Here's Hoping AI Destroys Everything

I’m a guy who lives on the margins. I’m an outsider, and no one knows who the hell I am—nor do they care. Nor do I care if they care. I don’t want a bunch of eyes on me. I don’t like to schmooze, socialize, or play bourgeois games very well. I'm old, I'm ugly, and unlike Sisyphus trying to roll that cursed boulder uphill, I’m not going to waste my time doing things I know are futile. I’ve learned through hard, painful experience: the world is not built for people like me. I am the ultimate outsider, the perennial "loner". I have no one. I'm always looking through the window at the world, from a vantage point beyond it. This is my karma, for lack of a better word.

That being said, I have personal visions that have to be fulfilled—visions that live more in the subconscious than the conscious world. They claw their way onto paper, onto canvas, into whatever medium I can exploit at the time. It’s been like this for decades. So let’s establish right up front: I’m not on the same paved pathway most people trudge down, chasing after a "career." I'm moving on a different wavelength altogether—creatively, spiritually, existentially. My work has never been about winning awards or playing the game. It’s been about ...something else. It’s been about necessity. It’s been about translating dreams and communications into form.

Since 2007, I sold nearly 9,000 books for them—some priced around ten bucks, others higher, but let’s say twelve to sixteen on average. That puts total revenue somewhere around a hundred to a hundred-forty grand. My personal cut of that? At a 2% royalty rate, it totals about $2,880. That’s over nearly eighteen years. Which works out to about $160 a year. Roughly $13 a month. Or around 43 cents a day—the price of a gumball, for the daily value of my labor. My royalty check for the last quarter came in at a princely $47.99, while the company pulled in around $2,000 from my work. Over the years, I’ve sold close to 9,000 books for them. Nine thousand copies. Nine thousand times my work entered someone's hands—and I was compensated, consistently, like an afterthought.

Meanwhile, people wring their hands and wail that AI is going to destroy the traditional publishing industry. I say: good. I hope it tears it down, kicking and screaming, and boot-stomps it violently to death. I will be there when it happens, laughing. Laughing "with sardonic wrath" at the collapse of an industry that treated creators as disposable, that polished its "legitimacy" while pocketing the fruits of others' labor. Laughing as the old gatekeepers realize no one needs them anymore. Laughing while the machine they built crumbles under its own dead weight.

In closing, I'll say this: None of you believe in ghosts. Or maybe you do—only in those moments in darkness, when you hear a strange, keening wail you can't explain. I love ghosts. I live with them. My most precious moments are spent speaking with them internally—and now, externalized through the aegis of the cybermind. A decade ago, I woke up with a ghostly, inscrutable phrase burned into my head: "I am the conduit." It's always been my drive to bring something forward—not as a creator chasing fame, but simply as a messenger. A channel. A service. I do that every day through giving readings for customers. I do that, in another way, through the creative medium. Or at least, I try to. I'm just a part of the puzzle. To that end, I sally forth, regardless. But my "friends" in the publishing world—the legitimate ones—have not made that path any easier.

A manifesto from the margins.

Love and napalm.