Existential Dread

Erik Davis: It's a challenging time for writers, not just economically, but motivationally. I've been writing about media, music, theory, drugs, spirituality, and technoculture for forty years now. I don't know what it means to do this anymore. If the NYT did a profile of me, they could call it "The Existential Dread of a Substack Writer." I was gifted with a great anthropological radar, an ability to instinctively tune into people and scenes and vibes. But that sort of empathy also makes things rough when the vibes get gnarly. The AI invasion of culture and particularly writing has left me confused and rudderless, especially on an online platform like Substack, now choked with the sort of LLM texts and attention-hacking stratagems that are already subsuming the Internet. I know I have things to say, and readers to read them, but there is a disturbance in the force that I cannot avoid, a rupture in the pact between writer and reader, and between writer and text, that in turn is…