bulgur

Capitalism broke it, not blogs. Blogs, in the original sense, are mostly harmless. The format isn’t the problem. Chronology bias can be an issue, but you can overcome this by building up a store of essays that link to each other. One of the great things hyperlinks can do is break our innate chronology biases, which the internet didn’t create.

Whole books could be written about how capitalism destroyed the web, but one sleeper culprit is the collapse of the middle-class job market. You need a fucking national reputation just to get what would have been considered a regular job 20 years ago. This results in a ubiquitous quest for attention by mostly talentless people doing stupid shit for attention. And now we have this adversarial culture where sincere content can’t get through.

There’s a problem here: financial nihilism is the exact correct position. If the numbers stop flowing (we decided that numbers “flow”) because a private government called an employer chooses to turn off your income, your life rapidly becomes dogshit until you can convince some different stranger to turn it back on again. Why? Lots of reasons but not a single good one. It’s just how society works. It makes no fucking sense; it just is. The numbers just are.

Does this mean that life itself isn’t worth living? No, not at all. But capitalist society is worth overthrowing, even at a possible price of one’s life, because the objective truth is that life under capitalism goes into negative utility territory pretty easily and for almost all of us, usually by about 30. It is in fact because life is valuable that capitalism is so intolerable.

It’s not. The world is run by people who seriously think that we’ll have the means soon to terraform Mars (we won’t) or at least put a million people there, or who at least believe that if they promise that, the pours will forgive them for what they are doing to this planet.

One of HN’s old favorites wrote a long essay in which he predicts that professional writing up to the level of the bestselling novel will be done by AIs, although real literature (by his idiosyncratic definition) will not be. The essay is here: https://antipodes.substack.com/p/ai-will-kill-literature-and... . He argues that the respected curators and institutions of literature and art will actually become targets of book spammers just because they are hated so much. It makes me wonder if this sort of thing is already happening.

CharGPT introduced a mistake, unless ChatGPT is claiming itself to be a non-native English speaker.

Here’s a long but interesting essay by a credible AI programmer arguing that AI will be writing bestsellers by 2030, although “true literature” will still be written by humans: https://antipodes.substack.com/p/ai-will-kill-literature-and...