Why we write with the lights off (and you should, too)
Image by Vazhnik
If we follow online algorithms to value attention over connection, our voice—when discussing politics, culture, etc.—loses its power and depth. Enlightening conversations become banal transactions. Below, an excellent Substack article on reclaiming complex, real, even risky communication (and the Opp Now team smiles behind our glowing laptops :-)).
As content becomes more engineered than written, AI has stepped into the role of ghostwriter; fluent but fatally hollow. Tools like ChatGPT and its cousins can produce grammatically perfect, tonally inoffensive copy at scale. What they lack, of course, is experience. They have no stake in what they say. Their fluency is not expression, but simulation. They reheat the language of others with no memory of heat. As Ted Chiang puts it, large language models are “blurry JPEGs of the web”; articulate without awareness, derivative without depth.
This matters. Not because machines are writing, but because we are beginning to write like them. Predictability has become a virtue. Voice is flattened into tone. Style is reduced to format. And behind it all is a new kind of anonymity and not the anonymity of the humble author, but the anonymity of the absent one. In the glut of generated content, no one really speaks. No one risks themselves on the page.
Sherry Turkle has written extensively on the consequences of this shift. In Reclaiming Conversation, she argues that digital communication encourages performance over presence: we craft ourselves not to connect, but to be seen. The result is what she calls “the edited self,” curated for likes, detached from genuine reflection. In place of inner life, we have brand management. In place of thought, performance.
Sven Birkerts warned of this in The Gutenberg Elegies, lamenting the loss of “the language of inwardness.” As the screen displaces the page, he argues, we risk becoming strangers to our own interiority. “Writing, in its essence,” he reminds us, “is an intimate, recursive act, an engagement with thought that deepens it.” But in a culture saturated with artificial content and algorithmic curation, intimacy becomes noise, recursion becomes redundancy, and thought becomes just another asset in the content economy.
The tragedy is not that we are reading less, but that we are being fed more, and that what we are fed no longer expects much from us anymore. It demands clicks, not contemplation; affirmation, not argument. It asks us to skim, to share, to move on. In doing so, it erodes not only our attention, but our appetite for complexity, for difficulty, for truth. The reader is no longer a co-creator of meaning, but a consumer of impressions. In such a system, the very possibility of serious thought begins to look anachronistic. …
In the absence of this patience [for deep thought], complexity is not engaged, but avoided. Ambiguity is not tolerated, but dismissed. We become allergic to intellectual difficulty, not because it is beyond us, but because we have forgotten how to sit with it. …
We are moving from what [Sven] Birkerts calls “vertical” reading: deep, devotional, recursive engagement with a single text, toward “horizontal” reading: skimming, browsing, grazing across sources, surfaces, and screens.
Vertical reading is immersive. It asks something of us, namely time, attention, vulnerability. It allows meaning to accumulate and resonate. Horizontal reading, by contrast, privileges motion over meaning, exposure over absorption. It is the cognitive equivalent of scrolling a buffet table: a little here, a little there, but rarely a full meal. …
Just as ultra-processed food is engineered for convenience and immediate reward rather than nourishment, so too is the content we increasingly consume: short, simple, emotionally legible, and optimized for rapid ingestion. We don’t dwell in it, we move through it. We are constantly full, but rarely fed. …
To read slowly, attentively, without agenda or distraction is to resist. … It defies the algorithm’s logic of efficiency, the newsfeed’s velocity, the platform’s hunger for engagement. It says: I will dwell here, I will think for myself, I will go deep when the world wants me shallow.
To read in this distracted age is therefore to make a moral and political choice. It is, as Sven Birkerts put it, to defend “the private self,” that fragile interiority born of silence, solitude, and sustained thought. It is to reclaim what Walter Benjamin called the “aura” of experience; the depth and duration that resist flattening by mechanical reproduction. We must create sanctuaries for such reading, not out of technophobia, but out of care for what kind of minds, and what kind of citizens, we are shaping.
The alternative is not just a diminished literacy, but a diminished self: a culture that feeds on fragments and forgets what it once meant to know.
Read the whole thing here.
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