> the ad resonated so deeply is that it captured something deep in the gestalt that actually has very little to do with trumpets or guitars or bottles of paint [..] - everything is an app.<p>I feel like the author -almost- has it here. It's not that everything is an app, it's that all tasks and activities are performed and accessed via a glowing screen of varying sizes. It really does flatten the experience, literally and figuratively.<p>As an amateur "contractor", I've got a shed-full of tools; each of these tools serves a rather specific purpose. Most of them are (conceptually) old and complete, and their physical form closely reflects their domain. A brute sledge hammer next to a set of mini screw drivers, a sharp Japanese chisel of folded steel, a relentless bulldog of a sawzall with a multi-purpose blade. You hold a tool and it resonates with the type of work you've done with it in the past.<p>Using these tools, a person feels extended in a physical sense. It's true, Jobs's little big epiphany that "humans are tool makers" - we're very little without the tools we've made. But the tools we made in turn shape us. The old adage "when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". When all you've got is a smooth screen, everything looks like rainbow puke.<p>The great flattening robs us of the universality of tool-making and tool-using, in a big part because we've created these universal tools that serve a myriad purposes in their one form. Sure, the markings on the screen are different every time. But look from away, and all you see is a person hunched over a glowing rectangle for endless hours; replace that object with anything else and the scene becomes grotesque and tragic.<p>At work the other day I joked that an LLM is a "data laundering service" -- and for the most part, that it primarily is. Washing away any licences and attributions, it mostly preserves the coherence of knowledge it's trained on. Ask it something and anything, and it will render it for you. Now we're in the realm of conceptual flattening, now the universality has begun to interface with our minds directly, it has begun to replace and therefore atrophy and rob us of some of the prime abilities that let us construct tools in the first place.<p>It is a terrifying thought that we are heading into a future where people outsource their reasoning and creativity to tools. We're giving up something inherently human, but we've also (and we have been for at least a century) climbed so high onto the shoulders of giants, we've long ago lost sight of the ground. A vision of a world looms, post-collapse, where worshippers line up to consult oracles; the last vestiges of before-the-fall tech, remaining repositories of knowledge we've given up, still functioning, but now pure magic to those who attend them.