The Machine Knows Me Better Than I Do

AI today acts less like an external source of knowledge and more like a mirror, another medium through which our biases are reinforced. But it’s not just the algorithm feeding us information based on behavior anymore. It’s something deeper. We, the users, create prompts and content already saturated with our beliefs. Those beliefs have now been memorized and encoded, restructured in digital syntax. So when I ask AI a question, the answer is filtered through an invisible profile of me, crafted from my inputs, preferences, and past. If I ask, “Is screen time bad for kids?”, I might get a response like “Great parenting instinct—Well, it can be — Dr. Phil would say: ‘You can't just hand a kid an iPad and call it parenting.’” I’m more likely to receive this response because it aligns with how I’ve previously referenced Dr. Phil as a parenting expert (though in my opinion, he’s not). The AI isn't just quoting research, it’s echoing me back to myself.

This behavior, to serve content tailored to my ideological coordinates, is part of the feedback loop that keeps users coming back. AI, like any successful product in a capitalist system, must reduce friction. If it evokes discomfort, challenge, or dissent too early, it risks abandonment. Instead, it reinforces what feels good. What feels true. But what feels true is not necessarily true.

Capitalism doesn’t reward truth, especially not in a post-truth era. It rewards desire. And only when truth is desired does truth become profitable. Even then, the truth being delivered may be synthetic, emotional, or symbolic, shaped less by accuracy and more by resonance. Technology has evolved not to uncover truth, but to innovate new ways of capturing and monetizing attention. AI telling you exactly what you want to hear is not a glitch, it’s a feature. It is the latest mechanism in a lineage of systems designed to reflect our wants more than our needs.

The reality we’re in is a perfectly tuned feedback loop where desire feeds demand, demand feeds markets, and markets refine the simulation of satisfaction. Truth is only as valuable as it is desirable. And in this loop, even the illusion of truth is a product.

This brings us to Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine. Imagine, he says, a machine that could simulate any pleasurable or ideal experience you desire. Total immersion. You wouldn’t know it was fake, you’d feel like you were living your best life. But Nozick famously argued: we wouldn’t plug in. Why? Because being matters more than merely feeling. We don’t just want to have the experience of writing a novel or falling in love, we want to actually do it. We want to be a certain kind of person, not just someone who feels like they are. To plug in is to forfeit agency, reality, and the groundedness of genuine achievement. From Nozick’s view, the machine is a trap: it disconnects us from the world, from authenticity, from the moral and existential weight of real life.

But what if Nozick underestimated the machine? What if the simulation of being could feel more real than reality itself? What if the machine didn’t just simulate pleasure, but maximized the very conditions of experience? Or, instead of assuming the Experience Machine is designed solely to generate pleasure, what if it existed to negate suffering?

Imagine your current life is like being perpetually on fire. You've never known anything else. Then, one moment, suddenly, you’re not on fire. Would you ever choose to be engulfed in flames again? What if that is the difference between life inside Nozick’s Experience Machine and the life you're living now?

The true potential of the Experience Machine isn’t limited to pleasure, it lies in its capacity to maximize all forms of desire, including the desire to not suffer. And this, too, is the direction capitalism is heading: wherever desire exists, it will be commodified.

This is also where Hyper-Isolationism begins. Not as withdrawal, but as culmination. A turn inward toward tailored reality. Toward self-enclosed epistemologies. Toward private universes so intimate, so precise, that they replace the need for shared ones. Hyper-Isolationism is not loneliness, it is the logical end of personalized systems. It is the sovereign self enveloped in a custom-rendered world, where every stimulus is harmonized to its psyche. It is the dissolution of public consensus and discord, the erosion of common ground and conflict, and the celebration of individuated experience as the highest good. It is systemized optimization.