Sometimes you gotta admit you're beat.

For the last few years I've progressively retreated from online spaces in the name of my own peace and sanity. First, uninstall the mobile apps. While you're at it, put the phone in grayscale mode, turn on annoying haptics, generally make it unpleasant to use.

Next: quit posting on the Nazi salute guy's platform, and delete the account a few months later. Delete Instagram and TikTok, then <gulp> delete LinkedIn. Unsubscribe from newsletters. Call it a content diet.

Here's the thing: all these changes were immediate, obvious improvements to my quality of life. No regrets whatsoever. I retreated to RSS–a command line RSS reader at that–and congratulated myself on my taste and restraint.

Then, the other day, I found a prompt fragment in a post from a writer who is very firmly in the "anti-AI" camp. (Or should I write 'anti-"AI"'?) All my efforts to curate a cozy echo chamber, laid to waste. I realized: being opposed to all the obnoxious pro-LLM PR that suffuses our information environment ... is just another niche to exploit with your LLM content production workflow. Nowhere is safe.

It's not the first time this has happened. On previous occasions, someone in the LLM Disliker subgenre has come forth with a predictable "well, I do use it for X, and occasionally Y ... but definitely not Z!" admission. And of course I can't know how many others are steady Claude-ing their articles and just being more careful about cleaning up prompts before they paste and post.

So, what is the value of that "information environment"? It's not all that informative. It's mildly entertaining, except when it's disingenuous or just plain disappointing. What am I doing?

Feeding a habit. You've probably seen the stats about how the average human now consumes 34GB of data per day Amid all the slop-summaries I found an actual paper by actual scientists. But I'd still treat the number with skepticism; scientists are the original Content Creators, beholden to publishing platforms for their livelihood .... Cutting out video might have drastically reduced my byte count, but I've still been stuffing my head with globs of text at a rate unimaginable to humans as recently as a few decades ago.

Even indieweb, LLM-opposing, earnest and vulnerable blog posts filtered through a plain text RSS reader are ultimately about novelty. 50+ new posts a day, more than you can possibly read. Just splash around in the pool.

I've decided to stop. I'm cutting out all Almost. I have a handful of good friends still in the game, and I will manually visit and read/watch/listen to what they're sharing from time to time. quote-unquote Content. No more social media, RSS, blogroll, or newsletters. Nothing published since 2023. There's plenty of interesting stuff to read that is known to have been written by actual humans, and I will focus only on that. It's not a sacrifice at all. It may end up being the kindest thing I've done for myself in quite a while.

... and yet. Here I am, hypocritically publishing a blog post. Why? It's not to Build an Audience, or Increase Engagement, or even Contribute to the Discourse. I'm simply writing to figure shit out. Like James Baldwin said:

When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

That's what this space and practice are for. I cannot in good faith recommend you keep reading. But I do promise I will never–and I mean never, with no asterisk–paste or post machine-generated text here. There's enough of that out there already, and it would be inimical to my actual goals.

Take care. Take a break if you need one. Wishing you and your eyeballs a very slow consumption day.