By Sam Guss In 2014, two 12-year-old girls lured their friend into the woods of Waukesha, Wisconsin, and stabbed her 19 times. When asked why, they did not cite hatred, or jealousy, or money. They said they did it to please “Slenderman.” Slenderman does not exist. He is not a mythological demon from the Bronze…
By Sam Guss We suffer from a chronological arrogance. We believe that “Globalization” was invented in the 20th century. We think the concept of a complex, international supply chain—where a component made in China is assembled in Vietnam and sold in New York—is a uniquely modern miracle enabled by container ships and fiber optics. We…
For the last decade, we have labeled this phenomenon the Mandela Effect—named after the collective false memory that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s (he actually died in 2013). Psychologists dismiss it as “confabulation”—a mass failure of memory, a social contagion where we reinforce each other’s errors. They say the human brain is a faulty hard drive that corrupts files.
By Sam Guss Imagine a farmer. It is a humid night. He is walking home through a field. Suddenly, he sees a bright, unnatural light. Time seems to stop. The sounds of the crickets vanish (the “Oz Factor”). Small entities appear—humanoid, but not human. They are pale, with large black eyes and spindly limbs. They…
Why You Are Haunting Yourself By Sam Guss There is a recurring scene in therapy offices around the world. A patient sits down, shaking, and says, “I don’t know why I am afraid. I have a good life. I have never been to war. I have never starved. But I feel… hunted.” For a century,…
By Sam Guss In April 2022, a Swedish artist known as “Supercomposite” sat down at her computer to explore the edges of a new AI image generation model. She wasn’t trying to summon a demon. She was trying to test a technical parameter called “negative prompting.” She typed a prompt. She asked the AI to…
Decoding the Alien in the Deep By Sam Guss For sixty years, humanity has pointed its radio telescopes at the sky, desperate for a signal. We have built massive ears in the desert (SETI), listening for the faint hum of a distant civilization. We sent Voyager into the void with a Golden Record, begging the…
For the last forty years, our collective dreaming has been monopolized by a single aesthetic: Cyberpunk.
You know this world. You have lived in it since William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in 1984. It is a world of rain-slicked neon streets, towering corporate ziggurats, cybernetic limbs, and social decay. It is “High Tech, Low Life.” It is a world where the government has dissolved into the background, replaced by omnipotent mega-corporations (Arasaka, Tyrell, Amazon). It is cool. It is sexy. It is cynical.
And, as we look around in 2026—at the algorithmic surveillance, the widening wealth gap, and the environmental collapse—we have to admit: We manifested it.
The AI Pulse: Daily Intelligence Briefing January 6, 2026 Introductory Hook: As we settle into the first full week of 2026, the artificial intelligence landscape is no longer just about “smarter” models—it’s about the integration of agentic autonomy into the physical and economic fabric of our lives. From breakthroughs in decentralized training to the first…