Perhaps it was once possible to think of writing as something beautiful and wondrous, an amazing conduit of silent communication between soul and soul. For a monk in the 13th century, maybe all writing was worthy of illumination. We are now, quite obviously, a long way from that.
This is the era of linguistic overproduction and downgrading. There are the rapidly developing AI language machines, with their endless ability to create new texts out of pre-existing ones. And, meanwhile, there is this other infinite factory of words: our constant production of online language. Graphomania is the new condition. Every day, millions of people write out a long series of opinions, blogs, TV one-liners, memories, confessions, reactions, heartfelt tributes, funeral notices: a whole apparatus of self-presentation. To be a writer is now a universal syndrome.
Not all writing succeeds in this universe. Tender or even just cool or neutral language doesn’t easily exist. Instead the language that dominates is designed to provoke the most luridly moral emotions, such as contempt or self-congratulation. Headlines that hint rather than explain, conspiracy theories, humblebragging, comical lists that define groups or personality types, provocations, moral exhibitionism, unverified gossip: these are a few of the new trends in everyday writing. And the kind of reading this language produces is also a different kind of reading: our scrolling provokes not so much amused or delighted pleasure as obsessive fandom, Fomo, vituperative anger, anxiety, terror and finally, eventually, a kind of demented lassitude …
This new writing is being distributed not by publishers so much as platforms, and platforms only thrive on attention. Writing recently on the debacle of Elon Musk’s Twitter, Willy Staley argued that Twitter isn’t exactly what it seems to be – a form of broadcasting or micro-publishing. Instead, a tweet is a message that immediately encodes its own feedback. It’s a way of addictively testing out versions of identity on a network, then revising those identities immediately – dependent on the attention of other people. This model isn’t specific to Twitter: it’s there in Facebook or Reddit or any other space where writing can be immediately liked and commented on by giant groups of people.
Famously, this is not a healthy situation: for our selves or our societies. There was a short period around the time of the apparent Arab spring when it seemed possible that the internet and its social media could become forces of liberation. In his book The Chaos Machine, journalist Max Fisher tells the story of the moment where this proposition was finally dismantled – in Myanmar in 2013, when the internet was suddenly visited on a country that until then had no experience of it. The then executive chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, talking in Yangon, solemnly observed that “the internet, once in place, guarantees that communication and empowerment become the law and the practice of your country”. In the same speech he added: “The answer to bad speech is more speech.” What then happened was that the era of writing took over – writing that, on the platforms of the internet, rewarded propaganda, fake accounts and fabular violence, until eventually the violence became real and the genocide of the Rohingya began. Not, of course, that this sudden explosion of bad speech was the only reason for the horror. But still: it turned out that, in the era of digital graphomania, more speech was not necessarily desirable. Or perhaps more precisely, it’s possible that all that will follow bad speech will be more bad speech.
If everyone publishes in a constant process of self-presentation, then this self will become more and more extreme in its opinions, and society will correspondingly become more fractured and more vulnerable to acts of violence. This is one possibility. Another is that an era of graphomania has to be an era of manic reading, which leads to even more graphomania, as people write their opinions concerning other people’s writing. If everyone is a writer, then at the same time everyone is a critic – and so each person’s self stops being an interior, and instead becomes more mutant, produced by the words of other people.
If all writing, then, is now a form of contagion and addiction, how might it be possible to form a linguistic resistance? One clue to an escape route could be to look backwards, to other moments from history. Because if parallels or overlaps can be found, this could point towards potential reasons for hope. And one of these parallel moments, I think, could be a scene that developed towards the end of the 18th century.
In the decade before the revolution in France, a group of exiled Parisian writers based in London produced a series of pamphlets and libels, nearly all of which were about the women of the French aristocracy and the secrets of their sexual lives. Not just celebrities such as Marie Antoinette or Madame de Pompadour, but anyone who once might have been rumoured to be one of their friends, like the Duchess of Bouillon or the Duchess of Polignac. These exiled writers weren’t highbrow or celebrated or august. They weren’t published intellectuals like Voltaire or Diderot. They had the vanished names of Charles Théveneau de Morande or Louis Pierre Manuel or Louis-Sébastien Mercier. They presented themselves as radicals, as satirists of a corrupt and unjust regime – and in a way these dissident claims were true. Certainly they created an atmosphere where anything could be subjected to violence, and therefore, in a way created the possibility of revolution.
But they were also just a group of manic men attacking as many women as possible with unsubstantiated pornographic allegations, using titles such as Chronicle of Scandal or Secret Memoirs. The way they used language to distort and manipulate is like a screen test for our 21st-century mania and its Reddit groups of “incels”. Written on the same principle that extreme and violent content will be the most compelling, these pamphlets became bestsellers, and from them you can start to observe a taxonomy that could also be our own: pornography, conspiracy theory, baseless accusation, pure fiction, refusal of privacy, anonymous attack, exaggeration, insinuation and salacious hypocrisy.
The women being written about were, it’s true, privileged in their possession of wealth. It’s not that I have a nostalgic affection for the ancien regime and its human rights abuses. These women, however, experienced an early version of the trauma of being publicised. And what interests me the most is how they had their own forms of writing and language that weren’t necessarily part of the linguistic machine being used against them. Instead of accusation and revelation, they had separate networks of mutual messaging. They held salons and wrote letters. Their care for accurate language could be so desperately precise that one aristocrat, Julie de Lespinasse, was involved in a project analysing 73 groups of different synonyms. They played games with portraits, jokes, ambiguities, a whole array of forms where writing and language weren’t violent or brutal but instead were tender media for the production of more pleasure and, in particular, more friendship.
It sometimes seems as if optimism or hopefulness is a dying sensation, but I wonder whether one possibility of hope could be in this kind of language. These half-lost voices from another information era form a kind of chorus of resistance – and the fact that a chorus might be lost doesn’t mean that it can’t be imagined.
To undo some of our graphomania’s mutual traps of extremism and anxiety might just need a change in emphasis – a proliferation of small-scale writing that, like those communications between 18th-century women, is tonally unsure, based in uncertainty, in the quizzical and delightedly ambiguous. And if this kind of writing can’t algorithmically flourish via the platforms of social media then perhaps it needs a corresponding change in distribution, for example the zines and miniature books put out by new publishers including Nieves and isolarii, Prototype and Book Works. Or the gentler media of newsletters and mailouts, the book clubs put together by A Public Space, beginning with Yiyun Li beautifully reading Tolstoy among a community of readers, or Ann Kjellberg’s Book Post, a collection of carefully edited reviews.
Of course, this isn’t the only form of resistance, or the only historical moment to think about. There are so many silences to recover. But if we want to envisage a more utopian ideal of writing to replace our graphomania, we need to go back into the archives, and listen.
• The Future Future by Adam Thirlwell is published by Jonathan Cape. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
