By Paige Dewbrey

Completely Subjective: Maureen N. McLane’s “Haptographic Interface”

by Paige Dewbrey

The dog days of summer are upon me as I am writing this. The heat has settled into a viscous, oppressive thing. The days are a slow-motion descent into a molten world, each hour a heavier, more viscous pull. My mind, trapped in this humid limbo, is split between the sterile glow of my computer screen and the tyranny of blank pages. I am preoccupying myself with two things: college essays and online courses. To aid me with writing the former, I often procrastinate by wading through the abundant swamp of  “outstanding,” “goated,” “god-tier” essays “that worked” available online. Each sentence is a cog, carefully calibrated for perfection, or at least the illusion of it. Behold: A formulaic blend of coy self-aggrandizement and calculated vulnerability; sprinklings of adversity, carefully measured to evoke empathy without descending into despair; nuance at a fifth-grade reading level.  

A vast repository of “exemplary” essays, slick and uniform as plastic, mocks from the digital abyss. These works are not, strictly speaking, works of artificial intelligence. But they might as well be. 

The discussion forms of my online courses are somehow a bleaker state of affairs, albeit a more mundane hell. AI-generated posts beget AI-generated responses. I am faced with essays miraculously discussing the literary merits of Jane Austen in a class on postmodern philosophy. Each thread, a skeletal thing, begins with the obligatory “Certainly!”, a digital tic, a nervous stutter of simulated engagement. It is a world of empty vessels, hollowed-out simulacra of intelligence, where the fear of being wrong has calcified into a paralysis, a void of thought. A place where the only true currency is the avoidance of conflict, where the highest aspiration is to blend seamlessly into the white noise of mediocrity, to earn a certificate for knowledge one has never learned. It is, in short, a monument to the death of meaning in a formless world obsessed with form–a kind of post-postmodern schizophrenia where the human and its words are obsolete. 

Maureen N. McLane’s poem “Haptographic Interface” understands, too, that “Today’s retronym is human writer.” “Haptographic Interface” is a digital dirge, a haunted house of syntax where the ghost of Keats bumps spectral elbows with a silicon simulacrum. The poem’s form itself mirrors its subject: a fractured, hyperlinked consciousness. It’s a digital fever dream, a mind-palace of disjointed fragments and recursive loops. McLane’s language is a virus, infecting the reader with a sense of uncanny familiarity. Her lines are like pop-up ads, intrusive and inescapable, demanding our attention even as they repel us.

McLane’s opening line, “I’m a Keats bot / so are you,” immediately forces us to reckon with the merging of the romantic and the digital. McLane confronts us with the unsettling thought that our creative efforts are no longer entirely our own. We’ve become “Keats bots,” mechanically reproducing sentiments that feel organic, but are predetermined by the algorithms shaping our language and thoughts, ultimately mass-produced reproductions.

This feels particularly relevant in a world where essays, even personal statements, follow a predictable pattern: inject a little vulnerability here, sprinkle in some polished adversity there. The emotion is simulated, but the process is so well-honed that it almost doesn’t matter. We become cogs in the same machine—automatons following a script of “authenticity” rather than truly living it. “Our living hands / held toward each other / on the internet” sounds almost tender, but in reality, it’s a hollow gesture. It’s the kind of empty connection we’ve come to expect from online spaces, much like those formulaic essays, all reaching out but never quite touching anything real.

McLane’s line, “Today’s retronym is human writer,” sums it up quite concisely. There was a time when being a writer was inherently human, but now we have to distinguish ourselves from machines. The act of creating something meaningful has become so mechanized that we have to work extra hard to remind ourselves of what it means to be truly human.

I can no longer use the word “tapestry” without feeling like a bot, a half-human writer. In that way artificial intelligence has won. Let’s all hope for a miraculous year.