One could tell Clavicular’s lawyer by his jurisprudential profile, even before he got out of his car. Middle-aged, raincoat, grown-out and grayed Julius Caesar haircut and the confident, portly bearing of a lifetime of legal accomplishment. He was brash. You could feel how brash he was from behind the glass, how much Jameson he could put away in victory or late-night reconnoiterings. He opened his door and kicked his rumpled pant legs straight, before striding to the middle car and giving the window a curt knock of his knuckles. A young Jewish couple with a dog exited the other car on the left of the triumvirate. The man wore the largest yarmulke I’ve ever seen, so big you could see it from the front like a beanie. He and his girlfriend looked dressed for a high-school semi-formal in a Disney script. The TikTokers prowled some distance away as the lawyer and the dog-bearing friends converged on the middle car with Nevada plates. You knew who was in there. 

First out was a dark-haired middle-aged woman who, I thought, could only be Clavicular’s mother. They looked alike: same nose, same flex to the high cheekbones when she clenched her jaw. She had a maternal concern and loving gravity about her, as she held the door open for Clavicular’s spray-tanned girlfriend, Lily Snyder. Snyder is one of the smallest women you could ever see. In addition to the proverbial 10 pounds, the camera must put on half a dozen inches. Then, out he came, Clavicular in the flesh, with a gaggle of tall dorkish pals who looked as if they’ve been slouching on their looksmaxxing regimens. 

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For more than a year, Clavicular, or “Clav” as people call him, has dominated social media — and even made it into the style pages of The New York Times — for encouraging young boys to chisel their jawlines by smashing their faces with hammers, grow their penises by hanging weighted shopping bags from them for hours, and take meth to curb appetite. This is called “looksmaxxing,” and looksmaxxing allows one to “mog,” which means to dominate or overshadow someone in person. It’s worth noting that the term “mog” was derived by recluses on internet forums, who spend as little time as possible in rooms with real people, where “mogging” might come into play. Clavicular teaches that you can mog someone financially, or with your height or looks. Clavicular thinks he’s so handsome and buff that he mogs everyone just by appearing in front of them.

The press casts a jaundiced eye on him but largely allows that he is handsome. But nothing can prepare you for how very, very small he is in the flesh. As he passed the windshield of my car, it looked like he’d been shirking on his own looksmaxxing. Or perhaps there’s not much you can do with his physique. There is no way this self-proclaimed aesthetic model of masculinity is six foot two as he claims. His shoulders are small and narrow, and not a hint of musculature was visible through his tight suit jacket. His obsession with bodybuilding suddenly seemed warranted: he has no body. He dapped up his Jewish friend with the dog five-foot-ninedly. The friend went into the dap with the energy of someone who has watched too much Entourage, saying something like, “Whaddup playa. Let’s get this, boi.” The group all turned to go get it, and the friend transferred the leash of the dog to Clav. They formed a posse 10 people deep, and Clavicular didn’t exactly stride to the courthouse doors; perhaps it isn’t within his gait to stride. He is so short his head floated among a barrage of shoulders. 

There were no more than three local news stations and one national outlet at the doors of the courthouse, and yet as the Clavicular posse approached the steps, the lawyer screamed at the paltry sum of newscasters. “Let him through! Clear a path! Get out of the way! This is ridiculous! Let him through!” The dog began barking, and the media backed up to keep clear the already-open path. The young TikTokers came from behind and began shouting, “We’re with the BBC! Black c—k loves you, Lily! We’re with the BBC!” BBC, get it? They’d been practicing this accosting earlier. But rather than go into the courthouse, as is their constitutional right, they seemed frightened and peeled off from the group and ran back to the woods.

All their talk about the BBC was directed at Clavicular’s tiny little girlfriend, Lily Snyder. In Clavicular’s world, where the libido and sexual expectations have been formed entirely by the internet and porn, every woman is assumed to ultimately prize penis size above all else. And who, pray tell, has the largest penises? Not Clavicular and his friends, who film themselves discussing Gaussian distribution probabilities that prove conclusively that every girl they meet has had sex with at least one very large penis. Penises much larger than their own. They despair about it. 

That’s why Clavicular hangs shopping bags full of weights — or produce, it’s unclear — from the end of his penis. But we’re not there yet. 

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This was a revelation of the full scope of the Clavicular algorithm, internet pathology breaking into the real world. A premier brand of Vixen, one of the largest porn companies in the world, is “Blacked,” whose content focuses on white women cheating on their white husbands and boyfriends with black guys with very large penises. Clavicular’s content lives algorithmically within this cuckolding pathology. If you watch his videos on Twitter, say, to learn a little more about him before covering his rape arraignment, suddenly your video feed is filled with cynical slop podcast clips about penile insecurity, interviews with vapid white pornstars talking about the biggest black penises they’ve ever filmed with, how they recover afterwards with ice and days on the couch, and then those horrible softcore-porn fruit videos, in which AI-generated fruits have hypergamous sexual misadventures. (Those horrible, horrible fruit videos.) There’s also him consoling a depressive friend, who was recently cuckolded by a black sex performer after he lost a pathetic “boxing” match to him. You are but one thumb flick away on your feed from Clav to the “cuck” chair.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the mainstream young-American algorithm. At any rate, Clavicular does not have a very large penis; he has a normal penis, and he’s insecure about it. In Clavicular’s world, you can “mog” someone with your face or your finances, but there is no outmogging a very large penis. The frightened TikTokers have tried to symbolically “cuck” him, before cucking themselves by running away into the woods.

We filed into the court and sat in the pews. There is a courthouse physiognomy: faces that only a cop, military vet, or armed guard possess, and such faces abounded. There is also a physiognomy of the arraigned — the actual people who may or may not have committed some crime, assembled here. They appear sad, tired, nervous, accommodatingly polite, hopeful. A protester came in with a roller suitcase. Everyone looked at it and then at the guards with the same thought: it’s a bomb. The protester had tried to film himself arraignment-maxxing outside the courthouse. That is, he filmed the film crews and complained about how there was no story there. “Most journalists are Ivy-League educated and here they are sitting around doing nothing. Nothing’s going on here.” He refused to turn his mic off in the courthouse, and the guards escorted him out.

Clavicular’s lawyer waddled in at high velocity. With him was the woman whom I took to be Clavicular’s mother, but no Clav. The “mother” was very pretty but very thin. Out of vanity, she has made herself too thin as she deepens into middle age. She has a kind of beauty that is negated at the wrong turn or vantage, but amplified at the correct angle. This is the physiognomy that becomes obsessed with the camera, obsessed with its intimate angles. She knows what her good side is. 

She has the same nose as Clavicular, the same cheekbones, the same frame, the same vanity. Even with Clavicular out of the room, I felt they were webbed together. I could feel the genealogical join. She looked like she had done some crying leading up to this date, tears she had kept to herself. Courtrooms are asexual spaces, but any large gathering of humans will create a sexual field. She had the only sexual presence in the room.

Suddenly, out he came, walking in on his little legs alone, no average-sized males towering over him. We’ve seen him before, of course, but optimized for the American internet stream and not with our own eyes. I’ve long believed that Clavicular did not come to look the way he does through one-man hammer parties in his bedroom, but by the archaic process known as aging. But this belief did not hold up to scrutiny in the courtroom: he looks like he’s never aged. Clavicular looks like a little boy. But a chiseled little boy. Imagine a cherub making gains at the gym without growing a day older, and you get a sense of the confused physiognomy he’s cut the ribbon on. His testosterone levels are not exactly in orbit. He has no physical presence. There is no sexual energy about him. He is, after all, infertile (he says so himself) and one can feel it in his anti-magnetism. His arms are weird, and his biceps sit oddly high and near the armpit as if the structure was never meant to develop them, and his musculature is bewildered as to where to place them. I took back everything I had ever thought: his looksmaxxing is completely warranted. His frame was never meant to be big. He had to do something about how small he is. He has no legs.

He was small and nervous. There was a long, dry, white stain running down the bag of his right trouser leg — raw milk, semen, the possibilities are endless with a character like him. You could see it clearly when he stood up. He stood between his lawyer and the woman I thought was his mother. They are the same exact size. They have the same muscle mass. Clavicular has the body of a too-thin middle-aged woman. He sat down and stared ahead. He was handling himself well, but you could see a nervous twinge every now and then. When his lawyer bent over to whisper to him, he thought he was supposed to stand and jerked almost to his feet, but his lawyer indicated he could stay seated. He was such a little boy, I felt almost sympathetic. 

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Finally, the judge strolled in 20 minutes late, and we all rose. It felt a bit like the opening of a Catholic mass, and then we sat back down. But Clavicular was up first, so he and his lawyers stood back up. He had already surrendered his passport. The bail was set at $10,000. The judge asked if he understood all this. “I do, Your Honor.” There was neither contempt nor apathy in Clav’s voice. He was nervous, polite, good-willed, scared. He was a scared child trying to be polite. The judge rattled off more procedural prose, and Clavicular leaned into his microphone and said eagerly, of his own respectful volition, “Thank you, Your Honor.” But the judge was shuffling papers and missed this act of a respectful little boy on his best behavior. This tugged somewhat at the heart. The judge mogged Clavicular. 

The woman I thought was Clavicular’s mother turns out to be Melinda Thompson, a lawyer. But I do not throw my psychoanalytical intimation out with the bathwater. Standing side by side, the way she looked at him, I maintain there was something libidinal in her gaze. She saw herself in him. She loved him. And if this woman can love Clavicular, can gaze upon him with concern and worry, can I do that too?

I can’t. You see, Clavicular’s birth name is Braden Peters, and while Peters is something of a surname glowdown from “Clavicular,” that “Braden” carries vital information directly to the American gut. If we knew nothing about Braden but his name, we could intuit with no small accuracy his class, his bearing, his destiny: solvent, suburban, no personality, generically handsome and insecure about the size of his penis. If nomen est omen, then the Clavicular arraignment was really the story of the American “Braden.” The facts of his biography and the allegations of the case are all things a Braden would do. 

First, Braden was born in New Jersey. This is not a crime, but an affluent genesis in Hoboken — with a businessman for a father and a stay-at-home bodybuilder for a mother — does not bode well for the development of a personality. He attended a private all-boys Catholic high school, was bullied for being very small, and started experimenting with testosterone — formerly known as “going through puberty.” However, Braden belongs to a generation that has distinguished itself by thwarting the course of puberty and outsourcing it to third parties, and so he began taking testosterone, hitting himself in the face with hammers, and attaching weighted shopping bags to his penis. You know, to permanently stretch it. 

Braden was kicked out of Sacred Heart University in — you saw this coming — Connecticut, for selling drugs after just three weeks. This sounds halfway promising, until one realizes Braden was not inviting classmates into his room to get high, but to take off their pants and bend over so he could shoot them in the buttocks with steroids and help them make big gains in the gym. Expelled, Braden worked at a restaurant, polishing his 18-pack, hitting himself in the face with hammers, and microdosing meth to curb his appetite. Without college, Braden was sexually educated by porn and, insecure about his penis and having never seen Austin Powers, he got earnestly into penis pumps and began diversifying his natural penis-enlargement techniques from the rudimentary weighted shopping bag. 

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As all people do who are going up in the world, Braden went down to Florida and started streaming his life on Kick, the medium that has replaced reality television and monetized boredom. His manosphere predecessor is a bald, closeted delta male who feigns wealth by renting luxury cars and mansions. I’m speaking of Andrew Tate who, now caged and whimpering from jail for sex trafficking, has left Braden the last unwittingly self-satirical protagonist among the internet ruins; the lone voice expressing nausea at cunnilingus and explaining that attempts at producing a female orgasm are a bad ROI — better to optimize one’s ejaculato praecox.

This brings us to the innocence of Cape Cod. One summer during his rise in fame, when tiny little Braden was still 19, he filmed himself getting a 17-year-old girl drunk on his stream. (Correcting for Gen-Z psychology, they were then 13 and 12, respectively.) Braden had Ubered her over to his grandmother’s seaside McMansion with the promise of helping her become famous. According to the police report, the girl said hello to Braden’s grandmother and mother before climbing the stairs to Braden. Braden, she alleges, instructed her to say she is 18 on the stream and to pretend the vodka he gave her was water. 

On the stream, she becomes visibly flushed and intoxicated and says to Braden, leaning in for a kiss a floor above his granny, “Wait, I’m so drunk, though,” to which Braden says, “It’s OK,” and kisses her. 

After the camera turned off, Braden allegedly took the drunk young woman to his bed and began “throwing [her] in different positions,” as the criminal complaint alleges. When she woke up the next morning, it was to Braden already having sex with her and “pushing her head backwards.” When he was done, the complaint continues, he “coldly” ordered her the Uber home she’d expected the night before and — we imagine — gazed out over the ocean, brooding on the size of his penis. 

The world in its present form would not exist without the internet. We wouldn’t have the 1,001 gender identities without the fractalizing sales funnels of technocapitalism’s targeted marketing and audience segmentation. We wouldn’t have cancel culture without the medium from which to be canceled and through which to lodge anonymous protest. We wouldn’t have President Trump without Twitter’s creation of a “public forum” and  Trump’s presence and aptitude in such a place. And finally, we wouldn’t know who Braden Peters is without this ecosystem. We wouldn’t, in an analog world, open up the newspaper and find an interest piece on a guy named Clavicular going around to obscure college campuses encouraging young men to put their penises in tubes and vacuum pump them. In a parallel, still-analog world, “Bradens” are still allegedly inviting young women to their grandmother’s McMansions, getting them drunk to have sex with them, waking them up in the morning by having sex with them, and then coldly whisking them away — we just don’t hear about it nationally. 

The defining feeling of this century and driving force of technocapitalism is boredom. Mankind’s attention span has been caged these three decades in the visual medium of the internet, whose momentum relies entirely on monetizing the metadata this boredom gives off. Boredom and brief reprieve from boredom: ejaculation. The video gamer takes a break from gaming to ejaculate to porn. The pornstars — Sky Bri, Mia Malkova — now take a break from porn to stream themselves playing video games, oftentimes with dorkish video gamers. It was inevitable that the pornstar would find her way into a deeper intimacy with her true audience. Clavicular would not exist without the internet, but he also would not exist without porn. If porn is tails, Clav is heads, and together they make the Janus-face of the internetic structure.

Outside of figures like UnHerd’s Yanis Varoufakis, most of the Left has never woken up to this reality: when automation replaces labor, the exploitation of user metadata replaces the exploitation of labor. In so doing, we continue widening the frontiers of what we outsource to the computer: we have outsourced natural memory to the “download” and the “file save”; we have outsourced public discourse to tweets; writing to podcasts; sex to masturbation and pornography. If we are indeed building a machine god through the internet and AI, porn is its cybernetic libido and sexual imagination. This is Braden’s world. Braden’s “stream.” He is a next-gen narcissus staring at his reflection. You are driven by boredom to his stream, and he makes money off your observation. But you are not looking at him, you are looking at his reflection. Braden Peters is making money staring into the mirror and you’re staring in it with him. Marshall McLuhan clarified the meaning of the Narcissus myth in Understanding Media: the viewer does not see their reflection as their reflection, but confuses it for an external object. Clavicular, a tiny little fella, has conclusively confused himself for his buff internet image. I went into this wanting to push his face into the water. But the tenor of our age is irresolution, and I must say I’m not bored by what I’ve seen. Not at all. In fact, I think I’ll come back Nov. 24, for the next hearing on probable cause, in the flesh, for the human observation of Braden Peters. I don’t want his face to fall through the water just yet — not until society is ready to give him a swirlie.

Heading out of the courthouse, Clavicular is height-mogged by everyone: his friends, the guards, the newscasters. His tiny head bobs in a sea of normal-sized people. He is asked for comment from his right. He turns his head so far right that he gives the newscaster his left profile all the way behind her. Jawlines and profiles become very important to people so shy they can’t look others in the eye.

His lawyer is chewing everyone out again. “Clear a path! Let him walk!” And the TikTokers meet him at his car. They yell: “BBC owns you! BBC owns you!”

We may now speak of an ancient America. You’ll forgive me such bold pronouncements, for there isn’t the time to waste trapped in tired registers of speech, and I have several more shockwaves to get through before we’re done. Furthermore, the ambition to push my country’s mind into new modes overrides all possibility of modest thought and all hope of modest deliverance. Add to this motive the jolly of no ordinary birthday: We the People have reached our 21st century and are now old enough in the eyes of arbitrary law to grow brave on the vintage Madeiras our Founding Fathers left aging in the cellars of the republics plural, for 13 republics and counting we were meant to be, never the one. With this intimation you may catch on the air of my intoxicated breath the first whiff of America’s founding hornswoggle and her hogsheads of secret history. But I warn you, there are secrets in the swigs of these old wines that some of our fathers are illegitimate and so some of us are illegitimate Sons of Liberty. I should know, for I have been conducting vigorous research among the casks and deliver myself presently to the top of the cellar stairs, fresh from a choice cache of reds, with a maximum of confidence and high patriotic focus, not to mention every wine-lover’s intention of pouring generously. But I said we may speak of an ancient America, so let us speak.

After 250 years, we have hurtled such a distance from our origins that the histories, philosophies, and intentions of our founders equal the lost secrets of Greece, the sacked libraries of Alexandria, the aborted steam engine of Rome and an Industrial Revolution a millennium early, all of it abandoned to Barbary. The year 1776 is an ancient date to the American eye staring across the dilation of our epoch’s accelerated speed. For we did in but two centuries what historically took most civilizations 1,000 years, and we are a little warped from the pace. You think I speak of the betrayals of the Constitution, and while there is certainly much of that, I am speaking of what the Constitution betrayed. I am speaking of a betrayal equal to discovering that Romulus did not kill Remus with any masculine honor, but sent a goon to sneak up on him with an icepick while he slept, and lay in an anxious sweat until dawn when the head was delivered to his slick and clammy bed. I speak of a revelation equal to learning there was an even more ancient and mysterious people slipping the sock up the boot of Italy before the Romans did.

Half the mystique of anciency is the intimacy it shares with oblivion: there is awe in what has been lost, and will never be known. We await bold innovations in physics to storm limbo, for like the particle horizon round our domain in the universe, there is a shrinking horizon to the past which knowledge can make very few enduring incursions beyond. For instance, where it was once casual knowledge to any Roman, today we are left to wonder, “Who were these Etruscans who came to Italy before Rome; whence these Italianate people who gave Rome her Tarquin kings, her arch, her Cloaca Maxima, and her regal purpura; these people who taught the Romans how to read portents in the lightning and in the thunder, and predicted down to the century their own nation’s 1,000-year lifespan and the eventual Roman eclipse; who wrote from right to left against the arrow of time in a lost and still unsolved language; who sailed defensive navies so powerful, they terrified a Greek people fresh from Ilium; whose protectionist polity was structured to preclude the doom and ruin of imperial expansion; yes, who were these Etruscans and their confederation? For political morphology tells us that republics decline and fall into empires, but a daring charge into Etruscan and, now, American oblivion reveals a new morphological truth: confederations precede republics. On this note, I lift to your lips the first sip of the olde vino.

* * * * *

The uniform perception of American history tells us that we declared independence from Britain in 1776, fought a revolutionary war that ended in victory in 1782, became the first glimmering modern republic by ratifying our noble Constitution after a good-humored and lively debate in 1789, and, because we were in an expansively democratic mood, added in the handy first 10 amendments, the Bill of Rights, in 1791. This myth is our Romulus, and everyone from Ken Burns to the folks of the 1619 Project take it for fact. 

Anarchist-anthropologist David Graeber on the Left and Fox News’s Sean Hannity agree that the Constitution but resolved the chord of the 1776 Revolution. But this is a Romulus myth that hides its integral fratricide. The seven years between 1782 and 1789 are short enough, I suppose, to give no hint they were seven of the only eight years that the United States of America actually existed. For America’s original constitution was not the Constitution. Decorum, please, with your wine, sir! It is an ancient vintage — don’t be so surprised to find it spiked with a little of the Eleusinian ergot. Your mind must be open for this historical trip. You are going to be asked to think in plurals and simultaneities and the paradox of their attendant contradictions. Drink deep.

No, gentlemen, I say again, slowly for the timorous: America’s first constitution was not the Constitution, but the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, created by the same Second Continental Congress that issued the Declaration of Independence. The astute among you will note the word “Confederation” right up there near the front of the name, conveying a definite impression of the type of government the document describes. No, this was not one of Benjamin Franklin’s elaborate jokes in the vein of his “Fart Proudly” columns. Rather, the word “Confederation” names precisely what America was established to secure for all time: a loose confederation of 13 independent, sovereign states. 

Whereas the Constitution has taught us to think in singulars — one nation, indivisible — our true nature is plural and decentralized. There are geologies to a nation’s psyche, and the idea that a citizen of Maine can cast a vote for president that will affect the governance of the citizens of Arizona 2,500 miles and 300 million people away, is so entrenched a modern American expectation that the pre-Constitution psychology is nearly incomprehensible. Attempt to take in America’s original intent: if you were a citizen of, say, Massachusetts in 1784, that was your country. You did not have weighing on your mind the election of a national president in Washington, DC, but rather the election of your governor, lieutenant governor, and legislators. In 1776, the separate states of America were not the vestigial provinces and administrative arms of Washington they are today, but sovereign countries. And these 13 original countries each had their own constitutions. They printed their own money. They regulated their own commerce. They levied their own taxes. They banded their own militias. They decided the boundaries of their own liberties. They decided their own political structures, and there was no national government that could or would intervene. Contrary to the high-school-history fairy tale promoted by the likes of filmmaker Ken Burns — in which America was a rambunctious gaggle of independent states just yearning deep down to be one people under a common yoke, and learning step by improbable step to get out of its own libertarian way — the opposite was the case. The Revolution of 1776 was not fought to replace one entrenched central power with another, but to dissolve the principle of central power altogether. For the oppression that spurred the rebellion was the totalism of a distant monarch and aristocratic parliament, enforced by a standing army. American militias did not take up arms or turn their farms into battlefields to dissolve the sovereignty of their home state and establish a new central government, nor to simply swap nomenclature: a king for a president, Parliament for Congress. No, the movement was genuinely a revolution in that it aimed for the decentralization original to Western Civilization, and succeeded in restoring mankind to a governance like the confederations of Etruria and pre-Socratic Greece, the latter the very structure that birthed Western philosophy in the Tragic Age. 

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The Articles of Confederation were commissioned by the Second Continental Congress on June 11, 1776, the same day Thomas Jefferson began work on the Declaration, that first masterpiece of American-English prose. They were drafted by a committee of 13 members, one from each state, including John Dickinson from Pennsylvania and Samuel Adams of Massachusetts. The committee finished its work in 1777, and the Articles became the de facto law of the land until official ratification in 1781. What Jefferson expressed in poetic precision, the Articles expressed in political precision. More than an equal masterpiece, they are the definitive text of America’s original intent. The Articles established a one-year president of Congress, a presiding officer who was already a member of Congress elected by Congress with no veto or other executive powers; congressional term limits with officials under the power of recall by their state legislatures at any time; no standing army or power to conscript soldiers; no power to compel taxes directly on the people or states nor alter or override state constitutions; and a unanimous majority of all states to amend the Articles. Power over the actions of the state rested with each of the separate states, and the national Congress was there merely to mediate matters such as border disputes or to coordinate response to threats such as foreign invasion. “Weak and ineffectual,” says Ken Burns — “As intended!” answer the Patriot Dead. Yes, we’ve woken some ancient spirits.

Now, it may be the wine talking, but I would just love to saddle you and ride you horse-breathed through a bit of history, for you simply will not get this education anywhere else and a gallop of 18th-century air is good for the constitution. But this anticipates. 

* * * * *

In 1782, the West was won and the plural republics of the United States, having dissolved central power for all time, settled into a dream of perpetual confederal union under the Articles. But two antagonistic forces were in the wings preparing a sleight of hand: a large national debt held by chafing creditors, and Lin-Manuel Miranda — sorry, Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first secretary of the Treasury. That is, with the Articles’ weak powers of national taxation, the states were not exactly racing to pay off their war debts. This doubly roiled the monied class of bankers, lawyers, merchants, and reintegrated Loyalists, who made their fortunes under London’s central power and now couldn’t sleep at night for all the moolah they were missing out on, because with Red Coats gone, there was no more central power to exploit financially, nor monarch around whom to form a new aristocracy. There was no purse string because there was no purse — as intended.

Lucky for these chafers, Hamilton and James Madison, the future president, were dreaming up just such a wealthy national government and colluding in secret with other “founders” about reshaping the country into a polity that looked familiarly British, familiarly overthrown — and reeking of windfall. Madison engineered the national Annapolis Convention in 1786 under the guise of discussing the federal Congress’s powers over interstate commerce. Only five states bothered to show up. Madison and Hamilton used this gathering to foment national anxiety. In Hamilton’s “Annapolis Report” and Madison’s “Vices of the Political System” memorandum, lax dispassion was spun into a deeper national crisis about the union of the states, then used as a pretext to call for another national convention “with the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation,” specifically and unambiguously its powers of taxation. 

If powerful cards had been gathering in the hands of the wealthy, the time to play them came in 1787 at what was then known as the Philadelphia Convention. (Bad boy, Ken Burns — this was not called the Constitutional Convention until the late 18th century! Go to your crate!) Madison and Hamilton enjoyed leverage in the selection of delegates and the fomenting of ulterior motives. Several pro-Articles politicians declined to attend, citing the Convention as extra-legal, finding the Articles sound, and confident in the track record of past conventions that states wouldn’t even show up. Virginian Patrick Henry declined based on the power of his nose. “I smell a rat,” he said, an accurate reading, but a miscalculation that freed Madison to hand-select ardent nationalist delegates in Virginia — aristocrats who would go on to propose such pro-democratic statutes as life tenancy for presidents and for congressmen. 

According to the historians Charles and Mary Beard’s analysis of the portfolios of the Convention members, the majority of these delegates were lawyers, merchants, large landowners and creditors — the ones who held much of the public debt and, buying citizens’ debts for mere pennies on the dollar, stood to make exorbitant sums if the debt could be paid off in full. If a new national government could be created, these creditors were poised to become aristocrats. Madison then secured the key that unlocked the convention hall: a retired, wooden-toothed, tight-lipped general who never won a battle, George Washington. General Washington, who retreated his way to victory, had previously refused to attend, but he too much enjoyed his role as American statuary and omen. It is not hard to court a statue and, by putting Washington on display, Madison legitimized the Convention in the national eye. 

Despite the pretext of amending the Articles, Madison arrived weeks early in Philadelphia with a draft of the future Constitution in hand and established a nationalist bloc, including Virginia, Pennsylvania, and various other states, with the sole intention of subverting the Convention and dissolving the Articles of Confederation. On Day One, Hamilton proposed a strict measure of secrecy. Guards were posted at the doors; publishing or communicating about the proceedings was prohibited. It was then, in secret, that the plan to replace the Articles outright was raised.

Operating like a modern, private, extra-legal corporation, the secret treasonous proceedings took four months before the public was alerted that the Articles had not been amended, but rather dissolved and replaced with what was called simply “the Constitution” — conspicuously with no Bill of Rights yet in sight. Furthermore, the new document bore striking resemblance to the monarchical system it had just overthrown. The president was an elective monarch with alarming powers, including to “refuse his Assent to Laws” (veto) and make “Judges dependent on his Will alone” (nomination of judicial officers) — two points that were among the declaration’s stated grievances against English monarchy. The Senate was designed to have an aristocratic makeup similar to that of the House of Lords, and the ambiguously expansive “Necessary and Proper” and “Supremacy” clauses equaled Parliament’s 1766 Declaratory Act, which established no limit to Parliament’s power over the colonies and first inflamed America to revolution. To name a few more betrayals of the Revolution, the language of the Constitution gave this new central power unlimited direct taxation and established a permanent standing army in peacetime. 

This last English resemblance seems like nothing today — we have had a standing army forever, what of it? But it was arguably the biggest fear of revolutionary Americans. In the 18th century, standing armies were recognized as the coercive forces of dictatorial empires. Militias were the republican American solution: it was the duty and the honor of the common man to defend his state, a principle that thwarts imperial expansions. Whereas standing armies create occasions for their own use and can be used to suppress citizenry, militias are the citizenry and organize themselves only for common defense in legitimate existential crises. Militias are citizens and laborers who disband to private life at the end of conflict, unlike career soldiers and officers. Most important, they answer to themselves and their state, not a national executive branch. Under the pseudonym Centinel IV, Pennsylvania dissenter Samuel Bryan summed up the Constitution in the local press: “An evil genius of darkness presided at its birth, it came forth under the veil of mystery, its true features being carefully concealed, and every deceptive art has been and is practising to have this spurious brat received as the genuine offspring of heaven-born liberty.”

* * * * *

So the Constitution rendered the American Revolution an American reformation of British tyranny and centralization. If you can beat ’em, join ’em. Madison knew that very few state legislatures would ever agree to dissolve their own sovereignties under a Westminster replica, and so concocted a novel ratification process. The Constitution was sent to state conventions, only nine of which had to assent in order to bind all 13 states forever. The state conventions were assembled with fresh delegates, not state legislators, and framed to the public as therefore allowing “the people” to ratify the document. 

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Now, not only did the Constitution enumerate a system of central power almost identical to Britain’s, it was to be shoved down the victorious revolutionaries’ throats. In Pennsylvania, Gouverneur Morris — the leader of the state’s nationalist bloc, a man who argued the president should serve for life and pick the members of the Senate, who he also believed should serve for life — argued for accelerated speed in the assembling state conventions and ratifying the Constitution. According to Madison’s Notes on the Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, published in 1840, Morris’s “object was to impress in stronger terms the necessity of calling Conventions in order to prevent enemies to the plan from giving it the go by. When it first appears, with the sanction of this Convention, the people will be favorable to it. By degrees the State officers, and those interested in the State Governments, will intrigue and turn the popular current against it.” Things were so speedy in Morris’s Pennsylvania that dissenters who refused to form a quorum were forcibly escorted to the state house by a sergeant at arms. The state legislature had not seen the Constitution. During the proceedings, the dissenters were prohibited from voting, and their objections were not entered into the official record.

This is the moment when Madison and Hamilton began issuing the pro-Constitution propaganda now known as The Federalist Papers, which coerced and frightened the public into support. The authors framed the manageable issue of paying back debts as an existential crisis whose only solution was to undo everything the Revolution had achieved, save official reattachment to Britain. Of course, there was an outcry, presently muffled by Ken Burns and PBS. Recognize now the voice of our true fathers, those who argued against the Federalists and their Constitution: the anti-Federalists. Think, for a moment, how easy it is to lay your hands on a copy of The Federalist Papers. Now ask if you have ever seen a bound copy of The Anti-Federalist Papers — the public-essay responses to The Federalist Papers. It is so obscure a collection of texts that my copy is a 10-by-10-foot, 30-pound print-on-demand paperback. My mailman dragged it to my door by rope. The only copy of the complete papers issued by a publisher costs $450, from the University of Chicago Press, in PDF form only. Yet these are the writings of America’s true founders. These are the disquisitions of America’s original intent, and original dissent, and today they read with the prescience of Nostradamus.

The true founders were stolen from us, and the nation was deceived as to Madison et al.’s intentions partially through language. These men (and woman: Mercy Otis Warren of Boston) did not call themselves “anti-Federalists” — the Federalists burdened them with that epithet as a smear. For up until the end of the Convention, the terms “confederation” and “federation” were used interchangeably. A supporter of a confederal system — the original system established by the Articles of Confederation — was a “Federalist” or “Confederalist,” and it meant the same thing. Thus the Philadelphia Convention was alternatively referred to as the Federal Convention without indicating profound seismographic change. By branding their opponents anti-Federalists, the supporters of a central (federal) government made them seem like the ones attacking the gains of the Revolution, when the opposite was true. Timorously, I float renaming the anti-Federalists the Confederalists, but one must sail a narrow straight between accuracy and the unrelated implications of “Confederate” and “Confederacy.” So let us continue with the scurrilous though historical “anti-Federalists,” for now. 

Chief among these men were the Founding Fathers Patrick Henry and George Mason of Virginia; George Clinton, the first governor of New York and fourth vice president of the United States; the New York merchant Melancton Smith; the Founding Father and fifth president, James Monroe; Massachusetts writer Mercy Otis Warren; the Maryland super-lawyer Luther Martin; and attorney and Founding Father Robert Yates of New York. The anti-Federalists, often using pseudonyms of  ancient republicans — Agrippa, Brutus, Cato, Centinel IV, Cincinnatus, Columbian Patriot, Philadelphiensis — predicted that the Constitution would lead to civil war, an imperial presidency, the dissolution of individual liberties, a military-industrial complex, limitless taxation, soaring debt, a congress of distant self-enriching aristocrats, and no constraint on the growth of power.

“What, then, are we to think of the motives and designs of those men who are urging the implicit and immediate adoption of the proposed government?” asked Bryan (“Centinel IV”). “Are they fearful that if you exercise your good sense and discernment, you will discover the masked aristocracy that they are attempting to smuggle upon you under the suspicious garb of republicanism? In many of the states, particularly in this and the Northern states, there are aristocratic juntos of the well-born few who had been zealously endeavoring since the establishment of their constitutions to humble that offensive upstart, equal liberty.”

Despite their tragic foresight, the anti-Federalists failed to stop the Constitution. They failed, too, to embed themselves in the collective memory of modern America. However, their dissent was powerful enough to force the adoption of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution in the form of the Bill of Rights, a codification of the republican principles of the Articles of Confederation. Many of the supposedly liberty-loving “Federalists” fought tooth and nail against the Bill during ratification and for years afterward, claiming the amendments were redundant and their principles already implicit in the Constitution. Yeah right! Now you may spit out your wine, sir! The Bill of Rights has, of course, been the only legitimate constraint on the entropy of the federal government, the only bulwark we have against censorship and mass surveillance, and even so it buckles. 

The anti-Federalists conceived of their Bill of Rights as educative on civil liberty for the succeeding generations of Americans. The amendments “can inspire and conserve the affection for the native country, they will be the first lesson of the young citizens becoming men, to sustain the dignity of their being,” said Melancton Smith. It is the most cited element of the Constitution in legal cases, the foundation of Americans’ conception of their identity, and the basis of international human-rights charters, so ahead of its time that Europe has still never caught up to the First Amendment and routinely and shamefully imprisons its citizens for reposting memes or disparaging religions. Imagine America without these protections. As I write, Congress is trying to do away with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s requirement that the government obtain warrants for surveillance of private citizens, and is trying to forever wed America’s military and intelligence to a foreign nation — that is, replace its yearly funding of the Israeli military with a permanent coordinating office for the purpose in the Pentagon. Compared to the Bill of Rights, it is the Constitution itself that has dissolved: the president may declare war at will, the national-security apparatus forms an illegal fourth branch of government that cannot be voted into or out of power, and so on. 

* * * * *

And does this not create a psychosis in a people: to be lied to, to have buried deep in the unconscious the truth that we are bastard children, that our fathers are false fathers and our true ancestors are hidden from us? The original 10 amendments are our ancient identity, and yet we do not know the names of their authors. We do not quite know they existed. The anti-Federalists and their spirit have entered the roll call of oblivion.

But must we repine? Yes, a little. A little. We must grow drunk. For in our cybernetic age, our synapses grow in arbitrary patterns around unnecessary phone-related cerebrations. We have formed new habits of mind around addictions to stagnation — and only alcohol can destroy enough brain cells to return us to our original minds. So let us drink deep in our cups, and see the paradox of our psychology.

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Firstly, our debates today about “original intent” begin only after our original intent was forever dissolved. This is not unmystical on the part of the villainous Federalists. The Federalists were the last men of this Earth to create a myth. The Theory of Inflation (cosmic, not monetary) teaches us that pre-creation is subject to different laws of physics, so by dissolving the Articles and creating anew, the Federalists called down the deific power to alter the American language, tamper with and rewrite our history, banish the memory of an entire generation of souls, and forge a new American psychology. 

Nations have psyches. By consolidating 13 countries down to one, our illegitimate fathers created a single, distant, and unnatural center over which 340 million Americans and counting now shall fight until the end of time, impotently, through two accepted factions that are really but two wings of the same party. Our legislators and officials are aristocratic and do not represent the people but the interests of the ruling class. But this travesty aside, the unnatural American center severely simplifies our openness to political possibility and creates a messianic impulse. It creates a righteous instinct to centralize everyone else. What is more American than to think, “I alone am right, and not only are you wrong, but I have the power to implement what I know to be right over you, even though you are thousands of miles away in an alien clime”? 

As America expanded into an empire, this centralized psychology followed in lockstep. What was wokeness but the most recent patriotic reflection of the American psyche? What was American democracy but a projection of the fragile American psyche that had to be defended over the course of the past century in such far-flung places as Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait? What is more fragile than, say, a Brooklyner’s temperament, which can only be pacified by forcing blue-collar Texans to use preferred pronouns? No American mind can sleep at night unless the entire world operates according to its wishes — to centralize individual beliefs over a vast foreign territory is America itself!

The gravitational field of our fabricated constitutional origin bends all thoughts of what is politically possible to its centralized target and gelds all heterodox political thought. This explains horseshoe theory: it is the consolidation of political possibility into a straight line, warped in a curve around an arbitrary gravitational center. Thus, the Marxist gazes across and is startled to see the libertarian. The uniform perception of a singular origin also works backward in time: the hack historian collectivizes all evils and attributes them to a singular point. The sins of the fathers are applied backward to a false singular origin, a false singular consensus. So whereas Pennsylvania and all of New England had already abolished slavery in their states by the Convention in 1787, they are held equal in guilt to the secessionist South. It becomes educative to tell the children of our nation that all of America is slaverously evil. 

Once every other generation a historian tries to breathe life back into the anti-Federalists, but even here their breath hiccups in the false language of American centralization. Herbert J. Storing’s What the Anti-Federalists Were For, the last to attempt it in 1981, critiques our real fathers for being united in opposition of the Constitution, but without being collectively for anything. Of course, lack of a positive consensus is only a defect in a centralized framework. The anti-Federalists were united on heterogeneity. The political structure they agreed upon was a confederation, in which they enjoyed the freedom of not having to be in agreement across state lines on anything at all. In fact, the nature of a confederation necessitated they not be in consensus on imposing a national structure, for such a power was not within the mandate of state constitutions. This is the very soul of decentralization. 

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Yes, the modern American mind is centralized, and we also do suffer under the psychosis of false origin and treasonous birth. Add to this the historical fact that centralization kills thinking and leads to postmodernism. Consider: Western philosophy, born in a confederation of disparate Greek city states, was destroyed by Alexander the Great’s centralization of empire. Also, the Hellenistic centralization of learning in Alexandria severed the connection between philosophy and praxis in the city state, and ushered in the defeatist, solipsistic era of Greek postmodernism in the form of the Cynics and Skeptics who ran the Greek Academy until Rome’s capitulation to censorious Christianity and the Dark Ages, in which even Etruria’s arch was gambled away. The American consolidation of 13 countries into one under a single authority was a quasi-imperial act, and killed all political possibility save for accelerated consolidation. Everything we’ve achieved since has been but a caged stride.

Are you ready to wonder at what America would look like if it had remained a confederation? This is where the ergot kicks in. Perhaps we would have grouped into separate confederacies. Perhaps Aaron Burr would have succeeded in making himself king of Mexico. There being no prohibition on how the states could arrange themselves, perhaps some states would have gone monarchical, while others on the same border went Marxist and still others pushed the bounds of libertarianism further into direct democracy. Perhaps a decentralized confederation is the only political structure in which those red herrings Marxism and libertarianism can be captured. Perhaps Virginia would today be an aristocratic republic and Massachusetts a liberal monarchy. Perhaps it is the bloated gravity of central government that bends the political spectrum into a horseshoe, whereas all forms of government are supposed to exist coterminously, in a constellation. Perhaps the southern states would have resolved slavery of their own volitions, and without ruinous reconstruction imposed upon them, consequently never imbedding in themselves such deep resentful racism. Perhaps Europe would have fought World War I to an even draw all by its lonesome without American interference, and so the scales wouldn’t have been so tipped against Germany that it elected a genocidal Charlie Chaplin impersonator to lead it into even worse rubble. Perhaps, then, the Soviet Union would have collapsed much more quickly and organically, with less harm done on its outskirts. Perhaps now, we would have decentralized finance, without the middlemen of bankers and creditors, such a structure could exist again. Perhaps, when we get to Mars, we could….

But we must end on the road to this mystery, these cellar stairs down to the founding casks. For if spacetime curves all straight lines and the universe goes on forever, we may find ourselves tracing a circle and thus rounding back on our beginnings, our Greek and Etruscan confederal origins. They once bordered each other on the Italian peninsula, the Etruscans and Greeks. On the boundary of these nations, just as Etruria’s confederation began to wane to Rome, the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides was born and lodged the first recorded argument against oblivion. Nothingness does not exist, he said, for that which is not can’t be. The closest counter-argument we have is the oblivious American mind, which can never hold a memory long. But suppose the physicists are right, and something comes from nothing. Come, let us revel. Watch your head on the stairs.

On May 15, the Commonwealth Foundation awarded prizes to five emerging writers — four of whom (named above) have so little by way of an online or print papertrail, someone hip to artificial intelligence might wonder if they even exist. Commonwealth has a partnership with the prestigious literary magazine Granta, based in Britain, which promptly published the stories on its website. Just as promptly, a college professor at Wharton, Ethan Mollick, suspected machine prose. Mollick ran one of the incoherently metaphored stories — “The Serpent in the Grove,” by Trinidadian author Jamir Nazir — through an AI-detection software and found that it was a 100% match for AI-generated text. 

Granta’s presumably human staff, the magazine says in a statement provided to UnHerd, did not read the stories beyond a copyedit. Though accusations have so far fallen on the shoulders of the unfortunate Nazir, my investigation into the similar schlock of three other finalists and their odd online histories raises discomfiting questions, as well.

For two of the finalists, DeMicoli and Miller, this contest marked practically their first hint of an internet footprint. Of course, as the traceless 20-year-old would-be Trump assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks proved two years ago, young people are abandoning the internet in droves. And we can all agree it’s likely that social media are on their way out. Besides, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize discovers emerging writers, and is it not brave to choose writers so emergent that there is hardly any evidence they exist, such as previous fiction available to Google, or social-media presences before 2025? No, so far this all marks a healthy, understandable civilizational development. But there are other reasons for concern.

How about that two of the pieces were graded 100% AI-generated on AI-detection software Pangram, and a third was graded 92% AI-generated? Is it possible that Commonwealth has spent nearly a week praising the literary value of AI slop, while Granta threw its brand behind the same? 

Commonwealth’s website leaves no room for doubt: these finalists were chosen from nearly 8,000 painstakingly sorted entries. The judging process was “robust,” the organization wrote in a statement provided to UnHerd: “Each story is assessed through a thorough process which involves multiple rounds of readers before progressing to the final judging panel. We select our judges for their expertise, passion for the literary community and strong backgrounds in writing.” 

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Round after round of scrupulous literary appraisal narrowed down to a select few writers of staggering talent. “Here are five writers who share an immense confidence of tone, announcing themselves from the very first line,” says jury chairwoman Louise Doughty, a novelist whose forthcoming memoir, On This Spot Fell One Tear of Love, bears the sort of title that hints at the faux-profound style the jury was keen to sniff out across the globe. 

“The style and content of each work may vary,” her statement goes on, “but what all our winning authors have in common is an ability to take their readers by the hand and lead them into a world where the characters are utterly believable, the prose assured, and the author has something important to say.” In other words, according to Doughty, the finalists are all doughty. Among these doughty and diverse voices are “a young woman whose henna art enables silenced women to speak, and a resourceful young sheep farmer.” Bahhh, get me to that sheep farm!

Doughty did not return UnHerd’s request for comment.

Contrary to her claims of utter believability, many non-professional readers found the assurance that these stories were written by humans utterly and immediately unbelievable. It was not a gambol through the sheepfolds that kicked off accusations about AI, but scenes in a room where the air “clung thick as porridge skin. […] No fan, no bulb, no hum — only the thin light slipping between warped boards and the breath of hills holding their heat like a secret.”

That’s a passage from Nazir’s “The Serpent in the Grove,” and it has the unmistakable cadence of AI slop: not W, not X, not Y — but, poignantly, Z. Anyone who has ever read a news tweet by Mario Nawfal knows this style instantly. If you want to understand why Caribbean Region Commonwealth judge Sharma Taylor calls this writing “sublime — precise yet richly evocative — conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy,” let’s tip the scale with a further sampling of Nazir’s prose. “They called her Zoongie. Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it.” Ah yes, a quandary I can relate to: am I really Vincenzo, or did rain take a shape and decide to keep it? This is one of those Ocean Vuong-styled metaphors that sound like they mean something. Here’s another: “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is a metaphor so incomprehensible you know it’s profound.

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According to the prize-winners’ page, Nazir hopes readers walk away from his tale “reflecting on the quiet consequences of choices we normalize.” A sentence that also means something, I think. Next to what many speculated was an AI-generated photo in his bio on Granta’s website, we learn that Nazir is a “prolific poet … particularly known for his love of poetry.” However, he’s taken an eight-year hiatus between publications, in which time he’s written pro-AI posts on Facebook, as well as LinkedIn. His last and only other literary footprint is a 2018 self-published collection of love poems, Night Moon Love. Of the eight enthusiastic reviews this book has received on Amazon, four reviewers had never reviewed another product, and the ones who had left reviews usually did so for items such as a junk game or cheap sneakers.   

Nazir did not return UnHerd’s request for comment, sent through Facebook. 

As for the other winners, Aruparayil has an Instagram account that was launched five weeks ago and a LinkedIn profile that had its first human interaction in 2025 and asks in its bio, beginning in lowercase, “what happens when a psychologist learns to zoom out, studies international relations, and adopts a fascination with startup ecosystems, public health, and venture capital?” Literary gold, apparently. 

Aruparayil’s LinkedIn profile may, of course, be real. The sentences in the profile frequently begin in lower case, yet her winning story, “Mehendi Nights,” was written in English (and not translated from a foreign language), and is flawlessly grammatical, nonsensically slop-ridden, and riddled with semicolons — another hallmark of machine prose. Like Nazir and DeMicoli’s stories, which are based on the personification of cities and landmarks (“the limestone remembers” and all that tripe), Aruparayil’s fictional city is one where “even the shadows seemed tired,” and the city itself “had a way of setting things ablaze when it could not understand.” The kind of writing one finds in self-published Romantasy smut on Amazon.

Nonetheless, Aruparayil’s online presence is the most robust of the four prize winners. She was a finalist for two literary prizes for Indian citizens in 2025 (the Deodar Prize and the Toto Awards; her name is on both of these organizations’ websites), and her bio on the Granta website notes that she was nominated for a prestigious PEN/Dau Prize for Emerging Writers and a Pushcart Prize. These last honors, however, may be misleading. Any publication can nominate a writer for a Pushcart Prize or a PEN/Dau Prize. Neither organization announces short lists or long lists, so the real honor is in winning the award, and the nomination in itself is nearly meaningless. Bill Henderson, the founder of the Pushcart Prize, told UnHerd that the organization does not keep records of the “thousands” of nominations it receives each year.

John Edward DeMicoli is the winner from Malta. His bio on the Granta site says that he has published “essays on Maltese culture and heritage” that have appeared in print and online publications. These publications are not named, and no other writing of his comes up in an internet search, either in English or the Maltese language. The bio also mentions a forthcoming novel to be published by Maltese small press Midsea Books, which did not return a request for comment by press time. Holly Ann Miller, on the other hand, has a private Instagram account, and only has one publicly accessible comment on an obscure photographer’s page, rubykawitiphotography. The rest of the comments on the photographer’s photos are generic-seeming comments from other private Instagram pages. Miller, for what it’s worth, was also apparently a runner-up for the 2025 NYC Midnight Short Story Competition and the AAASL Short Story Competition. 

In an e-mail to UnHerd, a spokesperson for the Commonwealth Foundation said that it had “confirmed that the writers do indeed exist! They are real people. The Foundation has had discussions with each author.” 

Again, this may be so. In a sense, it doesn’t matter if they’re real or not. Let us not repine, but instead laud Nazir, Aruparayil, DeMicoli, and Miller. Recall that I began by calling these personages heroes. Let me amend that a little. What’s possibly happened here is that someone has pulled off a brilliant hoax on the literary establishment — and that person is a hero. He or she has shown the arbiters of taste in the publishing-industrial complex to be frauds, and out of touch with the average reader, who is still able to tell the difference between slop and organic human voice, and who sides with the human, too. Hopefully, it is dawning just about now on the judges of Commonwealth that they can’t tell real writing from AI not because AI is so good at writing, but because they themselves are talentless hacks and slop addicts. 

But mark my words, besides hand-washing and under-the-bus-throwing — the second sentence of Granta’s prepared news release is “Granta editors have no control over the selection of the Commonwealth Prize stories, and nor are they involved in choosing the jury” — we are going to start seeing a lot of pieces about how this scandal proves not that the literary gatekeepers are mindless cogs in the publishing-industrial complex, but that AI is so scarily good, it will soon replace all creative jobs anyways. After all, many professional writers have been striding to center stage as of late to declare themselves proud queryers of robots, such as the Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle, who has shared that she she uses AI to “generate pushback on my column thesis, suggest trims when I’m over my word count, sharpen podcast interview questions.” Nobel Prize winner Olga Togarczuk recently admitted to using AI in her writing. Just imagine, how much better would Shakespeare have been if he had had a robot to turn to in creative crises?

What we actually have here is the final cloaca from the merging of two rivulets of spume and drool: the eradication of human literary voice via the publishing-industrial complex, and the three-decade-long imposition of the algorithmic voice of tech conglomerates on human writing and sensibility. In the early aughts, Google co-opted the main profit-stream of publishing: ad revenue. It became much cheaper for companies to advertise on Google search-result pages than in newspapers and magazines. Thus, with ad revenue slashed, such outlets had to start ranking high on Google through a practice called search-engine optimization to stay afloat and be read. 

The writer was not hooking a reader anymore with an anecdotal lede, but hooking Google’s algorithm, which prioritizes algorithmic styles of writing, styles of writing that a computer can understand and parse. We have been reading and writing in this medium for three decades, watching the birth of the one-sentence opening paragraph — a contradiction in terms — in journalism, and the extinction of voice and style across all genres. AI writing itself has been trained predominantly on this dumbed-down anti-style, which is why it strains so comically hard for metaphor. In the 1960s, when the inevitability of this future became clear to cultural commentators, the philosopher Marshall McLuhan observed that technology itself had become a medium of perception. After three decades of surveillance capitalism we can conclude that we have entered an environment in which the concept of the “audience” as we know it is no longer made up of humans, but of technology itself. 

The only reason AI has a chance of replacing mainstream writing (and hoodwinking “professionals”) is because for the last 30 years, algorithmic rules of writing have devolved the style and quality of most mainstream prose so as to be near indistinguishable from computer-generated writing. It has lowered us to such a point that the gap between man and machine is no longer so far to leap. Thus, in the “post-colonial” endeavor to pick diverse voices, the Commonwealth judges may have picked fabrications of the most malignant, surveillance capitalistic technology the West has ever conceived of. The medium is the message, and in this sense, the judges may have picked the only thing they can understand: the industrial rules of surveillance capitalism. Their cage.

And if all of these finalists are real, and their work is their own, their writing operates by the same rules, and is still trash. Of the five finalists — one of whom is the verifiably real Lisa-Anne Julien, who has been published since 2021 and appears animated and otherwise alert and not-computer-generated in videos — the overall winner will be announced on June 30. For my money, I like Nazir’s work the best.

Just barely skirting expulsion and social ostracization for the pedophilia of the first draft, the author, by the end of term, would revise Lilya to be about a widowed man who takes his 12-year-old biological daughter on an innocent and sexually eventless road trip, learning a thing or two about fourth-wave feminism and gender theory along the way. There’d be incredulous lines over the steering wheel like, “How do you know that?” and “How old are you?” (Not to mention the “You go girl”s from the reader.) Having been recognized as a “Master of Fine Arts” for this ability to be editorially coerced by 20-year-olds, Nabokov would spend a sleepless fortnight after graduation researching 140 literary agents so as to pretend in his query emails to be a fan of their client lists of nonentities and “comparable” titles. (Nabokov would have failed to secure an agent through one of those end-of-term backroom deals every student-novelist dreams of, having permanently rubbed the professor the wrong way.) He’d find obscure interviews online with agents who say with hauteur and scarcely credible pride, “Don’t even bother cold querying me, I never look at the slush.” Of the 140 agents, 10 would respond and request sample pages. Eight would ghost Nabokov. One would write him a moderately personalized rejection with the cadence of the admiring pass, “confident that many agents will want to toss their hats in the ring.” The last agent would, because he knew Nabokov’s professor back in grad school, sign him. Champagne would be opened. Véra would smile to Volodya over the foaming brim.

Three months of torturous silence later — Nabokov’s new agent having disappeared into a vague and nebulous paternity leave without warning — the author would receive an email with a draft of Lilya riddled with inspired deletions and insightful suggestions for rewrites. If Nabokov plucked up the courage to so much as balk, the agent would, after another mum trimester in which he’d leisurely switched American coasts — never intimating exactly which one he’d settled on — buck him up threateningly. “I worry that sending Lilya off in its current state would threaten all of the hard work you’ve put into this, and publishing this version would be a mistake for you and your career. My job is to give you honest advice — I can’t sell this, Nabokov. I know this is a lot to absorb, but we’re almost there. Talk soon?” 

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Terrified of the state of agentlessness — that Hades of non-representation — and his stomach dropping at the thought of his ambitious six-figure student debt rendered all for naught, Nabokov would have submitted to the next round of unnecessary edits, finding some substitute stepmother approved of by young Lilya for the novel’s hapless pops, or perhaps an age-appropriate stepfather, having discovered in a brisk, bland, and anti-Nabokovian 55,000 words that Humbert was queer-curious the whole time. Nabokov would then use the bulk of his small advance from a Big Five imprint to hire a freelance editor to further gut Lilya for upmarket “readability,” the book no longer bearing any trace of his voice anyways, and his new editor turning out to be more of a point-person of obscure purpose than someone who edits books. 

With the publisher putting zero publicity effort behind it, Lilya would get a handful of listless, monotonously congratulatory reviews from critics Nabokov had vague connections to from his MFA days. There would be some TikTok video reviews, Substack essays with three likes — then, mysteriously, only two, the user having died perhaps — and it would never be read again, if it had been at all. Netflix would cut Nabokov a check for $5,000 for film rights and never develop it. He would land his Cornell job and work off his debt from college by toiling forever at college. Jeffrey Epstein would be lost to the wilderness on what to christen his jet. And posterity would not remember Lilya’s name except, I suspect, to chide the past for its tepid conformity. Which is what we shall begin doing now: chiding the past from an enlightened vantage.

I hate to pass along such news, but it’s the 30th anniversary of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, the preeminent MFA novel, which in the heady days of the Clinton surplus passed through the aforementioned burning hoops of the publishing-industrial complex with flying colors. In fact, it introduced many of the colors as it leapt and gamboled. Three decades of nimbus have grown round its obsolescence, and yet its publishers insist on goading us every 10 years with a freshly introduced reissue of the dead horse. This time, the publishers have tapped singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner, an introductress who has gone into the belly of the beast cognizant of her “own innate and internalized misogyny,” an obligatory non-sequitur that lets the reader know they’re in the good, coercible hands of someone in way over their head. 

But a country that amended its constitution to prohibit alcohol and then changed its mind a decade later has the mettle to make sure this doesn’t happen again: we can’t allow a 40th anniversary reissue written by, say, Clavicular in a booksmaxing phase. It is high time to marshal a final confrontation with the insidious philistinism of David Foster Wallace. That sweaty bandana of his and what publishers let him do to us with it. Wallace, the middle-aged student who never left the classroom; the teacher from whom no college was safe: Amherst, University of Arizona, Harvard, Illinois State, Emerson, Amherst redux, Bennington Writing Seminars, Pomona. Just try and keep Wallace from going to college — go ahead, try. He’s still there, on desks and bookshelves in dorm rooms. His presence there has become inappropriate, and we can’t let this go on a moment longer. We must think of the children.

But it’s not we who are going to confront Infinite Jest. Not head on. Cormac McCarthy, our dashing and fearless hero, is going to confront it for us. The terse, macho cowboy who thought Proust was a waste of time because no one was killed is going to read more than 1,000 pages about tennis and beta-male marijuana addiction. The writer who never had a running TV in any of his novels, let alone electricity or plumbing and so offed one of his most famous scalp-hunters in an outhouse because that was his idea of modern comfort at the time — well, this tough customer is going to get his fill of couch potatoes. There are limits to man’s imagination, as Wallace will shortly show us, and so this time around I’m not asking you to tax the gray cells by picturing America’s greatest novelist wasting his time with America’s most overrated: I’m going to tell you exactly what happened when Cormac McCarthy read Infinite Jest.

In the decades following his heartbreaking split with formerly secret muse Augusta Britt in the early 1980s, McCarthy and Britt talked by phone nearly every night, Britt in Tucson and McCarthy in El Paso, then Santa Fe. In the last few months of McCarthy’s life, Britt connected with me online. She liked a Substack essay I wrote about McCarthy’s final novels The Passenger and Stella Maris, the two novels most intimately based on her life. Eventually, I flew to Tucson and spent nine months living with her and writing her story for Vanity Fair, while she fended off hopeful biographers and all other journalists — a practice she continues to this day.

Among matters of the heart and the soul, literary taste and distaste was a leitmotif of conversation between McCarthy and Britt. McCarthy was hard to please — or rather, very easy if one merely disregarded the bulk of popular literary output since the mid-20th century. He referred to Joyce Carol Oates, for instance, as “the goggle lady.” If one were, for whatever reason, to defend Oates for having written more than 60 novels, McCarthy’s dependable response was, “Yeah, that we know of.” He considered Don DeLillo no great shakes. He only began to speak of Saul Bellow as a very fine writer after he received the life-changing MacArthur Genius Grant from Saul Bellow. (After reading McCarthy benefactor Guy Davenport, it’s not therefore harebrained to wonder how much McCarthy could have really liked the novels of Guy Davenport.) Pynchon he found much ado about nothing, though Britt suspected he was perhaps jealous of the esteem Pynchon enjoyed for the scientific knowledge brandished in Gravity’s Rainbow, “knowledge” McCarthy found mostly utilitarian and otherwise nugatory. (Nothing like the quantum mechanics numinously undergirding Blood Meridian.) He once walked in on Britt reading Updike and stopped cold. His deafening silence spoke volumes, but he felt moved to speak anyway, “You’re not reading him, are you?” “No, I’m not,” said Britt, plainly reading him and now trying to find a way to play it off as if she hadn’t been. The only English translation of Homer that McCarthy recognized as legitimate was Chapman’s from the 16th century, the one Shakespeare had to hand. He never let praise of Proust pass unpantsed, even in the company of ladies. At one of the few literary parties McCarthy ever attended in New York in the 1990s, Norman Mailer lumbered up to him to pick a fight and McCarthy ignored him avuncularly. After all, McCarthy was the true heir and surpasser of Hemingway that Mailer failed to become. But McCarthy was nothing if not honest, and knew when on the fields of joyous contempt he’d been bettered, and so would say reverently of Christopher Hitchens, “No one can put someone down as beautifully as that man.”

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Up till now, a mythopoeia has developed around the reclusive McCarthy’s disregard for contemporary fiction. For the last three decades of his life, he concerned himself with classics, history, the prose and equations of cutting-edge physics, and the exclusive company of non-writers and non-literary academics. His indifference was one of the only things he revealed about himself to the public, or as she still prefers to be called “Oprah”: America’s greatest living novelist didn’t give a farfegnugen for living novelists and their novels. From the outside looking in, one could board accurate trains of thought on the question of “Why?” by considering McCarthy’s style itself. It is an almost reactionary expression of modernism, thumbing its nose at all passing literary fashions, composing itself as if postmodernism, rules of commercial writing, and quotation marks had never been invented, their rumored existences not even worth looking into. He even snubbed the modernist plot eccentricities and disorientations of Joyce and Faulkner, while remaining in their linguistic bloodlines. But no one knew if there was something definitive in his sage souring. There was.

The consequential year is 1996.

Infinite Jest has just been published. It is a national story, and David Foster Wallace — a television addict who has filched his trademark glasses and bandana from John Corbett’s poetically waxing Gen-X disk jockey character Chris Stevens in CBS’s hit Northern Exposure (one of Britt’s favorite shows — is a demigod of literary celebrity, nay, a current affair. (People are so ensorcelled by Wallace that they even claim his face, which is plastered everywhere, is “handsome,” though it could simply be the subliminal effect of thinking they are looking at John Corbett.) McCarthy — a proud spurner of PR assignations and at the time still commercially obscure compared to what he would be in a decade — tells Britt that he wants to see what all the fuss is about. Not that he’s about to burn rubber to Borders for the book and sweat out the seconds waiting in line to pay for the damn thing and then crack it open in the parking lot and sit there till he runs out of gas. But at the time, he is still reading The New Yorker and other periodicals and cannot dodge the overindulgence. (He even has a subscription to W Magazine, though, in its feminine wisdom, it managed not to cover Jest.) Yes, McCarthy’s a curious cat, and we all know what is wont to go down between cats and their curiosity.

Britt doesn’t hear from McCarthy for several days. Almost a whole week of terrifying silence inches by. She’s worried sick about him by the time the phone finally rings. She races to it. It’s McCarthy alright, and he’s in a dark mood. Bleak and beleaguered, ornery. Britt’s rarely heard the love of her life so lowdown, perhaps not since she’d broken his heart a decade earlier. “Cormac, I can’t make out what you’re saying.” “I said: it’s drek. It’s drivel.” “Drek” and “drivel” being McCarthy’s lowest insults for writing, as opposed to his highest praise, “very fine writing.” He’s talking about Infinite Jest. For a polymath who read more than 10,000 books, it’s likely the worst reading experience of his life. “Lady, am I just that out of touch?” he asks. “How can people like this?” 

Overindulgence in PR was a matter of course for unmemorable novels with big money behind them in the ’90s, and McCarthy was, as already mentioned, heroically out of touch with the literary fads that waylaid publishing. But he couldn’t grasp the scale of the national elation for Wallace. In a just world, it’s the hysteria he should have generated with the publication of Suttree, his 1979 novel and first masterpiece. It was a new, definitive low for the publishing-industrial complex. Infinite Jest was something of a literary psyop, and McCarthy’s intelligence was being insulted by it: the press, the prose, and the pose — the bandana crown. Everyone who could steady their fawning fingers over a keyboard was lining up to say, “Yes, I am a television addict too! How did he know!” and to hail Wallace as the megatalent America had been waiting for. Everyone else who had never read Gravity’s Rainbow and so couldn’t spot the shoddy simulacrum by the first use of the word “interface” was crowning Infinite Jest the greatest work of the 20th century, a novel pioneering a revolutionary form the way Ulysses had done before it. There hadn’t been such a coronation since The Naked and the Dead, and we know now what McCarthy thought of Mailer. The only thing to compare it to in modern memory is the Left-wing media blitz leading into the 2024 presidential election, and its claims that the demential Joe Biden was mentally sharper than he’d ever been despite having no clue where he was half the time and bearing the unmistakable rumple in his rump of the adult undergarment. As with Biden, people actually fell for the Wallace ruse. Cormac McCarthy would never read another new novel again, he told Britt. And he never did. He stopped paying attention to the literary world altogether. Infinite Jest was the last new novel McCarthy would ever read. The 1,104 pages that broke the literary lion’s back.

Taken in a vacuum, McCarthy’s reaction to Infinite Jest is perfectly understandable: the novel is, after all, the pinnacle of drek, the delta of modern drivel, and Wallace something of the star quarterback of conformity, philistinism, false importance, and everything else that had gone wrong with publishing by the ’90s and was sure to continue at full steam into the present. 

While it was personally edifying when Britt told me of the “drek” reaction in her Escalade, a rainbow shimmering against a thunderhead, the Catalina mountains high above us — O, those days! — it was not in the least surprising, and anyone who’s fallen out of his chair should stay down on the floor for a while and crawl around like a pig. McCarthy was never an optimist about the state of literature. For one, no one in the industry even bothered to call it literature anymore, but “literary fiction,” a pseudo-term for pseudo-art that McCarthy never used or recognized. He saw “postmodernism” as a non sequitur, a false trail in the great mountain chains of the English-speaking canon — not to mention in the development of philosophy, it being a diversion for “philosophers” who’d been outstripped by physics — a tedious literary inconvenience like the Metaphysical poets who wasted everyone’s time before Milton. No, he’d never been tempted to vouchsafe the taste of the industry, save the publishing of Cormac McCarthy, of course. 

While I have emphasized the scoffer and the scold in McCarthy’s personality (traits he earned every right to disport at his leisure), McCarthy also had a heart. He knew young unpublished talent was out there, and he would express to Britt an empathetic sadness for young writers and how hard they must have it. The hoops they must jump through, the arbitrary and artless gatekeepers they must charm, and the credentials unnecessary and detractive to creativity that must be gathered in order to write well. Then the need to succeed immediately on a paltry advance or be set loose upon the zephyrs and find a new line of work. A Faustian journey of delousing stations that rewards writers only in relation to how willingly they relinquish originality and the ability to develop their talent naturally. 

McCarthy knew how lucky he was, comparatively. He broke into the industry in the days when you didn’t need an agent or an instant blockbuster. He simply submitted his debut, The Orchard Keeper, at age 32 to Faulkner’s publishers and was signed by Faulkner’s editor, Albert Erskine. His early novels, all of them masterpieces save the debut, sold terribly, and yet Erskine never dreamed of cutting McCarthy loose the way publishers would now. McCarthy didn’t have a literary agent until the ’90s, when Binky Urban knocked his socks off with promises of how much money she could make him and translated McCarthy, so to speak, into the modern publishing system that he disdained. Urban became the emissary who popped down into the fallen world of publishing for him, the dark and sordid background against which he wrote and whose distractions and fashions he refused to pay attention to. (His innate and heroic indifference, the young writer should note, rewarded him and his novels with greatness and canonical immortality.) To McCarthy, Infinite Jest was the crowning bandana of everything wrong with contemporary novels.

There’s nothing more annoying than an economic critique of art. Actually, there is: when art becomes economically critiquable. And that’s just what the industrialization of novels and the monopolization of publishing have done: turn art into a phenomenon of neoliberal capital. Writing this article has forced me to do a lot of things I don’t like — high up on that list rereading David Foster Wallace — and the absolute last thing I want to do is lecture scoldingly and scoff accordingly, but McCarthy’s contempt and apt dismissal of Wallace cannot be fully appreciated without being properly contextualized within the Gomorrah of publishing.

You couldn’t have seen this publishing world from the window of McCarthy’s ivory tower. It lay just over the desert rims of Santa Fe, which his tower stood far back from. You would not have known it was going full fathom five up the Atlantic seaboard during the 1980s time period of his last novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris. It is a world born of a double helix, the dark DNA of destructive involution. One strand is modern commercialism, and the other is academic postmodernism and its curiously capitalistic unfolding in America. This is what McCarthy secluded himself from, his eye on posterity rather than cheap and temporary celebrity. 

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First, in the mid-20th century, the novel and short story began to be decentralized, the writer’s artistic sovereignty ultimately relocating itself into the hands of the editor and finally to the C-suite. The first step along the way was the increased power of the book editor. Great editors are integral to great writing, but proper balance between the two is key. The editor should not, as Nabokov pointed out in the afterword to Lolita, mistake themselves for your muse. In the 1930s, editors like Maxwell Perkins began pioneering the perilous editing-by-committee process of the novel, which is alright only when your ward is a Thomas Wolfe whose multi-thousand page manuscript begs for demarcation, and when your standards are those of gold. However, usurpations of power are hard to reverse and have a tendency to burgeon, in publishing as in politics. So Perkins was not to be outdone by his spiritual heir Gordon Lish, whose vaunted cut-ups beginning in the 1970s have only nominal relations to the editees who penned the first drafts. (See, and then never see again, Raymond Carver.) Once ripped from the hands of the author, the locus of creativity was freed up to move entirely into the hands of publishing executives like Simon & Schuster’s Richard Snyder, who, during the reign of Lish, set the modern industry standard of “profit at any price” — the kind of model that favors the predictable sales and easy marketability of cookbooks over novels and literary nonfiction. This bureaucratic mishandling foisted editing into collusion with marketers and sensitivity readers and other ancillary personnel whose editorial aims have nothing to do with books as works of art but rather as economic and political factors, and has caused many contracted writers to have to hire expensive freelance editors to edit their books. Editors had to justify novelists based on sales projections, and could no longer afford to let novelists develop. Between McCarthy’s debut and his first breakout success, All the Pretty Horses, lay 27 years of Albert Erskine’s patronage, and it can be argued that his greatest works — synonymous in this case with saying America’s greatest works — were written in his near three decades of commercial obscurity, which novelists are no longer permitted.

In the midst of this midcentury coup, when power was still concentrated with the editor, The New Yorker editor William Shawn opened up a separate theater of war against the writer. Shawn began curtailing modernism and experimentation in commercial magazine fiction by mass-modeling fiction into palatable commercialized products, and attaching its fate to the doomed prominence and national indulgence of the magazine. (See, and then see again John Updike — but only occasionally, when Cormac McCarthy is not fuming over your shoulder.) It was during this era that the ghastly phrase “the craft of writing” drifted into parlance. Successful writing became about style and voice more than the soul below the paragraphs, and writers became “craftsmen” and sleazy contractors who build pretty, expensive houses with bad bones that all begin to look the same. “Raise high the roofbeams,” commanded J. D. Salinger. The mansions of this generation look modernist, but their plumbing and electricals are post-mortem. They don’t live. This kind of writing, say of Updike and Philip Roth, can be enjoyed only topographically: that is, at the level of the sentence, there being no levels below. 

This is why McCarthy refused to write for magazines like The New Yorker, despite lucrative offers and access to Davenport harborfronts. He was not interested in entering games of fashionable carpentry, the shellac-offs of the lyrically talented. He preferred to perfect novels in penury, since he knew that obscurity and the disinterest of contemporaries in middle age oft attend genius (see Nabokov). 

With Updike and Roth, a sieve also opened up in literary masculinity. If they were misogynists, they were the worst kind: beta-male misogynists, who lacked all erotic legitimacy. Updike’s characters vapidly cuckold and then get vapidly cuckolded in turn and throw fits about being fathers and generally disport themselves as unmanly bores who do not love women beyond their bodies. Roth’s characters masturbate five times in one sitting, sometimes into their own mouth. Mailer, on the other hand, pulled in the other direction with his dialectical (and occasionally literal) stabs at the gentler sex, and often rendered his form of reactionary masculinity farcical and flailing. Mailer invited so much abuse that Hemingway took a pounding from the grave just as collateral. The male identity started to commercially crack. Beta males make poor fathers and masculinity became insecure and dubious and vulnerable to the neurotic developments of insecure grandchildren they did a bad job rearing. McCarthy’s unneurotic comfortability with being a man was thus not much in vogue.

So the momentum of commercial publishing became fixated on a particular kind of standardized, sellable style, the soft cream at the top of a story, less on the milk. But cream rises to the top from milk, and you cannot construct cream on its own. Though you can create an imitation of it in a factory. You can start canning foamy synthesized sugar, from which college students huff IQ-plummeting gas. You can make swill from almonds and oats. So that’s what America started doing in the post-war college-crazy era, with MFA programs and their anti-artistic, capitalistic, and utilitarian logic that commercial fiction can be taught and great works of art produced under tutelage and economic bondage. The muse, it turns out, is not a mysterious force within the unconscious operating according to its own dictates; the muse is a failed novelist professor who will work for peanuts. And why not, people have to make a buck at something. Thus, this “craft of writing” development lent itself to the synonymous but even more hideous and collegiate MFA-driven “rules of writing,” a satanic delusion that has led to the modern genocide against the adverb. America began industrializing writing, and establishing official parameters for the expression of style and strict rules of narrative. While it can be pleasurable to read the adverb-rich language of Updike, conceptions of writing as a “craft” or a “rule-based trade” following union regulations will eventually turn against language. Words having failed the mediocrity, they start failing words. After all, it is the mediocrity who first came up with applying “rules” to art, for something with rules, the middling talent reasons, can be “learned” and “applied.” This does a very terrible thing: it lets the failure have power over creation. 

In 1980s Iowa, the land where they unconscionably turn corn on the cob into bad gasoline and force the whole country to buy it, Frank Conroy, constructed the modern MFA monopoly. Under his influence, the MFA definitively attached itself to publishing companies as convenient factories and funnels of “new talent” who had spent formative creative years not living, but writing for a small uniform audience of randomly assembled mediocrities and their arbitrary sociological critiques, grammatical preferences, and pet envies. (We have already successfully imagined what would have happened if Lolita were to pass through one of these industrial delousing stations today.) It was discovered in the ’80s that genius does not come from obscure, unpredictable, and unconventional places, but can be found herded together in groups, hemming and hawing about semicolons and modern mores and issues of “contemporary significance.” Genius is not a superiority at the top of a hierarchy, which it is the duty of the editor and the publisher to discover and nurture and promote the pants off of, but a perennial student at the bottom of the totem pole extruded through a pipeline at the executives’ feet. Quite the convenience.

The convergence of commercialism and academicism set a definite limit to how creativity could be expressed, to what then could find its way upwards in the bureaucracy of agents and editors and publishers, and turned artists into economic factors whose windfalls could be accurately forecasted — because they all wrote more or less the same novel. Naturally, cookbook-crazy executives want more of the same and less of the untested because they want more of what they can accurately predict, with their predetermined target audiences down pat. 

This was when “major” novelists began writing almost exclusively about novelists, and professors, and schools — hemmed in by the totalitarianism of schooling and of rules, they turned self-referential. The industry also began to burgeon with these sociological cogs: many MFA students publish once or never and then go on to become agents, publicists, talent managers, entertainment lawyers, editors, proofreaders, marketers, publishing reps, sensitivity readers, friends, muses, partners, fact checkers, professors, students, assistants, interns — all of whom think the same way and thus know “talent” when they see it. One need not enroll in an MFA program to learn their bad habits, either, what with these rules being dispersed universally on campuses these days: namely, the ethical cleansing being carried out against adverbs and other kinds of grammatical bigotry against “mixed metaphors,” poetical imagery in general, and any attempt whatsoever to describe lightning. 

But this is where things get truly dark and could use the bright burst of summer lightning. Critical theorists like Jacques Derrida and Jean Beaudriallard began postmodernizing academe at the same time as Conroy, the architect of the modern, conformist MFA, put literature downstream of it, which required of “serious fiction” to be engaged with the “powerful” ideas of the day, namely the postmodern credulous skepticism toward art and beauty, and its dogmas on the impossibility of truth, further narrowing the scope of imagination and publishable fiction. At the same time, academe was taking its capitalistic course and applying postmodernism and critical theory to every sociological targeted audience imaginable. Gender theory, critical race theory, feminist geography — you name the group or invent one, and there’s a “theory” for it. (One thought the lesson of the 20th century was to stay away from theories of race, but no, “race theories” are apparently progressive and “critical.”) The modernist maximalist expansion of language started to fall by the wayside in such climates, this being the fate of letting the talentless apply red tape to it in the first place. What survived, instead, was therefore not the lyricism of Joyce, Faulkner, or even Pynchon, but their insistence on confusing and disorienting the reader through unnecessarily convoluted plots and structure. 

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This very confusion became the favorite past-time of postmodern students reverse-engineering creativity, yielding overly complex and unrewarding plot structures and characters in a clever postmodern way of showing how disorienting existence and “systems of power” are. Postmodernism reanimated “serious fiction.” And just as postmodern “philosophers” who could not comprehend and metaphysicize general relativity and quantum mechanics farcically rebranded themselves “critical theorists,” their literary offshoots rebranded “literature” into something called “literary fiction,” a tacit admission that what they were up to had no pretensions to the canon, the canon turning out to be another Western-patriarchal-racist construct of power anyways. Besides “literary fiction” had more important things to do than aspiring to art: it had the alchemical task of fictionalizing sociological doctrine. The sieve Updike and Roth and their ilk opened in masculinity made it vulnerable to these absurd collegiate neuroticisms, collectivist sociological “theories,” and the favorite intellectual pastimes of the beta-male: ironically venerating low culture (TV) as high culture (art) and then, once this quality standard has been established, taking obscure Frenchmen seriously. (Most especially those whose last names start with “Barthe-”.) 

The conclusion of this sordid development is to create a world of monopoly publishing with a restricted public and limited progeny. Not to mention plummeting profits.Writing with aspirations of publication must conform to revealed truths of rules of aesthetics and political dictum, to the exclusion of writers and readers who are not part of the industry’s monostyle, monopolitics, and monoconceptions of novels. One cannot strive in this environment to be a Hemingway or even an Austen, enjoyable by brows high and low and first-time readers. There emerged only two acceptable character arcs of a male in a commercial novel: the realization of his internalized misogyny, or punishment for failing to realize it. 

As Infinite Jest introductress Michelle Zauner (a musician with her own vanity brand memoir) describes these options, in the “litbro canon (Bret Easton Ellis, Hemingway, etc.): a white, male protagonist, isolated and misunderstood, stands at odds with social norms and expectations and either grapples internally to critique them or identifies the source ideology and seeks violent revenge against it.” The precis describes fewer than zero books by Bret Easton Ellis or Ernest Hemingway, but perfectly accounts for commercial publishing’s one-dimensional view of that mysterious group of humans: men, who, if I have the latest figures correct, populate a meager 50% of the earth. 

The modern male reader who picks up a modern sociological text masquerading as a piece of art can only expect to be patronized by going through an arbitrary and tedious process of discovering through a novel that he kind of sucks and was born that way. (Modern women who don’t think men suck are patronized by this, too.) So you know what they do? They stop buying and reading books. The publishing industry then makes one of the oldest mistakes in the book: confusing their present audience for their potential audience. After publishing novels acceptable only to the tastes and standards of bourgeois MFA sociologies and publishing-industrial-complex mores, it gazes into its dwindling audience numbers and sees that “the majority of reliable customers of literary novels are Left-wing college-educated women. We must put out more literary novels for Left-wing college-educated women. Why, by the way, are men not reading the novels we put out exclusively for Left-wing college-educated women?” “Well, didn’t you read the last big summer novel? Men kind of suck.” “Oh yes, right. More of that please. Left-wing college-educated women will love something along those lines.” Technology and competition from other forms of entertainment have contributed to shrinking readership, but publishing monopolies rendered cock-eyed by haste to turn a devalued buck along predictive-marketing lines are colluding with the plummeting literacy of the country. It is amazing how well suited postmodernists and Leftists are for monopoly capitalism, and what a penchant socialistically minded bureaucrats have for alienating working-class readers by telling them they suck. None of this, by the way, can be said to be in ruthless pursuit of profit: for publisher and novelist have never earned so little.

In summary, we have the blitzkrieg into a writer’s sovereignty; the bureaucratization of editing; the industrialization and rules-based protocol of writing that can be judged by a grade point average; the postmodernizing of these rules and fictional content; the population of the publishing industry with people not so much brainwashed as mediocre; obligatory character arcs of male insecurity.

What could possibly recrudesce into success from this world but a sordidly pedantic super student? The kind of grammatical hall monitor who hangs around the lockers and says, “Excuse me, my mother’s an English teacher, and I have to tell you the way you’re using that word is wrong,” when he hears a young woman say “nauseous” when she meant “nauseated.” The kind of guy who writes “Don’t get me wrong: I like this,” on fellow students’ short stories. Throws tables at ex-girlfriends’ heads. Turns to a friend in the spring term and says, like a bad actor in a script written by a virgin, “Smell that? It’s the smell of cunt on the air.” Whose idea of a good time with friends is forcing them to watch more than six hours of television while he makes ironically apposite cracks about watching six hours of television. Who, according to his schoolmarm mum, dinged students in his creative writing class for grammatical breaches he couldn’t even explain and conducted full-scale unconsensual semicolonoscopies upon their short stories. Who emails the bosom that did nurse him: “Yo. Question. Re the following sentence — ‘I have trouble being clear, concise, lucid, and brief.’ — are the four adjectives here adjectives, or are they subject complements? In ‘I am tall,’ I know that ‘tall’ is a subj. compl. I was taught that predicates following the verb ‘to be’ are always subj. compl.’s, not adjectives/But is that still true when the form of ‘to be’ is part of a participial phrase that is itself modifying something?”

And the violet past prime fires back: “When I first clapped my beady, bloodshot blues on the beginning of your query quite early this morning, my reaction was ‘Yikes — clear and lucid are synonyms, as are concise and brief — why the wordiness? … My training in grammar (and it was Latin grammar) took place long before subject, object, and verb complements were designations. so [sic! lol] my grammatical expertise is probably antiquated to the point of being little use.’”

The recrudescence I’m referring to is David Foster Wallace, these shimmering biographical factoids emerging only after going through the DTs — that is, the horrifying biography of Wallace by D.T. Max, and David Lipsky’s lip-service Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, a supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again and don’t countenance anyone else sallying forth in quest of adventure doing even for the first time. Writing being the most libertarian of arts, there is nothing more dangerous to creativity than a high-school English teacher, and Wallace was raised by one. Such an unconscionable nurturing can only help rocket one to the top when the standards of judgment and literary fame are those antithetical to art. People often hate Wallace and Infinite Jest for the wrong reasons, or for less important ones: his admittedly insufferable male readership. But McCarthy hated it for the right reasons: for its origins in anathema.

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What Margaret Atwood got wrong

By Kathleen Stock

Infinite Jest is a bourgeois novel in the Nabokovian differentiation of the term from its identical Marxian twin. Bourgeois as applied to the social world which Madame Bovary satirizes. “A state of mind, not a state of pocket.” Infinite Jest merged the strains of post-mortem commercialism and postmodernism and satisfied the philistine urge of a contemporary “reading public” to be told what capitalistic “era” they’re in (’60s? ’70s? ’80s? ’90s! That’s it!). The urge to be sold the falsely important “intellectual” topics of the day in a falsely artistic and faux-challenging manner. The public had been told for half a century that it was addicted to media and technology by Marshall McLuhan, Aldous Huxley, Norman Mailer (and every other public intellectual ever) and so was ready to be told it again definitively by Wallace and give him all the credit for the third-hand observation. (Amnesia and a low threshold for being impressed are symptoms of the television addict.) It satisfied the misguided attitude that the height of intellectualism and the cutting edge of originality were whatever the young people were up to at those mysterious colleges of theirs. To feel, in the alienated stratum of liberal-college-educated automaton reading public, an ennobled purchaser, a spirited consumer of “art.” In this sense it is also bourgeois in its economic meaning: the novel is an economic product developed by an industry for a specific economic class. Its very length and heft lends its hapless reader an unearned feeling of bourgeois superiority for finishing it (or pretending to): “Oh, you couldn’t finish it? Yeah, it took me a couple weeks but I found a rhythm and actually couldn’t put it down.” “Oh, you didn’t understand it? Yeah, it’s really complex, let me see if I can drill it into you, hold still.”

The novel’s basic plot, as I’ve so far mercifully spared you from, is essentially about a film called Infinite Jest which is so addictive people can’t stop watching it. The message here — because the novel is situated entirely in the industrial foreman’s questions, “What is the author’s purpose?” “What is the author trying to say?” — is about America’s addiction to commercialism, entertainment, technology, and, get this: addiction to other things, too. Addiction, the novel intimates, to addiction itself. A novel about a sociological problem, it offers no solution to mass addiction to entertainment. Wallace repines but ultimately lies in a supine daze to television and technology, and his style is imitative of slop-entertainment, meant to addict the reader to its vapidity and alienation and cybernetic sociology. (If you tell the American public a product is addictive, they will become addicted to it.) The novel, like the fictional film whose namesake it borrows, is après-garde, which is defined in the endnotes as, “characterized by a stubborn and possibly intentionally irritating refusal of different narrative lines to merge into any kind of meaningful confluence.” The narrator is the collated voice of ’90s American cyberneticism, an AI hallucination. Even still, it is falsely complex, falsely clever, falsely poignant and moreover commonsensical. None of the hallowed “blue trees” of Nabokov’s The Creative Writer essay, which the hooves of the commonsense rules of writing back-kick dirt upon. 

It is art as total artifice. A work of false maximalism, an opus minimum. If there was a movie called The 90s, Infinite Jest would be the big “challenging” novel written by the film’s fake and cringing novelist, David Foster Wallace, and the producers would say, “Let’s style him like that bandana’d dreamboat John Corbett. His show just won an Emmy.” For Infinite Jest, perhaps the last title to be borrowed from the Shakespearean iambic, and “David Foster Wallace” are canonizable names. They look and sound natural to the ear of the litterateur calmly awaiting the progress of contemporary genius, the next “challenging” book like a cog in a smooth progression they were promised. Like GMO produce it fits in from afar. But that’s all there is to the novel and the novelist: surface. Whereas its supposed maximalist ancestors Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow are buxom and voluptuous, Infinite Jest is cuboid, silicone, and ages poorly in wrinkled skin. It looks good only in certain angles in certain photographs staged to look natural. It is a false claimant to the consanguinity of Joyce and Pynchon, more the result of a pedantic superstudent reverse-engineering a novel in his dorm room; the kind of mind that thinks the secret to creating music like the the Rolling Stones’s can be discovered by studying music theory and double-plagals, meanwhile Keith Richards doesn’t know the name of half the chords he plays. (Why have these people never written a good song in their lives?) McCarthy saw straight through it as the bloated dummy text of an impostor.

Ulysses is a language novel whose locus is consciousnesses. Because it deals with the inward angles of consciousness it naturally possesses a cosmogony. God is present in the poetry: “White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.” “The heaventree of stars hung with humid, nightblue fruit.” The novel achieves a quantum state of language with the lili-fication of adverbs, as in the famous “godlily.” Joyce replaces the “-ly” ending of several adverbs with “-lily,” using a flower to subtly introduce a simultaneous state where a word is both adverb and poetic compound noun, where God is a lily and a lily is God, a linguistic transcendence which the modern genocide upon the adverb would never allow one to approach as a possibility.

Even Gravity’s Rainbow is a language novel despite being set within a sprawling and disorienting suprastructure, its locus an intelligence officer discovering how and why he is a consequential cog embedded in the Deep State of America’s newborn Western empire in Europe. It is a novel where “Splashes of bell-metal lay forever unrung in the foundry dirt.” The novel, like Pynchon’s best work, operates on the tension line between cosmology and cosmogony: is existence meaningless randomness or a grand mysterious design — and is that design cosmic or man-made? In other words, the tension between Deep State Cosmogony and the Deep State of the soul. “The soil’s stringing of rings and chains in nets only God can tell the meshes of.” Paranoia stalks this knife edge looking for clues and being pulled in the direction of both potential forces.

As for Suttree, McCarthy’s most stylistically maximalist and linguistically Joycean novel, the prose is haloed. “The traveler had seized his fingers in his jaws, but it was not alone this horror that he cried. Beyond the flayed man dimly adumbrates another figure paled, for his surgeons move about the world even as you and I” (emphasis mine). The balls to end the sentence that way, the meter of the paragraph forcing the third person to dip into a brief poetic first. (A no-no according to rules of writing.) “He has watched them summer nights, a pale pagan sat on the curb without. One rainy night nearby he heard news in his toothfilings, music softly” (emphasis mine). With that “night nearby,” spacetime bends to McCarthy and so he bids time relate spatially. He plays God with light: “Yellow lamplight clung in his lashes.” His characters read a few lines of a letter “backward candled against the light at the window…” (emphasis mine). 

Now here’s many people’s favorite line from Infinite Jest: “My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.” Hear the insidious technicality of this line? The soulless precision of this image? The A+ grade from a professor? It is an anti-numinous novel of singularly terrestrial concerns. Like Updike (whom Wallace is more similar to than he’d have liked to admit), he may be able to describe what goes on in, say, a church, but he has no artistic conception of the soul, nor what goes on between the soul and God. Thus the novel’s language is Earth- and classroom-bound. Its metaphors grade high on a ’90s collegiate rubric but are utilitarian. The novel’s best linguistic moments are when it attempts poetry, but this is only done in the form of poor imitation of Wallace’s idols. “Wet silhouette” is Wallace doing Updike; “Alphabets of exposed plumbing” is Wallace doing DeLillo; “embranchingly tunneled” is Wallace nearly plagiarizing Pynchon; “even the voice of Steeply had a different timbre inside the shadow” is Wallace doing Pynchon doing Rilke; and “the soul’s certainty that the day will be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of the it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer” is Wallace really doing Pynchon doing Rilke. When one borrows and steals, one must improve the absconded phrase and make it one’s own. Nowhere in Infinite Jest does Wallace improve on the predecessors he imitates.

But perhaps the worst thing about Infinite Jest is that it’s not funny. It beggars the multifocal structure of Gravity’s Rainbow, the structural tensions between discohering plotlines (or, do they cohere if you’re smart enough to spot the joinery?), but without any of the comedy. Not that it isn’t trying to be funny: the audience can’t miss the lit signs for laughter, as when one of its characters Hal says, “I consume libraries… I do things like get in a taxi and say, ‘The library, and step on it’.” Or when its Quebecois Separatists speak in bad literal translations of English.

It is a novel of endless itineraries and product histories of telecommunication technologies that don’t exist. Maximally detailed descriptions of buildings. Paragraphs like:

“The Union’s soft latex-polymer roof is cerebrally domed and a cloudy piamater pink except in spots where it’s eroded down to pasty gray, and everywhere textured, the bulging rooftop, with sulci and bulbous convolutions. From the air it looks wrinkled; from the roof’s fire door it’s an almost nauseous system of serpentine trenches, like water-slides in hell. The Union itself, the A.Y. (‘V.F.’) Richey’s summer opus, is a great hollow brainframe, an endowed memorial to the North American seat of Very High Tech, and is not as ghastly as out-of-towners suppose it must be, though the vitreally inflated balloon-eyes, deorbited and hung by twined blue cords from the second floor’s optic chiasmae to flank the wheelchair-accessible front ramp, take a bit of getting used to…”

The whole novel takes a bit of getting used to, beyond the point of its being of any use to reader or young writer. This quote — the last sentence of which goes on and on for over a page, my merciful ellipsis rendering it a bit more readable — is the worst of picayune Pynchon cranked to 11, and it’s the dominant mode of the novel. 

Wallace is not in command of language enough to neologize “godlily,” or to splash bell metal into the grass, or to relate time to space in just two words like McCarthy (Wallace would do three pages using “membrane-theory” to explain the spatial relation of time instead rather than find a way to do it with language). Minor readers mistake his pedantic constructions like “existentiovoyeuristic conundra” for hyperverbal megagenius, minor readers being trained by bad translations of French postmodern texts to believe that hypertechnical sentences with incomprehensible neologistic jargon are the natural expression of genius. That incoherence is brilliance and if you don’t understand what’s written it’s because the writer is really really smart and your best course of action is to just assume it’s true. Does the novel say anything about entertainment addiction that Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram” doesn’t? No. Nor does it move “the novel” beyond what others had done in the past, as its people are so oft coerced into believing. 

The novel is grammatical. That is the best that can be said for it. Whereas Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow and Suttree would meet similar fates to Nabokov’s Lilya, Infinite Jest would blow student socks off. It is the work of unnecessary cerebration and bears all the hallmarks of a student-teacher sitting around in his subsidized housing doing a lot of “challenging thinking” while trying to reverse-engineer Gravity’s Rainbow. In fact, the best way to understand Infinite Jest is as the return to this ChatGPT query, “Write me a thousand page novel. Make it Gravity’s Rainbow updated for the social and political banality of the ’90s. Try to be as funny as Pynchon, but only get as far as DeLillo. Infuse The King in Yellow’s plot about an illegal addictive play, as well as Monty Python’s sketch about the joke that’s so funny no one can read it without dying, wherein world militaries try to use the joke in warfare and try to destroy its original copy — apply this to a film and make reference to America’s addiction to entertainment. Along the way include random endnotes like Nabokov made use of in Pale Fire, only make the endnotes less cohesive and more pedantic and Borgesian and make sure that some run to multiple pages. Infuse a lot of random and nugatory post-modern “theories” and philosophers from Germany who don’t believe philosophy is even possible (think Wittgenstein but also go beyond). Have nothing to say about the cosmos or physics: just the self-referential Earth. Make sure the disparate plotlines of the novel do not cohere — or, do they, if you catch my drift?”

There’s nothing wrong with borrowing and outright stealing: it is how all the arts move forward. What matters is how one steals. Wallace merely aggregated. In this way, Infinite Jest was truly ahead of its time. Wallace was not an artist but an early stage generative Large Language Model. A simulator of literature, using all the commercial and collegiate developments of his time. Many now dismiss the celebrity of Wallace, but the damage is done. Too many still see him as a fertility to descend from. Supposedly opening up a new branch of literature with the purpose of saying something about contemporaneity, this simulational style of literature is the reason why philistines have been holding a mysterious place open in publishing for the “Great Internet Novel,” considering everything else in the meantime meaningless. Infinite Jest is the internet novel. It’s not great and we can move on.When we hear the lament, “If only David Foster Wallace were around to write an essay on streaming, or cellphone addiction” we understand just how sordid his influence still is, how bourgeois is his scope.

The only reason why much writing is replaceable by AI is because it has been devolving towards AI’s aggregational style for three decades. Google’s aggregational service co-opted the ad revenue of magazine publishing, the industry’s main profit stream, and forced print magazines that didn’t go extinct to retreat online and compete not by human standards of writing, but by ranking high on Google’s search-result pages. To do so, one has to charm the algorithmic standards of Google, which outrank human voice and style with “authoritative, informative” writing. Gone was artistry and born was the one-sentence opening paragraph, which even an MFA wouldn’t dream up. The only reason why generative AI has a chance of replacing certain types of writing is because writing has been devolving toward AI’s algorithmic, encyclopedial, aggregational style for decades.

The only reasons novels may be replaceable by AI is because of human-made aggregational impostors like Infinite Jest, which fomented within the pipeline of the publishing-industrial complex as a proof of concept, and then lay supine to art-destroying developments in technology, ultimately leaving us in thrall to fictionalizing technology and cybernetic decline. Infinite Jest is considered the canonical branch of the future internet novel, Twitter novel, alt-lit, something called “post-irony,” and the sad stooge’s false question: “Is it possible to be sincere?” One needn’t answer with postmodern reference and sociological argumentation — one need only say, “Yes.”

Only a befuddled ignoramus or perplexed poltroon of an executive — you heard me, I said poltroon — could gaze into this seeping tree-wound and say, “Whither the male reader? Maybe we ought to mend this somehow.” But the intern, fresh from the Ivies, skulks up to his side. “Men don’t read because the novel is dead. And men are low and stupid beasts. And you know, Twitter, and porn….” And so we shall now let this poor, diseased branch of literature obsolesce in peace. Gravity will do its work and it shall fall from the great tree soon, and new flowers will be able to grow luridly from the old wound. We only hope this executive and his intern are brooding below with knit brows when it flutters to the ground.

The moral of the story being: do not be a student for life. The consequences may prove deadly.