Edokwin Editorial

There’s a rhetorical move, a powerful yet pernicious sleight of hand, that happens when a certain kind of person wants to address a topic they see as an “existential risk.” A catastrophic scenario will be introduced, the conceivability will be established, but probability of it will be quietly handwaved or just assumed. No real care taken to account for the mechanisms required, the actual ways by which this thing would come to pass (if it even could).

synthphobianoun syn·​th·​pho·​bia : an aversion to or prejudice against artificial intelligence and its use in creative or intellectual work, often manifesting as reflexive hostility toward AI-assisted writing, art, or thought regardless of quality or context — compare HOMOPHOBIA, SEXISM, XENOPHOBIA “What began as reasonable concern over labor and authenticity hardened, in some corners of the discourse, into outright synthphobia.” synthphobicadjective syn·​th·​pho·​bic 1 : relating to or...

Hey. Contrary to what I had indicated, this isn’t gonna be a piece about synthphobia (my term for the emerging phenomenon of anti-AI zealotry), but it’s not gonna entirely divorced from that either. For a fuller and more treatment of synthphobia, y’all will have to wait for this weekend’s piece (dropping sometime Saturday, at this rate). For today, our topic is less synthphoboes and the genetic fallacious witchhunts they’re running, more me and my existence on the platform.

I’ve been searching for a while now for the sentence that explains what I’m doing. Not the content beat, not the bibliography or byline list. Not the policy positions and political rankings I keep in my notes. No, the sentence—the thing that makes an essay on race eliminativism, a defense of AI-assisted writing or art, a critique of compelled speech, and an investigation into police misconduct all cohere as one project rather than a scattering of disparate impulses.

There is a familiar scene on elite campuses. A distinguished philosopher, tenured and well-published, addresses a room of undergraduates. He explains, with careful argumentation, that we cannot really know anything about the external world. Perhaps we are brains in vats. Perhaps a deceiving god has planted false images in our minds. Perhaps all of what …

We need to talk, gang. There’s a purported panic—and likely then a burgeoning counter panic—around child safety, censorship, and privacy on the internet. One group, we’ll call them the Haidtists (for reasons that’ll become obvious), think smart phones and the modern, web-based activities are ruining children’s lives.

There is a genre of Substack essay that has become familiar enough to have recognizable furniture. Someone was cancelled—in publishing, in journalism, in some online community—and they survived it. Now they are here, and they would like to tell you about it. The wound is present-tense even when the event is years old. The exile is recounted with a care …

Happy American Independence Weekend and Semiquincentennial (250th) Celebration, y’all. To be clear, what’s being celebrated each year on July 4th is neither the founding of the country per se, nor the winning of the war, nor the establishment of the government. Quite literally and simply, we’re celebrating theDeclaration of Independence—known as the unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America in the original printing. A founding document, but not the only one.

I’m going to tell you something I’ve only told a few people this year. It’s an open secret, but even with them I dribbed it out only in fragments. My biggest fear with Edokwin Editorial isn’t failure. My biggest fear is building a hollow little fort on sand: big subscriber counts, respectable follower numbers, and nobody actually home. Low open rates. Lo…

A note before we begin: this essay supersedes my earlier piece “Race Is (Largely) Fake,” which a few of you may have read and a few of you may have argued with me about at considerable length. I don’t disavow that piece. Its core argument stands. But critics from both sides of the debate had useful things to say, and I made concessions in that OG version which I’ve since decided were either unwarranted or imprecisely framed. The hedging, both in the title and the body, was part of that. No more.