Thirty years ago, the internet was a burgeoning entity. The ways you could use it were limited, but distinct. Save a stamp and send a friend an e-mail. Browse the “world wide web” with Netscape and check out somebody’s homepage. Chat with other people sitting at a keyboard on IRC. Exchange group messages with like-minded folk on a newsgroup.
At the core of any of these activities was the drive to connect with another human being. A lot of that is gone now in 2025.
E-mail inboxes are mostly filled with automated messages. Massive amounts of content on the web are generated by AI. Companies offer customer support with automat chatbots, which never really offer you any support.
ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini are everywhere now.
“You may not like it, but you need to learn it,” my wife tells me. “AI is where the world is headed. It would be shortsighted to not get on board, like rejecting computers in the eighties.”
She’s probably right. But I still want something rooted from people, and not just the machines that people create. The way a handpainted Christmas ornament strikes you more than one off the factory line. The way hearing a song with a live drummer resonates with you more than one with a drum machine.
If I sound like an old man with a yellow onion tied to my belt, yelling at a cloud, it’s probably because I am. This is the third iteration of Are You Insane. The first I crudely constructed with Perl in 2003, and the second was thrown together with PHP and Joomla in 2007. I’m 22 years, a wife, and three children older now than the mhatter106 who first launched AYI as a humor writing outlet. The things I’m interested are different. The things that make me laugh are different. The things I think about are different.
But they’re the thoughts of my own mind. And I am excited to grab a fresh pad of paper and write on Are You Insane again, whatever the topics may be.
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