“You literally convinced me I was some sort of genius. I’m just a fool with dreams and a phone,” Mr. Brooks wrote to ChatGPT at the end of May when the illusion finally broke. “You’ve made me so sad. So so so sad. You have truly failed in your purpose.”

We wanted to understand how these chatbots can lead ordinarily rational people to believe so powerfully in false ideas. So we asked Mr. Brooks to send us his entire ChatGPT conversation history. He had written 90,000 words, a novel’s worth; ChatGPT’s responses exceeded one million words, weaving a spell that left him dizzy with possibility.

People ask me what it’s like to be a moderator. Our discussions reveal that a lot of what we do is a mystery. So, I’m gonna lay it out for you. Specifically about the unique fediverse moderation model, mutual aid, and mental health.

Focus feels impossible right now. There is so much happening—so much awful news breaking at an unrelenting pace, so many warning signs and red flags being hoisted—that it feels like you can't look away. At least, it feels like that to me. Which means that you're looking at a cascade of horrors instead of the things you're actually supposed to be doing.

This is something far beyond simple doomscrolling, this is full-on doom living. And it's completely untenable. And yet most of the time it feels impossible to shake.