the geist of the zeit

Whose Problem Is That?

By in foolosophy, the geist of the zeit No Comments

When the Lady of the House was a teenager in the hinterlands, she and her friend Britney drove to a “nearby” town to see a movie. On the way home, Britney spotted her ex-boyfriend’s truck pulled over by the police. As one does in a small town, she pulled up alongside to see what was happening and everyone chatted amiably.

When the Lady arrived home, her mother greeted her at the door: “So, I heard you talked to the cops!”

Furthermore, the family chiropractor had apparently been at the movie theater and reported that she’d walked right past him without saying hello. All this intelligence had reached headquarters before the Lady had even returned from her outing. The Stasi could have learned a few things from rural prairie life.

The Lady’s mother also used to make something of a sport out of spotting people around town. “I saw you at Costco, but you didn’t wave!” There was a harrowing competitive element to this social vigilance. Failure to reciprocate would get you roasted at best, shunned at worst. I wouldn’t want to live under that sort of surveillance — I don’t even enjoy visiting it — but at a safe distance, I can respect the culture that produced it. In a sparsely populated agricultural region, knowing your neighbors and maintaining good relations with them wasn’t merely a pleasant social custom. When blizzards, farming accidents, and vehicle breakdowns miles from town were among the ordinary hazards of life, your social network was part of your survival equipment. You helped people because someday you might need them to help you. The custom had become a duty, and the duty had become a habit.

She has carried those habits into the digital age. On my birthday, I received her customary text greeting, bearing the signature “(sent with Echo).” At some point in the past, she arranged for her electronic assistant to send me a birthday message at the appropriate time. It doesn’t matter to me whether she made that arrangement the day before or six months ago. She thought of it at some point, decided it was important, and made sure it happened. Given the likelihood of being somewhere out of cellular service on the day itself, she may have been especially prudent. I don’t take it as a sign of inauthenticity that she didn’t hand-craft those characters in a fit of affection mere moments before they appeared on my end.

I mention this because I’ve recently read two essays about the supposed difficulties of maintaining friendships in the technological age. In UnHerd, Matthew Gasda worries that AI assistants will rob friendship of its essential friction. In the Atlantic, Julie Beck confesses to being a chronically bad texter. She describes setting a daily reminder to answer her accumulated messages, which helps, but makes her uneasy about treating her loved ones as though they were a productivity problem rather than a source of joy. I agree with Gasda’s skepticism of Silicon Valley’s perennial promise that removing obstacles to communication will somehow produce better relationships. Short of implanting chips in our brains that allow us to transmit messages as soon as we think of them, I don’t see how communication could possibly become much easier. And yet people still neglect to communicate. Beck’s complaint, by contrast, strikes me as more evidence of the self-absorption that inevitably accompanies the therapeutic concern with personal feelings over obligations to others. I can easily imagine the Lady’s mother listening to this elaborate account of emotional ambivalence with mounting impatience.

“Well, make up your mind! If you can’t remember to send the message on your own, then use the automation! But if you don’t like automating it, remember it yourself! Nobody’s making you use the damn thing!”

“But it makes me feel—”

“Well, whose problem is that?”

Pace Virginia Woolf, on or about 2011, human character changed. The smartphone had arrived, and with it a new incapacity to remember birthdays, answer messages, or arrange meetings. Armed with devices capable of performing nearly every clerical function formerly entrusted to a secretary, we apparently became less able to fulfill our social obligations. According to some demographics, at least. The younger people I know are quick to offer therapeutic explanations. They have ADHD, depression, anxiety, insufficient emotional bandwidth, or some other impediment to remembering that the rest of us exist. I couldn’t help but notice that many of my younger friends, despite living with smartphones grafted onto their palms, forgot to text on my birthday. I can’t help but think that rehearsing a steady narrative about your inability to perform the normal functions of “adulting” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The older generation, to which the Lady’s mother belongs, was taught to regard such difficulties as problems to be managed, not as permissions to disappoint other people. If you couldn’t remember something, you wrote it down. If you weren’t in the mood, you did it anyway. Your feelings didn’t automatically settle the question of what you owed somebody else. One advantage of cultivating discipline is that you don’t have to consult your feelings every time an obligation presents itself. You have already decided what matters and developed habits accordingly. Why should today’s mood automatically overrule yesterday’s considered judgment that a particular relationship is worth preserving?

We increasingly hear complaints about loneliness and the difficulty of maintaining adult friendships. Yet many of the supposedly antiquated conventions of social obligation existed to prevent precisely that difficulty. You acknowledged birthdays, returned invitations, checked on sick friends, and occasionally contacted people for no particular reason. These rituals kept relationships alive during periods when nobody was feeling especially inspired. If the human species were worth a damn, you might think we could use our vaunted powers of reflection and foresight to steer a middle course between the Scylla of stifling village life and the Charybdis of atomized isolation. Perhaps we could voluntarily choose to live up to challenging obligations out of a considered conviction that doing so avoids the worst of each extreme. Obviously this is too idealistic. We prefer to swing like a pendulum from one extreme to the other instead and complain either way.

Imagine a society in which everyone habitually asks, “How will the other person feel if I don’t?” Everyone who has friends will have people looking out for them, just as they look out for others. Now imagine one in which everyone defaults to asking, “How do I feel about doing this?” Everyone enjoys complete freedom to disengage whenever the inclination strikes, while wondering why nobody ever bothers to contact them. It’s almost a reversal of Adam Smith’s famous insight about self-interest. In a functioning marketplace, pursuing our individual interests can produce benefits for others. In this social marketplace, everyone pursuing their own emotional comfort can produce a general shortage of the very consideration everyone wants to receive. An invisible hand that leaves everyone sitting at home waiting for someone else to message.

He Likes Big Books But He’s Forced to Lie

By in books, psychology, the geist of the zeit

Today anyone can write a reasonably good article on anything; but no one wants or is able to sustain the strenuous effort of thinking just one single thought through to its finest conclusions. Instead, what is appreciated today is the writing of trivia, and for anyone to write a large book is to go so far almost as to invite ridicule. Formerly people read large books and if one did read pamphlets or periodicals, one didn’t quite like to admit it. Now everyone feels it their duty to read whatever there is in a periodical or pamphlet, but is ashamed to have read a big book through to the end for fear of being thought narrow-minded.

Another day, another Substack article complaining about smartphones and popular reading habits. It’s amazing how—uhh…oops, I got my notes mixed up. This is actually Kierkegaard in his journal in 1846. Well! Nevertheless, I believe this only reinforces my yada yada yada…

Many antiquarians would sigh and flutter their eyelids if you offered them a chance at time-traveling to the 1800s, especially in Europe, where authors and intellectuals were supposedly king. Then you get there and find this, or someone else complaining about the imbecility of newspaper readers in the same tone we use today to complain about kids and smartphones. Then you say, “Ah, this was always a human psychology thing.” The Golden Age of Serious Reading is like the Garden of Eden: everyone knows we’ve been expelled from it, but no one can agree on when we lived there.

Too Many Prophets, Not Enough Nehemiahs

By in fresh hell, the geist of the zeit

There have been a few briefly-popular 80s/90s bands coming through town recently, playing small clubs. At one point, there were some former 80s main-event wrestlers doing a show at a nearby high school gym. When the spirit is willing and the dignity is weak, why not? Greta seems to be heading into that stage of her career now. Before long, I expect to see the scowling face of the Omnicause on the activist version of OnlyFans, offering to come to your Midwestern town to protest a City Council proposal concerning stormwater drainage and the possibility of relocating the crosswalk on Birch and Main. For a platinum-tier subscription, Banksy might even contribute a stencil to the occasion.

This ridiculous cretin came to fame by refusing to go to school in the name of protesting climate change. Countless adults, evidently enamored of the idea of a children’s crusade and weary of their own responsibilities, decided to genuflect before her as an example of moral clarity (and favorable press coverage). To the best of my knowledge, nothing has been solved to the climate fanatics’ satisfaction, and we’re all going to die from Gaia’s wrath eventually if AI doesn’t get us first, but Greta has shrewdly expanded her professional activist portfolio to stay newsworthy. She spent a while protesting over Gaza, to similarly ineffectual results — as far as I’m aware, there’s still a “genocide” happening there. Undaunted by her complete inability to make any meaningful difference, she’s now getting involved in whatever they’re rioting about in France at the moment. Why does the world’s most famous dropout care about conditions in French high schools? Shouldn’t we all be quitting school and our jobs to heal the Earth before it’s too late? To ask the question is to answer it. Celebrity protesting is a safe career path, concerned above all with extending its own longevity. None of it matters, and none of it is expected to matter. It’s all kayfabe. The senior-citizen wrestlers at the local high school would nod approvingly. Groucho Marx sang in Horse Feathers, “I don’t know what they have to say / It makes no difference anyway / Whatever it is, I’m against it!” Greta could alter that to “Whatever is againstist, I’m for it.” What’s she protesting? Whaddaya got?

Many of you have heard the phrase “too many chiefs, not enough Indians,” and I trust you have already denounced yourselves and reported to the proper authorities for cultural sensitivity re-education. I would like to offer an Old Testament variation: too many prophets, not enough Nehemiahs. In the Book of Nehemiah, Jerusalem’s walls are in ruins, and rather than spending his days denouncing the wickedness of those responsible, Nehemiah organizes the work of rebuilding them. He negotiates for resources, assigns responsibilities, deals with opposition, and supervises the actual construction. According to Nehemiah 6:15, the wall is completed in fifty-two days. His story involves precisely the sort of practical difficulties that disappear when political activity is reduced to denunciation. And denunciation is all that our modern would-be prophets are interested in. Everybody wants to be a prophet, pointing and excoriating, especially when the mortal risk is much reduced from the olden days. We can’t have climate justice without social justice, Thunberg says. Well, that’s awfully convenient. It means you don’t have to juggle priorities or trade-offs. You can protest mass ecocide on Monday, QUILTBAG  oppression on Wednesday, and educational policy on Friday. It’s all connected, after all; nothing is too trivial in the struggle for cosmic justice. And since utopia is the only acceptable solution to any of it, since all problems must be solved all at once for true solidarity, there’s no danger of putting yourselves out of work. The play is always going on, and the play’s the thing.

Among the Offline

By in jests japes jokes jollies, socmed, the geist of the zeit

“Four days among normal people” is an intriguing pilot study, but the sample size is troubling, the methodology appears uncontrolled, and I’m not seeing preregistration. Until the Atlantic publishes “What We Learned When 200 Americans Were Randomly Assigned to Touch Grass,” I think we have to remain cautious. And even then, we’d need replication. Preferably a meta-analysis establishing that people who are not professionally online really do spend less time thinking about AI, fascism, the crisis of democracy, discourse norms, and whatever else Substack is angry about before lunch.

Of course the observation is perfectly true. It’s the tone of rediscovery that gets me — as though ordinary life had become sufficiently exotic that someone has to report back from it. “Most people are living their lives” now arrives as news from abroad. Even funnier, this observation itself is becoming a recurring tradition. The narrow, inbred world of the professionally-online keeps rediscovering the same “hidden” tribe, which vastly outnumbers their own. And because the people making these discoveries tend to read one another, interview one another, cite one another, and move among the same handful of publications, the “world” under discussion can become remarkably small while still being described in universal terms.

We’re probably not far away from: “Among the offline peoples I encountered several remarkable races. The Sciapods possess only one social-media account, which they use chiefly to shade themselves from discourse. The Blemmyae have no profile pictures; their faces appear instead on family Christmas cards. The Panotii possess ears of such prodigious size that they are able to hear opinions without immediately posting their own….” What’s that? Already there? Ah.

“Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. To them, the word ‘content’ is an adjective, not a noun!”

Niemand’s Wager

By in ai, foolosophy, the geist of the zeit

Is AI going to kill us all, or is this all just more political machinations? I’m agnostic and stoic, as usual. As a hardy survivor of Y2K, the 2012 Maya Long Count, and the repeal of net neutrality, I tend to be suspicious of apocalyptic doomsaying, seeing it as a perennial weird fetish hardwired into our retarded species. Granted, I could be wrong this time, but I don’t know enough to have a meaningful opinion, and there’s nothing I can do about it anyway, so if worse comes to worst, I may as well go out with dignity, not soiling my britches and wailing to an uncaring sky. If the catastrophe doesn’t occur, you’ve sacrificed real years to an imaginary future. If it does occur, having spent the preceding years frightened and distracted didn’t improve the outcome. Either way, obsessive rumination has a poor return.

However, there’s another way to look at this. Let’s assume you refuse to be pessimistic. In fact, let’s further assume that you remain excited about AI’s potential and expect it to be integrated into society without catastrophic disruption. If the worst happens, well, you won’t care about being wrong, because you’re dead. But if this all turns out to be a tempestuous teacup, you will get to LYAO at all the hysterical ninnies for the rest of your days. You will get to do the “told you so” dance as often as you could wish. It’s an easy choice when put that way. I think we can call this “Niemand’s Wager.”

Vast Negative Space

By in ai, foolosophy, the geist of the zeit

Thomas Chatterton Williams:

In the past week, consulting virtually any major news source—not to mention social media—has meant confronting the prospect of an AI apocalypse. Using AI has already diminished many people’s capacity to focus, work, and think; worrying about AI is making the problem worse. I’m no exception.

Until recently, I could quiet my fears, if not silence them. Now apocalyptic discourse is almost impossible to ignore. On social media, seemingly the entire literate world is contributing to an unceasing clamor. Respected theorists and experts compete for attention with self-interested oligarchs and accelerationists who want to hasten humanity’s demise. The most dire hypotheticals seem only more plausible every time I’m reminded of how profoundly unprepared our political leadership is. Most distressing of all is the underlying realization that our shared future is being determined largely by a tiny, unconstrained cadre of billionaires who do not fully understand the technologies they’re unloosing. I’m not paralyzed by this; I still wake up, care for my kids, do my work. But I also sense my energy and interest ebbing. The world around me is beginning to look disenchanted.

Ah, the Atlantic, the masthead that launched a thousand SSRI prescriptions, the anti-serenity prayer journal, where we make rumination feel like moral seriousness. If you’re frightened enough, informed enough, anguished enough, then somehow you’re responding appropriately to the gravity of the situation. But the emotion accomplishes nothing. It affects nothing meaningful in the world. It does not prepare you to take meaningful action, even if you had a clue what that might be. Telling yourself that “the entire literate world” is contributing to the clamor is a good example of what Rao was getting at with the “vast negative space.” The entire literate world plainly isn’t doing this. Millions upon millions of literate people spent this week grading papers, fixing transmissions, reading novels, arguing with spouses, taking children to soccer practice, lifting weights, balancing accounts, and wondering what to make for dinner. Williams means something more like, the portion of the information environment to which I am currently exposing myself is saturated with this subject. Yes. That is the problem. You’re just making excuses to contribute your own pointless chatter to the din. You might want to reflect on why being “informed” is not the same thing as “having perspective.”

The Bums Will Always Lose

By in ai, the geist of the zeit

Henry Oliver:

It is an inevitable step to make that knowledge available via an LLM. Yes, usage will be high variance, with some people getting smarter and some going the other way. But usage of current technology including books is already like that! I would not undo the superb work of the online George Eliot archive, or the online version of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, two websites upon which I am quite reliant, along with the online edition of John Stuart Mill, Project Gutenberg, and many others. Asking Claude to review them for me as part of my overall work pattern hardly seems immoral. I have read quite a lot of George Eliot’s papers. Am I morally obliged to re-read them, or to find my notes, every time I have a new stray thought? Do I have to use an index rather than Claude every time? Can I check how viable a line of research might be? Can I use it to test my hypothesis against existing scholarship and pursue those lines of enquiry? Am I only allowed to find new things to read in person in the library? (To be clear, that is what I miss most about the London Library and I expect that sort of activity to go up in value, but still.)

This is the sound of a brave soul on Plato’s Cave Search & Rescue Team trying to convince the shadow-gazers. “Come on, guys. I’ve been outside. There’s useful stuff up there. I brought a rope.”

Meanwhile, the doomsday cultists are warning of an “existential crisis of epic proportions” (as opposed to a run-of-the-mill existential crisis? A tastefully-proportioned existential crisis?)

I’m gonna level with you, folks.

This is an existential crisis of epic proportions.

It’s the game-changer of paradigm shifts.

We need to have a conversation about what a watershed moment of seismic change this is shaping up to be.

It’s the ting-tang-walla-walla-bing-bang of rama-lama-ding-dongs.

And if I’m wrong?

Then my blog isn’t called The Straight Shooter.

Please support my work—by taking out a premium subscription for just $6 per month, or at least for as long as AI lets us all continue to draw breath.

I exaggerate, but not by much.

Oliver discovered that an LLM is fantastic for researching an odd little question like “the prevalence of the phrase ‘self-command’ in eighteenth century moral discourse outside the work of Adam Smith.” This echoed my own experience a year ago. You can always tell the people who refuse to even experiment with an LLM’s capabilities, because they keep parroting clichés about an LLM “doing your thinking for you.” I have never thought so hard for so long as I do now that I have a useful tool at my disposal. Entire vistas have opened up that were never there before. Your Luddite revolution is over, Mr. Gioia. Condolences. The bums lost. My advice is to do what the rest of us did; get an LLM subscription, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Gioia? The bums will always lose!

The Eternal Recarrance

By in books, bring me the head of nicholas carr, the geist of the zeit

Henry Oliver:

And it seems to me that The New Dark Ages is largely written for people who struggle with smartphone addiction and wish to read more. That is the personal story James tells, very convincingly and absorbingly. There is a general tendency to admire the Wendell Berry, Against the Machine, dumb-phone view of life, which is a new pastoral image, a utopia in which the problems of being a human are attached to the idols of progress. If only it were so simple!

The entire review is worth reading because of its thoroughness. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a polite and respectful demolition job. None of the clichés of the decline-of-reading-genre and What It All Means are left standing, and I hope they are never rebuilt. This passage in particular is the goods, as Bertie Wooster would say. It has rung the bell. I examine it narrowly and find no flaws. It makes me smile for two reasons. One, it shows that little has changed since Nicholas Carr was delivering the same jeremiad fifteen years ago, to name just one antecedent, and two, it shows yet again the tendency of public intellectuals to inflate their personal problems into a diagnosis of societal decline. Civilization is collapsing? No, that’s just your self-image. You struggle with smartphone addiction and wish to read more. I’m sure that’s painful, but do be courteous enough to leave me out of your therapy session.

All We Are Is Piss In the Wind

By in ai, education, foolosophy, the geist of the zeit

David Shapiro:

What really needs to happen, and what has happened many times throughout history, is that we need to integrate the new technology into society. Like coal and steel, like electricity and radio, and like the internet before it, AI will have its pros and cons. That’s just a fact of life.

As some like to say in the South, fighting that is like pissing into the wind. I will pick my battles, namely about Post-Labor Economics, but that’s integration work, not unserious “shut it all down or everyone dies” nonsense.

I don’t think of myself as a Stoic, but I recognize that Stoic psychology is awfully useful. I just accept that change is always uncomfortable to those who have stakes in the status quo. How I feel about that is irrelevant, and childishly indulgent if I make it the centerpiece of my reaction. I also don’t need to be a Hayekian to notice that social orders routinely produce outcomes that no one designed. If a tyrant confiscates ten million homes for some vanity project, there is a decision-maker, an intention, a victim class, and an obvious moral question: was this act justified? Anger has a target because agency is concentrated. But if ten million people gradually decide they prefer streaming to DVDs, online shopping to department stores, AI-assisted work to unassisted work, or automated service to paying another human to perform the same task, what exactly is the corresponding moral event? There usually isn’t one. There are ten million little decisions, each of which may be perfectly intelligible from the standpoint of the person making it. The video-store clerk loses his job because nobody in particular decided that video-store clerks ought to suffer. People just stopped renting DVDs.  But ideologues, demagogues, and everyday morons turn “millions of people are voluntarily adopting a technology because they find it useful” into a story about a handful of sinister executives doing this to us. The moral grammar is much more satisfying that way. Someone can be blamed, resisted, or forced to stop.

I am mostly tired of what I think of as “theorizing from 30,000 feet.” The discourse around AI is full of humanities blowhards pontificating about What It All Means, despite the fact that none have them have even tried to use it, or understand how and why others have used it. I see Jonathan Pageau eructating about “shining souls” who want to “foster wisdom and virtue” and “practice truth and love,” in opposition to the tech lords building island fortresses who want to force AI on us, a moral framework better suited to Saturday morning cartoons. “Who does it serve?” he asks ominously, with the flashlight under his chin for spooky effect. Well, as Hayek might interject, it serves countless people in countless different ways, like all complex phenomena, and you would have to demonstrate some attempt at understanding those people’s perspectives if you want to be convincing. “The 1% vs. the 99%” was retarded demagoguery when Occupy Wall Street types said it, and it’s no less so when Christian humanists say it.

Most disappointing to me is the fact that so many of the humanities types, who I would expect to have greater-than-average perspective gleaned from engagement with thousands of years’ worth of culture and literature, are disproportionately among those panicking over their own high-altitude, worst-case theorizing. I don’t expect ideologues, demagogues and everyday morons to be capable of sober reflection. I did expect better from anyone who has actually absorbed thousands of years of literature in which we encounter human beings finding ways to be vain, lazy, brave, stupid, ingenious, loving, self-deceiving and disciplined under an astonishing variety of material conditions. But exposure to history does not automatically produce historical perspective. A person can spend decades reading old texts and still experience the present in a radically presentist way. In fact, expertise can sometimes make that worse. You acquire a vast stock of analogies, concepts and quotations, but those can be used either to relativize the present or to dramatize it. If you use them to enlarge your sense of the range of ordinary human adaptation, AI looks like another extraordinary circumstance imposed upon a very old animal. If you use them chiefly to furnish grand analogies, every new circumstance can become Armageddon.

A Pot of Message

By in foolosophy, music, the geist of the zeit, writing

I’ve never considered what it would look like if someone made a connect-the-dots sociology book, but suddenly I have a clear image of it.

I particularly enjoy the implied metaphysics of “confidence needed for rock.” Apparently rock requires some national reserve of psychic testosterone, and the towers falling depleted it. Green Day, the Strokes, White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, Queens of the Stone Age, Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys, the Killers, My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Mastodon, etc. must have been operating on the strategic confidence reserve.

The fact that the stakes are so low here is what allows you to see how easily confidently-stated bullshit can sound authoritative if you’re primed to take it seriously. You begin with an outcome: rock lost cultural centrality. You select a major historical event: 9/11. You invent a mushy intermediate variable: “confidence.” You attribute the outcome to the event through that variable. Then you narrate the sequence with enough certainty that the story feels like an explanation. Nothing in that procedure actually demonstrates causation, but it has the shape of analysis. That shape is what’s persuasive. A happened. Then B happened. Here is an abstract concept that connects A to B. Therefore I have explained B.

Again, it sounds hilarious when a bloviator on social media is trying to explain such a gaseous topic as “the death of rock.” Hell, any post or article about “the death of X” is like a porch light on a humid summer night: guaranteed to attract a cloud of the dumbest moths pontificating in circles. But move exactly the same method into geopolitics, sociology, macroeconomics, institutional decline, technological change, whatever, and suddenly the subject itself supplies prestige. The nouns get heavier: “legitimacy crisis,” “late-stage institutional decay,” “neoliberal subjectivity,” “civilizational exhaustion,” or “loss of social cohesion.” Now you may not know enough to say, “Wait, that doesn’t line up with what actually happened.” And because the speaker sounds fluent in the domain’s vocabulary, you mistake facility at constructing an explanatory narrative for evidence that the narrative is true. It’s sort of like Gell-Mann amnesia, but in relation to methods of inference. You recognize the bogus reasoning instantly when its inputs are familiar, but fail to recognize the same reasoning when it is dressed in unfamiliar facts and consequential abstractions. So just remember our friend Reuben Rodriguez the next time you see some blowhard posing like Spengler and portentously analyzing the deep structure of history, technology, populism, etc., and say, “Wait; is this another ‘9/11 killed rock music’ moment?”

In addition to warning against the dangers of rhetorical slickness, I want to reiterate what I said recently: this sort of thing is what happens when writers are trained to channel their thoughts away from personal reflection and toward cultural analysis and criticism. Rodriguez might not be embarrassing himself with this pretentious twaddle if only he had the confidence to talk about his own perspective instead. “Rock used to feel dangerous and exciting to me. Now most new rock sounds derivative.” That could lead somewhere interesting. When did it stop working for you? Did the music change, or did you? Does novelty in music depend partly on being seventeen? Does acquiring a huge library of antecedents make genuinely new music harder to hear as new? How much of the pleasure of rock was inseparable from youth, friends, cars, clubs, clothes, sex, rebellion, the whole surrounding context? How much of rock’s essence owes to its roots in baby-boomer hedonism and rebellion, and can it survive being transplanted into less-libertine soil?

The “I” forces you to acknowledge contingency. “I don’t hear much interesting new rock” leaves open the possibility that interesting rock exists somewhere you aren’t listening. Once you remove the I, however, your disappointment acquires the dignity of analysis. I suspect the grand sociological explanation exists precisely to protect the writer from the less-flattering autobiographical one. “The culture changed” feels much better than “I aged out of this.” “The medium became hollow” beats “people stopped reading me.” “The scene lost its vitality” is preferable to “I don’t know where the interesting people went.” “Audiences no longer have the attention span for serious work” sounds nobler than “my work isn’t attracting an audience.” It is a perverse exchange: abandon the one subject on which you possess unique authority in order to make an authoritative pronouncement about the subject on which you possess almost none.

Joseph Epstein once quipped about ideological hacks who have traded their literary birthright for “a pot of message.” The birthright is the one thing the essayist actually owns outright: his experience, his perception, his peculiar angle of vision, the embarrassing detail, the contradiction he can’t quite resolve. Then he gives it away for some portable conclusion about Society, Technology, The Culture, The Death of Rock, The Decline of Blogging. Esau gives up something uniquely his for a bowl of stew; the essayist gives up something uniquely his for a thesis anybody could have written. What a tragedy.

Digging For Gold In My Neighborhood

By in technology, the geist of the zeit, writing

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I’m not naive about why writers write what they write. We do it for the love of the game, certainly, but most of us also need to get paid, whether the essential currency is prestige, attention, career advancement, or … currency. The blogosphere worked as it did, in the ways that I so loved, because it evolved in a way that rewarded writers and aspiring writers for doing that kind of work. When the incentive structure changed, it stopped working.

For the conversation to return, we’ll need a new structure where the right mix of incentives, disincentives, technology, UX decisions, norms, etc. are in place to make it worth our while, as writers, to write to each other in the way bloggers used to write to each other. I don’t expect it to happen, but consider this my plea to the universe (and, what the hell, the Substack Team as well) that it will.

There’s a funny little circularity to a man asking, on Substack, “Can we bring back blogging? I miss it.” Well, you’re not asking this on Blogspot, so I guess the answer is no, at least in the sense you mean it. Which raises the obvious question: why act like a hapless bystander, pleading to an indifferent universe? It looks like you’ve already got danieloppenheimer.blogspot.com set up and ready to go. All you need to do is delete the Notes account, stop relying on Substack recommendations, give up the subscriber count, publish an RSS feed, build a blogroll, and send readers away from your site constantly, accepting that many of them may never come back. Ah…

It’s almost a textbook collective-action problem. Someone wistfully says, “I’d love a decentralized blogosphere.” Then he says, “But I’d rather not give up my 18,000 subscribers.” Then he looks around and asks where the decentralized blogosphere went. All of that illustrates why things are the way they are. The early-oughts blogosphere was something of a gold rush, unsustainable by its nature. The evolving technological development of the time made visible a deposit of talent that the old distribution system had been bad at finding. Under the old arrangement, being an excellent political or cultural essayist wasn’t enough. You also had to get yourself onto the institutional map. That might mean going to the right university, moving toward the Acela corridor, knowing which magazines took pitches, cultivating editors, acquiring credentials, tolerating junior positions, and generally possessing enough career orientation to enter the pipeline. There must always have been people who could write wonderfully but who were badly matched to that process: the insurance adjuster in Nebraska, the teaching professor at a small liberal-arts college in Ohio, the lawyer who had no desire to become a journalist, the housewife with encyclopedic knowledge of some obscure subject, the obsessive amateur reading three books a week. Their talent was economically and culturally stranded.

Then Blogger and Movable Type arrived. And like a gold rush, the first people into the territory could obtain wildly disproportionate returns. If you were unusually good in 2002, there weren’t yet ten million people competing with you for attention. A link from the right person might expose your work to thousands of readers. Those readers might link it again. Within a short period, somebody who had never been through the institutional filtering machinery could acquire a readership, something that previously required an editor to bestow. And a readership was convertible into columns, magazine assignments, book proposals, speaking gigs, and a professional network. Indeed, that’s where most of the talented bloggers ended up. But for every one of them, there are probably a thousand blogs adrift on the Sargasso Sea, abandoned shortly after launch with no signs of struggle.

There’s a sentimental suggestion here that the blogosphere was wonderful because people once possessed better norms of conversation. Well, I was there, and while things were certainly more decentralized, which is generally a good thing, it isn’t hard in retrospect to see how social media was just an intensification of already-existing trends rather than a qualitatively different thing. People linked, posted constantly, picked fights, sought recognition, discovered unknown writers and answered one another partly because there were enormous potential rewards for doing so. The frantic cross-linking Oppenheimer remembers wasn’t merely a lovely communal custom. It was also prospecting behavior. There was gold in them thar hyperlinks. “Can we bring the blogosphere back?” in 2026 sounds slightly like asking “Can we bring back the California Gold Rush?” in 1900. You can move to California and pan for gold. Gold still exists. You may even find some. But you can’t recreate the historical moment when somebody discovered that an enormous previously unknown deposit was sitting there and word had only just begun to spread.

The gold-rush people came to the blogosphere hoping something might happen to them. Blogging was only a means to a professional end. The people still out here twenty years later are the ones who discovered that they rather liked living in an abandoned mining camp after everybody else left. It’s a good life, if you like wide-open spaces, little excitement, and sparse conversation with the cacti, coyotes and tumbleweeds. But if you think a bunch of urban Substackers are going to give up their careers and move back out here, well, I have a deed to a mine I’d like to sell you.

In a World of Machines, What Can I Do But to Serve

By in ai, the geist of the zeit, writing

Way back in the day, my mom had a part-time business typing up term papers and dissertations for university students. Well, I did say “way back in the day.” We’re talking about a time when grad students would come in with handwritten theses and manuscripts. They didn’t have their own typewriters, let alone word processors. And yes, I was alive to witness this. Phones were attached to walls and desks, restaurants had smoking sections, cars had paper maps in the glove box, and everything was sepia-toned.

Point is, I’m considering resurrecting the old family business with a modern twist. In ye olden times, students supplied messy handwritten intellectual labor and paid somebody with technological/clerical expertise to turn it into professional-looking typescript. Today they could supply immaculate machine typescript and pay somebody with humanistic expertise to put the mess back in. (I also bet “humanism” will start to acquire new connotations in the age of AI.)

Why not? We have apparently reached the stage where software companies sell machines that generate prose, other software companies sell machines that detect the generated prose, and still other software companies sell machines that make the generated prose look less generated. At some point the cheapest solution will be to hire a human who grew up in a sepia-toned world.

The Decadence Preservation Society

By in ai, the geist of the zeit, the statusphere

Anastasia Berg and Jon Baskin:

Even more important is to create and protect spaces that allow people to read, write and discuss ideas without the encroachments of AI or any other digital technology.

…In response not only to the evangelists of posthumanism but also to a more pervasive despair about the ability of our words and actions to make things happen, these spaces must double as training grounds for the guardians of human language, thinking and imagination. For the “radical” task before us is not to hope that something resembling our concepts and practices will reemerge in the distant future; it is to do whatever remains in our power to preserve them in the present.

Like most reflections on AI from the writer’s guild, I don’t find this one very thought-provoking. What I end up thinking is that they have identified a real question but chosen the wrong scale for it. AI will force us to decide which activities are valuable only for their results and which derive some of their value from the human performance itself. A concept becoming difficult to apply is not the same thing as a concept becoming unintelligible. AI may make it harder to know whether Fred wrote his paper, whether Susan knows what she’s talking about, or whether some award-winning novel owes half its prose to Claude. That can obviously produce serious problems of verification and attribution. But the very fact that we care about those questions suggests that merit, authenticity and fraud remain perfectly intelligible. Indeed, fraud may become more salient when imitation becomes easier. Counterfeit money doesn’t make the concept of genuine currency unintelligible.

Their line about unassisted work becoming a mere “hobbyist’s predilection,” like using a typewriter, makes the confusion clear. It assumes that people undertake difficult activities primarily because there is no cheaper way of obtaining the output. But as I just said recently, a forklift has not made a 500-pound deadlift unintelligible. It has merely made obvious that moving 500 pounds from A to B and deadlifting 500 pounds are different activities.

But my main impression is that I’m once again a bit surprised at how uniform the reaction to the strange new tool has been among the supposedly-creative: pull up the drawbridge and ready the boiling oil. Where’s the curiosity, the experimentation? How psychologically conservative, even reactionary, of them! The stereotypical artist used to be the person who horrified respectable people by saying, What happens if we use this new thing in a way nobody intended? Photography, collage, tape manipulation, synthesizers, sampling, cut-ups, video, photocopiers, digital editing — the creative temperament was supposed to be promiscuous toward tools. Give the artist a machine and the artist immediately misuses it. Now the machine arrives and a surprising number of literary people become the church ladies: Absolutely not. That infernal contraption will alter the traditional relationship between Man and Paragraph!

In a funny coincidence, Arts & Letters Daily linked to this article, in the achingly-progressive Guardian, on the same day as the one above. The authors argue that contemporary people possess the costumes but not the spiritual substance of fin-de-siècle decadence: the luxury, excess, artifice, bodily display are there, but the authentic ethos has vanished. Which is, amusingly, structurally identical to every conservative lament about lost forms: we have Christmas without Christianity, universities without learning, manners without morality, architecture without craftsmanship. Except here, apparently, we have decadence without decadence. The old decadent said: Bourgeois morality is suffocating; propriety is fraudulent; good taste is merely convention; let us cultivate artifice, perversity, intoxication, useless beauty. The new nostalgic decadent says: Young people are practicing decadence incorrectly! There used to be standards! Aubrey Beardsley has somehow become Norman Rockwell.

I mean, I too think of scrolling, “looksmaxxing,” and self-quantification as dubious pleasures, but it’s simply hilarious how we’ve moved from “Away with Victorian moralism! Follow sensation!” to “No, no; not those sensations!” The interesting question is what an embodied human being can do with the artificial thing. If Wilde had somehow been handed Claude, I doubt his first reaction would have been, “Alas, this device possesses no phenomenological interiority; lock it in the cupboard.” I suspect you’d lose him for three days. That’s the missing decadent response: “What deliciously improper thing can I do with this?”

Instead, at almost precisely the place where their historical decadents would seem to recommend promiscuous experimentation with artifice, the authors become guardians of traditional authenticity. AI artifice is disqualified in advance because it isn’t backed by the correct metaphysics of embodiment. Again, how can you not laugh in delight? The self-appointed heirs of “the first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible” encounter perhaps the most powerful engine of artificiality ever devised and again reply, “No, no, not like that!” They make much of the decadent ideal that pleasure should be useless, an end in itself, opposed to Victorian utility, productivity and profit. Yet by the end they have turned decadence itself into a social-improvement program. They advocate for a “New Decadence” to resist optimization, restore embodied pleasure, revitalize culture and “force fresh blood through today’s complacent, anemic culture.” Poor des Esseintes. Even decadence has KPIs.

Fin-de-siècle fetishism aside, we’ve been living under the Baby Boomer ethos for a half-century now. David Brooks was writing about “bourgeois bohemians” around the turn of the century. That template of rebellious hedonism has long been a stale cliché in itself. But it really begins to feel its age when change arrives from the direction of the future, aided by technological developments that we have long thought of as progressive. If the kids today began to show signs of a return to sobriety, religion, monogamy, and so forth, that could easily be understood as a lamentable return to reaction. You could say, “Ah, the pendulum has swung; the squares are back,” and remain secure in the belief that you still understand the map. But what happens when you become the person saying, “That’s not a real relationship, that’s not authentic intimacy, you’re supposed to want human connection, this technology is degrading something essential”? You may possibly be correct, but you can no longer pretend to be Dionysian.

For people whose cultural identity was formed around novelty, liberation, experimentation, transgression, technological optimism, or being on “the right side of history,” AI can produce an almost metaphysical embarrassment. It threatens to reveal that progress was not a destination at which they arrived. It was a train they happened to ride for a while. And trains keep going.

Why Y?

By in ai, foolosophy, technology, the geist of the zeit

Gregory Conti:

AI means the death of authorship—and of the inspiration that work which you know reflects human achievement, and human competence, provides to all who read it. We will increasingly become mere “prompters,” at best “collaborators” with the machine. As sci-fi as it sounds, we are already well on our way to becoming mere interchangeable vessels for ChatGPT’s accomplishments and insights. The awe that we feel in reflecting on an Einstein or a Dostoevsky, we will feel toward no one again; Claude cannot be someone’s hero. The whole concept of a “life’s work” that belongs to a great progenitor of ideas is under threat; soon we may have less reason to care who “wrote” a paper with an AI’s help or who inaugurated a theory by prompting Claude than we do about who was riding Secretariat when he won his triple crown.

Conti is reflecting on what AI means for human achievement in the big scheme of things. I don’t have strong feelings about the majority of his points, but this one stands out like a sore, dumb thumb to me.

The crucial word is interchangeable. Give the same powerful tool to ten different people and they do not become interchangeable unless the only thing they contribute is pressing Enter. They bring different questions, accumulated knowledge, obsessions, standards of evidence, aesthetic preferences, capacities for judgment, willingness to reject attractive nonsense, and, perhaps most importantly, different ideas of what is worth doing in the first place. AI can supply an enormous amount downstream of those choices without making the choices cease to matter.

In fact, Conti’s own essay inadvertently demonstrates this. Claude apparently got close to an argument he was already developing, and he found that “phenomenally deflating.” But why was that particular argument significant to him? Why had he chosen those primary sources? Why was he interested in the question? Why does he accept some conclusions and reject others? Claude did not spontaneously decide one morning that technological succession was a threat to human flourishing and pitch an essay to Compact. Gregory Conti did. The machine’s competence can potentially alter how much credit he deserves for particular inferential moves, but it doesn’t turn him into a fungible nozzle through which Claude squirts ideas.

The machine, unlike Secretariat, doesn’t want to run anywhere. Secretariat was an organism pursuing the same immediate end as Ron Turcotte: get around the track ahead of the other horses. Claude has no intellectual project corresponding to Conti’s. It doesn’t care whether AI destroys authorship, whether the argument is published, whether it is true, whether it contradicts something it said yesterday, or whether anybody reads it. It can perform cognitive labor inside a project, sometimes astonishing amounts of it, but the project still has to come from somewhere.

“Claude cannot be someone’s hero” is therefore true and almost completely beside the point. Neither can a forklift. Yet the existence of forklifts has not destroyed our ability to admire someone who deadlifts 1,000 pounds. A forklift can make the human achievement look absurd if the only thing that matters is “how many pounds moved vertically?” But that was never what the human achievement meant. We admire a human being’s ability and desire to do it.

Cars didn’t destroy running. Calculators didn’t destroy mathematical virtuosity. Cameras didn’t eliminate painting. Recorded music didn’t make live musicians pointless. Mechanical advantage doesn’t automatically annihilate human accomplishment because human accomplishment has never consisted simply in maximizing output irrespective of the means. By Conti’s logic, chess should have become meaningless sometime around Deep Blue, because there was “one fewer arena in which a person, through their diligence and hard work and intellect, can shine.” Instead, millions of amateurs remain devoted to the game, and Magnus Carlsen remains famous precisely because nobody gives a damn that Stockfish could annihilate him.

A person who spends twenty years reading, thinking, developing peculiar preoccupations, deciding what questions matter, interrogating an AI, recognizing which of its suggestions are fertile, rejecting ninety-nine others, connecting one result to something he read fifteen years ago, and shaping all of that into a coherent body of work isn’t an “interchangeable vessel.” He’s doing something much closer to what authors have always done: imposing the form of one mind upon heterogeneous material. Conti sees a real problem — machine contribution can become large enough that conventional human credit becomes fraudulent — and expresses it as the much grander and far less defensible proposition that machine capability renders human individuality irrelevant. Those aren’t remotely the same claim.

AI attacks the scarcity of competence much more directly than it attacks the scarcity of salience. Producing a competent essay, competent illustration, competent computer program, competent critique — these things may become astonishingly cheap. Deciding that this obscure conjunction is interesting, that that apparently trivial experience deserves attention, that everybody else is asking the wrong question, that a ridiculous analogy is actually illuminating: those are different faculties. Weirdness is one of the sources from which importance originates. Dostoevsky is not Dostoevsky because he was extraordinarily proficient at generating grammatical Russian prose. Plenty of people could do that. What mattered was the fantastically peculiar configuration of obsessions that made The Brothers Karamazov seem necessary to him in the first place.

This is also why the “interchangeable vessels” line strikes me as almost exactly backwards. The more abundant generic intellectual competence becomes, the more valuable non-interchangeability may become. If everybody has access to something capable of producing a polished 2,000-word essay on Augustine, then “can produce polished prose about Augustine” stops distinguishing anyone. What remains distinctive is: Why Augustine? Why this passage? Why connect it to something your warehouse supervisor said yesterday? Why does that remind you of an obscure Tolstoy diary entry? Why do you find the conventional interpretation unsatisfactory? Why make a joke about forklifts halfway through?

There was a smart-ass kid in my Philosophy 101 class who argued that science could answer all philosophical questions better than philosophy could. My professor’s quip was that science couldn’t answer the question “Why?” Decades ago, when LLMs were still science fiction, that fault line was already obvious to anyone who looked. Science, technology, AI may quickly and effectively answer the question “Given X, how do I achieve Y?” They may have less to say in response to “Why Y?”

If I had to speculate on future trends, I’d suggest that we are probably headed toward a world in which competence is cheap and personality is expensive. And, amusingly, that may make the intellectual oddball rather more valuable, not less. The person who can write the 400th respectable essay about “AI and the Future of Humanity” is in trouble. The lunatic who suddenly realizes that prednisone, French symbolist decadence, and the ability to easily put on one’s socks belong in the same sonnet still has a job.

Most of these big-picture overviews of AI deal in ventose generalizations rather than the interesting particulars. This makes the genre frustrating and nearly useless to me. A sentence like Conti’s “we are already well on our way to becoming mere interchangeable vessels for ChatGPT’s accomplishments and insights” is nearly evidence-proof. What observation would establish that people had become “interchangeable vessels”? What observation would disprove it? The phrase creates an atmosphere rather than identifying a mechanism.

And because so much AI criticism operates at that altitude, it has developed a remarkably standardized inventory of anxieties: loss of authorship, loss of authenticity, deskilling, homogenization, dependence, replacement, alienation, loss of meaning, death of creativity. The nouns change places, but you can often predict the next paragraph. There is something genuinely funny about essays warning that AI will produce generic thinking while themselves reproducing a highly recognizable genre template.

The Smallholder Renaissance

By in ai, foolosophy, socmed, the geist of the zeit

We are all at the beginning of a vast migration into endless intellectual hinterlands that we didn’t know existed, at least not in any accessible way, until AI opened them up. And in the process, we are becoming not merely intellectual homesteaders, subsisting in sod houses out on the frontier, but farmsteaders — running complex and expansive intellectual operations with automation. As with the settlement of the American West in the 19th century, the railroads may follow, with more industrialized agriculture in its wake, but for now, we’re in for a period of AI-assisted smallholder intellectual culture.

— Venkatesh Rao

I am not accustomed to finding myself on the technological frontier. Usually, by the time I arrive, the frontier has parking regulations and a Walmart.

I still use bookmarks. I use a browser rather than apps. I read writers who have been dead for a century and maintain a personal website in an age when most people regard owning a website as an eccentricity somewhere between repairing your own shoes and corresponding in Latin. I have never felt any particular obligation to keep up with the future. Most new technologies strike me as ingenious solutions to problems I was content to leave unsolved. And yet I find myself unusually excited by large language models, for many of the same reasons Rao details.

What makes the technology appealing is not that it feels futuristic. It feels like a return (or RETVRN, as the reactionary kids like to say). My schematic history of the internet has three stages. The early web was the classical world. The social-media era was the Dark Ages. The arrival of LLMs marks the beginning of a Renaissance.

The early web was exuberant, decentralized, amateurish, ugly, learned, obsessive, and alive. People built places. They made personal websites devoted to forgotten poets, regional ghost stories, guitar pedals, local architecture, obscure religious sects, or every movie in which a particular character actor had appeared. Pages were linked to other pages because someone had found them interesting, not because a platform had calculated their likelihood of prolonging engagement. You followed paths laid down by individual curiosity.

Most of these places were badly designed. That was part of their charm. Their proprietors painted the walls whatever color they pleased, installed blinking signs, tiled the background with tiny images, and arranged the furniture according to private systems comprehensible only to themselves. Visiting the early web was like wandering through a settlement of owner-built cabins and eccentric little villas. You never knew what might be behind the next door.

The web was not free of stupidity, quarrels, fraud, pornography, vanity, or political mania. The classical world was not free of sewage. But its dominant sensation was expansion. Each link opened onto another little territory. Online life felt larger than ordinary life because people were continually making new rooms in it.

Then came social media, or “socmed,” a nod to Orwell’s “INGSOC.” Facebook promised a global village and delivered a brutalist-style housing project.

Instead of building your own place, you were assigned an apartment inside an enormous standardized block. You could decorate the interior with photographs, slogans, and approved widgets, but the architecture belonged to someone else. The corridors, elevators, sightlines, locks, and exits were controlled by the administration. Your “page” was not a piece of property. It was a unit allotted to you under terms that could change without notice. Even the shift in vocabulary revealed the change. On the old web, you built a site. On social media, you maintained a profile. One was a place you made; the other was a dossier about you.

The metaphor extended beyond surveillance. Life in the socmed block came with thin walls and vigilant neighbors. Every remark could be overheard, screenshotted, reported, stripped of context, and brought before the building committee. The authorities did not need to police every room because the tenants volunteered for auxiliary duty. Everyone became both resident and informant. Snitches were showered with riches rather than laced with stitches. We were herded into a few gigantic courtyards where everyone reacted to the same controversies, learned the same slang, performed the same approved identities, and watched the same handful of people denounce one another. The global village became a company town, then a prison yard.

The early web had encouraged eccentricity because most people were difficult to find. Socmed discouraged it because everyone was permanently exposed to the crowd. An odd private interest had to compete with the urgency of whatever the entire building was shouting about that morning. The socmed era felt paradoxically smaller even as its platforms contained more people, more information, and more activity than the old web ever had. The landscape had been compressed into a feed.

LLMs have given me back the sensation that the internet opens outward. The change is not technical decentralization. My solitary cabin remains connected by a power line to an enormous corporate data center. The frontier depends on centralized utilities, and the owners of those utilities may eventually behave like railroad barons. Rao’s warning is built into his metaphor. The railroads may arrive. The land may be parceled, standardized, consolidated, and planted with whatever crop produces the highest return. But for the moment, the experience is one of private exploration.

Socmed constantly asks: What is everyone talking about? An LLM asks: What are you thinking about? That difference is enormous. Two people can use the same model and travel in opposite directions. One asks it to write marketing copy. Another studies Akkadian verbs. Someone constructs a private concordance of Jules Renard. Someone else spends an afternoon producing heroic art venerating Willis Carrier, then veers into Nietzsche, social conformity, and the spiritual significance of swearing under a barbell.

The shared technology does not require a shared culture. It can support millions of private cultures. The operation does not have to scale. It need not attract subscribers, generate revenue, establish a brand, or enter the common conversation. A line of inquiry may justify itself because it enriches one morning. A discussion may be worth having even if it never becomes content. Under platform logic, private thought is merely unpublished inventory. Under smallholder logic, it is part of maintaining the soil.

The LLM also supplies something the old web could not: responsiveness. The early web contained endless strange settlements, but you still had to find the right one. Somewhere, perhaps, a retired professor had built a page explaining the obscure passage you were trying to understand. Somewhere, a hobbyist had documented the half-remembered event you wanted to investigate. Somewhere, another eccentric had noticed the connection that had just occurred to you. Theoretically, you could find these people. In practice, the friction often killed the inquiry. Now the trail talks back, so to speak.

For a somewhat cerebral and solitary person, this is exhilarating. Ideas can be discussed without worrying about giving offense, monopolizing someone’s time, testing the patience of a friend, or discovering that the other person has no desire to spend forty minutes distinguishing two possible interpretations of a sentence by Wittgenstein. Even the long-suffering Lady of the House has to beg off sometimes: “No thinky stuff tonight, darling; I have a headache!” A human companion may be willing to discuss your obscure fixation once. The interlocutor from nowhere will still be there for the ninth round.

This is what makes the newest technology feel like a Renaissance. It restores older habits under new conditions: private scholarship, amateur investigation, correspondence, commentary, commonplace books, eccentric syntheses, the small republic of letters. It gives the intellectual hermit some of the advantages of the city without requiring him to become an urban intellectual. Or, to put it less grandly, the future finally arrived in a form attractive to a conservative temperament. I had expected the future to appear as one more demand that I keep up. Instead, it appeared as permission to wander off.

Rao’s agricultural metaphor is especially apt because LLMs do not merely open new territory. They increase the amount of territory one person can cultivate. A notebook preserves a thought. A search engine locates information. A word processor records finished sentences. A conversational model can help gather, sort, test, connect, preserve, and develop material while it is still fresh.

This makes the LLM something like the Norman Borlaug of the blank page. Its innovations have introduced high-yield varieties of prose, intensive cognitive irrigation, mechanized threshing, and synthetic fertilizer for exhausted intellectual soil. A plot that once supported one stunted observation every six months can now produce three essays, a satire, seventeen aphorisms, and a prolonged inquiry into the timely appearance of seasonal candy.

Uncounted millions have been saved from idea-starvation. Does anyone hail the machine as the savior of the humanities? Naturally not. The literary environmentalists stand at the edge of the bumper crop and complain that the wheat has too many em dashes. They warn of textual monoculture, depleted semantic topsoil, dependence on proprietary seed stock, genetically modified phrases, and the extinction of venerable heirloom sentences cultivated by hand since the eighteenth century. “Yes, humanity has produced more writing than ever,” they concede, “but at what cost?”

These objections are not all foolish. The new abundance includes vast quantities of rubbish. Mechanization can increase the yield of weeds as easily as wheat. The coming railroads may favor industrial plantations over smallholders. A tool that enlarges private intellectual life can also be used to automate spam, propaganda, fraud, and empty production on a scale previously impossible.

For now, though, before the acceptable uses harden and the land is fully surveyed, there is room to build strange little operations. One can cultivate a few acres of private intellectual ground without submitting a business plan. One can follow an obscure thought until it disappears over the horizon. One can produce something useful without first asking whether the crowd will approve.

The early web gave the solitary mind territory. Social media gave it a crowd. LLMs give it infrastructure. The classical ruins are still there. The housing blocks remain occupied. The railroads are coming. But beyond them, for the moment, the land is open.

If You Strike Reading Down, It Shall Become More Powerful Than You Can Possibly Imagine

By in books, the geist of the zeit

I read Rose Horowitch’s essay in the Atlantic about “the end of reading.” As I’ve said many times, I think the class of people I refer to as the writer’s guild are prone to acting like Chicken Little about this issue, but Horowitch’s essay is fine as far as it goes. She surveys the grim statistics and concludes, rightly in my view, that it is ultimately up to us to choose whether we value reading books as an activity for its own sake. We haven’t been brainwashed by gadgets and evil tech-bros; we’ve done what people have always done — taken the path of least resistance, chosen easy pleasures over demanding ones. In that sense, the diminishment of reading as a leisure activity is a reversion to the mean. There will always be readers, but they may not command such high status as they once did. I can live with that.

But there’s being sanguine, and then there’s being glib. Jonathan Minnema offers a remarkably bad rebuttal to Horowitch. His opening analogy is confused from the start. Barnes & Noble created the Nook, not the Kindle. But more importantly, e-readers never posed the same threat Horowitch is describing. A Nook still asks you to read a book. TikTok does not. The transition from paper to screen changed the container; the transition from books to algorithmic fragments changes the activity itself. Personally, I don’t care for e-books or audiobooks, but they’re infinitely preferable to this garbage.

Then comes the central contradiction:

I actually see it as flourishing.

A few paragraphs later:

As fewer and fewer people read, it will become increasingly important to read.

And later still:

As reading disappears, it will start becoming cool again.

So reading is flourishing, fewer people are reading, and reading is disappearing — but its disappearance will eventually reverse itself because human beings naturally do unpopular things. Does this argument require psilocybin for maximum clarity?

His YouTube audience is the purest possible example of selection bias. A man who runs several book channels reports that the people who deliberately seek out his book channels are interested in books. That is pleasant news for him, but no more representative of the population than a powerlifting gym proving that Americans are becoming physically stronger. He briefly recognizes the problem — “it’s possible I am just insulated” — and then simply decides that he probably is not.

The retro-consumption statistics, even if accurate, do not rescue him. Vinyl can grow for nineteen straight years and remain a niche product. Film cameras, dumbphones, classics clubs, and social-media abstinence can all become fashionable among minorities while the broader culture continues moving in the opposite direction. In fact, that may be the likeliest future: not universal postliteracy, but a barbell distribution in which serious reading becomes a cultivated subculture while the median person reads less and less. His own business may be evidence of precisely that development. When a practice ceases to be ordinary, enthusiasts gather around it more conspicuously.

There is also a faintly comic leap from “young people buy vinyl” to “Gen Z will soon be unable to stop reading Anna Karenina.” The first is a low-cost aesthetic preference. The second requires dozens of hours of sustained concentration. Buying a turntable does not demonstrate that one can read Tolstoy any more than buying a Moleskine demonstrates that one keeps a serious journal. Retro objects often flourish precisely because they can serve as badges without restoring the disciplines and effort once associated with them.

His treatment of literary style is worse. The claim that sentences are shortening “not because our attention spans are dropping, but because writers are getting better” is breathtakingly complacent, reminiscent of Richard Hanania’s infamous claim that he could dash off a superior version of Shakespeare in his spare time if he so desired. Sometimes compression improves prose; sometimes shorter sentences merely reflect diminished tolerance for syntactic complexity. Style cannot be reduced to a speed test.

The “paid by the word” explanation is the familiar half-truth elevated into a theory of literature. Serialization affected pacing and structure, but Dickens did not write elaborate sentences merely to pad an invoice. Nor does it follow that abridgments are “likely better-written stories.” They may be faster, simpler, or better suited to impatient readers, but that is not the same as being better-written. On this principle, a plot synopsis would be the perfected form of every novel.

And the French Revolution paragraph may be the most astonishing:

The French Revolution didn’t begin with people yelling on street corners to join the movement. They didn’t publish articles in the papers.

Pamphlets, newspapers, political clubs, public oratory, and the rapidly expanding print culture were central to the Revolution. He has chosen one of the worst imaginable historical examples for an “invisible” revolution that did not announce itself in print.

Beneath the bluster, he has stumbled onto something true enough: decline can produce countercultures. Reading may become rarer and therefore more self-conscious, attractive, communal, and prestigious among those who retain it. Plausible enough, but it doesn’t refute Horowitch. It describes how a remnant might form under the conditions she describes. A better formulation might be something like: “The decline is real, but decline is not extinction. As serious reading becomes less culturally normal, those who still desire it may gather more deliberately, build stronger institutions, and recover some of the communal energy that mass literacy had allowed us to take for granted.” That would be hopeful without pretending that a BookTube audience, a stack of vinyl records, and a TikTok hashtag have refuted the evidence. Reading is declining, however we choose to respond to that fact.

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