Charlie Warzel:

The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and “truth seeker” accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was “spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton” in order to ensure maximum rainfall, “just like they did over Asheville!” 

The sentence from this paragraph I want to focus on is this: “The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel.” I think very few people take such posts as gospel. Or at least not in the sense that Warzel means it. 

Warzel errs here in assuming that when people in MAGAworld make declarative statements, and endorse or amplify the declarative statements of others, they do so because they believe those statements to be true. They don’t; nor do they believe or know them to be false. In my judgment, truth and falsehood do not at any point enter the frame of reference — such concepts are non-factors, and it is a category mistake to invoke them. 

In MAGAworld, declarative statements are not meant to convey information about (as Wittgenstein would put it) what is the case. Declarative statements serve as identity markers — they simultaneously include and exclude, they simultaneously (a) consolidate the solidarity of people who believe they have shared interests and (b) totally freak out the libtards. That’s what they are for. They are not for conveying Facts, Truth, Reality — nobody cares about that shit. (People who call themselves Truth Seekers are being as ironic as it is possible to be.) Such statements demarcate Inside from Outside in a way that delivers plenty of lulz, and that is their entire function. In that sense only they articulate a kind of dark gospel. 

Thus it is pointless to insist that Democrats have not in fact unleashed weather weapons on Florida and the Carolinas; even more pointless to argue that if Democrats had such weather weapons they would have used them when Donald Trump was President in order to discredit him. Whether it is factually true that Democrats have and deploy weather weapons could not be more irrelevant; what matters is that this is the kind of thing we say about Democrats — so if you want to be part of this “we,” you’d better say it too. 

And the account I am articulating here is, at least sometimes, openly acknowledged by the leaders of MAGAworld. Think of Steve Bannon’s famous “flood the zone with shit” comment. And when confronted with his long chain of fantastical statements about immigrants in Ohio, J. D. Vance said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” Because that’s what we do; that’s how we get what we want. 

The pundits and shitposters and, yes, elected representatives in our government whose real home is MAGAworld are in a strange and perverse way the bastard children of Richard Rorty. When, nearly forty years ago, Rorty rejected “systematic” philosophy for “edifying” philosophy — those terms come from his earlier book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, but the essay linked to refines that essential distinction — he thereby rejected philosophy that wants to “correspond to the way things really are” for philosophy that builds “solidarity.” Such a philosophy in action “is changing the way we talk, and thereby changing what we want to do and what we think we are.” 

Rorty thought that this model of philosophical language would be a way of building a new, more just, more generous society — would help us “achieve our country.” What he never imagined was a huckster-turned-damagogue who thinks of language — every kind of language, every imaginable use-case — as a way for him to get what he wants and change who he thinks he is, and who by his example teaches tens of millions of Americans to use language for the same purposes. They want to achieve their country too. That is, they have a vision of what the-country-they-call-theirs should be and employ language to affirm and strengthen that vision. What do truth or falsehood have to do with it? Not a damn thing. 

Rough Type has had a twenty-year run. That seems like long enough, particularly seeing as the blog has been pretty much dormant in recent years. So this will be the last Rough Type post.

But don’t shed too many tears. I’m going to continue blogging, maybe even at a faster clip, through a Substack I’ve started called New Cartographies. My first new post is up. It’s titled “Dead Labor, Dead Speech,” and here’s how it begins:

If, as Marx argued, capital is dead labor, then the products of large language models might best be understood as dead speech. Just as factory workers produce, with their “living labor,” machines and other forms of physical capital that are then used, as “dead labor,” to produce more physical commodities, so human expressions of thought and creativity—“living speech” in the forms of writing, art, photography, and music—become raw materials used to produce “dead speech” in those same forms. LLMs, to continue with Marx’s horror-story metaphor, feed “vampire-like” on human culture. Without our words and pictures and songs, they would cease to function. They would become as silent as a corpse in a casket.

Read on (and thanks).

Hey, AI Week at Baylor is coming! And to judge from that webpage, Baylor is the place to be if you want to feel really good about the giant AI companies. But if you want to think about

• how those companies — especially now that OpenAI is abandoning its nonprofit status — follow in the footsteps of other recent Silicon Valley juggernauts in striving to make every human being on the planet utterly dependent on their services
• the grossly unethical practice of harvesting and re-using, for profit, the words and sounds and images that human beings have labored their whole lives to make
• the massive environmental damage that is sure to come from the ever-increasing demands for energy from the AI companies’ enormous server farms

— well, I don’t think those issues are being raised.

Whatever AI might be in some imagined utopian future, AI companies in our present moment extract and exploit — ecologically, ethically, and humanly. This is simply what they do, intrinsically, necessarily — in a perverse sense of the phrase, on principle. A Christian university ought to be saying so, or at the very least should be putting some challenging questions to our new AI overlords. We’re not going to achieve that utopian future without first confronting the largely dystopian present.

Also: I think instead of teaching our students how to use whatever Silicon Valley happens to be selling them we should be teaching them how to tend the digital commons. And the issues about attention and reading I’ve been talking about forever — see for instance this talk from a decade ago — are even more urgent now. But none of this is on Baylor’s radar, as far as I can tell.

Early this summer I was interviewed by Rose Horowitch, an editor for The Atlantic. She told me that she had heard from a university professor that incoming students were struggling to keep up with the reading load. She explained that she was working on an article that would explore the problem of reading stamina and asked me to share my experiences in the high school classroom. I was not surprised by Horowitch’s hypothesis. She attributes undergrads’ lack of reading stamina to lowered expectations in high school literature curricula, specifically arguing that limiting full-length novels and replacing long-form content with excerpts and summaries has weakened readers’ constitutions.  She, in turn, ascribes these instructional choices to the oppressive presence of standardized testing and the Common Core. And cell phones, always cell phones. 

It is a perfectly reasonable assumption, but it’s wrong. This is not to say that there aren’t external factors affecting students’ reading stamina, but to line up such a simple series of dominoes to topple oversimplifies a complex challenge and places undue blame on the shoulders of discerning young readers and the public school teachers who work tirelessly to support them.

My primary concern throughout the summer of interviews, emails, and fact-checking, was that we were slipping into a familiar panic in the face of progress: how will this next technological or social development bring about the downfall of society?  It’s an old story; in the fall of 1978, The MATCY Journal published a handful of “probable” quotes from history including the infamous lament over the proliferation of paper: “Students today depend on paper too much. They don’t know how to write on a slate without getting chalk dust all over themselves. They can’t clean a slate properly. What will they do when they run out of paper?” This, and the other quotes in the article, aren’t actually real. However, they reveal a genuine pattern in panicked thinking that, rather than unveiling flaws in social and technological change, instead lays bare the atrophied mindset of the people doing the panicking.  

From a similarly stodgy perspective, Horowitch’s article reflects a frighteningly narrow definition of what constitutes worthwhile literature. Passing references to Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and even my unit about The Odyssey, confine literary merit to a very small, very old, very white, and very male box. As a staunch advocate for diverse and representative literature, I was immediately curious about the actual texts at the center of this “crisis” so I asked Horowitch directly what types of books were the sticking points in her professor friends’ curricula. Unsurprisingly, it was canonical classics. As Horowitch points out, I am just “one public-high school teacher in Illinois,” but while professors at elite universities sound the alarm over Gen Z undergrads not finishing Les Miserables because they are uninterested in reading a pompous French man drone on for chapters about the Paris sewer system, my colleagues and I have developed professional toolboxes with endless other ways to inspire our students to read about justice, compassion, and redemption.  

And that’s a good thing, since Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t cow to authority for authority’s sake. They simply won’t do things they don’t want to do, and I actually kinda love that. The rising young generations want texts that matter to them, that reflect their lives and experiences. So when we force-feed yet another vanilla canonical dust collector, and then complain that they aren’t playing along, it’s just not a good look for us.

Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, Ibi Zoboi’s American Street, and David Bowles’s The Prince and the Coyote, are all complex, challenging, and substantial texts that speak to the interests and experiences of my students, so it’s not a fight to get them reading. Frustratingly, despite the numerous examples I provided of students reading books cover-to-cover in my class, Horowitch opted to include only the unit that, like the original rhapsodes of the bronze age, I excerpt and abridge. Equally frustrating is that her article implies that I was forced into that decision in order to pacify floundering students or submit to the demands of standardized testing. 

Rather, my experience is that young readers are eminently capable of critically engaging in long form content, but they’re rightfully demanding a seat at the table where decisions about texts are being made. Luckily, we are living through a literary renaissance. Publishers are flourishing amid a profusion of stories, books that give voice to the experiences of people who look and live like the young readers in my classroom. There is no shortage of engaging texts that students can and will read cover-to-cover. But if we insist that quality literature must come from old dead white men, we are consigning ourselves to irrelevance before we even begin. 

One often overlooked hurdle that I brought up with Horowitch was the impact of language evolution on reading comprehension and comfort. Linguistically, the dialect of English spoken by contemporary adolescents is rapidly moving further away from the vernacular of the canonical works we ask them to read. While this has always been true to some degree, social media and technology have sped up language evolution and widened the gap between English dialects. My students code switch into my spoken dialect to engage with me -something that I never had to do to communicate with my teachers in high school. So when I ask them to code switch further into the recesses of linguistic history to read Shakespeare, the struggle is real. The additional layer of linguistic distance between them and Shakespeare is comparable to my own struggles through Chaucer in the original Middle English -difficult and worthwhile, but truly a challenge.  As a society, we have become more accepting of vernacular differences and demand less code switching -all good and important changes that validate students’ identities.  But it does inevitably become harder to successfully navigate long form texts in dialects of English that are fading ever further into history. As a responsible educator, I require more justification than merely longstanding tradition as I set a course for my precious minutes in the classroom. 

One of the reasons I have found so much success with The Odyssey, aside from the monsters and murder, is that the emerging generation of translators, including Dr. Emily Wilson and Maria Dahvana Headley have been transparent about their processes of bringing new life to canonical treasures like The Odyssey and Beowulf.  In one lecture, Wilson explains that historically, translators intentionally archaized their language to establish gravity and reverence for these works, a tradition the new generation of translators are choosing to break from because of the exclusionary effect it has on readers. Contemporary translators have shifted their mindset from one of preserving tradition, to one of illuminating narrative and purpose.  Homer wanted his audiences to be both entertained and shepherded into the culture. Wilson wants that too, and so she gives us a deeply relatable, heartbreakingly honest, and eminently readable translation of The Odyssey. In allowing her understanding of the story to shift with time, she remains truer to the story’s original purpose and relevant to a new generation of readers. 

These are all points I made in speaking to and emailing with Horowitch and her fact checkers throughout the summer. I have to think, I was not the source she was hoping for. I was a problem.  Perhaps the most disappointing defeat I observed in the final article was that although I shared my observations of the tireless work of colleagues at the state and national level advocating for intellectual freedom, Horowitch does not acknowledge that culturally, we do not value reading. We ban books, scrutinize classroom libraries, demonize librarians, and demoralize teachers. We pay lip service to the importance of literacy, requiring four years of English and regularly testing literacy skills, but when push comes to shove, we don’t make space for the curiosity and joy that are the foundations of lifelong literacy habits. In truth, we seem to be doggedly fighting against the best interest of a literate populace. While aggressive censorship is an agony I’ve been spared in my current position, it is a formidable obstacle I see my colleagues and heroes across the state and across the country struggling with.

Instead, Horowitch places heavy blame on standardized testing and the Common Core.  I argue that this blame is misplaced and irrelevant. While there is absolutely a push for analytical skills to be developed (see AP curriculum and testing), truth be told, Common Core or College Readiness, they’re more similar than different. The pressure to switch from one set of standards to another isn’t much more than a nuisance in the grand scheme of teaching.  In practice, teachers have always balanced various standards and testing with a familiar degree of disruption to the important work of building practical literacy skills. The never-ending cycle of new initiatives and projects outlasted by tough-as-nails veteran teachers is the oldest trope in the faculty lounge and certainly not newsworthy enough to merit The Atlantic’s hefty subscription fee. 

In a move as cliché as blaming standardized testing, Horowitch takes aim at smartphones and social media, a constant classroom annoyance to be sure, but old news, at least among high school educators, who have already read The Anxious Generation, adapted our routines, and moved on. It seems too easy of a target to take seriously in the context of a major American journal like The Atlantic, but here we are.  It should go without saying that there is a medium between TikTok and Tolstoy. If we position ourselves as fighting against social media and short-form entertainment, we’ve already lost. The dopamine hit from the ding of a push notification is far more neurologically satiating than anything I have to offer in a classroom. So even as I continue to develop more engaging curricula, I ask my students and their caregivers to reframe their expectations, to reconsider the type of “entertainment” that they expect from my class. When my students shift their mindset to enter my classroom expecting nerdery, thought-provoking conversation, and midwest dad jokes, they find that the forty-five minutes passes enjoyably. I trust the literature because I am confident in my skill as an educator. 

Creating space for the joy and curiosity of reading is important work that high school teachers step up to every day, designing lessons to teach what once came naturally. Previous generations turned to reading as a leisure activity, so they had an innate sense for how to read in school and how to read sneakily under the covers way past bedtime. To some degree, all of the things I’ve mentioned in this essay have stripped reading of its human value and made it into a chore. Teachers are thus charged with retraining kids to love books. It’s hard, but it’s working. Again, the current proliferation of complex and substantial young adult texts is a goldmine -if we don’t cut off access. But we have to be intentional about teaching young people how to read for fun versus how to read for academic purposes, and it’s not something that all professors have been trained to do. At the secondary level, we differentiate between the short works that must be read closely and copiously annotated versus the more substantial works that must be comprehended and revisited, pondered and discussed in a social-academic collaboration.  Are the panicked professors expecting -or implying- that their students should be giving everything the close-reading treatment? Are the professors clearly communicating appropriate expectations? In my sophomore honors class, I invest time in teaching my students how to build their understanding over several readings of a scene, chapter, or poem at various degrees of scrutiny and analysis, and that is an investment I consistently see returns on.

The golden rule of maintaining a presence on social media is to stay clear of the comment section, but realistically, its siren song is impossible to resist.  In this case, I truly wish I had tied myself to the mast. The Atlantic’s promotional tweet for this article quickly ignited a barrage of ill-informed comments about the “dumbing down of the American education system” and gratitude for yet another reason to homeschool or unschool or outschool. It’s a familiar cadence for those of us who have devoted our professional lives to education, and still try to maintain an online existence.  While this essay is evidence enough of my frustration, I’m first and foremost an educator.  I accept The Atlantic’s journalistic tantrum with a grain of salt, understanding that its articles are unbearably long and perhaps this topic cut the author a little close to the bone. I can extend my compassion and pity, but then I have to get back to work -we’re starting The Odyssey tomorrow and have some eyeball puns to sharpen before we hit chapter nine.

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Gratitude to my forever editor, Blake “The Hammer” Thomas.

I was reading Joanna Stern’s report in the Wall Street Journal about the new AI features that Apple is rushing to complete for the iPhone 16s. (Can’t LLMs debug their own code? I thought that was a done deal.) Among the promised features is a Rewrite function that will translate your messages and other writings into different styles of prose. One style is called Professional. Stern tested it on a note she was writing to her mom. Here’s the original:

I’ll be home tomorrow. 

Here’s how it reads after the rewrite:

I anticipate returning home tomorrow.

So, if I’m getting this right, you’d use Professional mode any time you want to sound like you have a stick up your ass. I anticipate forgoing its deployment.

This is all very silly, or at least would be if we hadn’t lost our collective mind. For years now, we’ve been acclimating ourselves to having machines speak on our behalf. It began with autocorrect and autoedit functions in word processors and has continued through ever more aggressive autocomplete functions on phones. Having an app fiddle with your writing now seems normal, even necessary given how much time we all spend messaging, posting, and commenting. The endless labor of self-expression cries out for the efficiency of automation.

We don’t even care that computers, despite years of experience, still do a crappy job of what would seem to be pretty simple algorithmic work. Here’s a sloppy text that I wrote with the aid of my messaging app. It’s filled with typos, weird punctuation, and bizarre word substitutions, but I’m sure you’ll get the gist. If not, who cares? Along with speeding up exchanges, the implicit it’s autocomplete’s fault! excuse that now accompanies every messy text has the added benefit of covering up the fact that we can’t be bothered to spend five seconds proofreading the messages we send to friends and family members. We’ve got headlines to read, YouTubes to watch.

Since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT two years ago, people have taken to using it for all sorts of formal writing tasks, from college papers to corporate memos to government reports. I was recently talking with a Methodist bishop, and she told me that a colleague now uses generative AI to help him write sermons. Apple’s Rewrite, and the similar writing tools being introduced by Google, Microsoft, Meta, and others, extends the AI-based outsourcing of personal speech into more intimate areas, shaping the way we talk with the people closest to us. It may start with rewriting—to help us “deliver the right words to meet the occasion,” as Apple describes it—but it will soon expand into the automated production of condolence messages, wedding vows, and the like. LLMs give us ventriloquism in reverse. The mechanical dummy speaks through your mouth.

It’s also the next stage in the long-running industrialization of human communication—one of the subjects of my forthcoming book Superbloom. For nearly two centuries, we’ve embraced the relentless speeding up of communication by mechanical means, believing that the industrial ideals of efficiency, productivity, and optimization are as applicable to speech as to the manufacture of widgets. More recently, we’ve embraced the mechanization of editing, allowing software to replace people in choosing the information we see (and don’t see). With LLMs, the industrialization ethic moves at last into the creation of the very content of our speech.

It’s hard to know what to say. Why not make it easier?