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Pretty much every morning I sit down and write, and I try to do it as well and as honestly as I can, and most days it goes pretty well, though some days it's tough. Writing is the best of what I've got to give, so that's what I do. And it's good work, and I find a lot of meaning in it, and I get a lot out of the process of working through some story problem, whether it's a story problem that exists in the real world or maybe one that I made up in my head. And then usually by the end of the week I've got something to share, so that's what I do, and some of you read it, and hopefully you find it engaging and honest, and maybe you find something useful in it, and when you do maybe you tell somebody about what it meant to you, and sometimes that somebody you tell is me.

That's the idea, anyway. Good work, meaningful result, human response. Engaging and honest.

You may have noticed that a not everyone is operating on the same idea.

Most of our legacy media services—print, web, video, cable, what have you—have been bought up by billionaires, and most of the billionaires are becoming more and more open about putting their old thumbs on the old scales, so to speak, to promote their billionaire agenda. Jeff Bezos has the Washington Post. Larry Ellison now owns TikTok. Elon Musk has Twitter. Somebody or other has Newsweek, somebody else or other has TIME. Maybe they're the same somebody. They've hired opinion writers and talking heads who exist only to launder the most retrograde opinions and abject moral complacency into common currency. You've got spectacle of degradation such as centrist-posing right wing troll Bari Weiss running CBS as a far-right conspiracy mill, spiking stories critical of the current fascist regime, and hiring the likes of longtime consent manufacturer Ross "Don't" Douthat as a featured correspondent on the once-respected journalism magazine show 60 Minutes. The billionaire idea doesn't seem so much to get people to believe in the lies their mouthpieces pass into common currency (though they'd be well pleased if people did believe them and a lot of people do) so much as to convince people there's no such thing as truth, or that it's no longer worth the work of trying to figure out the difference.

In the same way, billionaires are now openly breaking more and more laws, led by the perfect avatar of our scam economy, that elderly lumbering wig rack and cheat suit aficionado, Don Trump. The billionaires use the power and influence their wealth lends them in order to break the public safe and loot it, and then they let their lawyers battle it out in court over whether or not there will be any consequence for what they've done, and if there is any consequence, then they just ignore it and let the lawyers battle it out in court over whether or not they will be allowed to ignore the consequence, and if they aren't allowed to ignore it, then they just ignore that and ... look, we could be here all day. We never seem to get to the point where we just throw the fuckers in prison or strip them of their wealth, even decades after the funerals of their victims. The idea doesn't seem so much to get courts to agree with them that what they have done was legal because look, we've clearly already done it (though they'd be well pleased if courts did agree with them, and courts often do) so much as to convince people there's no such thing as law, or that it's no longer worth the work of trying to figure out the difference.

They're buying it all up, the billionaires; corrupting it or crushing it or shutting it down, and once they have it all, it looks as though they'll be coming for the rest of it—all the human qualities that aren't for sale, which they intend to snatch away and then rent back to us for a subscription.

And they might not even have to buy it. They've got these machines, the billionaires, word-guessing machines that have sucked up the sum total of human creativity and now are able to output simulacrums of human creativity that are good enough to fool less discerning sensibilities, able to convince people that they too can be creative without engaging in the work of creativity and the craft of creation that makes creativity worthwhile in the first place; to fool people who want to be fooled, that the outputs of the guessing machines are the results of their own work rather than just a flat-soda counterfeit of what others have done.

These days authors are losing big contracts for suspicions of using AI. Are they using AI? Who can say? Maybe so. Some authors surely are. But corporations use AI for anything and everything, and it's not a scandal when they do it. It's almost as if the plagiarism isn't making machines that issue outputs based on everyone else's work, but when anyone else writes something that seems to be aping the style of the plagiarism machine. Isn't that interesting? The billionaire idea behind these recent scandals seems to be not so much that we should keep human creativity in the hands of humans, but that those who own everything now get to say whose creativity is valid and whose isn't; to suggest not so much that some people are still being legitimately creative but that legitimate creativity isn't even possible anymore; not to get people to value the slop for its quality, but to convince people that there's no such thing as quality, or that it's no longer worth the bother of achieving it. or at least it's not worth the bother of trying to figure out the difference.

The billionaires seem to think that the machines have replaced the problem of their dependence on the existence of human beings. The often-repeated line is that the machines allow wealth to access skill without allowing skill to access wealth. And maybe so! Maybe the machines will get better and better and replace the billionaire's need for us, whose labor and creativity and humanity have given them all the value they enjoy so much. Their machines' creative outputs still strike my eye as mostly empty; gross and derivative and boring, but there's seems to be a market for this billionaire slop, and there's certainly a lot of enthusiasm for it from people who aren't interested in craft to pass a machine's work off as their own. Quality hasn't always risen to the top, so maybe quality won't be necessary. Maybe the billionaires, who are more and more open about their belief that the rest of us don't really exist, can finally get down to their long-dreamed-of fantasy of getting rid of us so that we actually don't exist anymore.

That seems to be the idea, anyway. They're warning that these machines might eradicate all of humanity, and while that claim seems just as questionable and self-interested as every other billionaire claim, billionaires sure do seem to be fantasizing about the eradication, so we might at least note the statement of intent.

All this is sort of a downer. I'm sorry about that.

Here's my answer (I was going to say "solution" but that seems optimistic) to all of this. Pretty much every morning I sit down and write and I try to do it as well and as honestly as I can, and most days it goes pretty well. It's what I've got to give, so that's what I do. And it's good work, and I find a lot of worth in it. And that's enough. The work of creativity isn't something I want to give up. It's where the meaning is. I don't use the new machines, not because I'm against machines (I am using many different machines to write this and deliver it to you), but because these machines propose to do the part that makes it meaningful and worthwhile, and I have no interest in that.

And some of you find worth and meaning in what I do, too. And that's even better.

I think that's the answer—the response, if not the solution—to all this anti-human momentum. Find people who haven't been bought, who do something that's meaningful to you or helpful for you, and help them do that.

Help how? is the question that naturally falls out from there. Luckily enough, there are plenty of ways. Every 3 months or so I'll remind folks of the different ways, and what do you know? It's been about 3 months. Here we go!

Some of you reading this help me monetarily. And I truly do appreciate it more than you know. I think it's good for people to get paid for the work they do, at least for as long as we live in a society where payment for work done is how people get by. And listen, if that's something you want to do and can do, there are a lot of ways to do that.

You can click here to start a standard subscription, including one at a sustaining level that gets you free books and special thanks and whatnot.

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Cool? Cool.

However, I recognize not everyone can help in that way. First of all, not everyone has even a buck or two to spare—and increasingly common situation. Things are getting harder out there in this age of billionaire scams and their billionaire slop. Those of you who have let me know you can't swing it anymore, I thank you for your cancellation. I really appreciate that you're not paying me money you can't spare. I do not want that.

Secondly, there are a lot of people out there being creative in unique and helpful and meaningful ways, and there are only so many any one person could engage with, much less pay for. No one person could ever hope to give even a couple bucks to everyone who might do work worthy of such largesse, and no one person should feel they ought to. I myself support some but I sure don't support everyone. So maybe you're reading this and you're already helping elsewhere. I don't blame you, and thanks for reading.

Here are some free things that I'd find useful.

First, my new book, Fighting in the Dark, is out. Ask your library to shelf it. Give it a review and a rating in all the usual places. Tell other people about it. Let somebody borrow your copy. It's all good stuff.

Second, if you find value in what I do, just read. That's all, and for a writer, that's enough. Be an audience for the writers that are meaningful to you, and let somebody else know about it, and, every once in a while, that somebody else can even be the writer themselves.

Good work, meaningful result, human response.

That's the idea.

A.R. Moxon is the author of the novel The Revisionaries (2019) and the essay collections Very Fine People (2024) and Fighting in the Dark (2026), which are available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places. You can get his books right here for example. He's bold as love.