All The Dealers Are In My Living Room

I’m in the middle of a turf war and it’s happening on my couch.

On my left is my roommate, hunched over his laptop. He’s a DeepSeek loyalist. Swears by it. Says it’s cleaner, the logic purer. “It just gets me, you know?” he mumbled earlier, eyes glazed over, scrolling through pages of generated code. “It doesn’t try to please you, it just… works.” He sounds like he’s describing a vintage turntable, not an algorithm.

On my right is his girlfriend. She’s all in on Claude 3. She uses it for her freelance writing gigs, feeding it half-formed ideas and getting back perfectly structured paragraphs. “It’s about the elegance,” she says, adjusting her glasses. “It feels more… human.” She whispers this, as if we’re discussing a secret lover. She pays the subscription herself. Calls it a business expense.

And then there’s me, the Switzerland of this little conflict, with a tab open to Mistral. I’m supposed to be editing a report, but instead I’m asking it to generate recipes for a single, sad potato. Why? Because I can. Because the dealer is right here in my browser and the first hit is always free. We’re not downloading pirate movie torrents; we’re running three different, high-grade AI models simultaneously in a 40-square-meter apartment. It feels less like a tech-savvy household and more like a high-end shooting gallery.

The air is thick with the low hum of cooling fans and quiet concentration. It’s an intimate, deeply weird scene. We don’t talk to each other; we prompt. Each of us connected to a different digital dealer, all fighting for the same vein in our collective consciousness.

The Product Gets Political

What’s funny is how the product shifts. Yesterday it was poetry about lost socks, today it’s a perfectly plausible-looking news photo of a politician who wasn’t there, or a flood of bot comments on a local planning issue. We’re so focused on the quality of the high—the speed, the coherence—that we barely notice when the stuff gets cut with slopaganda. It’s still a good hit, right? The lines just get a little blurry.

I suppose this is progress. Not three separate conversations, but three parallel streams of silent, text-based communion with a machine. Sometimes I wonder if we’ll ever talk to each other again.

Here’s a little methadone for your habit: next time you have a question, close the laptop lid and force yourself to get up and ask another human being. A colleague, a friend, a stranger. Then, and only then, you can go back to your dealer. You might find some helpful resources for that at the Unplug Collaborative.

I just asked Mistral what it thinks of my roommates’ habits. It told me to foster open communication. Maybe I’ll start with that tomorrow.

Tell me I’m wrong.