Having played two hours and change of ZERO PARADES For Dead Spies demo I'm left with a few elemental questions about the story's pursuit of communism as a central topic, especially given the studio's carnal history of obliterating the original creative team. The excellent reportage of People Make Games outlines a series of unethical, fanged board room sleight of hand that becomes somewhat inseparable to any consideration of Disco Elysium’s follow up, ZERO PARADES For Dead Spies, especially being a game that slings the word communist and techno fascist within minutes.

The story concerns CASCADE, an operative for the Opera, a secret communist agency engaged in a phantom war with the techno fascists who run the country. This is revealed within minutes of the game commencing, gesturing to a slippery aspect of Disco Elysium that many of us spent pages and pages trying to convey: the experience of playing Disco Elysium is one of slow, constant realisation. No one ever sits you down to explain The Pale (unless you literally badger Joyce into telling you about the world) but when you find a bottle of Pale Aged wine, something in your brain clicks. The game’s writing is an experiment in tasking you to read not between the lines but below the lines and before the lines.

ZERO PARADES contains flashes of this writing. A man selling music records belies the taste of his customers, the art of the cassette gone to hell thanks to the destruction of taste at the hands of capitalists. He is truly insufferable, and, as my friend put it, “reminds me of you talking about booktok when we’re out drinking” which is… unfortunately accurate. The world building of the banal, flavourless slop peddled by the new ruling class infecting this man’s special interest is well realised, and perfectly aligned to how this happens in the real world. The supposed fantastical turned mundane is transposed from Disco as well. A leering creep watching the bizarre is just a logistics employee, in perpetual corporate punishment by his employer, unable to quit but unable to do the unethical thing. A young woman’s father and friend are missing after investigating a phone tapped by the fascists, and she rightly feels a little silly admitting this is what she suspects occurred.

Being concerned with a kind of cyberpunk grunge rather than a decaying soviet docklands, ZERO PARADES’ setting allows for more open discourse about the state of the world. This produces an odd doubling where characters voice displeasure with the state openly but double-speak on the specifics. This is a promising combination that one expects to perform the magic trick of Disco once again. I am, however, not convinced the idea wasn't meant for Kim as the protagonist. The notion of communist spy craft to counter techno-fascist spies feels coconstituent with the ending of Disco and Kim's realisation that traditional policing is insufficient to all scenarios. You could imagine a story set ten years after Disco picking up in the same way ZERO PARADES does with Kim undercover performing spycraft in a new city.

I'm reminded here of Gilory describing the need to focus Bourne's identity into action and rely on Damon's micro-performances when writing a spy, but the difference here is the words have to do that heavy lifting and that leaves much to be done across the length of this game. Visually, the UX of ZERO PARADES feels as fresh and electric as in Disco, each click and interface a glitchy, neo noir collection of secretive documents and smuggled evidence. The decaying town built around a stale canal is interrupted by green and purple graffiti, occasioning after Gibson’s entropic future Singapore. The writing reflects this cyberpunk tilt that hums alongside the spycraft. “Is he zeroed out” your handler asks through an encrypted telephone. A one-time trip code begins the mystery of your assignment. CASCADE’s rain slick straight out of Blade Runner 2049. Cyberpunk is here, the game announces loudly.

But as much as the individual components feel like Disco, the difficulty of engaging with the project is a familiar one. The executives of ZA/UM obliterated the original creative team in a messy bid for control of the software firm and for profit, only to write a sequel concerned with spies attempting to fight back against techno fascists. The irony is… visceral and didactic. The closest colocation for these problems is the time weathered question “can you truly make an anti-war film without making a war film” - to which 2005’s Jarhead answered a resounding “yes, but you have to really want it.” And so ZERO PARADES is charged with a similar quest, whether the new writers want to take on this task or not.

Art about communism feels especially a heavy burden in our moment when we see democracy failing around the world, even in the once goliath moral authority of the US where secret police murder citizens, the government threatens war with Iran for a genocidal dictator and pedophiles run the country. Just one example of the knife’s edge, where other countries are actively experiencing their own genocides and existential violence at the hands of capitalists. These moments of interval - between what was and what will be as the ruling class decimate reality - are often retrospectively applied to pressure art of the moment. This is useful, certainly. Looking back at the sequel to Starship Troopers or the dreadful Jarhead follow ups, the history of franchises capitalising on established works of political significance is not a well decorated one. To state the obvious: when money men acquire an anti-capital intellectual property they are motivated to write backwards from a piece that, generously, represents a threat to said money men. This, combined with the Neo-liberal insistence on producing “balance” because “there are good people on both sides” is how you arrive at a pro-war Jarhead sequel, for example. So while I don’t think ZERO PARADES is going to be pro-fascist, one has to wonder how the writers will earnestly pen critiques of fascists in bed with technocratic mega corporations when the studio itself is so deeply compromised.

The fortunate position of the critic allows me to perform this cautious finger wagging without committing one way or the other to a perspective on the available content of the game. Since beginning this piece I’ve since finished the available demo, and my guess is that the game will be perfectly fine, and feeling enough like Disco to serve the casual consumer. In so far as there is a casual consumer of CRPG’s concerned with the finer workings of Marx and the tides of mass capital in a dystopic cyberpunk city. Which feels an odd place to find the follow up work for ZA/UM who many of us once thought of as the ultimate resolution of a desire for modern, well written Planescape and Fallout. Replaced by Larian, then as swiftly left wanting as the CEO told some fairly dreadful lies about the studio’s “love” of generative LLMs.

ZERO PARADES is still a little rough (audio occasionally fails to play or is a take that isn’t matched with the prose) but the bones of the Disco engine are here, and we know the format is absolutely killer. In the category of game design, all aspects are closer to art and sound rather than graphics and audio respectively, but I struggle to get under and in front of the studio’s history. The trouble, I suspect, is what that art will be in service of. It’s all just art, at the end of the day, but I wonder if ZERO PARADES will crumble under the phantom of its own history. How can the game write jokes about being pro-cop when the owners of the studio are likely believers in the thin blue line? Only time, and a great deal of words, will tell.

Fall literature spoils on the bloated wooden boards. You recognise the shape of names--fiction you once knew and loved--now reduced to damp, cloggy promises that threaten your balance. The world has emptied out, yet these recollections stick to the sky, unbidden.

This week the gang cracks into Cormac McCarthy's seminal classic, The Road (2006) and try to unpick the behemoth that is the novel.

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

J.M. Anderson: it really hit me hard. Especially run-on sentences and incomplete sentences and stuff. I'd have to go back, I don't what this is this talking about, you know? So that really took me out of it at the at the beginning. Just the the way that it's written.

D.C. McNeill: Yeah. Well, that that's kind of my point about like um McCarthy, you know, in that introduction, the first thing they say is like McCarthy writes like no one and no one else writes like McCarthy. And that's for a really good reason. Like these are hard books. You know, it's like when you sit down to read a Gene Wolf novel and you have to promise yourself that you won't stop and look up words and instead sort of dig around for context clues or what a particular section might mean or like might imply.

it's why I thought this would be really good for this show because there are some scenes in this book. Well, I don't know what happened, y'all. Like, just truly, there's some scenes in this where I'm like, I don't know... I know chronologically what is being told to me, but I don't know what it means.

I think there's this this passage from Vereen M. Bell that nails exactly what J.M. is talking about with like the pros being being difficult and don't worry this we will read a lot of this book because I think it's really illustrative to do that. But this this is a really good summation. This is Vereen M. Bell writing about the the kind of um the exact thing J.M. is pointing out:

"There is a powerful pressure of meaning in McCarthy's novels, but the experience of significance does not translate into communicable abstractions of significance. In McCarthy's world, existence seems both to precede and preclude essence, and it paradoxically derives its importance from this fact alone. The vivid faciticity of his novels consumes conventional formulae as a black hole consumes light. He is Walker Percy turned inside out--intuitive, unideological, oblivious to teological fashions, indifferent if not hostile to the social order, wholly absorbed in the strange heterocosm of his own making."

D.C. McNeill: There's one thing I want to highlight and then we can really get stuck in. What I've just tried to illustrate there is how much people have written and talked about this book and McCarthy as an author um for this exact reason, right? People like me are saying "This might be the best book ever written." And then you pick it up and read it and you're like, "This is really hard to read and I'm not sure if I'm enjoying the art of reading this thing that's in front of me." And both are true.

J.M. Anderson: "The one caveat that I did not let myself form a solid opinion yet is that I do not know if this book is supposed to be written by the kid who doesn't know English and doesn't know how to write aside from the little tiny bits that he was taught before dad probably dies. So the broken grammar is part of the diegesis maybe. So I was giving it a grain of salt, part of me was like just stick with it. Maybe this was done on purpose and then the other part of me was like nah.

D.C. McNeill: So I mean it's done on purpose but it's not like a it's not going to cash out in a-- "and here is the purpose", right?

Patrick Lovern: For me actually – because I some similar experiences at some points, you know had to read a paragraph went what the fuck did I just read and then I had to go back and read it twice more but strangely enough like the lack of grammar and syntax actually made it quicker to read for me, you know it's truly a conversion of a stream of consciousness from author to reader. I feel like I was able to blaze through it because the lack of grammar. But also I have been pretty intensely reading like the last year like very difficult things.

Yeah it was... I felt like it was way more effective that way because I feel like I know in a normal book like you're forced to cohhere to the structure of proper grammar and stuff like that, and you're always stopping and starting. Whereas this one it just flowed through me kind of thing, and it was yeah all the more better for it I think.

You iron the shirt one more time, just in case. Your partner watches you from the corner of their eye, pretending to be distracted by the news. You've had it on for a week straight now, muted with the subtitles on. Barely able to leave the couch save for the essentials. You keep waiting for the moment it turns out to be a mistake. Of course it's a mistake. And then very suddenly it's the the night, and not until you sit in the car with the cardboard containing your pill in the breast pocket of your jacket that it becomes real.

The gang see out the year with the only Christmas Apocalypse film David could find, Silent Night, a blistering black comedy.

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

D.C. McNeill: So, I picked this film because I can't tell if it's good or not. And I think it's really funny. And I kind of have predictions for what everyone thought.

Like I think that Darth and Eric probably loved it and had a bunch of stuff to wax lyrical about. I think Patrick thought it was mid. I think Alex still has not fully decided whether it's good or not.

I think Daniel probably hated it, was my guess. Those are my, that's the gifts I've brought in my Christmas sack, as it were. But let's go to, let's go to Darth first.

Yeah, what did you think?

Darth: Overall, I adored it. I almost immediately rewatched it, especially because like right when I finished watching, Eric was beginning to watch it.

And so I was like, oh, let's get on the phone and we can watch it together because I really want to watch it again. There's a lot that I would, I think that the film would have been a lot stronger had they made different decisions.

Some of the backstory stuff, if they had moved that to on screen, it would have heightened all of the drama way more. Like all of the parents go into the film already having made the decision.

If all of that had taken place on camera, I think it would have been an overall stronger thing. But aside from that, I absolutely adored it.

D.C. McNeill: Okay. Interesting. Sort of what I thought you would say. Yeah. It's... okay. Interesting. Patrick, vibe, vibe check.

Patrick: I loved it, actually. I thought it was hilariously unhinged. I thought a lot of the events and scenarios that take place were very relatable and raw.

Like, last day on earth, confessions and stuff like that. I thought that was all really inspired. Yeah.

In terms of apocalypse stuff, it was quite... The whole thing with the pills and the government, that was an interesting premise. I don't think I've really seen that before.

Overall, I was pretty warm in this movie. I thought the script was really sharp. I thought all the characters, or rather all the lines of dialogue were just funny or interesting or kept to the story moving in some capacity.

Yeah, I thought it was a pretty good film.

D.C. McNeill: Okay. Glowing, almost. The second most positive path has been all year about anything, I think.

It's been that kind of year. Danielle, you were kind of, I assume, the one that was going to be the biggest hater of this film. What did you think?

Danielle: Yes, so for full transparency, I have not seen the full movie.

I only watched till, I don't even know where I ended up stopping, probably forty some minutes in, I want to say.

D.C. McNeill: So you got the hook, at least, the twist on the...

Danielle: Yeah, and it's funny because I did know the twist, I just forgot what it was, and I was like, because I saw when this movie came out, like what, in 2021, I remember watching the trailer and being like, hmm, I don't know how I feel about this, but

okay. But you know, so far, I wasn't a huge fan of it. I thought it was a little on the nose. And just, I don't know, everybody like talks so fast.

Like it reminds me of like Gilmore Girls, like of just like constantly going, like there's no time to process anything. But you know, it's just hard for me to give a definitive rating since I haven't seen it all the way through.

But so far, like I ended up being like, okay, well, maybe I'm glad I don't have to watch the whole thing.

But you know, I feel like that's a lukewarm take considering like I quite literally like watched like an hour before this, because time has just unfortunately been crazy.

D.C. McNeill: Yeah, it's this time of year. Look, I mean, you can see where the film is going, I assume.

Danielle: Yes. Yeah, it does

D.C. McNeill: If I think it's the my general reading on this is like, if you're a genre person, you basically get to like about where you're up to and you go, okay, I know how this is going to go. I know what the moves are.

I think to Pat's point, it's twisted enough that it does continue to make jokes about stuff. And you're like, I don't know if you should be joking about that. And I do think that's quite an admirable trait. Like it's willing to push some lines right up to the end.

Danielle: I mean, if I could say one thing real quick, like I did think the acting was very good. Like I thought everybody was doing an excellent job. And hats off, I generally think the kids.

D.C. McNeill: Yeah, it's a film with like annoying kids, but like the characters acknowledge they're annoying.

So it doesn't like, you know, like a normal film where like they get like a kid actor and the kid actor is really annoying. And then everyone pretends the kid's like delightful. I like in this film that everyone's like, Kitty, shut the fuck up.

Like that's really fun. That everyone hates this fucking kid. That to me is, that's storytelling.

Patrick: You're harshing the end of the world vibe.

D.C. McNeill: Yeah, be chill.

The steady trickle of the river reminds you of home, but as you blink, you find yourself not on the abandoned streets of Night City, rather, the glittering white pillars and spires of Colony One surround you. There can be such oppression in order, can't there?

This week the cast analyses Emily St John Mandel's conclusion to a trilogy of novels to try and figure out what exactly is going on.

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

D.C. McNeill: I want to preface this discussion with, I've read a lot of critical pieces on the book since last week, and I've done a lot of thinking about where this book sits for me, having read it a couple of times, or I guess three or four times now, having

Thought a lot more about Mandel's work throughout the discussion with you guys. And where I think it has value is maybe different than what I was thinking when we went into this unit.

So yeah, I'm curious if you guys feel like this was a sufficient payoff for us having our little Mandel mini-unit divergence, and yeah, where you guys land.

I want to get a Pat first because I realized that you've had a couple of days to chew on it now. So yeah, what do you think about this whole thing and how it sits within the larger corpus of Mandel's trilogy as in?

Patrick: Well, yeah, I mean, that's the thing. It is so different from the first two books.

It's a confronting thing thinking about, does a high concept ruin a thematic cohesion, i.e. does time travel distill this trilogy of stories that are deeply human and relatable and, you know, like, you know, rooted in reality and the human experience?

And then it's like, does time travel obscure that or, I don't know, like unfocus it or some way? I last night, I was I was literally in the shower and I had a thought and I was like, I need to write this down.

But I've actually I've wrote something down. I know.

And a literal shower of thought too.

D.C. McNeill: Now, folks, this is this is what this this job is all about, is going away and doing something else and then being like, oh, my God, I have to write that down and then writing it down and forgetting where you've written it down.

That's half of my experience with this job. Yeah, what do you got?

Patrick: And because I've written because I've written this down, it's much more poetic than I normally am.

So just, yeah.

Emily St John Mandel's trilogy ends by focusing the series' thematic lens in an unexpected way. She wonders what makes human interaction so special.

To get ontological, it's where drama is created, that clash of binaries that generates infinite nuance in between. It makes me think of that Niels Bohr quote, in the great drama of existence, we are ourselves both actors and spectators.

He's talking about quantum physics there, but equally it's a good expression for how human drama is an equal and opposite partner to time.

Time is documenting supernovas, yes, but it's also hosting the most intricate interplay of complex variables you'll see anywhere in space, i.e. human drama. You need time in order to have human drama.

She even choosing to jump on stage to help Arthur Leander. Miranda falling and dropping the both keys into the ocean. Morella choosing to ignore Vinson at that bar.

These are moments, both decisions and acts of random fate, that only take form in time, and which in turn changes the course of the universe. And only us humans really understand what that means.

Mandel then asks, but what if decisions and fate were reversible? Would drama still mean the same thing, produce the same feelings?

Would we put any less value on the past because of the sobering fact that the past is malleable and not, in fact, irreversible? And to that question, Mandel says, the time police are on their way.

D.C. McNeill: Round of applause to Patrick Lovern. Well done. Yeah, nihilism, right, is the thing that she puts square in her lens and doesn't spend any time discussing that.

The book just kind of ends. And there's some of the criticism I read. This is by Lily Zhao, and this is her article, provocatively titled, Emily St John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility is an Overly Simplistic Exploration of Nihilism.

I roundly disagree with her thesis and would have to do a lot of work to kind of recompose her argument to make it sort of feel like something I agree with. But this is what she, this is the bit that I think relates to what you were talking about.

Through these intersecting timelines, Mandel raises interesting conundrums about time travel and the value of human life. Zoe warns Gasperry not to attempt to save the lives of the people of the past, in fear that it will compromise the future.

She proclaims that the job requires an almost inhuman level of detachment. Additionally, multiple characters throughout the novel grapple with the possibility they are living in a simulation.

Gasperry refers to the anomaly as a corrupted file, and he ponders the possibility that the world as he knows it is not truly real. This worry is compounded by the fact that, in the book's futuristic timelines, very little of the characters' lives as they see them are truly real.

The humans who inhabit moon colonies live under an artificial sky that is meant to resemble that of Earth. To communicate across space, characters utilize holograms that give only the appearance of a face-to-face meeting.
On a more abstract level, the characters are unfounded in their worry. They are, after all, living in a simulation called a novel.

And, you know, I think that's the most salient and provocative part of Lily's piece there, because I think this is also a book that is using these ideas to think about what a novel is. It's a book about books, and it's a book about...

It's a book about Mandel's books, and it's a book about her reflecting on what it has meant to be an author that has done this thing of writing a bunch of books that have the same characters in them that are nominally not really sequels or prequels

to each other. I have so many big and complicated and unwieldy thoughts about what you said as well, which I'm sure we'll sort of really dig into as we talk through this book.

Many moments preceded my enjoyment of Dustpunk, but I knew I would need to write about the game when a factory of workers raised their hands to support an unborn child, and I finally broke. I paused the game and cried for a moment, just to hold myself in the moment of such profound grief. Which is, ultimately, the heart of the story. The crumbling city of Dredgeport is bent on churning people into profit and oil while the Emperor and his kin thrive in the Palace District.

The game is structured around a series of competing clocks (ala Blades In The Dark). Each clock has a number of segments that count up as you invest money or time to progress to a positive outcome, or clocks count-down toward a given outcome based on the number of in-game days. You play a soldier returned from the Empire’s bloody war, a husk of a person. A zealot preacher keeps you alive, but almost immediately the vibes are wrong and it’s clear this is a temporary reprieve. Each morning you wake with a limited number of actions per day and a limited number of actions per night, and almost all actions that progress time require a dice-roll. Your character is traumatised and weakened from the conflict, and so most mornings you wake not renewed and rested, but tortured and stressed. You can spend double the time on a task to prepare, increasing your odds of success, but not guaranteeing a better outcome. This is where Dustpunk swerves from contemporary siblings: stress is a punishing, distressing mechanic that shows no signs of abatement until very, very late in the game. When your stress ticks too high, you start to break dice until you finally break inside, and injure a skill. The only way to heal stress is to take solace, an addictive heroin allegory that grows weaker with each use.

The core tension is competing priorities, clocks ticking as time runs forward, but really who you align yourself to and why, and whose interests you advance. And which of those interests align with your own, and which are just the right thing to do. Placed in opposition to ensuring you have enough money for food, shelter, medicine and sanity.

Early on I fell in with a clutch of beggars, using my sneak to five-finger discount enough money for food. And then one night my stress peaked and my sneak skill broke. The problem with this, dear reader, is that I dump stated into sneak, and was suddenly faced with the alternative of working in an incredibly dangerous factory, where at least once a day I injured myself on the assembly line. Which meant I wasn’t making enough money to visit the doctor, and even when I did, with my stress high I often failed to be healed, losing more coin and growing more stressed. This spiralled toward a progression-hole which plagues the genre, until I clicked on a random event on the map. I drifted along the streets and paused beneath the curve of a church. Voices rose in song within, and for a moment I felt a glimmer of hope, and peace. And my stress decreased by a few ticks. Enough to recover a dice. I went back to the factory, sailed through three shifts without incident, and then with the wheel ticked up, I met the other factory workers, a delightful thruple being crushed by the factory conditions. And so, after a few more shifts, we start planning a unionisation effort, and things seem less bleak.

Meanwhile the no-nonsense bartender Zai who poured me drinks a few nights a week to fight off stress asks me to recover scrap for her latest build, a furnace to teach other mechanists the ropes. So, even as I plan to unionise, I sneak back into the factory after dark to swipe scrap components and tools. The game never punished me for this strange dual position, but I felt an itching guilt and compromise. Fuck the factory bosses, obviously, but if my theft came to light, would that undercut our union effort? And both are on a timeline so I’m doing little else, my wanted level increasing with each evening I toss in fitful nightmares, sleeping in the sewers with the other veterans.

I illustrate this spiral of compromise and conflicting priority to communicate the feeling of Dustpunk at its best. A series of best of bad choices, and irreconcilable goods crashing over the shores of war, and the violence of the plasm factory.

The games sharpest political writing arrives with Markov, a straight forward rearrangement of Marx. With a curious twist: Markov has been forcibly addicted to solace, a dreadful secret that could crumble his entire Collaborist movement. This turned out to be incredibly fitting for my character who refused to touch Solace, even once, on principle. After chastising Markov for risking our revolution, I set about printing pamphlets and performing speeches about politics. The Emperor’s war is just an excuse to solidify his power while producing an endless supply of bodies to churn into plasm. His rule is not divine but greedy and ugly, and so on.

Markov is a useful stand-in for Marx, and his ideology is reduced into simple beats that are arranged in unobtrusive ways. Markov never explains use-value and exchange-value, but we’re provided the broad outline of the philosophy. Though the practiced reader will understand the game’s structuring principals also communicate Marxism.

Perhaps the weakness of Dustpunk is a structural issue a lot of RPG’s run into, the “I want to play more but don’t quite fancy it” hump. This occurs in Disco Elysium, for example, when Kim leaves to take a body back to the morgue or the day before the bridge opens. The timing is often unique but similar for most players. I remember Josh Sawyer calling this the “about to bite down” moment of a meal. One must simply bull through and take that next large bite, and then everything falls into place.

For me this occurred the night before a strange, wealthy socialite summoned me to her club. She asked me to do a small job at first: gather some gossip. Then blackmail, and then very suddenly she’s asking me to murder one of my co-revolutionaries. The city is on the precipice, and The Ossuary sees only an opportunity for power.

The game hangs all of these ideas on an evolving revolution that goes from idea to reality so much faster than I was prepared for. I won’t spoil where this goes, or the late game “currency” twist which manages an impressive zag to undercut the typical RPG late-game economy curve. When I realised what this twist meant my panic over certain clocks reached fever pitch and I sacrificed my body and mind for the cause, pushing myself day after day, night after night, desperate to keep the machine of revolution turning. This never errs into full-blown main character syndrome: the writing keeps a close handle on the fact this takes an army, and diverse leaders with diverse interests and priorities doing huge amounts of work. The cascading pressure feels fitting, as does the necessary violence of revolution, and neither end up reproducing the aesthetics of what they critique.

I’m reminded here of the argument of moralism which we hear endlessly in our modern context. “It’s inevitable, keep up or get left behind” they tell you, compromising before a cheque has even been written. Meanwhile profiteers like Dresden sell their soul to the highest bidder and soldiers serve the Empire, knowing it is wrong. On this note, my resolution with Dresden involved a distant church, a preacher and the sweatiest five minutes of gameplay so far. I managed to finesse the situation but it was a close thing indeed. Proof that even after the dust settled, the game still had knives to twist.

I knew Dustpunk worked for me as a whole when, with my revolution resolved, each closing conversation with core characters left me in tears and punching the air in equal measure. The game is a radical argument for hope in the face of oppression, and understands that this is an adversarial position. Choices have a cost, and Dredgeport always collects. You must fight, comrade, together we can take back our city.

Caiette sleeps beyond the treeline. Here in the forest you are truly alone. Your loafers perch on the lip where the sand meets the sucking mud. Here, so far from the world, there may as well not be a world at all. The horizon and the trees are the only real thing.

This week the team try to peel back the layers of Emily St John Mandel's perplexing time travel novel Sea of Tranquility.

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

Patrick: So suddenly a lot of things made sense about you foregrounding supernatural more sci-fi stuff in the last two works. I was really sure that there was going to be nothing like this.

I thought yet again, it was going to be the possible feelings of what might happen in the future were always going to be fantastical and sci-fi-ish. I never thought we'd actually get to the point where it would go straight into sci-fi.

But yeah, it's interesting. It's as if you just read, it's as if the author just translated what they had been doing, which is completely grounded non-sci-fi thing into sci-fi all of a sudden.

It just has all the same structures and hallmarks and themes and stuff. And you know, the feelings of human experience in that book.

But you know, it's also quite interesting how like, she has to speculate a lot about what the future is going to be and how people will live in experience in settings in the future and how they possibly are similar to the feelings we have today.

But yeah, it's a bold swing to take, especially the time jumps she does. Yeah, and I really admire it. I think it's kind of...

So far, I like the previous one better, but I feel like this one is about to go into some crazy, insane, interesting direction.

And I'm here for it.

D.C. McNeill: Yeah, this is a real... You built your career off writing these really meditative, literary fiction type stories, and then you wake up on a Thursday and you're like, fuck it.

What if it was all actually part of a big sci-fi trapping? And there's some... You know, it's...

I read The Singer's Gone last week, and then I read The Lola Quartet this week, two of Mandel's other works, and they're just literary fiction. Like this is a complete... This is a real post, Station Eleven.

You know, Mandel has escaped containment from Canada, is getting published everywhere. And the audacity to be like, yeah, my third big book. This is pretty incredible, I think.

Whether you like it or not, I think like, yeah, as you say, it's a swing, and a lot of authors will go their entire careers without swings that look like this. So, yeah, it's interesting.

So, I'll explain why we stopped where we stopped toward the end, but yeah, it shit's about to happen is what I would say. Darth, what about you?

Because this, I think is, I can't tell, I think that at this point, the stopping point, I'm making a prediction. This stopping point is Darth's worst nightmare of the book.

I think when you finish the book, you're gonna think it's like the best thing ever. But I'm curious where I find you right now, sort of, at the two-thirds mark.

Darth: Okay, so Station Eleven had me thinking it was sci-fi, and then rug pulling, so it wasn't. Glass Hotel had me thinking it wasn't sci-fi, and then rug pulling me so that it might be, but it might not be, we couldn't really tell.

So, I have not let myself assign any meaning to anything in this book until we finish it.

So, in my mind, there is no time travel yet, it could be a dream, it could be real, we don't know what's happening, and I will not dedicate my mind to anything until we get to the end, because I don't trust Mandel.

The collapse is an apocalypse first in your mind, then when you learn that it's all over, a sheer, cosmic relief. At least now the lies can stop, and this ugly thing can end at last.

David, Pat and ‪@DarthdYT‬ close out their discussion of Emily St John Mandel's sleep hit and try to figure out what the book is doing.

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

D. C. McNeill: Now, I finished this book. There's two things I want to say before we get started.

The first is that I did a disservice on the last episode, Pat, where you asked a little bit about Emily St John Mandel's relationship with sex, and I was like, gosh, she's just not that interested in writing about it. I was wrong.

Someone on the Patreon DM'd me and went, look, and they asked to remain anonymous. Fair enough.

They were like, listen, it was a really eloquent point, but you need to read The Singer's Gun, because that is Emily St John Mandel's book, functionally about sex. I did that this week.

The Singer's Gun is a novel that basically follows a, I guess they're second-generation immigrant cousins, Anton and Arya. Their parents run a clothing store. It's like a tchotchke furniture thrift store, antique store blend in Manhattan.

And all of the furniture they sell is stolen. And the book kind of follows Anton's life. And growing up, he immediately falls in love with his cousin.

And that's kind of like the beginning of his sexual awakening. And then marries a woman that he definitely shouldn't marry, who they have a terrible relationship, and is having an affair with this woman, Eleanor, the whole time.

The book is sort of about, it's still written quite keenly from the female perspective in that it's about the connection and the absence of that connection as it relates to sex that like actually matters.

So like Eleanor, the character, while she's having this affair, she's in a relationship with his boyfriend, Gabriel, and he's been on these like depression pills that mean he has no sex drive.

That's kind of why she starts the affair in the first place. But the book really centers like, it's not lurid and it's not torrid, it's like really dealing with these things as like elemental facts of reality.

And so I think that to more thoroughly answer your question from last time, Pat, I think that Mandela is not necessarily interested in sex itself as like an act, but the things that it produces in us as people and the things that it produces in us in

its absence as well. And the way that some connection can be sustained without it and some connection can't be sustained without it.

But reading that book, it really felt like she'd sat down and went, let me think about this once, so I don't have to worry about it ever again. That type of exercise.

Patrick: Yeah. I mean, that makes sense to me. She's very interested in the complicated, messy relationships that come from such intimate acts, like in the before and after of that kind of thing.

But yeah, it sounds like from that description as well, that she also still doesn't go into the very, as you said, carnal aspects of sex and stuff.

D.C. McNeill: Yeah. Yeah. I think like a male author, and certainly I've noticed like the way that I write about sex insofar as I have, because obviously the Maynard Trigg series is like Young Adults, so it's not really in that series.

But I'm working on like a side novel set in the same universe just to figure out like what is sex in this universe like mean and look like.

It's like, yeah, I guess I'm interested in Sea of Tranquility because that ends up being a book about a lot of things.

But seminally, it becomes a book about like every, I think everything Mandel has written, which is like how do you not live the wrong life and then die, right? That line from Station Eleven.

And a big part of that to her seems to be, who do you choose to be vulnerable to over like large periods of time? I think that's like a like a foundational piece of her corpus.

Darth: I think it's worth pointing out that that the both Station Eleven and this ended up being much more about like relationships than about whatever the the quote-unquote mystery was, right?

And I think the same thing can be said about all of the sex scenes that we've not seen in this book, because each one is just indicative of a relationship either shifting or, you know, something like that, where the point of it is what is being

indicated. Does that make sense?

D.C. McNeill: Eric, we live in precarious times: I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. This is for myriad reasons: the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the rise of fascism in America, and most keenly the fact that I am not dealing with my thirties… particularly well. I released my first shitty novel at nineteen and my first real novel was published at twenty-three. That was… a while ago now. This has me thinking about time and those big, scary choices that feel like things other people do: adult stuff. I bought my apartment in 2022 and I’m already looking at upgrading to a townhouse / a nicer apartment in no small part because the Olympics are coming to Brisbane and we’re all desperately trying to outpace the subsequent economic collapse.

More procedurally, something I really struggle with is some simple executive tasks because of my depression. My shower grout is worn down: I need to go to the hardware store and buy silicon. I drove over a nail and need to take my tire in for repair. The balcony needs a power clean. It all goes on the backburner. Not because I lack the time (I don’t have 3 kids, a job, and a wife studying like you) it’s just not something I can do without a companion. One of my closest friends Lucy is a therapist and she calls this paired behaviour. The avoidance is mostly harmless, but occasionally gets me in avoidable trouble. Last night I accidentally fudged a password reset on my recording PC because I’d been putting it off for weeks, and I had to stay up til one in the morning fixing it. I do not recommend this.

As I get older, I’m struck by how much my thinking about time and death has changed and how small these annoyances I seem unable to resolve really are. I find myself instead focused on writing and reading as much as possible, while seeking out activities in the real world: they’ve made public transport 50 cents where I live so the barrier to slinging a laptop in my bag and hopping on the bus is lower than it’s ever been. To say nothing of the convenience of being able to have ice cold beers and enjoy the last few weeks of perfect weather in Brisbane before it gets hot again… I sometimes think about my last beer.

I love beer. I think about the (if we don’t burn our planet into a ruinous hellscape in the next decade) conversation in a doctor’s office where they tell me that I have to give up drinking to extend my life. I wonder if I’ll even want to do that. Either way, there will be a last beer. A last book I publish. A last podcast I record. A last… well, you get the idea. It is within this reflection that I think very often about the ecology of my life. I wonder if I’ll remember my incredibly annoying neighbours across the road who are incapable of shutting up for five minutes. I wonder if the irritation I feel at how long it’s taken me to donate a few bags of clothes to goodwill will be resonant all those years later. I suspect not. I suspect I will recall my favourite restaurants. My favourite work colleagues. My favourite books. My favourite experiences. And, probably, my favourite beers: shout out Range Brewing, Aether and Happy Valley. The corollary, too: what will I be remembered for? By readers. By audience. By colleagues.

I’m curious if legacy and memory is something you think about often. And if it is, how your relationship has changed as you’ve grown older (and, in theory, wiser).

E.S. Anderson: David, bold to begin this letter series with a simple, “But what about death, then?” But, death, or legacy, has definitely been close to mind these last few months, for the global reasons you described, and some very personal to me. I lost my mother, age 67, in 2024, and my aunt, age 80, this year. I have seen my father navigate the passing of his brother-in-law, his father-in-law, his father, his mother, his wife, and his sister, in a span of 25 years. Our family has gotten “good” at death.

Artists probably consider their legacy more than average. It comes with the work, which we hope will outlast us. To some, this comes packaged with the burden of considering what future generations will think. I believe that there are only a few ways to react to death: fear and reclusion, carpe diem, or a Hamlet-esque revenge plot. Thankfully, unless I decide to spend the rest of my life in a war against cancer, I have only to choose between the first two. This leads to the binary struggle inherent in all human decisions: safety/excitement, security/growth, comfort/adventure, fear/wonder. The Garden or the Field. Tatooine or Space. The Hobbit-hole or the Misty Mountain. Having children meant that I had to begin making these decisions with regard not only for myself, but those under my care. I am now responsible for the development of tiny humans that need a balance of comfort and discomfort to become happy and capable adults. We may make decisions soon that will make us all very uncomfortable for quite a while, in exchange for greater fulfillment and joy.

I offer a reframe to your frustrations with “adulting.” Societally, people are expected to care for their stuff, and stuff falls apart. A home needs repairs, a car needs new tires (I write this from the waiting room of my local shop). And when those things break, it shows what our priorities are. I have coworkers that see their cars and homes as extensions of themselves. A dirty car infers a negligent driver; cracked grout infers a cracked resident. But for some, these moments bring clarity for what we personally prioritize, societal norms be damned. I drove for years with missing hubcaps, because for me, the time/money cost was greater than the benefit. Some have a much lower threshold, some a much higher.

When I was in grad school, I attended a talk by Jorge Cham, author and artist of Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD) Webcomic. Caged in humor and a relevance to grad-student life was one basic life lesson: the enemy of joy is not hard work, long hours, or strict academic advisors. The enemy of joy is Guilt. We feel guilty when we take extra time for work, and can’t go out with friends. We feel guilty taking a long phone call with family because it puts us behind on our to-do list. Those who live joyful lives do so because they are able to appreciate every moment achieved without regretting the moments lost. It is important to recognize that these priorities can change, quickly and drastically, or slowly, with time and age. The garden I kept for years is filled with weeds, but I have a new baby and a finished novel in rewrites. I wouldn’t trade those for tomatoes any sooner than Bilbo would trade his adventures for those lost spoons.

I was just informed that it will take two more hours to fix my vehicle. I could dwell on the “work” I’m unable to do from the waiting room. Instead, I’m writing to you and thinking about death. And instead of feeling guilty, I am thankful for this opportunity to pause and work on something I enjoy.

D.C. McNeill: Guilt is an emotion I have spent the past five years trying to grow away from (not out of). Through the writing of Palerunner, a book of video game essays shot through with a catastrophic break-up, I arrived on the other side with a cautious lack of guilt. I love spending hours and hours studying genre fiction, talking about that into a microphone, and hours editing that into a podcast I am proud of. Yet I am no perfectionist. I am a just-good-enough-ist, I am just fortunate that my good enough is honed by years of practice and training, and I let my mistakes go without prejudice. A hard won skill that occasionally falters.

The guilt you describe is, in my opinion, a through-put of a capitalist economical concept that any econ-101 student is familiar with: opportunity cost. The notion that if you are doing A, you are missing out on any hundred/thousand other things you could be doing. Which is, of course, nonsense. Each of us exist within a web of context that push and pull us in, as you say, drastic and small ways. We are not free moving Newtonian objects that could just do something else.

On your note of these priorities changing with time, an anecdote: I recently visited my family in the UK. We are not close. These are strangers for the most part. With the exception of grandmother, Maureen, and my cousin, Charlie. My grandmother is 92. I am certain that this year is the last time I will speak with her. The last time my behaviour irritates and confuses her. The last time I cook for her. The last time my Aunties complain about her fussiness. I have never had a good relationship with my grandmother: my Mum, my brother and I are the black sheeps of the family. I feel no regret or guilt over this relationship, yet, having spent a night in London drinking with my cousin Charlie, I find myself flooded with guilt and nostalgia. A guilt that I have lived this great big rich life and she has not been a part of it. That, I think, is where my regrets tend to nest and multiply. Not in carving out time for edits or writing sessions or personal space, but in realising I have accidentally gone without someone I love for no particular reason other than time and space and life. We are all parallel lines on a graph, and I regret that I allowed my line to stop intersecting with this person’s line. When we hugged at the train station we pulled our bodies together as if we might impart some permanent imprint on each other, some small piece of the other to carry forever. I like to think we did.

The guilt, I think, also resides in the lies about productivity people use to sell self-help books about maximising your time so, you guessed it, you can do more labour to produce more excess capital: this being the only true metric that many measure their time with. I recall a third year writing seminar where the formidable Dr Kari Gislason asked a class of four hundred students who would consider self-publishing. A silence enveloped the lecture theatre. I raised my hand very slowly indeed, trying to catch the eyes of my fellow writers, looking for support. The beacons are lit, David calls for aid! Two students answered the call and raised their hands. Dr Gislason asked the other students why they had not raised their hands. Would it be so bad? Dr Gislason asked.

But how would we get paid, one student replied, and I swear Dr Gislason never looked at that student the same way ever again.

E.S. Anderson: David, I had a similar experience in my first year at university. I was in a Western Civilization class and the professor, knowing that most of us were in our first semester in higher education, asked us “why are you here? Is it for money? To earn a high-paying job?” Several raised their hands. “Is it because your friends and family told you to and you had no better options?” A few raised their hands. “Maybe you know that this is the best place to find a spouse and you don’t plan on using this degree at all?” Two very honest girls raised their hands. By the end of it, I was the only person in the class without my hand up, and he asked me, “why are you here?” Having never put much thought into it, I said “I’m looking for a job I enjoy so much I would do it for free.” He grinned, called me an idealist, and moved on. He should have added “naive.”

Now twenty years later, I am not working a job I love so much I would do it for free. I enjoy the work and the freedoms it provides, but would give it up immediately if a better option came along. The interesting thing is, I could have chosen otherwise. We used to joke that I’d be living in my friends’ basements after graduation because they were all going to get real jobs. But at some point along the way, the idea of being a starving artist became unappealing. Some may consider it a weakness, but when I saw an easier path to self-sufficiency, I took it.

I have had major internal and external debates about “art for the sake of art” or what work I put myself through if I’m not going to “get something out of it.” My side-hustles, my hobbies, are all done without the promise of immediate compensation, but in the back of my mind I can justify the work as a part of building my audience, my portfolio, my connections, and my skillset. I have not been able to embrace the idea that I am creating for my own enjoyment. I must have an audience in mind to feel legitimate, a path to publication to justify the words on the page. I sometimes wonder if this is healthy, or if it is just the way I am wired.

Several years ago, we had some family members move to the other side of the country. It came suddenly and without proper farewells or explanations. Bitterness festered. Ties were cut. Suddenly, we had to balance how close we actually felt to these people with how much work it would be to visit them, or to sustain awkward phone conversations, letter writing, etc.  The funny thing about it is, we have other friends and family that live just as far away, if not further. We hold no bitterness towards them and consider it a special treat when we are able to meet in person. This realization rearranged our entire approach to those we pursue for relationship and the guilt we feel when we let some of those relationships go. We had to rethink our definition of relationship.

I’m currently at a writer’s conference in Atlanta and attended a talk on “Writing with a Full Time Job.” The room was filled with marketing managers and teachers and cardiologists who are struggling to write on weekends, in free minutes between patients, or during their long commute. The crux of the talk was that we needed to reevaluate our definition of success. Some want to win awards. Some only want to see their books in print. Some only want to finish a project. If I can push out a novel every 3-4 years, along with random articles, poems, podcasts, and other projects, that is far better than not writing at all. And if the writing I am able to do finds success that leads to publication, fame, and fortune–so be it. I will write, no matter what, just as I will visit those important to me, no matter what. And I must leave myself open to reframing what, and who, are current priorities in my life.

D.C. McNeill: Funny, I was the friend in my writing degree who had the real job, and frequently the person who paid for beers, dinner, and often attracted couch surfers for various periods of time.

You raise a problem at the nadir of every creative unlucky enough or untalented enough to not be an Alan Moore or a Sarah J. Mass or a Stephen King: we artists who fell through the cracks and now live beneath the surface of the culture. On this note, a confession: I originally started the Art For Artists podcast to promote my writing. That podcast expanded into Digital & Creative Media Works, and it took the cracking of that company to free me of that motivation. I find myself so grateful for ZeroIndent, and the absolute willingness of my colleagues to do big, large creative work just for the sake of doing it, and because it is fun. I vividly recall the ending of our Daredevil unit where it occurred to me and Pat just how much doing the work had changed us. While we make work, our work makes us, too. This is why I will always write novels. Articles. This is why I will always find new and emergent reasons to speak into a microphone about something I have thought about very deeply. My life is better for doing this work with people I love working with. The audience is a nice side benefit, isn’t it?

I’m reminded here of a conversation I had with my old Engineering Manager some four years ago. We were sitting in the office--which at that time overlooked the Storey Bridge and the curve of the Brisbane river--sipping beers and watching the sunset. We’d just been through a gruelling client go-live, and all I could think about was going home for a cold shower and a whisky. He’s a huge science fiction fan, so we got to talking about Maynard Trigg, and he asked, in his very direct way, how the hell I find the time to write, alongside work, podcasting, socialising and so on. I’d never actually been asked that before, and I tried to figure it out. The answer, I explained, is that I just sort of do. But the real answer is that creative work is like any work: you simply have to sit in front of the computer and do the damn thing. Even if you do the thing for ten minutes. That’s ten minutes more than nothing.

As you say, if we could wave a magic wand and become fiscally successful authors tomorrow, we would both do it. Yet there is a delicious freedom in running my own independent publisher. UnderInk lets me do things the big three never would, like sell secret Novellas to frequent customers or publish Palerunner, a completely non-commercially viable book of essays. The few times videos or projects escape containment of my core audience, I am always disappointed by the comments from the masses. I can only imagine how that must go for a famous author, so I find myself torn between wanting that success, and getting that success on my own terms. Getting it isn’t getting it if you don’t get it how you want, I think. But then who am I to judge? Chris Nolan made Batman to unlock unlimited money for his films for the rest of his career. Brandon Sanderson wrote Wheel of Time to catapult his Final Empire series into the stratosphere.

I posit then, it is a brave thing indeed to change how you define success. When we draw a line and say “for me, this matters” we wage war against cynicism. To believe in the work is no neutral position: each word puts the devil back in his hole, just a little more each time.

E.S. Anderson: David, since your first message, I had a moment of transcendence that I think captures these thoughts perfectly. I also had a large bag to donate to Goodwill. It was filled with toys my kids either never played with or ones I couldn't stand to hear any longer. It was in my car for a long time. Every day, I felt guilt when I saw it. A bit of a failure. How couldn't I find the 2 minutes it would take to do this simple task? Then my office participated in a volunteer project for a boy's foster care camp. They needed landscaping, furniture moving, cleaning, organizing, etc. It was very fulfilling work. And after it was over, I realized I had a bag of toys in my car. When I showed it to the staff, they were immediately able to name the boys that would appreciate every single toy. Often, these kids come with nothing, fleeing horrible circumstances, and the camp is only able to supply so much. We were all in tears by the end.

Not every recurring guilt will end so well, but I took these thoughts away: I could have just thrown those toys away. Added them to a landfill. My basic desire to do good resulted in me accidentally doing more good than I ever expected. Call it divine intervention, serendipity, kismet. I call it planting seeds we may never see grow. If I leave my door open at work so my team can come talk to me, I'll get a lot of distractions and annoyances. But I'll also get opportunities for human connection, better workplace morale, and a team I can count on when I'm the one who needs help. I take meetings with people that will have no affect on my sales goals, merely because they are lonely or need help, or because I don't want them to bother my employees. And maybe 1 of 4 times, my actions reap benefits.

Once, while I was on a ridiculous side-quest,  I needed a stranger's help to park my professor's truck in a parking garage in Atlanta. Then my good Samaritan disappeared. She didn't even wait for me to open my door so I could thank her. My thanks were completely unnecessary and her good deed needed no justification. Her legacy is that I now try to stop to help strangers back into tricky spots.

I believe that, at best, my legacy is the trail of deeds left in the wake of my life. If I have lived well, it will be impossible to trace the ripples. At worst, my legacy is my last good deed. If nothing else, I can still see those closest lines, and concentrate on dropping one more good thing into the world.

D.C. McNeill: This is a tricky thing to articulate, but I think that so often we are willing to attribute those moments of kismet to fate, or some divine coincidence. The truth that we all have to adjust to eventually is that we are fleshy objects with mass that move through and interface with a material reality. This is one of those bone rattling truths that I think of when I consider legacy. Sometimes, I think that my life will be the objects I leave behind to my family, or perhaps if I somehow outlive my brother, a marathon runner, the objects I burden Patrick with. To this end, I am obsessed with owning the least amount of stuff, and instead concerned, like you, with the amount of ripples I can produce in the universe.

Sometimes it feels like we are ghost stories, waiting to happen. Idea for a ghost story: a great writer becomes a great writer while working as a Sales Director, only to die never achieving fame as an author. Idea for a ghost story: a mediocre writer spends their entire life talking about storytelling and running an independent publishing company, only to die never achieving fame as an author.

E.S. Anderson is the co-host of Diamonds in the Rough Draft podcast and author of Science-Fiction/Fantasy titles for children and young adults.

Cover photo by Wallace Chuck: https://www.pexels.com/photo/round-silver-colored-pocket-watch-and-eyeglasses-on-opened-book-3109167/

The novel prickles in your grasp. The sweat on your fingertips make turning the pages easier, but the sense of an axe about to fall remains. You glance up from the words: the gardener is attending the rhododendrons by the edge of the terrace, and once again you feel a flutter of anticipation.

David, Pat and ‪@DarthdYT‬ dip their toes into the heady, brilliant waters of Emily St John Mandel's brilliant novel.

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

D.C. McNeill: The structuring idea of this book is basically there's a hotel and the hotel is this big elaborate fancy glass hotel obviously in Caiette, which is a remote insula, like it's not even a spit, it's a tiny strip of little houses in the Canadian wilderness. We get our first glimpse of this through uh Vincent's perspective as a kid. Something I should say, we were talking about this in Station 11, and you guys looked at me like I was crazy. So, in the books, Caiette is where Miranda and Arthur are also from.

Patrick: Oh, okay... wait... Miranda and Arthur are from the same place...

D.C. McNeill: They're both from Caiette. So that's the big connective tissue with, at least nominally, that's the big connective piece of tissue with Station 11.

Patrick: Is Caeitte meant to be in and around like Ontario?

D.C. McNeill: It's not. It's based on qu--fuck, um, I don't how you say that... Quatsino? Quastono? North of Vancouver Island.

Patrick: Watching David try to pronounce words he doesn't know how to pronounce is one of my favourite things.

D.C. McNeill: I don't know, dude. But similar vibe like Great Lakes vibes.

Patrick: Yeah okay.

D.C. McNeill: So nominally the idea is that like the whole of this corpus sort of centers around this one geographical location in some way or another.

Patrick: Yeah. Exactly. Severn City.

D.C. McNeill: This is the lake that presumably Jeevan  crosses and so forth. Let me give you our first glimpse of Caiette because I think the description is probably relevant. So, this is Vincent and Paul catching the bus home from school just after Vincent has vandalized the school property with the words, "Sweet me up." Which she just thinks is really poetic. And it's really funny because Paul catches her doing it. And he's like, "Why did you do that?" She's like, "I don't know. I just like the phrase" - it's very um it's very kid brain stuff.

This is our first proper look at it. This is on page 30 of the e-pub:

They rode the bus in silence back to Grace Harbor where the mailboat waited to take them to Caiette. The boat careered around the peninsula and Paul stared at the massive construction site where the new hotel was going up, at the clouds at the back of Melissa's head, at the trees on the shore. Anything to avoid looking into the depths of the water. Nothing he wanted to think about down there. When he glanced at Vincent, he was relieved to see that she wasn't looking at the water the water either. She was looking at the darkening sky.

On the far side of the peninsula was Caiette, this place that made Port Hardy look like a metropolis in comparison. Twenty-one houses pinned between the water and the forest. The total local infrastructure consisting of a road with two dead ends, a small church from the 1850s, a one room post office, a shuttered one room elementary school. There hadn't been enough children to keep the school open since the 80s, and a single pier.

Isomorphic is David McNeill's column about adaptations and the infectious influence of memory.

I thought first of my own injuries from the video game on concluding The Last of Us season two: a bleak, ugly story devoted to replicating a flat conception of reality that makes little effort to say more than “there’s good people on both sides” about some morally imperative problems. I would be more easily swayed by certain adaptive changes if writers Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann attempted to address the underlying issue of this story, which, in no uncertain terms, is that the story does not have much to say about its themes of violence, and, by the end, essentialises all violence as individual rather than structural or socially located. Muddied further by the television adaptation insisting on protecting our protagonists from their worst choices.

I knew I was in trouble with season two when, after the events of the cabin on the hilltop, Dina looked at Ellie and said “I loved him too, you know” - and I said to myself “huh, that’s an odd choice.” Comporting Dina into a more classic highschool girlfriend archetype is sensible but love? Is she another adopted daughter, then? Nominally Dina and Joel having a relationship is a dimension in the game. In the game as Dina and Ellie patrol the snow, Dina announces she and Joel are planning a movie night, and invites Ellie. You can read this a few ways. Is Dina hanging out with Joel just as an excuse to get closer to Ellie? Is she trying to mend their relationship as a sort of gesture to help someone she really likes? Does she just actually like hanging out with Joel? Like a lot of the game’s writing, this idea is presented as flavour dialogue to engender you, the player, to like hanging out with this character. Because it’s super fun, actually: riding a horse through the post-apocalypse learning all about your new girlfriend is just a good idea for a gameplay sequence, so much so Naughty Dog dedicated a miniature open-world sequence in Seattle to this exact idea.

I’m not convinced the only thing that makes this work in the game is that you, the player, are doing other things. I’m not convinced that nudging the stick on my Playstation controller and sneaking around infected adequately occupies my brain so that Dina’s dialogue feels less like exposition and more like flirting. In fact, I actually made this argument about The Last of Us Part 1 on the release of that second remaster - just kicking around the empty world with Ellie, mediated by gameplay loops, does serve that narrative in some impressive ways. I found myself more actively engaged with those small “press square to chat to Ellie” moments and more actively listening to her ongoing chirps. Much more impacted by her change in demeanour toward the end of the story, especially in the lead up to the hospital. The moment where she does not provide you gameplay assistance by dropping a ladder, in particular, hits different in such detail.

The Last of Us Part 2 attempts a similar alchemy with its character switch halfway through the game to produce a truly predictable narrative that never quite lands any of its many punches, both literal and figurative. To be blunt: the game is far too simplistic in how it writes and approaches its themes, especially so the replication of the conflict in Gaza where it attempts a “both sides” argument when writing about a protracted decades long genocide. And look I get it: Druckmann is writing about his own personal experience growing up, but the story fails as a tragedy because these characters never sit down and try to contend with their grief and trauma in the context of this world. They never actually try to reason with their own motivations, their own actions. The brief glimpses of this reflection (Ellie falling silent after beating someone to death in anger, Abby using her oldest friend Owen in a dire romantic encounter) do not coalesce into saying anything other than violence is here, and violence is roundly bad.

Consider, by contrast, the best tragedies: Macbeth, Madame Bovary, Of Mice and Men. Each centres violence, domestic and otherwise, but their tragic figures have things to say about these events. Justifications. Deflections. Lamentations, regrets, convictions. And they want to talk about it. Because that’s the juice: how do our tragic protagonists deceive themselves and the world about how they feel? That’s just honest to goodness drama.

The act of switching characters to play as Abby, and filling her world with characters that she likes and that like her, and repeating the Joel/Ellie dynamic with Abby/Lev, is effectively a game of empathy that produces a much more complex thesis. Where the first game engendered you to Joel by having you play as him and do the work of protecting Ellie, the second game makes you play as Abby to empathise with her, and, ultimately, complicate your feelings about Ellie’s revenge quest. To the extent that by the end of the game your perspective should be shot-through with Abby’s grief as much as Ellie’s. But the complication is asked and answered by the ending: yes, violence is indeed bad. How quaint, you might say, as Ellie holds a knife to Lev’s throat. Druckmann’s corpus is filled with similar hollow suggestions - the cynical e-brake turn of the Uncharted series - explaining every inch of Nate’s life for a sterile “perhaps the family you choose is the real family” ending makes me want to yell to this day  comes to mind. Not to undercut the emotional impact of Ellie’s plight or the awful, sweaty panic I feel from Abby many times during her journey.

Without the mediation of the gameplay itself, The Last of Us season 2 has to do something to elicit the same empathy from a reader, and then, hopefully, have a perspective on that empathy and what it might mean for these characters.

One of these somethings, then, is to show us part of Joel and Dina’s relationship. Early on we have Dina sitting with Joel as he teaches her how to replace a capacitor. But then, as if realising they added this extra dimension to their relationship, it’s Dina who accompanies Ellie on the search for Joel. She’s captured by Abby’s crew and drugged unconscious, because Dina needed to be there, but the added dimension of Dina’s love for Joel should force the scene to change, right? Dina should react to Joel being killed in real time, and we would lose Ellie’s isolated reaction. And I have… no idea why they did not do that. Why put Dina there instead of Tommy, and then do nothing with it but reproduce the same logistics but without having to punch Dina in the face? Just to have Tommy back in town for the Game of Thrones sequence? Why not just have Ellie alone? This is a classic trap of adaptations: the relentless comparison to a previous homeostasis is why it is so difficult to think and write about adaptations. I’m not meeting the text, but rather, drafting a previous version of reality with a new brush and complaining the image resolves differently.

Because that truly is the lever that the TV show can pull that the game cannot: resolution. Without the need for gameplay the story can divert and indulge and express in ways that wouldn’t quite make sense for the game, even in the Playstation house style of narrative blockbusters: there is just a wider aperture of what you can put into the story. This is something the show takes advantage of with varying degrees of success. Joel’s dire therapy session is excellent character work, while the added characters to the Dina/Ellie patrol only serve to make our protagonists more immature by comparison.

I’m usually the last to excoriate additions like this unless they undercut an idea I’ve already staked rhetoric on or built an argument around. The net:new Bill anthology story in season one is a great example of a change that I like quite a bit despite what we lose in the translation. No longer is Bill a cautionary tale of what might become of Joel if he cannot open his heart, but instead an example of a life well-lived. The immediate resolution to the “will they, won’t they” of Ellie and Dina in the game is strung along in the show for added melodrama that, honestly, works. Isabela Merced puts forth a stand out performance as Dina. The revelation of Ellie’s immunity via a bite to save Dina is followed by a harrowing eight minute sequence of Dina holding Ellie at gunpoint, distraught, trying to come to terms with shooting her best friend. The moment relies on Merced flashing through a dozen emotions at once and she sells the visceral relief when Dina finally believes Ellie is immune, cascading into a kiss of pure, cosmic relief.

Yet the story seems content to ratchet up the tragedy at every opportunity, make the violence more real and even buy into the idea that these characters are fused with violence as an elemental quality. Violence is not socially located but inevitable. Dina delivers a speech about this very fact: there’s nothing she wouldn’t do for revenge. Despite this, Ellie’s violence in the aquarium is played up as an accident. Self-defence. Violence is at once bad, sure, inevitable, yes, but also accidental? Minor compromise to insulate Ellie from moral consequence. These things happen to her. They are inevitable. Nora was already going to die from the spores, why not torture her for information? It’s already too late. It’s already too late. It's always too late.

I resisted the performative credulity that follows identifying these changes, and then the show provides us a “reason” why Joel is the selfish hardcase. We flashback to Joel’s childhood in a freighted, bizarre addition. The scene is captivating: Tony Dalton turns in a brilliant frayed portrait of masculinity. A young Joel stands up for Tommy, says his father won’t hurt Tommy, and Dalton breaks down in tears, says he wants to do better than his own father. No surprise Joel’s father is a cop, I suppose, but this detail casts a long bow in an attempt to contextualise Joel’s whole deal as a complicated dad. And that really is the story of this show now. Ellie is bad for extracting revenge, but not that bad. No longer does she beat Nora’s face in with a pipe. Now she just beats Nora’s leg a bit and already after Nora is infected - gone is the blood rage. No longer is Joel bound to anxious attachment by the loss of his daughter’s death, now his father was kind of physically abusive but Joel took care of Tommy so it’s also a hangover of his childhood, you see, unresolved traumas, you see. Tommy doesn’t irresponsibily run off for revenge, instead he and Jesse are here to support Dina and Ellie. These micro-compromises shoot through the whole of season two in a perhaps necessary attempt to make our characters redeemable.

I struggle here because the show falls for the adaptation problem of adding extra material in occasionally unhelpful ways. Compare season one’s Bill episode with season two’s Joel episode. Rather than a unique anthology story in the world, season two ops for an extended portrayal of the birthday mission, but one that contorts itself to also be the same sequence Ellie burned over her bite mark. The same sequence Joel made her a guitar for her birthday. For all the cuteness of a high Ellie eating cake with her hands, these decisions engender a sense of completeness to the story, to the extent that Joel sings his ballad: If I ever were to lose you on the very same day.

For all that: fuck me if the museum doesn’t hit like a ton of bricks. The warmth between Joel and Ellie allides with Joel’s murder in all the familiar ways. The Apollo 15 sequence still damages me in a personal “my Dad wasn’t really around when I was a kid” way. All to say: I want to like what is here, but I find myself just sort of… stuck in my ability to appraise the alterations to the story, in no small part, because the show almost commits to making Joel, well, Joel. His reaction to Ellie’s queerness and drug use is “this is my house” and Ellie countering with a classic marxist “you don’t own anything” argument rings true enough. This is the end of the world, Joel, property doesn’t exist (and maybe never did). But then Joel, after a beat, is fine with Ellie moving to the garage for her own space. This is what I mean: the show’s constant capitulation to “what if things were always kind of okay and reset to a status quo” when given space to expand the text. Gone is the notion that from about age fourteen Ellie and Joel are apocalyptically estranged. Now they just sometimes argue with each other in small ways.

The show does call overt attention to one idea that the game doesn’t: Ellie’s moth. This is the symbol on Joel’s guitar, and apparently(?) the design of Ellie’s tattoo that covers her bite. The moth, as the show posits, is a symbol of death. A symbol Joel gives to Ellie on the guitar. Yes, Joel does give Ellie death to keep her alive at the hospital, we know this, but I am unsatisfied with the solved jigsaw of the season this produces. We have to see Eugene’s death because it’s referenced earlier. We have to see the burn, because it’s referenced earlier. We have to see the tattoo, because it’s referenced earlier. This sense of completeness dispatches whatever small subtlety Part II had. To the extent that Joel does an Of Mice And Men on Eugene in a scene that the show seems to frame as beautifully tragic that is so over-explained by the cinematography and Joel’s dialogue: ten minutes of Joel, more or less, facing the camera and explaining that he is, in fact, a bad dude but a justified one.

Yet the show has the audacity to fix my biggest issue with the game: the porch scene. You spend twenty hours murdering people in the game because of Ellie’s unresolved Joel issues only to get an epilogue sequence that reveals they resolved their issues before he died! And the show just gives us that, plain and simple, in episode six. But then, unbelievably, the porch scene becomes the “you swore” scene from the game. The aperture shrinks further and our world grows that much smaller because of it. Not to take away the performances and directing: Joel weeping and nodding. The stutter in his voice as he speaks. The break in Ellie’s voice and the violence in her gaze as she calls Joel selfish, and he repeats his father’s words “I hope you do a little better than me.”

So if we set aside the changes themselves for a moment and step back, the story retains, and seems to be heading toward, the same bleak, compromised theme of violence is bad and there’s good people on either side. Joel kills Abby’s father. Ellie slays all of Abby’s friends, and so Abby slays Jessie and nearly blows Tommy to hell (okay that bit doesn’t happen in the show). And then Ellie goes to hunt down Abby and her surrogate son. This violence is inevitable! How can it possibly be stopped! We’re all just monsters waiting for a reason and gosh darn it we can’t help but put ourselves in positions to keep doing violence! To the monsters, we’re the monsters, right?

This radical moralism is the fundamental failure of The Last of Us season two. “See, the homophobe can be on Ellie’s side, these characters have dimension” my television shouts at me as it performs a sleight of hand to rob Tommy of any complexity because we need a likeable dad-type now that Joel is in a pinebox. The moral crisis of whether Ellie should complete vengeance on Abby is no crisis at all here: violence is inevitable after all, and instead we’re left to argue for a small genocide over a large genocide because in the world of The Last of Us this blood-sport between Ellie and Abby is, first, necessary, and two, after a fashion, productive. To borrow the language of Ian Dell Danskin: “the war crime that stablises a region is not, to them, a necessary evil; if it was necessary, it was no evil at all.”

I’ve made the argument before that Druckmann’s work capitulates to centrism as a default position, but the second season of the show really works hard to produce a moralist universe, fill that joyless country with violence, and shrug as it paints the walls with blood.

Rain patterns across the bitumen. Thunder peels over the horizon, white-blue flashes followed by calamity that vibrates the walls themselves. The smell of fresh rain on soil fills the empty city as the roads become spillways and the sewers overflow.

This week David and Darth are joined by Danielle from ‪@levelstoryplays‬ and Alex to close out their discussion of what has turned out to be a fairly bad season of television.

Follow Danielle on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/levelstory.b... Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

D.C. McNeill: I think it feels quick because it's structured really poorly. If that makes sense.

Danielle: I also want to bring this up just because it's fresh on my mind and I don't necessarily want to assign it to the last assign it to the Last of Us season 2, but perhaps it could be a product of this, but I saw a video and I forget who the actor's name, but if I find it, I'll make sure to post it in our Discord chat with an actor talking about when screenwriters are writing their scripts, they have to have a second pass because they want to write it in such a way where people can understand it when they're looking at their phones.

Alexogeny: Oh, I remember seeing that one, too.

Danielle: I couldn't help but think of that as we were talking. And again, I don't want to assign it that to this, but part of it does feel like that, but that's like a larger conversation, but I wanted to at least throw it out there.

D.C. McNeill: Yeah. I mean, I knew that we were all in trouble in 2019 when Netflix started talking about second screen viewing. Where they were developing TV shows that were like that you're supposed to just have on in the background. As an illustrative example, and this is the most like David's on his high horse bullshit, but I think this is like a valuable thing to say, so I'm going to do it anyway. Let me know in the comments how pretentious this sounds, but we were-- it was I think it was like the second or third viewing session um after I got back from the UK when when me and Lucy were watching the season. Um and it was a Friday night. We got to like 9:00 p.m. and she was like like, "Wow, like I'm like I'm really relaxed. Like I was super in the story and have completely decompressed." And I was like yeah it's because like you sat down and you actively watched the TV.

The way that people like Lucy, and I think it's like a pretty normal thing to do, she runs her own business, right? She's a busy person. She's got a kid all that stuff right is when she's watching TV's usually working or doing email or doing, you know, making dinner or whatever. And so I think for her it was the first time maybe ever that she'd sat down and just like like you know the lights in the apartment are off, the TV's on, you're actively watching the TV. I and it was so funny afterwards because, you know, she's had a rule for a long time which is no TV in this house, right? She doesn't want to have a TV in her house. It was the first time ever where she gone "oh I think I get it now." Like I think I understand the appeal of this as an actual active pastime. And I think we're seeing a growing divide--maybe divide is the wrong word–but a kind of factionalization within viewership production and artistry in the screenwriting TV industry: people who want to make television and people who want to make stuff that's on the TV.

And you know in the same way that we're seeing increasing factionalism within technology technology companies and technology communities where some people can tolerate the use of AI in minimal ways and some people absolutely you know refuse it and will detonate communities if they find out that has been injected into into certain practices without their consent or without their knowledge. I think increasingly what's going to happen over the next couple years is we're going to see that second screen viewing focus be increasingly affected by the proliferation of these generative tools because it's an easier way for these companies to lazily make you know more and more what we would call content as opposed to to art.

A steep wind blows across the golden field of swaying grass. Sunsets, painful in auburn beauty that only reminds you of what has gone from the wold. You think again of violence. That freedom born from the collapse: violence, and vengeance.

This week David, Alex and ‪@DarthdYT‬ are backed up by Danielle from ‪@levelstoryplays‬ to unpack the strangest adaptation choices so far.

Follow Danielle on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/levelstory.b... Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

D.C. McNeill: This, by contrast... it feels like when we cut from a scene to another scene, it's either very literal, right? We get that at the start of the next episode where it's like, well, this is the same guy. Are you paying attention?

Or there's no relationship between scenes, whether that be logical, or emotional right? And occasionally there is sure, you know the Kuleshov effect is here but I think episode 3 in particular feels like they shot a ton of stuff, and they went "it's just way too long" and then they found it in the edit. That's kind of the vibe I get from episode 3.

Alex: I think is that because they like locked themselves into seven episodes.

Darth: I was going to say I think I think part of what we're seeing is is just the format that they're forcing themselves to stick to. Meaning there's dialogue that happens in the game and then there's this action sequence, and much like Danielle was saying there were scenes that didn't feel like they should be there and they were in the game. There were scenes that felt to me like they shouldn't have been in the show and I was like "this was in the game."

Like when they find the guys hanging from the ceiling and then they have to sneak out of the sneak out of the warehouse without getting seen and then they have to go and and sneak down into the subway to try to hide and then they have to run away from the zombies. And like all of that is like ultimately pointless except I'm I'm just imagining like crouching in the game and you're doing the sneak thing and then you got to go up behind and do an assassination move. And I'm like "I can literally see this is only here because this is what happened in the game and I don't think this should be here because the show doesn't necessarily need this.

And there were so many scenes that could have flowed, I think, better and transition from one spot to another. When they're in the forest and Dina gets shot by the arrow and then they split up. So then you could have the action scene, which I'm assuming is in the game where Ellie has to run away from, you know, from all of the people in the in the forest. They didn't need that either. They could have gone a different direction and stayed focused on the characters, which may have transitioned from one scene to another better, but because you keep having these action breaks that were in the game, the whole thing has that montage-y feel that y'all were describing.

Danielle: I think that's so interesting that you're saying that 'cause I feel like that's sort of where I'm getting hung up is that I love seeing stuff from the game, but I agree like it just feels like why is it there? And and it's weird because it is from the game, but it's not adapted like it is in the game. And it's just odd like the they they shrink everything down to like, okay, well, like I do recognize this scene from the game, but it's still like isn't really the same. And then they always feel the need to add hordes of enemies all the time.

When they're in the subway and there's this huge amount of infected and I guess they do it for the budget, but again, the spectacle of it. It's exciting, they're running from the zombies. There's action, adventure but yeah it just feels--

Darth: Just quickly to interject think that was because of the problem that they introduced before that was they had all of the the WLF members. You had the dozens of people chasing them into the sewers, so now you have to have dozens of opponents to defeat those dozens of people. So that horde didn't need to exist like you said if you get rid of all of the Wolves.

Bitter snow crashes against the window of your small room in Jackson. You shiver as you try not to think of the cordyceps that ravaged your patrol. Thank goodness you made it away in time before the creatures could pursue you.

This week David, Alex and ‪@DarthdYT‬ are joined by returning guest Danielle from ‪@levelstoryplays‬ to talk about The Last of Us Season 2's opening salvo. Massive spoilers for this one folks.

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

D.C. McNeill: if you haven't played the game, this  this season of television breaks roughly halfway through with some adaptational choices that that bleed a few different bits and pieces forward. The season ends roughly halfway um through the game where the big change, which we'll get to next next episode of this this discussion. High level, going around the horn we'll start with you Darth because you seem to be the most positive on this these two episodes. How do they find you um did are you really enjoying you know revisiting the show for this discussion - yeah what's your high level on these two two episodes?

Darth: First, I'll back up and and also answer that same question because two of the things that I heard before I watched this which I was just kind of flummoxed by was one that that many fans were hating Ellie in this season whereas they for the most part like loved her last season and before watching this I I just could not understand how they could so change a character that this many people would be talking about hating the character. Then, secondly, Dina, a lot of people were talking about how they hated either. They hated the casting or they hated the hair. It was something so stupid that I was like, I don't understand why you're you're making such a big deal about this that I've seen multiple posts about that. So I I remember I remember hearing that going into it.

D. C. McNeill: that's crazy. I feel like, and Danielle backing up, I feel like Dena is one of the highlights of this show. It's pitch perfect.

Danielle: She was fantastic.

Darth: there were literally people that were like her her ponytail was like the wrong length or the wrong color. There was there was some really stupid stuff. Granted, it was like Reddit and so like if you're in the right spot, then they're just there to complain, you know?

D.C. McNeill: okay...

Darth: But I wasn't sure, especially with y'all who are coming from the video game, like I don't know how for me, if I was looking at Halo or whatever, it's got to be really darn close accurate for me to say this show is a good depiction of the game. So, if they fundamentally changed even some minor physical characteristics, I'd be like, "Okay, you got to have a good reason for doing that." Grain of salt there. So, all that said, I was I kind of had a negative perception of the show going into it because I had been hearing some quote unquote "bad" things about it, even though the overall reception was: it was good, but it was nowhere near what the first season was. So my my expectations were tempered going into it, even though I was still I was vibing all the way through. I very much enjoyed it.  Aside from all the times I was probably crying because there was also a lot of sad stuff. A lot of deep emotional connection moments and I'm like how are how how is this happening, and you know this the zombie mushroom head show. And you've you've got this this deep connection happening at the same time.

Hosts

Patrick: https://amttm.com/

David: https://underink.press/

Darth: https://www.youtube.com/@DarthdYT

You stare, dumbfounded, as a familiar silhouette crests the horizon. It can't be, can it? They left you so long ago. Yet they are walking toward you, smiling. You are only aware of your tears as you pull them close as you can, as if in hugging you might prevent them from leaving again. The unbroken wheel turns ever onward.

David and Patrick are joined by ‪@DarthdYT‬ to deal with the most INSANE Jeevan episode before wrapping up Station Eleven.

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

Darth: Do you remember Do you remember what I what I messaged you guys after I watched uh the penultimate episode?

D.C. McNeill: Uh, vaguely...

Darth: it was something like uh if I had a thousand guesses, none of them would have prepared me for episode 9.

D.C. McNeill: Dude, yeah. Episode 9 is one of the wildest episodes of television I've ever seen. It comes out of left field and then it goes "we're just doubling down. Yeah we're leaning into this I don't know what to tell you, strap in." But I mean, you still had a good time?

Darth:  it's it's really hard for me to articulate, because I had the same reaction that Pat did where I was like this is one of the best shows and I absolutely adored it. But that was in the midst of me saying I didn't like half of the decisions that were made specifically in the last episode. But it was it was still perfect the way they did it. So I can't be like, you know, I'm not faulting it, but also I'm mildly disappointed but also blown away, you know?

I've been really I've been really torn on it because there was a lot that maybe I just wanted Kirsten just to to stay like stabbing people and then she got all nice and I'm like, "No, no, girl. You got to you got to go back to the stabbing. You got to do the madness. You've got a talent. You've you've got you've got talent, kid."

Patrick: Yeah it's not Macbeth. It's throwing knives at people.

D.C. McNeill: She was pretty sick at that

Darth: in honor of her giving it up, I brought I brought all of my knives with me to uh to to honor Kirstston giving up the way of the knife.

D.C. McNeill: Oh, that's good. I love that for you.

Patrick: Hell yeah.

D. C. McNeill: I love that for our monetization on Youtube. Thank you Darth. Appreciate that.

Hosts

Patrick: https://amttm.com/

David: https://underink.press/

Darth: https://www.youtube.com/@DarthdYT

D.C. McNeill: Eric, I’ve been thinking a lot about my writing degree - it’s been just shy of a decade since I finished the last of my coursework. I did a dual degree in creative writing and business (you can guess which degree has actually been useful - it’s not the business one). A lot of recent journalism has been focused on how students are using LLM’s to effectively cheat on every piece of university coursework, demolishing the academic project. I was doing some looking around, and found a post on Bluesky from a writer I follow Micahel Lutz: “probably the most insidious thing about LLM cheating is that it allows students to cheat without developing any sort of meta-awareness or cleverness about how to cheat when a computer isn't there to do the bullshitting for you.This produces gaggles of hopelessly dependent con artists” - which got me thinking about my own university experience, and cheating. Because Lutz is right. I didn’t cheat on my writing degree, it would, at the time, have been incredibly difficult to cheat a creative writing degree. I suppose I could have paid someone to write my stories or my essays but my professors would have known: it was a small cohort and they’d likely clock a different prosaic voice.

Where cheating was a going factor was my business degree. I never needed to cheat on my business degree, but I was privy to a few people who did, and their approaches required no small amount of cunning and planning. Well, okay, I tell a lie. I sort of nearly cheated on my accounting course. The first time I took the course I failed, along with sixty percent of the class. The next time I took the course, I had my friend (a real accountant) check my assignments before I submitted. I went into the final exam knowing I would pass, and that was that.

Now I’m no martinet but I’m beginning to feel a divide drawing between those of us who value the process, and those who care how much money the outcome can produce. I have “cut corners” my entire writing career. I use fantasynamegenerator.com more often than I care to admit, but always as the foundation, right? I don’t just choose a category and use a name. I take part of one name, hit generate twelve times, and eventually compose a name I like. I am an active participant in this process. I would argue this is not con-artistry: this is having a belt of tools, and knowing when to use the appropriate implement for a given moment of the craft.

What concerns me about LLM’s (which we are now doomed to know as AI) is that, it seems to me at least, young people use them for everything. Purely discursive and agnostic replacements for learning how to do a thing. And to Lutz’s point: a complete lack of substance, and failing that, a lack of guile. If every life is a series of deeply personal compromises, these LLM’s provide a side-ramp. Why learn how to write a poem if I can ask the bot to make one? Why come up with a joke for the work Slack when I can ask a bot to make one? While I understand concerns about the dead internet, my injuries are for the future generation. There’s this section in Gene Wolfe’s book of the new sun where Severian explains that humanity was once so advanced they built sentient AI that ran everything. Every task, every need, completed by machines. But generations later the machines started to panic. Humans could use a shower, but they didn’t understand how it worked. And so the machines began to teach humans how certain technology worked. But the machines could not agree what to teach and fell into civil war. Eventually, the machines were sealed in a tower, their brilliance lost forever, and the remaining machines in the world ticked over and over, each cycle corroding and fracturing until all of the machines felt silent. All they had built was lost forever.

And, to be honest, I am concerned about our future. If all of these young people use these probability machines for everything, they’ll never really learn how to do the underlying task, right? If you can just have an LLM bash out a piece of code, you never have to actually learn that coding language. How far away are we from Wolfe’s future of living atop technology we can’t engage with ourselves? But I don’t have kids, and as my thirties start to move past me, it seems unlikely I will. And so I wonder, is this something you think about, and are your concerns for academia and the underlying principles of our industry the same on your side of the pond, or is the looming threat of fascism taking the wheel, and are those even separable?

E.S. Anderson: David,

One of my coworkers attends a weekly “closed networking” meeting. For a fee, organizations like BNI, PowerCore, and Master Networks allow members to reserve a seat as the resident architect, insurance agent, mortgage banker, etc. Then the members spend an hour or so every week talking about their business and trading referrals to help build business for the group.

This particular week, members had an assignment to come prepared with a business “toolkit,” to show what kinds of tools they use while helping their clients. It is meant to be a conversation starter and a way to deepen understanding of each other’s businesses. However, it soon became obvious that several members had used an LLM to put together their toolbox, as the business banker, accountant, and mortgage lender all showed up with the exact same presentation.

This is a harmless example of business-folk phoning in a presentation to a voluntary networking organization. But it led me to a conversation with my coworker about the amount of time he spends “workshopping” his ideas with ChatGPT. Without exaggeration, I do not believe he ever closes the app on his phone. Every time I see him type an email, he filters it through Chat. Every time he makes a phone call, he double-checks his calling script on Chat. If he needs a 20-second introduction for a conference, he starts by looking it up on Chat, then tweaks it afterwards.

I believe that the ready access to an LLM has formed addictive behavior, to the point that he has little confidence in his own abilities. In situations like the above, when he has time to prepare, perhaps the ramifications are few. But what happens when he needs to think on his feet? When a situation arises that must be dealt with immediately and without time to type out a script without seeming odd, if not incompetent.

I love Lutz’s idea that cheating without guile robs us of cleverness. That’s brilliant. I know so many clever people who navigate the world by cutting every corner possible. They find every shortcut, rewire every system, and take advantage of every loophole. But it takes them considerable physical and mental effort. From the perspective of brain development and teaching kids how to think, I very much enjoy watching my children try to bend the rules or overcome an obstacle. I would rather they get a chair and figure out how to sneak that cookie themselves than cry for an hour begging me for that same cookie.

The try/fail cycle innate in many video games can easily be bypassed by looking up a guide to the game. It will explain exactly how to reach that ledge, to find the key, to open the door. Cheating actually robs the player of the dopamine hit they should have earned, and they find themselves a level further in and no further knowledge of how this game sets up its puzzles, or how they should approach the next level. To cheat once almost necessitates cheating repeatedly and with much less satisfaction than playing the game through as intended.

In undergrad, my English Composition II class was taught by Dr. Glen Gill. He had us read The Educated Imagination by literary critic Northrup Frye. Largely a defense of the study of literature for personal and social development, Dr. Gill used the book to drive conversations on reading literature through the lens of Phenomenology, or concentrating on a subjective view that avoids societal biases and pre-conceived notions. Dr. Gill discouraged us from reading anything outside of the primary text, so that our personal interpretations would not be colored by the thoughts of the critics who came before. I was once scolded in class because I looked up some scholarly articles on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” so I could feel more confident in class discussion. It was immediately obvious to him that these ideas I was spouting sounded nothing like my ideas in our other sessions and I was (kindly) banned from speaking again that class period so that I wouldn’t infect my classmates.

Now, is there significance that America’s current political environment rose at the same time as the LLM explosion? I may be catastrophizing, but there seems to be a cultural insecurity in determining proper Truth. The double-speak employed by all political parties ensures that every event can only be seen through the lens of the argument of the hour: if our man is arrested, the justice system is broken. Their man got arrested, so the justice system has finally been fixed. No event can be viewed outside of context because the average citizen can not experience the events being reported. Even for domestic affairs, our world is far too complex for events to be experienced by direct observation, making a Phenomenological approach to understanding impossible.

Therefore, when direct understanding of anything is impossible, it is tempting to rely upon a higher power for our Truth. Before I wrote that sentence, I hadn’t planned on comparing LLM reliance with religious fervor, but here we are. So the question now is, has the “opium of the masses” changed? In LLM’s, We Trust.

D.C. McNeill: I’m as distrustful of phenomenology as the next socialist academic (the irony of The ZeroIndent Review using that as a method is not lost on me) but what I would put forward is “in LLM’s we rely” rather than “trust.” I say this because the younger people I have worked with seem vaguely self-aware that their use of LLM’s is bad in some nebulous way they cannot articulate. I would hazard a guess that if you sat down with these people at the pub and asked them, thoughtfully, if they believed their constant usage of these tools to be positive, I bet they’d say no. In the same way people know their relationship to Tik Tok and/or Instagram is maladaptive, but they are unable to stop. This is addiction after a fashion, I almost agree.

To pick up on your video game analogy, I am a Dark Souls freak. I love nothing more than locking in and just learning a fight, move by move, until that moment of pure execution when strategy and learning and performance pay-off and you finally do the dang thing and kill the boss. I love these very challenging games for the same reason I love making art. Friction has this unique tendency to force improvisation. Not just that but friction is, well, human. I am currently living in a prison of my own making trying to finish Maynard Trigg books four and five as I (stupidly) decided to make them twin novels, so I kind of have to finish them both at the same time. As you can imagine, I have been procrastinating, hard. I’ve written a complete horror anthology, a standalone novella and four short stories set in the same universe in an effort to find the limits and contours of the world of Maynard Trigg (but really, it’s because I’m avoiding writing the dang books I have to write). This is the story of my creative career. I always have five or six irons in the fire that I bounce between, gradually moving the needle on all of them until I lock in on one and crack the code as it were.

This ill-advised process of forever context switching when I get stuck or bored is how I produce and do so many creative things and it’s all driven by that underlying friction. If, at sixteen, deciding how to finish my first novel series, I could have just asked a machine for ideas or to write it for me I’d never have learned a clutch of lessons about narratology and how to stick the landing (in theory, let me get back to you when Maynard Trigg 5 is out). This is not an original thought. But as with the Dark Souls idea, you can either beat the boss, or you can’t. You can either write a novel or you can’t. No machine can change that. You can learn, of course. Practice. Research. Build a skillset. Watching other people kill a boss can be instructive. Watching back your own performance (like game tape) is invaluable. But at the end of the day, at a certain point, you can either write a novel or you can’t. You can kill the boss, or you can’t. This, I believe, is where the insecurity of “AI Bros” is centrally located. I won’t strawman these LLM users as being insecure by definition, but I’ve certainly experienced it first hand. This coy insistence on “upsetting the establishment” when they show off their slop and craftsmen aren’t impressed.

An ex-colleague of mine who used chatbots for everything once bit back during a meeting with “well we can’t all write essays about video games” in response to feedback on the quality of his email writing. I found this particularly enlightening as this was clearly on his mind in the background, nagging at him in some small way our entire working relationship. I feel a lot of these LLM power-users are secretly ashamed. They know it’s super lame. They know it’s infantile and servile and so they project these ideas onto the rest of the world. I’m not lame sheep, it’s the woke mob and so on and so forth.

Your example of the close-reading strikes a particular nerve for me in this context. With my dual degree I messed up the scheduling of my coursework because I was juggling university and two jobs so I found myself taking a beginner short story class in my fourth year. The unit involved a peer review at the end of the course. I found myself marking up a story that, generously, strongly resembled a Witcher short story I’d read. Most generously: fan fiction with the serial numbers filed off - the dude even had two swords. But I’m no nark so I did what I always do and mercilessly critiqued the piece within an inch of its life, careful to avoid implying the story was lifted (he changed the ending too which really undercut the original story, odd choices across the board). Now, did he cheat or just accidentally recreate a story he once read? We could talk about this for hours and not land on an actual answer, and even if we do, that will be subjective and separate to the question of whether cheating is morally acceptable. These questions require engagement with our own biases, our own politics, our own context. Frequently on The ZeroIndent Review I have to remind your brother that an assumption he has is entirely predicated on the American experience, and a conservative experience at that, being in the bible belt. My point is that the work to decide on Truth is hard and requires sustained ongoing effort. Incidentally, part of what I enjoy about the Dark Souls/FromSoftware games is that the stories are impenetrable, frequently requiring extensive close-readings and theorising to piece together basic narrative elements. That ongoing friction must be endured to figure it out, and I love doing that kind of work.

We might then say that social media and LLM’s act as tools to numb and mediate. These philosophical opiates provide an immediate truth, curated to your existing biases and calling you a genius for asking a question respectively. Comparison threatens this act of avoidance, I think. This is why it’s a short bow to draw from these chatbots to fascism. Wouldn’t it be so very nice and comfortable if, like in Oz, you could draw a curtain back to reveal the villains of reality? Wouldn’t it be so nice and comfortable if there was simple right and wrong like in Star Wars. We must shut out and suppress anyone who says or demonstrates this simplicity to be untrue, they must be lying. They must be paid actors. They must be infected by the woke mind virus and so on.

Your point about cheating once almost necessitating repeated cheating rings true here. Once you buy into one obvious mistruth, you sort of have to buy into the next, and the next, and the next, because any crack threatens the whole. Friends of mine met in church at a very young age (I think they were eighteen) and gradually deradicalised each other as they went through university and realised that all of these beliefs were false: a line of dominos waiting to fall. I had a similar experience with my view of capitalism. In my adolescents I became obsessed with jet-fueling my career. I wanted to be the best at everything I touched and slingshot into senior roles. Then one day I started to see the people around me with clarity. All of these suits pretending to be adults. All of them sleepwalking through life. After that I started reading Marx and Deleuze and the rest is history.

I’m no philosopher but I have read Derrida and I’m increasingly concerned about BookTok/the internet’s willingness to abandon craft, and in the book industry, ignore the words on the page themselves, in favour of ideas, gestures and imagery. A symptom of the same rot that produces these “AI Bros” who were crypto bros ten years ago. An unwillingness to do the work because they are scared of being unable to do the work and/or sustain the effort. They defend these chatbots like kids defending fan fiction on Tumblr, like the student copying The Witcher. Corporations exploiting the willingness of people to emotionally invest in texts while bent to the wheel of capitalism so radically they trick themselves into believing this impressive machine exists at all.

I’ll leave you with a scene from Rick & Morty, an excellent Dan Harmon joint, where a therapist explains to Rick (the smartest man in the multi-verse) that therapy is like brushing your teeth. It’s boring, annoying, and you have to keep doing it. And the reality is that some people are okay doing the work, and they improve, and some people just aren’t. You have to accept that it is your mind, that you are in control of your own intelligence, and you have to do the work or accept that you will be frozen, unable to grow and change.

E.S. Anderson: I love when seemingly nonsensical shows like Rick & Morty, Community, South Park, etc. make valid points and reveal themselves to be thoughtful works of art merely masquerading as fancy. I did some work on the purpose of Fables in my MA. Unfortunately for me, I found a book called Fables of Power, by Annabell Patterson, that said all I wanted to say, and more. Fables as used by Aesop are used by the politically powerless to communicate change and critique society. “I'm not denouncing the king–this is an innocent children's tale about a lion and a mouse.” With the form comes deniability and safety for the author.

When you mentioned that AI bros evolved from Crypto bros (we should get JM to edit together some Pokémon-esque trading cards), it led me to a bit of gender study–the movement of financial/technological fads marketed predominantly to men, mirrors the fads of beauty/health care that I see marketed predominantly to women. In 2015, every white woman I knew was putting coconut oil everywhere they could reach. They kept it in giant vats on their kitchen counter. It was added to coffee, replaced cooking oil, was rubbed into skin and hair, used as toothpaste, diaper cream, antiseptic. It was the miracle solution that we had foolishly been drying out, filling with sugar, and stuffing into Mounds bars for decades. Then after a while of coconut oil not solving all our problems, we moved on.

(Apparently, today's fad in American beauty care is anything branded as “Korean.” Do with this information what you will.)

I am left with questions I have no ability to answer: am I wrong in my observation that men are more likely to find their “solution” in a process or scheme like AI, while women are likely to seek it in a product or service? Are those gendered roles still so prevalent? Do these fads always split along gendered lines? Are the lines wavering as the boundaries between culturally male/female also waver?

So anyway, back to AI. I agree with you that consistent usage probably does come with a guilt complex for the average AI user. What they are doing “feels” wrong after the initial thrill wears off. But I'm going to try to play devil's advocate for a moment. AI is the flashy new toy of the day, as significant as the invention of social media and the internet itself. But each of these previous two also had its own ramifications. I think the presence of social media is the largest-scale experiment on humanity since the Flood. While we can all list and argue the awful effects of social media on any person of any age, there are enough upsides to make it feel like a necessary tool. For the infirm or homebound, social media helps them connect with the world. I wouldn't have reconnected with several of my closest friends if Facebook hadn't shown us that we moved to the same city. You and I would never even have connected without the presence of YouTube and now we're conspiring in real time from opposite sides of the globe.

But I'm absolutely not letting my kids get onto social media until their brains are fully developed. Or until they go rogue and open profiles behind my back. That shit is scary.

Our teachers were wrong. We do have a calculator in our pocket at all times. We can just look up the answer to any question any time we want. There's really no need to memorize anything because any information can be accessed. Is the world worse for it? The distances between “educated” and “noneducated” have leveled. 50 years ago, those who pulled themselves out of poverty did so in the library and the classroom (or the football field, but that hasn't changed and never will). Now, people pull themselves up online. Those who are desperate for a better life will take the most accessible option to get there. And it is hard to see fault in that.

I heard an NPR interview with a musician in his 50's. He was complaining about how bands “make it” today versus when he started. Now, bands are discovered on TikTok and YouTube. They may never even play a live show before they start making money. This musician in the interview had been playing bars and parties and festivals for 30 years. Because for all of history, that's how musicians made it big. Now that era is gone.

But has that democratized music? Doesn't it mean that a 15 year old with a plastic ukulele who can't drive has just as much chance of getting discovered as the 6-man-band with day jobs and tons of equipment they bought with cash?

Of course, now I've argued myself into a corner. Because each of these examples assumes that the creators being discussed have actual talent, or at least skill at creating entertainment. With AI, the talentless can appear brilliant and the truly virtuosic can get buried among the pretenders. But I have to wonder about that. Right now, those with means can have music written for them, videos produced, marketing teams hired for promotion. No talent required. “Friday” singer Rebecca Black immediately comes to mind, as an example of a very privileged kid whose parents could afford to buy her the type of experience other people spend 30 years chasing. But her story stands out because it is not the norm. Yes, you can argue all day that more talented artists are overshadowed by those who have connections and money, but that's true of everything, everywhere. More often than not, artists who are successful actually care about making art. They want it to be real because they love their medium. And that authenticity shows through. I think those trying to make fake art tire of the experiment long before those who actually care about the art itself.

A friend once said that he thought the rise of “superfake videos” would kill the conference call. If AI gets good enough to completely mimic a human consistently, then all meetings will become face-to-face. I'll take his ideas one further and claim that AI has the potential to kill social media and social media marketing.

If there are too many fake profiles on dating apps, people will go back to meeting at bars/church. If too many fake artists make AI slop, we'll start buying paintings from artists painting live in the park. We'll stream music from the band we heard at the concert last week. We'll visit that local artist market to get our crocheted bathrobes instead of yet another knockoff online. We won't conduct business through email or phone anymore, because AI can fake anything coming through a device, screen or audio. I will only be able to close deals and have meaningful conversations face-to-face. Any digital communication will have to include nauseating levels of security questions just to verify the speaker is human, as well as the person they claim to be. Maybe this will kill 1-800 numbers, robo-callers who prey on the elderly, Facebook love scams, and cyber-bullying. If AI can be anything, we stop trusting that anything online or on the phone is reliable.

Maybe AI destroying everything could slow us down and shrink our worlds back down to a manageable size. Maybe this can be one of the steps towards humanity healing from the great experiment.

I need to develop a sign-off. Whenever I'm finished, I'm driven to write, “David, I'll see you on Tuesday.”

D.C. McNeill: You blew the dust off the back of my head with the coconut oil example, I had entirely erased that moment from my mind, apparently in favour of remembering every episode of Rick & Morty. Funny you landed in the same place I did when considering the long term ramifications of these tools, which is, hopefully, incredible value being placed on authentic, human-made works. Which, to your point about craftsmen doing it for the love of the game as it were, I am already seeing a rift forming between people like us, and people willing to embrace these tools. My Engineering Manager, a much smarter man than I, once said that what people fail to understand is that LLMs are only good at one thing. LLMs are very good at computation where the answer to a problem does not require perfection. Digital binary computers, like the one I am typing on right now, excel at solving classical mathematical problems. LLMs, on the other hand, use probability to produce something that affects cognition - a kind of statistical magic trick that samples these enormous datasets to produce an answer that is “close enough”. They are tools to be applied where a problem doesn’t have a right answer, just a good enough answer.

An example to demonstrate my meaning. On an episode of the now defunct Advisory podcast, we did an experiment where I wrote a section of prose describing an encounter I had that day. James then asked a chatbot to write the same piece of prose in the style of D.C. McNeill. I’ve written enough articles and books that if you asked a university student to do this task, they would have sufficient materials to do achieve this as an exercise. The chatbot did its magic trick and produced a few paragraphs that read a bit like me. It even managed to produce this flourish I often do a lot where I have characters half-hear or mishear dialogue so you don’t always get a complete piece of dialogue on the page because the subjectivity we’re reading from doesn’t have access to that information. But what I also noticed is the chatbot included some phrases that read a lot like Gene Wolfe and Stephen King. After the episode I had James ask the chatbot a few questions about how it gathered the data, and it had used the books, plus a combination of reviews and marketing material - and, it turns out, the chatbot also used transcripts of a few podcasts which threw it off even further as I frequently read out passages or citations or dialogue on the podcast.

After the podcast I combed through the passage in great detail and drew two conclusions. First, the chatbot did a decent enough job to likely convince someone who hasn’t studied the craft. Second, the listeners had to trust me that I’d written my passage myself. Short of filming myself writing the passage the night before (which still doesn’t really prove anything), how could I prove I wrote the passage? Your point about in-person and “real” interactions potentially supplanting and subverting these chatbots prompted me to recall this exercise. Which then reminded me of the movie Her - a pretty looking film that I don’t especially like - as the film contains a bizarre example of manufactured authenticity.

The protagonist works as a letter writer. Clients send in requests and context, and the protagonist composes “hand-written letters.” The Spike Jonze “oh look aren’t I clever” spin is that the protagonist dictates the letters to a computer, which then digitally hand-writes the letter. Aside from the nauseating smugness of the concept, this desire for things made by people is well represented here, if a little farcical and one that annoys me to this day.

Your two very American examples of heterotopias (bars and churches) replacing the internet and apps as the primary locations of human connection and socialisation seems one likely outcome. I think it’s far more likely that people will, in the short term, use these new tools as supplements to the real thing. We’re already seeing this with the advent of people claiming to date chatbots. I use claiming here because this, to me, is like saying you’re “dating” a cam performer who you can interact with. If the interaction is, at an elemental level, one way to serve you, it is no relationship at all in my opinion. That aside, this is a small example of this supplementation.

I just don’t think there is anything that can ever replace striking up a conversation with a stranger at the bar. A few months ago I ended up meeting a man working to literally cure cancer. I would’ve stayed for a few more beers but he started defending Trump in the most bizarre way possible (he was the definition of a moralist, my sworn enemies) so I high-tailed it out of there.

My personal desires for the future aside, I think the popularity of Skeuomorphic technology in recent years is encouraging. I now write all of my prose on a paper-Tablet - something that literally changed my life. With no exaggeration since acquiring this device my writing output has tripled and I’ve read forty two books this year already. I am hopeful for a future that includes more attempts to recreate the organic sense memory of our world. To borrow from Cameron Kunzleman: “We live within a context. That context is defined primarily by the movement of materials in specific locations. In the current moment, we are algorithmically drawn out of that context into a vast web of relations that are mediated by sounds and images.”

If nothing else the proliferation of these tools has encouraged people to conduct work that is not indexed against their own context, but is instead statistically rendered to supplement the structures the prompter lives within. That, when you follow the turtles all the way down, is the difference between something made by a person and something produced by an AI.

This divide I referenced earlier concerns me more and more as people buying into these tools are missing an obvious trick, aren’t they? As we’ve seen with recent examples, the person running your tool could just turn the tool into a Nazi. These tools are, essentially, infrastructure to these power-users, and infrastructure exerts and produces ideology, intended and otherwise, by those who design that infrastructure. So to those who say that AI is inevitable, I say to you: if we can demolish a building, we can sure as hell demolish a shiny new toy.

E.S. Anderson: The “manufactured authenticity” of Her really struck a note with me. Back in 2016, a coworker very excitedly showed me this new service he had discovered that would allow us to upload our marketing letters so the service could print out pseudo-handwritten postcards. The technology wasn’t quite there and I think a discerning eye could probably tell that they weren’t written by hand, but it was one step towards making it easier to generate leads. But after a while, he stopped using the service because the novelty wore off. I now get 1-2 “handwritten” advertisements for new windows or home insurance in my mailbox every day.

In 2018, there was a large push in my market towards using the “Mail Merge” tools built into Microsoft so we could print 100 letters/send 100 emails very quickly. We would write the generic text in Word, keep a list of prospect names and addresses in Excel, then merge them together so the software neatly placed the individual names into each email or letter. Then we all blanketed the greater Atlanta area in letters and emails for the next year, because it was so easy to send them. I could even automate the process and send them out on a regular schedule. The unexpected consequence was that suddenly our “target customers” were receiving dozens of letters and emails from all of our associates every week. I had a desperate phone call with a veterinarian who was politely trying to figure out how to make us stop. While we were talking, he got three different emails from us. Our market executive had to send a specific email out because his wife, an attorney, was being hounded by us, and we had no idea. She was just a name buried somewhere on our lists. Of course, at first these efforts got results. But then, 12 months later, everyone had blocked us or knew to throw our letters away, so we all stopped using Mail Merge.

I’m musing about this because I’ve been struggling to develop an ethical system for marketing under late-stage capitalism. While I naturally prefer “organic” business development (referrals from happy clients, networking, trusted advisors, etc.) sometimes I just have to pick up the phone and bother people in order to bring in business. While this makes me feel gross, every now and then I find someone who could really use my help and who, after working with me, has a measurably better life. This push and pull between ethical sales tactics and the goals we have to hit to keep our jobs is a constant that I do not believe will ever go away. And I argue here that there is no way to ethically market by using AI.

Perhaps I believe this because I see it as an intrusion into a sacred human space. It is sending a robot to spend quality time with my  grandmother while I work. It is taking communion and receiving the blessing through a conference call. It is having software write love poems to my spouse with my name signed at the bottom.

Behind every interaction I have with a prospect, there is the innate knowledge that we both have to work to feed ourselves and our families. With that knowledge comes at least a modicum of empathy for the person on the other side of the interaction. When that humanity is emptied by the insertion of an artificial being, we break the social agreements of civilization: we do not remove the tools of existence from one another, so those tools are not removed from us.

This may be my own way of dealing with the realities of my corporate existence–if I am going to bother you and ask for your time and money, you are going to hear my own, human words. I am not asking AI for its business, and I will not allow AI to ask you for yours.

So far, every experiment I have witnessed that abandons the “real,” that organic sense memory, has failed. The world eventually seeks authentic interaction. While immediate results can be gained by cheap imitations, those who depend upon them have eventually found themselves outpaced by those with a more ethical approach.

So far.

D.C. McNeill: You’ve landed on the exact concept I’ve been struggling to articulate in this entire letter series: “The world eventually seeks authentic interaction.” At one of my very first software jobs my biggest client was my key responsibility - keeping this dude happy was paramount. I emailed this client multiple times a week. The last month before I quit, he called me out of the blue. To this day I’m unsure how he found my mobile number.

He proceeded to, in a friendly tone, explain all of the problems with our software, and why it added no value. I was so confused that I came out and asked the question: why do you keep using it and paying for it? He chuckled and said, well, you know how your boss can be. He’d never leave me alone otherwise. And he explained what sounds like a grueling sales cycle where my boss just hounded and hounded until he signed. Nothing ethical about the sale whatsoever. But it was that human interaction, the actual phone call, when he was free to be honest with me. It may sound silly, but I don’t think anything can replace that electric sense of revelation that comes with human interaction.

Increasingly I find the only ethical sales technique is as you describe: recognising this person on the other side of the deal is also bent to the wheel of work. Their job is to spend the least amount of money while extracting the greatest value, and my job is to produce a fair compromise. As much as fair is even possible under end-stage capitalism as we watch genocide powered by Microsoft tech through our phones, American fascism becomes background radiation, all the while the capitalist worries about shareholder value and brand equity as they promise AI is not about making roles redundant. They promise really hard, and maybe some of them believe it. But in a year when the board demands the line go up more, and more, I wonder how strong that conviction will remain.

And so I ask you one final question. I struggle to see any future where this technology is not weaponised against the labourer. Where do you see this technology going, and what salve might we turn to when AI is used to break union movements and worse?

E.S. Anderson: As I try to imagine the future my children will inhabit, I do find it difficult not to inherently picture it as worse than today. I do not think that this is useful and I force myself to approach the future with optimism. After all, my parents did not have a personal home computer when I was born. They did not use credit or bank cards. All bills were paid by a written check in the mail. When I was born, there was no gender reveal party or FaceBook announcement. Change is inevitable and the future is a foreign land.

As with any new development, I think it is difficult to predict final-stage application of a tool. This happens in the medical field all the time. Viagra was discovered by accident while trying to improve blood pressure. Viper venom is used as an anti-coagulant. An ingredient is only banal until it can be applied in a new way.

My favorite quote on AI is by X user Joanna Maciejewska: “You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes” (Mar 29, 2024).

My best friend from childhood is a family doctor. The medical practice that employs him wants him to see twenty patients a day. But when it takes him 15-20 minutes to write up the interaction after each appointment, and natural human interaction often pushes his appointments past the allotted time-slot, he finds himself completing paperwork into the evening many nights. If we could apply AI to assist with the paperwork without increasing the doctor’s workload, it would increase the quality of care and the work/life balance of the physician. The tool can be used to increase human interaction, rather than detract from it. But in order for that to be accomplished, the executive, or organization, or society in general has to assert that the increase in quality is more important than the increase in revenue.

Now, will the labourer suffer at the digital hands of AI development? The Science-Fiction author in me wants to suggest that the very Executives that are ordering the implementation of AI will soon find that their positions are actually the easiest to outsource to software. Let the AI push out that corporate babble-speak memo on sustainable partnership. Let the AI develop the bold new sales plan with a catchy branded slogan to motivate the workers every January. The Executives are already asking ChatGPT for ideas today; let’s just cut them out of the picture.

Middle Management is the most at-risk because they have risen above the lever-pullers and button-pushers that actually move a business, but they are not yet high enough to be considered “innovative thinkers.” They have not personally taken on the risk required of upper-management and don’t have the correct last names to move into Ownership. Perhaps they will be the first to go.

Our power grid will need to look completely different. First, there will be a lot of new jobs as we develop and build this physical technology to power our shiny new digital tool. This process will be painful and slow and will cause a lot of xenophobia about East Asia, because they’ll beat us to a more efficient system that can handle the extra workload. But eventually, like the internet and the cellphone, we will have global systems that work for everyone.

The importance placed on the arms-race for a self-driving vehicle actually makes me hopeful. I do not think that these mega-coporations understand what is being built, or how much of the American economy is dependent on fast-fashion car ownership. The ramifications are endless. A self-driving car will cost about the same as a normal one. Its introduction will do nothing but hurt our economy by reducing accidents, body work, new vehicle purchases, medical claims, insurance policies, and frivolous lawsuits. Less manslaughter cases will come to court and less tax dollars will be spent housing prisoners. No more driving schools, DUIs, or car washes. After enough years, I predict that driving your own car will limit your ability to litigate accidents and make insurance rates completely unaffordable. The quality of driving will go up, while profits across industries will go way down. This will cause a general economic collapse, as we have spent 150 years building society around a personal vehicle, driven poorly.

I suspect that the answer to the AI question will not be developed by Big Tech. They are trying to reduce headcount and streamline operations. The world will be changed by disrupters in their garages, who are finally able to apply this tool to the needs of the average person. They are the New Billionaires and they are building an affordable, efficient, AI-driven dishwasher, so I can spend my time writing bad poetry.

E.S. Anderson is the co-host of Diamonds in the Rough Draft podcast and author of Science-Fiction/Fantasy titles for children and young adults.