Taking Fright

 In his study of Rimbaud, Henry Miller challenged us to name the last time a single poem, unassisted, had succeeded in changing the world—the way it had in his subject's day. 

Well, I don't know about a poem. But I do know that a single Substack post appears to have briefly tanked the U.S. stock market yesterday. The week before that, a single X post generated a similar panic in the software industry.

In case I ever doubted whether blogging is a waste of time—here, at least, is proof that the written word still possesses power.

Cyril Connolly, in The Unquiet Grave, stretches a bony finger of accusation toward us—saying any time the writer wastes on mere journalism, instead of creating masterpieces, is a crime against the craft. 

To which I say—the blog may not be able to move mountains; but it can apparently move markets. 

Are the doomer warnings of these most-potent blog posts right though? Or are they going viral merely because, as Noah Smith put it in a new post today, they make for "scary bedtime" reading. 

One side—the employment apocalypse side—comes in, warning: AI can already do all the work of most white collar professionals. Intelligence is no longer at a premium. 

The other comes in: you have no idea how powerful the forces of friction, institutionalism, ingrained habits, preferences for human interaction, the Jevons paradox, and the power of comparative advantage really are. 

That second side adds to this: every previous time there was a technological advance, it ended up creating more jobs than it displaced. 

The first side responds: a technological advance like this one has never before taken place. 

I don't know who's right. The only thing I will say with certainty is this: many people will suffer from this transition. Even if new jobs eventually come along, there will be innocent people who perish from the rapidity of the change. 

Above all else, therefore, we are going to have to fight against the human mental tendency to blame misfortune on the sufferer. 

How am I doing on that score, so far? 

I fear the self-accusation of hypocrisy. 

Just last week on this blog I was excoriating Mamdani for walking back his campaign promise to stop city raids on homeless encampments. 

But how am I modeling treatment of the world's unhoused in my personal life? Am I treating them as innocent sufferers? Or assuming in some way they are to blame for their plight? 

My dad and I were going to a city tax office yesterday when a man approached us. He asked not for money—at least not directly—but for help moving his bags somewhere. 

"Where to?" I asked. The reply was not very clear, and didn't make a lot of sense to the extent I could understand it. 

I suddenly had a vision of myself still toting this man's bags half an hour later, my car dwindling into the distance, being assured "oh it's just a little further... just a little further." 

It seemed impossible that this would be the end of the story. There were would be another request, and another. 

And all at once the homeless man became to me a kind of Old Man of the Sea, from the Arabian Nights—who wraps his legs once around your neck to cross a river and will never afterward let go. 

And so I made up some excuse. I said we had an appointment. I said we had to run. 

He correctly identified this as "bulls—" as I was walking away. I felt the justice of the accusation; even as I felt relieved. 

We drove away—just as Brecht once confessed in a poem that he drove away from a "raggedy" hitchhiker—declaring, falsely, to his companions in the car that they had no room for the stranger. 

We had gone some distance further, a day’s march perhaps, Brecht reflects,

When I suddenly took fright at this voice of mine

This behaviour of mine and this

Whole world.

(Kuhn/Constantine trans.)