the statusphere

The Race Is Not to the Swift, Nor the Battle to the Strong

By in ai, battling personal entropy, the statusphere, writing 2 Comments

The Prix Pascal de Littérature is a genuine new French literary competition, accepting fiction produced with AI assistance. Entrants must disclose their methods, models, and prompts. The submission form requires entrants to certify that they haven’t manually inserted preexisting human-written text, apart from the initial creative seed. That suggests something closer to a competition in directing AI-generated fiction than ordinary co-writing. Entries are supposed to be between ten to fifty thousand words, and “submitted texts should help solve an ethical, social or ecological problem threatening humanity.” That last bit already makes this uninteresting to me, but in principle, similar future competitions might be more creative. In any event, it sounds as if the “author” might be more akin to a jockey or a race car driver. It would be weirdly stupid to insist that a Formula One driver is a “lazy idiot” for not being a sprinter, because while both competitions are “races,” they use different equipment and different skills. Likewise, you would think that an active intelligence would include being able to distinguish different types of writing using different skills toward different ends, but there is no shortage of lazy, reflexive thinking among the Substack literati.

There is a recurring humorous trope among people who post publicly about lifting weights, especially on garbage sites like Twitter. If you post a picture of a heavy lift, or even a bodybuilding pose, you can count on some BJJ/MMA type showing up in the comments to inform you that all those muscles wouldn’t save you from tapping out to a rear-naked choke. It would be easy to brush this strange behavior off as the predictable result of men getting punched and kicked in the head for fun — people with violent hobbies tend to exhibit high levels of aggression in general? What a surprise! But I think we can afford to be more charitable. Rightly or wrongly, large muscles are popularly associated with strength, manliness, and even toughness. And yet it is true that many lethal fighters are not large or even overly muscular, while strength alone says little about fighting ability or even aggression. The boxer or martial artist possesses a skill that may be more useful in a physical confrontation, but it isn’t necessarily advertised by his appearance. Meanwhile, the bodybuilder receives the admiring glances. It’s practically stolen valor! Hence the chip on the shoulder.

Status is a resource subject to scarcity like any other. Even within the lifting world, the distinction between “natty” and “enhanced” is enough to make enemies. We may have the same physiques, but mine came from hard work and disciplined diet, while yours came from a syringe (and hard work and diet, but still). When it comes to writing, a polished essay or novel has traditionally served as evidence of certain abilities: verbal fluency, imagination, narrative construction, stylistic control, and the patience required to put thousands of sentences together. A reader could reasonably infer that the author possessed those abilities because, until recently, there wasn’t much alternative. Now, the natty-versus-enhanced distinction has arrived among people who have never lifted anything heavier than a textbook. Someone who has spent decades cultivating a difficult skill may understandably resent seeing its characteristic products generated by people who haven’t undertaken that apprenticeship. The traditional writer is not merely defending his craft but defending the cultural assumption that a certain kind of finished product should confer a certain kind of status upon its creator.

The traditional writer may reasonably say, “You haven’t demonstrated that you can do what I do.” The AI-assisted writer may reasonably answer, “I never said I could.” And perhaps the exchange ought to end there. But it won’t. Even within lifting, there are competitions that make being drug-free the defining condition, and competitions that are open, and therefore assumed to be full of steroid users. It seems intuitive that AI writing could become like the “enhanced” competition. If people want to look down on it for not being natty, they certainly can, but seeing it as a different competition altogether should, in theory, allow everyone to be happy. In practice, though, separate categories can settle disputes over rules and fairness, but they can’t settle disputes over prestige. AI-assisted authors and traditional authors may compete for the same readers, publishers, prizes, and cultural prestige. An author might happily concede that an AI-generated novel belongs in a different category while resenting the possibility that readers won’t care about the distinction. And if the real grievance is that somebody might receive admiration without suffering through the same apprenticeship you did, there may be no set of rules capable of satisfying you.

The Bores of Perception

By in literature as moral fiber supplement, the statusphere

Yeah, that was Don Quixote’s problem. He “perceived” quite a lot of extra reality thanks to his reading. Whether that was a good thing or not was, and remains, a different question. “Broadens consciousness/awareness” is not necessarily the same as “improves the person.” Isn’t it ironic, dontcha think, that the first example of the modern novel was warning readers about the danger of taking literature too seriously?

You could replace “literature” with psychedelic drugs and have the statement remain true. Religious ecstasy, falling in love, trauma, or joining a cult could also have that effect. Some might disclose things you had previously missed, others might manufacture things that aren’t there. This is the kind of deepity that only sounds profound to lit-rah-chur readers who are already predisposed to think highly of themselves, which is to say, pretty much all of them.

It Seems Strange How We Used to Wait For Letters to Arrive

By in ai, the statusphere, writing

Giles Crouch:

When a human has written something, as I am writing this now, there is a cost (I’ve got a ton of other things on my to-do list), and we inherently know this cost. Just as we are, when reading something, paying a cost with our attention. We like good writers, something I am striving for, because they have thought something through, done the research, crafted and organized the story. If they are good at it, we like that. It’s why we have the Pulitzer Prize or in Canada, the Giller Prize. Most nations have them, or a lucky writer becomes a best-selling author. We are rewarding the cost of their attention to the writing because we are happy to pay the cost of reading their works. Part of Mauss’ gift economy idea.

The labor theory of value was dubious enough when economists used it. I see no reason to resurrect it as a theory of writing.

Years ago, the Lady of the House and I did some freelance corporate copywriting. This was the golden age of SEO, when every business needed a steady supply of “fresh content.” The work was excruciating for me because there was absolutely nothing that needed to be said. It was the ne plus ultra of bullshitting. Good spelling and grammar were important, but every other rule of writing as I understood it was irrelevant. I was simply required to manufacture several hundred new words about an old subject. There was no fact-checking. Hell, there was no audience but Google itself. We were basically just offering generic words up in mass sacrifice to the inscrutable algorithm so that anyone Googling “how do u use dental floss” would find a post for Dr. Yankem’s dentistry services somewhere in the first few results. I labored mightily, but the resulting prose did not thereby become meaningful.

Crouch’s argument about AI writing rests heavily on this connection between effort and value. Good writing costs the writer attention; the reader reciprocates by spending attention on it. AI supposedly disrupts this “gift economy,” a concept he borrows from anthropology, because the machine allows the writer to avoid paying his share. But effort is a fact about production, not a measure of value. We don’t know how many hours a Pulitzer winner spent on a particular chapter. We don’t reduce our estimate of a novelist after learning that he writes quickly; we might even see him as a natural genius. Conversely, my old SEO copy could absorb hours of my attention without becoming worth anyone’s time.

Crouch also describes an “uncanny cognitive valley”: AI prose feels almost human but somehow off, and once readers recognize its tells they resent the writer for not offering them genuine attention. I have heard this complaint before. Writers used to complain about email, text messages, and social media in the same way. In 2010 I wrote about people who called online communication cold and impersonal. My explanation was less exotic: most people are simply unskilled writers. Plenty of intelligent, interesting people are poor at turning their thoughts into nuanced sentences that capture the flavor of their personalities. Their emails were brief, awkward, misspelled, utilitarian. The problem wasn’t email; they just weren’t good at prose.

Sixteen years later, the same people have better equipment. An LLM can remove misspellings, fix grammar, supply transitions and produce sophisticated-looking sentences. What it cannot automatically supply is judgment. A weak writer may not recognize that a metaphor is awkward, a paragraph redundant, an argument too neat, a phrase unlike anything he would actually say. He now produces something different from the clumsy email of 2010: polished generic prose. The underlying problem is the same. What Crouch identifies as machine uncanniness may only be fluency without discrimination. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, the animated tool has gotten out of the pedestrian writer’s control. He isn’t skilled enough to shape and direct the output, and the reader can tell: “This doesn’t sound like him.” People who aren’t good at shaping their own thoughts are also not good at shaping prompted thoughts. It’s not because an LLM inherently makes it impossible to produce good prose, it’s that most people aren’t good at it even if an LLM gives them a leg up.

So, if we don’t need elaborate theories from anthropology to explain the extraordinary agitation about AI writing, what would suffice? A cold look at basic human psychology seems good enough to me.

People are conservative in the elementary psychological sense: radical novelty makes us uneasy. Most of us also lack the time or inclination to investigate complicated new subjects deeply, so we glean a basic sense of what our peer groups think and conform to that. Add a nonstop barrage of posts and articles telling us that AI will steal our jobs, drink all our water, eat all our books and perhaps terminate civilization, and a certain amount of reflexive hostility is unsurprising.

But writers, academics, journalists, editors, and other people whose self-conception is bound up with verbal facility have an additional problem. Fluent prose has long functioned as a status signal. It suggested education, wide reading, practice, professional competence, cultivation. You could often locate somebody roughly within a cultural hierarchy after reading a page of his writing.

AI has has abruptly cheapened a form of cultural capital, and the people who accumulated that capital are understandably unhappy. Someone who once advertised his limitations through awkward sentences can now produce something resembling educated professional prose in seconds. The old distinction has become harder to see at a glance. Hence the sudden emotionally-charged obsession with restoring provenance: AI detectors, mandatory disclosures, watermarks, “human-written” certifications, threats to stop reading anyone caught using the machinery. If the clothes no longer reliably identify rank, somebody has to start checking invitations at the door. It’s a linguistic version of sumptuary-law anxiety: “Wait, how am I supposed to know who is entitled to wear the velvet now?”

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.

Longing For the Past, But Dreading the Future

By in battling personal entropy, books, the geist of the zeit, the statusphere, waiting for the barbarians

Joel Miller:

This sort of skewed picture of the past skews Horowitch’s understanding of the present, as well as her fears for the future. She credits print culture with its highest achievements (Boris Pasternak and James Baldwin, analytical thought and political deliberation) and then charges digital culture with its worst (TikTok slop, conspiracy memes, AI deskilling, and Donald Trump’s social-media posts). That’s a fake contest.

Yes, print produced everything from the Federalist Papers to the Pentagon Papers; it also produced yellow journalism, eugenics and race science, libel, red scares, and oceans of formula fiction arguably worse than the dregs of a discount streaming service. Digital media produce brain rot; they also distribute serious newsletters (hello, Substack!), digitized archives, research papers, online courses and how-tos, public-domain libraries, and more—including the very long article in which Horowitch announces the end of serious reading.

The decline of reading is real enough to lament. What interests me is the theatrical pitch of the lament: The End of Reading. The Postliterate Age. The book is not merely losing market share or cultural prestige. It is dying, chewing the scenery like mad, and perhaps taking thought, democracy, and civilization into the grave with it.

We speak differently about exercise. A large majority of Americans are overweight, sedentary, or both. Many rarely perform deliberate physical exercise. Few develop substantial strength, endurance, mobility, or technical skill. Yet no one surveys this population and announces a new portentous essay about The Death of the Gym. No one mistakes the neglect of exercise by the majority for the extinction of exercise itself. We understand that a dedicated minority will continue lifting, running, swimming, cycling, and otherwise tormenting itself voluntarily while everyone else drives around the parking lot looking for the closest space.

The minority may even flourish amid the general decline. Gyms multiply, training methods improve, small communities form around obscure sports. A sixty-year-old amateur with an office job may know more about programming, recovery, and biomechanics than many professional athletes knew a century ago. None of this disproves the obesity crisis. It merely shows that mass deterioration and minority excellence can coexist. Why is it so difficult to imagine the same future for reading?

A large part of the answer may be status. Serious readers have long regarded their discipline not merely as one worthwhile practice among others, but as the official measure of cultivation. The reader was not simply a hobbyist. He was the advanced form of the citizen. His interests were identified with reason, civilization, moral seriousness, and the life of the mind. Physical culture enjoyed no comparable presumption. The old Egghead/Meathead divide assigned the latter a lower place from the start.

Reverse the joke and the hierarchy becomes clearer. Each language learned represents a deadlift never pulled, a load never carried, a bodily capacity allowed to decay. That sounds philistine. Guppy’s version sounds witty because everyone already knows which achievement counts.

Eggheads therefore had little reason to write elegies for the decline of exercise. The gym was for sweaty, grunting illiterates anyway. The collapse of physical culture did not threaten the egghead’s rank. It may even have improved it by making the body seem still more vulgar and the sedentary intellect more refined.

The reaction resembles the response of many white-collar professionals to automation. When machines eliminated factory jobs, the ruling vocabulary was efficiency, innovation, and creative destruction. Displaced workers were told to retrain, relocate, and accept that no occupation possessed a divine right to continue existing. Once software began approaching journalism, law, illustration, programming, academia, and literature, work was suddenly rediscovered as a sacred source of identity, dignity, community, craft, and human meaning. All of that was true. It had also been true of the machinist.

The reading panic may indicate a similar injurious insult. It is one thing to discover that fewer people read difficult books. It is another to discover that reading difficult books no longer confers automatic authority — that the serious reader has become one enthusiast among many, like the powerlifter, birder, chess player, or amateur astronomer. A discipline once imagined as the center of respectable culture is becoming a subculture. Books may become less normal. Serious readers may become fewer and more deliberate. They may have to build small institutions, seek one another out, and practice their discipline while being seen as weirdos and eccentrics by the culture at large.

The meatheads have managed under those conditions for decades. Perhaps readers can — gasp! — learn something from these human oxen: show up, do the work, preserve the form, and stop mistaking majority approval for proof of life. The squat rack has endured decades without an Atlantic cover story announcing its civilizational indispensability. The bookshelf may have to learn the same humility.

Surely Thou Also Art One of Them; For Thy Speech Bewrayeth Thee

By in ai, extraordinary popular delusions, the statusphere, writing

In Kipling’s Jungle Book, the Bandar-log have a slogan: “We are great. We are free. We are wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We all say so, and so it must be true.” I would just like to remind you again: 99.9% of the people who repeat some form of this claim — “the most credible AI analytics provider” — have no idea how to evaluate it. They are just making soothing noises in lieu of sucking on a pacifier. They do not know the training corpus, evaluation design, decision thresholds, base rates, sampling problem, distinction between false positives and false negatives, or what “AI-assisted” actually means in practice. Sure, they could possibly look all that up if they so desired, but they’re happy to take it on faith. They are the Bandar-log: “We all say so, and so it must be true.”

Pangram’s importance to most people is that it scratches a psychological itch. (The fact that it flatters the self-importance of Smugstack writers is just a nice bonus.) It allows us to rest assured that “slop” has been unerringly identified and contained by heroic experts. In reality, the object being detected is shapeshifting, while the surrounding human environment is changing with it. Like generals fighting the last war, people continue to fulminate against em dashes and “not X, but Y” sentence structure even as model makers incorporate critical feedback into new updated versions, phasing out the old tells, while users learn to roughen their output and human writers absorb the same rhythms by exposure. The signal weakens from every direction.

A person who spends eight hours a day reading LinkedIn posts or corporate memos written or polished by AI will begin to hear those cadences as normal professional prose. He may reproduce them without ever opening an LLM. The detector then flags the human imitation of the machine imitation of the human. At that point, what exactly has been detected?

A detector may identify a statistical resemblance to model output, but resemblance is not authorship. Once a style enters the environment, it is available to everyone. No software can look at a symmetrical paragraph and determine whether it came from a model, a human prompting a model, a human editing a model, a human imitating model prose, or a human whose style merely happens to resemble the prevailing machine-assisted norm. The anxious want style to function like fingerprints. It will behave more like an accent, and accents can be learned or altered.

“We are changed by what we change.” We train the machine on our prose; the machine regularizes it and returns it to us; we absorb the regularized version and begin writing back in its image. The exchange is recursive. After enough cycles, “AI style” will no longer name a distinct alien manner. It will name one of the ordinary dialects of contemporary writing, however déclassé. The better AI succeeds in altering the linguistic environment, the less stable the category “AI-generated prose” becomes. The control group is learning from the experiment.

The Suicide of the Author

By in ai, aphorisms, books, the statusphere, writing

The writer’s duty, his proper function, is to fade out of the picture, to obliterate himself, his face, his personal concerns, his love affairs. About many authors of the greatest works we know absolutely nothing. Shakespeare never existed and I am sorry that a name has been appended to his plays. The Book of Job is by nobody. Nothing does more to falsify the profoundest, most fruitful ideas that we can form regarding human creativity than to let our appreciation of a great work’s intrinsic value be cluttered up with facts regarding a man’s social status, dealings with women, and the rest of it. What makes a work is not the man who signs it. What makes a work has no name.

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

For decades, literary academics announced the Death of the Author with the excitement of men setting fire to a Guy Fawkes effigy. The Author was a bourgeois fiction. Intention was a superstition. The text was a tissue of quotations, language speaking through a temporary human host. The sovereign creator had been exposed, dethroned, abolished.

Needless to say, everyone put his own name on the article.

The author’s death was one of those revolutions that improved the revolutionary’s professional standing without disturbing his material arrangements. Names remained on books. Royalties continued to arrive. Careers still depended upon attribution. Footnotes carefully distinguished one dead author from another. A scholar could spend twenty pages explaining that originality was an illusion and become furious if another scholar borrowed a paragraph.

Nothing had happened except that a class of ambitious people had acquired a dramatic vocabulary for describing ordinary literary facts. Writers are influenced by other writers. Language precedes us. A work may exceed the conscious intentions of the person who made it. Readers discover meanings the writer did not foresee. None of this required the symbolic murder of anyone. But “the author is not always the final authority on his work” lacks the thrilling aroma of cordite. The Author had to die.

Valéry’s thought experiment is more serious because it asks something of the writer. It diminishes the author not only in theory but in vanity. It asks him to surrender the warm pleasures of personality, fame, gossip, worship, and identification. It denies him the consoling thought that the work is valuable because it expresses the fascinating fact of himself. The academic death of the author surrendered none of this. It killed authorial authority while preserving authorial prestige. The writer could no longer govern the meaning of his text, but he remained perfectly entitled to govern its byline, payment, ownership, and place in the hierarchy.

Then artificial intelligence arrived and committed the vulgar error of taking the rhetoric seriously. AI threatens authorship from the opposite direction. Valéry dissolves the author upward, into the impersonal mystery of creation. AI dissolves him downward, into a process of prompting, generation, selection, editing, imitation, probability, and machinery. One says the maker of the work should not be contained by a name. The other produces works for which no single name gives an adequate account of the making.

Between them stands the literary theorist, suddenly clutching his byline. This is the ordinary pattern of academic revolution. The language is insurrectionary; the conduct is clerical. Foundations are demolished in prose and relied upon in practice. Categories are denounced as artificial until one of them protects a salary, a reputation, or a claim of ownership. The thinker positions himself at the thrilling edge of dissolution while remaining careful not to dissolve anything he needs. Who let these sans-culottes into the palace, for God’s sake?!

Valéry asks the author to efface himself. Barthes permits the critic to efface the author. The first requires humility and discipline. The second creates a job opening. And now AI has produced an amusing panic. The academics had imagined themselves playing with dynamite, only to discover that they had been holding painted wooden sticks. The author wrote his suicide note, arranged the lighting, invited the critics, and collapsed beautifully across the chaise longue. Everyone applauded. Then artificial intelligence walked into the room and took the note literally.

Aesthetic Prion Disease

By in ai, technology, the statusphere, writing

Sam Kriss:

I’ve had enough. Which is why, from here on out, if I see you passing off an AI output as your own work, I am going to kill you. I will find out where you live and bash your head in with a crowbar, until the brains you decided not to use are dripping down the walls. This is not a literary device. This is not a comic bit. This is a highly credible real-world threat to do physical harm, punishable in America under 18 USC § 875(c) and in the UK under section 16 of the Offences Against the Person Act.

Kriss goes on to argue that beauty and insight have already been lost to the machines. If you attempt to write in that mode now, you are trespassing on their territory. What remains inviolably human is not judgment, taste, memory, craft, or responsibility, but degradation: real writers are “sexual perverts,” “bitter and frustrated little gremlins,” “rapidly obsolescing apes” driven by “dumb lust and jealousy.” The machine may have won beauty; we retain “death threats, racist tirades, and pornographic fantasies.” Well. With friends of the human spirit like this, the robots can afford to take the afternoon off.

This is Romanticism minus the aspiration. The old Romantic complaint was that Enlightenment reason had made the world too neat, too dry, too mechanical. Man had to be rescued through passion, imagination, nature, sublimity, eroticism, madness, rebellion. Fittingly for an age of undead IP franchises, Kriss offers the rebooted and degraded version: if machines can imitate poignancy and insight, then the human writer must prove himself through spite, obscenity, and menace.

The other thread in the essay is less Romantic than professional: the guild-reflex. Kriss is a man with postgraduate training in Critical Theory, a long record of publication, and a livelihood bound up with being recognized as a writer (at least until his wealthy parents die and leave him their “massive house“). Now automation has wandered onto his turf. His fury is territorial. This is the prose equivalent of lifting one’s leg.

It’s true that much AI writing is bad in precisely the way he says it is bad: maudlin, frictionless, padded, eager to please, always reaching for poignancy without earning it. But much human writing has always been bad in the same way. The machine did not invent false profundity, stale metaphor, obscure nonsense, or the thrill people get from mistaking vagueness for depth. Hegel, Heidegger and Zizek did not need ChatGPT. Generations of poets, mystics, academics, commencement speakers, essayists, and newsletter moralists have managed to produce deepities under their own power.

What AI changes is not the existence of bad writing, but access to its surface competence. A person without the usual training, leisure, inborn talent, or literary inheritance can now ask for help organizing an argument, finding a phrase, testing a paragraph, or sanding down a clumsy sentence. If you need that sort of help, the implication runs, perhaps you were never meant to be here. Go back to assembling widgets, sweeping floors, driving Uber, or whatever else the uninitiated do with their days. The title of Writer is not yours to share.

Like it or not, AI is now another active agent in the literary ecology. It is not some alien corruption descending on an otherwise pure republic of letters. It is another producer of verbal atmosphere, though an unusually powerful one because it can generate enormous quantities of plausible prose on demand. The important point is that it imitates the existing discourse, then feeds its own imitation back into the discourse, where humans imitate the imitation, which machines then ingest again. Aesthetic prion disease, basically.

And the funny part is that human beings have always been machine-like in groups. Give any scene enough time and its members converge on the same rhythm, vocabulary, in-jokes, pieties, insults, and other verbal mating calls. Most “original voices” are partly just talented instances of a local dialect. AI makes this more obvious, and maybe more depressing, because it shows how much of our supposedly personal expression was already patterned.

People talk as if AI prose will simply flatten everything forever, but annoyance is one of the great engines of aesthetic change. The more dominant the median machine cadence becomes, the more valuable it becomes to sound unlike it. Some people will overcorrect into conspicuous difficulty: God help us if more people try to write Finnegans Wake. More jagged syntax, more private references, more deliberate ugliness, more broken forms, more “you can’t autocomplete this, you bastard.” That may produce some interesting work but will certainly produce a lot of unreadable peacocking.

Evolution proceeds. A new predator appears; the prey get faster, spikier, more camouflaged, or better at tasting like poison. The bot-species enters the ecosystem, and writers who care about style develop new defenses. Some responses will be hysterical. Some will be snobbish. Some will be productive. The worst writers will imitate the machine. The vainest writers will perform anti-machine authenticity. The better ones will absorb the lesson and keep moving.

Ad Hoc, Ad Lib, Ad Nauseum

By in extraordinary popular delusions, media/propaganda, the statusphere

“What do you think of Niebuhr’s theology, of the new president of Vassar, of the future of air transportation, of book clubs, of the new women’s hats, of Truman’s chances in 1948, of the nature of happiness?” At the drop of a hat, or of the handkerchief of the lady who asks the question, I would blush not to have a reply. And like many others, I become so absorbed in developing the music and dialectic of my answer that I have no time to blush at the fatuities the answer may contain.

— Irwin Edman, Under Whatever Sky

****

I now think of my urge to consume news not as an adaptation to the modern world, but as a vestige of our ancient past.

This urge was evolved at a time where information was scarce, and therefore, highly valuable. It makes sense that a hunger for all the information one can find is advantageous—even lifesaving.

Other human urges—for sugar and fat for example—evolved in a time of scarcity too. But we know now, and readily accept, that eating enormous meals of carbs and fat is a bad thing.

A similar thing is happening for information flow—but unlike food, there is little credence given to the idea that it might be bad for us. In fact, we actively encourage the habit, leading to the equivalent of a diet full of junk food: A diet of 24 hours news.

— Sarah Haider

****

The chattering classes are forever congratulating themselves on the nobility of their inclinations. The vulgar man comes home from work, opens a beer, and watches sports; the cultivated professional comes home from work, opens his phone, and gorges on headlines, podcasts, opinion columns, panel shows, and algorithmically dispensed indignation. One is supposed to be “mere consumption,” the other a form of civic virtue. Vanity, vanity; it’s all vanity. The sports fan at least knows he is being entertained. The news addict imagines he is performing citizenship.

What does this elevated consumption usually yield? Not knowledge in any deep or chastening sense, but the kind of patched-together opinion Edman describes: a few skimmed articles, a half-heard broadcast, some conversational lint picked up from peers, all hastily assembled into a position that must now be displayed as proof of seriousness. It’s amazing how quickly people learn to build an identity around this. A man who could not tell you, yesterday, what he thought about some distant political question will, by tonight, be defending his freshly improvised view as though it were an heirloom. The more fluently we talk, the more we mistake fluency for depth, which is a constant temptation for the verbally dextrous, conceptually agile person. The more publicly we state a thing, the more we feel obliged to stand by it. And once a view has become entangled with self-presentation, any challenge to it feels like a challenge to rank, intelligence, and dignity. At that point, the actual merits of the opinion barely matter. If we were truly honest, most attempts to elicit an opinion from us on important issues would be answered with “Hell if I know; I haven’t thought much about it.” But that would be social death for this class, a figurative punchbowl-defecation.

To go ahead and put too fine a point on it, news consumption is how educated professionals assure themselves of their own seriousness and importance. Like most human activity, it is about showing off for their peers, while positioning themselves favorably in comparison to the outgroup — in this case, those uncredentialed misinformation-guzzling swine who are derelict in their duty to “defend democracy” as it dies in darkness. Crucially, though, as Leopardi noted, this sort of illusion is necessary if these poor souls are to be capable of functioning without collapsing into nihilism. Only “half-philosophers” follow the proselytizing urge to enlighten others, whether they asked for it or not. We should not seek to cure our betters of their consumption habits, because they would only fill the void with another enthusiasm, possibly even a worse one. We, however, are insignificant enough to allow ourselves amusement at their expense.

The Mundane Comedy

By in books, history, literature as moral fiber supplement, the statusphere

Roman Helmet Guy:

But if this answer is correct, it leads us to a troubling conclusion: New books are not worth reading. Why? Because everyone alive today has the same perspective, and none of us have experienced a wide breadth of anything. Especially not those of us who are likely to get platformed by a major publisher.

…In conclusion I leave you with a rule of thumb for actually understanding the human condition by engaging deeply with a wide breadth of human experience and perspectives: Half the books you read must’ve been written before WW2, half of those must’ve been written before the American Revolution, and half of those must’ve been written before the fall of Rome.

Ten or fifteen years ago, the fashionable line among the cognoscenti was that reading literary fiction makes you “more empathetic.” Whatever the research actually said, the audience mostly heard the part it wanted to hear: Look at how admirable I am — so sensitive, so intelligent, so morally improved by my refined tastes. Now we get “long-ago-ism,” the mirror image of presentism: read “the classics” because modern culture is all groupthink, and old books will make you wiser and set you apart from the ignorant mob. And again, you can watch the audience seize the incentive: Look at how amazing I am for doing this.

It’s a perennial spiritual comedy. The self is infinitely adaptable. It can turn romance novels into “self-care,” and it can turn Thucydides into a caste marker. Either way, the point isn’t the book; it’s the glow. “I only read dead authors” can become its own Reddit — a pre-approved identity with pre-approved contempt.

The sober objection isn’t that old books are bad. It’s that they’re being sold, explicitly or implicitly, as a way to graduate from the human condition: read the right authors and you’ll become less stupid, less credulous, less vain, less herdlike. But no matter whether you read J. D. Robb or Herodotus, you’re still a confused animal, prone to the same rationalizations, the same fits of resentment, the same stupid mistakes, the same posturing and self-deception that humans have always practiced. Reading Thucydides won’t prevent you from wanting to be admired; it may simply supply better words for the desire.

In Cultural Amnesia, Clive James notes the deeper difficulty: the apparently unexceptionable call to support the classics against the fashions conceals a dilemma, because all the classics were fashions once; new classics have to come from somewhere, and may arrive disguised as fashions when they do. That should be enough to ruin any attempt to outsource discernment to a publication date. “Old” is not a sacrament, and “new” is not a sin. Time may alter the odds, but it doesn’t relieve you of judgment. You never get to stop weighing, measuring, and deciding what’s alive and what’s dead.

In fact, the fetish for old books can produce its own refined version of cliché. We mock the man for whom every political event he dislikes is Hitler; the helmeted antiquarian can fall into a classier variant, where every modern event has its precursor in Herodotus. The past becomes a stencil. You get the pleasure of analogy without the burden of particulars. But the particulars are precisely what matter: technology, scale, speed, institutions, incentives — everything that makes this moment different from the ones you’ve read about. The classics are not an answer key; they are lenses, and lenses can distort as well as clarify.

There’s also a more mundane point: the raw material of “human nature” isn’t scarce. You can find it in Target as easily as in Tacitus. The difference is that the Target experience doesn’t come with an introduction by Penguin Classics. Vanity, cruelty, tenderness, boredom, status games, self-serving moralism, genuine decency — the whole human condition is on display in the food court and in the Facebook comments for anyone who cares to look.

But the mall and the timeline don’t arrive pre-sifted. The chaff is still attached to the grain, and the sorting has to be done by you. That’s exactly what the would-be aristocrats resent. They prefer the fantasy of sitting in a chair with a pipe, imbibing the “best of” insights through a curated narrative, spared the indignity of wading through the unwashed muck of reality where the same human motives appear without a classical frame. But if you can’t find human nature in the mall, you won’t find it in Plato either.

So yes: read old books. They puncture the spell of the present. They remind you that your era’s obvious ideas are contingent, and therefore questionable. But don’t read them as a way to feel inoculated against folly. The past is useful precisely because it shows how little we change — and how easy it is to tell ourselves that we have.

Detestable, Hearing Servants Moving About

By in the statusphere, work

Sian Cain: I would like to ask your opinion on five things. First of all, leaf blowers.

Fran Lebowitz: A horrible, horrible invention. I didn’t even know about them until like 20 years ago when I rented a house in the country. I was shocked! I live in New York City, we don’t have leaf problems. We have every other kind of problem. When I was a kid, we had leaf raking. Which is quiet. Leaf blowers are the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. First of all, they are incredibly noisy. And second of all, 10 minutes after you use it, that big leaf blower in the sky blows them all back. It’s a very stupid invention.

S.C.: What is the worst job you’ve ever done?

F.L.: Boy, I had a lot of bad jobs when I was young. New York City was full of bad jobs in the 70s. You could get a different bad job every week, and I did. I used to think, “I hate this job. I’m going to get a different bad job.” And then I would hate that job. Finally, I realized, and this is the truth – “Fran, you just don’t like to work”. I would have been a fantastic heiress.

— “Fran Lebowitz Lays Down the Law“

This immediately reminded me of something Douglas wrote on the performative hatred of leaf blowers. There’s a certain kind of conscience that expresses itself as manual labor for other people. Like Virginia Woolf forgoing the corrupting influence of modern plumbing in favor of earth-closets maintained by an elderly servant, Lebowitz visits the countryside, discovers how the tidy-landscape sausage gets made, recoils in horror, and returns to the drawing room to demand the rest of us do it the hard way. Calling leaf blowers “the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen” has the faintly Bourbon tone of someone discovering during a brief country interlude that the world does not, in fact, maintain itself. You can dislike the noise; fair enough. But the tone is pure class tourism: offended that the labor required to keep things clean is not only happening, but happening audibly, with modern tools, in daylight. And half the neighborhood is wearing noise-canceling headphones anyway. Low-status labor is simply a socially-safe target, especially for would-be heiresses. Oh, for the days when we could openly enjoy knouting poachers and running down peasants in our coach and six!

The Long, Foul Rant That Is Our Moment In History

By in ai, moralizing, socmed, technology, the statusphere

My thesis, again, is a simple one. The information technologies of the twenty-first century have enabled the public, composed of amateurs, people from nowhere, to break the power of the political hierarchies of the industrial age. The result hasn’t been a completed revolution in the manner of 1789 or 1917, or utter collapse as in 1991, but more like the prolonged period of instability that preceded the settlement of Westphalia in 1648. Neither side can wipe out the other. A resolution, when it comes, may well defy the terms of the struggle. None is remotely visible as I write these lines.

— Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

The internet didn’t invent deception, of course, but it did make mediation the default condition of social life. Most of us have probably heard the old joke from the New Yorker: on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. Once you live through screens, you’re always inferring a reality you cannot directly inspect. Even when nobody is lying, the medium itself encourages curation, performance, selective lighting, selective framing. A fragile trust is inherent from the start.

Social media monetized that uncertainty. It turned identity into a product and status into a scoreboard. It incentivized us to treat the self as a brand and attention as a currency — quantified, gamable, and therefore permanently vulnerable to counterfeiting. Filters, lighting, editing, branding, metrics; none of it is “fake” in the simple sense. It’s real, but optimized. And optimization is the prelude to suspicion, because it blurs the line between honest self-presentation and calculated manipulation.

As Gurri explains in his excellent book, the basic claim that institutions can certify reality — this is true; this is false; these are the rules; this is what happened — has been weakened. That doesn’t mean institutions are always wrong, or that the public is always right. It means the power to end arguments by proclamation has decayed. The public can keep disputes permanently open. Competing narratives can be built cheaply, distributed instantly, and defended by swarms of “people from nowhere.” Arguments metastasize, every claim begins to feel like propaganda, every correction begins to feel like power protecting itself, every disagreement starts to carry the tone of betrayal. You don’t merely think I’m mistaken; you think I’m captured, paid, brainwashed, malignant, or stupid. And once that adversarial posture becomes political weather, it spreads. “Chaos rampant, an age of distrust. Confrontation, impulsive habitat,” the metal band Slayer sang, describing hell, social media, or both.

For a while, we still had reliable tells. Spam looked like spam. Machine writing sounded like a machine. Bad Photoshop had a visible sheen. The reassuring thing about fakery was that it was legible.

Generative AI is an accelerant because it collapses the tells. It produces competent imitation at scale — text, images, voices, short videos — often good enough to pass the first glance, sometimes good enough to pass the second. So the aesthetic question (“is it good?”) gets replaced by a forensic question: “Who made this, how, and do they deserve credit?” When outputs get cheap, the status war moves to authorship and provenance. Everyone becomes a customs officer stamping passports of authenticity.

It’s common to say “online isn’t real life,” and for a long time that was comforting because in-person reality could still function as the ultimate lie detector. Filters might beautify a photo, but presence would reassert itself up close. You can curate your profile, but you can’t curate your face at close range under ordinary lighting on an ordinary day. Digital editing can’t firm up a weak handshake.

Except now the body itself is becoming a kind of interface, not so much because bodies are “fake” than because the meaning of a body is less legible. PEDs and GLP-1s create an actual result, not a mere illusion. The suspicious question isn’t “is that physique real?” It’s: “What does it signify?”

For decades, we treated physical transformations — lean bodies, muscular bodies, big lifts, dramatic before-and-after stories — as costly credentials. We read them as moral evidence: discipline, self-control, sacrifice, will. You could argue about how fair that moral reading was, but it was socially legible. It made sorting easy. Now, a person can be leaner because appetite has been pharmacologically altered. A person can be bigger and stronger because recovery and hypertrophy are pharmacologically assisted. Now the old inference (“therefore virtue”) is unreliable because the method is opaque. And humans hate unreliable inference. We hate it the way we hate a loaded die: not only because it might be unfair, but because it makes the game hard to interpret.

Then comes the new complication: AI doesn’t arrive as just another tool, like a better wrench. People talk to it. It answers. It imitates personality. It can console, flatter, argue, roleplay. So even if it has no intentions in the strict sense, it reliably triggers the human perception of agency. A new force enters the already-chaotic field — something that can amplify messages, imitate people, generate culture, automate persuasion — and the public can’t agree what kind of thing it is. Friend, enemy, mercenary, or merely a new industrial capability. The disagreement itself becomes part of the atmosphere. Europe got a “German Question” in 1871. We’re getting an “AI Question” now.

Our atmosphere of suspicion is less paranoia than a rational adaptation to broken shortcuts. When cheap trust signals stop working, people do what they always do: they demand receipts (“prove it,” “disclose it,” “show your drafts,” “are you natural?”), they invent new tells (“AI slop,” “natty or not,” “Ozempic face”), and they fight to rewrite the moral code. It encourages moral entrepreneurship. Not everyone is seeking truth; everyone is seeking advantage. Authenticity becomes a weapon because authenticity is a status currency in a world where the old currency is being inflated.

It’s sort of like musical chairs. Technological change, as it often does, has set the music playing again, and people are circling around warily, hoping to be well-positioned in the scrum for a high-status seat once it stops. Eventually some settlement will arrive. Possibly, as Gurri says, one that defies the terms of the struggle. But for now, the defining feeling is that the old shortcuts for telling what’s real are failing, and we haven’t yet agreed on new ones.

Obiter Scripta, no. 150

By in books, obiter scripta, the statusphere

Those who write abstractly are rather lucky: they will have commentators. Others only have readers, which, it seems, is to be looked down upon.

— Albert Camus, The Complete Notebooks

In Midnight Maxims, Theodore Dalrymple wrote, “Intellectuals are the bureaucrats of thought.” Likewise, Camus’ commentators are the bureaucrats of the book world. The bureaucrat’s survival skill is activity that can be documented, not outcomes that can be verified. A text that stays “richly ambiguous” is a renewable resource. A text that gets nailed down is a closed case. It’s safer to write “a reading of” than to say something falsifiable. And if you can turn “understanding a book” into a method (frameworks, lenses, rubrics), you can always claim progress even when nothing clarifies. Clarity reduces the need for the middle-management of meaning.

The Soft Hum of Suspicion

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

Sam Kriss:

If you’re anything like me, you did not enjoy reading that paragraph. Everything about it puts me on alert: Something is wrong here; this text is not what it says it is. It’s one of them. Entirely ordinary words, like “tapestry,” which has been innocently describing a kind of vertical carpet for more than 500 years, make me suddenly tense. I’m driven to the point of fury by any sentence following the pattern “It’s not X, it’s Y,” even though this totally normal construction appears in such generally well-received bodies of literature as the Bible and Shakespeare. But whatever these little quirks of language used to mean, that’s not what they mean any more. All of these are now telltale signs that what you’re reading was churned out by an A.I.

A specter is haunting the severely-educated — the specter of AI usage in writing. All the powers of old media have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter; the NYT Magazine and the Atlantic, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and Turnitin, university integrity offices and Reddit bot-sniffers. And so here we have Sam Kriss, yet another spoiled-rich-kid communist who wants to burn down the system that gave him his rarefied aesthetic education (and who nonetheless still harbors bourgeois dreams of inheriting his parents’ “massive house“) swirling a vintage line from Virginia Woolf under his nostrils as he informs you plebs that he was already bored with ChatGPT in 2022, before you even knew it existed.

Seriously, though, the people most likely to see AI text as contamination are the people whose social identity is bound up with text: the literary humanities set, the professional writers, the custodians of taste. For everyone else, it’s just a convenience. An appliance. Maybe that’s part of the outrage: automation was supposed to take the warehouse and the assembly line, not saunter into the poetry workshop and start doing an impression of “voice.” The machines are stealing the wrong jobs.

Most people have never treated everyday writing as sacred in the first place. We flatter ourselves that Christmas wishes “come from the heart,” but come on: normal people use templates because they have lives. Mass-produced holiday cards work for their intended purpose, and no one regards them as a civilizational threat. If anything, the sincere and authentic are the ones who refuse the template and send a detailed, self-important “year in review” that makes everyone vaguely regret having an inbox. Before chatbots, the socially-striving could always reach for Bartlett’s book of quotations; AI just makes the rhetorical prosthetics cheaper and faster. And of course, anything that steals fire from Olympus and gives it to the masses is, by definition, sacrilege.

We are changed by what we change. Good ol’ Auden. It’s the best description I know of what’s happening to public language right now. People imitate their peers constantly. So of course we’re going to imitate the newest voice that surrounds us, even when it isn’t a person. If the environment becomes saturated with AI phrasing, we will begin to speak it the way you catch an accent. From a strictly evolutionary angle, that’s neither good nor bad. It’s adaptation. It’s the social animal looking for a snugger fit.

But there’s always a counter-movement. A stock phrase can be useful right up until the moment it starts to sound insipid from overuse. Then we drop it and reach for something else, not because we’re heroes of authenticity but because we’re bored. “AI voice” will eventually become a class marker the way corporate-speak already is: safe, competent, emotionally pre-chewed. And as that dialect hardens into “middlebrow, typical, mediocre,” anyone who wants to sound alive will have to push harder for distinction — more particularity, more risk, more texture. So it goes: the mass adopts a style because it’s easy, and then a minority flees it because it’s everywhere.

These pieces about AI writing all share the same undertone: suspicion. A kind of low-grade paranoia that turns reading into auditing. You can’t just take in a paragraph anymore; you have to scrutinize it for tells, like a customs agent checking passports. “Tapestry,” “delve,” the syrupy uplift, the eager sincerity. ChatGPT, like Kilroy, was here. Maybe that’s justified, maybe not. But it’s corrosive either way. Even when you’re right to be wary, living in that posture constantly makes you meaner, narrower, less amused.

And it isn’t just AI. It’s a broader collapse of trust in cheap signals. I don’t have any grand analysis or conclusion; I’m just observing what appears to be the prevalent mood. A sincere paragraph used to be a mild indicator of effort. Now it might be a one-click artifact. So the audience becomes forensic, and the writer becomes defensive, and both sides grow touchy. It reminds me of the obsession with PEDs in sports: post a physique photo or a lift total and you’ll be swarmed by amateur detectives hunting for signs of steroid use. Enhancement spreads (or the suspicion of it spreads), and suddenly every impressive result is presumed guilty until proven otherwise. The honest have to perform extra authenticity; the dishonest learn to fake the performance; and the spectators get to feel clever for “catching” someone.

We are changed by what we change. We built machines that can produce endless fluent prose, and now we’re building a world in which fluent prose is no longer evidence of a mind behind it, only evidence that a machine exists. Reading starts to feel like border control.

Clean Shirt, New Shoes, And I Don’t Know Where I Am Goin’ To

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

Magnanimous as I am, I will start by conceding the obvious: there is such a thing as being aggressively anti-social, or provocatively slobby, almost as if daring you to have a problem with it — letting one’s pants sag halfway down one’s hamstrings, showing off one’s boxers and buttcrack, for example. Less aggressive, but still wince-inducing: pajama pants, tattered t-shirts, and slippers/flip-flops. Even dedicated athleisurists like me have standards.

Still, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg if people want to model homeless chic in public. As an orangutan in spirit, I’m more concerned with urging all the busybody chimpanzees to go fuck themselves and each other and leave me alone. These shallow complaints aren’t about taste; they’re about legibility. They pine for uniforms that sort people at a glance — age, class, occupation — so the scold doesn’t have to think. In the nostalgic fantasy, suits and cocktail hours are the default adult costume, and anything outside that script is arrested development. But most adults don’t spend time in boardrooms. They wear company-issued shirts with nametags, drive forklifts, stock pallets, juggle gig-work, chauffeur kids, lift weights after work, and relax at home. They dress for the life they actually have.

What you see at Walmart is downstream of bigger forces: the work-life blur; car-errand culture; fabrics that wash and stretch; the decline of dry cleaning; post-pandemic norm collapse; orthopedic reality; climate-controlled interiors; and a retail loop that sells what people actually buy.

We’ve done worse for status. Before A/C (praise Willis Carrier), people literally cooked in their clothes because etiquette demanded it — wool and flannel undergarments in July, corsets and multiple petticoats for women, dark frock coats and gloves for men; even “summer furs.” Doctors warned against drinking water or removing layers. I prefer the supercilious scorn of some jerkoff stranger to the wrath of Sol Vindictus in a southern summer.

Standards still matter, but the adult rule is simple: the 3 C’s — Clean, Coordinated, Context-aware. Clean: no stains, no holes. Coordinated: neutrals, one or two colors, clothes that fit — not painted-on, not sagging. Context-aware: sweatpants to the grocery store, fine; an “I Got Crabs at Lucy’s” t-shirt at a funeral, no. That’s just maturity. Presentation without artifice. If you want castes, say so. Otherwise, judge people by how they look after their clothes and how they behave.

Oooh, I Wanna Make Up My Mind, But I Don’t Know Myself

By in foolosophy, music, the statusphere

Liz Pelly:

Meg Lethem was working at her bakery job one morning in Boston when she had an epiphany. Tasked with choosing the day’s soundtrack, she opened Spotify, then flicked and flicked, endlessly searching for something to play. Nothing was perfect for the moment. She looked some more, through playlist after playlist. An uncomfortably familiar loop, it made her realise: she hated how music was being used in her life. “That was the problem,” she says. “Using music, rather than having it be its own experience … What kind of music am I going to use to set a mood for the day? What am I going to use to enjoy my walk? I started not really liking what that meant.”

It wasn’t just passive listening, but a utilitarian approach to music that felt like a creation of the streaming environment. “I decided that having music be this tool to [create] an experience instead of an experience itself was not something I was into,” she reflects. So she cut off her Spotify service, and later, Apple Music too, to focus on making her listening more “home-based” and less of a background experience.

Such reckonings have become increasingly commonplace in recent years, as dedicated music listeners continue to grapple with the unethical economics of streaming companies, and feel the effects of engagement-obsessed, habit-forming business models on their own listening and discovery habits. In the process, they are seeking alternatives.

Ah, yes. Shallow people catch an unwelcome glimpse of self-awareness, immediately decide it must be “the system” that’s to blame.

Wendy Eisenberg, a musician and teacher who recently deleted their account with Napster Music (formerly called Rhapsody), put it this way: “The one thing I’ve noticed since divesting is that music sounds better to me because I’ve put in the work to either locate it on a hard drive or download it from a friend’s Bandcamp or something. And every time I listen to it, even if it’s just on the way to work, I can hear the spiritual irreverence of that choice. And so it doesn’t feel like I am just receiving music from some distant tastemaker. But it seems like I have some relationship to the music, of ritual, which is where I come to it as a practising musician.

“Taking the extra step to load it on to my phone, or the extra step to flip over the tape, or put the CD on in the car, it feels like something that I’m doing, rather than something I’m receiving,” they continue. “And that sense of agency makes me a more dedicated and involved listener than the kind of passive listening-without-listening that streaming was making me do.”

She’s “put in the work,” the spiritually irreverent work, of searching through a file folder or clicking a download button, which is categorically different from compulsively thumbfucking a smartphone. The labor of ejecting a cassette or inserting a CD, the absence of which was the only thing preventing her from, you know, really hearing the music, man. Who says there are no heroes anymore?

I feel like an elderly farmer, watching kids come home from college in the big city for the weekend and rhapsodizing about how authentic and spiritual and mindfulness-inducing it must be for me to work so closely with nature. In reality, streaming music is too common to be special anymore, so the status-obsessed have to find new ways to signal their elevation above the masses. When technological abundance reaches the wrong sort of people, you have to romanticize the inefficient and inconvenient ways we used to do things. Get rid of your dishwasher, turn off all your electronic devices, and have musicians come play chamber music live in your living room if you really want to live deep and suck the marrow out of life.

Like most people who have used a pencil to fix a spaghetti-pile of unwound cassette tape, or who have lugged a small briefcase of compact discs around the car, I appreciate the ease and convenience of streaming. My smartphone is essentially a glorified mp3 player anyway. I have several thousand of my own songs in Apple Music, either bought as digital downloads or uploaded from CDs, organized into playlists. If I don’t feel like listening to any of those, I can just pick a song or a genre and let the algorithm do the work of finding whatever it considers to be related music. I’ve discovered lots of interesting new music this way. How is this “distant tastemaker” any different from the ones who decide which songs get played on the radio station you listen to, or from the ones who choose which bands get featured in the music magazines and websites you read? As always, the relevant question when faced with stupid romantic fantasies is “Compared to what?” The previous status quo wasn’t more authentic; you simply had fewer options. I’m sorry your digital agoraphobia prevents you from appreciating that.

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