How to reclaim your brain from machines

What Superman villains and John Stuart Mill teach us about thinking independently

As a young teenager in the mid-1990s, I enjoyed the TV show “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.” Watching the title characters report news, solve mysteries and save the world inspired me to start my career working at newspapers.

I even joked about going to a job interview in a white button-up sheer enough to expose a Superman T-shirt underneath.

More seriously, the show impressed upon me the power of words because of two memorable villains.

The first was a newspaper editor who plotted to out-scoop the Daily Planet and drive it out of business. He told an accomplice, “When you control what they read, you control what they think. And when you control what they think, then you can really begin to make it happen.”

The second was a time-traveling villain who ran for president with the help of “the Subliminator.” “With this device, I can implant subliminal messages into the minds of the masses,” he said, “thereby controlling the collective will.”

These episodes were written when fewer than 20% of American homes had modem-equipped computers and only 3% of Americans had browsed the web. Now that almost all of us are connected, these Superman villains remind us that if we want to think for ourselves, we must not let a machine think for us.

On Liberty and Thinking Machines

Long before Superman, John Stuart Mill expressed the same concern about automatic, uncritical, mechanical thinking.

“To conform to custom, merely as custom, does not educate or develop … any of the qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being,” he wrote in “On Liberty.” “If the grounds of an opinion are not conclusive to the person's own reason, his reason cannot be strengthened, but is likely to be weakened by his adopting it.”

Think about that: When you believe something simply because it’s tradition — or you read it online or heard it from a friend — you weaken your thinking power, one of the defining traits that makes you human.

Writing in an England recently transformed by the Industrial Revolution, Mill used a mechanical metaphor: “Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers said, by machinery—by automatons in human form.”

He goes on to say that it would be a shame to choose those machines over humans — or to outsource our thinking to them. Doing so would limit human potential rather than unlock it.

“Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it,” Mill wrote, “but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides.”

This word of warning from Mill — and from 1990s Superman villains — reminds us of the danger of letting machines replace our thinking, whether that machine is tradition, a newspaper or a subliminal message device.

Fortunately, these warnings also point toward a few practical ways we can reclaim our thinking from machines.

Don’t let a machine control what you read

The rival editor in “Lois & Clark” knew that reading sways our thoughts. Therefore, one way to strengthen your independent thinking is to not let machines control what you read.

You can start by rejecting or deleting tracking cookies, those bits of code that almost every website wants to install. This limits how much sites can tempt you with customized distractions.

Next, read news curated by humans, for humans. Get your news directly from a news source — like the homepage of local and national news organizations — rather than from social media.

Another powerful tool is the good, old-fashioned printed word. Spend time each day reading wisdom literature ― scripture, philosophy, or classic works that have stood the test of time. Pick up a real newspaper. Find a novel recommended by a friend or a librarian rather than an algorithm. (My recommendation: “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro.)

By spending more time with carefully curated human wisdom rather than algorithm-made engagement bait, you can reduce machines’ influence on what ideas meet your mind.

Don’t let a machine control what you write

When Lois Lane found herself repeating the slogan, “John Doe is a darn nice guy,” she asserted that she didn’t believe it. “He put it in my head just like everybody else's head,” she said. “The difference is, I know who he is and what he's capable of.”

Likewise, the second way to make our thoughts more independent is to not let a machine control what we say — or, more crucially, what we write.

I understand why any college student would be tempted to use ChatGPT to write an essay. One student quoted in New York Magazine last year justified using AI to write by comparing it to a contractor using power tools to build a house. “At the end of the day, the house won’t be there without you.”

This misses a crucial point, though: A contractor with power tools knows how to build a house. A professor doesn’t assign an essay because the world needs essays, but because the world needs essayists — people who can think and express themselves. To think independently, we must practice writing independently.

Don’t let a machine replace people in your life

Last, we can keep ourselves independent from machines by making sure machines do not replace people in our lives.

So much of technology is built just for that. Today, we can get our groceries without ever seeing another human being. AI chatbots have promised to be therapists, friends and even romantic partners. Unlike humans, technology doesn’t require nurturing a relationship, it won’t argue with our politics, and it doesn’t waste our time telling us about its day.

But Mill urged us to remember the unique role that people, imperfect as we are, play in each other’s lives. As I mentioned earlier, he argued that even if technology can create anything that humans could create, “it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women who at present … are but starved specimens of what nature can and will produce.”

In other words, just because your uncle disagrees with your politics, your neighbor sometimes plays music too loud, your roommate snores, and your professor’s humor is a bit too much like your dad’s, you still need these people and others. We are social creatures. Thinking together allows us to challenge our own thoughts, learn from other people’s perspectives, and think more critically. All these people can help you to grow, and you can help them as well.

In fact, decades of “Bowling Alone” have shown us that our politics become more extreme and our mental health becomes less resilient when we isolate ourselves. Computers are doing more thinking for us. We need each other to think for ourselves again.

Conclusion

A few years ago I decided I was spending too much time on social media and it was affecting my thought process and my mood too much. I remembered those Superman villains and realized what I should have learned from them about the power of words, ideas and technology.

Since then, I’ve tried the ideas I’ve outlined in this article to reclaim my brain from the machine. By reading more independently and intentionally, writing more, and connecting with other people, I think I’ve loosened technology’s hold on my thinking.

Although I know I’m not immune and I still find myself using social media more than I’d like, I’ve learned to think more critically about my technology use and adjust my habits when I need to. I’ve found that reclaiming our thinking won’t happen automatically. It requires intention, effort, and relationships with other people. But it’s both possible and worthwhile.

Bryan Gentry is a communications director at the University of South Carolina and a 2025-2026 fellow of the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement.