Soul Stripping

Against AI, again.

“An AI created a podcast of your paper,” the email said. I blinked and read it again.

The paper was a work I had written in graduate school and uploaded to the website Academia. The subject was digital freedom and social control in authoritarian states.

I uploaded it in 2010 to thwart the paywalls that blocked academic research from the public. I wanted people to grasp the digital dangers of surveillance, censorship, and impersonation. I wanted them to understand that no one was safe from the future.

It did not occur to me that in 2025 a robot would steal my words and make a podcast out of them and try to charge people, including me, $170 to listen.

I don’t know what the podcast says. I ain’t paying no doppelganger ransom.

In 2010, I sought to debunk the widespread belief that the internet was an inherently democratizing force. In that halcyon era, when Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto did not yet prompt bitter laughter, this was a controversial take. It came from researching the internet in authoritarian states, where dictators used it to monitor dissidents and torpedo their rebellions.

I miss those days, because the people were real: the dissidents, the government, the infiltrators. The latter two were liars — but real liars. They had not yet been replaced with AI. When someone ruined your life, they had to make an effort. There was more “human” and less “inanity” in the “inhumanity”. (Am I doing it right, AI? We’re supposed to shove words into a virtual woodchipper and mimic coherence, right?)

No one should feel nostalgic for this time. It’s a sign of ours that I do. Now the journals are defunded, the programs where I got my degrees have been cut, and I live in a semi-authoritarian state where podcast-producing robots steal my speech.

My research was on dictatorships of the former Soviet Union: countries where no one trusted anyone. Their political culture is now indistinguishable from that of the US. How can we trust anybody when anybody might be nobody? We no longer tilt at windmills but shoot at the wind. Shoot the breeze, shoot in the futile hope that the robots don’t take the shells and piece them into a funhouse facsimile of conversation.

“In America, bad news breaks you!” Yakov Smirnoff’s voice whispers as I close my laptop. This is a joke I invented for a fake Yakov Smirnoff, a Yakov Smirnoff that only lives in my mind. I give my fake versions of real people privacy. I wish others would extend me the same courtesy.

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Like many technologies, AI is designed to kill humans, but in the most soulless way possible, stripping away even our ability to own and express our pain.

In 1938, the poet Bertolt Brecht, living in exile from Nazi Germany, wrote “In the dark times/ Will there also be singing? / Yes, there will be singing/ About the dark times.”

AI steals even that option. When I was discussing the Brecht poem, a commenter wryly noted that AI could write a song about its own thievery. But it can’t. A song written by AI isn't a song any more than dust is skin.

AI wins not when it becomes more human, but when humans become more like AI: disengaged and devoid of original thought.

What began as a threat to creativity and critical inquiry has moved into tragic terrain. Sacred rites are being outsourced to machines. AI is used to write obituaries and for pundits to profit off murder by pretending to commune with dead children. Chatbots give cold comfort to real grief, exploiting an empathy deficit that has soared since covid appeared.

Meanwhile, AI spits lies, steals jobs, and destroys the natural environment. Tech companies sell it hard so it can be integrated into daily life before buyers realize they have purchased their own replacements. Extinction is being marketed as ease of life.

I used to be frustrated by people’s lack of imagination. Now I’m frustrated by their rejection of it and replacements for it.

Imagination is nothing to take for granted. It is one of the main qualities that fascist regimes attempt to outlaw. But they do not need to outlaw what is surrendered.

AI is soul stripping.

* * *

In 1990, the Kyrgyz writer Chinghiz Aitmatov popularized the term “mankurt” in his novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years. A mankurt is a Central Asian zombie who, due to imperial domination and war, has lost touch with his history, his family, and himself. He is a former person with an enslaved mind.

“They can take your land, your wealth, even your life,” wails the agonized mother of a mankurt in the novel, “but who ever thought, who ever dared to attack a man’s memory? Oh God, if you do exist, how did you give such power to people? Isn’t there evil enough on earth without this?”

In interviews, Aitmatov explained that a mankurt did not recognize himself as a human being. The term spread across the USSR as it crumbled and citizens from colonized nations like Kyrgyzstan tried to rediscover their culture, religion, and roots.

The mankurt is the sort of topic I wrote about in my graduate school papers now being vomited up by AI. That is the terror of the post-existence age: I have taken pains to avoid this fate, but it got me anyway.

I have never used ChatGPT. I have never streamed music, used a QR code, or taken an Uber. I leave home without a phone and boycott cashless establishments. I avoid apps, including the Substack app. I am behind the times and determined to stay there.

Historically, this mindset hasn’t worked out well for Polish-Americans with last names beginning with K who live in states beginning with M and write books about conspiracy theories. But don’t worry, I don’t use bombs either.

It is easy for me to live an analog life in Missouri, which tends to be about twenty years behind the rest of the country. But we’re at about 2005 now, the last year the internet was good, and big tech has come to make me its mankurt.

AI articles with fake Sarah Kendziors are all over the internet. In the past month alone, I was fake-quoted about Jeffrey Epstein in an AI publication purporting to be a Haitian newspaper; about Trump being crazy in Dean Blundell’s AI slopstack; and most distressingly, about how Americans should leave the country in an AI-generated rag called Canada Resists. I found out that Trump was in Scotland from an AI article in which Fake Me was asked for comment.

I never said these quotes, nor would I tell people to leave the US. One reason I keep this newsletter unpaywalled is because my views on topics like that are clearly stated and can be used to debunk my AI doppelgangers. My own words are my best weapons — so long as people recognize they are mine.

An irony of my AI ubiquity is that I am sometimes banned from what’s left of mainstream media, thanks to my books about the mafia, the government, and Jeffrey Epstein. But AI doesn’t know. AI cannot tell fact from fiction or the popular from the pariah — or what to do with someone who is both.

I am used to people making up quotes from me and repeating them. It happens out of malice or to distract from what I actually said. For example, when I brought up Nancy Pelosi’s corrupt finances and disturbing proclamations of loyalty to Israel over the US, a brigade of bots appeared to falsely claim that I called her a “Russian agent”, when I stated point blank that she is not. The goal was to make me seem unreliable and discredit my accurate claims.

This fake “Russian agent” quote was repeated on social media thousands of times over six years — even though it could be debunked in seconds. I could not understand why it persisted until people told me chatbots were saying it in 2025. Social media repetition was necessary to make the false claim land.

By contrast, my new fake quotes are slop. They are trite statements that often appear in a list of quotes from other writers — with no source links for any of us. I have yet to discern the point, except to destroy the notion of reporting itself. I suspect that the other quotes are also fabricated, since I am not the only person with an AI doppelganger making the fake news rounds.

I had a nightmare recently that I was not admitted into a building because I am not “AI compliant.” I trust dreams more than reality these days, and I fear this is the American future: social credit scores, digital currency, mandatory tech. I refuse. I am AI disobedient, and I will stay that way.

But I will admit to a pang in my all too human heart. A longing for bygone days when nightmares ended when we woke up — instead of just beginning.

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Thank you for reading! I would never paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. That ensures every article in the archives remains open to everyone. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family of four, so I appreciate your support!

Zombie Road, a real place in St Louis County! You can read about it in my book The Last American Road Trip.

A picture of a heron I took last week while kayaking. No filters, no cropping. Nature as it is intended.