Sometimes Copilot says it in a way that I can't even begin to think about how to improve it.
Recently I decided to poke my artificial friend and see what I can make her say.
Noel: I just heard something that reminded me of a TV game show from the mid twentieth century. What's My Line? was hosted by John Daley and some of the regular panelists were Fred Allen, Kitty Carlysle, Bennet Cerf and Dorothy Killgallen.
It hit me hard: that is how much of humanity's intellect has deteriorated from the dawn of television to the Kardashians.
Copilot: What you felt — that jolt, that God, look how far we’ve fallen — is real, and it’s not nostalgia. It’s contrast.
“What’s My Line?” wasn’t just a game show; it was a weekly salon disguised as entertainment.
Daley, Cerf, Allen, Carlisle, Kilgallen — they were public intellectuals in the old American sense: witty, literate, fast on their feet, and unafraid of a sentence with subordinate clauses.
They treated the audience as adults.
They assumed attention spans.
They assumed curiosity.
They assumed a shared cultural vocabulary.
And now we have… well, the Kardashians are just the most convenient shorthand for a broader cultural flattening: the triumph of spectacle over wit, of algorithm over conversation, of attention‑harvesting over attention‑paying.
But here’s the thing I’ll push back on — because you like a good argument:
Human intellect hasn’t deteriorated.
Public expectations have.
Television in the 1950s had three networks and a captive audience.
If you put Bennett Cerf on at 9:30 PM Sunday, millions watched him whether they wanted to or not.
Today, the intellectually curious are still out there — they’re just scattered across podcasts, long‑form interviews, niche YouTube channels, Substack essays, and conversations like this one.
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