This Is Not an Automated Message
On what we lose when machines do the writing
Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and humanism. This essay was prompted (so to speak) by the supposed promise of AI writing assistants to help students learn to write and to aid writers more generally. In 2023, the online education nonprofit Khan Academy introduced Khanmigo, a chatbot that runs on OpenAI’s GPT-4 and is designed to assist students taking its courses and to play the role of a personal writing assistant for students working on essay assignments. But insofar as writing is an attempt to arrive at a form of understanding that is impossible in any other medium, I am skeptical that this technology, with its bid to ease the burdens of writing, is likely to enhance its rewards. It seems much more likely that, just as earlier media technologies have diminished our capacity for idleness and solitude—virtues once necessary for a well-adjusted person—the automated writing assistant will diminish our capacity for the unique form of intellectual self-reliance which writing has always demanded of its practitioners. By changing the terms on which writing is produced, it will also change the kind of person the writer is required to be—and not obviously for the better.
It is something of a well-earned cliché on Substack to write about writing, and I acknowledge that this post contributes to that surplus, although I hope not without justification. As this essay was nearing completion, I discovered that its subtitle duplicates almost exactly the title of a 2022 op-ed in the Boston Globe by
, which can also be found here. Sometimes asking important questions risks a certain degree of unoriginality. In addition to the present essay, I have also been working on two others which I hope to share sometime later this summer: one is on transhumanism and the denial of death, and the other is about the mechanically-produced image, which was first introduced by nineteenth century cameras and is now undergoing another major transformation with the current rise of algorithmically-generated images.A good number of you are reading this post as new subscribers to the newsletter, having found your way here through
’s The Intrinsic Perspective, which included one of my essays from earlier this past spring in the first installment of the annual summer series, Sampling the 2024 blogosphere: Part 1 (a second installment has also been published). If that’s you, welcome! I’m grateful to Erik for sharing my work alongside so much writing of fine quality. For subscribers who aren’t reading The Intrinsic Perspective, I’d encourage you to peruse these first two installements of the series—and while you’re there, to read some of Erik’s own work, which engages myriad topics and never fails to be interesting.If you enjoy Ever Not Quite, please share it with others; this is by far the most effective way for new readers to discover it. Thank you all for reading!
There is a famous line that is usually attributed to Dorothy Parker: “I hate to write, but I love having written”. Whatever its provenance, this remark has always captured something true to my own experience, and I suspect the same of many other writers as well: writing is a difficult business, but while the road may be arduous, the destination is rewarding. It can be painful, at times even excruciating, but ultimately its travails give way to a distinct sense of clarity, of having surveyed the contours of an issue, mapped some of its invisible pathways, its false leads, its trap-doors, and discovered a way through. In a word, writing is a process—perhaps the best we have—by which confusion may be transformed into something resembling understanding.
But here’s a claim I’m willing to defend which has recently become controversial in certain quarters: the fact that writing is such hard work and exacts such demands upon its practitioners is no argument that it ought to be made any easier, nor that we should consider its many struggles to be problems in search of solutions.
Let me be clear right away: I’m not concerned with all of the textual proliferations that can be found online which barrage us with meaningless “content” (a perfect word, really, for the co-incidence of abundance and emptiness), and which I suspect is already largely generated by artificial intelligence—copywriting, advertising, listicles, et cetera. You’ll have no trouble thinking of your own examples. All of this, it hardly needs to be pointed out, is the lexical equivalent of widgets punched out on an assembly line, and there can be little doubt that the reason this sort of material can be offloaded so readily onto machines is that the techniques by which it has always been produced were already entirely mechanical: it is the output of a ‘formula’ of sorts which has been calculated in advance to generate clicks and to boost virality in order to maximize the value of the content to advertisers. In fact, I’m not interested in any text that is intended to perform a useful function—giving clear instructions, say, or summarizing the body of academic literature on a certain topic. I’m referring instead to that much smaller share of writing—whether to be found online or anywhere else—which can only proceed from the same open attunement to reality that is necessary for genuine thought to occur, and which depends upon the faculty of judgment in its vital pursuit of understanding. As the political theorist Hannah Arendt once put it, the process by which we understand and become reconciled to events occurring in our world can be said to resemble philosophy, “engaging the human mind in nothing less than an interminable dialogue between itself and the essence of everything that is.”1
Although it constitutes only a modest portion of the text that we might come across, this kind of exploratory writing that is receptive to the realities which present themselves continues to be an essential capacity which the students at any serious educational institution are expected to master. And the continued existence of this model of education is what warrants all the recent hand-wringing—both within and outside of these institutions—about the place of artificial intelligence in their endeavor to fulfill their mandate to educate their students. It has been proposed that AI software be introduced in order to play the role of conversation partners and writing assistants for students who are writing essays, and also as all-purpose tutors for those who are studying just about anything else. Indeed, many history and language arts teachers are now evaluating—with all apparent seriousness—the allure of AI-generated resurrections of historical figures and impersonations of characters from literary works, which their advocates insist can help breathe life into the otherwise dull classrooms which already compete with social media for the attention of modern students. As a matter of fact, what had been mere proposals just a few months ago are already finding their way into actual pedagogy in classrooms both public and private, upper and lower, all over the world.
Notwithstanding my profound skepticism of all this, I won’t comment here on the dubious educational value of each one of these fashionable gimmicks, nor will I decry the pressure that is placed on educators to run these sorts of high-tech experiments on their students.2 I simply want to point out what I doubt anybody who is paying attention would deny: that the very shape of education itself—and not only the methods by which students are trained to write well—is being redesigned with impunity in ways that have unforeseeable results. Typically, I would welcome any sort of back-to-basics reassessment of whatever it is we value enough to trouble ourselves with transmitting it to the young, but this conversation now derives its urgency not from the usual responsibility to thoughtful engagement with matters of ongoing public concern, but from what I think can be described without much exaggeration as an impending and incalculable transformation in education. And because these initiatives so often seem to be pursued in order to better accommodate the needs of technology to extend its reach and to make itself indispensable, this revolution in the way students are taught to write demands the consideration of anyone who is concerned about our relationship with technology.
The purpose of what some might call a humanistic education is to cultivate in students a sensitivity to the whole of reality—to prepare them, in the words of the American educator Eva Brann, “to go about interpreting all the world”. We can perhaps agree that the world doesn’t need another 5-page essay on the issue of, say, political authority in Antigone, but the student, according to a humanistic pedagogy, does need to undergo the piercing experience of reading, thinking, and writing about the questions that are raised by Sophoclean tragedy, and to wrestle into being a coherent and perceptive analysis of its most serious issues. Simply put, the purpose of learning to write is to render the entire world—from works of literature and art, to the human relationship with the natural world, to politics, and, indeed, to our relationship with technology—accessible to the inquiring mind. The result is both the mind’s deeper relationship with the totality of what is, and also the new product which is introduced into the world: a written work capable of revealing these insights to a reader. “The dignity of the word”, the German theologian Josef Pieper once wrote, “consists in this: through the word is accomplished what no other means can accomplish, namely, communication based on reality.”3 The act of writing thus initiates a dual motion: one which directs the writer outwards, into the world and towards the reader, just as surely as it draws the writer inwards, into that conversation with oneself in which we strive to take the measure of the truth.4
But the argument is now made anew every day: large language models can teach students to learn how to write, and also aid anyone else who finds themselves, for whatever reason, in the position of having to produce a written piece. The algorithm functions as a partner in writing, one that can inform, goad, challenge, and raise Socratic questions that push both the writer and the work into new and fruitful directions. This technology, it is alleged, enables students to learn better and also enhances the final product, without necessarily supplying unethical shortcuts that falsify its authorship; in short, it can make writers better able to achieve the understanding that the activity of writing has always furnished to those willing to undertake its rigors, thereby making them into more capable and more prolific thinkers.
In March of 2023, the online education nonprofit Khan Academy, which boasts more than 135 million users worldwide, introduced Khanmigo, a chatbot that runs on OpenAI’s GPT-4 to assist students taking its courses.5 But more audacious still, Khan Academy’s vision, according to a page of its website dedicated to laying out its plans to make Khanmigo available to teachers, is to “put the power of Khanmigo in every classroom.” In his recent book, Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing), Khan Academy’s founder and CEO, Sal Khan, discusses the potential for LLMs like Khanmigo to work with students who are writing school papers, as well as their teachers whose duties include assigning and grading them.6 Here’s how Khan describes the working relationship between Khanmigo and the student:
With Khanmigo [...] we are creating a middle path for teachers, intending to balance the need for students to learn how to write with the utility of generative AI for support. In this scenario Khanmigo acts as a powerful guide, but the student does the bulk of the work. The student can ask Khanmigo: “What points should I consider as I write an essay about The Great Gatsby?” It will suggest themes including the American dream, social class and inequality, the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties, and key symbols in the novel, such as the green light, the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, and the valley of ashes. The technology works well when a student takes a couple of paragraphs of something they’ve written and asks the large language model to read it and critique its strengths and weaknesses. It can help students with counter-arguments and make what they’ve written more compelling, encouraging them to think about the essay as a good writing coach might do. Again, the AI tutor does not do the work for the students. Rather, it works alongside them. Within seconds, the artificial intelligence will provide feedback, highlight areas for improvement, and offer suggestions for how to revise and refine the work. It helps craft tone, voice, and perspective even as students develop their own. At its best, an education-based AI platform can be the world’s finest assistant and co-collaborator, objective in its assessments and thorough in its analytics, designed to do one thing and one thing only: to sharpen a student’s skills.7
Now, I’ll leave it to the reader to ponder what are, to my mind, many hair-raising specifics in this passage. Instead, I’ll merely point out that the use of Khanmigo, as it is described here, involves more than simply coaching students to become better writers; it also means tacitly, and perhaps inadvertently, altering fundamentally what it means to write in the first place.
A part of what makes writing so difficult—and surely the reason it might seem to require this sort of high-tech remedy to begin with—is the fact that, in the absence of any input from an LLM like Khanmigo, it calls upon the writer to play numerous distinct roles: a writer, of course, writes. But a writer also edits what has already been written; a writer must fashion the tone and voice of the work, taking into account its audience, and the existing discourse to which the final product is intended to contribute; and perhaps above all, a writer must conjure that critical inner voice which objects to every argument, takes issue with every characterization, demands greater clarity from every explanation: he who knows only his own side of the case, let’s not forget, knows little of that. What’s more, any good writer knows how to step away from the work-in-progress, allowing it to continue to murmur in the indistinct reverberations of thought and imagination, and to return after some time with fresh eyes, now better attuned to blemishes in pacing, diction, or logic.
This is all to say that the writer must engage in an ongoing self-dialogue, the participants of which cannot be pulled apart without compromising the integrity of the writer’s total possession of the competencies demanded by the very nature of the craft. Proponents of software like Khanmigo and other AI-based writing assistants, which deeply insinuate themselves among the writer’s native faculties, suggest that these myriad functions—which any writer properly so-called must command and balance—should be classified and ranked, with some being deemed essential and therefore inviolable, while others which are deemed dispensable are outsourced to the effort-saving tool. It casts a pall of suspicion over the need of the writer ever to struggle and implicitly pathologizes writing’s exertions as needless agony and wasted time, both of which ought to be minimized. Against all this, I continue to suspect that the best way for anyone to become a better writer—properly speaking—is to write, which means by definition to exercise all of the faculties that this activity requires. Unfortunately for the techno-solutionist ethos, which perceives the need for time- and effort-saving tools wherever it discovers any indication of human striving, this means that writing must continue to be hard.
Now, perhaps this appraisal is overly harsh, and maybe there’s something to Khan’s vision after all; some readers may insist that LLMs can further advance the pursuit of understanding, to which writing offers unique access; Karl Popper famously attributed to Einstein the remark: “my pencil and I are much cleverer than I am,” and I too sense that I am well served by the keyboard and word-processing software with which I write these words.8 But let me make an observation about the impending upheaval in the technology of writing which makes me wary of the premises that underlie the unmindful introduction of an apparatus like Khanmigo to the writing process. This can be stated simply: to precisely the degree that writing is difficult, the practice not only produces a written work, but it also inevitably shapes the writer. Conversely, and perhaps more relevantly in the present context, to the degree that writing is not difficult, the practice does not shape the writer. Of course, just as word processing software once rendered typos and simple grammatical errors inexcusable, students who are being trained to write using Khanmigo will be expected to clear a much higher threshold of quality in order for their teachers to consider their work satisfactory. But my point is that the conditions under which we write shape what the process makes us into: what it requires us to do, to know, and to attend to.
All of the resources which have been marshaled into Khanmigo—creative consultant, co-writer, all-around editor—have of course been available to writers in every epoch in one form or another, but always at a distance, and it usually required real effort to access them: I could seek the conversation of a thoughtful interlocutor to help bring shape to my thinking, or the counsel of a trusted editor, or a proofreader’s second pair of eyes. But for the most part, the basic condition of the writer has always been to be alone: not lonely, a state that implies a kind of desperate isolation, but solitary, engaged in the dynamic activity of conversing with oneself—of exercising what Arendt later called the “two-in-one”, that inner dialogue between me and myself which constitutes all real thinking.9 Not for nothing does the aesthetic that has surrounded writers of all ages tend to conjure scenes of the secluded forest hut, the remote cabin on the shores of a rustic pond, or the soul-searching retreat in the wilds of the desert. Even the more modern image of a figure like Jean-Paul Sartre urgently converting coffee and cigarettes into upwards of twenty pages per day of existential philosophy inside crowded Paris cafés depicts, for all the oppressive churn of the multitude, the writer working alone, and in dialogue only with himself; hell, after all, is other people.
But if to write has always involved a measure of solitude, Khanmigo is the product of an entirely different—and decidedly contemporary—impulse. Indeed, the name “Khanmigo” plays on the Spanish “conmigo”, meaning “with me”. It was created to be, in the words of Khan Academy’s website, “your always-available writing coach”. Consider some of the antecedents here: Facebook’s defining prerogative was to connect everyone with their family and friends—and ultimately with the rest of humanity; as Mark Zuckerberg put it in a 2017 statement, the “whole mission” is to “bring the world closer together”. This kind of connectivity-at-a-distance, of course, had been made all the more necessary after nineteenth and twentieth century technologies of transportation, together with various other forms of social disruption and fragmentation, had rendered our physical separateness more practical than in any prior era. Like countless purveyors of digital media before him, for Sal Khan, there is a democratizing and equalizing potential behind the endeavor to connect each and every student to an always-available artificial tutor capable of performing functions that may otherwise remain unavailable to most of them; whatever else the impending proliferation of AI tutors is likely to bring about, we should recognize that it represents only the most recent episode in a much longer-standing contemporary trajectory which bends towards making everyone and everything available to everybody—its guiding principle: only connect.10
An earlier phase of these technological, cultural—and inescapably psychological—transformations was explored in an influential 2009 essay, “The End of Solitude”, by
.11 Many of the distinguishing characteristics of our modern sense of self had been made possible by a unique technological configuration which, beginning in the seventeenth century, was characterized by the widespread availability of texts that had been touched off by the appearance of the printing press. This technology not only created the modern printing industry, with the books, newspapers, and scientific and literary journals that sustained a new culture of reading and writing; it created such notional associations as the new “Republic of Letters”, which later made possible what we have come to call more broadly the “public sphere”, in which events of public interest could be debated, opinions aired, and a kind of dynamic consensus reached, which ultimately lent political legitimacy to the state which purported to act on the public’s behalf. But the wide circulation of newspapers, and, later, radio and television broadcasts made possible a new kind of mass society which could be measured and polled, and the results would come to be understood to represent what we now call “public opinion.”But in a complimentary development, this new relationship to the printed word also made possible our distinctly modern sense of ourselves as individuals—as direct correspondents with God through an inner conscience; as rational agents in possession of an interior source of self-certainty; as political subjects whose inalienable rights must be defended against the trespasses of the state; and with these dimensions of newfound subjectivity which now constituted our sense of ourselves came a corresponding need and capacity for the forms of solitude and introspection necessary to sustain and defend them. In its Romantic manifestation, it is the writer—and above all the poet—whose singular genius lies in a gift for channeling nature’s awesome forces into verse, and giving written expression to the visions that can be wrested from among nature’s secrets. For these secular saints, as well as for their nineteenth and twentieth-century cultural descendants, the greatest danger to this vision was the threat of submersion in the now maturing currents of mass society: conformity, inauthenticity, absorption in popular culture, or any other failure to live deliberately.12
But today, Deresiewicz writes, “we no longer believe in the solitary mind”; “[O]ur great fear is not submersion by the mass but isolation from the herd.” It is the socially-networked mind that enjoys our allegiance, and it is impossible to overlook the role of era-defining technologies in making this so. Telephone, Radio, television, internet-enabled social media: each of these, in its own way, is a technology of connection, of contact at a distance. (“Reach out and touch someone”, Deresiewicz reminds us, was AT&T’s ubiquitous slogan in the 1970s and ‘80s.) But like all supposed benefactions, each also harbors a corresponding and self-undermining flipside: in addition to the entertainments the television can deliver, its absence subjects us to a new experience of boredom. “Television, by eliminating the need to learn to make use of one’s lack of occupation, prevents one from discovering how to enjoy it. In fact, it renders that condition fearsome, its prospect intolerable.” And if social media connects us with others, its absence creates the possibility of novel forms of loneliness—of isolation as it had never been experienced before: in its absence, as an affliction which none should be expected to endure, and in its presence, as contact without substance.
Writing as a self-avowed product of the 1970s TV generation, Deresiewicz observes:
[T]he Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom. If six hours of television a day creates the aptitude for boredom, the inability to sit still, a hundred text messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself. [...] If boredom is the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation. We lost the ability to be still, our capacity for idleness. They have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude.
And, to speculate about the next phase in the progress of media-enabled connectivity which now appears to be well underway, if the great emotion of the AI-generation may perhaps be helplessness, then they are at risk of losing the ability to depend on themselves for knowledge, skill, and proficiency—their capacity for self-reliance. It is above all this Emersonian virtue which the peddlers of ubiquitous AI-powered writing assistants appear to have set their efforts against: the solitary writer, thinking, possessed of the full range of the competencies demanded of them by their craft, and pursuing a truth or an artistry which must take a form not answerable to the crowdsourced verities of algorithmic consensus.
As a cultural value, self-reliance—long so deeply rooted, especially in North America—appears to be coming due for reappraisal: by suggesting themes for the student to write about, Khanmigo mocks the student’s capacity to discern the meaning of a text in a way that is not pre-packaged and spoon-fed; by suggesting counter-arguments to a student’s reasoning, it diminishes the need for the writer’s own searching and capacious intellect to discover, under its own power, how an argument will sound to those who are not already convinced of its truth; its suggestions about tone, voice and perspective suggest to the student that it is unnecessary for the writer to develop their own ear for these qualities; and finally—and, indeed, above all—its constant presence and ever-watchful gaze means that the writer, once an icon of solitude, now need never be alone. It supplies a powerful and perpetual reminder that the many struggles that necessarily accompany writing—and which alone can turn a writer, properly speaking, into ‘one-who-has-written’—are needless and are borne only in vain. Rather, the message is implicitly addressed to the writer: this difficult business is beneath you, and ought instead to be turned over to the machine that can do it better.
If, as
has observed, the message of the medium of artificial intelligence in its many guises is that faculties like thinking, responsibility, and agency can and should be outsourced to it rather than continuing to be exercised by human beings, then its use should be expected to cause us gradually to become de-skilled, intellectually disempowered, and divested of our responsibility for the fate of the world.13 And in one of the many ironies that have characterized much of the history of communications technology, it seems that this may occur at precisely the moment—and, indeed, for precisely the reason—that we will also convince ourselves that we have gained capacity, and made ourselves not less, but rather more powerful. Ultimately, in addition to the individual’s experience of intellectual helplessness which Khanmigo seems almost to have been designed to cultivate, the more of our core competencies we cede to machines, the narrower the share of the world we preserve for ourselves, and the more we will have consented to become a burden, merely to be tolerated, supported, and looked after, on the otherwise efficient systems of machine intelligence that increasingly manage our fate.If the act of writing, whether the fingers contact pen or keyboard, shapes the writer by offering an incomparable gateway to understanding, then it goes without saying that the writer who renounces the practice also surrenders this possibility. The emergence of the modern self out of, among other things, mechanical technologies of textual reproduction opened unrealized possibilities which had not previously been explored; beyond its power to create readerships and to found public institutions, the printing press, with the essays, poems, and psychological novels it made reproducible and profitable, helped to reveal a subtler and more articulate sense of the unseen spaces we harbor within ourselves. In one influential framing of the resulting social transformation, a culture of sincerity, in which we derive our sense of identity primarily through the sincere enactment of social relationships which are largely fixed and externally dependent, yielded to a culture of authenticity, one which is more interested in the possibilities that may be discovered within the interior of the individual.14 And this inward turn meant that the authentic self needed to be defended against the influences, appropriations, and injustices that may be imposed upon it by external social realities. But a different set of cultural values, encouraged by a technology offering collaboration and partnership, is now coming into view. The human-AI hybrid that emerges from this alliance, as it has been described by Sal Khan, declares an outward-facing orientation, one that looks askance at solitude and has little need for self-reliance—once the indispensable virtues of a now fading literary culture.
But it will also shape the kinds of writing that will be produced: indeed, every technology shapes the stories we tell, just as surely as it shapes the ideas which we take most seriously. As Marx once wondered:
[I]s Achilles possible when powder and shot have been invented? And is the Iliad possible at all when the printing press and even printing machines exist? Is it not inevitable that with the emergence of the press, the singing and the telling and the muse cease, that is, the conditions necessary for epic poetry disappear?15
It isn’t that the poet is irrevocably deprived of some essential potentiality with the advent of the printing press; it’s that these technologies don’t just change our material conditions, they also reshape our experience of the world: our sense of what is beautiful, or excellent, our estimation of which stories are worth telling, of what is interesting, and worthy of exploration and inquiry. The world, in short, speaks to us differently. I won’t be so bold as to venture predictions about which forms of the written word, perhaps now unimaginable, may flourish as algorithms become more deeply insinuated into their composition, or about which are most likely to wither from neglect. But what is all but certain is that, like powder, shot, and above all, the press, the technologies that define both our experience of the world and also the process by which we interpret it, will shape what we write and how.
So too, the technologies of perpetual connection, communication, and collaboration which are now delivering the automated personal writing assistant do nothing in themselves to nullify what Josef Pieper called the dignity of the word: its fundamental capacity for communication based on reality. It remains true that our writing can continue to interpret and communicate reality, with our still-intact faculties of understanding, imagination, and judgment when we address others as fellow members of a shared world in which language continues to be meaningfully spoken. But, as ever, those who would fully acquire the means and the skills to communicate on the basis of reality must not be afraid to rely on themselves to do so.
Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics” in Essays in Understanding, pg. 322.
For some commentary about all of this, see a recent New York Times op-ed by Jessica Grose, “Every Tech Tool in the Classroom Should Be Ruthlessly Evaluated”.
Pieper, Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, pg. 33 (italics mine).
I’m borrowing here from the philosopher Vilém Flusser, who once wrote:
One who writes presses into his own interior and at the same time outward toward someone else. These contradictory pressures lend writing the tension that has made it capable of carrying and transmitting Western culture and of endowing this culture with such an explosive form. (Vilém Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future?, pg. 7)
The book is basically an extended advertisement for Khanmigo.
Later in the same paragraph, Khan even looks forward to a world where Khanmigo recommends grades to teachers for the papers it has helped the student to write. Khan reassures the reader that:
“It would also be difficult for a student to cheat using ChatGPT in this context. If they use ChatGPT to write the essay but simply copy and paste text into their assignment, Khanmigo will tell the teacher: “We didn’t work on this essay together, it just showed up, so we should be suspicious.”
What is being proposed, in other words, is a novel system in which students who have chosen not to use Khanmigo in the process of writing their paper can be accused—by Khanmigo—of cheating on their assignments.
For a more boldly contrarian take, I refer the reader to Wendell Berry’s short 1987 essay, “Why I am not Going to Buy a Computer”. Here’s a choice passage from that essay:
When somebody has used a computer to write work that is demonstrably better than Dante’s, and when this better is demonstrably attributable to the use of a computer, then I will speak of computers with a more respectful tone of voice, though I still will not buy one.
See Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Volume I: Thinking, pgs. 179-193.
For more on the seeming ubiquity of the word “democratizing” in the language of AI, see
’s recent post over at .In 2022, the piece lent its title to The End of Solitude, a collection which includes more than forty of Deresiewicz’s essays on culture and society, and which I recommend highly. You can find William Deresiewicz here on Substack at
.These last two paragraphs expand upon the account presented by Deresiewicz and are not a straightforward presentation of his essay. Consequently, any errors here are to be laid at my door.
See Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity.
Karl Marx, “Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy” in The German Ideology, pg. 150.