# Today's links * America's collapsing consumption is the world's disenshittification opportunity: America's loss is the post-American internet's gain. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * Object permanence: DanKam; Backyard M*A*S*H; Blockchain voting is bullshit. * Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. * Recent appearances: Where I've been. * Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. * Colophon: All the rest. * * * # America's collapsing consumption is the world's disenshittification opportunity (permalink) We are about to get a "post-American internet," because we are entering a post-American _era_ and a post-American _world_. Some of that is Trump's doing, and some of that is down to his predecessors. When we think about the American century, we rightly focus on America's hard power – the invasions, military bases, arms exports, and CIA coups. But it's America's _soft power_ that established and maintained true American dominance, the "weaponized interdependence" that Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman describe in their 2023 book _The Hidden Empire_ : https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties As Farrell and Newman lay out, America established itself as a more than a global _power_ – it is a global _platform_. If you want to buy things from another country, you use dollars, which you keep in an account at the US Federal Reserve, and which you exchange using the US-dominated SWIFT system. If you want to transmit data across a border, chances were you're use a fiber link that makes its first landfall on the USA, the global center of the world's hub-and-spoke telecoms system. No one serious truly believed that these US systems were _entirely_ trustworthy, but there was always an assumption that if the US were to instrumentalize (or, less charitably, _weaponize_) the dollar, or fiber, that they would do so subtly, selectively, and judiciously. Instead, we got the Snowden revelations that the US was using its position in the center of the world's fiber web to spy on pretty much every person in the world – lords and peasants, presidents and peons. Instead, we got the US confiscating Argentina's foreign reserves to pay back American vulture capitalists who bought distressed Argentine bonds for pennies on the dollar and then got to raid a sovereign nation's treasury in order to recoup a loan they never issued. Instead we saw the SWIFT system mobilized to achieve tactical goals from the War on Terror and Russia-Ukraine sanctions. These systems are now no longer trustworthy. Is as though the world's brakes have started to fail intermittently, but we are still obliged to drive down the road at 100mph, desperately casting about for some other way to control the system, and forced to rely on this critical, unreliable mechanism while we do: https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/26/difficult-multipolarism/#eurostack This process was well underway before Trump, but Trump's incontinent belligerence has only accelerated the process – made us keenly aware that a sudden stop might be in our immediate future, heightening the urgency of finding some alternative to America's faulty brakes. Through trade policy (tariffs) and rhetoric, Trump has called the question: https://archive.is/WAMWI One of the most urgent questions Trump has forced the world to confront is what we will do about America's control over the internet. By this, I mean both the abstract "governance" control (such as the fact that ICANN is a US corporation, subject to US government coercion), and the material fact that virtually every government, large corporation, small business and household keeps its data (files, email, records) in a US Big Tech silo (also subject to US government control). When Trump and Microsoft colluded to shut down the International Criminal Court by killing its access to Outlook and Office365 (in retaliation for the ICC issuing an arrest warrant for the génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu), the world took notice. Trump and Microsoft _bricked_ the ICC, effectively shuttering its operations. If they could do that to the ICC, they could do it to any government agency, any nationally important corporation, any leader – anyone. It was an act of blatant cyberwarfare, no different from Russian hackers bricking Ukrainian power plants (except that Microsoft didn't have to hack Outlook, they _own_ it). The move put teeth into Trump's frequent reminders that America no longer has allies or trading partners – it only has rivals and adversaries. That has been the subtext – and overt message – of the Trump tariffs, ever since "liberation day" on April 2, 2025. When Americans talk about the Trump tariffs, they focus on what these will do to the cost of living in the USA. When other countries discuss the tariffs, they focus on what this will do to their export markets, and whether their leaders will capitulate to America's absurd demands. This makes sense: America is gripped by a brutal cost of living crisis, and contrary to Trump's assertions, this is not a Democratic hoax. We know this because (as _The Onion_ points out), "Democrats would never run on a salient issue": https://theonion.com/fact-checking-trump-on-affordability/ It also makes sense that Canadians and Britons would focus on this because Prime Ministers Carney and Starmer have caved on their plans to tax US Big Tech, ensuring that these companies will always have a cash-basis advantage over domestic rivals (Starmer also rolled over by promising to allow American pharma companies to gouge the NHS): https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nhs-drug-prices-starmer-trump-tariffs-b2841490.html But there's another, highly salient aspect to tariffs that is much neglected – one that is, ultimately, far more important than these short-run changes to other countries' plans to tax American tech giants. Namely: for decades, the US has used the _threat_ of tariffs to force its trading partners into policies that keep their tech companies from competing with American tech giants. The most important of these Big Tech-defending policy demands is something called "anticircumvention law." This is a law that bans changing how a product works without the manufacturer's permission: for example, modifying your printer so it can use generic ink, or modifying your car so it can be fixed by an independent repair depot, or modifying your phone or games console so it can use a third-party app store. This ban on modification means that when a US tech giant uses its products to steal money and/or private information from the people in your country (that is, "enshittification"), no one is allowed to give your people the tools to escape these scams. Your domestic investors can't invest in your domestic technologists' startups, which cannot make the disenshittifying products that also cannot be exported globally, to anyone with an internet connection and a payment method. It's a double whammy: your people are plundered, and your businesses are strangled. The whole world has been made poorer, to the tune of trillions of dollars, by this scam. And the only reason everyone puts up with it is was that the US threatened them with tariffs if they didn't. So now we have tariffs, and if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow orders, and then they burn it down anyway, you really don't have to keep following their orders. This is a point I've been making in many forums lately, including, most recently, on a stage in Canada, where I made the case that rather than whacking Americans with retaliatory tariffs, Canada should legalize reverse-engineering and go into business directly attacking the highest margin lines of business of America's most profitable corporations, making everything in Canada cheaper and better, and turning America's trillions in Big Tech ripoffs into Canadian billions by selling these tools to everyone else in the world: https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/28/disenshittification-nation/#post-american-internet There's lots of reasons to like this plan. Not only is it a double _reverse_ whammy – making everything cheaper and making billions for a new, globally important domestic tech sector – but it's also _unambiguously within Canada's power to do_. After all, it's very hard to get American tech giants to do things they don't want to do. Canada tried to do this with Facebook, and failed miserably: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/understood-who-broke-the-internet-episode-4-transcript-1.7615096 The EU – a far more powerful entity than Canada – has been trying to get Apple to open up its App Store, and Apple has repeatedly told them to go fuck themselves: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/#500-million-affluent-consumers Apple, being a truly innovative company, has come up with a whole lot of exciting _new_ ways to tell the EU to fuck itself: https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/16/apple_dma_complaint/ But anticircumvention law is something that every government has total, absolutely control over. Maybe Canada can't order Apple, Google and Facebook to pay their taxes, but it can _absolutely_ decide to stop giving these American companies access to Canada's courts to shut down Canadian competitors so that US companies can go on stealing data and money from the Canadian people: https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/#elbows-up-eurostack Funnily enough, this case is so convincing that I've started to hear from Canadian Trump appeasers who insist that we must not repeal our anticircumvention laws because this would _work too well_. It would inflict _too much_ pain on America's looting tech sector, and save Canadians _too much_ money, and make _too much_ money for Canadian tech businesses. If Canada becomes the world's first disenshittification nation (they say), we will make Trump too angry. Apparently, these people think that Canada should confine its tariff response to measures that _don't work_ , because anything effective would provoke Trump. When I try to draw these critics out about what the downside of "provoking Trump" is, they moot the possibility that Trump would roll tanks across the Rainbow Bridge and down Lundy's Lane. This seems a remote possibility to me – and ultimately, they agree. The international response to Trump invading Canada because we made it easier for people (including Americans) to buy cheap printer ink would be… _intense_. Next, they mumble something about tariffs. When I point out that the US is _already_ imposing tariffs on Canadian exports, they say "well, it could be worse," and point to various moments when Trump has hiked the tariffs on Canada, e.g. because he was angry to be reminded that Ronald Reagan would have hated his guts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCKmMEFiLrI But of course, the fact that Trump's tariffs yo-yo up and down depending on the progress of his white matter disease means that anyone trying to do forward planning for something they anticipate exporting to America should assume that there might be infinity tariffs the day they load up their shipping container. But there's another way in which the threat of tariffs is ringing increasingly hollow: American consumption power is collapsing, because billionaires and looters have hoarded all the country's wealth, and no one can afford to buy things anymore. America is in the grips of its third consecutive "K-shaped recovery": https://prospect.org/2025/12/01/premiumization-plutonomy-middle-class-spending-gilded-age/ A K-shaped recovery is when the richest people get richer, but everyone else gets worse off. Working people in America have gotten steadily poorer since the 1970s, even as America's wealthiest have saw their net worth skyrocket. The declining economic power of everyday Americans has multiple causes: stagnating wages, monopoly price-gouging, and the blistering increase in education, housing and medical debt. These all have the same underlying cause, of course: the capture of both political parties – and the courts and administrative agencies – by billionaires, who have neutered antitrust law, jacked up the price of health care and a college educaton, smashed unions, and cornered entire housing markets. For decades, America's consumption power has been kept on life-support through consumer debt and second (or third, or fourth) mortgages. But America's monopoly credit card companies are every bit as capable of price-gouging as America's hospitals, colleges and landlords are, and Americans don't just carry more credit-card debt than their foreign counterparts, they also pay more to service that debt: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-visa-monopolizing-debit-markets The point is that every dollar that goes into servicing a debt is a dollar that can't be used to buy something useful. A dollar spent on consumption has the potential to generate multiple, knock-on transactions, as the merchant spends your dollar on a coffee, and the coffee-shop owner spends it on a meal out, and the restaurateur spends it on a local printer who runs off a new set of menus. But a dollar that's shoveled into the debt markets is almost immediately transferred out of the real economy and into the speculative financial economy, landing in the pocket of a one-percenter who buys stocks or other assets with it. The rich just don't buy enough _stuff_. There's a limit to how many Lambos, Picassos, and Sub-Zero fridges even the most guillotineable plute can useful own. Meanwhile, consumers keep having their consumption power siphoned off by debt-collectors and price-gougers, with Trump's help. The GOP just forced eight million student borrowers back into repayment: https://prospect.org/2025/12/16/gop-forcing-eight-million-student-loan-borrowers-into-repayment/ They've killed a monopolization case against Pepsi and Walmart for colluding to rig grocery prices across the entire economy: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/secret-documents-show-pepsi-and-walmart They've sanctioned the use of price-fixing algorithms to raise rent: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-odd-settlement-on-rent-fixing As Tim Wu points out in his new book, _The Age of Extraction_ , one consequence of allowing monopoly pricing is that it reduces spending power across the entire economy: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/691177/the-age-of-extraction-by-tim-wu/ Take electricity: you would probably pay your power bill even if it tripled. Sure, you'd find ways to conserve electricity and eliminate many discretionary power uses, but anyone who can pay for electricity _will_ , if the alternative is _no electricity_. Electricity – like health, shelter, food, and education – is so essential that you'd forego a vacation, a new car, Christmas gifts, dinners out, a new winter coat, or a vet's visit for your cat if that was the only way to keep the lights on. Trump's unshakable class solidarity with rent extractors, debt collectors and price gougers has significantly accelerated the collapse of the consumption power of Americans (AKA "the affordability crisis"). But it gets worse: Americans' consumption power isn't limited to the dollars they spend, it also includes the dollars that the government spends on their behalf, through programs like SNAP (food stamps) and Medicaid/Medicare. Those programs have been slashed to the bone and beyond by Trump, Musk, DOGE and the Republican majority in Congress and the Senate. The reason that other countries took the threat of US tariffs so seriously – seriously enough to hamstring their own tech sector and render their own people defenseless against US tech – is that the US has historically bought a lot of _stuff_. For any export economy, the US was a critical market, a must-have. But that has been waning for a generation, as the Lambo-and-Sub-Zero set hoarded more and more of the wealth and the rest of us were able to afford less and less. In less than a year, Trump has slashed the consumption power of the an increasing share of the American public to levels approaching the era of WWII ration-books. The remaining American economy is a collection of cheap gimmicks that are forever on the brink of falling apart. Most of the economy is propped up by building data-centers for AI that no one wants and that can't be powered thanks to Trump's attacks on renewables. The remainder consists of equal parts MLMs, Labubus, Lafufus, cryptocurrency speculation, and degenerate app-based gambling. None of this is _good_. This is all _fucking terrible_. But I raise it here to point out that "Do as I say or Americans won't buy your stuff anymore" starts to ring hollow once most Americans can't afford to buy _anything_ anymore. America is running out levers to pull in order to get the rest of the world to do its bidding. American fossil fuels are increasingly being outcompeted by an _explosion_ of cheap, evergreen Chinese solar panels, inverters, batteries, and related technology: https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/02/there-goes-the-sun/#carbon-shifting And the US can't exactly threaten to withhold foreign aid to get leverage over other countries – US foreign aid has dropped to homeopathic levels: https://www.factcheck.org/2025/02/sorting-out-the-facts-on-waste-and-abuse-at-usaid/ What's more, it's gonna be increasingly difficult for the US to roll tanks _anywhere_ , even across the Rainbow Bridge, now that Pete Hegseth is purging the troops of anyone who can't afford Ozempic: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/09/30/hegseth-blasts-fat-troops-in-rare-gathering-with-military-brass/ And Congress just gutted the US military's Right to Repair, meaning that the Pentagon will be forced to continue its proud tradition of shipping busted generators, vehicles and materiel back to the USA for repair: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/congress/2025/12/congress-quietly-strips-right-to-repair-provisions-from-2026-ndaa-despite-wide-support/ Eventually, some foreign government is going to wake up to the fact that they can make billions by raiding the US tech giants that have been draining their economy, and, in so doing, defend themselves against Trump's cyberwar threat to order Microsoft (or Oracle, or Apple, or Google) to brick their key ministries and corporations. When they do, US Big Tech will squeal, the way they always do: https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/big-tech-zeal-to-weaponize-trade But money talks and bullshit walks. There's a generation of shit-hot technologists who've been chased out of America by mask-wearing ICE goons who wanted to throw them in a gulag, and a massive cohort of investors looking for alpha who don't want to have to budget for a monthly $TRUMP coin spend in order to remain in business. And when we _do_ finally get a disenshittification nation, it will be _great news_ for Americans. After all, everyday Americans either own no stock, or so little stock as to be indistinguishable from no stock. We don't benefit from US tech companies' ripoffs – we are the _victims_ of those ripoffs. America is ground zero for every terrible scam and privacy invasion that a US tech giant can conceive of. No one needs the disenshittification tools that let us avoid surveillance, rent-seeking and extraction more than Americans. And once someone else goes into business selling them, we'll be able to buy them. Buying digital tools that are delivered over the internet is a hell of a lot simpler than buying cheap medicine online and getting it shipped from a Canadian pharmacy. For an America First guy, Trump is sure hell-bent on ending the American century. * * * # Hey look at this (permalink) * The Ross Dowson Archive https://archive.org/details/rossdowson?tab=collection * The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Criticizing AI https://distro.f-91w.club/reverse-centaur/reverse-centaur_imposed.pdf * Daddy-Daughter Podcast, 2025 Edition https://craphound.com/news/2025/12/14/daddy-daughter-podcast-2025-edition/ * Old Teslas Are Falling Apart https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/old-teslas-falling-apart * EFF Launches Age Verification Hub as Resource Against Misguided Laws https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-launches-age-verification-hub-resource-against-misguided-laws * * * # Object permanence (permalink) #20yrsago PSP 2.01 firmware unlocked https://web.archive.org/web/20060115012844/https://psp3d.com/showthread.php?t=874 #20yrsago HOWTO make a DRM CD https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2005/12/15/make-your-own-copy-protected-cd-passive-protection/ #15yrsago DanKam: mobile app to correct color blindness https://web.archive.org/web/20101217043921/https://dankaminsky.com/2010/12/15/dankam/ #15yrsago UBS’s 43-page dress code requires tie-knots that match your facial morphology https://web.archive.org/web/20151115074222/https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704694004576019783931381042 #15yrsago UK demonstrator challenges legality of “kettling” protestors https://web.archive.org/web/20101219075643/https://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5hK97JtRIOOeKUxESqXRLSeUDBTJw?docId=B39208111292330372A000 #15yrsago Backyard M _A_ S*H set replica https://imgur.com/a/mash-ztcon #15yrsago Bottle-opener shaped like a prohibitionist https://web.archive.org/web/20101222062101/https://blog.modernmechanix.com/2010/12/15/booze-foe-image-opens-bottles/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ModernMechanix+(Modern+Mechanix) #15yrsago Typewriter ribbon tins https://thedieline.com/vintage-packaging-typewriter-tins.html/ #10yrsago Sometimes, starting the Y-axis at zero is the BEST way to lie with statistics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14VYnFhBKcY #10yrsago DEA ignored prosecutor’s warning about illegal wiretap warrants, now it’s losing big https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/12/09/illegal-dea-wiretap-riverside-money-laundering/77050442/ #10yrsago Lifelock anti-identity theft service helped man stalk his ex-wife https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/consumers/2015/11/23/lifelock-used-electronically-track-arizona-woman/75535470/ #10yrsago EFF and Human Rights Watch force DEA to destroy its mass surveillance database https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/victory-privacy-and-transparency-hrw-v-dea #10yrsago Do Androids Dream of Electric Victim-Blamers? https://neverbeenmad.tumblr.com/post/134528463529/voight-kampff-empathy-test-2015-by-smlxist-and #10yrsago Billionaire GOP superdonors aren’t getting what they paid for https://web.archive.org/web/20181119192737/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/12/gop-billionaires-cant-seem-to-buy-this-election.html #5yrsago EU competition rules have real teeth https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/15/iowa-vs-16-tons-of-bricks/#dsm #5yrsago Asset forfeiture is just theft https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/15/iowa-vs-16-tons-of-bricks/#stand-and-delivery #5yrsago Pornhub and payment processors https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/15/iowa-vs-16-tons-of-bricks/#chokepoints #5yrsago Blockchain voting is bullshit https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/15/iowa-vs-16-tons-of-bricks/#sudoku-voting * * * # Upcoming appearances (permalink) * Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30 https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html * Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937 * Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25 https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/ * * * # Recent appearances (permalink) * (Digital) Elbows Up (OCADU) https://vimeo.com/1146281673 * How to Stop “Ensh*ttification” Before It Kills the Internet (Capitalisn't) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34gkIvYiHxU * Enshittification on The Daily Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2e-c9SF5nE * Enshittification with Four Ways to Change the World (Channel 4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZQaEeuuI3Q * The Plan is to Make the Internet Worse. Forever. (Novarra Media) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wE8G-d7SnY * * * # Latest books (permalink) * "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 * "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ * "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels). * "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org). * "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). * "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). * "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. * "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com * * * # Upcoming books (permalink) * "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 * "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 * "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 * "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 * * * # Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: **Currently writing:** * "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE. * "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING. * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * * * This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. * * * # How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "_When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla_ " -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. 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There's a texture to grief very few examine. People talk about the loud grief—the kind of grief that shatters your soul and rattles your cage of will—but there's another kind of grief that's rarely explored. Watching and listening to your friends losing who they are. I think the climate is foreshadowing for my life. The bitter cold of the winter is a warning sign I don't pay attention to as I sip hot herbal tea at my writing desk, vanquishing my writers block and attempting to put some literary order back into the chaotic rhythm of my thoughts. A phone notification shakes me out of my thoughts about how I can stretch out two men taking their clothes off for about five hundred words. It's Leo. He's texted me. "Hey Rob," he says, "Did you forget about the writing group today?" I did, but I can't tell him that. "Nope! Just getting ready!" When he makes it to my apartment, there's an email notification from my phone. I don't have time to read it at the moment, and oh, I am a fool for not stopping to check what that email is. * * * The air in the conference space where our "Writers of the Future" group meets always smells of harsh cologne and performative productivity. It is a sensory assault of laptop fans and the frantic tapping of laptop keys. I sit in the corner, my cane hooked over the back of my chair, listening to the room. I hate the name. Writers of the Future sounds like a corporate slogan for a pesticide company, but the name is less important than the people within it, and that's why I'm here. Leo sits next to me. I can hear the nervous rhythm of his breathing. Leo is a Black writer with a voice that sounds like jazz—unpredictable, syncopated, full of unexpected dissonances that resolve into heartbreaking chords. He writes about his life, the specific, humid weight of a Texas summer, the way joy can taste like a cheap freeze-pop on a Tuesday. "I have something new," Leo says. His voice is tight. "But... it's rough. It's really messy." "Messy is good," I say, leaning in. "Messy is where the blood is." Leo is a writer of immense, jagged power. He is a powerful man with a voice that sounds like gravel crunching under heavy tires, deep and resonant and full of a history that refuses to be smoothed over. When he reads his work aloud, the air in the room changes pressure. His prose is not "clean." It does not flow like water; it flows like molasses, thick and sweet and slow, or sometimes like lava, burning everything it touches. He tells more than he shows, a stylistic choice that critics hate but which I find profoundly honest. He doesn't invite you to watch; he commands you to listen. and I love everything he writes. Today, the writers in this group aren't buzzing with typing. They're listening to Chad, a white tech bro that sounds like his larynx is constantly massaging his speech for a pamphlet instead of talking to people. Chad isn't a writer. He's a content generator. He's published 400 generated books on Amazon and won't stop—not to mention—the insessant bragging he does about how he's a better writer because of whatever LLM he's using today. He is the kind of person who listens to podcasts at 2.5x speed because he believes silence is an inefficiency to be eliminated. He works in "Prompt Engineering," a job title that sounds to me like "Assembly Line Foreman for the Dream Factory." Chad's voice is smooth, frictionless, possessing the terrifying cheerfulness of a customer service bot that cannot be turned off. "Claude just released an update. It's incredible for unblocking. It really smooths out the edges." He's explaining to the group how to get the most out of large language models. Leo, beside me, is fidgeting with as much annoyance as I am. We're both immensely relieved when Brad finally claps his hands together, as if he's about to announce a press release. "Okay," says Brad. Brad is the organizer. His voice is a rich, polished baritone that vibrates in his throat but never seems to reach his chest. It's the voice of a podcast host who sells mattresses between segments on mindfulness. "Leo, you're up. Did you bring the revision of _The Asphalt Hymn_?" "Yeah," Leo says, "Great! Alright, creators," Brad announces. The word 'creators' sounds slippery in his mouth, like he's selling a subscription service. "Let's optimize the workflow tonight. Who's ready to output?" I have to suppress the urge to violently groan about his word choice. Instead, I turn my head towards Leo. I can't wait to hear this. Leo reads. It's a piece about his grandmother's kitchen. He describes the smell of collard greens as _a heavy, green blanket that wrestled the air into submission._ He describes her laugh as _a rusted hinge that still worked perfectly._ It is beautiful. It is jagged. It stops me cold. When he finishes, there is a silence. Not the reverent silence of a shared emotional impact, but the uncomfortable, shifting silence of a boardroom that has just been shown a graph with a downward trend. "It's... interesting," Chad says. "But the pacing is a little weird. And that metaphor about the hinge? It kind of pulls you out of the immersion. It's not very smooth." "It's not supposed to be smooth," I snap. "It's supposed to be true." "Leo," Chad says, choosing to ignore me entirely—he hates me just as much as I hate him—and addresses Leo directly. "Leo, did you read what I sent before this meeting? I took your last draft and ran it through Claud." The fuck? I roar internally. "I asked it to optimize for flow and readability. Listen to this." Chad clears his throat. The sound is grating. It sounds as if he's optimizing how to speak to humans. He reads from his screen. _"Her laugh was a joyous sound, ringing through the house like a silver bell. The kitchen always smelled delicious, the aroma of greens filling the air like a warm hug."_ The words hang in the air like dead flies. They are perfectly grammatical. They are perfectly structured. And they are completely, utterly stripped of everything that is Leo. A silver bell? A warm hug? It is the language of a Hallmark card Leo would never write written by a sociopath. "See?" Chad says, triumphant. "It just flows better. It's more... accessible. You should maybe use that as a base, Leo. Clean up your edges." I wait for the room to revolt. I wait for the other writers to laugh Chad out of the shop. But they don't. "Actually," says Amber, a poet who used to write searing verse about heartbreak, "that does sound a lot more professional, Leo. The 'silver bell' image is really classic." "Yeah," says Mike. "It's less... abrasive." I feel Leo shrink beside me. I can sense the physical collapse of his posture, the way he folds in on himself. "I guess," Leo whispers. "I guess I was trying too hard with the hinge." "No," I say, and my voice is the low growl of a guard dog. "The hinge was perfect. The bell is a lie. Leo, that machine didn't improve your writing. It erased your grandmother." "You're just resistant to the tools, Robert," Chad sighs. "It's the future. Adapt or die." "Oh, go power down somewhere. This isn't adaptation," I say, gripping the edge of the table until my knuckles ache. "It's lobotomy." Nobody agrees with me, though. I am outcast in a gaggle of readers and writers that seem to prefer LLM writing to the jagged edges. "And this is why," Chad practically yells, "why you don't listen to Luddites! Work smarter, not harder," Chad beams. The smile in his voice is audible, a stretching of wet skin. "That's the future. Why churn butter when you can buy margarine, right?" I sit there, gripping my cane until my knuckles pop, feeling the beginning of a horror story that has nothing to do with ghosts and everything to do with the slow, methodical erasure of a human soul. * * * ## Part 2. I walk home, my cane tapping a furious rhythm against the concrete. I fucking hate them. I fucking hate the Tech Bros. I hate the venture capitalists in their Patagonia vests who talk about "disruption" while they burn down the library of human experience. I hate them with the specific, intricate hatred of a survivor who knows exactly how the grift works. I hate LLMs. My hatred knows no bounds. I love the small web, the clean web. I hate tech bloat. And LLMs are the ultimate bloat. They didn't build these things to help us. I know this. Why do LLMs exist? They say it's to "democratize creativity." Bullshit. You don't democratize creativity by automating the act of creation. You democratize it by funding arts education, by supporting libraries, by paying writers a living wage. No, they created LLMs to solve a supply chain problem. The "problem" was that creating content—real, human, meaningful writing—is slow. It is expensive. It is unpredictable. And it is diverse. It requires dealing with _people_. People with traumas, people with political opinions, people with voices that don't fit into a corporate style guide. Minority writers, specifically, are "high friction." We talk about queerness and transphobia and racism, and We talk about disability. We make the advertisers uncomfortable. So the Tech Bros, in their infinite mediocrity, decided to bypass the human element entirely. They built a machine that scrapes our work—our pain, our joy, our very souls—without consent, grinds it into a mathematical slurry, and extrudes it as a flavorless, inoffensive paste that can be sold by the bucket. They built a machine to gentrify the English language. and the horror of watching my friend lose his soul almost eats me alive. * * * The next week, Leo brings a draft that was written 90% by him. The justifications are quiet, unsure of his own skill. The week after, he brings a piece that's written 50% by him. The shame is palpable, but it hurts me even more when readers and writers say the LLM versions are always better than his old drafts. This week, he stuns us all. "I don't—I don't have a draft," he admits. I immediately take his hand among the gaping and gawking of the room. His skin feels like it's a hallow shell of his soul. His voice is strained, broken, like there's something that's fundamentally shattering inside him nobody can see. "I just—I just—I haven't written in a while," he says. Claude has been down. I tried to write something… and, and… it just… I can't write. I ain't got nothin'." Chad chooses that exact moment to colonize the conversation. "Leo sent me his last draft," Chad announces. I freeze. NO! "And," Chad continues, "I ran it through the new 'Literary Fiction' AI I've been working on. Listen to the difference." He reads Leo's original sentence. I know it is Leo's because it has teeth. and then, he gets to the LLM version. The group murmurs. "Oh, that flows so much better," someone says. "It's more... universal." "Universal means average," I snap, wishing I could get away with prompt engineering Chad's stupid LLM to self destruct. "It means it touches no one because it tries to touch everyone." "Robert," Chad sighs. "Always the contrarian. Look, the metrics don't lie. Readers prefer the second one. We did A/B testing on Wattpad. The second one had a 40% higher retention rate." "You are feeding them sludge," I say, my voice rising. "And because they are starving, they eat it. And then you tell them sludge is what food tastes like." "It's just writing, Rob," Chad says, his voice hardening. "Why do you have to make it a crusade? Leo likes it. Don't you, Leo?" We all turn to Leo. Even though I can't see his face, I feel the weight of the room pivot toward him. "I..." Leo's voice cracks. A dry, brittle sound. "I don't know." "Leo," I say gently. "Tell him you are a good writer that doesn't need fixing." "It's better," Leo whispers. The words hit me like a physical blow. A kick to the shin. "What?" I ask. "It's better," Leo says, louder this time, but with a hysterical edge, a vibration of pure panic. "He's right, Rob. My metaphors... they're confusing. People don't get them. The machine... it makes me sound smart. It makes me sound like a _real_ writer." "You don't need an LLM to write for you. You're a good writer," I say, but his voice cracks as he stands up, snatches his coat, and practically bolts out of the room. "I can't write anymore. I can't write anymore. I just—I can't." I chase after him but it's too late. He's already out of the building. * * * The unraveling doesn't happen all at once. It is a slow rot, a decomposition of confidence that the Germans call Zersetzung. Psychological decomposition. It was the method the Stasi used to break dissidents not with torture, but with gaslighting, with subtle alterations of reality until the subject lost faith in their own mind. The Tech Bros haven't invented the term, but they have automated the process. They have built a machine that weaponizes mediocrity and sells it as perfection. Two weeks later, I sit in Leo's apartment. The air is heavy with the smell of stale laundry and despair. I have brought cookies—oatmeal raisin, heavy on the cinnamon, baked until the edges are crisp and the centers are dense and chewy. Food is a language of gravity; it pulls you back to earth. "Eat," I say, pushing the container across the table. Leo doesn't move. "I got into _Fiction Magazine_ ," he says softly. "Leo! That's huge!" I reach out, finding his forearm. His muscle is tense, rigid as wood. "Why do you sound like you're at a funeral?" "Because I didn't write it, Rob." "You used the LLM again?" "I used it for the whole thing," he whispers. "I fed it my draft. My messy, ugly, jagged draft. And it spit out... it spit out this smooth, perfect thing. And the editors loved it. They said it was 'refreshing.' They said the prose was 'elegant.'" He pulls his arm away from me. I hear the frantic clicking of keys. "Listen to this email," he says. His voice sounds like he's chewing glass as he reads it to me. _> "Dear Leo, we were impressed by the fluidity of your metaphors. Usually, your work feels a bit... disjointed. But this piece sang. The line about the 'tapestry of fate' was particularly moving."_ "Tapestry of fate," Leo spits. The words sound like poison in his mouth. "I hate that phrase. I would never write that phrase. It's a cliché. It's slop. But they _liked_ it better, Rob. They liked the machine better than me." "They liked the conditioning," I say, my voice sharp. "They liked the familiarity. It's the linguistic equivalent of McDonald's fries. It's chemically engineered to be palatable, but there's no nutrition in it. It passes through the brain without leaving a mark." "Maybe I'm just bad," Leo says. The sentence hangs in the air, heavy and wet. "You are not bad. You are a jazz musician in a world trying to sell ringtones." "But Robert, I can't do it anymore," Leo says, and then he breaks. It isn't a loud sob. It is a continuous intake of breath, a collapse of the chest. "Fuck, I tried to write this morning. Just me. Just a blank document. And I stared at the blinking cursor, and every sentence I thought of felt... weak. It felt amateur. I wrote, 'The rain hit the roof like gravel.' And then I thought, no, the AI would say something better. And I deleted it. I deleted it all." I'm about to say something when he continues, "I feel so stupid, Rob," he chokes out, the words drowning in his tears. "I feel so stupid. I let it into my head and now I can't get it out. I look at my own thoughts and they look wrong. They look like errors." I stand up and walk around the table, navigating by the sound of his breathing. I find his shoulder and pull him into an embrace. He clings to me for dear life, his hands clutching my body as if I'm his only life raft at sea. "That is the trap, Leo. That is the psychological warfare. They are selling you a solution to a problem they created. They want you to feel insecure. If you feel insecure, you pay the subscription. They are strip-mining your confidence to sell you back a synthetic version of it." "I'm losing money!" he wails. "I'm losing money, I can't write anymore—and readers—readers love my LLM writing! I don't know what to do, Rob! Readers like it. Editors like it. Editors. Editors of Magazines. I can't write anymore! I just—what the hell is happening to me—why do readers like it?" "I don't know," I answer honestly, rocking him, trying to comfort his soul with my words. "But just because people want to eat McDonalds, that doesn't mean we need to stop home cooking. But I don't know what to do. I'm just one person, but Leo, I love you, okay? I'll always be here if you need me. If you need me to look over a draft or—" "It's not just the subscription," he weeps. "It's the readers. They're getting used to the slop, Rob. They're getting used to the smooth edges. My writing... my real writing... it feels like it has too much friction now. Even the editors. Even the people who are supposed to know better." "Friction is where the heat comes from," I say fiercely. "Friction is where the life is." But he can't hear me. The Zersetzung is working. He is taking himself apart, piece by piece, and replacing the parts with synthetic fillers because the world has told him his own parts are defective. * * * Days later, it's my turn. we're back at that fucking writers' group. Although, today, it feels like it's a uniquely crafted torture chamber. I decided to read something. I usually don't. I keep my work for my blog, for the people who understand that a screen reader isn't a constraint but an instrument. But I needed to show Leo that imperfection was power. I needed to prove that raw data hits harder than processed data. I read a piece about my mother. It is raw. It is angry. It describes the sound of her voice as "a serrated knife cutting through warm butter." It describes the smell of the trailer park as "wet cardboard and ambition gone sour." It is jagged. It has no tapestries. It has no symphonies. It is a piece of writing that demands you look at the ugly thing and call it by its name. It's imperfect, but it's everything me. When I finish, the room is silent. "Interesting," Chad says. The word is a dismissal. "Very... visceral. But Rob, my guy, it's a little hard to follow. The sentence structure is all over the place. And 'wet cardboard'? It's a bit gross, isn't it?" "It's the truth," I say. "Truth doesn't scale," Chad says. He taps on his keyboard. "Just for fun, I ran your first paragraph through the new GPT-fiction-Plus wrapper I'm beta testing. Just to see what it could do with the core idea. I prompted it to 'elevate the tone' and 'smooth the syntax.'" "Don't," I warn. My voice drops—calm, dangerous, flat. "Do not run my life through your blender." "Too late," Chad says. "Listen to this improvement." He clears his throat, loving this. I feel like I'm being punctured by a thousand arrows through the heart. When he finishes, Chad beams. I can hear the smile in his voice. "See? Same info, but now it's palatable. Now it's _content_. It took out the aggression. It leveled the tone. It's objectively better writing." A woman in the front row murmurs, "Oh, that is much nicer. It feels more... literary." "Exactly!" Chad says. "I fixed it." "Chad," I say, my voice calm, the voice of a teacher correcting a slow student. "Why did it choose 'stone' for the throat metaphor?" "What? Because it's intelligent. It's smart. It knows. Because it fits." "No," I say. "It chose 'stone' because statistically, in the petabytes of training data scraped without consent from the internet, the word 'stone' appears in proximity to 'lump in throat' with a probability of 0.04 percent, which is higher than 'wet creature.' It isn't a choice. It's a math problem. It is a predictive text algorithm on steroids. It doesn't know what a throat is. It doesn't know what fear feels like. It is predicting the next token based on mediocrity." "It's still better writing," Chad insists, but his voice vibrates with the anger that someone who he thinks is a technophobe knows this tech better than he knows the tech. "It is a hallucination of competence," I say. "Chad, asking that machine to improve writing is like asking a blender to improve a salad. You don't get a better salad. You get sludge. And you," I turn my head to sweep the room, "you are all cheering for the sludge because it's easy to swallow. You are letting this tech bro convince you that your own distinct flavors are defects." I hear a sound next to me. It is Leo. He is making a sound like a wounded animal trying to stay quiet. A high, thin whine in the back of his throat. "You… fixed it," Leo whispers. "See?" Chad says to me. "Even Leo gets it." "No," I say. I stand up, unfolding my cane with a snap that sounds like a gunshot in the quiet room. "You didn't fix it. You lobotomized it. You took a scream and turned it into elevator music. You took the specific, painful texture of my life and turned it into a generic stock photo." "Whoa, calm down, Luddite," Chad laughs. "You're just jealous the machine has better flow than you." "I am not a fucking technophobe!" I shout, and the room flinches. "I built my own website stack from scratch! I code in raw HTML! I know more about the architecture of the internet than you and your wrapper-scripting ass ever will! I love technology! I love tools that expand human capacity! This?" I point my cane at his laptop. "This isn't a tool. This is a replacement. This is a parasite. It doesn't expand us; it eats us. It eats our confidence. It eats our specificity. It eats our struggle." I turn to Leo. "I'm a better writer than this—any LLM. So are you, Leo! You're a better writer." Leo doesn't move. He stands up, sad, resigned. He grabs his coat and walks out. I quickly tap my way out to follow him. "Rob," he says, stopping to turn back, facing my fury. "Rob, I wish I was as good of a writer as you. I'm a shit—" "Leo, no. You're a good writer—" "I can't write, Rob!" Leo screams. It is a terrifying sound, a man ripping his own throat open. "I feel so stupid! I look at my words and they look like trash! I can't do it! I'm done! I hate everything I do without the AI!" I have Mo idea what to say. Leo comes closer, his hands grasping mine. The force of his grip breaks my heart. "Rob," he says, and his voice shakes with tears. "I hate this. I hate this." "I know, buddy. I know! I'm here. I'm right here, with you. I'm here." As I let go for now, I don't know what to do to help him since my writing exercises didn't work. I told him to write fun Fanfiction. I told him to just write something bad. It's okay. I told him he didn't have to be marketable, but nothing is working, and he hates his own writing more as the days pass. I know Leo can still write without an LLM. He just needs encouragement. This is the thought that plants another seed as I leave the building. I can't go home yet. * * * ## Part 3. I take a bus to the other side of the city, to a neighborhood that smells of pupusas, exhaust fumes, and resilience. I walk three blocks, absently counting the cracks in the sidewalk through the tip of my cane, until the acoustic landscape changes. The echo of the street vanishes, absorbed by walls of paper. I eventually make it to The Cat's Shelf. The bell above the door doesn't ding; it clatters, a sound of heavy brass against wood. The air inside is cool and smells of vanilla (from the degrading lignin in old paper), binding glue, and peppermint tea. Entering it is a sensory baptism. The floorboards groan under my feet—a specific, B-flat groan that tells me exactly where I am in the room. There is no ultrasonic hum of cooling fans here. There is the rustle of pages and the hushed murmuring of conspiracy. "Rob?" Sarah's voice comes from behind the counter. Sarah sounds like she looks—sturdy, worn, and warm. She is a trans woman who built this bookstore with her bare hands and a lot of crowdfunding. She understands the politics of space. "I need a favor," I say. "A big one." "For you? Always. Do you need an audiobook or a body buried?" "I need a router," I say. "And I need a space." I explain it all. The Tech Bros. Chad. The Zersetzung. Leo's disintegration. The horror of watching a friend scrub the humanity out of his work because a machine told him he was inefficient. I tell her about the magazine editors who preferred the lie. Sarah listens. She pours me tea. It's an act of love I didn't know I needed. "you're not being hysterical, Robbie. They're colonizing the imagination," Sarah says softly. "That's what it is. Gentrification of the mind. They price you out of your own creativity." "Yeah. That's why I want to make a space, a space where that can't happen. I want to start a new group," I say. "Here. After hours. But I have rules. No LLMs. Not just discouraged—blocked. I want to configure your router to sinkhole every request to OpenAI, Claude, Anthropic, all of them. If they try to connect, I want the browser to redirect to an HTML page that has a very judgmental cat purring at you." "I love it," Sarah says. "When do we start?" "Tonight," I say. "I can't go home. I need to bring my friend back." * * * We call it "The Drafty writer's group." It's not the best name I've ever invented, but I don't care. The first meeting is small. Just me, Sarah, and a non-binary poet named Ash who writes sestinas about urban decay. We sit in a circle on mismatched chairs. I bring cookies—chocolate chip with sea salt, the contrast of sweet and sharp designed to wake up the palate. I don't invite Leo yet. He isn't ready. But word spreads. I don't use social media with an algorithm. I use the vast power of word of mouth. We print physical zines—little folded pieces of paper that smell of toner—and leave them in coffee shops, record stores, and community centers. Any place that will let us talk about the space. _Tired of the Slop? Come write poorly with us._ _Recovering Prompters Welcome._ _We don't want your polished draft. We want your mess._ By the third week, we have seven people. One of them is Adam. Adam is a Trans Black man with a voice that is soft, almost a whisper. He sits in the corner for the first hour, just listening to the sound of pens scratching on paper and keys clattering, phone keyboards clicking, the rhythmic clacking of my mechanical keyboard. "I... I used to use it too," Adam says suddenly during the break. The room goes still. Not the hostile silence of Chad's group. A holding silence. A waiting silence. "I wrote a story about my transition," Adam says. "And I showed it to a friend, and he said it was 'too angry.' So I put it in ChatGPT. I told it to make it 'more universal.' And it did. It took out the anger. It took out the specific smell of fear. It took out the things that made me, me. It made it... nice. And I hated it. But I couldn't stop. Because every time I tried to write the anger back in, I felt like I was doing it wrong. I felt like the machine knew better how to be human than I did." "You weren't doing it wrong," I say. "You were doing it human. The machine averages out humanity until it's just a beige paste." "I want to write the anger back," Adam whispers. "But I'm scared. I'm scared it's going to be bad." "Let it be bad," Sarah says from the counter. "Be bad. Be furious. Be unintelligible. Just don't be artificial." "We call that being a Recovering Prompter," I say. "There's no shame in it here. We know the pressure. We know the addiction of the easy fix. But we're here to do the hard work." Adam picks up his pen. I hear the scratch, hesitant at first, then harder, faster, digging into the paper until I think it might tear. Encouragement and love flood the space. There's still one person missing, though. I send Leo an email and a text message, and yes, an actual letter. _Leo,_ _I made a writing garden. It's full of weeds. It's messy. Nothing is polished. It's not perfect._ _We have cookies._ _I miss your voice. Not the LLM one. The one that shakes the floor._ _Come home. You are always welcome. I miss you. Come to one group, just one. We need you._ _- Rob_ He shows up twenty minutes late. I hear the bell clatter. I hear his heavy, hesitant steps. He smells of old sweat and that specific, acrid scent of anxiety. "I didn't bring anything," he says, standing in the doorway. "I haven't written a word in two months, Rob. I'm empty. The well is dry." "You're not empty," I say. "You're just quiet. Come sit." He sits next to Adam. "This is Leo," I tell the group. "He's the best writer I know. He's just forgetting how the instrument works." "I'm not the best," Leo mutters. "I'm a fraud. I sent a story to a magazine that a robot wrote, and they paid me for it. I cashed the check, Rob. I spent the money." "And you're here now," Adam says. "That's the work." That night, Leo doesn't write. But he eats a cookie. And he listens. He listens to Ash read a poem that doesn't rhyme and has a stanza that is just a scream. He listens to Adam read a paragraph that is so angry it feels like heat radiating from a furnace. And for the first time in months, I hear Leo breathe. A real breath. Deep into the diaphragm. * * * The resistance grows. It isn't a war fought with DDOS attacks or angry tweets or furious posts about how AI sucks. It is fought with vulnerability. It is fought by local businesses putting our flyer in their windows. It is fought by people telling their friends, "Hey, there's a place where you don't have to be perfect." Weeks bleed into a month. We start talking of putting on a live literature event. None of us have money, but none of us care. We want to do this. As we plan, people come to just listen. readers arrive to just enjoy writers being messy on the page. Other writers that are recovering prompt engineers come to our space. They all write poorly while they eat and drink, laughing at lines, embracing hugs, feeling far less alone than when they walked in the door. As the night of our first live reading is under way, just before the event, three people walk in who smell of expensive leather jackets and throat lozenges. "Is this the place?" a woman asks. Her voice is incredible—rich, trained, with perfect diction but a warmth that feels like velvet. It's a voice that knows how to hold a listener. "Who's asking?" Sarah says. "My name is Britany," the woman says. "I'm an audiobook narrator. This is David and Sam. We... we heard about what you're doing from the guy who runs the falafel stand down the street. We would love to read for anyone with disabilities or social anxiety or who just don't want to read work themselves." "that's incredible!" I say, unable to hide my joyous shock, "but we can't pay you. We have a lot of cookies and anger but that doesn't translate into cash, and we didn't get enough donations to pay you all." Brittany laughs. It is a musical sound, telling me everything is fine with the world. "Honey, I don't want your money. Do you know what I've been reading for the last six months? AI-generated litRPG novels. Thousands of pages of slop. I am dying of thirst. I am drowning in slop. I sit in my booth, and I read sentences that mean nothing, written by nobody, for an algorithm." "We never seen a space for recovering prompt writers. This is such a cool idea. We want to lend our skills. We want to help. We heard there was grit here," David says. His voice is a deep baritone. "We heard there were jagged edges. We want to read them. For free. Just let us chew on something real. Let us narrate something that's growing into itself." "We have plenty of jagged edges," I say. "Welcome to the writer's garden." * * * The Live Lit event was meant to be a small showcase. It turns into a riot of joy. We didn't shy away from the fact that recovering LLM prompters were going to be performing tonight. **Live readings by recovering humans. Show starts at eight PM.** The flyers catch the most attention. Sarah can't even fit everybody in the bookstore. The alleyway is packed. I can feel the body heat, a wall of humidity and anticipation. It smells of rain, cheap beer, and electricity. There are people here from the neighborhood, people from the university, people who just sound tired of being sold things. I walk up to the microphone. I tap my cane against the stand to gauge the distance. The hum of the PA system is dirty, crackling with interference. I love it. It sounds like potential. The microphone hums and pops before me. None of us are audio technicians, and it shows. It's the most goddamn beautiful thing in the world. It's the sound of electricity trying to speak. "Thank, uh, thank you all for coming," I say, and the microphone squeaks with a high-pitched feedback whine that makes a few people wince. I smile. I love that wine. It means the gain is too high. It means we are pushing the limits. "You might notice our manifesto on the door," I say, my voice booming through the cheap PA system. "These writers... some of them have used LLMs before. Or what the venture capitalists call 'AI.' I think we can all agree, fuck AI, right?" A cheer goes up. It's ragged and loud. "But," I continue, lowering my voice, leaning in until my lips almost brush the metal grille, "I believe there should be a space for people that have been broken by the system. There will always be people that love whatever slop the LLM makes. There will always be those readers—and God help them, the editors—that prefer the LLM versions, the slop, the generated works that slide down your throat without you ever having to care about the artist behind it." I pause. I listen to the silence. It is a deep, attentive silence. The kind of silence you find in a forest, not a packed room. "Tonight, you'll hear grit," I say. "You'll hear mess. You'll hear first drafts. You'll hear bleeding onto the page. Nothing will be polished. Nothing will be sanitized. I admit, some things won't make a lick of fucking sense. But you all are here because you love the mess. You love artists. You love art. You love the chaos of a human mind trying to explain itself to another human mind." I can feel the energy in the room shifting. It is a wave of warmth washing over me. "We didn't tell you which writers are recovering LLM users," I say, my voice thickening with emotion. "Because they deserve better than to be hated. Psychological harm and warfare isn't easy to recover from. When a machine tells you your soul is inefficient, it takes a long time to stop believing it. But none of the pieces were generated by an LLM tonight. Not one word." I grip the mic stand harder. "So enjoy the recovering writers. Have some cookies—Sarah made them, and I can confirm by tactile inspection they are excellent. Be a part of the readers and listeners that listen to and appreciate art instead of just consume it like content pigs at a trough." Laughter ripples through the room. "If you don't want to support any of these writers for fear all of them used an LLM at some point, I understand. Trauma leaves scars. But there's information on how to donate to these writers in the front, and on the bookstore's website. Thank you for giving everyone a chance. Thank you for saying fuck you to the way others want you to be. Thank you for taking a chance on artists." I take a breath. I can smell the ozone of the amp and the sugar of the cookies. "Now... let's have some fucking fun!" I step back. The applause is deafening. It isn't polite golf claps. It is stomping feet. It is whistles. It is the sound of a community knitting itself back together. With every artist, the applause increases in volume. The audience participation is utterly stellar. There's whoops. There's cheers. There's exclamations of shock and wracked sobs and guttural laughter that spills out into the open space. Nobody leaves. Everyone stays. Finally, it's time. "and our final artist for tonight," Sarah announces, "is Leo." The stomping grows louder. I hear Leo walk to the mic. His footsteps are heavy. Solid. The footsteps of a man who remembers he has weight. He clears his throat. It is a wet, nervous sound. "This is... this is a first draft," Leo says. His voice shakes, just a little. "It has typos. I didn't run it through a spellchecker. I definitely didn't run it through Claude. And... for a while, I thought I couldn't write without it. I thought my voice was broken. But my friends told me broken things still make sound." Laughter. Warm, supportive laughter. "It's called _The Taste of Love_." He begins to read. It's the best thing I've ever heard. It's about his momma cooking for him in her kitchen. There are stumbling blocks. Some metaphors swerve a little. Everything is Leo again. It's the best story I've heard from him in months, even with its imperfections. Britany, the audiobook narrator, is standing next to me. I hear her inhale sharply, a sound of pure appreciation as the scene unfolds before our mind's eye. His words grow in confidence as he dives deeper into his work. Everyone is engrossed. "He's good," she whispers. "He's real," I whisper back. Leo continues reading. He describes the sound of a screen door slamming in the wind. He describes the texture of his grandmother's hands—"rough as unfinished pine." He doesn't try to hide his tears when he speaks of her clothes. He doesn't hold back. He doesn't try to change any part of his mess. He builds a world out of friction. When he finishes, there is a second of silence—that profound, heavy silence that happens when a truth has landed in the room. Then, the world explodes. The applause isn't just hands clapping. It's yells. It's people roaring. It's whistles. People stomp their feet. I swear, I think the sound rips a hole through time and space. The wooden floor vibrates so hard it travels up my cane and into my marrow. The applause is a physical assault of love. I hear Leo sob, just once, a sharp intake of breath over the microphone, before he is drowned out by the noise. I feel a hand on my shoulder. It is Sarah. "We did it, Rob," she shouts over the roar. "We built this—this night—we did it!" I lean back against the brick wall, feeling the rough texture snag against my jacket. I listen to the chaotic, unpolished, beautiful noise of human beings screaming for a story that has jagged edges. The Tech Bros can keep their tokens. They can keep their scale. They can keep their LLM modules. We have the love. We have the care. And we have the voices. And that, I realize as the tears unapologetically spill onto my cheeks, is something they can never code. * * * If you enjoyed this story, support artists and art. But for real, if you enjoyed this story, you might enjoy Frindle by Andrew Clements's

The best part might be the consideration given to Cookie Monster's nostrils