Rough Type has had a twenty-year run. That seems like long enough, particularly seeing as the blog has been pretty much dormant in recent years. So this will be the last Rough Type post.

But don’t shed too many tears. I’m going to continue blogging, maybe even at a faster clip, through a Substack I’ve started called New Cartographies. My first new post is up. It’s titled “Dead Labor, Dead Speech,” and here’s how it begins:

If, as Marx argued, capital is dead labor, then the products of large language models might best be understood as dead speech. Just as factory workers produce, with their “living labor,” machines and other forms of physical capital that are then used, as “dead labor,” to produce more physical commodities, so human expressions of thought and creativity—“living speech” in the forms of writing, art, photography, and music—become raw materials used to produce “dead speech” in those same forms. LLMs, to continue with Marx’s horror-story metaphor, feed “vampire-like” on human culture. Without our words and pictures and songs, they would cease to function. They would become as silent as a corpse in a casket.

Read on (and thanks).