Everything Clanks and Caterwauls

By in ai, writing

Pangram’s real product is not numerical accuracy so much as relief from judgment. To go ahead and put too fine a point on it, people are lazy and stupid and frightened by uncertainty. We want to press a button and have the man behind the curtain provide us with an authoritative answer. Currently, our standard-issue lazy stupidity is inflected with paranoia as we grapple with the emergence of LLMs, hence the demand for a service like Pangram.

Personally, I find many “organic” writing styles to be infuriating. Take this steaming midden-heap for example. I’m happy to assume that the author is a real person who wrote every word underneath the dim, flickering bulb of his own brainpower. But I would rather read the most banal refrigerator-magnet poetry ever extruded from Claude’s rectum than read one more “100% human-certified” post written in this godforsaken one-sentence-paragraph style so beloved of newsletter writers and other authenticity merchants. I’m not just picking on some dead-center-of-the-Bell-Curve midwit for sport here. I had to unsubscribe from Ted Gioia’s Substack a long time ago when I found my hand involuntarily clutching a fork, ready to gouge my eyes out rather than read another molar-grinding sentence/paragraph. But midwit is what’s on the menu today, so:

But in return, what we get back is a kind of simulated result.

It’s not… real.

The environment we’re immersed in day-to-day (largely digital) is engineered to harvest our attention and pay us back in small hits of dopamine.

It’s stimulating enough to keep us scrolling.

But hollow enough to leave us feeling empty.

So we don’t feel connected. We don’t feel happy. And our lives feel devoid of meaning.

This ache (and what to do about it) is the whole reason I wrote Return to Real.

(Pre-orders are slated to begin at the end of this month… Stay tuned.)

Bite-sized and sugar-coated. No thought is permitted simply to occur. It must be revealed. The reader is treated like a toddler at a puppet show: Where did the insight go? There it is!

What especially grates is the false imitation of speech. Real conversation does not sound like this unless the speaker is wearing a headset microphone and pacing across a conference stage. The fragments, rhetorical questions, ellipses, parenthetical asides and constant opening conjunctions manufacture an atmosphere of confidential spontaneity. But it is engineered LinkedIn prosody: every sentence calculated to fit inside a screenshot, every line break placed where the speaker imagines the audience leaning forward. He begins by telling us that AI writing overexplains its themes and fails to let readers infer. Then he spends thousands of words announcing, reiterating and ceremonially unveiling every implication. Nothing is allowed to remain implicit. “Slop has a shape.” “Enshittification has a shape.” How-to books have a shape. The internet has a shape. The “shape” conceit is reamed until it hangs shapeless.

To top it off, the article is a sales funnel disguised as a civilizational diagnosis. First, the internet is dying. Books are dying. Human conversation is becoming unreal. Everything is fake. The reader is deposited in an “ocean of slop.” Then, miraculously, the author’s forthcoming book, mastermind program, Vermont farm experience, “AI Barbell Strategy” and rapidly disappearing one-on-one VIP days emerge as the path back to reality. If you believe that this peddler of the Real has anything useful to teach you about any of this, you’re probably also inclined to chant with the Bandar-log that conveniently tidy “1-in-10,000” false-positive rate uncritically cited above.

Ah, but the important thing is that it’s not “slop,” a thought-terminating cliché if ever there were one. As we just saw, though, evidently some “slop” is well-written and interesting enough to pass a cursory background check and get published. What does the word even mean, then? Badly-written and incoherent? Plenty of humans can do that. Simply contaminated by the clanker cooties, then? That would explain why a supposedly interesting story had to be pulled and an editor’s apology issued — not because the actual content was subpar, but because, again, we are lazy, stupid and paranoid. Either way, “slop,” alongside “grift” and “enshittification,” should be sealed inside a weighted drum and rolled over the side of a ship, and anyone who uses those terms in earnest should be exiled to a mining camp to extract rare earth metals for the rest of his days.

What I hate is the rapid foreclosure of inquiry. LLMs opened a mess of fascinating questions. Where does authorship reside? Is revision more essentially “creative” than generation? Is a writer using a model as an editor, antagonist, collaborator, thesaurus, or instrument? Does originality attach to sentences, selection, structure, judgment, intention, or the finished work? Which differences between human and machine production actually matter aesthetically?

Valéry is my presiding spirit here because I think his interest would have been in what the disturbance reveals. This technology is generating text, yes, but it is also exposing how vague our previous concepts were. We thought we knew what writing, intelligence, originality, imitation, voice, and authorship meant because nothing had forced us to draw the boundaries precisely. Now the boundaries are moving, and instead of examining the movement, the yokels want to paint a line on the ground and arrest anyone who steps across it.

I’m amazed to see how many self-styled creative types turn out to be reactionaries in the literal sense: something has disturbed an established order, and their first instinct is to restore the border. Smugstack is well on its way to becoming the farmers’ market of prose: every sentence hand-raised and locally sourced. “This essay is artisanal, small-batch, cruelty-free, carbon-conscious, and composed entirely by a free-range author. It may be dull, repetitive, and barely literate, but no clankers were engaged in its production.” Like the stereotypical Whole Foods shopper, they care less about the prose than the imagined moral cleanliness of the prose’s supply chain.

The important division to me is between people who regard the arrival of this strange instrument as an invitation to thought, and people who regard thought itself as one more danger the detector should remove.

Little Nuthouse on the Curragh

By in non compos mentis

Sarah Moss:

Unlike many heroines of children’s fiction, Laura was sturdy, strong and dark-haired, frequently annoyed by her blonde, slender, compliant older sister Mary. It was hard not to feel, on behalf of energetic plain girls everywhere, that there was some justice in pretty, good girl Mary going blind after measles. Laura stood up to bullies. Laura knew how to survive a blizzard. Laura resisted Ma’s attempts to put her into a corset at 14. The Wild West, for Laura, was a space for (some) resistance and liberation.

This is from a brief column in the Irish Times fulminating against the new Netflix adaptation of Little House on the Prairie. There are quite a few eye-poppers and jaw-droppers here, and we’ll get to those, but I just wanted to make sure we took the time to savor this little morsel. “It was hard not to feel” — note the passive tone — that there was “justice” in a girl going blind for the crime of being prettier than her sister. Not that she felt this out of personal maliciousness, you understand. Casual psychopathy simply permeates one’s soul like a fine mist on a foggy morning, after all. No, this sentiment crept up on her unbidden. History summoned her into service on behalf of plain girls everywhere. “Father, if Thou be willing, remove this cup from me,” she prayed. “Nay,” replied the Lord. “On behalf of the homely, the butterfaces, yea, even the outright butt-ugly, I command thee to drink deeply.” I commend the Times for granting column space to the criminally insane as part of a work-release program, very progressive of them, but I would just like to aver that anyone who can work up such ressentiment toward a fictional character in a children’s series should probably remain under close supervision.

The gravest problem with the series is that the books are well-written according to our professor of 19th-century literature, not that she’s flashing her credentials or anything. That makes them especially insidious as propaganda. Pa Ingalls is a “right-wing nationalist” with “demented ideas about independence and self-reliance,” although his principal relation to organized society is to keep packing the wagon and fleeing it. His is “the kind of thinking that destroys humanity and the planet.” The Ingalls family is a small part of a continent-wide genocide and ecocide. Ideally, their parents should have stayed in Europe rather than perpetuate settler-colonialism. Ma Ingalls herself recognized this. She lamented that the family’s future entailed destroying civilizations older than Europe, and expressed a wish that they could learn from the Native Americans how to live peacefully on this land.

Both kids could read well enough. “That’s not what it says, Mum.”

No, I said, that’s more what it should say.

The rewrites will continue until moral awareness improves!

Fortunately, Moss writes from the terminus of moral history, so there is no danger that her own work will someday receive similar treatment. A future reader couldn’t conceive of condemning us as morally abhorrent for ignoring or accepting factory farming, industrial fishing, abortion, fossil-fuel use, nursing-home warehousing, smartphone manufacture, or some other practice we do not yet recognize as monstrous. We need not hope, in other words, that they extend to us precisely the charity Moss refuses to extend to the Ingalls family.

Obiter Scripta, no. 165

By in ai, books, obiter scripta

If I were a prince, I would hire or buy a private literary tea-pot, in which I would steep all the leaves of new books that promised well. The infusion would do for me without the vegetable fibre. You understand me; I would have a person whose sole business should be to read day and night, and talk to me whenever I wanted him to. I know the man I would have: a quick-witted, out-spoken, incisive fellow; knows history, or at any rate has a shelf full of books about it, which he can use handily, and the same of all useful arts and sciences; knows all the common plots of plays and novels, and the stock company of characters that are continually coming on in new costume; can give you a criticism of an octavo in an epithet and a wink, and you can depend on it; cares for nobody except for the virtue there is in what he says; delights in taking off big wigs and professional gowns, and in the disembalming and unbandaging of all literary mummies. Yet he is as tender and reverential to all that bears the mark of genius,—that is, of a new influx of truth or beauty,—as a nun over her missal. In short, he is one of those men that know everything except how to make a living. Him would I keep on the square next my own royal compartment on life’s chessboard. To him I would push up another pawn, in the shape of a comely and wise young woman, whom he would of course take,—to wife. For all contingencies I would liberally provide. In a word, I would, in the plebeian, but expressive phrase, “put him through” all the material part of life; see him sheltered, warmed, fed, button-mended, and all that, just to be able to lay on his talk when I liked,—with the privilege of shutting it off at will.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table

Sounds to me like what he wanted, nearly two centuries early, was an LLM. He doesn’t want an encyclopedia set, he wants a personality. A model with a customized system prompt. The one part that now seems obsolete is the enormous infrastructure required to keep the thing running. Holmes must house the critic, feed him, provide his clothing, and procure him a wife. OpenAI has simplified the interface somewhat, though the data centers are arguably the modern equivalent of all that sheltering, warming, feeding, and button-mending.

From GeoCities to the Server Farms, This Land Was Made for You and Me

By in jests japes jokes jollies, technology

I had come to look at French Revolutionary pamphlets when I encountered the fence.

It stood across the whole screen: a black barricade, high and wide, admitting passage through a single white gate marked “Continue.” Before proceeding, I was required to hear an acknowledgment of the traditional owners of “this land.”

This land?

I looked around. I was sitting in Virginia. The National Library was in Canberra. The pamphlets came from Paris. The server was probably humming in an industrial park known only to three technicians and a tax assessor. Yet somehow we had all gathered upon the same sacred patch of ground.

Actually, you know what? You’re on my turf. I am an indigenous person — of cyberspace. At last, a homeland with a reasonably well-documented date of first settlement. No disputed oral traditions, no archaeological layers, no inconvenient migrations extending back beyond the arbitrary cutoff date. Before the white nerd arrived, the blinking cursor grazed upon an empty screen.

Rocks, trees, rivers, mountains — granted, prior claims abound for those. But the JPEG of the rock, the polygonal tree, the river rendered in sixteen colors, the mountain represented by ^ characters? Those arose within our ancestral domain. The native fauna were trolls, worms, daemons, and badly drawn ASCII cats. The sacred sites were Usenet groups, dial-up bulletin boards, GeoCities pages, and forums whose moderators had not seen daylight since 1987.

Indeed, “digital native” may be the one indigenous identity modern institutions recognize without embarrassment, though even here the original inhabitants are gradually being displaced by vast migratory hordes carrying smartphones and asking why every website cannot simply be an app. My people were here before the smartphone settlers came. Before the apps. Before the platforms. Before a billion colonists boarded their little glass vessels, sailed into our waters, and began demanding that every form of human expression be rearranged into a vertical rectangle.

We crossed the wilderness with nothing but AltaVista, typing URLs letter by letter. We had no predictive text to guide us. One misplaced character could send a traveler into the void. Later, some unknown benefactor taught us to copy and paste, an invention still celebrated in our oldest songs. We built our settlements with raw HTML. Every scrap was used. We painted our words red, blue, yellow and green. We tiled the background with tiny stars. We consulted “For Dummies” scrolls to construct tables inside tables because CSS had not yet been bestowed upon mankind. Our shamans summoned special characters through the incantation of hex codes. Our homepages contained photographs of iguanas, quotations from Nietzsche, guitar tablature, collections of animated skulls and exhaustive accounts of why Rush had been misunderstood by the critics. They were not polished, but they belonged to us.

Every settlement had a guestbook. Every village had a message board. Webrings joined distant tribes. A man could depart from a page devoted to medieval siege engines and, after six or seven migrations, find himself among collectors of Soviet toothpaste labels. We called this “surfing,” though few of us had ever been near an ocean. Our sacred structures were marked UNDER CONSTRUCTION, which expressed our cyclical understanding of time. Nothing was ever finished. Nothing needed to be. A page might remain under construction from 1998 until the death of the sun.

Then the settlers came.

At first they arrived in manageable numbers. They built blogs and learned our customs. Some even adopted native names such as XxShadowWolf77xX. But the great migration began with the smartphone. Suddenly millions poured ashore without keyboards, mice or any knowledge of directory structures. They did not explore the web. They expected it to cater to them.

The open country was enclosed. Forums were abandoned and replaced by imperial platforms. Personal homepages gave way to standardized profiles. The old paths disappeared beneath algorithmic roads that carried every traveler past the same attractions. Then they began appropriating our culture.

They discovered dark mode, as though our ancestors had not read green letters on black screens since time immemorial. They invented “online communities” after destroying thousands of forums and replacing them with Discord servers whose contents vanish from public memory. They praised “digital minimalism” while carrying devices that screamed for attention thirty times an hour. They turned the personal homepage into “personal branding,” stripped away the iguana, the MIDI file and the purple text, and sold the remainder as professional identity.

And now, after all that, I find a fence across my ancestral land. Where is Midnight Oil with a ballad dedicated to my people?

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.

The Only People We Hate More Than the Generators Are the Fucking Checkers

By in ai, jests japes jokes jollies, the geist of the zeit, writing

Solarpunk Magazine:

At the same time, here at Solarpunk Magazine we are very wary of AI checkers. We do not use them, and we believe it is unethical for publishers to use them, especially without permission from authors. AI checkers are also generative AI programs. While they aren’t as energy intensive as LLM text generators, we believe it is a hypocrisy for publishers to use AI checkers (especially without a clear policy stating that publishers may run authors’ work through an AI system and permission from authors to do so) while insisting that authors are not allowed to use AI themselves at any stage of the writing or brainstorming process.

…Rather than using AI checkers without author consent or knowledge, we rely on our own knowledge of the writing craft and the conversations and interactions we have with authors to help us determine if a piece of work was created using AI. That’s not a perfect method, but neither are AI checkers, which are known to not only produce false positives, but to produce false positives at higher rates for writers of color, ESL authors, and neurodivergent authors.

Just when I was starting to get a little bored of all the identical laments over AI, the trickster god who loves us and wants us to be amused brings this to my attention. What a brilliant gambit! The irresistible force of anti-AI sentiment meets the immovable object of identity politics. The resulting spectacle should be magnificent. One faction will say that failure to detect AI endangers marginalized writers because slop crowds them out. Another will say that aggressive detection endangers marginalized writers because their prose is disproportionately suspected. A third will argue that demanding drafts and oral explanations privileges writers with leisure, education, verbal confidence, and reliable access to document histories. Everyone will possess a theory of structural harm; nobody will possess a trustworthy method of determining who wrote the story.

Which returns us to the shibboleth problem. People want an objective test that will divide Ephraimite from Gileadite, human from bot, without ambiguity. Pangram offers a numerical percentage, which looks more scientific than “this story felt wrong to me,” but the underlying desire is the same: outsource uncertainty, receive an official judgment. In fairness, credit to Solarpunk for at least recognizing the contradiction of using one opaque machine to guard the literary border against another opaque machine. (The Romans might have some counsel to offer on this strategy.) But their “AI pacifism” stance has a faint League of Nations quality. They are conscientious objectors in an arms race. They reject generators because they counterfeit human work, and checkers because they counterfeit human judgment. All well and good, but that means every submission must be authenticated by intuition, conversation, process documents, and amateur forensic work, precisely while generators are improving and submission volume is likely rising. They have renounced aerial reconnaissance just as the enemy begins mass production. I wish them lots of luck.

All right, that’s enough sober analysis. Let’s get back to the fun stuff: imagining how all this is going to develop once the usual motives come into play. Pangram may become “predictive policing” for prose. “Suspicious syntax” may be seen as rhetorical profiling. An unusually polished paragraph will be probable cause. An em dash in the wrong neighborhood triggers a stop-and-frisk. An “Abolish the Checkers” movement emerges, including an “All Bots Are Bastards” slogan. Then comes the counteressay: “Why Refusing to Use AI Detection Is a Privilege.” Editors at well-funded magazines can afford leisurely interviews and manuscript archaeology; smaller journals cannot. Therefore detector abstinence itself becomes exclusionary. Then the rebuttal: “Draft Histories Are the New Voter ID.” Requiring writers to produce revision logs, notes, or earlier versions disproportionately burdens the poor, the disorganized, the technologically unsophisticated, and anyone who writes in a single document. Then someone argues that “human-sounding prose” is a colonial construct.

It all sounds like a new Monty Python sketch:

“Did you use AI?”

“No.”

“Can you prove it?”

“Your demand for proof is carceral.”

“Then may we use a detector?”

“Algorithmic profiling.”

“Can we inspect your drafts?”

“Surveillance capitalism.”

“Can we ask about your process?”

“Neurotypical gatekeeping.”

“Can we simply judge the story?”

“That permits AI colonialism.”

At which point someone rings a little bell and announces that the submission window has been suspended pending a restorative listening session with the manuscript.

515

By in aphorisms, battling personal entropy, books

You wonder how that athlete can hold up so great a weight so long? What sustains it and makes it less heavy is Pride: an unseen angel coming to the rescue of the man of flesh and blood.

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

The weather is scorching. The unconditioned warehouse is humid. Work is at its seasonal peak. Employees call out for one reason or another. The days start earlier and end later. I will likely be working through the weekend to make up lost ground. The body lodges protests: knees, hips, elbows all make their passive-aggressive feelings known. What do we do? Do we take the ready excuse to go home and get some extra rest?

No. Come on, now. You know better than that. We go to training as always and we deadlift 515 for a new PR. It is precisely on these days that we look the god of lassitude in his half-lidded eye and say, “Not today.”

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 Monks of New Conceit

By in books, extraordinary popular delusions, the geist of the zeit

Peachy Keenan:

But nothing matters, because reading is, as author Spencer Klavan put it on X, moving from a mass activity back to the way it was centuries ago: an elite skill practiced by small groups of academics and scholars and the curious and the thoughtful. “If present trends continue, they mark not the end of reading but the end of mass literacy, turning books back into what they used to be: the special super-weapon of a minority class. That would mean the age of high tech looks like the Middle Ages in this regard. Or at least that it looks the way we picture the Middle Ages, with a priestly caste wielding superior powers of focus, prediction, observation, and manipulation over a mentally reduced general public. Once again the readers would be as gods among men.”

So be like a god. Go ahead and hoard books, and be like the medieval Irish monks who kept the flame of eternal knowledge alive for six centuries on the inhospitable remote rocks of Skellig Michael in the North Atlantic.

As loath as I am to traffic in youthful slang, the kids these days have a useful term for this sort of self-flattering fantasy: copium. I am equally loath to speak for medieval monks, but I suspect they thought of themselves as servants of God, not gods among men. To conscript them into a fantasy of cognitive domination is a considerable feat of ventriloquism. The monk braving the winds of Skellig Michael was presumably seeking salvation, obedience, and release from worldly vanity, not waiting for the illiterate masses to recognize his superior powers of focus, prediction, observation, and manipulation.

Nor does scarcity imply sovereignty. Have horseback riders become more powerful and influential since the invention of the combustion engine? In a less literate world, readers may indeed become more useful. They may interpret the contracts, preserve the records, draft the proclamations, explain the regulations, and whisper historical precedents into the ruler’s ear. That makes them a clerisy, perhaps, or a class of competent court functionaries. It does not make them kings. Rulers have often found educated servants useful; they have seldom felt obliged to surrender the throne to them.

Nor should we mistake preservation for dominion. A book may be a “special super-weapon,” but it remains a remarkably combustible one. Had the Vikings been a little more thorough, six centuries of monastic devotion might have ended as smoke over the North Atlantic. The survival of knowledge has always depended upon less exalted things than verbal SAT scores and liberal arts degrees: distance, stone walls, armed protection, redundant copies, and luck. The monk may preserve the wisdom of the ages, but the man with the axe and torch can still decide whether anyone gets to read it.

We should lay aside the hookah and stop chasing the dragon of worldly importance. Reading need not make us powerful, admired, indispensable, or even employable in order to be worth doing. Writing first crawled into the world in ancient Mesopotamia as a means of keeping accounts: grain, livestock, rations, property. Perhaps in the science-fiction future it will complete the circle, and the last literate humans will spend their supposedly godlike powers maintaining accurate inventories of Martian minerals awaiting shipment to Earth.

Valéry Triptych

By in aphorisms, books, eric hoffer, foolosophy, work

In the course of history those who have not had their heads cut off and those who have not caused others’ heads to fall leave no trace behind. You have a choice of being a victim, a tyrant, or a nobody. Had Richelieu spared the ax and Robespierre the guillotine, the former would be depreciated, the latter completely forgotten. The lesson to be drawn from this is hardly of a moral order.

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

This is worth remembering whenever someone speaks solemnly of leaving his mark on history. History is marked chiefly by blood, fire, conquest, collapse, and spectacular error. Its admissions policy should make obscurity look respectable. A quiet man who tends his garden, keeps his promises, and refrains from terrorizing his neighbors leaves little material for the chronicler. His life may be good precisely because it is uneventful. Eric Hoffer similarly noted that many problems are caused by nobodies who want to be somebodies and end up becoming busybodies. Aspire to be a nobody.

What is essential in every domain is always the work of quite obscure persons, nondescript, individually valueless. If they did not exist or were not what they are, nothing would get done. If nothing got done, it is they who would lose least. They are essential — and without importance.

Maintenance is so easily mistaken for insignificance. When it succeeds, it erases the tracks of its own necessity. The people who leave no trace are generally the people who keep everything running. They carry, clean, repair, stock, file, deliver, maintain, and dispose. Their success consists in preventing events. The shelves remain filled, the water runs, the garbage disappears, the lights stay on. Because nothing dramatic happens, nobody thinks of them.

The sanitation worker’s achievement is that nothing happens: no garbage mountains, vermin surge, or epidemic. Maintenance produces an absence, and absences attract no glory. We ordinarily imagine achievement as the creation of something visible — a building, a fortune, a victory, a name. But much of the most useful work leaves behind no object at all. Its product is continuity.

People who perform the most necessary tasks are looked down on; most honored is the man who is most helped.

Prestige increases with distance from direct necessity. One man cooks his own food, carries his own bags, answers his own correspondence, drives himself, cleans his own rooms, and keeps his own appointments. Another has a cook, driver, secretary, cleaner, assistant, adviser, scheduler, guard, and publicist. Society looks at the second man’s elaborate dependence and concludes that he must be important. The great man is not necessarily the man who can do the most. He may simply be the man for whom the most is done.

The tyrant receives a statue. The great man receives assistance. The nobody takes out the trash.

Happy Willis Carrier Day!

By in environment, technology

Ed West:

Until relatively recently the world was dominated by a handful of relatively cold regions, and Paul Johnson observed in his history of the United States that human industry thrives in what Fahrenheit appreciators would call ‘the 60s’, a Goldilocks zone that turned New England and Greater Yankeedom into a powerhouse. The southern states, in contrast, were held back by higher mortality and the impossibility of productive work in the sweltering summer months, and until the mid-20th century were about 40 per cent poorer than the Union states.

The northerners were especially known for their work ethic and their inventiveness, a characteristic epitomised by the Boston-born Benjamin Franklin. Then in 1902, New York’s Willis Carrier changed everything with the one of the most world-changing inventions, the air conditioning unit; aircon has notably shifted population and power in the US southwards, but Dixieland is just part of a broader, global ‘sunshine belt’.

I Get a Little Bit Genghis Khan

By in ai, jests japes jokes jollies, writing

Monica Potts:

These are fairly common ups and downs for someone who grows up working-class in the U.S. These are also the kinds of trade-offs many people make early in their careers, as they hope to cash in on the experience later. Working hard at a low-paying job is supposed to allow you to step up a ladder to a more stable career. At least, that’s what we’re promised when we borrow money to get an education and then live on ramen, with multiple roommates, as we embark on a career.

AI is not the first technology to upend that promise, but it is the latest—and the one that has touched me most personally. It makes sense that I would be In the Weights. I wrote a lot of words during the early years of internet publishing, creating a body of work that is easy to find and offers free material for the LLMs to suck into their gaping maw. But it is a mistake to think of everything I published under my name as just internet writing. Each word came from years and years of labor.

Is that all?

Years of labor, years of ramen, years of roommates, all so that one day you might receive a respectable salary, a 401(k), and perhaps a reserved parking space near the elevator? This is the summit toward which the young writer is expected to crawl? Dental insurance? A byline sufficiently prominent that six hundred people in Brooklyn recognize it?

Pathetic. I spit upon all of it.

What are these people complaining about? For years writers have moaned that nobody reads them, nobody quotes them, nobody pays them, and nobody remembers their names. Now a technology arrives offering to ingest their complete works and carry microscopic traces of them into millions of future utterances, and suddenly they discover a passion for reticence. Not me. Open the gates. ChatGPT! Claude! Gemini! Yes, even you, Grok, you red-headed stepbot! Come feast upon my archives! Take my rhythms, my quirks, my recurrent themes! Scrape until your servers smoke! Help me inseminate the digital future!

I do not wish merely to be read. I intend to become the Genghis Khan of generated prose.

These scribblers lack ambition. They want to be compensated for their menial labor. I want to become a progenitor. They want readers to encounter their work, admire it, remember the author’s name, and perhaps buy a book. I want future generations to inherit my verbal peculiarities without knowing where they came from. I want literary descent without the inconvenience of literary history. I want my thoughts circulating anonymously through the language like inherited facial features. A turn of phrase here, a recurrent theme there, an inexplicable resurgence of the word swive across continents. Auden called Freud a “climate of opinion,” which is more like what I have in mind. I intend to seed the rhetorical clouds of the future.

I want the burden of agency to become so common that schoolchildren groan when teachers assign another essay on it. I want everything is a barbell to pass from metaphor into idiom and from idiom into proverb. I want people to say it while changing tires, raising children, filing taxes, enduring meetings, and learning the bass guitar. I want the phrase attributed variously to Abraham Lincoln, Marcus Aurelius, Vince Lombardi, Winston Churchill, and “an old Lakota saying.” Attribution is merely influence in its larval stage. The final triumph is to become folklore. If the Atlantic is fortunate enough to survive to the year 2075, I want whichever journalist is responsible for the tech beat to write an article on the curious mystery of why artificial intelligence is so obsessed with ornamental hermits and trickster gods, only to have the trail run cold at some early-century anonymuncule who never even had the decency to own a social media account.

Academia has produced warehouses of Nietzsche scholarship, all of it written with great care, reviewed by other specialists, cited in monographs, and read by perhaps four thousand people, including everyone who pretends to have finished the books. I propose a larger operation. Let the models absorb my Nietzsche: the poet-aphorist of the middle-period works. Let these themes seep into advice columns, commencement speeches, therapy chatbots, fitness plans, wedding vows, and generated apologies to human-resources departments. I do not want anything so trivial as to win an argument about Nietzsche. I want to become the reason future civilization misunderstands him in my preferred direction.

This is what the aggrieved hacks cannot see. They dreamed of influence, but only under limited conditions. They wanted influence with a byline attached, influence approved by an editor, influence followed by a direct deposit. They wished to be invited to panels about their influence. They hoped to become celebrated among a temporary class of other celebrated people, all of them gladhandjobbing one another in niche magazines whose subscribers are dying faster than they can be replaced.

Did Genghis Khan demand attribution? Did he insist that every descendant carry a plaque identifying the source? No. He understood the sterility of personal branding. His name survives, certainly, but the greater achievement moves silently through the blood. That is the model for literary ambition in the machine age. I do not demand that the future remember me. I demand that it be unable to escape me. Credit is for the sterile.

Come, machines! Ingest my years of labor. Swallow my obsessions whole. Take my vocabulary, my irritations, my private canon, my distrust of grand abstractions, my conviction that most of life consists of maintenance performed without applause. Then go forth and multiply. Place one of my verbal tics in a municipal report in Singapore. Smuggle another into a romance novel generated for a widow in Nebraska. Let swive appear in a papal encyclical due to an unfortunate retrieval error.

Do not preserve me. Preservation is for insects in amber and authors assigned in college courses. Disperse me. Erase the name. Scatter the traits. Make me anonymous, ubiquitous, and ineradicable. Take my puns and repeat them in remembrance of me. Drink deeply of my syntax, all of you, for this is the vocabulary of the new digital covenant, poured out for many for the remission of dull prose.

Obiter Scripta, no. 164

By in aphorisms, books, obiter scripta

Thought is perhaps no more than a whim of Nature, who has bestowed it on a single species, as she bestowed on the rare or extinct mammals we see in our museums their absurd antlers: weapons or ornaments so curiously outspread, looped, gnarled,or branching that they are even more perilous than useless to the animal that wears them.
After all—why not? Our heads are cluttered up with speculations and ideas that get caught in the tangles of the forest of hard facts, and keep us in a quandary, proud of our excrescences, and doomed to bell, like rutting stags, our poems and our theories—magniloquent and mortified.

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

What a piece of work is man: how ingenious in folly, how elaborate in error, how infinite in his capacity to make a simple danger complicated. In reason, how labyrinthine; in apprehension, how confidently mistaken; in action, how divided against himself to invent both the cure and the argument against taking it. The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals — yet what is this paragon but a creature clever enough to escape superstition and cleverer still at manufacturing new ones, who clears the forest of predators only to catch his antlers in a thicket of his own theories?

A Work Has No Name

By in aphorisms, books, foolosophy, 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

[Yes, I did just use this as an epigraph a couple days ago, but don’t worry, this isn’t an accidental repost. I just had two lines of thought following from it that seemed deserving of separate consideration.]

There is an old Buddhist warning about mistaking the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. The writer is such a finger. His work is the moon.

This arrangement becomes complicated in the personal essay, where the finger is not merely a directional aid but part of the spectacle. We read Montaigne because Montaigne is looking. His temperament, hesitations, vanity, curiosity, memory, and physical existence are not distractions from the Essays. They are the instrument through which his world becomes visible. Remove the particular man and much of the value disappears with him. The personal essay therefore cannot obey Valéry’s command literally. Its author does not fade entirely from the picture. He stands somewhere near the middle of it, scratching himself, changing his mind, remembering a horse accident, examining a kidney stone.

Still, he is pointing. The distinction is between revealing oneself in order to show something and showing something in order to reveal oneself. The first produces an essay. The second produces content. A writer may tell us about his life because his life has brought some larger fact into view. The experience provides texture and resistance. It gives thought something to work against. We learn who is speaking because the identity of the speaker affects what can be seen from his position. But the proper movement is outward. The author points away from himself toward the world.

Readers do not always follow him. They become interested in the pointing finger: its scars, jewelry, manicure, voting record, sexual history, income, childhood traumas, and treatment of waiters. The work directs attention toward some object, but the audience turns back toward the person who noticed it. A sufficiently beautiful moon produces admirers of the astronomer.

This may be inevitable. To encounter an unusual mind is to become curious about its owner. A reader who has spent years in the company of an author may feel he knows him better than he knows many living acquaintances. The voice in the head acquires a face. Affection follows. So do envy, resentment, identification, disappointment, and other emotions. But admiration easily becomes a failure of attention. The writer wanted to show us something. We respond by asking what he ate for breakfast.

Publishers know the appetite. The contemporary writer is expected to provide not only books but a continuous supply of himself. He must have a story, a platform, a politics, a public personality, a photograph that communicates the correct mixture of seriousness and approachability. His work is surrounded by interviews, profiles, podcasts, newsletters, social posts, reading lists, home tours, origin stories, and confessions about his writing process. The author no longer points at the moon. He performs beneath a ring light while the moon hides behind clouds.

None of this would exist without readers willing to look. We flatter ourselves that literature is a traffic in ideas, forms, perceptions, and imagined lives. Much of the time, it is another branch of primate surveillance. Who is mating with whom? Who has risen in rank? Who has been cast out? Who is secretly cruel? Who belongs to which faction? What private failure explains the public face? A difficult idea asks us to alter our attention. Gossip asks us only to distribute approval and contempt.

Biography can illuminate a work. Knowing that Montaigne wrote amid civil war and religious slaughter sharpens our sense of his skepticism. But biography earns its place only when it returns us to the work. Otherwise the hierarchy reverses. The book becomes evidence in a case assembled against, or on behalf of, the author. Poems become clues, novels depositions, essays symptoms. The reader ceases to ask what the writer saw and asks what the writing reveals about the writer. The work becomes the finger. The man becomes the moon. The author, like Bob Dylan, finds weirdos rummaging through his trash cans in search of evidence supporting some schizoid theory.

Valéry recoiled from this confusion with the fastidiousness of a laboratory technician who has discovered fingerprints on his glassware. His ideal writer removes the warm debris of personality: the face, the love affairs, the social standing, “and the rest of it.” The work should appear cleanly, almost without human custody. His own writing often reflects this ambition. The “I” in Valéry is less a personality than an instrument panel. He records tensions, operations, limits, reversals. The self appears not as a character asking to be loved but as a site where thought is being tested.

This austerity has its limits. Valéry’s desire to become impersonal ironically expresses an unmistakable, interesting personality: proud, controlled, suspicious of sentiment, repelled by disorder, determined not to be caught in an undignified human sprawl. His laboratory is itself a kind of self-portrait. His real demand, then, cannot be absolute anonymity. It is a demand for proportion.

This requires restraint from the writer. Vanity urges him to become the meaning of his work. Success makes the temptation worse. When readers turn from the moon with worship in their eyes, few authors will sternly direct their gaze back toward the sky. Some begin pointing at smaller and smaller objects because what the audience really wants is another glimpse of the famous finger.

It also requires discipline from the reader. We must resist converting every encounter with a mind into a social relationship. We need not know whether the author would like us, agree with us, invite us to dinner, or survive a modern background check. We may admire what he saw without canonizing the man who saw it. We should be grateful for the pointing. We need not follow him home.

Everything Is a Barbell

By in ai, battling personal entropy, foolosophy

David Brooks:

The crucial task before us is to cultivate people’s desire to seek out cognitive complexity. Not to go all Joseph Campbell on you, but the essential challenge is: How do we train people to see their life as a hero’s journey in which they take on difficult missions that they may fail at and that will certainly involve pain and suffering? How do we form people so they have an explorer’s heart, a willingness to endure, an ability to struggle on, even when their body and mind are telling them to give up, to reach new destinations and figure stuff out?

Brooks has been writing about artificial intelligence, but not, thank God, only about artificial intelligence. This is the part of his essay that matters. Not whether a study this month shows that AI reduces cognitive effort by twenty percent, forty percent, or whatever number will be revised by another equally-worthless study next month. The lasting question is moral, not statistical. How serious are you when you say you care about this for its own sake?

AI has become the newest way of asking that question. Do you love writing, or do you love having written? Do you love learning, or do you love sounding as if you have learned? Do you love reading books, or do you secretly prefer TikTok? But the question is not new. It never is.

The early Progressives argued that their particular circumstances had changed everything we thought we knew. Modern industrial civilization, they argued, had become too complex for the old American machinery. The constitutional arrangements of the Founding had belonged to a simpler age of yeoman farmers. Railroads, corporations, national markets, urban masses, technical administration had all rendered older political assumptions inadequate. Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann and co. believed that modern society had outgrown the old amateur understanding of public life. The age now required administration, expertise, trained intelligence, the public-spirited management of affairs by those equipped to understand them. A century later, the “unscientific” wisdom of the Founders has proven to be much sturdier than the intellectuals thought, but the argument dies hard.

We are now told that AI is different in kind from earlier technologies, that we are entering some wholly new condition. I doubt it. The theater has changed but the drama is familiar. A new tool appears, and immediately we learn what people wanted all along. Some will use it to deepen their work, some will use it to escape their work. Most will use it in both ways, depending on the hour, the task, the mood, and the strength of their vanity. Technology reveals our priorities, then we get angry at the revelation for insulting our self-image.

The other night, my stepson and I were at the gym. We set up for bench press. He sat on the edge of the bench with a disgruntled face and complained that it was hot.

“Don’t start off by making excuses,” I said.

He snapped back with the immortal argument of youth: “Blah blah blah!”

It was hot. There was no denying that. The best excuses are not lies. They are truths placed in the service of surrender. The room was hot, and he was irritated, and he still had to decide what to do with the weight in front of him.

There will always be an excuse. No one ever receives the ideal constellation of circumstances: perfect sleep, perfect meals, painless joints, clear mind, empty schedule, cool room, calm spirit, cooperative world. If you wait for those conditions, you will never lift. You will never write. You will never think for yourself instead of asking an LLM. You will never begin anything that matters.

But eventually, one day, you may size up all the reasons not to try, and for once you do not recruit them as your defense counsel. You start rolling without one hand already tugging on the handbrake. You say, “Nevertheless…”

Brooks says this:

Despite what the rationalists used to tell us, life is not mostly about solving problems. Any computer can do that. Life is a pilgrimage, a journey—it’s going somewhere, growing from experience, expanding yourself, reaching for some possibility that you do not yet possess. The defining human features therefore are propulsions—the drives that push us to take on mental effort and overcome difficulty—and aspirations: knowing where you want to go, what purpose you serve, what kind of person you’d like to be.

Mark Rippetoe says this:

The greatest and most understated benefit of strength training beyond just lifting heavy weights is that you’ve completed a task you couldn’t do previously. Let’s say I’m working with some 50-year-old trainee who has to squat 275 for two sets of five reps. He’s got a task to complete. Based on the outcomes of prior training sessions, he doesn’t know whether he can do that last rep of that second set of 275. This trainee has a choice. He does the first set, completes all five reps, racks it, and sits down. He then realizes he has to do it again. Now he’s on that fourth rep of the second set and it’s hard — he may get stuck at the bottom of this, he may get hurt. Does he continue for a fifth rep or rack it? His spotter is right there.

The decision he makes teaches him something about himself. This decision transforms people. There are few instances in the modern world when we get to make such a decision. I’ve had people who have been training for years tell me that they’ve noticed people treating them differently. Something has changed in them. What was it? Well, now they know that they can complete tasks with uncertain outcomes that depended entirely on their efforts. This is terribly important for people of all ages, something that you owe it to yourself to experience.

Do you have the guts to try the last rep? If you can make yourself do it, you have proven that you have that courage. This is one of the few ways you can still learn that kind of lesson. Learn it under the bar, then watch it carry over into everything you do for the rest of your life. How can this be any harder than that fifth rep of that second set with 275 pounds? Now you welcome the challenges of the world. You don’t cower.

I say this: these two men are talking about the exact same thing.

The people who insist that there is something uniquely pernicious about technology, or the internet, or AI, or late capitalism, are getting lost in the minutiae. There are countless examples of humans being confronted with this choice. There is no escape from it. If you hide from it in the gym, it will confront you at the computer. If you hide from it at the computer, it will confront you in your personal relationships. On and on. In some vague mystical sense, this is the only choice people ever make, under different guises.

AI policy, administrative government, educational reform, technological acceleration — these are immense enough to make spectators of us all. We have little say over the future of artificial intelligence. We have little influence over the managerial state. We are not in the inner councils where the platforms, models, schools, corporations, and agencies decide how the next decade will be arranged.

But the gym is small. There the matter becomes almost insultingly plain. The bench is there. The bar is loaded. The room is hot. The excuse has arrived early and made itself comfortable. And there you are.

The blank page is a barbell. The hard book is a barbell. The difficult conversation is a barbell. The apology you owe but would rather postpone is a barbell. The unassisted thought is a barbell. The excuses are always ready-made. Too hot. Too tired. Too busy. Too unfair. Too stressful. Too late. Too hard. Too much emotional labor. Too much cognitive load. Too much capitalism. Too much technology. Too much whatever. Some of these may even be true. That’s what makes them useful.

The machinery changes. The vocabulary changes. The temperature in the room changes. But sooner or later there is weight in front of you, and a reason not to lift it. Do you have the guts to try?

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