It’s been a good run, but I believe we’ve officially entered the Dead Internet era.
The majority of LinkedIn posts are already machine-generated. I got on Bluesky for a bit and every time I posted, I gained 5 new bot followers. (I’ve since deactivated my account.)
And Google has scraped this very site in order to further its mandate to create mediocre strings of text, forever. So-called copyright be damned.
Hustle bros will tell you that this was all inevitable, that it’s an opportunity. inNOvatIOn. I disagree. I think it sucks.
I think flooding Amazon with shitty books generated by large language models … sucks. Parking children in front of nonsensical auto-generated YouTube videos? It sucks.
And the fact that finding each other—and authentic, human-composed thoughts among this sea of slop—is getting exponentially harder? Absolutely sucks.
So I’m opting out, to the extent that I can. I won’t be on any social media. I won’t have an email opt-in on my site. Over the next couple weeks, I will be taking down everything I’ve ever written here.
And I won’t publish blog posts anymore. If the worst humans on earth want to feed my writing into their slop machine, they’ll have to pay for it—and I know they won’t, because that would break their business model.
I’ll still be writing! More than ever, in fact. I’ll publish more books (though I’m not too optimistic about finding readers among all the noise). As for short form writing, we’ll see. Chapbooks? PDFs? Zines? More to come. But it will all, every last character, be behind a pay-what-you-want-wall. Hope to see you there!