would you know when you’ve abstracted into tool-based consciousness (uselessness) in the real world?

Would you know where you end and the AI begins? Would you know when to turn it off?

You wouldn’t, because at that point, you’d have to turn yourself off, wouldn’t you?

Oh, you’d never let a tool define you?

Look at your hands…..

Modern culture has shifted from thick storytelling to thin content, and when thin becomes the foundation, rather than a byproduct of thick work, culture gets hollowed out.

The clip show, the highlight or newsreel, the training montage, the vacation slideshow, the baby book—we’ve always had compendiums of content that abstract the toil, boredom, and process of life into a neatly packaged product.

Instead of the raw, thick, often boring and sometimes senselessly cruel reality of living, we’re offered—and increasingly seek—comfort in products that condense experience, remove process, and present a thin, entertaining, scannable readout of only what we need. These formats emerge from edits and provide a sense of meaning without duration.

It’s the same mindset behind meal-replacement multivitamins: the belief that you can extract the benefits of food without engaging with it directly, without chewing, cooking, or even thinking about it. The nutrients remain, but the practice of preparing and finding food becomes some kind of mirage.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this in the short term. Abstraction can be extremely useful and compression is efficient. But what happens to a culture that allows this clip-based mindset to perniciously take hold of popular consciousness, and persist and proliferate for decades? Say, thirty-five years. What would it produce?

The DNA of AFV

America’s Funniest Home Videos premiered as a one-off special in 1989. Since 1990, it has run continuously on ABC—36 seasons, more than 800 episodes—making it one of the longest-running primetime entertainment shows in television history.

When it first aired, I watched it along with everyone else. Early on, the footage was genuinely incidental. The families were unknown, the videos rough, the moments clearly found and not staged for broadcast. When people won prizes, they looked surprised and vaguely uncomfortable on camera. The appeal came from the sense that these were real, unplanned fragments of actual lives.

A few seasons in, something shifted. It became obvious that some videos were being shot for the show. The families looked rehearsed when they took the prize and the moments seemed framed with broadcast in mind. What began as found footage slowly turned into speculative content: people performing in advance for capture and incentive.

After enough ball punches and manufactured elation, I lost interest. However, as we’ve experienced, the format didn’t disappear but metastasized.

The clip-centric production line spread across pop culture: first through shows like Jackass, then through reality television, and eventually through social media.

At that point, we all lived through it, clips became an entire infrastructure.

AFV didn’t cause this trajectory on its own, but perhaps functioned as a mass-scale proof of concept. Studio heads probably zeroed in on the fact that AFV proved you could build durable entertainment through user generated content, without talent or authorship, hyper-compressing context, and letting incentivized capture replace intention and behavior.

The lesson became a genetic blueprint for media and offline life.

We Exist for Captured Clips

The idea that we perform for capture is no longer controversial. The only question is the degree.

Some people are “too online” while others are able to turn constant performance into a career. Most of us exist somewhere in between, clipping up our lives—consciously or not—to see if something might land, travel, or be featured.

Using AFV as a launchpad, we’ve already rocketed past the point at which authenticity gave way to incentive. Behavior online, and off, has shifted our perspective on lived moments, seeing them no longer for themselves but evaluated by how they might play back.

And if you think this is just an entertainment quirk of the terminally online, it’s not. It’s me, and it’s you, and after decades of clip-based conditioning, the result is a widespread (but consciously unrecognized, or perhaps willfully ignored) acceptance of an engineered reality, and acquiescence to our role as both its eternally starved consumers and its uncomfortably stuffed, content-rich producers.

Enjoy the dichotomy! I know I am!

When Producers Began to Outnumber Writers

One downstream result of AFV was reality television. When reality TV hit, audiences were apparently clamoring for “the real deal.” According to the rating numbers, it appeared as if audiences didn’t want to watch perfect celebrities and elaborately sculpted stories anymore, they wanted to see themselves in the raw.

Scripted shows with writers, arcs, and intention gave way to formats optimized solely for capturing clips.

In scripted television, the story is written before filming. In reality TV, footage is captured first and the story is assembled afterward. Clips are the life-blood of these shows, and any storytelling comes as an editorial artifact.

Where a sitcom might credit a handful of writers and producers, a reality show credits dozens (even 40+) of producers, multiple camera crews, and layered production teams. The labor shifts from process of authorship to extraction of product. Everything depends on gathering enough footage to manufacture a narrative later.

Social media scales this model perfectly and includes the audience at home, a jacked up version of AFV. Most users aren’t writing or producing original stories; they’re reacting, sharing, remixing, and lightly editing existing material. We consume clips and produce them, day in, day out. But when producers replace writers, there’s no intention guiding creation, action becomes reactive, performative, and incentive-driven. It is a production…literally.

After thirty-five years of this AFV-like infrastructure to media, it no longer feels strange or off. In a real way, America has become its own funniest home video.

So, why am I still talking?

Process vs. Product (The Skill We Gave Up)

After decades of living alongside a cultural engine built on AFV-refined outputs, what has it done to us? The clearest damage appears in our confusion between process and product, work and output, effort and recognition.

Take education for example…

The outcome process of education is learning how to teach yourself. The output product is a diploma, which is often mistaken for the point.

This confusion between process & product hardened, about two decades into having AFV in our DNA, when reality TV and social media hit, and audiences stopped being audiences and started thinking like producers.

In television, production replaced authorship. It’s become more important to learn how to produce and compile clips than actually tell a story. In music it’s more important to have stage presence rather than work hard to earn and deserve to be on one. In art it’s about affect and aestethics more than learning how art evinces these effects in yourself and others.

We didn’t lose respect for process outright, but culturally absorbed just enough producer language to believe outcomes could exist without it. That belief has hollowed out both the work and the people consuming it.

When a culture only consumes products, it stops producing people who understand process. Everyone wants to arrive; no one knows how to set off. Everyone wants the spotlight; no one knows what sustains the light.

A culture that worships and idolizes products will end up forgetting how to make them. A culture that tries to forge meaning solely through procedural outputs, is at extreme risk for forgetting how to process and live life itself.

Or is this just a thick slice of bullshit? About that….

Thin vs. Thick

Luke Burgis, drawing on René Girard’s mimetic theory, describes thin and thick desires in his book Wanting. The distinction is useful here.

Thin desires are lightweight and imitative. We want them because we see others wanting them. They attach easily to trends and disappear just as quickly.

Thick desires form slowly. They are rooted in values, relationships, and long attention. They endure because they are cultivated, not copied.

A culture saturated with finished products and visible outcomes makes thin desires abundant and thick desires rare. When process disappears, desire itself becomes procedural—magnetizing us toward what looks desirable rather than what is worth wanting.

Thirty Years of Thin and the Missing Thick

Thin programming—AFV-style clips, memes, junk content—isn’t inherently bad. The problem is scale, dominance, and evolution. Thin content increasingly pretends to be thick. But it ain’t.

If you start with something vapid and thin, its only evolution is exaggeration. It becomes more pornographic, more violent, more absurd, more meaningless. You can’t arrive at thick, cerebral depth by intensifying thinness. That path only loops back on itself—a self-referential ouroboros, endlessly consuming its own output.

After thirty plus years, the results are visible. No argument is required. Unless, you’re in the thick of it and have figured it all out. Tell the monks we said hello!

I don’t care what you watch or listen to, and I’m not claiming thin content lacks redeeming qualities. But you can’t stack thin sheets into a load-bearing wall. Thin content serves a purpose, but it never swells into thickness. When it dominates, it actively devalues anything that requires time, attention, or patience.

Thick content isn’t defined by seriousness or artiness. I think it has a few, distinct properties:

• it takes time to make and time to receive

• it is weighted with values and relationships

• it implies a worldview without announcing it

• any clip taken from it must point back to the whole, even a thin slice carries the flavor of its thick source

Thin content is shaved from thick material, and that thickness must be maintained. If we don’t defend it, thin content begins slicing from itself. Eventually, it becomes thin cuts taken from nothing at all.

And a culture fed on meaningless bullshit forgets not just how to discover and make meaning, but how to sustain it.

For a full deep dive into the thin/thick dichotomy and for answers on how to address and confront this seriously epistemological concern, check out Eaon Pritchard’s “Chairman of the Bored”

Land the plane man!

America’s Funniest Home Videos still airs every Sunday night. The show hasn’t changed much, and neither has the audience response. We still laugh, clap, and reward clips.

The difference is that AFV is no longer a show we watch, but a culture we inhabit. We no longer submit clips but submit to them, live inside their sliced up logic.

We perform, capture, edit, and evaluate ourselves in real time, exchanging meaning for visibility and reaction for value.

AFV once extracted thin moments from thick lives. Now we extract thin moments from one another, and increasingly from ourselves, and ultimately from nothing at all.

And when the clips become the foundation rather than a byproduct of a fully lived and meaningful life, what’s funny isn’t the slip and fall, but how little remains standing afterward.

Unless, you’re in the thick of it….if so, hold the line and keep adding layers.

From backyard battlefields to AI-generated worlds, an essay on how toys & tools that promise creative freedom destroy it and dictate how we’re allowed to imagine.

As the connection to headquarters suddenly cuts off, Night Viper realizes the Arctic wastelands are playing havoc with his electronic components. It’s fine, he’s trained without them. Besides, he has bigger problems.

He knows he has only moments to reach a rise out there in the drifts—his only chance to break line of sight and escape the assailants launching missiles from the rear. He fires his jet pack and looks back with a smirk.

The smirk doesn’t last. It collapses into a grimace as the pack sputters and dies in the cold.

He smash-lands far short of his target. The odds that his attackers would hit theirs—and end the mission—just tripled.

At that moment…Mom told me to come inside.

Cinematic Play and the Blurred Boundary

I used to play with GI Joes the way Spielberg cuts a movie.

That exact scenario above unfolded in my front yard with this exact toy.

When I was on my hands and knees, staring into a kind of bokeh trance: the four-inch mercenary was sharp and enormous in my imaginary foreground, while the reality of me arranging plastic figures blurred into the background. I wasn’t a nine year old watching the story. I was inside it.

My hands were the same wind under the missile and the slipstream the jet pack was cutting through. My mind was a mash of sound and light—SFX, music beds, internal dialogue, trench grunts, radio chatter. Damage landed in multivariate ways and characters moved freely. Emotions registered, monologues maintained, stakes shifted effortlessly.

The stories themselves were simple, and pointless. I wasn’t interested in campaigns that began formally and ended formally. What mattered was motion. I stacked scenarios sideways and vertically, endlessly. They could go somewhere or nowhere. It didn’t matter. The act of imagining—of sustaining momentum—was the point.

When Toys Started Telling Me How to Play

I’m describing how it felt to play as a kid, because I want to convey how it felt when I began to notice the toys I used my imagination to activate, started to be sold with preloaded imagination activations of their own; battle damage, real projectiles, and SFX.

I can’t remember if it was this He-Man battle damage figure that first set me off, but it’s a perfect starting point, because suddenly imagination had a “right” way to operate, a way positioned as better because it was more real. He’s hurt. But hurt by what, I remember thinking? The damage has to match the story. The story’s gotta bend to the scuff. The battle damage-reversal didn’t control the play, but it narrowed it enough to feel restrictive, limiting, and pre-scripted.

The same thing happened with the first GI Joes that actually fired projectiles. Mildly exciting, until you realize you had to design battles at distances the weak missile could reach. Again, this was supposed to unlock imagination with a preloaded feature. Instead, it fenced the play into the toy’s limitations.

And particularly when the toys started being sold loaded with SFX, I felt the manacles of pre-fabricated imagination being thrown onto me the heaviest.

The battle sounds and catchphrases felt like plasticine prison cells. When playing with these “talking” toys, you had to wait for the perfect moment, or specifically and always artificially, manufacture one, where certain sounds or catchphrases like “let’s party” made sense. The SFX of explosions came from the toy, not from where the missile landed. I remember being beside myself about this (I was a weird kid) aware that us kids were being sold imagination, but all I saw was limitation after limitation.

Royalty-Free Imagination

In reality, the battle scene at the top looked like this….

In my head, it was an arctic wasteland ravaged by war. And in the spirit of “show, don’t tell,” I considered using GenAI to create an image of my imagination, but skipped it—and funnily enough, while searching for “snowy battlefields,” I came across a royalty-free GenAI image below that looked close, clearly fabricated, and dropped the central puzzle piece of this essay right into my lap.

Never mind that “royalty-free AI” is legally incoherent. The phrase gives the game away. It reveals a mindset: extract value without compensating creators—and more insidiously, erase the provenance, labor, and supply chain of imagination itself.

We usually think of AI in terms of replacing individual roles—photographers, illustrators, writers. But GenAI stock imagery makes the deeper shift to production itself obvious.

If the work isn’t yours, harvest it. If you can’t harvest it, fabricate it and usurp the entire supply chain.

Royalty-free AI generated stock image sites don’t just suggest, but directly point to the deeper shift: GenAI companies aren’t here for the content, but already are working to replace the product, producer, and production of imagination entirely.

Playing With Fixed Toys Keeps Imagination Fixed

The Disney–OpenAI deal snapped all of this into focus for me. Here was the newest chapter in the evolution of toys with pre-loaded imagination activations.

Everyone is allowed to play with the toys—but only certain ones, and in certain ways, and only on a certain platform. Characters and players both are trapped inside lore and canon, endlessly recombining what already exists, bouncing self-referentially within a closed system.

In this new sandbox world, players are required, but brand-new characters or games or universes invented off the platform, are not.

It feels like freedom, but isn’t this just more pre-fabrication?

If this technology truly expands imagination, shouldn’t it help us move beyond it rather than deeper inside it? Wouldn’t that be real imagination?

Or are we only allowed to pre-imagine—imagining what’s already been made manageable? Switching out imagination with highly managed imaginings?

Is there a deeper myth hiding in the sandbox?

Pushes button – “Let’s Party!”

The Illusion of Imaginative Freedom

I get it, it feels like GenAI gives you creative wings. But ask yourself: who built the sky you’re flying in?

If your ideas only take shape when they happen in and conform to a tool’s expectations, are they yours? Or are they being shaped in a platform-based feedback loop that edits creative ideas before you get to feel what it’s like to have them?

GenAI might seem to expand imagination, but often it replaces the messy, ambiguous, nonlinear act of imagining with the polished outcome of having imagined.

It’s not expanding your imagination but expanding the efficiency of expressing things that look like imagination.

GenAI is to imagination what pre-loaded activations were to my noisy GI Joes. They are sold to feel like an enhancement to imagination and creativity—until you realize they dictate the scenario, restrict the range of interpretation, and clumsily script what should be spontaneous. Over time, and ultimately and inescapably simply because it’s a closed-system, players are nudged toward predictable play.

The Cost of Effortless Imagination

I didn’t write this because AI is useless—it has real power, especially with clean data sets. I didn’t write it to dog on anyone who loves GenAI; have at it. I wrote it because I recognize a familiar trick: something offering to help, to enhance things we should want enhanced, while quietly shifting the boundary of where effort, uncertainty, and ownership used to live.

Cognitive hijacking doesn’t announce itself. It arrives as convenience, as the latest hotness. And by the time you notice it, you’ve already adjusted. The battle damage was always those same scars, the sounds were always brittle and distant, the scenery was always royalty-free, the play easy, effortless, unowned—and forgettable.

In a closed system optimized to replace offline imagination with online activations, to remove creators from creation, producers from production, and production from supply—generating endless demand from recycled air—we should at least ask where the fresh oxygen will come from, find out how to step off the machine long enough to catch our breath, and get back into our own minds and reclaim the power of imaginary play and creativity.