The question is no longer whether writers use generative technology. It is what remains of the writer after the technology becomes indispensable.
The question is no longer whether writers use generative technology. It is what remains of the writer after the technology becomes indispensable.
Still here. Still thinking. Still refusing to disappear.
Expressing ideas with, without, through, or as technological mediation isn’t the issue. The trouble begins with what we expect that mediation to deliver. The moment we try to instrumentalise the whole field—writing, sharing, signalling, transmitting—we quietly become the instrument. We become the relay. The medium. A carrier for systems and incentives that were never ours […]
It is a dying practise. Even as automation bludgeons narrative salience and nuance into the cognitively and culturally low-functioning relational slurry that it has now become, our thought patterns and socioeconomic reflexes adapt and align along with it. Try writing without AI. Feel the difference. That is natural intelligence. That is life.
Loneliness begins in language. Not just in what cannot be said, but in what is said and does not arrive. A sentence needs uptake to become real. When no one receives it, the words complete their neat arc and fall back like rain on sealed glass. The echo confirms existence yet withholds communion. The world […]
Charles Bukowski was born in 1920, in Andernach, Germany, and died in Los Angeles in 1994. Most of his life unspooled across the raw edges of the American city—the factories, the post offices, the rented rooms with peeling walls and no guarantees. He worked jobs that broke bodies and wrote about the things polite society […]
Somewhere along the way, scholarship stopped wondering. It began repeating. Rote, recursive, self-preserving patterns. You can hear it, like a machine turning over in an empty hall—papers, citations, more papers—output for the sake of throughput. It’s not malice. It’s momentum. Inertia disguised as rigour. What’s fascinating is how this very pattern—this repetition—is the mechanism by […]
I have, it seems, made something of a life in words and the variously disambiguating compositional artefacts of language or thought (and other such conceptual melodies) with which we each and all make our ways and narrative meanings in or as this world, but I have not found happiness. There is an irremediable darkness here […]
Unread letters, like forgotten dreams acquire as much literary value in their obscurity as they do an equivalent degree of emotional gravitas. There was a time when people wrote thoughtful, reflective and intelligent letters to each other and in all the playfully-constructive ambiguities of language and meaning there sought to explore, discover and redefine themselves […]
Context: The Great American Novel will not be written by a Computer It’s a great point and notwithstanding that hard-core reductionist types often enough give the piñata of John Searle’s Chinese Room a comprehensively passive aggressive thrashing with pitchforks and torches, it is an irreducible fact under the current ascendant paradigm. Semantic complexity in either […]
The greatest barrier to truly influential or eloquent prose style is that which occurs when a writer assumes (or aspires to) unique and separate – effectively isolated, discontinuous – individuation as inalienable symbolic possession of the creative art and act. Words as a living embodiment of complexity quite naturally express themselves both through (and as) […]
Context: Logical Fallacies Curiously, though, logical fallacies have a largely unacknowledged and arguably pivotal role to play in the successfully sustainable continuity of cultural (as much as cognitive) communications systems. What is inaccurate or even outright absurd often carries more information entropy and influence than that which is, strictly speaking, factual or true. It is […]