From:
Christopher B. Jeffers
Just Down The Road A Bit
North by Northwest of Hickory Junction
Tuesday, 11:53 AM
Hello Friend and Fellow Achiever!
Have you ever felt recently that what you are experiencing around you isn’t fully real?
So much of what you see and read in your media feed today is not so much intended to inform you, as it is to get something from you – your money, your attention, your outrage. Likely all three.
More and more often, most of what you see, read, or hear isn’t even written by a real person at all.
That nagging sense isn’t mere paranoia. It’s pattern recognition.
Increasingly, we live in a world flooded with machine-created content deliberately engineered to keep you scrolling and clicking — and feeling things that lead to a darker place.
You’re not wrong, or crazy
It’s not just you. The pattern is real. With the rise of an always-on, hyperconnected global Internet and social media, many people find themselves haunted by the unsettling sense that the world they experience – both on and off-line – is becoming ever more hollow, artificial, angry … and unhinged.
It’s not so much real, as it is manufactured.
Studies from digital security firms like Imperva show that over half of all Internet traffic is now non-human, dominated by automated bots, information scrapers, and scripts.[1]
On social media, fake engagement isn’t a bug — it’s a feature, and a business model.
Click farms, astroturfing, and purchased followers have been widely documented. Even as far back as 2018 a New York Times investigation found that many celebrities, public figures, and “influencers” routinely buy fake followers by the tens of thousands — inflating their reach and status with audiences that don’t exist.[2]
Despite occasional well-publicized purges of fake user accounts, the problem has only gotten worse. The same tools that make bot creation cheaper and easier to build have also made fake audiences cheaper and easier to create or buy — and harder than ever to tell apart from the real thing.
Behind all this is a simple, driving engine:
The Attention Economy
Social media platforms actively optimize for engagement and time-on-site because that’s what they sell to advertisers. The longer you scroll, the more you’re worth. So the systems are built to keep you scrolling — and the content is engineered to keep you reacting. AI-driven content farms automatically create and post articles, likes, and comments by the millions.
It’s a problem driven by many different actors: advertisers, PR firms, state and government propagandists (both foreign and domestic), political pressure groups, NGOs, and straight-up fraudsters selling fake products or fake causes.
Each has a reason — political or economic — to capture your attention, and each of them has learned that shock, fear, and anger are the cheapest and easiest ways to get it.
Increasingly, you can’t tell whether what you are reading or watching was written or created by a real person, or generated by a machine — and the platforms have no real incentive to help you tell the difference.
The Algorithm
We talk about “the algorithm” as if it were some ghostly, omnipotent force invisibly shaping our lives and manipulating what we perceive.
That’s not an entirely unfounded view. Algorithms determine what we see in our feeds, and what article, post, or video gets recommended to us next.
Stripped of its technical mystique, an algorithm is really nothing more than a precise, step-by-step set of instructions for solving a problem or completing a task. It takes input, processes it, and produces an output.
Increasingly, that output is designed to keep you engaged — clicking, scrolling, and viewing.
Here’s the uncomfortable part: these platforms measure success as seconds of attention — not what you actually learn or remember.
Those two things are often in conflict. Most of the content you consume this way, you won’t remember thirty seconds later.
We actually know this, yet we’re hooked. Have you ever tried NOT checking your phone for more than a few minutes at a time?
It’s an almost painful effort.
—–
“A wealth of information creates
a poverty of attention.”
– Economist Herbert Simon (1971)
—–
Imagine a machine
… able to produce identical copies of something, on demand, in infinite quantities, essentially for free.
When it comes to machine-simulated “intelligence,” that’s increasingly the world we’re living in.
More and more of everything, with less and less friction, effort and cost, and produced in quantities far beyond what anyone needs — or even wants.
So if machines can make things faster, more consistently, and at a lower cost — why do people still buy things that are handmade and hand-crafted?
Being Human
There’s no question. Hand-crafted items can’t compete on price. They take far longer to produce, and are far from perfect or consistent from piece to piece — or may even be one-of-a-kind.
Yet many people will go out of their way and pay a premium price for something handmade, rather than a similar factory-made item cranked out by an automated machine.
Here’s why: mass production optimizes for efficiency, cost, and consistency. The human-made optimizes for meaning. Those two things are almost never found in the same transaction.
A handmade object is intrinsically unique. Each piece will have small inconsistencies — and it’s precisely those imperfections that prove no one else owns what you own.
Many people will willingly pay more for the feeling of exclusiveness, of having something no one else has — even if that difference is a small flaw left by the hand of the human artisan.
Behind every handmade object is a backstory — a narrative. A specific person put their expertise, creativity, and skill into making it.
That story attaches a deeper meaning. It’s a transaction between two people – the maker and the purchaser – rather than simply being one of identical thousands from a faceless seller’s inventory.
Raging against the machine
For many people, buying something handmade — or making it themselves — is a small but significant act of defiance.
Handmade means standing up against the scourge of algorithmic sameness, mass production, and the creeping sense that everything (and everyone) is interchangeable and disposable. It’s a vote for the human over the machine.
This is not irrational. People don’t buy for function alone. We buy for meaning, identity, connection, and a sense of agency.
While the mass-produced item may be the smarter purchase on paper (lower cost and better quality), the handmade one satisfies a deeper hunger – for authenticity, for connection, and for the feeling that your money went to an actual person, and not a faceless shareholder or multinational conglomerate.
That connection is part of the product. It’s what gives it its extra value. As soon as you try to mass-produce something, it loses some of its humanity.
AI-generated content is like that
After a while, everything starts to feel the same.
Unlike a friend who may push back and say things to you that are new, uncomfortable, or that you NEED to hear, AI tells you pretty much what it has pattern-matched from your prompt to algorithmically determine what you most WANT to hear.
AI is nothing if not a total suck-up, eager to please.
An attributable, human-written book, essay or newsletter on the other hand, has a recognizable human voice and style, crafted by a real living person who spent time formulating, outlining, and describing an idea. It is the intellectual version of hand-made, that brings with it and delivers authenticity and connection.
And that’s worth having.
A simulated intelligence algorithm (AI) can convincingly imitate the format, copy the structure, and mimic the tone — and is constantly getting better at all of those. But no matter how convincing AI becomes, it can’t actually replicate the human understanding, nuance and intent behind the words.
Imitation works backward from previous output. A human works forward from a life. For a machine, no matter how sophisticated the program, understanding doesn’t come first. It’s mimicry reverse-engineered from other people’s understanding.
An AI-bot can certainly generate a plausible-sounding post, article, or even a book in seconds, but the authenticity of a human face, voice and emotional connection are missing.
Being Human in an Inhuman World
Being human makes you increasingly unique in a world that is more and more dominated by digital simulations.
Who do you actually follow and read? Authors and artisans who still write and create by hand? Or an AI chatbot that spits out generic content that reads like a thousand other articles artificially generated from the same keywords?
It’s not about just writing or posting more. It’s about thinking deeply, creating carefully, and producing something that only a person — with their unique personal story, experience, and perspective — could have written.
The stakes are real
ChatGPT by OpenAI, the most well-known of AI Large Language Models, was unleashed upon the world in November 2022.
Author Tim Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek) recently revealed that since 2022, his book sales – which were reliably steady since his first book was released in 2007 – will have plunged by 80% since 2022, and are already down 57% in 2026 alone compared to 2025.[3]
As late as 2019, Tim writes, a published book was the “highest-density transfer of obsession” he knew of, representing years or decades of an author’s thoughts and experience, compressed into a form you could hold in hands.
Now, that medium increasingly competes with an interface (AI) that has been trained on nearly every book ever printed — and can summarize them into bullet-points instantly, conversationally, and for free.
Ferriss himself acknowledges that some of that decline reflects fundamental changes in the publishing industry as well as cultural trends, but the timing – coinciding almost exactly with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other AI competitors —is hard to dismiss.
Slop On Demand
“AI slop” is the term used to describe the flood of low-effort, shallow, algorithmically-generated content that increasingly clogs the Internet — churned out to game the search engines, rather than to inform or enlighten.
Search for almost any how-to topic, and you’ll find pages upon pages of near-identical sounding articles — articles that confidently explain nothing because they were generated to rank, not to teach.
The numbers tell the story. According to industry sources that track ISBN registrations of new book titles, over 4 million new titles were published in the U.S. in 2025 alone. Of these, only about 15.4% (642,242) came from traditional publishers. The rest — 84.6% — were self-published by the author.[4]
ISBN-issuer Bowker’s product marketing manager Andrew Kovacs attributes much of this to “the growing availability and adoption of new tools in the author community.”
As Kovacs goes on to explain, every aspect of the publishing process once available only through traditional publishers can now be obtained from self-publishing service providers at a lower cost and a comparable level of quality.
In short, the new tools (increasingly AI driven) enable authors to not only more easily write and publish books, but distribute and market them as well.
This is a polite way of admitting that AI content generation has flooded the book market.
When anyone can prompt a chatbot to produce a 200-page manuscript in an afternoon, wrap it in an AI-generated cover, and upload it to Amazon KDP (ebooks and print-on-demand) for FREE — the barriers to authoring and publishing have essentially disappeared.
Some self-publishers — especially on Amazon KDP — adopt a “quantity over quality” strategy — using AI authoring to pump out dozens of titles across several hot-keyword niches.
The reality is that most of these listings will only sell perhaps a handful of copies, if any. The strategy is volume: by targeting trending search topics, they can hope to profit from selling a few copies each of a very large number of titles.
The paradox: More books are being published than ever, yet authors who have built a real readership and presence are selling less.
Result? More titles of lower quality chasing fewer readers — with royalties that rarely cover the cost of promotion, much less produce a profit.
Enduring Magic
I personally don’t think books are going to go the way of the dinosaurs or the Dodo bird. There is still something magic about a real, physical book — human knowledge and imagination compressed into a three-dimensional object that you can hold and feel in your hands, that doesn’t need a device or batteries to be read.
A human-written, printed book is, in a sense, a handmade object. In spite of its mechanical reproduction, someone chose the paper, the typeface, and the cover. The result carries the effects of a maker’s decisions in a way an ebook or PDF never will.
A growing number of studies show that physical print is read more deliberately, more deeply, and with better comprehension and retention than the same material viewed on a screen.[5]
Printed pages engage your body as well as your mind — the weight, the texture, the smell, the rustle as you turn them. A printed book engages your body in a magical way that a glowing rectangle simply can’t.
That’s not trivial. That physical touch, and the physical place where you were when you read the pages, are part of why you remember what you read.
Printed books mean fewer distractions: No hyperlinks pulling you away. No incoming notifications. No endless scroll. Better focus, concentration and deep learning.
They’re also more memorable and collectible. Pages get underlined, dog-earned, reread, and stored on a shelf you can walk by and browse.
Electronic documents — ebooks, PDFs, emails — are mostly consumed once and forgotten.
What actually matters
The best books, magazines, and newsletters help the reader see their own problems more clearly, give them hope, and guide them with lessons they can actually use.
Authenticity without usefulness is self-indulgence. Usefulness without any human connection is ultimately forgettable.
The best resources offer both — practical wisdom and insight, with a real person behind them.
That’s the human element that machines can never fully replace. And that’s the whole game.
It’s Up To You
As my regular readers know, I have published a (real) print book about creating a personal framework for personal development, and for establishing productive, sustainable life habits that will transform you and enable you to achieve your goals.+
I wrote every word of it. Myself. Based on a lifetime of reading, learning, and experience. No AI.
It’s titled It’s Up To You! How to Unleash Your Inner Beast and Achieve Your Wildest Dreams. I also publish a regular monthly newsletter for a select group of elite subscribers – The Christopher B. Jeffers Letter.
Neither are available at Amazon, or in any bookstore. You can only get them from me and my publisher (see the links below.)
If you love REAL books as much as I do, I hope you’ll consider picking up a copy – I’d like to know what you think!
That’s it for now. Until next week … remember to Always Keep It Awesome, my friend!
Warmest regards,
Christopher B. Jeffers
“A Man Who Believes In ACTUAL Intelligence!”
Author of IT’S UP TO YOU! How to Unleash Your Inner Beast and Achieve Your Wildest Dreams. Get your free copy (just pay shipping) here.
P.S. – To get a 30-day trial of the best physical monthly newsletter in the world about Life, Liberty, Knowledge Development, and the Happiness of Pursuit, visit the following link:
[1] Imperva. (2025). Bad Bot Report 2025. Data covers the years 2022-2024, which shows that non-human traffic increased from 47.4% of all traffic in 2022, to 49.6% in 2023, and 51% in 2024, surpassing human traffic for the first time. Additionally, “Bad Bot” (malicious) traffic rose from 30.2% in 2022, to 37% in 2024. The report identifies that the increase has been driven by AI and large-language models (LLMs) which have made bot creation more accessible and scalable. – www.imperva.com/resources/reports/2025-Bad-Bot-Report.pdf
[2] New York Times. The Follower Factory – January 27, 2018. The investigation exposed a company called Devumi, which sold fake followers and retweets to 200,000 customers, including celebrities, athletes, pundits, politicians, influencers, and businesses. These included the use of over 3.5 million automated bot accounts, producing 200+ million fake followers – www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/social-media-bots.html
[3] Ferriss, Tim. Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction? June 12, 2026. www.tim.blog/2026/06/12/has-ai-already-killed-nonfiction/
[4] Milliot, Jim. Publishers Weekly. Book Output Topped Four Million in 2025 (March 17, 2026). – www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/99943-book-output-topped-4-million-in-2025.html
[5] Salmeron, L et al. Journal of Educational Psychology. Reading Comprehension on Handheld Devices versus on Paper (2023). This meta-analysis of 38 between-participant (different groups for text in-print and text on-screen) and 21 within-participant (each participant reads one text in print and another text on a screen, or the same text in both formats at different times) studies found that readers comprehend text at least slightly but consistently better in print than on screen. – www.doi.org/10.1037/edu0000830
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