Years ago, a man I’ve known for decades via electronic networks, started a blog.
He apologized because, to that class of people who assume a byline in the New York Times (described by Gore Vidal as always being “at the very heart of malice”) or a PhD confer a kind of omniscient expertise, starting a blog was akin to driving a Volkswagen (back when they were much cheaper) when a Mercedes was preferable as a class marker.
His blog was, indeed is, good. He ably writes about what he knows, how capital markets function, a topic he understands deeply from the inside. I suppose we could wait for a book by an academic or a series by a Columbia Journalism School trained NYT staffer on capital markets – such work is part of the fabric of what people who choose doing violence to the English language call ‘knowledge making’ but surely there is a place for information from the trenches.
My friend’s unnecessary apology was inspired by snobbery. You know what I mean. It’s snobbery that causes people to dismiss Wikipedia, even as an introductory source. Is the Wikipedia entry on magnetohydrodynamics bad? Most of us don’t know but we’ve been told it’s in a bad neighborhood, far from the tree-lined campuses where police beat pro Palestinian students or Manhattan newsrooms (or what’s left of either). To participate in the game of snobbery, a game imposed on most of us by a few nervous elites and their minions, we must turn up our nose, as if detecting the scent of a pile of dog poop, carelessly left on a sidewalk.
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This comes to mind because of the way Microsoft and Google, in their sales propaganda, have promoted large language models as the solution to the problem of writing. I wrote ‘problem,’ because for many of us, told that only a small group of people possess the ability to write, putting ideas to paper or screen is felt to be a problem.
Consider the way Microsoft describes its product, Copilot for Word:
Copilot in Word ushers in a new era of writing, leveraging the power of AI. It can help you go from a blank page to a complete draft in a fraction of the time it would take to compose text on your own. While it may write exactly what you need, sometimes it may be “usefully wrong” thus giving you some helpful inspiration.
The ‘problem’ solved by a machine that, as it bestows upon us a new era of writing, consumes, by some estimates, terawatts of electrical power. Writing, no matter how laborious, is a problem best solved by thought. Indeed, one of the critical aspects of writing – whether it’s fiction, non fiction or even a well considered social media post – is the application of thought to the process of organizing and recording your ideas and points of view.
Dependence on word assemblers such as ChatGPT and even our new silicon frenemy, DeepSeek, regardless of how cleverly architected, interrupts this process but so does snobbery. The snob industrial complex – which promotes the idea that good writing requires a university course or attachment to a media corporation – prepared the soil for the idea of replacing writing with machinery. Of course millions, harassed, short on time but also, purposely discouraged from writing, apologize for the blogs they should make to share their knowledge. Millions who are made to feel inferior when looking up a topic on Wikipedia, are, unsurprisingly, receptive to tech industry propaganda: never mind about thinking to write, we’ll do it for you.
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Writing is a craft; putting one sentence after another to build a tale – sometimes true, or as near as one can come, sometimes fanciful. You hone your craft by reading and writing and, by assembling for yourself what a friend of mine calls a writer’s table. When writing about the tech industry, Raymond Chandler and Karl Marx are sitting at my writer’s table alongside others – living and dead – from whom I learn to sharpen my own, yes, voice. There is decades of experience – being in the data centers – and a love of writing that goes into the work.
There’s nothing stopping you from doing the same. I want to read from people who serve food in restaurants and pilots and nuclear plant workers and people who have been cast out of the world of work. I want to hear from everyone, not just the famous or celebrated writing about everyone.
Having reached this point in the piece it’s typical to try to create something pithy that sums up what came before. In lieu of that, I’ll say, please write if you want to. Do not surrender your creativity to snobbery or machinery. If you need encouragement, I’m here to help.
We need as many voices reporting from the various fronts as we can get.
Computational Impacts 