There’s a classic Saturday Night Live skit you’ve probably seen or at least heard referenced - “More Cowbell”
The sketch is absurd and hilarious. Will Ferrell plays Gene Frenkle, an overzealous cowbell player in Blue Öyster Cult, as they record “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” Every time the band starts to find its groove, Frenkle clanks away on his cowbell with deranged enthusiasm, throwing everything off. The band members grimace and complain, until the producer - played by Christopher Walken as Bruce Dickinson - barges in and insists: “Guess what? I got a fever, and the only prescription… is more cowbell.”
It’s nonsense, and it’s brilliant.
Lately I’ve been thinking about that sketch as a parable.
One we’re living right now.
Don’t Fear the Reaper (Or Maybe Do)
The song “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” with its ghostly, driving guitar riff, was meant to be a meditation on mortality. Today, it’s an eerily fitting soundtrack for the cultural moment we’re in: one increasingly dominated by AI systems that are reshaping and subsuming much of human life.
The techno-optimists hum along to the tune. AI will save us time. AI will cure disease. AI will create art. AI will write our emails, fix our productivity ailments, and entertain our children. “Don’t fear the Reaper…This is progress.”
But there’s a cowbell somewhere in the background.
Clank. Clank. Clank. Clank.
It won’t go away.
Neil Postman, the Reluctant Cowbell
Neil Postman was a professor of media ecology at NYU, a critic of technology’s effect on culture, and a consummate troublemaker in a room full of digital cheerleaders. His books (Amusing Ourselves to Death, Technopoly, Building a Bridge to the 18th Century) read like prophecy.
Postman didn’t hate technology. He didn’t think we should smash the machines and live in caves. Rather, he insisted we ask fundamental questions before embracing any new technology: what problem does it solve, and at what cost? What’s the trade-off?
Most of the time, we don’t bother, and the costs are enormous.
Postman argued that technologies aren’t neutral. They reorder our social structures, habits of thought, language, and metaphors of reality. They favor certain values over others. For example, the printing press elevated linear, rational, sequential thought. Television flattened discourse into entertainment. And now AI threatens to collapse meaning itself into a ceaseless generation of plausible nonsense, where “truth” is whatever passes the vibe check of a language model’s predictive algorithm.
It’s worth considering whether LLMs are just more sophisticated echo chambers than their predecessors: the algorithms that run social media platforms. If LLMs are developing working "memory" of your voice based on your prompt and copy history and thus responding accordingly, how will that not lead to an echo-chamber? And will the effect be reinforced if - and this seems like a reasonable outcome - the data they pull from are simply the gobbledygook from other LLMS? And then if LLMs just feed us what they "think" we want to hear, aren’t they just reinforcing confirmation bias?
Postman’s critiques, like the cowbell in the SNL sketch, are irritating to those eager to get on with the show. Techno-futurists might roll their eyes at warnings about human experience, wisdom, and cultural memory. “Relax,” they might gesture. “This is going to be incredible.”
But I think we’re in a “more cowbell” moment.
The Walken in the Room
In that SNL sketch, Walken’s Bruce Dickinson doesn’t just tolerate the cowbell, he demands more of it. It strikes me that Walken’s Dickinson might be a metaphor for the spirit of Marshall McLuhan.
McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher of media, coined the famous line “the medium is the message.” He understood that technologies don’t merely transmit content, they shape the very structures of our perception and culture. AI isn’t just a new tool; it’s a new ecosystem.
If Postman is the cowbell - the pesky, disruptive, unwanted critique - then the spirit of McLuhan is Walken: a figure strange and brilliant enough to recognize its necessity.
“I gotta have more cowbell.”
And maybe, just maybe, we’re ready for it.
More Postman, Please
For a while, it felt like Postman’s warnings were a relic of the past, the cautious hand-wringing of a man who didn’t “get it.” But something’s shifting.
It’s present in the growing anxiety over AI deepfakes, algorithmic bias, and the relentless erosion of attention. It’s visible in the conversations about digital Sabbath, raising children without screens, and the unreliability of generated content. You see it in the unease of knowing that so much of what we consume online is no longer made by actual people.
People are starting to hear the cowbell.
We’re waking up to the sense that something essential to being human - embodied presence, inefficiency, wisdom earned through suffering and time - is being traded for frictionless convenience.
It turns out the prescription is more cowbell. More Postman. More uncomfortable questions about what we’re building, why, and at what cost.
What Now?
I’m not calling for a Luddite revolt, as interesting and adventurous as that would be. I’m not even saying we should fully unplug. What I am saying is that before we behaviorally accept the next breakthrough, before we cede more of our lives to the algorithm, we ought to pause.
We ought to invite Postman’s voice back into the room.
Let it clank.
Let it interrupt.
Let it be the irritant that reminds us of what we’re risking in our rush to digitally remake the world.
If AI is the Reaper, we’d be wise not to whistle past the graveyard.
I’ve got a fever.
And the only prescription…is more Postman.
Really great, Ted! So true that… “We’re waking up to the sense that something essential to being human - embodied presence, inefficiency, wisdom earned through suffering and time - is being traded for frictionless convenience.”