“And it keeps getting worse.”

Everyone knows this; sees it clearly, feels it.

And yet underneath there is a strong pull toward simultaneously believing in the decaying myth of Progress.

The dissonant tension between the two is a big part of the Worse.

***

The only real difference between us is that if I ask you when it started getting worse, you might give me a date in the last century or two.

Whereas my own would be: “Oh a lot longer ago than that.”

But dammit, man, what about writing itself!?

Yes. I know. Writing is a technology. Born of Civilization, and therefore necessarily tainted with the same Original Sin as all the rest (Agriculture, Granaries. Markets. My gas stove and gas guzzling pickup. The divine right of ‘kings’, or representative democracy or whatever as opposed to no-Rulers; anarchy).

Sure.

Granted.

And it’s even worse with the AI, obviously.

I’m playing with the Devil’s own tools.

But I tell you, and myself, that it’s for God’s own Purposes. That I say sooth regardless, in a poisoned ink.

And I believe it: maybe I need to believe it to hold myself on this side of the Madness of the Mistake.

If you want to indict me for being wrong, convict me as an addled philosophical criminal, that’s your best courtroom strategy right there.

Good luck with that, and

paradoxically

I mean it.