Digifesto

I miss writing.

For most of my formative years, writing was an important activity in my life. I would try to articulate what I cared about, the questions I had, what I was excited for. Often this was done as an intellectual pursuit, something para-academic, a search for answers beyond any curriculum, and without a clear goal in mind.

I wrote both in private and “in public”. Privately, in paper journals and letters to friends, then emails. “In public”, on social media of various forms. LiveJournal was a fantastic host for pseudonymous writing, and writing together and intimately with others was a shared pastime. These were the ‘old internet’ days, when the web was imagined as a frontier and creative space.

The character of writing changed as the Web, and its users, matured. Facebook expanded from its original base of students to include, well, everybody. Twitter had its “Weird Twitter” moment, which then passed as it became an increasingly transactional platform. Every public on-line space became a LinkedIn.

Instagram is, for a writer, depressing. Extremely popular and influential, but with hardly any written ideas, by design. YouTube can accommodate writing, but only with the added production value of performance, recording, and so on. It’s a thicker medium that makes writing, per se, seem small, or shallow.

The Web made it clear that all text is also data. Writing is a human act, full of meaning, but digital text, the visible trace of that act, is numerical. Text that is published online is at best the body of a message with so much other metadata. The provenance is, when the system is working, explicit. The message is both intrinsically numerical — encoded in bits of information — and extrinsically numerical: its impact, reach, engagement, is scored; it is indexed and served as a result to queries based on its triangulated position in the vast space of all possible text.

Every day we are inundated with content, and within the silicon cage of our historical moment, people labor to produce new content, to elevate their place in the system of ranks and numbers. I remember, long ago, I would write for an imagined audience. Sometimes this audience was only myself. This was writing. I think writing is rarer now. Many people create content and the audience for that content is the system of ranks and numbers. I miss writing.

Generative Artificial Intelligence is another phase of this evolution. Text is encoded, intrinsically, into bits. Content is sorted, extrinsically, into tables of impact, engagement, conversion, relevance, and so on. But there had been a mystery, still, about the way words were put together, and what they meant when they came in this or that order.

That mystery has been solved, they say. See, my looking at all the text at once, each word or phrase can be seen as a vector in a high dimensional space, relative to all other texts. The meaning of the text is where it is in that space, as understood by a silent, mechanical observer of all texts available. Relative to a large language model, the language in one person’s mind is small, shallow.

Generative AI now excels at creating content. The silicon cage may soon start evicting its prisoners. Their labor isn’t needed any more. The numbers can take care of themselves.

I remember how to write. I now realize that what is special about writing is not that it produces text — this is now easily done by machines. It is that it is a human act that transforms the human as writer.

I wonder for how long humanity will remember how to read.