Among my many electives in undergrad, I took a Symbolic Logic course, either my sophomore or junior year. It was a course that fulfilled a core requirement for the linguistics minor I was acquiring at the time, and it sounded interested. Now, the central problem in taking a Symbolic Course is that Symbolic Logic is indeed Logic, and I had not actually taken any logic classes previously. I had taken Intro to Linguistics and learning about phonemes and morphemes was decidedly unhelpful in learning how to write proofs.

I did pass the class though. I could not tell you much from my time there, but I did incur a small kernel of knowledge. The idea of contraposition.

Given a statement: [IF P, THEN Q], the contrapositive would be: [IF ~Q, THEN ~P].

I spend a fair amount of time pondering my own contraposition, usually in the form of recurring refrain: “what are you if not this?”

And I think it’s easy to get caught up in a series of conditionals, but I think sometimes, things can be simplified.

I am Mikkel, therefore I am a writer. And I think in this case, the contrapositive of that is indeed true, which is to say: if I am not a writer, I am… not myself.

I learned how to write through mass production. I learned how to write by trial and error. I learned how to write because a teacher asked “have you ever tried writing 50000 words in 30 days” and I said “no” and then proceeded to do it. I learned this skill because it gave me joy and purpose and community and there is a magic that comes from the process.

Historically speaking, soft skills (communication skills) are not valued or sought after in technical disciplines. This is why there is an entire profession dedicated to parsing and interpreting technical jargon into common parlance. And historically, this field is an afterthought. It is considered at the end of the process. It is considered “easy” (ironic). It is constantly undervalued and several times throughout my career as a technical writer, I have had folks try to do my job without me and then have to make sense of the wreckage and make it usable, and most times, that is a clean slate.

In the last four years, the wreckage is being mass produced at a shocking rate and I am constantly asked “what if it gets better”, and my frustration comes from the fact that right now it’s an active detriment and in the last years, things have not gotten better. They’ve gotten worse.

I mean, AI videos and photos are photo-realistic and destabilizing reality and no one can trust anything they can perceive with their own eyes. Surveillance technology is constantly finding more insidious ways to embed itself into every conceivably facet of society. People are able to build things with no thought on whether or not they should actually be build. There is a an active push to have intelligence be a utility rather than something shared and cultivated. And the simple cost of this technology is psychological damage, human life, and an unprecedented ecological toll.

I don’t want to be angry about this anymore however I do not believe I have the luxury of neutrality, especially not in this fight.

I am Mikkel. I am a writer. The current trend of the universe is that what I am doing now is threatening that I become something else and each and every day, I find that I need to stop asking “what am I if not this” and start asking “how do I stay this?”

Because I, after so many years, truly do like who I am and I am not willing to give that up.