Article inspired by Paul Graham’s “Putting Ideas into Words.”
For the past few days, I’ve been coming back to it, mentally preparing an article about… that article. The more I think about it, the more questions I have about the state of writing today. I’m not talking about AI writing for people — that’s irrelevant in this particular frame. Because writing, as Graham says, takes us through a certain mental process (see the article [paulgraham.com/words.html]).
Today, I became curious about how shitposting relates to the conscious process of clarifying thoughts and ideas — how it compares to what writing actually is and what it’s for. Since I’d never really looked into shitposting as a phenomenon, I turned to AI to see how it would assess it in the context of Graham’s piece.
Here’s the classification it came up with:
- Pure Impulse – immediate, unfiltered posts with no thought refinement, purely for instant reaction.
- Conceptual Shitpost – looks like nonsense but hides an idea; the thinking process is minimal, like posting only the punchline of an essay.
- Metacognitive Shitpost – uses the form of shitposting to comment on writing itself; ironically close to Graham’s clarity process, but twisted through satire.
The conclusions are quite interesting — here’s a graphic showing them on the Chaos → Clarity scale.
I’m curious — do you shitpost consciously, or do you just throw out untamed thoughts with some vague hope? Or maybe with no hope at all… like shouting into the crowd?
I'm just throw out my untamed thoughts with some vague hope)
I think I mostly gravitate between conceptual shitpost and metacognitive shitpost. It's hard for me to just have an impulse and run with it, need to first sit with it and observe how it unfolds. Always an interesting journey to transverse between both extremes, the build up, drowning in chaos, achieving clarity, etc.
I think I may have written a few meta-cognitive shit posts in my time. They're fun to write. I think this might be just one example. It is pure Chaos, but I tried to write it with full clarity.
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