The Perils of Writing in an Age of Distraction

When Wendell Berry wrote “Why I Am Not Going to Buy A Computer” in 1988, I was seven years old, and it was possible to be a writer without using a computer. Nearly thirty years later, I’m 44, and it’s not. In 2025, to be a writer just is to be a computer user. More importantly, to be a writer now is to be an Internet user. And it’s not possible to use the Internet without being used by a system which makes it difficult to write with integrity. What is to be done?

“We face paralysis,” concluded Annabelle Edamala in her reflection on Berry’s essay. For her and for everyone in her generation, “there was no ‘before the computer,’” and the choice to replace “old models” of writing with the one that now rules was never a choice she got to make. I suppose if you’re my age and can remember “the before-times,” you did have some kind of choice. But even so, you already made it, and here you are. Here I am. Here we all are.

Of course, it’s still possible to write without going online. Paper and ink exist. What’s not possible is to be a writer. Being a writer isn’t just about writing; it’s about writing for other people. You may have a few readers, or you may have a lot, but you must have some, or you’re not a writer, even if you write. And the readers are all on the Internet. If you’re just starting out and have no readers yet, then you must find some, and they’re all on the Internet, which is where they must find you. Even if you write physical books, you need the Internet to market it and review it and sell it, and you probably need the Internet to do the research for it.

I don’t make my living as a writer, even if I make some money here and there. But I still try to think of myself as a writer. Part of that is that I’d like to make more money someday, and part of it is the usual grubby desire to see my name in lights, even if it’s just the modest light of the front porch. But the better reason is that thinking of myself as a writer—someone who is responsible not for “expressing himself” but for deepening a conversation with others—helps me to write better. Even a casual writer like me needs readers, not just to pay him, but to keep him honest. And that means that even a casual writer today needs the Internet.

Fifteen years ago, Alan Jacobs published a little book called The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. Reading, he argued, has often been ruined by pedants who want us to read “because it’s good for us” and would instruct us in the correct methods for reading the books that we ought to read. The better way is to read for pleasure, widely, and without much thought for self-improvement. If reading is good for us in an “age of distraction,” it is because reading is the sort of pleasure we cannot get from our online distractions. Reading must therefore be defended in those terms, not as some kind of bad-tasting medicine for people with diseased attention spans.

If fifteen years later we are not just distracted but “post-literate,” then Jacobs’s argument is all the more persuasive. But fewer people will be persuaded by it, simply because fewer people will have read any books at all, and so they will be unable to know what Jacobs is talking about. If you grow up being forced to eat your vegetables, you still have some experience of vegetables, and when someone comes along and says that vegetables can be experienced differently, you have some purchase on what they are saying. But if you have never tasted a vegetable, the promise that vegetables can taste different means nothing to you. You are a very different sort of “reader” than the one Jacobs has in mind. For, of course, you do read all the time. You read texts and posts and comments on posts. You read inspirational quotations on inspirational photos. You read summaries of summaries of things that are tl;dr. You read subtitles for movies (if you even watch movies – TikTok videos are so much easier) in your native language, because you find it too taxing to follow the dialogue with your ear. You read texts and posts and comments on posts while you are reading those subtitles. And, of course, you now read many things that were not even written by a writer. According to one six-month-old headline (which is naturally all I bothered to read) “over 50% of the Internet is now AI slop.”

The point is that writers are more reliant than ever on the Internet for readers, and that the Internet is better than ever at forming people into “readers” who cannot read, let alone enjoy what they read. The writer who wants readers who will keep him honest as a writer, not as a painfully inefficient generator of text, will have to look for people who have not been lobotomized by the Internet. But he will have to look for them on the Internet. Where else? Should he staple some posters to a light pole and hope people call his landline seeking copies of his debut novella, Another Tilt at the Windmill?

But I’m overselling it a bit (the apocalypse is always good for clicks). I like to think Front Porch Republic is proof that if the Internet addles brains, it also keeps the less-addled in touch, and so helps them stay sane. And there are plenty such sites. In spite of the medium there are still readers, and so there are still writers. At any rate, no writer should spend too much time complaining about the quality of the audience. Also, a good writer raises his audience’s quality—not because he’s so great, but because he rises to the occasion when it counts. My real fear is not so much that the Internet makes us bad readers, but that it makes us bad writers.

Of course, the first way it makes us bad writers is that it makes us bad readers. Just as you can’t make good food without eating and appreciating good food, you can’t write anything worth reading if all you read is crap. Since you’re reading this, I’ll indulge myself in the presumption that you have good taste. But that’s no sure protection. The Internet is brimful of great writing; the problem for people who know what to read is knowing not to read it while scrolling ahead for the next hit of great writing. The best defense is to do your reading offline: to read printed books (especially old ones) and printed magazines, and to print at least some of what you find online so you can peruse it properly, at your leisure. Fortunately this isn’t hard. It’s perfectly possible to avoid becoming a bad reader, and to the extent that being a good reader makes you a good writer, it’s therefore possible to be a good writer even now.

Nor is it too difficult to avoid the more obvious ways in which the Internet makes us bad writers, or tries to. Trying to think and write (same difference) when I’m online often makes me feel like George in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”: “[W]hile his intelligence was way above normal, [he] had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.” I don’t know if my intelligence is above normal, but it’s probably less than what it would be if I’d been born a hundred years earlier. But I can recreate that lost paradise to some extent, just by shutting off the various bells and whistles that screech at me, and there’s no law that says I can’t (not yet!). I can even pony up for a fancy no-frills writing machine with mechanical keys guaranteed to make me feel like Hemingway (hangovers not included).

No, the trickier problem with being a writer in the Internet age is the special way the Internet can distract us from our reasons for writing. The usual distractions—fame and fortune—are still present, magnified perhaps by the sense (if not the delusion) that they are easier to achieve, but balanced by the knowledge that even if fame and fortune come they are likely to be more ephemeral than ever. But the usual distractions are not really distractions from writing. They are part of being a writer. Fortune is unlikely, but no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. The “except” is a piece of hyperbole—who doubts that Samuel Johnson mainly wrote because he liked it?—but it is no more degrading to think of writers as craftsmen who ought to get paid for their work than it is to think that way about carpenters. Fame is an idol, but every writer worth reading is one who feels about certain famous writers not as fans feel about celebrities, but as children feel about parents, or friends about friends. That feeling is gratitude, not obsession, and fame doesn’t render it false. As for ephemerality, it was always very unlikely that anyone will be reading this in 200 years; the Internet merely makes that obvious to all but the most self-important.

What is newer is the way that the Internet distracts us from the only really good reason anybody ever wrote anything for anybody else to read. Writers ought to get paid if they can, and they ought to be recognized when they deserve it, but there are better ways to get money and reputation. The only really good reason to be a writer is that you like the work. It may be true that a writer is “someone for whom writing is the hardest thing in the world,” but a good writer is someone who does not resent the difficulty. But on the Internet, it’s increasingly possible to be a writer without doing much writing. Even before the advent of AI, the Internet encouraged a kind of cut-and-paste, disconnected way of thinking that must at least partly explain the declining quality of contemporary fiction. Now you can literally just push buttons. As “writer” gets further separated from “writing,” the idea of “being a writer” turns into a powerful distraction from the actual work of writing. You sit down to write, and find yourself “being a writer.”

At FPR, we want to keep “writer” connected with “writing.” That’s why we’ve made clear that we won’t publish AI-generated text. We’ve even joined Paul Kingsnorth’s “Writers Against AI” campaign, despite our Berryan distrust of movements. To be a writer against AI is to make three commitments:

1. I will not use AI in my work as a writer.
2. I will not support writers who use AI in their work.
3. I will support writers, illustrators, editors and others in related fields whose work is entirely human-made.

Alan Jacobs posted a thoughtful response to Kingsnorth’s campaign. After detailing the various ways he uses Claude “in his work as a writer” (none of which involve using it to actually write), Jacobs suggests that “while I think I . . . comply with the spirit of Writers Against AI, I am not meeting the criteria demanded by the letter.” This distinction between the spirit and the letter of the no-AI-for-writers law is worth thinking about. I think Kingsnorth’s three commitments can themselves be fairly read as expressions of the spirit of the law rather than as attempts to impose the letter of the law, which is how Jacobs seems to interpret them. I don’t think Jacobs is violating the spirit of the law with the way he uses Claude (in fact, I was intrigued by how he uses it and thought about trying it out). I don’t know if Kingsnorth would say he is—given that Kingsnorth sometimes talks about AI as the Antichrist, I suspect he might.

But Kingsnorth’s own distinction between “raw” and “cooked” barbarians might be useful here. “Raw” barbarians shun the Machine entirely, while “cooked” barbarians resist the system by inhabiting it thoughtfully rather than mindlessly. Jacobs might be more “cooked” than Kingsnorth, but Kingsnorth allows for that: it’s not a betrayal to be “cooked,” and most of us have to be. Kingsnorth’s principles don’t speak to the problems with AI (like the environmental costs) that might lead someone to endorse a complete ban on using it even if it has its legitimate uses in a writer’s work (hence the value of a religious exemption, the freedom to not be forced to use a technology you find morally hazardous). So as long as we’re talking about AI and writers in particular, and as long as we’re emphasizing the spirit rather than the letter, I don’t think that aligning ourselves with Kingsnorth’s principles implies that we’d be obliged to reject anything that we knew was written by a writer who uses AI in the way Jacobs describes.

The risk of emphasizing the spirit over the letter is always that people will take advantage of it. The fear that that will happen is one of the things that leads people to emphasize the letter over the spirit. But I think it’s better to take that risk. We should be able to state principles clearly and trust that people will interpret them in good faith, even if that leads to different interpretations. Taking a clear stand doesn’t mean being legalistic, and FPR in particular should avoid being legalistic. After all, our patron saint is the man who wrote “Why I Am Not Going to Buy A Computer.” But we’re a website, and I’m sure every single person who writes for us uses a computer to do the writing.

The letter kills, but the spirit gives life. When half the Internet is AI slop, there is no shortage of the letter. For that reason there is no shortage of “writers.” The real peril of writing in an age of distraction is that, on your way to becoming one of them, you’ll lose your soul, or never develop it. You’ll forget that writing is a pleasure. And a little more spirit will go out of the world.

Image Credit: Jean-Jacques Henner, The Little Writer (1869)