Calami-tease

01 — The Feed

The world ended at 4:42AM. By 4:43AM, it was on sale.

You know the scroll. Thumb flicks up. A headline says the machines are coming for us. Thumb flicks again. A different headline says the same machines will cure cancer, fix your inbox, and cut your grocery bill. One more flick and gas prices are falling, peace is breaking out, and a new app is free for a limited time. Nobody blinks. Not even me. The apocalypse and the coupon arrive in the same feed, in the same font, about four inches apart.

I've started calling it the calami-tease. Disaster one second. A tease of something better the next. Then repeat until bedtime.

We are told to be terrified and thrilled about the same thing, on the same morning, by the same people.

02 — The Calamity

By our own account, we are scared to death.

At the end of September, Quinnipiac asked 1,202 Americans how they feel about AI. The answers weren't subtle.1

Two weeks earlier, a POLITICO poll put it more bluntly. 63% of Americans believe AI carries a real risk of destroying humanity, and 48% favor pausing advanced development altogether. That's not a fringe. That's most of the country, on the record, saying the thing on their phone might end the species.2

03 — The Tease

Then comes the good news. Kinda.

In June, the U.S. and Iran announced a fourteen-point peace framework that ended more than 100 days of war and promised to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Oil dropped more than $4 a barrel almost overnight. Relief was on the way.34

Except it mostly wasn't. Last month set a record for the most expensive September at the pump. The national average was $4.33 a gallon, 50 cents above the old record. On 1OCT, AAA celebrated a dip to $4.41, down from $4.48 a week earlier. By 6OCT, it was $4.37. Peace was announced. Lower prices were teased. Your fill-up in an old Sequoia still costs what it costs.5

That's the tease. It's never a lie, exactly. It's a loose promise with the timing left out.

04 — The Download

Meanwhile, we couldn’t hit “Install” fast enough.

Meta launched Muse on 8SEP. It's not a chatbot. It's an agent. You connect it to your email, calendar, payments, health data, shopping, and smart home, and it does things for you. It sends the email. It books the trip. It buys the thing. Ten days later, it was the No. 1 free app on the U.S. App Store. It was even ahead of ChatGPT, with more than 730,000 downloads. It held a 4.9-star rating across more than 25,000 reviews. By 6OCT, it had 5 million downloads and 4 million active users.6789

Here's the goofy part. In one survey, only 8% of consumers said they'd trust Meta with their passwords. We installed it anyway. According to TIME, Muse updates a running dossier on each user every hour. It tracks your relationships, your disputes, your inside jokes, and your “tensions and alliances.” It even notes when you're most persuadable. One example TIME cited: “responds better to short nudges after 10 PM.” People who never downloaded Muse get mapped too, by the friends who did.79

Seventy-three percent of us fear it could end humanity. Four million of us handed it our calendars.

05 — The Rebrand

If the product scares people, change the name.

On 22SEP, standing at the United Nations, the POTUS said “artificial” makes AI sound fake when it's actually “amazing.” Seven days later, he signed an executive order. Every federal agency must now call it “Super Intelligence.” SI, not AI. The same order touted more than $5 billion for the Genesis Mission to speed up breakthroughs in science, medicine, energy, and manufacturing. That same day, six tech chiefs signed a voluntary, one-page “Superintelligence Accord” promising four layers of internal controls. It has no enforcement mechanism.101112

The Internet did what the Internet does. It went shopping. Slovenia owns the .si web address. Its registry saw a 2,199% jump in September sales. About 11,000 .si domains were registered the day after the order. Since 22SEP, 8,000 buyers have grabbed 22,800 of them, peaking at 5,300 a day. A .si address runs about $12 a year, against about $83 for .ai. Some buyers are gambling on a big resale. Only 3% of the new names have anything to do with AI.1013

Nothing about the technology changed. Just two letters. And a gold rush. Frustratingly, I only own eight .si addresses. No one has offered me $1.

06 — The Disconnect

We don't believe what we say we believe.

Perhaps we believe both things at once. I'm not sure that's better. A man who truly thought his house was on fire wouldn't stop to reorganize the garage, especially if it looked like mine. While 77% of us want AI slowed or stopped, millions of us are giving it the keys. We fear it in the poll and feed it in the app. Calamity is something we answer on a survey. Convenience is something we act on before morning coffee (which is coming soon).

James has a word for that. He calls it being double-minded, “unstable in all his ways.” It's a man who asks with one hand and grabs with the other. Jesus put it simpler: “Let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No.’” Not yes on the survey and no on the download. Not terrified at 7:42AM and signed up by 7:43AM.1415

The calami-tease works because it keeps us off-balance. Scared enough to keep scrolling. Hopeful enough to keep buying. Never steady long enough to ask what we're trusting and doing.

07 — The Steady Thing

Something must stay the same.

Solomon saw this coming three thousand years ago. What has been will be again. There is nothing new under the sun. New names. Same hunger. Every generation gets its own end of the world and its own miracle product, sometimes in the same commercial break.16

I'm not telling you to delete the app or panic about the robots. I use these tools every day. I'm asking for something harder: be the same person in the poll and in the app. Decide what you trust before the feed decides for you. Hebrews says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” No rebrand. No tease. No limited-time offer. He doesn't need a new domain name to be what He's always been.17

The world will keep selling you the end and the cure in the same scroll. Pick something that doesn't change. In case you're wondering... jesusistheway.com!