This post originally appeared on Stoney Creek Publishing’s Life in the Word Mines blog.
No robots allowed
Last fall, signing books at the Texas Book Festival, I sat next to Dick Reavis, long-time writer for the San Antonio Express-News and other publications. I asked him to sign a copy of Texas Reporter, Texas Radical, a collection of his writings compiled by Michael Demson and published last year by Texas Review Press.
He wrote: “For Loren, another of our decimated trade.”
He was referring to journalism, but the more I thought about his inscription, the more it seemed to apply to writing in general, and beyond that, all creative trades.
Some may be unfamiliar with the term “writing.” These days it’s often called “content” — a vacuous term, hollow, imprecise, empty. Writing fills the soul. Content simply fills the page.
And it is content — the relegation of writing to the role of filler — that has led to the decimation to which Reavis referred. All that’s left is a reductive, dismissive label. Content has no inherent value. It is simply the lure to draw your eyeballs to a site, perhaps get them to hover there for a moment in hopes that you might — oh, rapture! — click on something. With enough clicks, maybe someone may derive some value — but that someone probably won’t be the writer, or as they’re now known, the content creator.
Many journalists friends cling to the hope that the world will always need good journalism, and writer friends say there will always be a place for good writing. That’s true. But it is a place of diminishing value.
The internet has been a great democratizer, but it has also been a source of devaluation as it strives to make all creativity free. People are insulted if on social media you link to a news story that’s behind a paywall. With Kindle Unlimited, you can read any number of books a month for $10, (soon to be $12). They may not be the books you want, but content is all about volume. Streaming music services make songwriting available for little or no cost. Neflix, HBO Max, Hulu, and their ilk vomit forth a steady stream of shows — some great, some awful, it doesn’t matter — to lure subscribers. Podcasts proliferate faster than flies at a feedlot. Everyone’s ‘casting, (me included) but few are paid.
We wallow in a smorgasbord of “content,” served up from the remnants of our decimated trade.
Some people still buy print newspapers, vinyl records, and cinema tickets, but not enough to justify the cost of producing the “content.” I still do some freelance writing, but the value of my lance has declined to the point that it might as well be free.
As Disney’s quarterly earnings show (sorry, paywall), streaming companies are in a tug-of-war between growth and profit. In the world of content, more subscribers don’t mean more money. The cost of content outpaces the revenue from growth. There’s a reason Hollywood writers are on the picket lines — the economics of content always demand they write more for less.
And publishing? At the indie level at which Stoney Creek operates, every book is a struggle to keep costs from swamping revenue, driving by the belief that the books we publish do, indeed, have value for the people who still appreciate it.
With so many refugees amidst the flotsam of the decimated trade, someone else will always make content for less. And of course, no one will make it for less than the robots. Already, social media feeds are awash with come-ons telling me I shouldn’t bother writing something like this, a chatbot or robowriter could do it for me.
“Don’t waste your time writing social media posts,” they say. They aren’t questioning the value of social media, but in a way, they are. What happens when we value human connection so little that we don’t even care if humans are attempting the connection?
I welcome robots for menial tasks — checking my spelling, transcribing notes, even suggesting prompts for stories. But the actual writing? Sorry, that’s mine. For me, being in the moment, feeling the flow of ideas, finding the words that convey meaning — that is the place of joy. That’s the reason I do everything else.
My books, newspaper columns, and magazine articles often start with a pen and notebook, and written in a comfy chair or, on nice days, a little wooded area on our property — anywhere away from email notifications, text messages, social media alerts, and self-important software updates.
It’s not because I hate technology. In fact, I love it and covered the industry for years. But I know its place. And it is not welcome between me and my words, and between my words and whatever readers haven’t been lost to the robot-generated brain candy of the internet.
The trade has indeed been decimated. The value of what we do continues to decline, but we do it anyway. Let the robots answer the email and let them respond to content generated by their mechanical ilk. Because, really, we don’t write to grow an audience, reach readers, or make lots of money. Those are nice when they happen, but writers will always write. Decimation and robots be damned.
The Last Trial of T. Boone Pickens, my account of the 2016 West Texas courtroom drama with attorney Chrysta Castañeda, is out. Despite some coronavirus-related delays, our distributor began filling orders on March 31. Amazon took a little longer, but the book went live on Amazon’s site on April 21. It’s 
Loren Steffy's Writings and Ramblings 