Where have all the writers gone?
The “Cut and Paste Generation” have won.
Like so many of you, I penned my first story as a kid in school. I distinctly and fondly remember this childhood memory as we were forced (yes forced!) to use a fountain pen whereby you “sucked” or “drew” the ink into the pen from a pot of ink before later variations used a capsule of ink you attached behind the incredibly thin “nib” of the pen. I remember this for a variety of reasons from the oft breaking of the nib as I wrote too hard (and still do), some crazy cats thought it a wonderful idea to place the capsule in the sides of their mouths and bite down, thus the ink exploded giving the impression of a blood thirsty vampire (if they were addicted to ink rather than blood) or some horrific scene from a scary movie. I’ve no idea if these crazy cats are still alive and I’m fucked if I want to know and nor do I care.
The other reason I fondly remember this throwaway story from a Dickensian age of fountain pens and children with ink poisoning is that I commenced my very first story with this exact sentence:
“What you bin doing?” I asked my friend.
OK, not exactly Pulitzer Prize winning material I’ll grant you but hey I was a kid and rather than self-inflicting myself with ink poisoning I was writing my very first story and crucially, I was starting it by using the local vernacular of the city of my birth. The local dialect bastardised so many words and here was a prime example: “bin” rather than “been” and far more importantly, I was laughed at by my school friends and chastised by the ink pushing teachers for using an incorrect form of language. But as I hope I’ve demonstrated I wasn’t. I was in fact being inventive but I doubt I communicated this in a suitable way as I was obviously only a kid but I was right, I was using my imagination and anyway, at least I wasn’t being like Jimmy in the corner of the room, squirting ink from the side of his mouth like a deranged zombie from a George Romero film.
So anyway, where have all the writers gone?
After the quaintly old fashioned and saccharine if true story above, I’m now going to annoy and offend nearly every one you. But that’s OK, as no-one truly reads any of my rambling musings anyway. Which is the first point of this brief emptying of a tired and weary mind as we’re all writers here, not readers. Which leads me onto my next point: None of you are true writers. Suck it up. Move onto the next article in The Matrix you’ll PRETEND to read with a desultory one clap or even fifty. You don’t read anyone else’s writing and furthermore, you don’t actually write anything. The vast majority of the guff here on Medium is just cut and pasted gibberish, someone else’s writing who cut and pasted it from someone else who cut and pasted it from someone else.
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation”.
Oscar Wilde.
It’s even worse than that now and especially so here.
“10 ways to make money with Bitcoin”, “7 reasons you’re in a toxic relationship”, “Follow me for tips on how to make money on Medium”. Banal, vacuous, vapid, vexatious and other words I can’t pretend to know beginning with the letter V and every other letter of the alphabet too, cut and pasted in tiny little paragraphs with huge headers. This isn’t writing. This is just copying and pasting rubbish, get rich quick schemes, grifts, frauds, and other ways of duping the algorithms that ruin (sic) our lives.
Then there’s the people (though I seriously doubt the vast majority of you are human but mere bots churning out utter rubbish) that say “Here’s MY article. If you read MY article I’ll read yours” as they spam MY article, MY actually written, thoughtful, insightful, human article. Then there’s the “one-word wonders” who post “Nice” or “Interesting” in the comments of an article I’ve spent hours curating, 2, 3, 4,000 word articles, often more, a 10 minute read with callbacks, in-jokes, or an in depth analysis of the subject.
And you put “nice” in the comments.
Fucking “nice”?
What is wrong with you people if indeed, you are actually a person.
A cursory glance at my over 1,000 articles here demonstrates that I pen my thoughts on a variety of subjects but let’s just stick with the main topics of sport, travel, music and film. With the very odd exception (and you know who you are as we’ve “spoken” and I call one of you a dear Matrix friend) no-one ever comments on the actual piece of writing! Not “Great film, I saw it last week” or “I’d love to travel to England” or “I love that song too” or “I’m a football fan too and I remember this game” etc, etc boring etc.
Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Niente. Zip. Well, except for “nice”. Obviously.
Yes I’m well aware of the current Medium crackdown on multiple, dubious, scheming accounts but they need the traffic to compete with other platforms and so they welcome the dross that fills this vacuum with utter, cut and pasted nonsense that simply isn’t writing and which blocks out the sun from some of us who actually try, and often fail and sometimes spectacularly succeed, with a piece of human thought transcribed and transposed into writing.
I’m also well aware that this won’t garner me any friends here but I drink from the fountain of Salvador Dali and Hunter S Thompson and as the good doctor once said when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Is chat GPT to blame? Do you use it? If so, you are indeed to blame. Notice how this anti-human device is trumpeted and lauded? Where’s your human compass? Why don’t you rebel? Why can’t you think of a single unique idea for an article or long form piece of writing all of your own?
Or is it too easy to cut and paste and grift your way from one “side hustle” (pass the sick bag) to another?
I think you’re scared of the competition and you know what?
I’m right.
This isn’t writing folks, this is cutting and pasting your way to a soulless nothingness.
Oh, and if you do use Chat GPT and you are human and you do cut and paste your way through The Matrix, why not just visit Elon Musk and get a microchip implanted in your brain.
You’re no longer human anymore anyway.
*Originally posted to my Medium blog site and reproduced here for
and any other interested parties!*
Thanks for reading.
Maybe they have at Medium, but elsewhere...