175 Words on the History of Writing & One Point on AI

Sharing ideas has always been central to the human experience.
For tens of thousands of years, we relied on oral tradition—stories told around fires, repeated until they became communal memory. But memory is imperfect, and like a long game of telephone, details bent and warped over time. Important ideas needed a more permanent home.

So we carved them into stone and scratched them into clay tablets.
It was slow, labor-intensive work—early Sumerian scribes could spend hours on a few lines—and every mark felt expensive. Walls and monuments doubled as public record keepers; if you had something worth saying, you wanted it to last for centuries.

Then came paper.
First in China, where it transformed communication, and centuries later in Europe, where parchment was so costly that scribes sometimes scraped it clean to reuse. Choosing what to write wasn’t casual—it was resource triage.

Eventually, materials became cheap enough that people could write almost anything: philosophy, fiction, love letters, war declarations, how-to guides, encyclopedias. But getting those words in front of people still required partnership—printers, publishers, booksellers. If your idea wasn’t polished, you often didn’t bother.

Then the internet changed everything.
Anyone could publish anything instantly, and distribution no longer needed gatekeepers. The only prerequisite was having something worth saying.

Social media took it further.
Algorithms didn’t just help distribute ideas—they seeded them, nudging you toward what to think about. The only barrier left was turning your thought into legible language. And if your idea fell flat, it simply vanished in the feed.

Then came AI.
Now, you don’t have to think the thought, write the sentence, or shape the story. Just tippity-tap your fingers and more noise enters the world.

Here’s where I get frustrated.
The real problem isn’t the tools—it’s the way they interact with algorithms. AI can churn out content engineered to get a reaction, and algorithms mistake that reaction for quality. The result is a feedback loop where shallow, synthetic work rises to the top, not because it’s valuable, but because it’s tuned to trigger engagement.

I’ve spent my career thinking ideas through, analyzing how they’ll land, refining them until they stick. That’s still the job. I’ll use AI as a writing partner, but I won’t let it think for me.

And when you dismiss my work because you spot an em dash, I get annoyed. These are my thoughts.

We all share the words.

And yes—that now includes AI, whether you like it or not.

- Kevin