writing as thinking

on maintaining voice in the era of acceleration

the push for productivity makes us lazy. maybe not immediately. but the same objective that makes us more efficient also leads to shortcuts. the ways in which we decrease friction can become crutches.

shortcuts enable us to place attention elsewhere. every day, i lament the fact that my tiny manhattan studio lacks a dishwasher. but i don’t care to be stellar at washing dishes; and, more abstractly, the state or process of dishwashing is not a creative process for me. i am happy to trade my allocated dishwashing attention for almost anything else.

writing, however, is a creative process for me. writing is thinking. generating, reviewing, revising, interrogating. when i write, it is always obsessively, uncomfortably. i have never considered any piece of my writing to be finished, and i am never satisfied with the outcome; i can always find fault: a slightly imprecise argument, a story detail that more neatly connects ideas, a place where punctuating with a colon strengthens the claim. but it is through this process of composing a mess of clumsy, disjoint thoughts into a coherent piece that clarity emerges.

words are living things. they have personality, point of view, agenda.

— hannibal

the deference of even polishing writing to llms concerns me. those last small, agonizing decisions are what maintain one’s voice and point of view. sometimes, the inquiry into a singular, seemingly small claim undermines the entirety of an argument. by shortcutting this process, we are never forced to confront the choices that establish one’s unique style and perspective.

the tension is: if the optimal strategy for local efficiency is adopting a piece of technology, but it degrades long-term quality of thought, what should one do? i will not pretend to have a prescriptive answer, nor will i pretend that i do not use this technology myself. but the ease of deference asks us to confront our values. what are we willing to sacrifice for accelerated progress?