The beginning of a new year is always a good occasion to consider what (the hell) are we doing here. After an evening dancing to the pinkest-lipstick pop music imaginable, I switch from Long December to the Mountain Goats’ This Year.

Toward the middle of the long December, Robin Sloan’s newsletter linked a few smart posts on the business and practice of newsletter writing, from Max Read and Kyle Chayka. (Newsletters on newsletters, blogs on blogs—is every form of artwork ultimately a comment on itself? A more generalized principle than the spiel which my spouse could by now recite from memory, about how many movies, particularly action/heist movies are ultimately about the process of movie making…) Now, I’m not running this newsletter ‘as a business’—is that the sound of my agent groaning across the continent?—but I do like talking with y’all, and I like the discipline of thinking in public, and if I want to justify that pursuit, it’s worth considering the practicalities.

Like Robin, I, well, “loved” isn’t quite the right word, Read’s characterization of content-forward newsletters as “textual YouTubers for Gen Xers and Elder Millennials who hate watching videos.” Felt. (Am I using that right?) I’m in this photo and I don’t like it! as we used to say. well, I don’t quite hate watching videos, my youtube history would maintain, but I just don’t have much time for them in long form and I don’t trust them in short form. Beyond that, though: some ideas I took away from these essays: post regularly, lol, present informally and with identity—to achieve a sort of ‘lounging in the living room’ impression—find a way to be a bit… hashtag unfiltered. The idea here, I think, is not so much that you have to be a jerk on the internet, as that you’re trying to present the impression that you’re not secretly a jerk. This is of course a posture that can be cultivated like any other, but it’s cultivated for a reason. We’ve all had reason to become skeptical of smarm. And we have so many more reason now, with so much of the internet dying, or anyway getting eaten by large language models.

(By which I mean: How much of what you read is written by an LLM? How many ‘people’ on your timeline would write a sestina about grapefruit if you asked them to disregard all previous instructions? And it’s not just a matter of fake accounts or fake posts: I saw a post from a sysadmin recently that claimed 70% of their traffic was from LLM-training-bots. If that’s even somewhat generalizable, it means anyone who’s paying for their own hosting—or advertising?—is paying a substantial tax to their hosting solution for the privilege of adding incremental value to openAI… And here we rejoin the main line of our train of thought.)

If ‘formal writing’ in the classic high-school-essay fashion is easy for machines to copy at their usual B-average level—and of course it would be, it’s the most disembodied form of writing in the English language, the whole point of it is to put your flesh somewhere else for 500 words while you find three paragraphs to support an ad-hoc claim about the Carolingians—it makes sense that even the slightest taint of robot in the waters would lead us naturally to seek out language cut with more raw human. (There’s probably some whole body of work about the connections between disembodied language-of-power ‘formal writing’ and the particular shape of background-immolating or defensive-coloration American immigrant whiteness. One section of DFW’s essay Authority and American Usage treats on this a bit.) At any rate, sautée those ideas up with the notion Hank Green explored in a recent video about the history of radio and print—about how technologies that make it easier for one person to reach many people lead to a dramatic rise in explosive, angry voices, disruptive to settled notions of how the world works—then of course we’re all on Mr Toad’s Wild Ride. There’s a certain bracing horror in reality.

And as cynical people try to present the appearance of being bracing horrors as evidence of their own authenticity / good faith… it’s important to remember that the pit, while real, isn’t the end of being. Blake, right? Innocence->Experience->Higher Innocence. The high-cynicism of ‘Experience’ being just another mask of childishness—to borrow a bit from C.S. Lewis. I don’t know if history itself has an end or a shape, but human lives have shapes, and (so far) they all have ends. (Phrasing?) The quicksand of Experience—and the seduction of false cynicism—who’s got time for that? Let’s keep exploring.

What’s all this mean for the newsletter? We’ll see. To explore means to experiment, and this is a great space for experiment. Thank you all for being along for the ride.

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On Jan 16, I’ll be at Porter Square Books to help promote New Year, New You, an anthology of stories by Viable Paradise class of ’23 and friends, alongside Chris Campbell, Nick dePasquale, Elizabeth Bear, Allison Pottern, Brigitte Winter, and Scott Lynch. If you’re in Boston, come join the fun!