Tag: writing

Affirmation

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Scene: A dusky afternoon in the Vatican. The light from high windows slants across the unfinished vault of the Sistine Chapel. Scaffolding creaks faintly in the background. Michelangelo, spattered with pigment and fatigue, stands before Pope Julius II. The Pope, impatient yet curious, watches him from his elevated chair.

POPE JULIUS II

You are always so—difficult, Buonarroti. You resist honors, refuse coin, scorn praise. Why do you stand apart from your own glory like a man in mourning at his own feast?

MICHELANGELO

Because, Your Holiness, each of those things you name—honor, coin, praise—is a subtraction. A subtraction from the very thing I serve.

POPE

You serve me, Michelangelo. And God. Do not pretend your allegiance is solely to stone and plaster.

MICHELANGELO (steps closer, not kneeling, not bowing)

I serve that which is inside the stone. That which waits in the block and begs not to be disfigured by applause.

POPE (raising an eyebrow)

You speak in riddles again. Are you saying the laurel itself is an insult?

MICHELANGELO

Not always. But when a man begins to hunger for the laurel more than for the labor, he carves not for God, but for the crowd. And worse: he begins to carve for himself.

POPE

Is that pride or humility, I wonder?

MICHELANGELO

It is vigilance. For each time I feel the world affirm me—be it through a purse well-lined, or a look of envy from a lesser man—I feel something leave me. Some grain of necessity, some spark of struggle. And that, Your Holiness, is theft. Not from me. From the work. From Him.

POPE (leaning forward)

But we are all men. Even apostles craved bread and blessing. Would you live like a ghost?

MICHELANGELO

Perhaps I already do. I walk through Rome as though I belong to it, but I do not. I feel it every time I accept its comforts. Each affirmation I receive—from your court, from the bankers, from the silk-draped patrons who commission Venus and do not know her—weighs on me like a counterfeit soul.

POPE

And yet you build for us cathedrals. Paint for us heavens.

MICHELANGELO (quietly)

Because I must. But I must fight to keep that necessity pure. The system—this world of commissions and currencies—wants to make me grateful. It wants me to feel lucky. But art is not luck. Art is calling. And calling cannot be comfortable.

POPE

You speak as though virtue lives in suffering.

MICHELANGELO

No. But truth does.

(A silence. Dust motes drift. The Pope studies the ceiling, then Michelangelo.)

POPE

You are a dangerous man, Buonarroti. You speak treason with the tongue of a priest.

MICHELANGELO (half-smiling)

And you, Your Holiness, are a patron with the soul of a thief. You steal men from themselves—and in so doing, sometimes, you make them divine.

POPE (laughs, low and long)

Finish the ceiling. And remember—Rome only remembers saints once they’ve bled in the street.

MICHELANGELO (returning to the scaffold)

Then may I bleed not for Rome. But for the hand that shaped the clay.

[End Scene]

Revenge of the Writer

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Any showrunner, TV writer, film hack — they all know exactly when they’ve cut a corner. It’s not a mystery. It’s a negotiation. The only variable is how many corners you can cut before the whole thing falls over. You do just enough for the audience not to notice — or not to care. Minimum viable illusion. Minimum viable soul.

What makes Andor so remarkable — so seditious, really — is that Tony Gilroy doesn’t cut a single corner. Not one. He sees the corner. He nods at it. Then he calmly redraws the floorplan of the entire building to make sure he doesn’t have to step around it like a hack. It’s not extravagance. It’s integrity-by-design. He doesn’t spend more — he just refuses to insult the architecture because he remembered that storytelling is architecture, not spray foam insulation..

And what Andor proves — possibly by accident, though that makes it even better — is that audiences remember what real storytelling tastes like. You give them one clean bite, and suddenly the processed paste of “content” starts to feel like what it is: a gray, high-fructose slurry of tropes and compromises. They tune out. They ghost your IP. They unsubscribe.

It used to make sense — in that late-ZIRP, money-is-free, flood-the-zone-with-crap way — to mass-produce cultural noise and pray for virality. Just churn out cheap narrative scaffolding and let the algorithm hang a poster on it. But interest rates are up. Audience patience is down. Burnout is real. The margins are thinner and the bar is higher. Slop isn’t just artistically bankrupt — it’s financially obsolete.

Gilroy didn’t just make a good show. He launched a quiet indictment of the last decade’s content-industrial complex. He made it clear that every “efficient” decision — every data-driven storytelling hack — is actually a tax on attention. And sooner or later, people stop paying.

In Andor, everything earns its place. Pacing has weight. Dialogue does more than explain. Walls speak louder than digital backdrops. The conflicts aren’t charted in the writer’s room with a beat sheet template — they grow out of character, out of lived contradictions, political tensions, exhaustion, dreams.

Gilroy’s not using a different toolbox. He’s using the same hammer, the same wrench, the same limitations. He just bothers to ask what each tool is for before he swings it. No flourish, no flex — just honest craftsmanship. And that kind of rigor, once thought of as auteurist indulgence, might turn out to be the only model that survives the next contraction.

Not because it’s noble. But because it works.

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There’s that scene in Michael Clayton — late in the game, late in the hallway, where George Clooney tells Tilda Swinton, calm as a surgical laser: “I’m not the guy you kill. I’m the guy you buy. You don’t kill me, because I’m the one you make a deal with.”

And that line — that whole beat — it’s not just corporate thriller tension. It’s an operator’s truth. It’s also the secret contract between the writer and the system.

Because for years, the system has believed it could kill the writer. Replace them with a brand, a committee, a plug-and-play template, or lately, an LLM that’s read a million three-act structures and still doesn’t know what a beat means. But Andor is that hallway moment. Gilroy stands there and says: “You don’t get to kill me. You don’t get to discard me. Because I’m the guy who makes this real. You want something that works? You make a deal with me.” Because for a long time, the writer was the ghost in the machine. Useful, sure. Necessary, kind of. But mostly treated like an obstacle to be optimized, shortened, or outvoted. Pitch decks and IP libraries grew fat while the soul of the thing — the part that actually made it mean something — got stripped for parts.

Somewhere along the line, Silicon Valley — and, let’s be honest, a few execs in Burbank too — started thinking, “Wait a minute. We’ve been training these AIs for years on every story ever written. What if we actually don’t need writers? Not real ones. Maybe just a few to steer the ship. Traffic controllers, not architects. Button-pushers, not operators.” People like Bob Iger looked at the charts, saw the margins, and thought, why not? Writing became a line item, a bottleneck, a risk to be automated. But what they missed — fatally — is that when you remove the architect, you don’t just lose elegance. You lose load-bearing integrity. You lose the part that holds.

The audience can feel it. That covenant. That authorship. They don’t articulate it in trade lingo — they just notice when everything stops feeling like soft plastic. They notice when it’s a story, not a simulation. You can’t kill the operator and expect the machine to run. Not for long.

What Andor does — structurally, narratively, even politically — is insist that the operator must be in the loop. Not as a nod to old-school prestige. Not as a writer’s ego trip. But because in the new economy, craft is leverage. Attention is a finite resource. Garbage doesn’t just bore people — it breaks the machine.

Gilroy’s show says: you want tension? You want payoff? You want an arc that means something when it lands? Then bring in the operator. Make the deal. Respect the craft. Otherwise, you’re just throwing zeros at a script-shaped object and calling it development.

And in this post-ZIRP, post-algorithmic-discovery wasteland, that approach might not just be better — it might be the only one left standing. Because once audiences have seen the guy in the hallway, calm and clear-eyed, they’re not going to cheer for the boardroom anymore.

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So here we are. The floor is rising. The money’s tightening. The audience is ghosting your carefully A/B-tested sludge. The studio notes don’t land like they used to. The algorithm’s drunk and retraining itself on garbage. Everyone’s standing around, confused, wondering why nobody’s clicking “next episode.”

Andor is the blowback. The consequence. The quiet proof that you can’t cut the operator out of the loop without the machine eventually breaking down. You don’t get the tension, the stakes, the soul of that prison arc — or the monologues that actually say something — unless there’s a writer at the controls. Not a content manager. Not a data wrangler. A writer.

It’s not romanticism. It’s thermodynamics. You want something with structure, friction, heat? You need someone who knows where to place the load-bearing lines. You want to move someone, shift them — not just entertain them, but change the temperature of their thoughts? Then you need someone who understands how emotion and revelation intersect. That’s not a spreadsheet skill. That’s a writer’s domain.

And now, the model’s changing. Capital has a cost again. Algorithms have plateaued. Audiences are done being tricked. You don’t get to kill the writer anymore. You have to make a deal. Because without that, you’re just throwing noise into the void — and the void isn’t listening.

The Revenge of the Writer isn’t loud. It’s not violent. It’s structural. It’s architectural. It’s the slow, methodical return of everything the industry thought it could cheat.

The Art of Writing

The Business of Being Read

There’s a new breed of prose jockey out there, and they’re hell-bent on cornering the market on words. They’re not journalists, not novelists, not even the rugged, chain-smoking bloggers of yesteryear—no, they’re Substackers. These digital scribes have proclaimed themselves the saviors of the written word, promising to deliver insights, frameworks, and hot takes straight to your inbox for the price of a good cocktail.

Once upon a time, this might’ve been honorable work. Blogging, in its golden age, was a noble art—a little like monastic illumination but done in dim apartments lit by the glow of WordPress dashboards. Bloggers weren’t writers in the traditional sense, but they didn’t pretend to be. They were diarists, documentarians of the internet’s wild frontier, their posts a patchwork quilt of hyperlinks, personal reflections, and the occasional bit of hard-won wisdom.

Substack, though, isn’t that. Substack is blogging’s glossier, monetized cousin, surgically stripped of its raw sincerity. What’s left is a sleek, hyper-optimized machine for delivering content to an audience with the attention span of a caffeinated squirrel. And worse, it’s staffed by a rising class of writers—if you can call them that—who are less interested in storytelling and more interested in audience segmentation.

Substackers, for all their hustle and sleek monetization, are creatures of a very specific economic moment—an era shaped by zero-interest rate policies (ZIRP). These policies didn’t just pump cheap money into the market; they pumped cheap ambition into the creative class. Substack, with its endless pitches of “monetize your expertise” and “build your personal brand,” is a direct product of this environment. It thrives on the promise of easy gains and perpetual growth, much like the tech startups that funded their early days in a world where borrowing money cost next to nothing.

Readers

Ah, the upward mobile soon to be precarietat—those fine, well-dressed souls clinging desperately to the illusion that they’re not the ones who planted the seeds of their own destruction. You see, they’ve become addicted to distractions, quick talking points, and hot takes served up like fast food for the mind. Anything to keep them from acknowledging that their entire existence—your overpriced avocado toast, their weekend getaways to Napa, that smug “I’m voting for change” bumper sticker on the Tesla—has been built on a shaky foundation of capital, exploitation, and outright greed. They don’t want to hear about it. They don’t want to know about it. So, instead, they’ll gobble down whatever shallow nonsense they can find to soothe the gnawing panic that, deep down, they know the whole thing’s about to come crashing down.

And that’s where the optimizers come in. The Substack hustlers, the life coaches, the “CEO advisors” who churn out perfectly polished, 400-word pep talks designed to keep these over-extended mortgage-repaying rich folks just distracted enough to maintain the illusion that their wealth came from hard work rather than decades of unsustainable profiteering. They don’t care if it’s garbage—so long as it’s a neat, digestible pile of pseudo-insight that fits nicely in an inbox and doesn’t require any of that pesky “thinking” thing. It’s not about substance; it’s about keeping the show going, making sure the masses stay just uninformed enough to keep forking over the cash while the whole system spirals into the abyss. Exactly. And that’s what Substack is for. It’s the modern-day opiate for the overextended bourgeoisie, a perfectly curated digital cocktail of distractions and feel-good nonsense, tailored to make them feel like they’re doing something meaningful while they continue to scroll past their mounting existential dread. Forget about digging into uncomfortable truths or examining the crumbling world around them. No, no—Substack is here to give them their “daily dose” of self-assured, bland wisdom from people who’ve figured out exactly what the 1% wants to hear and will happily cash in on it.

The Substack Dream

The archetypal Substacker dreams of one thing: scaling. They aren’t slaving over the next great American novel or chiseling a piece of poetry from the rough marble of the soul. No, their mission is to “grow the list,” optimize their opening lines for “click-through rates,” and get retweeted by the tech elite. They don’t write for people; they write for personas, those mythical creatures conjured by marketing guides and UX design blogs.

Substackers live for the dopamine hit of a paid subscriber. They obsess over their analytics dashboards like hedge fund managers tracking portfolio performance. Their prose? Slick, digestible, and painfully useful. These people don’t want to write War and Peace—they want to write Five Leadership Lessons from Napoleon You Can Use Today.

The Rise of the Optimizers

Armed with Substack newsletters, SEO manuals, and the smug certainty that they were here to save writing from itself. “Save” it? These people wouldn’t know a sonnet from a spreadsheet, yet they’ve somehow rebranded themselves as the necessary custodians of modern prose. Their mission isn’t to create art but to churn out content—neatly packaged, hyper-relevant, and optimized for the attention span of a fruit fly.

They dissect language like surgeons performing unnecessary amputations, shaving off complexity, nuance, and soul. Metaphors are “inefficient,” humor is “distracting,” and anything that requires a second reading is deemed a failure.

These are the optimizers—slick, well-coiffed peddlers of bite-sized takeaways, selling the illusion that if you just “optimize” your mindset, your habits, your morning routine, you’ll magically rise above the chaos you’ve helped create. They’re the digital equivalent of snake oil salesmen, except instead of curing disease, they’re curing guilt. Want to feel better about the fact that your wealth is built on an ever-expanding pyramid of exploitation? Just read a couple of motivational articles about how it’s all about mindset and how the future is “now,” delivered with a splash of minimalist design and a dash of faux-wisdom. Substack isn’t a place for writing; it’s a glorified Band-Aid, stapled over the hemorrhaging truth that these folks have been living the good life on borrowed time—and eventually, someone’s going to come collecting. But until then, Substack’s here to keep the game going.

The Corporate Delusion

The Optimizer’s wet dream is to be noticed by a CEO who totally gets it. They fantasize about writing pithy insights about productivity and “taking ownership” that will one day grace the margins of a Silicon Valley PowerPoint. Their ladder to greatness involves being retweeted by Naval Ravikant or having their wisdom cited in Forbes.

Meanwhile, they scoff at the Writers. “Who has time for all that?” they ask, referring to the kind of painstaking craft that involves grappling with sentences for hours or inventing phrases no one will appreciate until 2043. Optimizers view this as indulgent, naive. They imagine themselves pragmatic revolutionaries, clearing the literary forest for “value-driven” saplings that yield immediate ROI.

The Crime Against the Future

But here’s the rub: Optimizers don’t write for the future because they don’t believe in the future. Their world ends at the quarterly report or the latest growth hack. Writers, by contrast, know that good writing is often unread for decades, if not centuries. They know that planting an idea in words is an act of defiance against the fleeting nature of existence. That it’s worth it even if only one person reads it and understands. Optimizers live for the now, not the long arc of history. Their prose is disposable, written to die in the inbox of someone who skimmed the first paragraph before opening TikTok. The art of writing is being replaced with the business of “being read,” and the irony is that nothing written by an Optimizer will ever truly matter.

It’s not that writers don’t like money or fame or recognition—of course they do. Who wouldn’t want their name lit up in marquee letters or their bank account fattened by royalties? These things are intoxicating, seductive even, and any writer who denies their appeal is lying or has already gotten too much of them to care. But here’s the truth: however important those things may be, they are not the main act. They are the sideshow, the after-party. The main act is the writing itself—messy, maddening, glorious writing.

For real writers, the process of writing is all-consuming. It’s the thing that swallows hours, days, sometimes years, without offering a guarantee of fame or fortune on the other side. Writing demands more than just labor; it demands time. Time to think, to wrestle with ideas, to chase sentences down blind alleys and drag them back kicking and screaming. Fame and money, if they come, are mere by-products of that slow, agonizing process. Writers don’t reject them—they just know that chasing them directly is like planting a tree and expecting fruit the next morning. The fruit, if it grows at all, takes its own damn time.

Writers as a Problem

“Real” Writers—the kind who’d claw their way out of their graves for the chance to revise a half-finished sentence—don’t fare well in this brave new world. Substackers dismiss them as anachronisms, too preoccupied with literary flourishes and slow-burning ideas to survive in an inbox-driven economy.

“Who has time for that?” the Substacker sneers. “Nobody wants to read your dense prose that won’t even be relevant for twenty years.” They say this, of course, while furiously threading tweets on “how to write for busy executives.”

Irrelevance is sometimes the whole point of writing because great ideas often begin their lives as outcasts, misunderstood or ignored by the present moment. Writers know this. They understand that the act of writing is not always about catering to the zeitgeist, but about resisting it—about planting seeds in the soil of irrelevance, seeds that may not sprout for decades. To write something meaningful, you sometimes have to accept that the world isn’t ready for it yet, that it might sit unread, unappreciated, or even mocked. That’s not failure. That’s patience.

In many ways, irrelevance is a test of endurance. Writing that is too tied to the moment—the kind of optimized, click-driven work that Substackers churn out by the gigabyte—might thrive today, but it’s also likely to expire with the next algorithm update. Truly ambitious writing, on the other hand, aims to transcend its time. It’s a message in a bottle, sent out into the unknown in the hope that someone, somewhere, someday will crack it open and understand. Writing is a gamble on the future, and irrelevance is the price you pay to play. For the writer, that’s not just acceptable; it’s essential.

Cycles

But here’s the thing about zero-interest bubbles: they don’t last. As interest rates rise and capital tightens, all that speculative froth—Substack included—will start evaporating. Those shiny subscriber counts and meticulously groomed email lists are going to start blowing up like supernovas, spectacular and short-lived. The hard truth is that writing tied so tightly to economic cycles has a shelf life. When the money dries up, what’s left? For most of these Substackers, not much. Writing for algorithms and growth metrics leaves no foundation, no lasting mark. It’s the kind of work that dies the moment the machine stops feeding it.

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