Vicious little bastards

And I wrote that all by myself

A baby seagull fell into my sister’s back garden a couple of weeks ago. This sounds cute until you realise that baby seagulls do nothing but screech like demons 24/7 and try to sicc their parents on to you. Every time anyone went into the back garden, the baby panic-screeched even louder and a huge grown up gull would swoop in and try to batter us around the head lest we upset the thuggish little baby.

For reasons we don’t need to get into here (Rhyl), my sister’s garden gate is nailed shut, so the baby couldn’t just wander off, and so instead it made itself comfortable in the yard. We watered it frequently and watched in horror/admiration when its mum turned up to vomit coleslaw and fried chicken into its hungry screeching mouth every day. But after a while, the baby’s parents adopted a more ‘wings off’ approach. And the other night, when I heard a yowling cat in the alleyway, I realised it was time to set the baby free.

What, you may wonder, has this got to do with the price of fish? Well I’ve been thinking that in relation to this platform, substack, I am like that baby seagull. I have accidentally fallen into an enclosed space, where kind strangers have taken pity on me. But the longer I stay here, the more it seems that what protects me also makes me vulnerable.

This week, substack announced it has partnered with an AI company and is going to be scanning and scraping all our posts and newsletters in order to assess whether we’re using AI to help write them. We can, of course, opt out. But in order to opt out, we have to first agree to let AI scan our newsletters, anyway. Not only this, but writers are being encouraged to scan each other’s work to find out everyone's AI scores and then.. well, I don’t know what then. Or actually I do. Because as previously mentioned in this organ at least several million times, writers are the worst people in the world. The power will go right to their vicious little heads.

I could be wrong, of course. (It has happened once or twice.) It could be that everyone just quietly* agrees to ignore it. (*I wrote that on purpose to fuck with the AI scanner.) That would be the best outcome. Don’t scan your own work, don’t scan anyone else’s, don’t run around the internet trying to shame writers for a less than 100% purity rating. That’s my plan, anyway.

But we all know how much writers love a purity spiral. It’s a thrilling opportunity to conduct a public shaming of all the writers who are more talented and/or successful than you are. All you need is one bad number on the scanner and you can set about ruining their life and making yourself look like the Most Sensitive and Best Person Ever. Hooray!

I really hope that people haven’t still got the energy for this sort of thing these days, but then again, the kind of people who lead cancellation campaigns against their fellow writers have literally fuck all else in their lives and so they’re probably already drafting their open letters and rubbing their grubby hands with glee as they prepare the bonfires for some more book burnings.

I don’t use AI to write for me, by the way. That would be insane. There are very few humans who are better writers than I am, and I certainly can’t imagine a soulless machine writing anything I’d be happy to put my name to. On the other hand, I’m not anti-AI per se. I do use it to help organise my research (for my other newsletter. This one doesn’t usually require any research, although the last time I wrote about seagulls, a reader had to inform me that they have webbed feet and not monstrous terrifying talons as I had conjured in my feverish imagination. So maybe I shouldn’t be so complacent.) Anyway, the point is, I’m way too talented and egotistical to let a robot write anything for me, let alone a newsletter that goes out under my real name to hundreds of people every week.

So, to get back to the point, which I promise I do have, fuck substack and its “AI partner” Pangram. Most annoyingly, pangram is also the term used in the NYT Spelling Bee game when you use all the scrambled letters at least once in a single word. I’m really good at the Spelling Bee and have been “Queen Bee” three times in the last week, meaning I have found every possible word in the game, all by myself. So not only is substack ruining itself, it’s also ruining one of my favourite little pastimes, because now every time I see the excited little ‘Pangram!’ flash up on my phone screen, I’ll be reminded of how substack got us all here on its platform under the pretence of being our friends who just want us to succeed and get paid for our writing, and is now giving all our writing to Ba'al or whoever the hell they’ve summoned and have to feed with human souls.

The upshot is that substack is likely borked and enshittified beyond salvation. At some point, anyone hanging on here is going to essentially be a baby seagull trapped in an enclosed courtyard screeching for regurgitated coleslaw until a feral cat climbs over the wall and tears out its throat.

Not me, though. I already have an exit plan in place. (Claude helped me organise it.)

Maybe I won’t need it just yet. There are some great and lovely people on here who I'm sure also don’t want to play the stupid games and strike the ridiculous poses required of us by the machine. So maybe I’m wrong and Ba'al is gonna be crushed to smithereens by a gang of plucky guys and gals just doing what is right.

I won’t hold my breath, though. And if and when I call it quits here, I'll let you all know where I’m setting up and what the plan is.

In the meantime, now seems like a good time to say thank you thank you thank you for all the metaphorical regurgitated coleslaw you’ve provided over the past few years. I feel quite emotional about it really.

Although not as emotional as I felt when my sister and I wrenched the back gate off its hinges and shooed the baby out with a broom while its mother watched approvingly from a distance. You’re free now, Stevenie (not Stephanie), we told it. Maybe you’ll be one of the greatest winged thugs ever to assault a child and steal its Mr Whippy. Or maybe you’ll waddle off and immediately get crushed under the wheels of a mobility scooter being ridden by a family of crackheads. But at least your destiny is your own.

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As for me, much like a young seagull working out the best way to steal a kebab, I’m working hard to open channels through which the universe can bless me with financial abundance so I can keep writing, making art, and travelling through time into the deep past. In other words:

Or at the very least, like and subscribe.