When you join and post as part of the Substack community there are some hidden costs you should consider. None of those costs are found in the fine print. Instead the costs are attached to the nature of what Substack offers and what it delivers. This essay examines what costs you are paying. I’m part of the Substack community. Whether or not my analysis matches your own views about our community, my intention is to leave you asking some serious questions about what you post and read on this platform.
You’ve read the advice that you should write out of your own experience. Others say write what you know. What you learn may accumulate from books, seminars, lectures, TV, movies and so on. These wells become stored in our memory as knowledge. Thinkers are prone to believe that reading about someone’s experiences is equivalent to having personally experienced them. To visualise the scene from a book is to be in the scene in his or her head. For the thinker that’s experience. I can say this because I was caged into thinking that thinking was the same as experiencing. There is a name for that trap. We prize critical thinking and forget its partner, critical doing. One reasons about the world. The other enters it. Once you’ve been shot at you discover that experience was never in your emotional experience bank though you’d read about such violence before. Being there. That matters.
You might counter that the best of our authors deliver a steady stream of plays, scripts, fiction, non-fiction, journalism, scholarship, stories and poems (collectively ‘Literature’) that draw on both experience and knowledge. The artist on his or her journey discovers recurring or overlapping patterns. Their magic is in making new connections which once made seem obvious but weren’t. They also revise our understanding of experience and knowledge through work previously missed, or unearth violations, or contradictions. I define the artist as someone who has refined TOC (Tolerance, Openness, and Curiosity) as a way of being in the world and emerges from that perceptual world with stories to share. I’ve discussed TOC at length in an earlier essay, The Bag, the Puddle, and the Glass.
First-hand versus second-hand experience
My fear is that social media and AI have tilted the balance in favour of third-party knowledge acquisition. We have a long history of mining the wisdom ore from the past. This was human-to-human transmission through the medium of language. Shift that to AI-to-human transmission and ‘Houston, we have a problem’ becomes relevant. The altered transmission relationship matters. AI is moving human knowledge down the pipeline and onto your screen, but it doesn’t have the capacity to verify the experience behind what it has discovered in the data.
This is unsurprising. As far as we know, an AI does not have experience, or the kind of experience that comes from embodiment and the ability to move as an embodied entity with five senses to filter the world of information. There’s growing evidence that large segments of the population are suspicious of AI capabilities, and of what the consequences are for human purpose and meaning.
Distortions in the experience create a gap the knowledge may hide, or at least doesn’t disclose. I have a couple of ideas, none that original, as to why computer-literate people are consuming more data and information that is provocative, entertaining, engaging, disturbing, persuasive, bias-confirming. By triggering emotions it provides a surrogate for actual experience. We feel that we’ve experienced something. That’s the magic of social media and AI. A powerful illusion becomes indistinguishable from the actual experience itself. The emotion registers even though there was never any skin in the game.
This is not the old worry about second-hand material. Writers have always used it. The danger now sits closer to the unanswered question of what happens when the ‘creator’ has no skin in the game. That comes from lived experience. The online experience is cloned. It is grafted onto the reader’s psyche and lived as his own. He can no longer tell his own experience from the one placed there. He carries someone else’s, or no one’s, and files it under memory. This is the road to becoming an experience cyborg uploaded with a range of experience that an AI has constructed taking into account his vast trail of internet use.
It is a stretch to say the bulk of what the public read fits our heritage of knowledge-producing information. If that is even partially true, then a red flag should be raised. We should inquire what the meaning of knowledge is, including: access to audit the underlying data or information, the ability to evaluate the conclusions, the context of where, when, how and for whom the rules apply, a secure place for the storage of evidence, lineage, revisions, and outstanding gaps or blanks in the evidence. I don’t believe this is likely to happen. Even with the best efforts, AI will evolve a language which will not translate into what we understand as conveying ‘knowledge’. It will be a dumbed-down sketch pad that even the best of our minds will struggle to understand.
Gradually we are losing our skills to acquire first-hand experience. Once the deskilling is complete our only source of experience will be what an algorithm decides we will like and what will confirm what we already believe. This is hardly an original insight. Daily someone is doing the Paul Revere ride through the internet, warning, not that the British are coming, but that our digital masters have already taken us prisoner. Most people have already surrendered.
The inflation of elites
The second point is the overproduction of elites. This is Peter Turchin’s turf. The basic idea is that a society uses education and skill training to prepare elites for governance, education, finance, law, medicine, academics, and the arts. That same society then produces more educated, skilled workers than it can place. These excess candidates for elite positions find little prospect of a job that matches their expectations and their attainment. They are left out. They feel abandoned. One response is to strike out and show the elites who excluded them that they will not go quietly. Substack, I suspect, without evidence, is heavily weighted with excluded elites. The Substack space allows them to display their talents, gain a following, and perhaps earn enough notoriety to be offered a book contract. Substack is, in other words, an Excluded Elite Lotto. Or better, the Excluded Elite Hunger Game.
The excluded elite banked knowledge as an asset with value in the marketplace. They were told knowledge was the asset worth having. The degree, the training, the mind that could process and produce information. But it turned out that AI can process and manufacture valuable knowledge acorns that wouldn’t keep a squirrel alive. That asset they spent years and substantial money to acquire is the one thing AI makes faster and cheaper. So their capital value has been marked down to near zero. Knowledge has been commodified. It is a product sold in the marketplace. The single asset AI cannot produce is a human’s lived experience.
My view is that experience is not only the last enclave for stories. It is the last thing the excluded elite still owns and has value, one that carries a price. Substack is the marketplace where they bring their words to sell. And there is the trap. Most of what is posted carries the invisible label of processed third-person knowledge dressed up as the Substacker’s knowledge. No one is fooled. If most people’s knowledge were a currency it would be devalued to the point it wouldn’t buy a loaf of bread. The lament and the sociology are the same fact seen twice. If first-hand experience dies, the excluded elite has nothing left of value. If it survives, then this points to one way back to where value continues to live.
Membership in the Excluded Elite Hunger Game is open to all. Only a few will succeed. The ones who fail will match the odds of the working world outside Substack. The display of knowledge (a great deal of it repetitive) on Substack only moves the competition around. The excluded elites remain excluded. A handful may survive. The vast majority won’t. I want to be clear. I’m a player who volunteered to play in the Substack Hunger Game. From the small list of my subscribers, I’m a failed Substacker.
The reality is my career is largely behind me. I write essays to clarify my own thoughts and share my experiences. That’s enough. For those whose career is ahead of them, more is at stake. I can understand that if I were just starting out, then I’d likely be The Substack Hunger Game loser. It is this group this essay is addressed to. I can understand why some of you would be bitter. I would be, too, if I were sold the promise that a knowledge worker needs credentials, that credentials mean an elite university, often post-doctorate training, and that the knowledge they banked would wait like a good soldier for deployment. And then I found the bases had closed.
Public and private sectors leaders have decided they could get better, cheaper, more reliable silicon knowledge workers. Posting on Substack would show what a mistake was made in overlooking them. In reality it shows the brutality of the Substack Hunger Game.
Like Squid Game, at the end of the series the sole survivor elects to go back and play again, knowing the odds of surviving are small. He’s addicted to the action, the competition, the thrill of beating the odds.
That market is flooded. Readers are overwhelmed with choice. Most Substackers do not know what they are really selling. Or if they know, they refuse to bend to the reality that most readers are up to their eyeballs in daily articles, essays, op ed pieces, and political analysis.
In the past, some of our best writers drew on their personal experience. This is a short list of the authors who fit the bill: Henry Miller, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Michel Houellebecq, Kurt Vonnegut, and Paul Theroux. These authors have been my teachers. They went out into the world and returned with a novel way of witnessing first-hand the desire, pain, cruelty, randomness, uncertainty and unpredictability of the world, and what happens when we exceed our boundaries. Their books have passed the lessons, observations and warnings on to their readers.
When I reflect on Barney Rosset, I have come to understand the importance of critical doing as an essential step used to pass wisdom down a chain. A master showed an apprentice the part that he could never find in a book. Sometimes the actions replaced the need for words. In contrast, an AI sits outside that chain linked by critical doing. While AI may have read every apprentice’s notes ever written, the reality is that AI has never been in a live workshop where unexpected things happen. AI is all words and no lived action. Literature delivers the receipts of lives lived. Preserved in the amber of words. Frozen memories of someone else’s experiences come alive through a reader’s imagination. But they are locked inside the amber archives of first-hand experience. Inspiration, yes. It doesn’t sit alone. To be inspired is the fuel needed to do. To act.
We learn to decipher the meaning when someone reacts with a roll of their eyes, a wry half-smile, a fingernail tapping the side of a table, or lean forward in their chair. We combine these observations with the words we hear in real first-person experience and detect whether a tigtening of the lip muscles, a slight wrinking of the nose, and so on. The kind of subtle clues used by a skilled interrogator or observer that separate lies from the truth.
AI has far more mentors than any human will ever have, and they’ve taught it what to say. Humans are misled by prose that appears workshop-tested. In reality there is no machine equivalent to the human workshop, where gestures, background noise, other voices and means of communication are integrated with words. We trap ourselves by assuming an AI report that is so convincing must rest on real doing. It does not. The AI’s connection to critical doing, if it has one at all, is alien to human doing.
An LLM might train on the text inside those books and produce a result that reads as though it had experienced what it returned. In a narrow sense this works. Until you realise the lived experience behind it is dead. The writers who replace them are where? On Substack. Or a day job at Starbucks that pays the rent.
The Boomer bonus
My final point is generational. Boomers enjoyed the best of both worlds. University fees were not an indentured servant’s contract. Flights were cheap, and travel was open to anyone with a passport. Knowledge meant human knowledge. AI was science fiction. There was a shortage of elites. Boomers had the Golden Age of the Human Knowledge Worker. The Hunger Game, Squid Game and Black Mirror had not yet arrived. Turchin’s overproduction would hit the next generation, and the one after that. There was no AI overhang threatening to ruin personal, first-hand knowledge with the ethics of a drug cartel. Nothing personal mind you. Eliminating the competition over knowledge is just business. What we are left with is a generational tension and conflict without a clear understanding of what is at stake and who are the players.
Our current issues did not start with the Boomers. Imagine Henry Miller in 1930s Paris, or Hemingway in the 1920s, glued to a phone, asking a chatbot for the ten best places to grab lunch with a meetup of expat influencers. Or Hemingway or Miller using a dating app.
These pre-AI creators had an advantage. No one can claim an AI wrote their work. That allowance is not available to the current generation, who must prove their creation was not assisted by an AI. The experience of the new generation of creators is built on social media and AI mentorship, so they must fight to claim ownership at the moment the notion of ownership is itself in question. The new generation is playing catch-up and falling behind.
A case can be made that many of the Boomers on Substack have already won the recognition social media promises. All they need to do is keep the candle lit. They don’t need to make money from Substack or any other platform that displays their writing. A signal that they are still there, still working, still writing, still experiencing. That’s their edge. They see the battle being fought, and the casualties inflicted, while staying safely above the combat zone. They have obtained recognition and can afford to deliver content without the same financial pressures subsequent generations face.
Boomers are a transition generation of creators. Once they are gone, those who replace them are often excluded elites seeking an audience, seeking recognition and hoping against all the odds to make a living from their writing.
Ask an eleven-year-old what they want to be, and the answer will likely include an influencer, or famous, or someone with millions of followers.
The cost of a frictionless world
There is one mechanism under all three points. AI optimises for goal achievement and efficiency. It finds the shortest path and takes it. We do not live there. Humans occupy an analogue world that is inefficient, difficult, often surprising, sometimes pointless. Our relationships reflect these sources of friction. It’s messy, tiresome, annoying, and frustrating to navigate the daily obstacles of non-screen life. What AI offers is a way out of those old limits. Don’t look up. There’s no need to engage outside of the screen world. The offer is real. So is the price. To shed the inefficiency is to impoverish the experience. To remove all friction is to leave the world we were formed in.
Friction is not the obstacle to experience. Friction is what turns an event into experience. Critical thinking can skip that friction. Critical doing cannot. That is the whole difference. No one reaches a Cambodian prison the efficient way. The path was luck and two officers willing to bend a rule. The meaning was in the cost of getting there. Strip the friction and you keep the information and lose the circumstances that led to the formation. A reader can take in a clean summary of a prison in thirty seconds. He will feel briefly moved. He will have been formed by nothing.
The scroll is friction removed. That is why the carriage is full of absent people. They have been handed a feed with the cost taken out, and the cost was the part that would have made them present. Boredom belongs here too. A frictionless feed has no dead time. Boredom is a writer’s nursery where the muse lives. The long wait, the empty afternoon, the delayed train, the long walk without a particular destination. A generation that is never bored is a generation that never had to look.
Writing optimises too. I revise an essay eight or ten times to earn a clean sentence. So this is not an argument against efficiency itself. Hold the line between two kinds. Efficiency in the output is earned. Efficiency in the formation is stolen. AI sells the second and calls it the first.
The link between first-hand experience and language
It is one thing to argue for first-hand experience. It is another to watch it disappear. Most days I use Bangkok’s transit, either the BTS sky train or the MRT underground. I look around the carriage. Most people are focused on a phone screen. They scroll, watch and read, unaware of others around them. No eye contact. No sign of curiosity about the person beside them. Motionless, they are far, far away. They are not present in their surroundings. Their reality is held in their hand. The passengers have been captured inside a manufactured reality, one that feeds the drive to consume more. They are snagged on a non-stop loop designed to keep them scrolling. This is our new world, where first-hand experience has been disconnected from the train of life. Is the chain that ran through the Boomer generation now broken? If it is, what role will first-hand experience play in future Literature?
Next time you read an essay or an article, or watch a YouTube show, ask yourself whether the author is speaking from personal experience. If so, what was the quality of that experience, what friction did he experience, and how did that friction resolve, or was the object of the friction abandoned? What can be gathered from the author’s journey through one of life’s obstacle courses?
So the pairing returns. Critical thinking is the skill everyone now rushes to defend from AI. Critical doing is its partner, and almost no one names it. Here is the asymmetry that should worry us. An AI can already reason. It cannot go. It cannot stand in the prison, board the train, or take the risk that turns an event into experience. When we hand it the thinking and stop doing the doing, we keep the half a machine can copy. We lose the half only a body can earn. That loss makes a different kind of human. This deserves an essay of its own, and it will get one.
My aim is to make this abstract idea concrete. I want to connect a number of experiences I’ve had as a writer living in Thailand and travelling extensively in Southeast Asia with my books. So I put the question plainly. What will the next generation of writers, the ones scrolling on their phones on the BTS, write about that carries any meaning? Are we destined to occupy a slop zone where AI creates the experience and we respond with a smile?
If you’ve made it this far, there is one takeaway I’d leave you with to ponder. AI’s siren call is powerful because it offers an exit from the difficult world. But you pay a high cost of leaving it. You leave behind the only place where experience is made. That realisation should be terrifying.