I date my mini-career in journalism to November 2021, when The American Prospect took a chance on an unknown contributor and published my article comparing Ozy Media (remember that?) to ESG investing (remember that?).1 At the time, freelance journalism seemed like a good way to build a body of work and some name recognition that might help me sell the book proposal I was working on.
The subsequent three years did not see that book sell, but they did see journalism become my main gig. Creatively and professionally, if not financially, this has been a rewarding undertaking. Attempting to learn a new craft and find a path into a new industry in my mid- (to late!) thirties has been humbling and satisfying. Lest the tone of these paragraphs mislead, I’m not abandoning this pursuit.
But I am rethinking it. Or thinking differently about it. Or, to be precise, asking a different question about it. I’ve been operating under the premise that my trajectory as a journalist will be determined by what I do on a day-to-day basis—the ideas I come up with, the stories I write, the relationships I build, the work I put in. But what if I’m playing the wrong game?
Not “wrong” in the sense of “bad” or “incorrect.” What I mean is: What if there are much bigger forces at play, forces that are shaping my work and career path and understanding of the world, forces that I’m not seeing because they are all around me but not right in front of me?
***
Instead of forces, which sounds conspiratorial, or games—a recent focus of my writing, for some reason—let’s think about it in terms of something else.2 Something like trees (which we should appreciate while we still have them).
Over the past few years, I’ve spent a lot of time planting trees: pitching, reporting, writing, publishing, and promoting stories. I work on a story, and then I work on the next one, and then I work on the one after that. Usually there are multiple trees at different stages of planting and growing and cultivating. All of this happens with the expectation that it will eventually yield a forest—which is, in this metaphor, a sustainable career in written journalism.
This expectation has its roots, so to speak, in the American promise that if you work hard, you will succeed. Freelance journalism is hard work; therefore, if I do enough of it, “success”—however I define it—should follow. No success? Work more, harder, and/or longer. (Even if you/I know that this promise is objectively false and intentionally deceptive, that does not mean you/I haven’t internalized it!)
Anyway, maybe journalism is one of the places where the American promise holds true. But in my case, at least, I’m not sure it does. Sometimes a bunch of trees is just… a bunch of trees. That’s not a bad thing. But it’s not a forest. And sometimes a bunch of pieces of journalism does not lead inevitably to a sustainable journalistic career. It might just lead to a bunch of articles. Again, not a bad thing! But a different thing.
Beyond the continuing implosion of the media industry, which has left journalism jobs scarce and freelance commissions meager, and also a bit of my own burnout, there are (at least) two more fundamental sources of uncertainty about what will happen to written journalism and its practitioners in our current era.
Here are two reasons I’m wondering if the game I’m playing is not, say, destined to evolve beyond what it is right now: writing stories, somewhat irregularly, as my time and editors’ interest (and budgets) permit. These, I’m beginning to see, are bigger games.
***
One is the vastness of the internet. Writing on the world wide web can be pretty lonely, in part because the internet manages to be both very loud and very quiet at the same time. The loud part is obvious: It pulses with noise and distraction and temptation and outrage and lots of interesting content.
At the same time, as anyone who has published online knows, the internet can be excruciatingly quiet. All that work to prepare a piece of content—in my case, a story or a newsletter, but it could be a blog, an Instagram post, a research paper, a video, whatever—and then it goes live in a flurry of excitement (at least for the people who created it), and then... silence. The world carries on, while the content sits in the middle of an unimaginably vast and ever-expanding ocean of other content.
This ocean contains not just written stuff, of course: It also has YouTube videos and social media posts and Reddit threads and other newsletters and news outlets and all the other websites and apps that are all competing for everyone’s limited attention and time. I barely feel like I have time to read anything on the internet, and I’m trying to make a living writing things for people to read on the internet.
So, when it comes to this particular thing that I’m hoping people will read on the internet, my question is: In my narrow and often compulsive focus on what I need to do next to finish a story—before moving on immediately to the next one—has my worldview itself become so narrow and compulsively focused that I’m forgetting the vastness of the information and content universe around each one of us?
Is this narrow and compulsive focus on my own little world—the game into which I’ve poured a great deal of time and energy—coming at the expense of seeing what’s happening on a broader scale?
***
That brings me to what the Professional Thought Leaders say is the biggest game—the most powerful force—of our time.
My brief stint in journalism has coincided with the emergence and explosion of generative AI/chat GPT/large language models/whatever. Some of the hype about this stuff is probably overblown. (That sentence might not age well.) As usual, some people will make a lot of money from it; most people will not. And does anyone really doubt that what’s driving the executive class’s obsession with all things AI, besides FOMO, is that CEOs feel closer than ever to realizing their long-held dream of replacing needy human workers with machines?
Anyway, my concern is not necessarily that AI will replace journalists or anyone else who writes for a living. That might happen, of course, but I think that something else might happen first: that content written by humans will simply be swamped and eventually snuffed out by the machine-generated stuff. That this technology—which, let us not forget, acquires “intelligence” by stealing centuries’ worth of human labor, almost always without paying for it—is going to take an already challenging content and attention environment and flood it with machine-generated nonsense.
Some of this nonsense might be interesting and useful. But for the purposes of this discussion, I don’t really think it matters what the machines produce, or whether it’s interesting or useful or accurate or partially human generated or entirely hallucinated.
At the end of the day, I suspect, what matters is that machines will generate so much content—so much text, so much audio, so much video, and all so cheaply and quickly—that most of the human-produced stuff will cease to be noticed.
***
There are beautiful spaces of human community on the internet. I feel lucky to be part of a few of them. I’m not going to stop reading or writing because the internet is overwhelming. As a writer, the vastness of the internet leaves me grateful for each person who gives some of their most sacred resources—their time and attention—to my work. (Hello, and thank you!)
I share these reflections not to lament my own career choices but because looking for bigger games that impact the world of written journalism is a reminder that beyond the unique world each of us inhabits on a daily basis, there are almost always bigger forces and trends at play. And these forces and trends almost always shape our experiences and trajectories as much as the conscious choices we make each moment.
Is journalism still a financially viable industry? Will it continue to be an effective mechanism for holding power to account and helping people make sense of the world?
Even if we didn’t have access to endless streams of algorithmically honed content, and even if machines weren’t producing more material in an instant than a person can consume in a lifetime, it would be reasonable to ask these questions. And, in fact, these are among the questions I have been considering over the past few years. They are questions at the heart of the game I thought I was playing. They are not unimportant questions.
But the infinite scale of today’s information environment and the flood of machine-generated content—and the political and social consequences of developments like these—suggest that there might be more existential questions to consider, and more existential games underway.
***
Here we return to that foundational American formula: hard work = success. Meritocracy is a deeply motivating idea, and I do not discount its power or its legitimacy as an idea, an aspiration, something we as a society strive to make true.
But in America it is usually more true that you can work extraordinarily hard—multiple jobs, backbreaking effort, soul-crushing and dehumanizing labor in soul-crushing and dehumanizing workplaces—and not come close to reaching the financial escape velocity required to “make it.”
This is not a description of my comfortable and low-stakes experiment in freelancing. I’ve put in some hard work over the years, but the fact that I have a comfortable and satisfying life owes little to my hard work. I have financial stability and the discretionary time and income that lets me spend hours walking our dog and reading and running and writing essays like this because I was born fortunate, and I’ve been fortunate to remain that way.
I say this not to self-flagellate or to repent for my good fortune but to underscore the point of this newsletter: The outcome of the game we think we’re playing, or the game we have been told we’re playing, might be determined by much bigger games happening all around us. And the bigger games, which usually have different rules for different people, tend to have consequences far more consequential than the amount of work that each person puts in each day.
This is not exactly breaking news. And it doesn’t change the fact that most people don’t really have a choice but to keep working—to keep playing the game in front of us.
Still, it can be liberating—especially when things are hard—to spend some time looking for the bigger games around you, even if the only thing it changes is your perspective.
What do you see when you zoom out? What if it’s not your fault?
https://prospect.org/economy/what-esg-investing-and-ozy-media-have-in-common
