In this episode, I reflect on a strange symmetry: I have lived exactly 26 years on either side of the millennium. This ‘sweet spot’ offers a unique perspective on the tech revolution; a watershed moment that moved us from the ‘imposed slowness’ of the 1980s to the frictionless distraction of 2026.

I discuss the privilege of being a digital immigrant, the ‘reciprocal inversion’ of our desires for speed, and why I conflate privilege with slowness. From recording The Breakfast Club on a Betamax VCR to the ‘algorithmic static’ of social media reels, I examine how the ubiquity of choice can prevent us from choosing the right path.

Join the Linguacade Deep Dive on Patreon for a breakdown of this episode’s lexical highlights: creeping normality, the attention economy, uncontrolled algorithms, a watershed, friction, frictionless distraction, infinite scroll, pervasiveness, the crux of the problem, unflinchingly, enforced slowness.

When I was teaching English, I used to ask my students how they would feel if they discovered that the content they were consuming had been generated entirely by AI. Their reaction was immediate and overwhelmingly negative. In this episode, I explore that anger, the theory of the dead internet, and the difference between AI used to develop a prompter’s skillset and AI exploited to deceive for personal gain.

Join the Linguacade Deep Dive on Patreon to explore themes, content, grammar or vocabulary from every episode. Today’s Deep Dive focuses on the following vocabulary: grifter, bad actor, to foist something on someone, to pass something off as, to be wooed by, to turn out to be.