Today’s ominous article is by Gabrielle Drolet, who tells us How to Make a Living as a Writer. It’s quite simple, really: lots and lots of tiny projects and strung together into something that pays the rent. Drolet’s gigs include a few cartoons, a bit of choose-your-own-adventure erotica, and a reliable standby of daily morning horse-racing news for a reputation management service monitoring (and trying to downplay) scandal in the horseflesh trade. It’s not at all glamorous, this sort of commercial writing — more a trade than a craft or art. But it’s how a writer pays the bills, the same way a visual artist might do layout or logos or signs. And as devalued as it is, it’s getting worse. As automation nibbles at the edges, writing-as-a-trade becomes easier to automate and harder to respect. Or get paid for.
Coincidentally, my 40 hours a week at what I call the medical paperwork factory became 20 this month. They didn’t replace me with AI, or cut my hours because of the coming Republican war on Medicaid. This is just the regular precarity of the writing life: we finished a project, so now I’m down to half time.
Drolet surely knows this even better than I do, but that regular precarity is getting more precarious. For example, before my hours were cut, I had already seen several projects canceled because certain states no longer recommend vaccination to the poor. Meanwhile, as automation advances, more of that small pool of work will be done by The Machine and less by a human. What human work there is might not add up to a whole job. And what are the odds that a company will need me in particular, with 25 years of experience and a wage demand to match?
Couldn’t you just make ChatGPT do it?
Mystery
Robert Jackson Bennett’s fantasy/mystery A Drop of Corruption is a fun book from several angles. It’s a well-plotted mystery, of course. It’s a fantasy in a complex world of alchemy, of course. It’s a parable about neurodivergence and courage and ability. But it’s also a novel about the virtues of working in an imperfect system. The empire that our protagonists work for is not exactly well-loved by its neighbors, and for good reason. It’s crooked, it’s cruel, it’s unfair, and it’s also full of people working to make it better than it is, to make it worth keeping. To make it worthy of the love of patriots.
In the afterword, the author makes explicit where he’s coming from: he’s been thinking a lot about the danger of dictators, about the dangers of hoping for a quick fix or a single autocrat who can make the right decisions. About how the American empire he lives in is far, far, far from perfect, and yet holds the promise of being, shall we say, a more perfect union than it currently is. He puts that promise, that hope, in the hands of underpaid but dedicated civil servants, and puts them at the heart of his novel. It’s really quite well done.
Further
- Neal Stephenson comments on artificial intelligence.
- The Atlantic: How Part-Time Jobs Became a Trap
- Mother Jones: Getting Out of Jail After Dark Can Be Dangerous — and Sometimes Deadly
- Rest of World: Robot Chefs Take Over at South Korea’s Highway Restaurants
- Houston Chronicle (now just “CHRON” for reasons): Book bans aren’t stopping at libraries—now Texas is targeting bookstores
Secretly Ironic 