Why I am asking for money

I’ve had this presentiment for a couple years now—ever since December 2022, when people started posting screenshots of ChatGPT output to prompts like “write an ad for Hot Pockets in the style of Shakespeare.” Here’s what I thought: This shit is going to ruin the internet.

That’s vague and a bit dramatic, so let me say what I mean here. Enthusiastic human users of large language models are going to fill up so many online experiences with machine-generated text, images, sound, and video that the internet will be less fun, more confusing, and increasingly dangerous—requiring a much stronger defensive posture than most of us currently have.

To be more specific about the “defensive posture”—essential practices like “Don’t reuse passwords” and “Don’t click on links in emails” are pretty easy and not particularly limiting. You can still have a password, use websites, read email. But the profusion of human-ish-but-actually-bot-with-an-agenda accounts, articles, images, voices, and videos requires a different kind of hygiene.

Are you going to vet the source of every comment, message, news story or TikTok you see to ensure it’s not part of somebody’s dystopian disinformation campaign? Probably not—it’s not even clear how you could do so if you had the time. So, are you going to engage with everyone in good faith and accept that maybe, just maybe, 80% of your interactions are with bots? Or are you going to disengage—not entirely, but largely, from the places you used to socialize, learn, and share?

Three lousy choices. But we must choose.

I used to have a little email form in the footer of my website. “I send out an update about what I’m working on every full moon.” I found that I was getting a lot of spammy signups—did zxqyftv4@gmail.com really enjoy my post about why I’m leaning in on feminism so much that they wanted monthly emails from me?

Probably not! Probably something much more mundane. Probably the Nigerian prince on steroids. And there’s probably only more of this on the way.

Simply disengaging from Instagram doesn’t necessarily protect you from the fake friends¹ proliferating on the site. The fake friends are coming for you, and they’ll reach you by whatever channel you leave open.

So I deleted the form, and I’m rethinking how I want to engage on the internet. Here’s what I’ve decided, without a doubt: I want to double down on keeping in touch with actual humans whom I’ve met, or worked with, or who have supported my work in some way.

That’s a much smaller group than “anyone who’s ever filled out a form on my website”²—and that’s okay. It’s a warmer group, and one with a much higher signal-to-noise ratio.

If we’ve met or if you’ve ever bought one of my books or courses, you are in this group. Glad to have you. Over the next couple weeks you’ll hear from me, one-to-one, because I want to offer you access to everything I’ve ever made as a way of saying “Thank you” and also “Let’s stay in touch.”

If you’re not in this group, no worries of course. Thanks for reading. And if by chance you’d like to join—or just want a cheap copy of something I’ve published—you can get access to everything when you support my work at any level. Even $1. Because … candidly, I just want to know that you’re a human. Let’s stay in touch.