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A search for meaning in the palace of lost memories: Thoughts on Piranesi, a novel by Susanna Clarke
In this article I examine two opposing worldviews when it comes to collections and the environment: viewing the world as something to exploit instrumentally, versus recognising its intrinsic value. I guess I’m interested in whether our systems of gathering and keeping serve to honour the world or merely extract value from it.
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How to decide what to include in your notes
This article explores commonplace books, personal collections of information, and the deliberate choices behind what we collect (and what we discard).
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How to start a Zettelkasten from your existing deep experience
Here I warn against building a “magnificent but useless encyclopaedia” and I champion active, meaningful engagement over passive hoarding. Easier said than done, but I’m trying.
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This is where I reflect on how personal notes construct a library of interpretations, and I ask how we decide what’s worth preserving.
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The Toe of the Year and the Curious Case of John Donne’s Missing Commonplace Book
This article looks at the mechanics of commonplace collecting and reflects on the risk of collecting quotes without genuinely digesting them. And yes, there’s a poem about the toe of the year.
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“Small pieces loosely joined”. — From fragments you can build a greater whole.
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“Everything is miscellaneous”. — What does it mean to write from the bottom up instead of from the top down?
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“The smartest person in the room is the room”. — The mastery of knowledge is an illusion.
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“The Internet is not made out of content”. — What comes after content?
- Projects
- Activities
- Resources
- Archive
- In-box
- Sleeping
- References
- Main
- Organisation theory
- Functionalism
- Decision theory
- Amt: office, post, job, duty
- Formal / informal order
- Sovereignty / State
- Isolated/individual terms, problems
- Economy
- Ad hoc notes
- Archaic societies
- High cultures
- Alex Woods | Don’t let AI write for you.
- N. Cailie | I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era.
- Elizabeth Spiers | The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites.
- “We can decide that we want to be human” | The Guardian.
- Less Wrong | Folie à Machine: LLMs and Epistemic Capture.
- Manuel Morale’s two-step process for writing AI-free blog posts (an amusing response to an interesting discussion).
Collecting notes is just the start
“The British Museum is not a good thing in and of itself. It is good only to the extent that its influence in the world is for the good. The collection is a starting point, an opportunity, an instrument. Will the museum use it to influence the future of the planet and its peoples? Or will it continue to project the power of colonial gain and corporate indemnity?” — Ahdaf Soueif, On Resigning from the British Museum’s Board of Trustees Soueif2019resigning
As a resigning member of the board of trustees of the British Museum, novelist Ahdaf Soueif was in a strong position to understand the point of collecting. His words, written in 2019, stand for any form of collecting, from world-leading to extremely modest.
Soueif reminds us that any collection is only “a starting point, an opportunity, an instrument”.
His resignation follows what I take to be an increasing realisation that in spite of the PR, through its collection and curation the British Museum really does perpetuate a colonial worldview, and is an instrument of destructive power. In particular he calls out the Museum’s continued sponsorship by oil multinational BP, its lack of leadership on the issue of the repatriation of looted artefacts, and its reluctance to support fair work conditions for ancillary staff in the wake of the collapse of service provider Carillion.
He asked of the Museum, not entirely rhetorically, it is to be hoped,
“will it be involved in making a world that is habitable, just, interconnected and open for the next generation; or will it continue to collaborate with those who are unmaking the world before our eyes?”
I think that this might apply as a test of any collection, at least in the following sense: Is the act of collecting making or unmaking the world?
In some very small way, even my collection of notes must play its part. Is my act of collecting making or unmaking the world?
Hence: publishing is important. It’s not enough to keep collecting. The aim is to make something and to share it with others.
Further Reading
I wrote a book, Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning. It’s available now.
Living questions
Living questions
Instead of chasing after easy answers, the poet Rilke urged a young artist to “live the questions”. Sound advice maybe, but which questions really matter, and how can we go about living them?
“I beg you … to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not know how to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now, perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer …” – Rainer Maria Rilke
Yes, it’s all very well ‘living the questions’ but which questions are we talking about here? All of them? Some of them? Which ones?
Learning to tell a bright cow from a dull one
You might be wondering how anyone can grow from being an advanced learner to becoming an expert. It might seem like an impossible step to climb.
According to the traditional Japanese approach of Shu Ha Ri, a vital step in the learning process is to so absorb the rules that the student transcends them. The rules and conventions become second nature. But what does that look like in practice?
Here’s a great example from the world of veterinary medicine, where veterinary students were trained to identify whether an animal is bright (i.e healthy) or dull (i.e. sickening):
“Eventually, the students get good enough at evaluating bright vs. dull. What’s interesting is that, by then, they’ve lost the rules. What was once effortful and algorithmic is now perceptual and automatic. They can see things you and I do not.” – Oddly-Influenced
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if you found this article interesting you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest. You’ll receive all the week’s posts in a handy email format which you might prefer. But this site does of course have an RSS feed.
Odysseus: A name that spells trouble
Since we’re currently lost somewhere in the middle of wars that seemingly have no end-point, and arguably no point, I wonder just what film director Christopher Nolan will make of The Odyssey, his blockbuster movie of which comes out mid-2026.
After I watched another recent movie version of the story, The Return, I found out about the work of psychologist Jonathan Shay with Vietnem veterans. He wrote two books linking the works of Homer – The Iliad and The Odyssey – with the modern experience of warfare and with the travails of homecoming.
Two quotes from Jonathan Shay’s work stood out particularly. First, this one about war-induced PTSD:
The heart of the craft: an encounter with the spirit of Shokunin
“There’s something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there’s always something you can learn.” – Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973.
I read this quote in the epilogue to Matt Alt’s book, Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World. (London: Constable, 2021).
It could be a summary of shokunin kishitsu (職人気質), the spirit of traditional Japanese artesanal culture.
In fact, Jiro Ono the consummate master of sushi, featured in the acclaimed documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and who was still going strong at the age of 100, says something very similar in the movie:
Atomic notes have a long history
Did previous generations ever think much about atomicity of ideas in their notes? After all, if most people were using notebooks, surely they didn’t need to consider how long their notes should be – they could just keep writing till they were done.
It seems thinking about atomicity was a major element (pun intended) of mathematics and philosophy at the start of the 20th century. Bertrand Russell’s ’logical atomism’ was very influential. Russell said:
“you can get down in theory, if not in practice, to ultimate simples, out of which the world is built, and that those simples have a kind of reality not belonging to anything else” (‘The Philosophy of Logical Atomism’ 1918: 270).
A similar positivism (where the universe is made of discrete entities rather than one great holism) was a major feature of the efforts to catalogue the world’s knowledge centered on Paul Otlet’s ‘Mundaneum’ into the 1930s.
Otlet inspired the ‘documentalists’ to reformulate information science in the post-war period, including Vannevar Bush, the originator of the ‘Memex’, which was a precursor to the desktop computer.
Douglas Engelbart further pioneered the way we now use computers. In his paper on augmenting human intellect (1962) he referred to his notes on edge-notched cards as ’thought kernels’, ‘concept packets’ and ‘kernel statements (cards)’ but the established concept behind this was the ‘unit record system’. This had originated in 1888 when H.E. Davidson of Melvil Dewey’s Library Bureau realised he could sell catalogue cards and shelving to commercial businesses to improve their record keeping, previously constrained in ledger books. Engelbart said:
“Mainly what is new is the use of the smaller units of information in restricted-subject sets (notedecks) so that I gain considerable flexibility in the manipulations of my thought products at the level at which I actually work in my minute-by-minute struggle with analytical and formulative thought. Not only do my own thoughts produce results in this fashion but when I digest the writings of another person I find generally anyway that I have extracted from his structure and integrated into my own a specific selection of facts, considerations, ideas etc. Often these different extracted items fit into different places in my structure or become encased in special substructures as I modify or expand his concepts. Extracting such items or kernels and putting each on its own notecard helps this process considerably–the role or position of each such item in the growth of the note structure is independent, and yet if desired all can quickly be isolated and extracted…” (Engelbart, 1962: 57)
The features Engelbart found he couldn’t get from his use of cards – that was precisely what he set out to obtain by means of the digital computer.
Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying earlier generations thought a lot about atomicity – more even than I had realised!
Now read: The shortest writing session that could possibly be useful
Note: This post started life on Reddit
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
And if you found this article interesting you might like to sign up to the Writing Slowly weekly email digest. You’ll receive all the week’s posts in a handy email format which masks how they were all created one by one like little atoms.
The Paradox of Mastery: Why the Expert Must Remain a Beginner
A Zen Buddhist master hands his successor a formal certificate of mastery. The successor burns it. Why?
No, it’s not a Zen koan but it almost could be.
The name for such a certificate in Japanese is inka. This word might be translated as a ‘seal of approval’, but it’s hardly that straightforward.
In the original transcripts of Shunryu Suzuki’s teachings, the foundation for his influential book “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”, he describes the inka as both profound and vacuous at the same time.
The inka, this formal paper, might represent decades of practice, but it also subtly indicates the need to abandon the very idea of mastery. If you’re an intellectual hunting for a hidden formula, the paper might appear to you as a riddle to be solved. But to the practitioner who inhabits “beginner’s mind” (shoshin), there’s no clever secret to be interpreted, it’s just a transparent occasion for a sincere “Thank you.”
Westerners might be tempted or conditioned to treat the inka like a diploma. Is it proof you’ve arrived? Is it a trophy? Or is it a kind of finish line? In fact, the moment you view the paper as a “result” like this, you’ve fallen into the expert’s trap.
Remembering what you read
One of the chief uses of note-making is to help you to remember what you read.
But it’s not as simple as imagining your notes are just an ‘aide memoire’.
When you make notes you forget your reading and replace it with the future opportunity to read again not the original book but your own notes on it. So making notes is inevitably a process of interpretation, which involves the occlusion of the original work, albeit in the name of preserving it.
Psychologists, including Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy, authors of Memory Lane: The perfectly imperfect ways we remember (Princeton UP, 2025) believe “we construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them”.
So when we re-read our notes, does that mean we’re reconstructing our memories of the book, or just the memories of our notes?
What's the future of creative work without human intent?
Nicholas Carr has written about the prospects for creative work in an age of digital production.
He argues that the era where technology merely copies art has given way to one where AI generates it by stripping away human intent and replacing it with mathematical patterns. This results in a flood of “efficient” but hollow content, which forces creators into a relentless “dance marathon” to feed the digital platforms. He suggests that as machine-made “slop” becomes the norm, the true value of art will lie in its humanity. In other words the slow, intentional, and relatively inefficient activities that a computer can’t replicate will be recognised as worthwhile. They’ll literally be a measure of value.
He touches here on a couple of themes I’ve been considering too.
The first theme is what it means for everything to be turned into ‘content’, and for a whole class of ‘content creators’ to rise from nowhere, the way a gold rush would generate a legion of instant but mainly ersatz gold miners.
Carr suggests the ‘content’ doesn’t matter compared with the ‘buckets’ that contain it. As every MrBeast video attests to, it’s the form that matters now.
MrBeast is the brand-name of a prominent American YouTuber who gained worldwide fame for his high-budget videos which feature elaborate challenges and massive financial giveaways. It’s a winning formula precisely because it’s a formula. And the formula of the show makes the content of any individual episode, though still necessary, oddly irrelevant.
If we’re not just making content what are we making?
That’s the question I’ve been pondering for a while now. Online platforms are in the container industry. They all provide containers for other peoples’ stuff. And what do you call the contents of a container, if not ‘content’? This led me to wonder whether the way forward is a) to seize the means of containment and create our own ‘containers’ or b) to deny the entire paradigm and do something else entirely.
So I wanted to know what comes after content?
It’s hard to imagine but I intend to try. At the moment the obvious answer to what comes next is ‘more containers’. As I write this, plenty of writers (including Nicholas Carr) have been moving to Substack because it seems to have some writerly buzz to it (aka ‘organic reach’). The quality of the material there is quite high, and the recommendation engine appears to be working, at least for some.
But attractive as it may seem, isn’t Substack really just the latest in a long line of platforms that seemed great then turned into mush? Blogger, Medium, and now Substack. here today, gone tomorrow. Buzzing along for now, but soon to be ensh_ttified by the venture capital money that feeds it. It’s been observed that the Substack business model is inherently unstable, so before too long the mush cycle will kick in and users will move onwards to the next shiny platform. If you don’t get this you should read John Gruber’s critique at Daring Fireball. What do I mean by an unstable business model? In brief, you can’t meet a billion dollar valuation by taking 10% of the proceeds of a bunch of bloggers. Therefore, adverts and lock-in will follow, as surely as night follows day.
Whether you’re interested in making your own containers or in challenging the whole paradigm, the key is to create new ways of being human, not necessarily because that’s fantastic but because being human is what we’ve got.
The second theme Nicholas Carr raises in his article is what it means when the automation of this machine formalism becomes so pervasive it undercuts the professional and existential self-confidence of a whole generation. Carr sums it up this way:
“In automated systems, human beings are placeholders for future machines.”
Which is a neat summary of the philosophy of German philosopher Günther Anders, whose ideas I’ve been reflecting on. In fact, fear of AI is nothing new.
Decades ago Anders said:
💬 “Our aim is always to create something that could dispense with our assistance and function perfectly without us. In other words, nothing less than appliances through whose functioning we make ourselves superfluous, eliminate ourselves, liquidate ourselves. It is of no consequence that we only ever approximately achieve this goal. What counts is this trend and its maxim, which is: “without us!".” — Günther Anders, ‘The Term’.
In some respects this is the leitmotif of this entire Writing Slowly website - the observation that from now on, by most metrics, all humans are writing slowly, that in relation to the machines, we’re second best. Coming to terms with this ironic de-centering of the human is one of the great moral and cultural challenges of our time. It’s ironic because, as Anders pointed out, we are the creators of the technologies that now confound us, and so, as he also pointed out, it’s weird that they’re now leading us by the nose.
One possible way forward is to challenge the slippery use of “us” and “we”, as in the sentence you just read. It masks some important detail, especially the detail of who benefits and who pays for technological innovation. For example, as I write this, nameable individuals are directly profiting from the use of AI to identify targets for missile and drone strikes in Iran. This targeting is horrendously error prone, even on its own terms. I’m not profiting from the killing of schoolchildren and you may not be either. The victims of these attacks aren’t profiting either; they’re dying. Perhaps if there’s to be a ”we" in this context, it might be me, the victims of this automated violence, and you. Because when they’re blowing up children just because the algorithm told them to, you can be sure their code will be coming for you and me rather than for its owner. It’s nothing personal, it’s just business. It’s merely speeding up the kill chain.
Conversely, if it’s true that “we all benefit” from AI, then, as philosopher Rod Tidwell said, show me the money.
Well, piece by small piece I’m addressing the question, What must I do now? My provisional answer to this question is that you’ve got to choose your own race and finish it.
But you might also notice that I’m doing my best here to form and maintain my own little container, a slightly eccentric bucket in which to mix my own ideas, which I’m still not calling content.
That got a bit heavy so here’s an adorable cat in a bucket, courtesy of marwool.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
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Compare like with like
When critiquing my own work it’s tempting to compare it unfavourably with something good. But almost all early drafts need improvement.
For example, here’s the final version of a well-known voiceover:
Space, the final frontier.
These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise
Its five year mission
To explore strange new worlds
To seek out new life
And new civilizations
To boldly go where no man has gone before.
But here’s an early draft of that famous start to Star trek. tl;dr it sucks too. [Neatorama.com]
The lesson? If your terrible draft lacks sparkle, it might just be because almost everyone’s does, at first. So if you can’t compare like with like, then don’t compare at all.
Unless you really are planning to regulate commerce and so on.
‘Beginner's mind’ keeps you young — even in your 80s
Stewart Brand was on the Ezra Klein Show, talking about his new book Maintenance: Of Everything. He’s well into his eighties, and he said:
“Looking into the things that you’re not good at, especially intellectually, is one way to stay young, because you’ve got a beginner’s mind.”
Well now, it was Shunryu Suzuki, the Japanese monk who brought Zen to Northern California, who famously spoke of ‘beginner’s mind’. He said:
“When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. Then we can learn something. The beginner’s mind is the mind of compassion. When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless… The most difficult thing is always to keep your beginner’s mind. … This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner” – Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind: Prologue.
Brand’s mention of beginner’s mind isn’t the only Japanese concept he references. The cover of Maintenance: Of Everything alludes to kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery by means of gold lacquer. With kintsugi, instead of hiding the cracks, you honour them.
You can read the interview’s transcript, or just listen.
My source for this little nugget was Austin Kleon, who also has a new book out in September 2026: Don’t Call it Art.
Meanwhile, I’ve written more about beginner’s mind, and why the greatest experts are serial beginners.
In Influence is everything I’ve mentioned Stewart Brand’s idea of ‘pace layering’.
“Pace layers is an idea Stewart Brand first developed in the 1990s. Civilization, he argued, works as a set of nested layers, each moving at a different speed: fashion changes fastest, then commerce, then infrastructure, governance, culture, and finally nature, which changes slowest of all. The fast layers are where novelty happens, but the slow layers provide stability. Healthy societies need both.
Each layer also requires its own kind of maintenance—and when any of them gets neglected, the whole system suffers.”
And I’ve also reflected on Austin Kleon’s advice about Sharing what you know.
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I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
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Holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content
Holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content.
💬 “The Net is not content.
There is great content on the Internet. But holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content.
A teenager’s first poem, the blissful release of a long-kept secret, a fine sketch drawn by a palsied hand, a blog post in a regime that hates the sound of its people’s voices — none of these people sat down to write content.
Did we use the word “content” without quotes? We feel so dirty.” — Doc Searles and David Weinberger, New Clues
Plenty of my thoughts about writing, and writing for the Web, are really just paraphrases of something David Weinberger has already said with far greater eloquence and perspicacity.
And what do you know? the author has a new book out in October 2026:
No doubt Beautiful Particulars will also help reshape my brain, and maybe yours too.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
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The real science behind Project Hail Mary
Yes, there is some real science behind 📚 Project Hail Mary.
It’s an enjoyable and successful sci-fi novel and film, but the science fiction is frankly quite a bit more fiction than science.
It would hardly give away the plot of Project Hail Mary to mention that it has a lot to do with the microbial contamination of experimental research. I mean, that’s what the story is about – in the same way Andy Weir’s previous novel, The Martian, was all about potato farming.
If this floats your spaceship (microbes I mean, not potatoes), you might enjoy a fascinating article about the real science of microbial contamination in experimental contexts. Apparently there’s a bacteriophage called Φ80 and it’s running amok.
How Φ80 infiltrates research labs.
Scary stuff! Perhaps someone will turn it into a movie.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
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Notes on the artificial style of writing
In which the artificial style of writing encounters the iron hand of fashion
AI makes writing more bland, as reported by NBC News. This will accelerate the rate at which readers demand new forms of writing that AI can’t yet (or ever) achieve. There’s been plenty of talk about how AI caters to the economic requirement for efficiency (aka reduced labour costs), but there’s another very obvious economic requirement too: novelty.
AI handles novelty of combination very well. Just try asking it for a story about a unicycling giraffe who learns quantum mechanics and escapes from a zoo in the Alpha Centuri star system — it won’t refuse you. That kind of combinatorial novelty it handles with aplomb. At no point will it tell you this is a bad idea. On the contrary, “You might consider how the unicycle itself acts as a metaphor for the observer effect,” says Google’s Gemini as it eggs me on. But it doesn’t produce novelty of expression. Despite the arguable novelty of this scenario, the adventures of a fugitive circus scientist space giraffe, the story, as written by AI, will still be, well, bland.
Cheaper, better and newer. Consumers crave novelty, which drives the endless parade of fashion, and the instant obsolescence of what only yesterday was highly desirable. In a sense, AI writing stands at the end of an era, the era that saw the kind of writing on which AI has been trained as up to date. For example, if a chat-bot wrote an article or a piece of advertising copy in the 150-year-old style of Charles Dickens, it would be quaint, but hardly useable. To achieve the effect it does, of being ‘as good as an average human writer’, it must mimic what’s considered the current writing style, and it does so blandly.
Now the research shows that AI-generated prose isn’t just bland, it’s also distorted in several other ways, many of them, such as pronoun use, connected with style.
How LLMs distort our written language.
But fashions change, and the blandness of the AI style will accelerate the speed at which writing style fashions change. Just as we can’t take seriously today someone who writes like Charles Dickens (unless it’s deliberate pastiche), tomorrow we won’t be able to take seriously any writing produced in the style of a bot. And that means soon we won’t be able to take seriously any writing that’s written in our current style.
Top level categories in my notes
What kind of top-level categories do you have for your notes?
If you’re doing knowledge management you might use or adapt Tiago Forte’s PARA system:
Or you might consider using Bob Doto’s four-folder approach:
Tame the chaos with just four folders for all your notes.
Prolific German sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s second collection of notes, his second Zettelkasten (ZKII) was arranged according to eleven top-level categories, based on subjects or themes associated with his singular major project, a theory of society.
In his lecture on Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, researcher Johannes Schmidt of the Niklas Luhmann Archive at Bielefeld University observes that these headings are hardly comprehensive. Instead they strongly echo the progression of Luhmann’s scholarly interests over many years.
“Looking at these you quickly see that this does not describe a certain body of knowledge to work through like in the first Zettelkasten. If you know a bit about the development of Luhmann’s theory you quickly recognize this as a historic record of research interests.”
Finished reading Trip to the Moon by John Yorke
Trip to the Moon by John Yorke 📚 sets out the author’s deeply-considered views on the nature of story and goes further than his previous work on the same theme, Into the Woods.
John Yorke is a highly experienced writer and producer for British TV, and here he presents invaluable insights into how stories really work, from the perspective of someone who absolutely knows what he’s talking about. I found the section on non-western story-forms very interesting, and though I wasn’t convinced by the claim that stories in all cultures are basically fueled by ‘some bastardization of the hero’s journey’, just hearing the argument made by a true expert was very helpful.
More convincing - and worrying - was the claim that effective storytellers ‘unshackle us from empirical observation by drugging us with rage or anger or pleasure.’ Indeed, if this book has a single key theme, it might be that telling stories is a uniquely dangerous skill, whose seductive power we’d do well to understand much better than we do.
The insights of Trip to the Moon are profound, though a more rigorous edit would have served the work well. In places the text feels unbalanced. Crucial developments are often truncated in the main chapters only to resurface in the lengthy commentary at the back. Despite this imbalance, the author’s body of work remains vital for any aspiring writer. Start with Into the Woods before tackling this more fragmented sequel.
On Mastodon, Harold Jarche points to the renewed relevance of Harold Innis, the mid-20th century Canadian scholar who called out US media imperialism for what it was.
💬 “We can only survive by taking persistent action at strategic points against American imperialism in all its attractive guises.”
I’ve written about Innis’s lost notes but his warnings about the distorting power of the media are very appropriate now.
Thoughts on ‘The Memex Method’
Today I noticed that the ridiculously prolific author and tech activist Cory Doctorow is commissioned to publish a book in 2027 on “The Memex Method”, which he described in a post of that name back in 2021. The basic idea is that he publishes continually in public by means of many, many blog posts, then collates it into books.
💬 “Traditionally, a writer identifies a subject of interest and researches it, then writes about it. In the (my) blogging method, the writer blogs about everything that seems interesting, until a subject gels out of all of those disparate, short pieces.”
I mentioned this post back in 2023, when I suggested: to build something big, start with small fragments.
Writing is still about thinking
According to author Larry McEnerney, writing is an essential part of a sophisticated thinking process. He says:
💬 “So here’s what you’re doing, you are thinking about your world in very difficult ways. This is a terrifically good thing, and it’s the source of most of the value of your work. Now, you are also writing about that world, and this is where it starts, the problem starts arising. Unlike a journalist, almost surely you are using your writing process to help yourself think. In other words, the thinking that you’re doing is at such a level of complexity that you have to use writing to help yourself do your thinking.” - Larry McEnerney: The Craft of Writing Effectively | Youtube
In my own reading I’ve felt there’s a difference between published writing as useful information (e.g. ‘how to fix that annoying computer problem’) and published writing as the voice of a human grappling with complexity (‘how I fixed my annoying computer problem ‘).
In the first instance I don’t care if the ‘author’ is AI, so long as the suggested fix actually works. I don’t need evidence of a thought process; I just want to fix my computer. In the second instance, the central thing I’m looking for is evidence of human thought. And if the writing starts to smell of AI, I don’t bother even finishing it.
But even though the AI-written information articles always seem highly plausible, I’ve found the ‘information’ contained to be highly untrustworthy. Sometimes it’s correct and helpful, other times it’s wildly off beam. That’s not exactly ideal. I noticed that at least one version of Microsoft Copilot says it’s ‘for entertainment only’ - which makes it a bit worrying that they named it Copilot.
So whether I do need a human or don’t need a human, either way, AI prose isn’t really doing it for me.
Well, here are some articles that consider the vexed question of whether AI text counts as writing, or just glorified Lorem Ipsum filler – or worse:
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for artists and Fighters, which I wrote myself and I also took all the photos myself. If you’re interested in learning, teaching, art, fighting, or Japanese aesthetics and philosophy, you might just find this short book of relevance to you.
Game of Likes
I was remembering that time when the MrBeast training manual was leaked and people thought it might offer some insights into how to win at YouTube. Well, it certainly gave some insights into MrBeast.
How to succeed in MrBeast Production | simonwillison.net
There was a part of the manual that made a clear argument in favour of ‘virality’:
This is what dictates what we do for videos. “I Spent 50 Hours In My Front Yard” is lame and you wouldn’t click it. But you would hypothetically click “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”. Both are relatively similar in time/effort but the ketchup one is easily 100x more viral. An image of someone sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is exponentially more interesting than someone sitting in their front yard.
This is a great example of how people do things because they think they have agency but actually their environment largely conditions what they do. If you make videos for YouTube, sooner or later you’ll at least contemplate sitting in a bath of ketchup. That’s the logic of the medium controlling both what’s ‘interesting’ (50 hours in ketchup) and what’s ‘rational’ (filming it).
This little theory goes some way towards accounting for what happened to the likes of Russell Brand, the comedian turned influencer turned defendant, who seems to have pursued every attention-grabbing fashion under the sun, like a seagull checking out empty takeaway trays. It might also at least partly explain the creepy and often abusive behaviour of those ‘manosphere’ influencers in Louis Theroux’s documentary on the tendency. One of them said “I’m playing the game of life and I’m playing it very well”.
That – or the game of likes is playing him and it’s playing him very well.
Because it’s not just the medium (YouTube) that determines the message (50 hours in ketchup): there’s also the audience. ‘An image of someone sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is ingfinitely more interesting…’ …well, interesting to whom exactly? The implication of the MrBeast manual was that this question was so irrelevant as to remain beneath asking. Presumably the algorithm delivered views and the view count went up, up, up. But whose views?
When you sit in a bath of ketchup for 50 hours you’ll attract the people who enjoy this kind of thing - the spectacle, the humiliation, the low-key shock value, (though presumably not especially the ketchup).
But is this the kind of attention or the kind of people you really want to attract? They just want ketchup, not you or anything else about you.
Unless and until you sit in a bath of custard.