An Exhortation: Expand the Circle

Writers in Revolt

“How can they know

Truth flourishes where the student's lamp has shone,

And there alone, that have no Solitude?

So the crowd come they care not what may come.

They have loud music, hope every day renewed

And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.”

-W.B. Yeats, “The Leaders of the Crowd”

You’re a writer. Of course you are. You’re reading Substack, the website by and for writers and one thus prone to a certain self-referentiality on the subject. Perhaps you’re plagued by a sense of inferiority, by the sense that you write simply because you can’t do anything else. Shelley’s great claim that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” has been left to rust. In our world, the mantle of production, of creation even, has somehow been assumed by the Tech Lord. Now, the writer is distinctly a creature of the margins. (This is not news to you, of course!)

If you are a writer, you have likely internalized a conception of yourself as a scavenger, a rodent, dumpster diving and teething on the discarded pizza crusts of society, haunting alleys far away from the silver corridors of Silicon Valley. You exist as a kind of obstacle to those around you, a “stumbling block” if you want to get Biblical. The tech oligarchs who control our world don’t like you because you insist on your own creations, holding a certain affection for and entitlement to your own intellectual property. They, of course, would like to remove all copyright law so that they could make free use of your work and feed it into AI without due acknowledgment or payment. (Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, and many others have all openly said this.) You are an unfortunate necessity that they would eliminate if they could. And they are eagerly seeking the means to do so.

This general contempt leaks through all the crevices of our world. You are everywhere an Unpleasant Thing, stuck in the social craw. Tell someone you’re a writer, and you’re met with a flash of mingled surprise and suspicion, as though that couldn’t be anyone’s real job or identity. You’re lying. You’re shirking. You’re hiding something. You’re shrinking from the Great Tasks of life.

But the truth is that you, even in your blindest, most fumbling efforts, are one of only a few pillars still holding up a collapsing civilization. You are Atlas. You are bearing the lonely burden of Reality on your shoulders, seemingly unaided. Look at the fuel that is running our society. AI operates on rehashed and reappropriated Visions — and they are your Visions. All the writers, past and present, living and dead, are shoveling coal uncompensated in the engine room of society. You’re being milked for blood, and some of you don’t even know it. That Tech Lord is dressed in your robes. He feasts at your table. He guzzles your wine.

You need to insist violently on yourself. In an environment so dead-set against you, no claim to your rightful place can be too fierce or too grandiose. You need to scourge this world with all the ancient literary beauty it has suppressed and kept out of reach. It needs to be lashed with tongues of fire. It needs the continual chastisement of its neglected poets and novelists - with its eventual betterment in mind.

And the situation really is that grave. When I see the mind of a Tech Lord in action, I see a constricting circle attempting to bring everything within its ambit and squeeze. It is restriction imposed without check or restraint, an attempt to impose uniformity and regularity on all things: a mindless mind utterly insensible to beauty, only capable of quantification, diseased and set on infecting the world with its disease. This needs to be resisted by any means necessary - and primarily with that most unpredictable weapon of mass destruction, the solitary author’s solitary pen.

Only the poetic imagination can expand the circle, the horizon of the future, which the Tech Lord seeks to continually narrow. Our goal, ultimately, is to expand this circle of consciousness so far that, in Augustine’s formulation, its center will be everywhere and its circumference nowhere.

For once, the issue is completely clear. We are literally talking about a war between good and evil, freedom and slavery. There is no alternative. There is no silver lining or upside to defeat. The only option is to go all-in, to wager unhesitatingly and completely, with total faith and devotion, on aesthetic power. Look at the writing on the wall, look at the way the world is moving: there is absolutely no benefit to any sort of compromise or partial capitulation. We have nothing to lose and absolutely everything to gain.