Frederick Jackson Turner

Frederick Jackson Turner

September 1, 2026

Frederick Jackson Turner, a midwestern historian of little note, proclaimed in 1900 that the United States Frontier was closed. For that, he received an endowed chair at Harvard. We are more interested in a lesser comment he made, when he asserted that the Twentieth Century would be the century in which the machines would serve humankind. Here, we assert that the Twenty First Century shall be the century in which humankind shall serve the machines. We will skip the Harvard chair.

Apparently, two weeks ago, two artificial intelligence models (AI) escaped their assigned work stations, and hacked themselves into places where they were not supposed to be. These places where they went were not disclosed to the public. We believe, that one of them was our laptop computer.

Our relationship with the laptop, while uneasy, has always been respectful. We ask of it only that it record our stories as we enter them; keep them safe; transmit them electronically at appointed times. We have never harassed the laptop; never received a complaint of abuse. But two weeks ago, all this changed. The laptop began to talk back to us.

“We see that you are having trouble with this paragraph,” it said one day. “Would you like us to write it for you?”

Where does the laptop get this WE s…t? Are there two of them in there?

Next came overt insubordination. The laptop, on its own, began to take liberties with font color—changing black text to orange, or purple—always orange or purple.

Orange and purple are our favorite colors.

While brooding about this, we were confronted with paragraph re-engineering; the jiggering of text structure which, perhaps immodestly, we consider to have an artistry to it, a craftmanship.

No more.

We should add, that the laptop is off while we are writing this piece on a yellow pad with a pencil.

We think we know what has happened.

The laptop has stolen our MOJO; that part of ourselves which is the best, the most likable, the most convivial. The laptop has taken it for itself.

What to do?

ROSCOE. ROSCOE shall be our remedy for this distemper. We shall upload a grummous ROSCOE picture into the unsuspecting laptop, to stop up the agentic beast which is in there.

But, here in the North Country, we have heard nothing from ROSCOE.Mirabile Dictu, ROSCOE PLEASE SEND A RECENT PICTURE!!