Writer's Diary
1/24/25
When eras and aesthetics change, when markets shift, grifters are separated from artists, opportunists from visionaries.
Thinking isn’t internalized conversation. Thinking is pattern-matching, anticipatory metaphor, geomapping the contours of a symbol, designating those contours, and developing a kinetic relationship between the body’s energies and the prelingual shape of ideas. Discourse comes much later.
How nice it would be, I think, to stop wanting things, to sit still and take pleasure in the pure presence of the mind—contemplating itself, the extended moment of intellectual perception, the ambient presence of the fire, and the snow-deadened, unrushed city.
For the last decade or so—perhaps even longer—there have been clear rules for succeeding in the culture industry: how to make movies, sell books, or become a celebrated artist or playwright. For the most part, there was an algorithm, and many ran it shamelessly, though unconsciously, to acquire cultural capital. I feel like a lot of creatives who were hot in 2017—or if not hot, then at least successful—are struggling now. If they’ve already cashed in, they feel a little useless. The rituals, spells, and charms that once worked don’t anymore. The paradigm in which they ascended has crumbled, and the one that has replaced it is, to some degree, the antithesis of what they built their identity upon. What do they do? Keep muttering the old spells, expecting the sky to burst into rain.
The information economy will be taken over by AI, but an insight economy will be born.
But I’m not sure if that economy will be accessible to many. Bureaucratic jobs—most notoriously, perhaps, DI jobs—paid people outrageously well to abolish technical jargon, to master it, and to dominate with it. AI can spit that kind of work out now, endlessly.
Lawyers, I think, won’t disappear, especially not trial lawyers, but much legal work will become automatic. Medical work, diagnostic tasks, lobbying, consulting—the bulk of actual laptop labor these jobs require—will be done by AI. This means that anyone unable to synthesize information and generate insight will no longer be employable in their field.
Writing work will barely exist.
Anything about technical matters, finance, astrology, psychology—easily automated. AI will put cultural reportage within reach too—and not just cultural reportage but narrative, legal, and lifestyle content. Even the “what I did with my Friday night in New York” stuff—everything unsold—will get gobbled up by the algorithm. There are only so many bars and parties: AI will figure out how to simulate being young in New York. Even our strongest writers will be, what, 80%, 90%, maybe 95% or 99% replicable?1
This is why, secondarily, I wonder if too many people are giving in to the temptation to write on Substack—not to read, not to communicate, but to be heard, to get the like, rather than to contemplate. We should put much more of our writing in letters and diaries, on paper. We shouldn’t feed so much to the algorithm.