The ease with which I can send people my thoughts about this matter is thrown off-balance by the unease the topic has been causing me in the year since I wrote my last piece. Many events in my teenage years led me to believe that time did indeed heal all wounds. However, something changed in the recent past that seems to have turned that saying on its head. Time has always had this element of causality and linearity to it - civilizations have come and gone, buried under the dust and rubble left behind by their successors. This linearity has now turned into a strange kaleidoscope or Zen table, reminescent of the desert; eternal winds shift the sand dunes slowly through a vast, empty landscape, burying some while exposing the others long gone. There is no guarantee that a kaleidoscope will repeat itself, but because of the finite nature of the beads and little pieces of colourful material and the space they occupy, the probability of a pattern repeating itself exists, albeit infinitesimally small.

There is not much that has changed the size and shape of the desert. The winds can only blow so hard, and the sand dunes can only move so fast. The rapid advancement of technology has, however, resulted in the spread of wormholes across the landscape. There weren’t many to begin with, so any travelling dune which happened to fall into one was likely to be transported to a place distant and unknown. Exponential growth, which models many natural phenomena with amazing accuracy, dictated that the wormholes would eventually outnumber the sand dunes. With nowhere else to go, vast amounts of sand are blown around in the winds, being everywhere, and nowhere, at the same time.

I can smell the hot, dusty sand in every breath I take. Grains find their way into my eyes. It hurts. I cannot clench my teeth without biting into grit. Water is warm, coarse and muddy. I can feel the grains in my foodpipe when I swallow food.

There is no escape from this dust storm. I wonder if it will consume me from the inside out.

Having never been to a desert myself, I rely on stories told by people who have been there. Occasionally, some of these people are gifted storytellers. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was one of them. I was incredibly pleased to find a (German) copy at a flea market, which I picked up for the good price of five Euros. When I sat down to read the book, it was not the image of Exupéry’s star-studded nighttime desert that I was experiencing. Instead, it was the hot and dusty air that I was choking on. Tears had not been moved out of me by the simple beauty of the storytelling. It was the dust storm. I realized that I had reached a point in my life where there was no going back. I could not admire the illustrations without getting a mouthful of sand. I could not read the story without my legs sinking into it. Where was the sand coming from? Wormholes ensured that it never went away. Sand from across the desert was here, all the time, just as it was not.

When I came to my senses, I realized that the existence of “AI” had ruined things for me. I could not look at an illustration thinking about “AI art”. I couldn’t get through a single paragraph without images of text being generated, line-by-line, invading my mind.

I got through the book, but like it had for the first decades of my life, reading had not brought me any joy.

I have fought hard to close the wormholes leading to the space I inhabit. Extensive adblockers, thumbnail removers, title decapitalizers and keyword blockers didn’t prevent the hot, fizzling content from escaping into my space. I could only block so many accounts on social media. I could not prevent posters being put up on the streets. I could not complain about the news and advertisements on the displays in Hannover’s otherwise excellent U-Bahn.

I tried to be on my phone all the time. That didn’t stop people from messaging me about it or talking about it in public channels and groups. I tried to satiate my desire for pleasing content on the EEVBlog forums, which has since created an “AI” section. Hoping that a dedicated section would contain the sand, I ventured into places I thought were sterile - until someone burst forth into a conversation to propound the death of “ephemeral languages” and the inevitability of desertification.

When I found myself in a long argument with middle-aged uncles, uncles from a generation leaving behind many Pandora’s boxes with no hope in them, with perhaps thirty years to their lifespan, I realized that I was up to my neck in the sand.

The propensity the people closest to me had to find me in the worst periods of my life and then talk to me about sand, while opening the windows wide in the middle of a sandstorm, is incredible.

Two years later, the sandstorm has not gone away.

This time, I wasn’t asked if I used AI. And I certainly wasn’t asked if I wanted to, or what I thought, let alone felt, about it. It was a plain “What AI do you use?”

I tried my best to fend the sand off with polite rebuttals.

It just ended in “You will need it at some point, believe me.” I was supposed to meet this person the following day and help out with a subject.

I cannot say when the sandstorm started. There has been a vast, long-running discourse as to the prevalence, importance and regulation of sand and wormholes. I was certainly aware of the existence of sand and wormholes long, long before I found myself standing here, beaten, tired, weathered, tired, worn-out, tired, exhausted, tired, unable to comprehend, left gasping for breath, at the prospect of having to spend the remaining years of my human lifespan weathering the storm. I would be buried, or would eventually turn to dust myself. It was only a matter of time, and a matter of trying to find my balance in a world that turned alien overnight.

This was not the article I intended to write as a follow-up to my pathetic, pandering, shameful and bothsidesing article I wrote at the end of 2024. It has since occured to me that I might not have, and should very well have been, quite a lot more negative. I did not really have to keep it within myself to appear outwardly “balanced” or “stable”. But this is the article I wrote in the first true, lone hour this evening I got to myself.