In May 2025, The Chicago Sun-Times published a list of recommended summer reads. It was the kind of list newspapers have always published: a curated selection of titles, presented with editorial authority, intended to guide the reader into the warmer months. Two days later, a reader named Rachel King noticed something. Several of the books on the list did not exist. They had been generated by an AI. Neither the writer nor the editor had checked whether the titles were real before pressing publish.
For two full days, nobody noticed. Readers read the list. Booksellers may have searched their catalogues for titles that were never written. Critics may have nodded along. And when the fabrication surfaced, the internet followed its usual choreography: a brief surge of outrage, a round of commentary, and then nothing. No lasting consequence. No structural change. The news cycle moved on. Someone described this as the "who cares" era. I have not been able to think of a better name.
There is a management cliché that goes: if you want to bury a problem, form a committee. The reasoning is that the moment responsibility is distributed, it dilutes. Five capable minds in a room will often produce less than one alone, because the collective energy shifts from solving to conforming. Each member, aware that both credit and blame are shared, gravitates towards the median. The individual who might have taken a risk alone now defers to the group. The bold idea never surfaces, not because nobody had it, but because nobody wanted to be wrong in front of four colleagues.
I have seen this in rooms I have worked in. The decisions that went badly were almost never the ones where someone took a clear, visible position and got it wrong. They were the ones where the group moved forward without anybody pausing to ask whether the direction was right in the first place. Consensus is not agreement. More often than not, it is the absence of objection, which is a very different thing from the presence of conviction.
The Latin word norma means a carpenter's square. A right angle. A tool for checking that what you are building is straight and true. From this root, over centuries, we inherited "normal": a standard, a reference point, a baseline against which everything else is measured.
The trouble is that a carpenter's square is only useful if it is agreed upon. And what counts as straight varies wildly depending on where you are standing.
What you eat for breakfast is normal to you. Cross a border and your normal may repulse someone else entirely. How you greet people, how you dress, how close you stand to a stranger in a queue, whether you remove your shoes indoors, whether you make eye contact, whether you tip, how loudly you speak on public transport. Every culture has constructed its own carpenter's square, and every culture treats its version as though it were universal.
Normal is not a fact. It is a local consensus with a confident name.
I think these threads are connected. A newspaper publishes fabricated content without verifying it. A committee produces less than a single motivated person because no one takes ownership. A concept we treat as objective turns out to be built from arbitrary convention. What links them is not incompetence or bad faith. It is a quiet indifference that has settled into how we process the world. Not malicious. Not deliberate. Something closer to fatigue. There is too much to attend to, and so we attend to almost nothing with the depth required to verify it, question it, or hold it to account.
I notice this in myself. I scroll past headlines I would have stopped at a year ago. I skim articles I once would have read in full. I open tabs I never return to. The information is always there, always abundant, always a single tap away. And because it is always available, it has stopped requiring anything of me. It simply waits, and I simply pass.
The uncomfortable part is that indifference scales. A single person failing to check a fact is a mistake. An entire system of writers, editors, and readers failing to notice fabricated books for forty-eight hours is a culture. And cultures are harder to fix than mistakes, because from the inside they do not feel broken. They feel normal.
Which brings us back to the carpenter's square. The tool that tells you everything is straight, even when the tool itself may be crooked.