The Hammock Papers: Insidious.

13 March 2026

Insidious.

John Nosta on what happens when intelligence is bought instead of built ...

Agency isn't just the ability to choose among options or produce language on command. It's the felt experience of your own judgment. It comes from working with a thought long enough for something honest to emerge. With AI, we may still feel informed and productive while the deeper habits, dare I say "agency intelligence," begin to weaken.

There is also an economic layer to this that carries psychological weight. A commodity can be priced, tiered, throttled, advertised, and differentiated. Once intelligence enters that framework, the old questions of human thinking begin to mix with the logic of the market. And I think that's exactly where Sam Altman and OpenAI sit—at least based on his earlier quote.

The questions abound. Who gets the better model, the deeper reasoning, the larger context window, the more persistent memory? Who can afford a more capable form of synthetic cognition? That may sound like a technical issue, but it also changes how people imagine themselves in relation to thought. The self becomes less the source of intelligence and more the customer of cognitive support. To me, that's not a trivial shift. It encourages an insidious dependence with no track record.

I suspect many people already feel this in everyday life. The moment before writing becomes prompting. The moment before reflection becomes querying. The unfinished thought no longer remains unfinished for long because something is always available to complete it—and at a cost. That is useful, and often impressive, but it is also worth watching carefully. The danger of AI isn't "simply" that it replaces human thought. It may be that it gradually makes thought feel less like something we do and more like something we access and buy.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL