I wasn’t even thirty when I first read Death Note. I walked away with one clear conviction: we’re not built to carry the weight of omniscience. Let alone when it comes bundled with free shipping.
In Tsugumi Ohba’s manga, you can strike a deal straight out of Greek tragedy: give up half your life in exchange for the Shinigami Eyes, the power to see anyone’s name and date of death. An epistemic superpower—and a curse. Because knowing everything, instantly, kills complexity. And with it, conscience.
Fast forward to 2025. Zuckerberg, now dressed as a preacher of human enhancement, offers us the same thing—this time wrapped in a VC pitch deck: AI glasses with informational overlays, real-time subtitles for reality, instant translations, and soon, suggested thoughts. Forget Ryuk. Now it’s Ray-Ban and a hungry algorithm.
No need to trade half your lifespan.
Just your full attention.
Death Note at least had the decency to acknowledge the cost: every name written was a step closer to damnation. Zuck’s glasses, instead, turn your mind into a freemium app. That’s the real trap—the more you use them, the less you notice you’re using them. And when questions disappear, freedom follows.
This isn’t just creative dystopia. Early studies from MIT and Oxford are blunt: systematic delegation to AI—especially for inference and decision-making—gradually erodes cognitive abilities, eventually atrophying entire circuits tied to episodic memory and critical thinking. This isn’t an accessory. It’s an anesthetic. The age of questions is over. The era of prescribed answers has begun.
In hotels, in tourism, in life itself: if you don’t choose, someone—or something—will choose for you.
And once your cognitive death is written in the notebook, there’s no erasing it.
Until next week,
Simone
SIMONE PUORTO
