Excellent essay on the uncanny valley that AI writing is in today and how it likely won’t be long before it’s out of it. This was a somewhat heartening conclusion:
Human writing will respond the way handicrafts always have to industrialization: by becoming a luxury good. Mechanical watches did not die when quartz watches arrived; rather, mechanical watches became less accurate and far more expensive. They are worn to signal that the owner can afford imprecision. Expect artisanal typos. Expect certified, free-range sentences that are lovingly hand-reared and traceable to a named writer with visible deadline damage.
Good to hear as I start a new blog in 2026. However, he doesn’t explicitly say for whom the hand-crafted writing is a luxury, the reader or the writer. OCT 1 | REPLY
The most important part of Beale’s speech is the part that is almost never quoted: it’s the part where he explicitly eschews any kind of direct political action. Instead, the culmination of this scene is everyone performing a meme. Yelling “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” out their windows. Success for Diane Christensen was measured by whether people were yelling in far-flung affiliate cities like Sandusky and Baton Rouge. It was, in many ways, TikTok before the person who dreamed the idea had even been born.
Today we are surrounded by a million “mad prophet” Howard Beales now served up customized and personalized to your exact demographic ideological aesthetic micropreference on screens of every size telling us that they don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.
It’s difficult for me to give a singular answer when I’m asked what’s my favorite band or book or film, but on that last score Network is a strong contender. It’s funny how people sometimes mistake Beale for a hero. SEP 26 | REPLY
[Social media] will only show us so much. They excel at finding the stuff that may be interesting to everyone, but they are virtually impotent at promoting what would be truly fascinating to a few.
The sweetest stuff has to be unearthed and recommended by people we trust. Which is why everyone should blog. When you blog there are two types of entries:
The Post: your stuff. The Link: someone else’s stuff.
There’s no reason why people couldn’t share on social media the same stuff they link on blogs. The reasons it doesn’t work in practice are the status-seeking incentives engendered by visible metrics such as views and likes, and the algorithm’s intervention in what you see to keep you engaged for longer.
Nevertheless, this 2009 post is inspiring me today. Blanc makes the case not just for blogging, but for making link posts a first-class citizen on blogs. SEP 26 | REPLY