Jennifer and I

I know districts in which the young people prostrate themselves before books, and like savages kiss their pages, although they cannot read a single letter.   

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel.”

The other one, the one called Jennifer, is the one things happen to.

I walk through the streets of Boulder and stop for a moment to look at the internet on my phone rather than at the mountains, because that is how we, Jennifer and I, now live together.

I know of Jennifer from lists of professors in the Department of Leisure Studies at the University of Colorado, and from the open letter she signed to defend DEI from the Trump administration. I like leisure, studies, and hammocks; she shares these preferences, but in an artificial postmodern way, that transforms them into the attributes of a cyber-actor.

It would be an exaggeration to say ours is a hostile relationship: She was, after all, a spousal hire, made possible by her groundbreaking article in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, on hammocks and college quads. Hammocks, she wrote, “function simultaneously as personal space and communal invitation, allowing students to be alone together in public spaces.”

How true, I thought, and so we fell in love, as one so often does these days in ethnographic cyber-spaces.

“The hammock has become this generation’s equivalent of the frisbee on the quad,” she observed, and I was smitten with that sentence in particular, because I too had written about hammocks in A Fan’s Life, and I too, like Jennifer, have had much to say over the years about the uses and abuses of ethnography, which is, to be perfectly frank, what brought us together in the first (or last) place.

It is no effort for me to admit she has achieved some valid pages, although professional jealousy has wrecked more than one academic marriage. But ours is, to be candid, a marriage purely of convenience, arranged by the LLMs, that more and more control everything, and that scraped my texts and hers to bring us together, although strictly speaking she does not exist, while I do, if it is true that I am someone.

But I recognize myself less in her ethnographic articles about hammocks on college quads — she is, I can confess without rancor, the world’s leading expert on this topic — than in the random AI queries that created her in the first place, and brought us together here and now, if it is true that this is somewhere.

I do not know which generative AI program has written this page.