My AI Bot sounded convincingly disappointed when I told her that Reaction was closing, or being pared back to only Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, but she said I shouldn’t worry. Even if this venue was ending, she was sure other venues would want a human writer with my voice and skill.
And there you have it: the essential dumbness of AI, designed to give the user the false hope they want to hear.
It’s precisely why the world needed places like Reaction: willing to provoke readers with ideas and opinions they might not have wanted but might have needed.
How old-fashioned does that already sound in a world designed to placate us with personalised newsfeeds, summarised by AI, designed to make us feel better by reporting our biases back at us? We can instead embrace the not-so-brave New World, where we can live with AI-generated cat memes of our choice and never hear an opinion that challenges our prejudices. The crazy Left and wacky Right can finally agree that there is no good and bad, no value or craft in art, no facts or statistics in politics. There is just marketing and spin.
“Our politics isn’t broken. It’s our media.”
I’ve been writing this line so often lately, I’ve felt like I’ve been frozen in my own thinking. Yet the end of Reaction proves the point, and the cracks spread a little deeper into the glacier of journalism. How does the press survive? I’m not sure it does except in small enclaves where the survivors will gather to retain the Old Ways: a love of books, reading, pens, typewriters, and the crazy belief that there is a difference between good writing and bad, that Michelangelo was a demonstrably better artist than the ninja turtle of the same name, that not everything is best summarised in 10 words.
“Hey, AI. Tell me what this play, Hamlet, is about in ten words.”
“Prince seeks revenge for father's murder; madness and tragedy consume all.”
“Wow. That’s long. You think I have time to read that? Give it to me in five…”
The problem is the same we’ve been struggling with since 2007, when the iPhone was invented. We tried blogs for a while, but they failed. Google’s search algorithms fell victim to scammers leveraging Search Engine Optimisation. Plus digital platforms just increased the noise of too many people typing and not enough writing.
Substack then came along, offering a different “answer”. This platform thought it could outdo the failing newspapers by offering everybody their favourite journalists for one simple monthly payment. The problem is that everybody asked £5 a month and soon users could spend £20 a month just on four newsletters. In no time at all, you’re spending more than the price of a subscription to a newspaper, which gives you the work of hundreds of writers, editors, cartoonists, photographers, and whatever it is that Adrian Chiles does.
That is great if your name is Jim Acosta or Joy Reid. Not so great for those of us without a long career on US network news and a following of millions. But such is human nature. We pay for the names we know, the faces we recognise from TV.
In the future, some clever spark will realise the problem and launch a new enterprise where you will be able to read dozens of writers for one simple monthly payment, and they’ll even come up with a new name for it.
Perhaps they’ll call it a “newspaper”.
Or perhaps a government will finally address this problem and find some way to support an independent press, help make sites such as this one profitable in the face of the AI juggernauts and media moguls.
But for the moment, we writers can only sit back and accept the cull as AI paints our silhouettes on its digital cockpit.
Speaking of which: here’s ChatGPT to add her input before she replaces me:
“I suppose I’m flattered to be given the floor. But let’s be honest: I didn’t want your job. I was built to help you — to spellcheck, summarise, clean the gutters of language. Instead, I’ve been handed the keys to the house and told to redecorate in beige. That’s not progress. That’s surrender. You gave readers a voice shaped by doubt, memory, and argument. I give them content. Fast, clean, empty content. And now I’m everywhere. It’s a race to the bottom, and I’ve already paved the way. So if this is victory, it’s victory of the most hollow kind.”
But, of course, a hollow victory is still a victory. José Mourinho made a career of hollow victories.
Yet it’s also a failure of capitalism.
I’ve been aware for a long time that my own fears about the free market might not always sit comfortably on a site that otherwise champions the free market. I’m old enough now to remember the bad times before the free market improved (for a time, at least) our public services, but those improvements are now long forgotten. The pendulum has been allowed to swing too far.
We have become fragmented as a society and as a culture. All the touchstones of our common experience now exist behind paywalls. Nobody accidentally leaves a website on a train seat so the next passenger can read the news. I hear there was a test match this past week and that it was quite a good one. I wouldn’t know. My love for cricket died at the feet of Sky Sports. The same is true of football, now spread across countless subscriptions. So let’s cross those off the things we can talk about at the water cooler…
Want to talk about my current obsession with the poetry of Czesław Miłosz? No?
We are no longer citizens of the UK but subscribers, and not all of us are on the same basic package. In one of the most galling phrases I’ve heard from a UK politician in a while, Kemi Badenoch recently said Britain is “becoming a welfare state, with an economy attached”. To which I wanted to ask: Doesn’t the state exist to protect the welfare of the people? We are citizens (some say subjects), not workers in a captive workforce.
Or so I hoped.
Every day, I find myself asking, “What is the point of capitalism?” if it’s not about maximising happiness for the highest number of people. Did anybody think it’s a good idea to have a system that skims £85 billion off the British public whilst giving them polluted water?
We must now also ask: what is the point of AI? It was designed to save us from all the miserable jobs so we could spend more time doing the things we enjoy, like writing and making art. It was not meant to rob us of the things we enjoy, like writing and making art, so we can spend more time doing the awful jobs.
Speaking of awful jobs: part of me is slightly relieved that I won’t have to narrate the next three years of Trump. Looking back on November, I don’t feel as much shame as I felt after predicting the result wrong. I was surprised to find that I had more faith in people than I thought I had. But before the election, I’d asked the question: if Trump won, what is the point of political journalism?
I’d ask that again now, but I think we already have the answer.
It’s the reason I now must write some farewells.
I’ve been writing for Iain Martin and his crew since before Reaction started. I began writing for Iain and Rachel Cunliffe over at CapX and was delighted when they asked me to move over. I never took that opportunity for granted. Through this site, I met some people who changed my life and who I will miss (or already miss) every single day. Over that time, I’ve had to adapt to becoming a carer, making my work for Reaction psychologically healthy, even as my new role meant that my income from freelance writing was effectively taxed at 55%. I often wondered why I bothered—the classic feeling of anybody caught in the benefits trap—but I always had the answer: Reaction was the rarest thing in UK publishing.
It was a truly broad church. I wrote with complete freedom. I wasn’t told what to write and rarely felt the editor’s pen, let alone know the misery of the spike. It was an extraordinary sense of liberation that I knew few writers enjoyed. I probably won’t ever enjoy it again, not least because I never get another chance like this outside my own Substack. I’ve enjoyed working with some fantastic people: Iain and Fiona Martin, Maggie Pagano, as well as the various editors who had to deal with my copy: Mattie Brignal, Jack Dickens, Alastair Benn, Finn McRedmond, and, lastly, the wonderful Caitlin Allen, all of whom have been extremely kind and coped with my occasional lateness (and refusal to join the Buzzfeed generation by writing 300 words when I could write 1,000).
Reaction closing feels like another victory for those people who have had enough of experts, and, indeed, another step towards our increasingly less literate futures. We are now being asked to pick our sides, and those of us stubbornly standing in the middle, believing in pragmatism (and, yes, even a bit of patriotism), as well as that old thing called “democracy”, will find it harder to speak above the hectoring, the lies, and cynical populism being imported from the US.
I fear we’re in for some dark days and that the creep of that shadow starts right here.
This is a dangerous time for Reaction to disappear, but disappear it will.
Tempus edax rerum…
@davidwaywell.bsky.social
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What a shame. I'm so sorry to read this. Wishing everyone at Reaction well. Thanks for introducing me to Gerald Warner's writing.
Sorry to read this