I am feeling it pretty hard. My work is as important as ever, but my traffic is down 75%. I am competing with LLM slop, with the search engine itself, and with LLM agents that paraphrase my work.
The worst part is that they're not replacing me! I'm still the one going out there, networking, asking questions and writing about what I find. Just so that their bots can hammer my website and use my work to metastasize faster.
Fucking parasites, the whole lot of 'em.
I will probably survive, but so many websites won't. Even if they do, they might drown in the noise of the torment nexus.
It’s not even that now. Companies just help themselves to our pockets. Products are downright user-hostile. They don’t even attempt to serve customers.
For 100% of the root cause analyses for critical production defects that I’ve done over the past 18 months or so, a key finding was that AI-generated tests asserted that the defective behavior was correct.
That's all I want! A not-completely-useless Siri, and performance/quality of life improvements.
MacOS is fine. For the most part it gets out of my way. However I have a laundry list of small issues that have been there since my first Mac in 2012. I wish there was a Department of Details to fix those little snags in the user experience.
To add: I have started getting AI-generated outreach that opens with a personalised compliment, but that is clearly AI-written. I get more of those in a week than I used to get normal outreach in a month.
He talks about how agents/delegates extend the agency of the people who operate them. And “almost all of society is premised on the fact that agency is scarce”. But software agents grant vastly more agency.
The thing that stops the worst people from annoying the hell out of you is that they lack the agency to do so. But now…
The risk of being punched in the mouth for your word choice dropped to zero, and suddenly all of these opinions were being shouted at anybody that would listen.
I suppose we can automate that sharing better now.
Yeah, the whole rise of the web has had that unfortunate side effect, but no one had treated it like a positive until now. Hell, Meta is showing off how to use their AI to jam up phone lines and bother call centers without having to spend time on the phone!
It’s unfortunate he seems to have gone around the bend, because there is so much that happens in our current unreality that reminds me of Mike Baron’s Nexus comic from the 80s. The “Trade War” storyline has the two competing marketplaces, run by Vooper and the other by a robot named Honest Crocus, get into an audio advertising war so all-consuming it winds up drowning out 911 calls and coming out of the plumbing when you’re in the toilet. Now we finally have the tools, we are going to make that happen along with a million other bad ideas.
It's not just that. Several social medias have evolved to the point where being a prick is mandatory or is rewarded. Chief example is X, where you get rewarded for agreeing with Elon; but see also the stereotypes of Reddit and Discord mods.
Does anybody insist the Oscar winners can't be (pun intended?) bad actors? As I recall, it's been widely criticised for a long time but the mass media shoves it down our throats anyway.
Crypto always felt similarly cynical to me, but it was still somewhat niche.
Now everyone must support AI because the entire economy is tied to it. Everyone's bonus depends on implementing it. Everyone's job search depends on cheering for it. It's like a virus.
Two crypto billionaires have just given one of the most cynically manipulative political parties in British history the largest donations received by any political party in British history.
The US president has crypto investments and shitcoins. His wife has a shitcoin. His weird sons have crypto businesses. (His former opponent's wisecracking prodigal-failson has an ironic shitcoin, for goodness' sake.)
The functioning of the US government and its international aid had a chainsaw taken to it by the richest man in the world, who named the entire endeavour ironically like a crypto memecoin.
One of the two biggest AI companies is run by a guy who also has a shitcoin-for-your-iris-scans company. And much of the long-tail of the AI industry is former crypto/NFT bros just wearing different turtlenecks. The big incubators and VC firms have moved smoothly from one niche to the other along with them.
These dead-eyed people are not niche at all. They are now the whole game.
It's rather frustrating that after they crawled my website to use for their AI without my consent, and using that AI to slowly strangle my traffic, they're not happy that _other people_ are doing the same to them.
>”This is what capitalism's all about. Take as much as possible and give as little as possible if you want to win. Ideally, give negative amounts.”
Your description is vague enough to encompass every system that I’m aware of, from feudalism, through to mercantilism, communism, and capitalism. It may best fit communism and feudalism, both of which are most notable for fostering negative-value-added firms.
I carry an iPhone because I love the size. I carry an iPad to read. This would be nice, although I prefer to keep these devices separate. The iPad isn't connected to my life, so it can enter my bedroom.
I'd like to think if Steve were around, the apple watch would have been pushed for more battery life and connectivity instead of more health monitoring, which is a gimmick people mostly use for a few months and then turn off.
I'd like to carry my iPad and tether it to my watch instead of my phone, and just have those two and the headphones as my Personal Area Network. Nobody is even doing an all-in-one device anymore, but we keep pretending like that's the world we live in.
There is just more of everything. It's as if the attention economy got flooded in the last two years, and everyone is drowning in noise.
Plus reading is competing with all the other ways to spend time. Podcasts are great for nonfiction. Substack and blogs are a much better format for many ideas. Then there's YouTube, and many ways to spend time that aren't ingesting non-fiction.
Besides, a lot of non-fiction just isn't that great. Many books should have been a blog post. These books are rarely a rewarding experience for me, unless it's from a rare combo of historian and good writer.
> the sensibility of nonfiction market is far more catered to men
The book industry is three quarter female. In my experience, book stores visibly cater to a female demographic (featured books, general selection).
> Besides, a lot of non-fiction just isn't that great. Many books should have been a blog post. These books are rarely a rewarding experience for me, unless it's from a rare combo of historian and good writer.
Many non-fiction books are essentially PR material for the author. They don't write these books, because they have interesting thoughts that are too complicated and long for a blog post, but because their career plan involves being some kind of a public intellectual and writing a book is a part of that. They often have a single idea, that in itself might be an interesting one, but it's simple enough that it could indeed be entirely fleshed out in a blog post or an essay rather than a book.
This is helped along by the number of people willing to cynically offer up a blurb, or even a glowing review, to something mediocre or seriously flawed that they may not even have read. I'm sure the blurbers think they're just doing someone a favour (and/or playing the game so that they will receive reciprocation), and the reviewers are probably less often crooked than simply busy/lazy, but it all goes to make it much harder for good, substantial work to stand out.
Most readers are women, and the largest genre by far is romance novels, so book stores catering to women is a matter of chasing sales.
Otherwise fully agree with your points. The non-fiction market is easier to saturate as there's only so many unique angles on something, and people will look for something that feels authoritative rather than something fresh, while in fiction you're likely to read many similar premises because it's what you like.
If that was the cause, 1) book sales would drop overall, and 2) nonfiction books would perform the same as fiction books. The OP says neither are true:
"What has happened in the last ten years is that the overall industry has grown modestly, but fiction and nonfiction have basically flipped positions. In 2015, 6 of the top 25 bestselling hardcover books—this is a not-perfect but useful proxy for new books published—were fiction. In 2025, 18 of the top 25 hardcover books were fiction, meaning only 7 were nonfiction, almost an exact inversion of ten years ago."
They suggest some explanation:
fiction/nonfiction reading habits are extremely gendered, with 80% of women making up the fiction market, and nonfiction being a more 50-50 proposition.
and
Proportionally we are gaining many more women as readers and losing our few men.
EDIT: But they add: "The collapse of nonfiction is less a “male reading crisis” than a massive breakdown in the social fabric of trusting education, expertise, or any authority other than follower count and force of personality."
Could it be that non-fiction is less competitive against other formats than fiction? I will read the book they made movies about. I don't feel that way about non-fiction.
Most people give away attention tidbits for free via social media: TikToks, YouTube shorts, posts on Reddit.
That means attention can be sated by microdosing on free attention morsels rather than paying for something long-form that requires investment.
People drowning in free attention and dopamine might not have a need to pay for a premium attention sink.
This is happening at an enormous scale. An evening book or prestige movie might be supplemented by doom scrolling sloppy content and memes. Instead of authors being paid for supplying entertainment, ads are being watched.
The companies that empower this are worth trillions.
Yeah I think this is pretty easy to explain: YouTube (sure, there’s terrible terrible channels out there, but also great ones and a fair many fine-to-good ones), Nebula/Curiosity Stream, podcasts, substacks (lol), LLMs, Anna’s Archive/LibGen, and even the Internet Archive. It's not 1994, if you want to learn, you don't need a book to do it.
It's not some grand conspiracy, people are going to gravitate to what is more efficient/convenient lol
The worst part is that they're not replacing me! I'm still the one going out there, networking, asking questions and writing about what I find. Just so that their bots can hammer my website and use my work to metastasize faster.
Fucking parasites, the whole lot of 'em.
I will probably survive, but so many websites won't. Even if they do, they might drown in the noise of the torment nexus.
reply