It’s likely I’m going to spend the next few days thinking out loud about the recent AI announcements from OpenAI, Microsoft, Facebook. I barely slept last night, as only yesterday did the ramifications of this week really begin to set in.
Bluntly, I think my job as a copy editor is largely gone, or could be within twelve months. This realization only hit me tonight as I was talking to my parents — why it hadn’t occurred to me months ago as I tooled around with ChatGPT 3.5, I don’t know. But thinking back, the very first thing I asked ChatGPT was to write a New York Times article about the destruction of the moon. And it did. It wrote it better than many of my editing clients.
I think I am obsolete.
I read that the new ChatGPT 4 can ingest images, too. Meaning you can sketch a website on a piece of paper. Snap a photo of it, then upload. Tell it to write a website that looks like your sketch…and it does. In seconds. Goodbye, web designers.
I read it now gets into the 90th percentile when taking the bar exam. Goodbye, lawyers.
The way I think about the internet has completely shifted in the last 24 hours. No longer is it a tool for communication between humans, but rather the amniotic fluid of these Large Language Models. And their fuel. They ingest everything on the internet — and ‘learn’ from it. That LiveJournal I kept in high school was food for these things. The purpose of the internet is now something else.
What happens when millions of people like me lose their jobs? What happened when millions of Americans had their jobs shipped overseas in the wake of NAFTA? I grew up in rural America — I spend a lot of time in towns long since hollowed out as industry moved to cheaper markets. Sure, we saved a buck, but the cost was the livelihoods of thousands of people, of their purpose. Humans are many things, and as cliche and unoriginal and obvious as it is, a good job is enough for most people to feel fulfilled in their sense of purpose, providing shelter and food to their families. What happened when those jobs left? Over the last 30 years, hopelessness and drugs moved in, suicides started increasing, small towns withered, and populism flourished.
The technological progress of the next 5 years is going to make the progress of the last thirty seem glacial.
I’m already exhausted by the potential instability.
What happens when children are raised with these LLMs? We thought Google was bad… Who will need to learn anything if we could just ask the LLM? Who will need to learn to code? Who will need to learn to write?
Given the level of most people’s technical sophistication, how on earth do we talk about the implications of these new AI language models?
Genetics data has revealed that the popular understanding of race, developed during a time when white supremacy was widely accepted, simply doesn’t make any sense. In the popular view, for instance, “Black” represents a single, homogenous group. But genomic data makes clear that populations in Sub-Saharan Africa are the most genetically diverse on Earth.
A few weeks ago, my only friend in this town died. Fifty-one years my senior, he was my neighbor across the street.
Four years ago, when we first met, I was wary. He would come to my fence as I was gardening, talking about immigrants coming over the southern border or something else he had seen on Fox News — but as our relationship matured and I learned to steer the conversation away from political issues (or, if I’m honest, indulge him a bit), we struck up a friendship.
Last summer, when his Android phone quit working, he walked over to my fence and asked me about “those iPhones you keep telling me about.” We bought a used SE on eBay. Within a few months, he had upgraded to a brand new iPhone, an Apple TV, an Apple Watch. He took to technology — well-designed, thoughtful technology — in a way I had never seen in someone his age. He loved learning about the capabilities of this incredible tool that fit in his pocket.
Long before he moved to this small town, he was a globe-trotter. He was born in Brooklyn in the 30s, became an Airborne Ranger in the Korean War, and went on to work at IBM, American Satellite, and other long-diminished-yet-bedrock tech companies. He told stories of setting up satellite uplinks in Alaska, of living in Rome, of business meetings with executives all over the world. He moved often — Missouri, Virginia, California, Italy, Minnesota — before settling in this small town in 2002. The tumult of 9/11 on the east coast caused him to re-assess where he wanted to be, and for some reason, he chose this tiny town.
Seventeen years later, I would move here, into a 130-year-old home across the street from his. We got to know each other over the next four years. I painted his garage as he told stories. I would help him with his new iPhone, or try my best to help him with his old Android. I mowed his lawn, shoveled his snow. Initially, he asked how much my services would cost, and when I told him to knock it off — he was a neighbor, after all — he took to me. I don’t think he was accustomed to people being decent without a price of some kind. It wasn’t long after his new phone that he’d start calling 2–3 times a day, asking about this or that, how to use the Find My app to share his location with his niece, or just to ask where I was hiking that day. Once, I FaceTimed him from the top of a mountain not far from our houses and he was amazed. Just that morning, I had been in his living room helping him with something or other, and now I was on a mountaintop? And we were videochatting? He relished those moments.
On a very snowy night a few weeks ago, I walked across the street to shovel his back porch. He heard the shovel on cement and cracked the back door. His voice sounding weak, he asked me to come inside. “I’ve got a question for you.” I walked in a few minutes later to him sitting on his couch. His hair was disheveled, his voice thin. He was clearly not feeling well. He had been vomiting for nearly 24 hours and asked if these were symptoms of covid. “I don’t think so,” I replied, “but I have some tests across the street.” I walked across the street, grabbed some covid tests and Thera-Flu, and walked back to his place. He didn’t want to take a test yet, so I put them on the counter. I asked if he wanted anything, if I could take him to the hospital, told him that I was worried about dehydration. He insisted on staying put, but if in the morning he wasn’t feeling better, he’d let me drive him to the hospital.
“Call me if you need anything. I mean that. Anything.” I told him as I got ready to leave.
“Thanks, buddy,” he said. He thanked me that way often, but this time his voice sounded different. Resigned. I heard both gratitude and finality. I walked across the street and messaged a friend of mine, telling her I was unsure he would survive the night.
Thomas Edsall’s opinion piece in the New York Times about rural American resentment has been lodged in my head these last few days.
I asked Maria Kefalas, a sociologist at Saint Joseph’s University who wrote “Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America” with her husband, Patrick J. Carr, who died in 2020, to describe the state of mind in rural America. She wrote back by email:
My best guess would be that it comes down to brain drain and college-educated voters. It has always been about the mobility of the college educated and the folks getting left behind without that college diploma. Not one high school dropout we encountered back when we wrote about Iowa managed to leave the county (unless they got sent to prison), and the kids with degrees were leaving in droves.
Those whom Kefalas and Carr defined as “stayers” shaped “the political landscape in Ohio, Iowa, etc. (states where the public university is just exporting its professional class).” The result: “You see a striking concentration/segregation of folks on both sides who are just immersed in MAGA world or not,” Kefalas wrote, noting that “people who live in rural America are surrounded by folks who play along with a particular worldview, yet my friends from Brooklyn and Boston will tell you they don’t know anyone who supports Trump or won’t get vaccinated. It’s not open warfare. It’s more like apartheid.”
Urban-rural “apartheid” further reinforces ideological and affective polarization. The geographic separation of Republicans and Democrats makes partisan crosscutting experiences at work, in friendships, in community gatherings, at school or in local government — all key to reducing polarization — increasingly unlikely to occur.
I say this as a native son. I was born & raised in the heartland in a rural town not too far from a big city. I have had every privilege afforded to me: I was born to two kind and loving parents, I wasn’t raised religious, I had a sheltered childhood full of books and free time and curiosity. I went to public school and received a good education, and while I never fit in or had a lot of close friends, that education was a playground for my curiosity, which has survived into adulthood.
I now live in an another rural town—this one far more remote than the one where I was raised)—in another part of the country. On a political map, my life has been inverted: where I once lived in a blue part of a red state, I now live in the reddest part of a blue state. I spent much of my 20s moving from city to city across the country, from the South to the Pacific Northwest, always looking for something I never found: community. Being the child of a small town, cities felt too unaccountable, too anonymous. While I once craved that anonymity, it came to feel hollow as I grew older.
Being gay, this anonymity initially felt freeing. Away from the confines of my childhood town, I could be whoever I wanted to be. I explored my sexuality without guilt or shame. I inadvertently became a different person every couple of years. I was a die-hard liberal, crystallizing into something more critical of the Left with age. I used to look to the political Right with suspicion: when you’re gay and raised in a conservative town, you learn not to trust conservatives. But with age, I can see these people as what they are: all too often afraid of change, and full of guilt and shame about who and what they are. The most difficult lessons are ones in which you realize the world isn’t as black-and-white as you thought. People that hate others for what they are merely hate themselves. I wish humans were more complicated than this, but we’re not. We’re predictable and obvious.
After years in the city, I became bored with the homogeneity of thought: almost everyone thought like me. We were all educated, liberal, and financially somewhat comfortable. Sure, most fellow millennials had very little money, but they never seemed to lack a purpose, always jetting off to work a third job giving books to the homeless or working long hours at a fancy restaurant with some prestige. But alarmingly, none of my friends seemed to want to travel too far from the city. There was a profound lack of curiosity about people that live in the spaces between cities, which is precisely how rural spaces have come—both understandably and somewhat condescendingly—to be defined. Worse still, during the rise of Trump and the rural populism that fueled it, there was a profound and sharp animosity that became palpable. My urban, liberal friends could not understand why Trump appealed to so many rural people, and my friends on the Left started to think of rural people as ignorant, racist, and dumb.
Let’s pause for a moment.
I am a gay man living in rural America because, plainly, I love it. I love the landscape, the general absence of people, the fact I can get in my car and be hiking with my dogs in ten minutes and not see another human all day. I love many of the values of small-town America: accountability between neighbors, the sense that kindness counts for something. I love waving hello to people whether I know them or not—and having them wave back.
But I’m a gay man living in rural America. Many of the values I don’t share with the people I’m surrounded by, first and foremost religiosity. I was not raised religious. Growing up, the people, both adults and fellow kids, that insisted, explicitly or implicitly, that I should feel bad about myself were the religious ones. As an adult, armed with the knowledge that they were merely trying to make me feel as insecure as they did themselves, I have some compassion for what they must go through. No wonder so many religious people believe in hell: they put themselves through it on a regular basis.
And then there is the poverty of rural places, which is unique in some of its causes and effects, from urban poverty. (Though it is just as unjust.) Desperation fills the vacuum left when a sense of purpose is taken from someone. For most rural people, this was a decently-paying job that has been automated or shipped overseas in the last four decades.
It is no wonder why alcoholism and opioid use and drug addiction and suicide are on the rise in rural places. When a person no longer has purpose, they look for meaning wherever they can. If that’s in the momentary solace provided by painkillers, so be it. This is not a mystery.
I’ll be candid: this poverty and the afflictions that stem from it make me very uncomfortable. I have a hard time trusting some of my neighbors because I know they struggle with heroin addiction. Some of them are religious. Many of them own high-powered guns. They are no different than the people I grew up around, my neighbors back in the Midwest. As someone who was bullied and ridiculed by many of those people, it’s hard not to pre-emptively judge rural people, to not assume they are bigots who hate me merely because I’m gay.
This is where I find myself: alive with the memories of growing up in a rural place, both good and bad. I have lost many friendships over the last few years with my more educated, urban friends because I do not tolerate the bigotry and condescension of rural people, even though I understand it. At times, I too am filled with that condescension.
And at times I am filled with doubt. Will I ever feel truly at home in a rural place, where I’m often the only gay person around? Will I ever feel at home around my neighbors, some of whom are addicts? Will I ever be able to be free of the judgment I feel for those religious neighbors that attend a church I know preaches against the sins of homosexuality?
I don’t have any answers. But this is where I am: trying to find a place in America where I do feel at home.
In this era of Substack and Medium and every conceivable lit magazine out there, I spend a lot of time wondering, “what’s the fucking point?” Why write at all, when there’s so much of it out there? The era of the internet means everyone is a writer, and while not everyone is a good writer, everyone feels entitled to put their work out there. Writing should be democratic, after all.
But as writing becomes ever-more commodified, this enshittification of writing has me looking around at my contemporaries and having second thoughts on this whole endeavor.
What’s the goal, anyway? To make money? To get attention? To process some long-held insecurity about not getting enough love as a child? None really feel like my reasons.
I started writing at a young age, encouraged by both teachers and parents. I would race home from school to write in my LiveJournal about the minutiae of my day with such urgency. Looking back, it reads something like Gawker or Nikki Finke might’ve published, full of real names and banal, catty details. It was the dawn of the second decade of the internet and I wasn’t sure how it could or should be used.
I took composition in high school and excelled. I wrote and wrote, again encouraged by my teachers. Senior year, we crafted an essay a week in AP Lit, and those essays were formative to my style. I’ve made a living cutting and carving and cleaving the writing of others, but never struck out on my own. I’ve spent the last fifteen years (I’m now in my early late–30s) thinking that I am, somehow, deep down, a writer.
I can’t conceive of doing anything else. At this point, I doubt I could do much else. I’m terrible at compromising, working with others, and keeping a schedule. I’ve lived alone and worked for myself for so long now that I doubt I can pull off a relationship, let alone a “real job.”
Yet I have strong and lasting hesitations about writing. I’ve watched—and participated in—the rise of the internet since the late 90s. uJournal, LiveJournal, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter… I’ve played around with all. I watch how these platforms corrupt and destroy. Social media makes people petty and rude and brash in ways they’d never be in real life, and it’s corroded the social fabric. (It has done some good, too, but that’s another post.) Discourse and connection has been so thoroughly commodified that people no longer seem to remember the Before Times.
I want to write because I love the challenge. The goal of writing is the same as therapy or mediation or solitude or exploration. To write is to think, and to learn to think in new ways. To write is to uncover truth, both about the world around me and myself.
It’s here where I’m cowed into silence. I see how people react when you write truthfully. Write honestly about a sports team or economic model or favorite actor and they, well, those people that don’t agree don’t handle it well.
This seems especially true in America. (Full disclosure: I am an American. I have lived overseas for prolonged periods of time, but I know this country far more intimately than I know any other, so consider this a from-here-on-out conditional.) America is a unique kind of unhinged: individualistic, tightly wound, and very litigious. Being honest here will inevitably piss someone off, and they will have no compunctions doing whatever they can to make your life hell.
This is why I choose to write anonymously.
The opposite, though, must be true: to be a writer, you must be able to hear the truth from others…and yourself. If I’m honest with you, dear reader, I don’t know that I’ve wanted to be honest with myself thus far. I’ve had a quiet little life, and the older I grow the more I want it to stay that way. All it takes is one post to become the internet’s Main Character and your life is turned upside down.
Yet what I aim to do here is be honest with you: as honest with you as I know how. And to be as honest with myself, for better and worse. I have a lot to say, but I’m just looking for a little courage to say it.
