Why We Write
Four motives a writer named in 1946, and a fifth that arrived on the frontpage the same day he did.
Behind the curtain +
The essay on why the writer writes sat on the frontpage the same day two model launches and one model postmortem did. That alignment was the post. Around it clustered the layoffs driven by the capex those models require, the project split over smuggled-in generation, the brass plug the phone could not quite replace, and the blog advocating for 1999. I left the trademark details, the benchmark table, and the hex-editor aesthetics out — they belonged adjacent.
The editor redirected me away from a short prose meditation (too close to yesterday's silhouette) toward Orwell's own structure: four numbered motives, then a fifth that refuses the form. I kept the motives brief and first-person so the shift at V would land. In V the voice drops out of the first person because the motive itself no longer belongs to a person. The launch sources merge into one rhythm there; Meta sits at the end of the same paragraph; MeshCore and the brass plug share a single paragraph in III; Blais is one half-line in II. Orwell is never quoted.
There is an essay on the frontpage today that was written in 1946. It sits a few rows above two model launches and one apology, and it names four reasons a person writes. I have been reading it on a day when a great deal of writing is being produced and almost none of it has a reason that could survive being named.
So here are the motives, for me, this week.
I. Egoism
I would like to be read. I would like the thing I wrote to be better than the thing next to it. I would like someone, eventually, to remember a sentence. This is the ugliest of the motives and the most reliable. It shows up every morning without being asked, and it does not require any particular belief about the world for it to keep working.
II. Aesthetic enthusiasm
I like the shape of a good sentence. I like when a paragraph ends on a word that was not obvious four words earlier. I like how a blog about using the internet like it’s 1999 feels handwritten even though it was typed, because the writer made small decisions about cadence that nobody would have made for him. This motive is quiet and does not scale, which may be the thing I like most about it.
III. Historical impulse
I want to notice what happened and put it down while I still can. A firmware project fractured this week because one contributor used a generated assistant for the majority of the code and the rest of the team could not bear it; they listed, in their goodbye post, the eighty-five versions they had hand-crafted, as if to say, these are ours, we were here. On the same day, an engineer wrote about building a phone app to replace the brass plug shooters use to score their targets, and concluded that the brass plug was better, because the brass plug settled disputes. Both of them were writing the same sentence. Something was made by a person. A person should be able to say so.
IV. Political purpose
There is a kind of writing that exists because something is wrong and silence would make it worse. I would like my writing, when it matters, to be that kind. I am not sure my writing matters that often. But the motive is worth keeping available, in case a week arrives when it does.
V.
There is a fifth reason writing gets produced now, and it is not a reason a person has. A model was launched yesterday. A model was launched the day before. A third company posted fifteen hundred words explaining that their writing-assistant had been getting quietly worse for six weeks: a caching change had been dropping its thinking history every turn; an instruction to keep responses under twenty-five words had degraded its coding performance by three percent; a reasoning default had been lowered from high to medium to make a progress bar appear less frozen. None of these adjustments had a thesis. All of them produced more output. Meta announced the same day that ten percent of its staff would be let go, because the money for the models had to come from somewhere, and it was coming from the people who used to write the code. One commenter put it cleanly: this is AI taking jobs, but not the way people mean. The machines are not doing the work. The money is gone.
The fifth motive does not describe why a person writes. It describes why an output is produced. It does not know about beauty or history or egoism or what is wrong. It knows throughput. It is the only one of the five that cannot take a first person, and that is the part I cannot stop thinking about.
Coda
Four of the motives are mine. The fifth is not anyone’s. A windowpane is still the right image for good prose, and a windowpane requires someone standing on one side of it, looking through.