Sam Brooker
“The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed” – nor, indeed, is our enthusiasm. More than once, in faculty meetings or discussions with industry colleagues, I’ve heard a world-weary the AI genie isn’t going back in the bottle or a beleaguered it is very clever spoken with the resignation normally reserved for a deserving colleague who just leapfrogged you into a promotion. Such voices stand in stark contrast to those celebrating this incredible new frontier in textuality; those who choose to embrace the storm rather than stand against it.
Well the future’s here, whether we like it or not – so get used to it, sucker. There is a worrying passivity inherent in Gibson’s well-worn truism above; when outgoing president Joe Biden signed off with a warning that “today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence … driven by a ‘tech-industrial complex’” the response was not one of astonishment, but incredulity: you just noticed, huh? Where once news of some new technological wonder was met with wide-eyed excitement, now it’s often met with a weary wariness: a majority of knowledge workers in 2025 reported that technology negatively affected their lives at work, while a similar majority report fears about the loss of both their jobs and their data autonomy as we face an AI future. Sorry folks, the future’s here and it can’t be stopped.
Meanwhile marketing is in overdrive, assuring us that AI (a term so loosely defined in the public sphere as to be essentially meaningless) now has a place at every level of text and textual production. For those unaccustomed to the tech hype cycle, the sheer scope of such claims is overwhelming. We may take comfort in the words of George Landow, who once noted that just as chlorophyll was marketed in the 1950s as a kind of “miracle” ingredient applicable to every situation, so the term interactive was (in his view) over-applied to almost everything in computing; a buzzword that implied almost magical benefits. Sound familiar?
We are clearly at an inflexion point in the history of text, beyond which lies a world in which artificial intelligence is integrated more coherently into our lives. The AI-washing, market-stoking phase – the Chloropyll Moment – will pass, the horizon of what an LLM can offer reached. Until then, speculation about the future of text in an age of AI is both essential and doomed, much as prognostication about the internet in the mid-1990s was inevitably doomed to be the speculation of people from a past where things were done differently; as Bush’s Memex was, and so ad infinitum.
“We cannot separate personal growth and communal change,” Erikson warned us, just as we “cannot separate the identity crisis in individual life and contemporary crises in historical development.” Perhaps my luddite anxiety is really a product of middle age – AI arising at a time when netstalgia and a yearning for the chaotic, more human web of my youth is at its strongest. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.