Creating Work That Doesn’t Get Absorbed by the Machine
I recently had a 1:1 with Emma, a professional writer, to review my PhD proposal. The feedback on the proposal was useful. But the more important moment came elsewhere.
Unprompted, she raised the same concern that’s been sitting at the centre of my thinking: that the algorithm economy is reshaping identity itself, fragmenting people into legible camps, and quietly deforming how future generations understand who they are.
When two people arrive at the same structural anxiety from different routes, that’s not sentiment. That’s pattern recognition.
The question that follows is unavoidable:
If I see the problem, how do I avoid contributing to it?
This is the answer I’ve arrived at.
- Optimise for durability, not reach
The machine rewards:
speed
hot takes
identity signalling
content that compresses well
Durable work is the opposite:
slow
layered
ambiguous
resistant to summary
If something can be reduced to a tweet, it’s already been flattened.
- Make the work hostile to extraction
Platforms survive by turning writing into fragments:
quotable lines
neat conclusions
moral packaging
aesthetic clips
So I avoid clean endings. I avoid “lessons learned”. I let ideas unfold rather than resolve.
The work should require presence, not consumption.
- Build a body of work, not isolated posts
Machine-friendly content stands alone. Resistant work accumulates.
It references itself. It develops internal vocabulary. It assumes long-term readers, not drive-by traffic.
That turns writing into archive, not feed.
- Choose infrastructure that doesn’t distort incentives
If visibility depends on:
engagement metrics
outrage
persona
performance
Then the work will bend to those incentives.
So the work must live somewhere stable: a personal site, an archive, email, slow publishing. Somewhere it exists even if no algorithm promotes it.
- Refuse self-branding
“I am the X writer who believes Y” is machine-legible packaging.
I don’t want to be legible. I want to be coherent over time.
Themes can emerge. Positions can evolve. Contradictions can remain unresolved.
That’s not weakness. That’s humanity.
- Write for future readers, not present reaction
If someone reads this in ten years, does it still hold?
Work anchored to trends decays quickly. Work anchored to structure — power, identity, cognition, perception — survives.
Timelessness is not aesthetic. It’s strategic.
- Accept obscurity as a feature
Small audience = less distortion. Slow growth = more integrity. Silence = independence.
You cannot both resist the system and expect the system to reward you. Those goals are structurally incompatible.
The session with Emma didn’t give me answers. It confirmed the terrain.
The machine is shaping identity. People are being trained to package themselves. Depth is becoming illegible.
So the work, if it’s to mean anything, has to be built elsewhere — slower, quieter, less legible, more durable.
Not optimised for attention. Optimised for survival.