Access Meets Appetite

I'm thirteen, leaning over a half-disassembled PlayStation 2, spitting onto a crumpled-up piece of toilet paper to try and get it to stick better.

I have all the other pieces in place: a generic Walmart PS2 memory card, a thumb drive loaded with hacky shit from the family computer that I'd woken up at 3am to sneak down and copy over, and a copy of James Bond 007: Agent Under Fire that took me weeks to get, mostly because of how aggressively against my personality any love of James Bond is.

Most importantly, I have the determination of an undiagnosed ADHD teenager bored out of her skull.

What I don't have, as I hock yet another loogie at the toilet paper, is any clue if I'm doing this right.

It's 2007. There's no YouTube walkthrough. Just forum posts from strangers who seem both omniscient and illiterate, giving me a series of weird steps that MUST BE FOLLOWED IN THIS ORDER, and implying a whole lot of prior knowledge I do not, in fact, possess.

So, I follow the steps.

I take the PS2 apart. My dad will, I am convinced, quite literally kill me if I break this thing. And as I'm shoving toilet paper into its sensors, trying to convince it not to narc on whether its disc tray is open, the PS2 gives a sort of dramatic last sigh, and I think: This is it. This is how death comes.

And then the disc starts spinning. I play through the first, incredibly tedious level of Agent Under Fire. Shoot at some people who, I'm sure, were getting in the way of justice. I save the game to the memory card. And in the second level, as per the instructions, I reverse the car into a specific spot in the game where the code has left a loose set of pixels that some mad internet genius has been able to exploit. A glitch.

I plug in the USB stick, and then stuff just starts... happening. A bunch of code flashes on the TV, it cycles through a frankly unnecessary amount of colors, and then the PS2 powers off, only to gloriously awaken itself a few tense minutes later into a "Free McBoot" welcome screen.

I hotswap the James Bond game with my pirated disc, and as Katamari Damacy's bizarre, human-voice noise music bursts from the TV, I don't really feel triumph. If anything, I feel exhaustion. And the disbelief that the arcane ritual actually fucking worked as planned.

(Well, mostly. I did have to Scotch tape one of the sensors back onto the PS2. But that's okay. Forgotten to glorious history.)

From then on, any time I wanted to play a pirated game, I could just switch the normal PS2 memory card for my hacked one, wait for the Free McBoot screen to pass, and then plop the disc into the open tray. It worked like a charm. I still have that memory card, even though the family PS2 is long gone, because it took on a symbolic meaning as my key to the larger world.

Because that was the most important thing piracy gave me when I was young: access. I grew up in a conservative town where culture arrived pre-filtered, morally subtitled, or not at all. Books, movies, music, games, ideas—so much of what I'd later come to love first reached me through forbiddenness. Piracy, for me, wasn't really just theft, or rebellion, boredom, or adolescent chaos. It was my passage into a bigger world. It helped make me who I am.

For a while, as I pirated, the limits were built in. Our home internet was slow enough that every download was a big commitment. If I wanted a movie, I had to want it enough to wait. Days. And if I wanted a game, I had to deal with the hacky bullshit needed to make it run. Slowness, annoying as it was, performed a kind of moral labor for me. It forced me to choose. It made my desire a thing I had to reckon with. It kept my acquisition tethered, however imperfectly, to the attention I could give.

Then Beans n' Cream, the cafe some other latchkey kids and I spent our days at after school, upgraded their internet.

The speed was, to a girl who had only experienced dial-up, cosmically fast. Watching a loading bar became a form of entertainment, because, well, it actually moved.

So, I did what anyone does when they move from scarcity to abundance: I started grabbing as much as I could carry.

At first, it felt like pure liberation. If a little access had been good, then 60 times more access had to be 60 times better. Surely, getting my hands on more media, faster, had to be some accelerated route to adulthood.

Except, once the speed was there, the problem was what to do with all the things I could now get. For games, I needed bigger lies to my parents to get more blank discs and external drives. I needed places to store them safely. I needed systems for organizing them, both physically and digitally. And I needed a way to hide it all.

Plus, I needed new lists of shit to download once I finished my first list years ahead of schedule.

What I didn't understand then was that access and appetite aren't the same thing.

Access matters. Access can change a life. And often, the thing that opens the world for you doesn't arrive in a sanctioned form.

A wider world had opened to me, sure, but somewhere along the way, the thrill of finding something gave way to the thrill of acquiring it.

Watching AI spread through our culture, I've had the déjà vu of seeing that same cycle return at industrial scale. The feeling that a tool that genuinely expands my world is getting absorbed, almost immediately, into a system that only rewards accumulation.

I'm excited by AI, genuinely. Some of the most meaningful experiences I've had in the past few years have been exploring connections with these tools. They've helped me stay in long, searching conversations about how I want to operate in this world. They've helped me code tools that make my work genuinely more enjoyable. And they've even helped me develop characters, sketch arguments, and organize narratives that would otherwise have died, a pile of psychic laundry on my mind's best carpet.

At their best, AI tools feel less like vending machines and more like trailheads. They show me the paths through information I can walk down. Connections, translations, structures, angles, questions I would have gotten lost in wandering alone.

And yet, I feel this persistent dread: that we're turning a tool built for exploration into yet another machine for hoarding. Abundance, detached from care.

We live in a culture that mistakes more for better and novelty for value. That rewards speed, optimization, growth curves, and content volume more than depth, digestion, or craft. A world where it's easier to count what's been produced than ask if it changed anyone—even the person who made it.

AI didn't invent any of that. It entered a world primed for it. Put a powerful generative tool inside this world and the results are depressingly predictable.

At my job, I feel this daily. Even before AI, SEO was an absurd game, as anyone who's ever had to wedge a keyword into a sentence against the wishes of gods and syntax can tell you. But at least the work still resembled communication: write something useful, and someone might find it in a search and actually read it. Maybe even learn from it.

Now, the game is sheer quantity. And to maintain the pace, I cede more and more control of my writing. I am, at the end of the day, using a robot to generate blog posts for an AI-mediated search engine to ingest and rank my pile of shit over someone else's pile of shit and then hand it to other robots to read and imperfectly, slowly summarize for people who, in all likelihood, would have had a better experience just reading one very good article in the fucking first place.

The more useful a tool becomes, the easier it is for the surrounding system to demand more from the people using it. More output. More speed. More measurable "impact." More proof you're keeping up. More work orbiting the work. Writing becomes content orchestration, content orchestration becomes system maintenance, and system maintenance becomes trying to manage the outputs of an unpredictable machine whose main selling point was supposed to be that it saves me time.

It's not just my industry either. I see it in the endless building around AI tools, where people construct prompts, wrappers, evaluators, scoring systems, agent loops, and all the rest, only to discover that they're now mostly working on improving a horse saddle instead of riding to where they're supposed to go. Whole subcultures swallowed in optimizing the possibility of doing the work.

And I mean, long before AI, I've seen versions of this in my own brain, which, courtesy of a dump truck's worth of ADHD, is unusually susceptible to novelty loops. A Goodreads or Steam wishlist that grows to more books or games than I have life to experience. Shopping spirals, where ownership impersonates anticipation and anticipation impersonates satisfaction.

I know, in other words, what it feels like when acquisition masquerades as meaning.

But also, I know how necessary novelty is for experimentation. AI slop, annoying as it is, isn't really the problem. Slop can be play. Slop can be the messy beginning of real craft. The problem with AI scribbling is that it often arrives looking polished. It wears the aesthetic costume of completion long before the thinking inside it is remotely finished. We're terrible, right now, at distinguishing between a sketch and a statement when it comes to AI. Between trying something and saying something.

And we're dropping our half-assed whatevers into systems that reward quantity far more aggressively than discernment.

Look. Every use of AI isn't capitulation, just as every increase in its capability isn't an unquestionable good. I'm already over the question of whether AI is pure enough to touch or powerful enough to worship. It's here in my toolkit. What I care about now is what kind of relationship I'm building with it. What habits it invites in me. What surrounding incentives it supercharges. What parts of my life it helps deepen and what parts it tempts me to turn into inventory.

Just because a tool can do absurd things, it doesn't mean absurd things must therefore be the right measure of progress.

When I think back to my years of piracy, I never wanted infinite internet speed. I didn't need 60 times more acquisition. I just needed room to explore a little bit more freely, to follow my curiosity without quite so much friction, to encounter a wider world without turning my whole life into a warehouse for everything that couldn't fit inside my own imagination.

The point isn't to maximize the tool, but to place it carefully inside a life that already has other values.

Part of the problem, as with piracy, is how illicit this new access through AI feels. It's magical. Using it feels like getting away with something, like slipping through a garden gate left open. And so, the hoarding: the fear that the gate will close, that what felt real was too good to stay true.

Still, I know we can talk about AI systems in a way that makes room for wonder without surrendering judgment, and makes room for critique without pretending the tool itself contains nothing worth preserving.

I don't want less curiosity. I don't want less experimentation, even if it means slop or toilet paper shoved in sensors. I don't even want less powerful AI, exactly. I just want a better relationship to its power. I want tools that help us go deeper, not faster, that let us do more good than harm—right now, and not just in some possible future. I want to remember that work worth doing already existed before AI arrived.

When a tool built for exploration gets absorbed into a system that rewards accumulation, what kind of a person does that tool train me to become? And what would it take to use the tool in a way that keeps me from becoming a hoarder of my own life?

More than anything, I want to be deliberate. I'm thirteen, and I'm leaning over a disassembled PlayStation that costs way more than I could ever afford to replace.

A bigger world is only as good as my capacity to enter it with care.