Democracy dies in comfort

Democracy dies when we fail to appreciate writing.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that some of the financial news stories in the business section of Apple News had eerily similar titles, something like “Netflix stock rises, outperforms Market.” The next day, I noticed stories like “Netflix stock sinks, underperforms market.” I don’t usually read the little stories that accompany the stock charts—after all, I’m usuallyjust there to check my stocks, but I clicked on the second story. I saw something that made me stop and take notice: Automated story. I was giving my time and attention to the thoughts of a machine.

I started to look for instances of stories like this and found them everywhere. Then I remembered back to a news story I had seen a few years ago about an entrepreneur who was spending a great deal of time teaching machines to write like humans. The reporter read two passages to audience members and asked them to choose which one was written by a human and which was written by a machine. They chose wrong. 

It was a simple story, mostly driven by facts, with just a few adjectives and no judgment. But most people don’t look for challenges when they read. They look for facts. At that moment, I realized something frightening—people might be just as willing to read what a machine writes as what a human writes. In fact, they might not even be able to tell the difference. The thought made me shudder.

You might say that this is the golden age of writing. I read that there are already more than a million Substack accounts—the “newsletter” technology that allows writers to create their own news or opinion system, gain subscribers, charge them, and make a living independently. Some big-name reporters and pundits like Matt Yglesias have jumped the media outlet ship and hung out their shingles. They seem to be doing well. But, naturally, most writers on the platform are making very little money on it. They write because they feel they have something to say, but as more supply arrives with a fixed amount of demand, it doesn’t take a Nobel laureate to predict the results.

When everyone has a megaphone, nothing gets heard.

I have written for several online publications over the years. I have seen firsthand the trends in writing. The big picture is that publications want quantity over quality. Readership is driven by an algorithm that recommends like-minded articles about topics people are already Googling. If a news story spikes because a celebrity met with Trump and called liberals names, the algorithm will provide an incentive for writers to give “hot takes” on the trending topic. It doesn’t matter if the topic has nothing to do with the writer’s expertise. It doesn’t matter if the writing is rushed, or juvenile. It doesn’t even matter what the writer’s opinion is, though the more freshly controversial, the better, according to the algorithm.  What matters is speed, relevance, and the number of social outlets willing to link to the article.

The algorithm doesn’t like unfamiliar words, so the writer has an incentive to dumb their articles down. The algorithm doesn’t like unfamiliarity, so fresh new ideas are frowned upon. You can see how the next logical step becomes creating an artificial intelligence engine that pulls keywords from recent stories, slaps a few connecting sentences together, and pushes it out under a familiar logo.

There are other, more sinister forces at work, too. Venerable media names have been snapped up over the past few years by private equity, which is interested in brand extensions more than great writing. New media outlets launch with names that sound authoritative: One America News; Now This News, The Epoch Times. Most readers have no idea what makes a well-written, well-researched, and well-edited article. 

Meanwhile, media outlets are literally being sued out of existence. The First Amendment is at threat like never before in relative peacetime. Sarah Palin sues the New York Times. Kyle Rittenhouse announces plans to sue a slew of publications and individuals. The website Gawker was sued into bankruptcy by a lawsuit funded by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Theil.

If your goal were to start a publication today, stay out of court, and make money, you’d create something that sounds like a real publication, gets its stories from recent Google spikes, adds a few important-sounding words, and surfs in the wave of other stories on the internet.

That’s exactly what’s happening. And if we don’t recognize it and combat it, we will become peons to our algorithmic overlords. How do we decide what to read? How do we recognize good writing?

Good writing should be challenging. It should compel you with an argument that is surprising, yet cogent. Something you haven’t heard before written in the same way, yet something that makes sense in your gut. Good writing should add clarity to a murky subject.

Good writing should teach you new words. If you immediately recognize every word because you’ve seen them thousands of times before, you are not reading something that is well-written. Good writers are fishermen in the sea of language, casting nets and sometimes bringing back exotic creatures that show you the wonder of the world through their unfamiliarity.

Good writing should contain judgment, but shouldn’t be dismissive or sophomoric. Good writing doesn’t demonize or castigate. It questions. It wonders. 

Good writing makes you feel something—it should be a balloon that lifts you above the mundane and carries you to a loftier view of something that you have never seen in the same way.

Nothing great can be envisioned without good writing. It’s no accident that our Declaration and Constitution are filled with mellifluous and harmonious phrases. They slide off the tongue. They help form the idea of America. 

Lincoln was a great politician, mostly because he was a great writer. We don’t quote Martin Luther King’s talking points. We quote his beautifully written speeches. Kennedy—both John and Bobby—could lift readers and audiences to a higher place. At his best, Obama can do it. Even George H.W. Bush, as tortured as his phrasing could be, was served by a very good writer—Peggy Noonan. I disagree with almost everything she writes, but I envy the way she does it so artfully and compellingly.

I no longer click on stories that I think are likely to have been generated by an algorithm. Our first weapon in fighting back is to take back our attention. Our next weapon is to support institutions that value good writers and fight back against those that don’t. We must pay for publications and support our favorite writers’ Substacks or blogs. We must buy books and use our social media to entice our friends to buy them. We must stand against censorship in any form.

We must recognize movements like the anti-CRT and book-banning movements for the thought-suppressing dangers they are. Democracy dies not in darkness, but in comfort. Curiosity kills cats, but it is the lifeblood of a healthy society. If a society forgets how to read, it will forget how to be just, how to be human.