There’s less demand, more supply, weakened global attunement to textual modes of culture and a weaker historical-philosophical case for primarily textual ways of being human.
Ie words are being devalued both financially and philosophically and deserve to be.
Conversation
Perhaps a necessary corrective to decades of elite overproduction. And I don’t mean we should switch to image-based or oral culture. That’s just textuality++. I mean just talking less in every way and doing more.
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Not necessarily anything as ideological as “building” but simply being in more basic ways. Both individually and collectively. A less talkative species 🤔
Even if it means people like me getting downgraded 😆
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I still want to write, but in ways that are in some sense more intense, and auxiliary. Like I really enjoy writing my threads on maker projects where the writing is a supporting role not the main act.
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Same with storytelling. I enjoy it because it’s pre-communicative. Writing down a story feels like an auxiliary step to “making” it. And you could substitute drawing it animation or oral telling… stories precede the telling in some weird way.
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Relatedly, for the narrower role for writing I see all around, I’m vaguely attracted to poetry again after decades, since it’s a way to make words instruments of seeing rather than ends in themselves. Each word a microscope. 100x fewer words, each doing 100x more 🤔
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I’m sitting in a cafe doing some long overdue planning (planning is another textual activity I have lowered desire for) and trying to apply my “10 year commitment or no deal” rule to all my activities, and asking: do I want to commit to writing in the next decade at all?
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Good or bad news depending on whether or not you like my writing: I still want to write through the 2020s for sure. It’s far from the cutoff risk zone. And it’s still an important part of the portfolio. But no longer #1 activity. #2 at best.
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And when I do feel the writing itch as a primary thing, it’s more stuff that comes out looking like psyche-scanning automatic writing… more primal and way more rough. With no clearly executed rhetorical intent. Feels like prefab concrete blocks rather than finished structures.
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