Unplugging Computerspeak
After more than two years of writing Computerspeak, I have decided to pause the newsletter while I think more deeply about how and when I write.
The short version is that the conversations around AI are now professionalized, institutionalized, and politicized. As a result, I’ve noticed that my relationship with writing morphed from something I did for fun every Thursday night into a weekly stress test to see if my thoughts would get me in trouble the next day.
It also feels like the only people allowed to have an opinion about AI need to work for a center, preferably one with a name that suggests a mandate to save civilization between meetings. There are now plenty of options to choose from, and thankfully for the human race, they are constantly growing in number, headcount and influence. We have the Global Center of AI Governance, the Centre for AI and Digital Humanism, the Center for Tomorrow, the Center for AI Safety, the Center for AI Governance (not to be confused with the Global version above), the Center for Humane Technology — I could keep going. Their branding might be immaculate and their mission statements heartfelt, but the overall aftertaste is that of a conference foyer where people dressed in suits talk with conviction and gravitas about technologies they don’t understand.
Computerspeak was never meant to be something read by people in those foyers. It was meant to be a place where I could write plainly about what I thought was happening, including the awkward parts, and where I could do that without the fear of paying a price and without needing to translate every sentence into the dialect of institutional reassurance.
The second reason for the pause is that the price for sharing personal views has become more obvious. When I was growing up on the internet, disagreeing with someone online was a mostly tolerable feature of having opinions in public and it usually ended with some strong words being exchanged on a social media platform. Now, people with moral certainty have taken up a new interest in administrative initiative, going so far as forwarding personal opinions to workplaces in the hope that the HR department can be persuaded to finish an argument.
While snitching might feel rewarding in the moment, I don’t think this behavior is going to result in positive outcomes for individuals or for society. You can either write with the freedom that makes it worth doing, or you can write as if every paragraph is a potential evidence exhibit, and I find the second option creatively unappealing.
The third reason is simpler and, in its own way, more embarrassing because it has nothing to do with politics or institutions, and everything to do with getting old(er). “Writing is harder than it looks,” and it is difficult in precisely the way that makes it valuable, because it forces you to sit still long enough to discover what you actually think rather than what you are prepared to react to. The problem is that the modern attention economy runs on short-form video now. A TikTok or Instagram video can travel further than a thousand carefully arranged words, and it can do so while requiring fewer evenings spent negotiating with a stubborn paragraph that refuses to become coherent.
I am not claiming that making good video is effortless, because the best creators make it look easy in the same way that good writing makes clarity look natural. I am saying that I want to use this break to experiment with TikTok and Instagram, and see what happens. So if you come across my short videos, you should interpret that as a sincere attempt to keep thinking in public without making every thought feel like a mini dissertation.
Here’s a video about Moltbook that I made while I was waiting to board a flight a couple of weeks ago. For some reason, over 1000 people watched it:
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To wrap things up: Computerspeak is pausing (here and on LinkedIn), and you should not expect the usual rhythm of posts for a while. The archive will remain available, because I do not believe in disappearing writing — these articles were, after all, a record of my personal opinions for several years. If and when I return to the newsletter format, I want it to be when I figure out how to do so like my true self, rather than like a ChatGPT-filtered brand.
For those who followed Computerspeak over the last two years, I am grateful in the non-performative sense of the word, which is the only sense worth using.
See you around!