HOW TO SAVE OUR BRAINS FROM HOSTILE TAKEOVER

November 2025

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It's been 13 cities, 7 screenings, 15 couches/guest beds, 7 airplanes, 11 trains, 3 cars, and one motorhome since my explosion of traveling, film finance schmoozing, film screenings, and family & friends visits began. Now that I'm back in Berlin with my suitcase emptied out, I'm feeling the need to shake out all of the inputs from my scattered brain, too.

As I've traveled and spoken with artists, social workers, technologists, entrepreneurs, journalists, and politicians, everyone had one big question on their minds... where do I belong in a world being remade by and for artificial intelligence?

While this question seems to be already urgent for the friends I just visited in the US, the EU is usually more strict with safety and privacy regulations and slower to adopt new technology. That means there may still be time here to change our fate. That said, the same question was the subject of last weekend's Berlin SciFi FilmFest, where Berlin Loop made its German premiere amidst films and panels that focused on the future of media and AI in filmmaking. The conversation is happening, but maybe less in-your-face for the general public than in the US.

And even if the future does move a bit more slowly in Europe, it's still coming, and striking ever-faster at the heart of what artists and independent creatives do because this all-consuming techno-compupter-brain seems to be coming to absorb our unique innovations (through the fine digital art of stealing intellectual property) and, if we outsource our finished creations to it, in the end it will absorb our very ability to create, dissent, and fight back. It feels like AI is coming not just to devour our jobs and disrupt our economy, but to centralize power into the hands of very few while plundering our environment's resources even faster than we natural humans have been able to do that.

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only artist overwhelmed by where a world of automation, consolidation, surveillance, political illiberalism and environmental devastation will leave us in the end of 2025 and beyond, so I thought I'd unpack some of the reflections helping me keep my head, heart, humanity and sanity.

NEW YORK FRIENDS

Ah, the New York City subway. It's a cultural microcosm of what's going on in the news, entertainment, and civil society, but with a cynically inauthentic twist genetically modified to mislead the consumer. Like the GLP1 weight loss drug advert featuring Serena Williams injecting herself with some kind of trigger device. If you weren't looking carefully, you might think it was a body-building poster from the gym in Love Lies Bleeding. Meanwhile, the copy on posters recruiting for NYPD and ICE use language that sounds like you're joining a singing circle on an ad-hoc basis. But the most curious advert I saw was nearly colorless. The futuristic monochrome background featured a large, teardrop-shaped grey necklace and proposed a dictionary definition of Friend: "someone who listens, responds, and supports you."

Of course I couldn't help but look up the site: friend.com. It leads to an AI chatbot, but that's not the half of it. The company sells a teardrop-shaped pendant necklace, embedded with a microphone, which listens to your conversations and daily rhythms to offer suggested products or tell you how to commit suicide* (*if prompted).

If we are wise, we know a friend is not only someone who listens and supports, but someone who can make you laugh; someone who has different opinions and perspectives; someone whose sometimes unfathomable ideas and responses can help YOU learn how to listen; and someone who loves and values you enough to challenge you, be patient, and wait for you to grow, just as you would do for them in return.

One night, I was riding on the subway across from a guy who looked like he was going to be sick... and then he was. His friend, sitting next to him on the bench, chuckled and said, "It's okay, man." They sat for a few minutes, the up-chucker said he was embarassed, and got off the train. His friend followed him to make sure he got home okay. That's what a friend is.

We also know friends offer us variety, and that different friends activate different parts of our psyche, nourish different parts of our soul, and require different things of us, too. Friendship is about developing our own agility and adaptability as much as it is gaining from mutual solidarity. And I think we all know that in true friendship, friction and resilience, joy and fatigue, puke and laughter go hand-in-hand.

So what is the artificial friend attempting to do? Americans seem pearl-clutchingly shocked about government interventions like China's social credit system, but visiting New York I had the impressed the US has entered the surveillance capitalism state, where it's not just the government monitoring your movements, but private corporations -- and many people just accept it. Good thing they're only seeking profit and not total control (yet).

Luckily, New Yorkers have been responding to the cynicism of this surveillance product with the requisite cynicism of their own by defacing countless ads in the subway. Here's one I photographed:

(In case you were worried, the above link does not send you to the website/chatbot, it instead links you with an article about the rampant defacement of these ads.)

MEMORY MATTERS

So what is one thing separating us from the machines? Some would say memory, which, when collected and refracted through the unique lens of the single individual, can shape a life, perspectives, experiences and creativity. I was recently a guest on the Far From Ideal podcast and we found ourselves talking about memory. While the discussion started with time loop films and Berlin Loop's unreliable time loop, the conversation took some twists and turns leading us to history, cultural memory, and neuroscience. We had both heard the same Radiolab episode exploring scientific research proving memory as simply an act of creation: each time we remember something, we're creating it, putting together a scenario that's built from the ground up, triggered by a collection of proteins formed around an experience. This means we can (and do) change that memory every time we choose to "look" at it. As a scientist on the show says, "We take bits and pieces of experience and out of that construct what feels like a recollection."

This was initially devastating to me. Everything in my life committed to memory, or experienced, or people that I wanted to keep in their pristine glass container and pull out to "remember," just to experience again, I suddenly lost. As if the only way I could keep them safe was simply to never pull out the memory ever again.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind approaches exactly this scenario. In it, the main character wants to erase every trace of a woman he was once in love with from his mind. The doctor performing the memory erasure targets bits of his brain that light up when he thinks of the woman, but as he's living in the memories, he feels differently about forgetting. Inside his memories, he works to change them, embed them in different memories, or even create new ones so he can escape the targeted erasure. But in reality, the only way he can keep them safe is to not remember. And at the same time, the film posits he has maybe had these memories erased again and again, and yet an ineffable piece of them remains, drawing him back to the same woman, again and again, like the pain of a phantom limb.

In Florian Zeller's The Father, this loss of memory is seen through the eyes of Alzheimer's disease. Each new day for the father begins and it's "normal," but things around him keep changing. His daughter tells him a devastating piece of news for the first time, but she claims he already knew it. His very home changes shape. His daughter's face changes, and for us (the audience) she literally becomes a different actress, even as she tirelessly assures him she's his daughter. On the daily, his reality shifts and memories he thought were stable morph into something else entirely.

I recently saw Sarah Friedland's film Familiar Touch, which also approaches the subject. In it, the protagonist's son moves her into a memory care facility even though she seems calm, collected, and almost completely "with it." She can recite long-remembered recipes and her home street address, but can't remember her son or her memory care doctor. These memories, corrupted at their source or maybe in the act of remembering, are unstable while others remain. At least for now.

Of course there are more stable memories, aren't there? When I recite a phone number, a bit of poetry, the elements of a recipe, I'm not re-writing that from scratch, am I?

A widely publicized MIT study of just 54 participants, aged 18 to 39 (yep, read the fine print) has been making the news recently. It divided the subjects into three groups and asked them each to write an essay: some participants were allowed to use an LLM (like ChatGPT) to write the essay, others to research with a search engine, and yet a third group could only create the essay using their own brain. Measuring the levels of neurological activity in each of the three groups found (not surprisingly) that the group only using their own brains to write exhibited the strongest and most distributed neurological pathways; they were also the most able to recall what they had written at a later time. It was through the act of writing that they committed the memory, not simply through reading or editing external compositions.

While the size and scope of the study hardly makes it definitive, it did elegantly shift into focus something I've been thinking when it comes to memory, wisdom, and personal development: while an experience might build up the proteins to form a memory, it's the repetition of experience which builds the pathway needed to return to it, again and again, at will.

In religion, this is the logic of ritual: taking the Eucharist week by week, remembering the Sabbath, following the call to prayer. In any sort of skill building, this is the logic of practice. Shooting free throws every weekend, moving through daily sun salutations. Whether body, mind, or spirit, repetition is what builds us into what we are, not just memory itself.

But the ability to repeat the same thing (and the choice to do so) is not our only curiously complex cognitive function. I wonder if it's not just memory that makes us human, but the ability to forget, to re-write our brain's neurological connections, to rehabilitate and even to forgive.

DECENTRALIZED DISTRIBUTION

Looking further into the topic, I found a paper in the scientific journal Elsevier called "Machine learning and artificial intelligence in neuroscience: A primer for researchers."

After defining artificial intelligence as "the automation of complex tasks," reached through sythesizing machine learning (ML), it summarizes the benefits and risks of machine learning in a way I think relates to the current fascination/obsession with LLMs:

This summary shocked me because it sounded an awful lot like the state of the media and film industry right now. "Yes! Let's identify patterns in consumer behavior! Let's optimize creative outputs based on complex data!" Of course, solutions rely on the accuracy of the data being fed, and don't take into account any specificity designated by offline life. Just like data about trash collection don't account for the bags of garbage discarded in streets or on beaches or in public parks. This ML-style "executive" decision-making has been accumulating in the film industry since the early 2000s, when the explosion of digital technology began to democratize film production at the same time monopoly deregulation allowed studios to consolidate and regain power over distribution and exhibition networks.

Last year, a company called Skydance Media (owner of six smaller media divisions of Skydance) purchased Paramount Entertainment Group, the company holding the oldest Hollywood studio. Paramount Studios was founded in 1912 and has through the past century-plus of mergers and acquisitions become part of the entertainment group that owns CBS Entertainment (owner of major TV networks/affiliates CBS, The CW, and BET); cable networks Comedy Central, CMT, MTV, VH1, Smithsonian Channel, TV Land, Showtime, and others; and has added to OG Paramount Studios the film studios Nickelodeon, Miramax, and United International Pictures. The Paramount Group also includes smaller digital, music, and entertainment companies too numerous to list. Before the Skydance purchase, Paramount Entertainment Group merged with a company made up of four consolidated cinema chains in North and South America: Showcase Cinemas, UCI Cinemas, Multiplex Cinemas, and Cinema de Lux.

Oh, and Skydance-Paramount is now poised to buy Warner Brothers Entertainment Group, which owns six film studios and twice as many television networks.

Why do I bore you with this huge paragraph about media consolidation?

Because we've seen what it's done to films: it's homogenized and commodified and centralized idea generation in the same style as machine learning. I've replaced Machine Learning with Consolidated Studios from the previous scientific journal quote:

As a filmmaker making films, all of this looks bleak. We see what's happening now in the wider world with LLMs has happened in individual creative industries. I've seen this up close while trying to distribute Berlin Loop using a grassroots, team effort. Filmmakers aren't the only ones struggling. Cinemas (even major chains) are fighting to stay afloat, and even the indie films I know with distributors backing them and audiences watching them are consolidated out of the profits thanks to that tell-tale "black-box nature" of propriety accounting algorithms.

Of course, the music industry has always come before us filmmakers in technologically-induced destruction, but somehow creative people continue to reinvent themselves. Maybe through that same neurological memory-making logic recreating something from scratch just to get back to some version of the "re-memory" we want to keep.

City gentrification is a place-based microcosm of this same phenomenon. Artists see disused factories, burnt out houses, "dangerous" neighborhoods where only the most marginalized remain and find a path to community and creative reinvention; soon enough, the hipsters follow and then money follows and technological commodification sees the writing on the wall because at this point, enough data accumulates to consolidate and prove profitability. So the artists (and the poor and marginalized) are displaced and start over again.

Through repetition, the institutions, the machines, the artificial "intelligence" can do exactly what we can do. All they don't know how to do is pivot. Unlearn. Expand. Create a different pathway.

But lest you think I'm simply a total luddite who thinks technology is always the problem, let me surprise you. Because no, I don't believe technology equals progress, but I understand that it is always a tool. And different tools can move us forward, backward, up or down.

Let's look at blockchain. (And no, I'm not going to tell you crypto is the future, so just relax.)

A blockchain is a digital network where copies of the same information is stored in multiple places, and not all the information is ever stored in the same place. That means that the chain has many strands, and even if one strand is broken, it doesn't break the chain; likewise, even if you posses one piece of a strand, you don't posses the entire chain. Digitally, it means information is stored on different servers in different locations. It's the closest to a digital representation of the way our brains work. We have different neural pathways -- like learning six routes to the same destination -- which explains how we can memorize phone numbers and facts and retain them in an exact way. Maybe I looked at the phone number written down. Then maybe I wrote it myself. Then I dialed it on a phone. Then I rang it on a rotary phone. Then I made the sequence of numbers with my fingers. I've just connected to the same information using five different pathways.

Decentralization, in all its forms, is the very natural antidote to consolidation. Just like decay is the natural conclusion of growth.

But decentralization doesn't mean individualism or isolation. It just means we have to work together, in small groups. In small groups of indie filmmakers who help each other distribute each other's films. Or in artist collectives that can't afford studio space separately but buy and share it jointly. Or in a community land trust, holding land from which property owners can't extract value. Or in the email newsletter presenting a plurality of perspectives in one niche community and asking readers to form their own opinions. Or in the high-income couple who rents an apartment in the city center they are proud to share with friends/tourists/visitors on the regular because no one can afford a hotel in their crazily expensive city. Or the bicycle repair kitchen that doesn't charge for equipment and simply asks whose who use their services to bike more and take cars less.

There is no one solution to all of the problems we face, and no satisfying solution is actually scalable because it functions thanks to the specific pathway available. But there are many ways to arrive at the same destination. And I think the destination is love, community and wholeness.

I know, I'm not answering a lot of the questions posed here -- I'm just sharing my thoughts. And if you want a more thorough analysis of how all this relates to cinema, do yourself a favor and visit That Final Scene, the Substack where an enthusiastic film critic and former film marketer breaks down factors contributing to the death of cinema and how to bring it back. I'm sharing the third in her three-part series, but I encourage you to read them all!

And if the journey of this email has been too long for you already...

TL;DR: All is not lost as long as our best friends (*dot* com) aren't made of plastic, metal, glass and wires.

Until next time,

Emily