41 years ago, Samuel Lipman wrote that an artist’s life is a “constant—and constantly losing—battle” against one’s own limits. That image has lasted because print culture taught us to imagine the artist as a solitary figure whose worth is measured by the perfection of a single, final work. Print fixed texts in place, elevated the individual author, and made loneliness part of the creative job description.
That world is slipping away. And with it, the tortured artist.
Twittering Machine (Die Zwitscher-Maschine) is a 1922 watercolor with gouache, pen-and-ink, and oil transfer on paper by Swiss-German painter Paul Klee
LLMs have made competent expression abundant. The blank page no longer terrifies; anyone can produce something fluent and polished. When craft becomes cheap, suffering loses its meaning as a marker of artistic seriousness. What becomes scarce instead is the willingness to take a risk—not in private, but in public, where a stance can fail, provoke, or be reshaped by others.
Venkatesh Raorecently argued that authorship is no longer about labor but about courage: the courage to commit to a line of thought and accept the consequences of being wrong. In an era of infinite variations, the decisive act is not creation but commitment. The value lies in staking something of yourself on an idea that may not survive.
This shift is reshaping where culture is made. In what I’ve called the “Cloister Web,” people draft and explore ideas in semi-private creative rooms before carrying only a few into the open. LLMs make experimentation cheap; they also make commitment expensive. The hard part now is choosing which idea you are willing to be accountable for.
As the burden of execution drops, something else rises: genuine collaboration. Not just collaboration with models, but with other humans. Andrew Gelman, reflecting on Lipman in a recent StatModeling post, noted that scientists, too, feel versions of this pressure of the solitary creator. In science, the burden rarely falls on one person. The struggle is distributed across collaborative projects that outlive any single contributor.
Groups can explore bolder directions than any one creator working alone. Risk spreads, ideas compound, and the scale of what can be attempted expands. The solitary genius was an artifact of print; the collaborative creative lab is the natural form of the world we are entering.
This leads to a claim many will resist but few will be able to ignore: the single author is beginning to collapse as a cultural technology. What will matter in the coming decades is not the finished artifact but the evolving line of thought carried forward by teams willing to take risks together.
The tortured artist belonged to an age defined by scarcity, perfection, and solitude. Today’s creator faces a different task: to choose a risk worth taking and the collaborators worth taking it with. The work endures not because it is flawless, but because a group has committed to pushing it forward.
It was a small announcement on an innocuous page about “spring cleaning”. The herald, some guy with the kind of name that promised he was all yours. Four sentences you only find because you were already looking for a shortcuts through life. A paragraph, tidy as a folded handkerchief, explained that a certain popular reader of feeds was retiring in four months’ time. Somewhere in the draughty back alleys of the web, a small god cleared his throat. Once he had roared every morning in a thousand offices. Now, when people clicked for their daily liturgy, the sound he made was… domesticated.
He is called ArrEsEs by those who enjoy syllables. He wears a round orange halo with three neat ripples in it. Strictly speaking, this is an icon1, but gods are not strict about these things. He presides over the River of Posts, which is less picturesque than it sounds and runs through everyone’s house at once. His priests are librarians and tinkerers and persons who believe in putting things in order so they can be pleasantly disordered later. The temple benches are arranged in feeds. The chief sacrament is “Mark All As Read,” which is the kind of absolution that leaves you lighter and vaguely suspicious you’ve got away with something.
Guide for Constructing the Letter S from Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta or The Model Book of Calligraphy (15611596) by Georg Bocskay and Joris Hoefnagel. Original from The Getty. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.
There was a time the great city-temples kept a candle lit for him right on their threshold. The Fox of Fire invited him in and called it Live Bookmarks.2 The moldable church, once a suit, then a car, then a journey, in typical style stamped “RSS” beside the address like a house number. The Explorer adopted the little orange beacon with the enthusiasm of someone who has been told there will be cake. The Singers built him a pew and handed out hymnals. You could walk into almost any shrine and find his votive lamp glowing: “The river comes this way.” Later, accountants, the men behind the man who was yours, discovered that candles are unmonetizable and, one by one, the lamps were tidied into drawers that say “More…”.
ArrEsEs has lineage. Long before he knocked on doors with a bundle of headlines, there was Old Mother Press, the iron-fingered goddess of moveable type, patron of ink that bites and paper that complains. Her creed was simple: get the word out. She marched letters into columns and columns into broadsides until villages woke up arguing the same argument.3* ArrEsEs is her great-grandchild—quick-footed, soft-spoken—who learned to carry the broadsheet to each door at once and wait politely on the mat. He still bears her family look: text in tidy rows, dates that mind their place, headlines that know how to stand up straight.**
Four months after the Announcement, the big temple shut its doors with a soft click. The congregation wandered off in small, stubborn knots and started chapels in back rooms with unhelpful names like OGRP4. ArrEsEs took to traveling again, coat collar up, suitcase full of headlines, knocking on back doors at respectable intervals. “No hurry,” he would say, leaving the bundle on the step. “When you’re ready.” The larger gods of the Square ring bells until you come out in your slippers; this one waits with the patience of bread.
Like all small gods, he thrives on little rites. He smiles when you put his name plainly on your door: a link that says feed without a blush. He approves of bogrolls blogrolls, because they are how villages point at one another and remember they are villages. He warms to OPML, which is a pilgrim’s list people swap like seed packets. He’s indulgent about the details—/rss.xml, /atom.xml, /feed, he will answer to all of them—but he purrs (quietly; dignified creature) for a cleanly formed offering and a sensible update cadence5.
His miracles are modest and cannot be tallied on a quarterly slide. He brings things in the order they happened. He does silence properly. The river arrives in the morning with twenty-seven items; you read two, save three, and let the rest drift by with the calm certainty that rivers do not take offense. He remembers what you finished. He promises tomorrow will come with its own bundle, and if you happen to be away, he will keep the stack neat and not wedge a “You Might Also Like” leaflet between your socks.
These days, though, ArrEsEs is lean at the ribs. The big estates threw dams across his tributaries and called them platforms. Good water disappeared behind walls; the rest was coaxed into ornamental channels that loop the palace and reflect only the palace. Where streams once argued cheerfully, they now mutter through sluices and churn a Gloomwheel that turns and turns without making flour—an endless thumb-crank that insists there is more, and worse, if you’ll just keep scrolling. He can drink from it, but it leaves a taste of tin and yesterday’s news.
A god’s displeasure tells you more than his blessings. His is mild. If you hide the feed, he grows thin around the edges. If you build a house that is only a façade until seven JSters haul in the furniture, he coughs and brings you only the headline and a smell of varnish6. If you replace paragraphs with an endless corridor, he develops the kind of seasickness that keeps old sailors ashore. He does not smite. He sulks, which is worse, because you may not notice until you wonder where everyone went.
Still, belief has a way of pooling in low places. In the quiet hours, the little chapels hum: home pages with kettles on, personal sites that remember how to wave, gardeners who publish their lists of other gardeners. Somewhere, a reader you’ve never met presses a small, homely button that says subscribe. The god straightens, just a touch. He is gentler than his grandmother who rattled windows with every edition, but the family gift endures. If you invite him, tomorrow he will be there, on your step, with a bundle of fresh pages and a polite cough. You can let him in, or make tea first. He’ll wait. He always has.
Heavily edited sloptraption.
He maintains it’s saffron, which is what halos say when they are trying to be practical ↩︎
The sort of feature named by a librarian, which is to say, both accurate and doomed. ↩︎
Not to be confused with the software that borrowed her title and a fair chunk of her patience. ↩︎
As part of the Contraptions book club we will be reading the Essays of Montaigne. I actually started to read the Donald Frame translations, but felt I needed more context. In the book club, Paul Millerd had recommended Sarah Blackwell’s book on the life of Montaigne. I just finished it and I was left feeling rather warm.
Honorable Mr. Cat by Helen Hyde
More:
Original public domain image from Art Institute of Chicago
In contrast I was left rather cold and unsure by a recent podcast on a recent book by Byung-Chul Han. The book is titled The Crisis of Narration and covers the idea that we have lost the ability to tell good stories. Stories, Han says, create a shared reality instead stories have been turned into a commodity to create consumers. Storytelling has become storyselling. As far as I know, Han doesn’t offer any solutions. Social media has turned a dark corner but it would have been nice to know what we can do, if anything. Montaigne seems to offer some relief.
Being literally the first person to write essays, and btw a cat’s person, Montaigne writes in a way that one could think of as storyselling. But you look deeper and it turns out to not be the case. He writes in a frank and meandering way that reminds of the old internet. Dead for 500 years, M seems more real as a person than the influencers ever could.
Now I just happen to have come across these two sources in a temporal coincidence, so, to quote Montaigne, what do I know, but writing and thinking like Montaigne could be the antidote to Han’s doom. Maybe we don’t need a global story thread, but knowing about how you thwarted the bugs in your balcony garden would create a sense of liveness that social media has stolen from us.
I’ll be reading Don Quixote and Montaigne’s essays over the next two months and I’m certain my views will change. Right now, I’m thinking having the average, mediocre, lens to life will take us through these dark days.
I leave you with two wonderful quotes (obviously about cats) from MdM:
“When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her.”
“In nine lifetimes, you’ll never know as much about your cat as your cat knows about you.”
In his substack post today, Venkatesh Rao wrote about reading and writing in the age of LLMs as playing and making toys respectively. In one part he writes about how the dopamine feedback loop from writing drove his switch from engineering to writing. For him, writing has ludic, play-like, qualities.
Japanese vintage original woodblock print of birds and butterfly from Yatsuo no tsubaki (1860-1869) by Taguchi Tomoki.
I have made almost all my “career” decisions as a function of play. I originally started off with a deep love of plants, how to grow them and their impact on the world. I was convinced I was going to have a lot of fun. I did have some. My wonderful undergrad professor literally hand held me through my first experiments growing tobacco plants from seeds. But that was about it. My next experiment was with woody plants and growing the seeds alone took 6 months, and by the end I had 4 measly leaves to experiment with. I quickly switched to cell biology.
This one went a bit better and I stayed with the medium through PhD. Although I was having sufficient aha moments, I knew in the first year that it was still a bit slow. What rescued me was my refusal to do manual analysis. I loved biology but I refused to sit and do analysis manually. Luckily, I had picked up sufficient programming skills.
I could reasonably automate, the analysis workflow. It was difficult at first but the error messages came at the rate I needed them to. I found new errors viscerally rewarding, it was now in game territory. The analysis still held meaning, it wasn’t for some random A/B testing or some Leet code thing. No, this mattered.
Machine learning, deep learning, LLMs, and their applications in bio continue to enchant me. I can explore even more with the same effort and time. I interact with biology at the rate of dopamine feedback I need. I have found my ludic frequency.
Years ago, maybe a decade even, I fell in love with this software called Scrivener. I could never justify buying it because I didn’t actually write. But having that software would represent a little bit of the identity I would like to have, a writer. The Fourth of July long weekend gave me a running start. The plan was to write every day for a month. If I did, I would buy Scrivener. This was going quite well, then I couldn’t write for two days.
I had fallen off the wagon. But hey, I have a wagon. Writing for twenty days isn’t nothing. Like David Allen says, getting back on the wagon is what it’s all about. Falling off happens because life happens. And life, happens to everybody. So, hey I’m back.
Being that this is part of the SoP, the question is of course what is the protocol? Robert goes much deeper than just the protocol of writing poetry and being a poet. He gives two equations for doing your life’s work and to build the self. I won’t reproduce those equations here, you should watch the talk. Here’s the gist of the poeting/writing protocol though:
To be a poet is observing the change in self: even when you are not writing you are noticing your inner environment, your outer environment and what you have read.
When you start to write, the change in self produces the writing, synthesis.
The writing is now part of the change in the self.
Sum of all noticing and synthesis is your life’s work
The self is is constructed, Robert says on the last day but I think its constructed continuously, through all the iterations of work.
Tyler Cowen, who if nothing else, is a prolific wrote a similar, though not as compact, set in 2019.
Zooming out, this applies to all work not just writing. Showing up and getting back on the wagon is where it all coalesces. But where am I going? To me, building wagons is as important as going somewhere with potential for something new, even if the path is uncertain. Pointing in the direction of maximal interestingness .
This need for exploration and the support from constancy is captured well in the song Life in a Wind : “One foot in front of the other, all you gotta do, brother […] Live life in the wind, take flight on a whim”
* The Scrivener team seems to understand this well. Their trial isn’t a consecutive thirty days, but thirty days of use 🙂
I don’t have any fun when I use LLMs to write. It may have perceived utility: popping out a LinkedIn article or two everyday. But I bet no one is actually reading. It’s a strip mall for a thumb stroll.
LLMs suck at writing. The summaries that LLMs give with the “Deep Research” are so poor in quality that I start to skim it. Yes, I skim the thing that is already a summary.
Let’s do a small experiment using the Harry G. Frankfurt Essay On Bullshit:
Here are HGF’s opening lines:
“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share.”
Now here is ChatGPT o3, with the advantage of having HGF in the training data and extra contextualizing from me “theory of bullshit”:
Prompt: write me an introductory paragraph on the theory of bullshit
Result: “Bullshit isn’t just lying gone sloppy; it’s a distinct communicative strategy built on indifference to truth. Where the liar knows the facts and works to conceal or invert them, the bullshitter treats truth-value as irrelevant raw material—selecting, mixing, or inventing claims to achieve an effect (status, alignment, vibe) rather than to inform. The result is epistemic pollution: signals that…”
Look! It’s the secret flag of “content”: “Blah isn’t just X; Blah is Y”.
AI generated flag. As dead as the text on it is wrong.
I cannot assimilate this, it definitely can’t help me synthesize anything. There is always better human writing even if it is poorly written. It has a certain aliveness, and that aliveness is contagious enthusiasm. Vibe coding I can understand, you can see bad output in the final result. Vibe coding still manages to change something in my mind: knowing what I don’t want.
I don’t mind people using AI at all, I use it alllll the time. Writing with LLMs is no just fun. All this prompting and almost nothing changes in my mind. When an AI rearranges your thoughts it does not rearrange your brain.
In 1986, David S. Landes wrote the essay, ‘What Do Bosses Really Do?’. He argues that the historical role of the ‘boss’ was an essential function for organizing production and connecting producers to markets. Digital platforms have become the new bosses. Platforms have the same functions of market creation, labor specialization, and management, but they have replaced the physical factory floor with algorithmic management. While their methods are novel, platforms are the direct descendants of the merchant-entrepreneurs and factory owners Landes described, solving the same historical problems of production in remarkably similar ways.
Design for a Teacup (1880-1910) painting in high resolution by Noritake Factory. Original from The Smithsonian Institution. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.
So, why am I posting this on my own blog and not on a “platform”? I don’t view writing as a financial transaction. It is a hobby. By putting the financialization lens front and center, platforms are killing the mental space for hobbies. When you monetize tweets, you create incentive to craft tweets that create engagement in particular ways. Usually not healthy ways.
If we think of old media or traditional manufacturing, we can compare them to guilds. Guilds kept up prices and controlled production. With the simplification of tasks factories could hire workers who weren’t as highly skilled but didn’t need to be. Nowadays, why should any newspaper or TV channel’s output be limited by the amount of airtime or page space they have?
Platforms take unskilled and train them. We are in the age of specialization of ideas. Akin to the “the advantage of disaggregating a productive process” Platforms leverage this by having many producers explore the same space through millions of different angles. This allows the platform to “purchase exactly that precise quantity of [skill] which is necessary for each process” —paying a viral star a lot and a niche creator a little, perfectly matching reward to market impact. Which is to say platforms make money through whatever sticks.
In Landes’s essay, Management became specialized, today management will become algorithmized. Platforms abstract away the issues that factory owners had such as embezzlement of resources, slacking off etc. Platforms don’t care how much or how little you produce, or even if you produce. If you do, the cash is yours (after a cut of course).
This may lead to a visceral reaction against platforms. This week when Substack raised a substantial amount they called the writers “the heroes of culture”. This should ring at least a tiny alarm in your head. The platform’s rhetoric of the creator-as-hero is a shrewd economic arrangement. In the putting-out system, the merchant-manufacturer “was able to shift capital expenditures (plant and equipment) to the worker”. Platforms do the same with creative risk. The writer, artist, or creator invests all the time and labor—the “capital” of creation—upfront. If they fail, they bear the entire loss. The platform, like the putter-outer, only participates in the upside, taking its cut from the successful ‘heroes’ while remaining insulated from the failures of the many.
So what do platforms really do? They have resurrected the essential role of the boss for the digital age. They are the merchant-manufacturers who build the roads to market, and they are the factory owners who discipline production—not with overseers, but with incentive algorithms. By casting the creator as the hero, they obscure their own power and shift the immense risks of creative work onto the individual. While appearing to be mere background IT admins, they are, in fact, the central organizers of production, demonstrating that even in the 21st century, the fundamental challenges of coordinating labor and capital persist, and solving them remains, as it was in the 18th century, a very lucrative role.
What Do Bosses Really Do?, David S. Landes, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Sep., 1986), pp. 585-623 (39 pages). https://www.jstor.org/stable/2121476
Yesterday I wrote about good documentation opening doors to options you didn’t realize you had. In the book On Writing Well Zinsser mentions how one of his key tools is the dictionary. That got me curious about the limitations about the dictionaries available to us. This is not just about the dictionary on the bookshelf but the ones that we have in-context access to. The ones on our computer and phones.
In my searches I came across this post by James Somers who references another great writer John McPhee and his article Draft No. 4. McPhee shows us how the dictionary is to be used. The crux is that modern dictionaries have taken all the fun out and left all the crud in. The old way is the proper way to play with words.
J.S ends with instructions on how to install the (apparently perfect) 1913 version of Webster’s dictionary. Unfortunately, his instructions are a little out of date. Which is to be accepted since he’s talking to people 10 years in his future. Luckily for us Corey Ward from speaking to use from just 5 years ago had updated instructions for MacOS that mostly still work.
I’m updating Corey’s instructions below:
Get the latest release for Webster’s 1913 from the Github Releases page for WebsterParser. Download the file: websters-1913.dictionary.zip and unzip it. You will see a folder like file with the extension .dictionary.
Open the Dictionary app on your computer, and select File > Open Dictionaries Folder from the menu, or navigate manually to ~/Library/Dictionaries.
Unzip the file, and move the resulting websters-1913.dictionary file into the dictionaries folder that you opened.
Restart the Dictionary app if it is open (important), then open Dictionary>Settings (⌘,). At the bottom of the list of dictionaries you should see Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (1913) in the list. Check the box, and optionally drag it up in the list to the order you’d like.
The dictionary is also available online if you don’t want to install.
The best option is probably the OED . It’s expensive, but you may get access through your library.
Through J.S. I also discovered this interesting site: Language Log. They get really deep into language. I mean how much can you write about Spinach, apparentlya lot.
I’d love to get back to a world where the internet was used in its raw form. If you are reading my posts, please do comment, share your site/blog and your posts. Social media is also good. More from Somers.
The wave towered over me. Then the sound filled my ears. Not the calm breath of the waves; but it was surf music. I was maybe 3. Song names and artist names were beyond me. There was only the blue-green wave and the twang of the guitar.
I have chased music all my life. Just had to figure out the tools. The record player and the giant speakers taught my first lesson: pressing buttons was joy. In my pursuit I learned in about records, tapes, CDs, mp3, flac, streaming, Napster, torrents, Winamp, VLC, blanks, CD-R/RWs, compression, bit rates, conversion, transfer, backups, VPN, networking, impedance matching, DACs, amplifiers, calibration, ARC, fibre, buying, licensing, and streaming in approximate order.
I discovered that they were called The Ventures by accident. Late in the college years I watched Pulp Fiction and wanted all the music. This one wasn’t quite home but it was the right street. It was surf music.
The hunt was on. Only a notion of the song and the confidence that I would know it when I heard it. I didn’t know the name of the album only that it had a big wave on the cover. It took me the better part of 6 months, on slow DSL, trawling all the sources I knew. Listening for that drum fade-in. Then one day I found it.
It’s been decades since the record player stopped spinning. I’ve moved a dozen times, the records were lost. I am the default A/V guy and love the role. Now I live in one of the surfiest places on the planet, the current still pulls but I walk, don’t run.
Traversing through human history, even in the last two decades, we see a rapid increase in the accessibility of knowledge. The purpose of language, and of course all communication is to transfer a concept from one system to another. For humans this ability to transfer concepts has been driven by advancements in technology, communication, and social structures and norms.
This evolution has made knowledge increasingly composable, where individual pieces of information can be combined and recombined to create new understanding and innovation. Ten years ago I would have said being able to read a research paper and having the knowledge to repeat that experiment in my lab was strong evidence of this composability (reproducibility issues not withstanding).
Now, composability itself is getting an upgrade.
In the next essay I’ll be exploring the implications of the arrival of composable knowledge. This post is a light stroll to remind ourselves of how we got here.
In ancient times, knowledge was primarily transmitted orally. Stories, traditions, and teachings were passed down through generations by word of mouth. This method, while rich in cultural context, was limited in scope and permanence. The invention of writing systems around 3400 BCE in Mesopotamia marked a significant leap. Written records allowed for the preservation and dissemination of knowledge across time and space, enabling more complex compositions of ideas (Renn, 2018).
Shelves, Sheaves, and Smart Friends
The establishment of libraries, such as the Library of Alexandria in the 3rd century BCE, and scholarly communities in ancient Greece and Rome, further advanced the composability of knowledge. These institutions gathered diverse texts and fostered intellectual exchanges, allowing scholars to build upon existing works and integrate multiple sources of information into cohesive theories and philosophies (Elliott & Jacobson, 2002).
Scribes, Senpai, and Scholarship
During the Middle Ages, knowledge preservation and composition were largely the domain of monastic scribes who meticulously copied and studied manuscripts. The development of universities in the 12th century, such as those in Bologna and Paris, created centers for higher learning where scholars could debate and synthesize knowledge from various disciplines. This was probably when humans shifted perspective and started to view themselves as apart from nature (Grumbach & van der Leeuw, 2021).
Systems, Scripts and the Scientific Method
The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century revolutionized knowledge dissemination. Printed books became widely available, drastically reducing the cost and time required to share information. This democratization of knowledge fueled the Renaissance, a period marked by the synthesis of classical and contemporary ideas, and the Enlightenment, which emphasized empirical research and the scientific method as means to build, refine, share knowledge systematically (Ganguly, 2013).
Silicon, Servers, and Sharing
The 20th and 21st centuries have seen an exponential increase in the composability of knowledge due to digital technologies. The internet, open access journals, and digital libraries have made vast amounts of information accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Tools like online databases, search engines, and collaborative platforms enable individuals and organizations to gather, analyze, and integrate knowledge from a multitude of sources rapidly and efficiently. There have even been studies which allow, weirdly, future knowledge prediction (Liu et al., 2019).
Conclusion
From oral traditions to digital repositories, the composability of knowledge has continually evolved, breaking down barriers to information and enabling more sophisticated and collaborative forms of understanding. Today, the ease with which we can access, combine, and build upon knowledge drives innovation and fosters a more informed and connected global society.
Aneesh Sathe 