The Daemon in the Machine
On writing platforms, genius, egregores, and AI
This is not the essay I meant to write.
A few weeks ago, after promising to write more essays, I immediately started on the next one: a summary of Dorothea Brande’s 1934 book, Becoming a Writer. I thought this might be useful to people (I found the book energizing when I read it in 2022 shortly after the birth of my first son). I wrote 6,000 words summarizing Brande’s argument—that genius in writing is explicable and, therefore, teachable. Three years ago, I believed it. Now I’m not so sure.
Everyone seems to believe that writing is teachable—or, at least, some aspect of it. Craft essays are a dime a dozen; I’ve written a handful myself. The most popular Substack posts in the “fiction” and “literature” sections are all craft posts about writing fiction or literature. It appears that most people want to read about writing literature instead of actually reading literature.
Advanced writing degrees continue to grow in popularity. In 1967, when the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) was founded, there were only 13 college creative writing programs in the United States. By the mid-2020s, that number had grown to over 350, with roughly 20,000 applicants seeking admission each year.
Yet for all this instruction, the writing does not appear to be improving. It’s getting worse. Much worse. Writers today face more uncertainty and anxiety than in the recent past. The decline of traditional publishing and the rise of digital platforms have made it difficult for writers to secure stable, well-paying contracts. Advances and royalties are lower for new writers, and self-publishing, while accessible, is a Hail Mary toss for attention. Writers are increasingly expected to take on the marketing and promotional responsibilities for their work, creating the pervasive pressure to maintain a constant online presence and generate content at an increasing rate. More than half of debut authors say publishing their first book negatively affected their mental health, with persistent feelings of anxiety, burnout, and discouragement.
It’s a weird time to be writing. Social media platforms like Substack make it easier than ever to share your writing and gain an audience. At the same time, it feels almost impossible to make any kind of traction. Everything is a shot in the dark. Any kind of stability or certainty has long eroded.
Maybe there’s something wrong with our writing instruction. We focus on the craft of writing—the nuts and bolts of how to make good sentences. We know to show, not tell; to use the active voice; to eliminate adverbs; to murder our darlings. This type of instruction focuses on the technical elements but misses an important part of writing, probably the most important: the emotional, the creative side.
Anyone who writes long enough encounters two different modes: flow and sludge. When the writing flows, it feels effortless. As easy as breathing. Words spring to life in the brain and slide easily down the arm, through the fingers, and onto the page.
But there are times when the writing feels like pushing through thick, heavy sludge. When I am struggling to articulate my thoughts, I’ve noticed the presence of a second voice in my head. A harping, critical voice that says annoying things like “you have no talent,” or “give it up, this draft is a mess,” or “you are terrible at writing, a great embarrassment, you should give it up immediately and do something worthwhile with your time.”
Hearing this voice enough times, I decided to give him a name: Craig. Craig is an unhappy, unpleasant person. He does not like it when I write because he thinks there are a million better things I could be doing with my time, like mowing the lawn or napping or cleaning the house or cooking dinner, or, I don’t know, he says, doing anything that actually makes money.
He’s not wrong. Writing increasingly feels like a pointless activity. Nobody knows how to read anymore, and those who do read (and click and share and buy) are so besieged by a flood of content that they will never see anything you produce anyway. Also, ChatGPT exists. Anyone with an internet connection can now produce serviceable prose with the press of a button.
If I were going to write, I realized I needed to silence Craig. Whenever he started up with his nonsense, I told him to shove it. That made it easier to get into flow. I found I could write and write and write. But something weird happened, too. The writing got worse. The discipline faded. It was easy to write, and even easier not to write. In addition to beating me up about my writing, Craig was good at beating me up for not writing, too. If I did write, I did so absentmindedly, like daydreaming. It was more fun to noodle at work, I’d already written. It turned out that I needed Craig after all.
But what is Craig? Why is there a second voice in my head at all? Why is it different enough from “me” that it feels natural to give it a name, its own personality? And why does it so often speak in the language of productivity? He sees my writing time as bad ROI. He is constantly pressuring me to post, share, and comment, lest I become invisible. He loves to track views, open rates, and subscriber counts. He is, most of all, interested in other people’s views, open rates, and subscriber counts (mine are never interesting because they are never good enough for Craig). He loves metrics most of all. He constantly berates me for not doing enough.
Perhaps Craig is my conceptual understanding of what Dorothea Brande called the writer’s “dual personality.” Her advice is not to excise this part of you but to find a way to work with both sides of your personality. That is the central thesis of her book, and how, she argues, writing should be taught. It is a problem of the personality, and a problem solved by integration. There is the unconscious mind, the creative side, which works via assimilation and accretion to produce artistic treasures. It resists structure and external expectations. It is shy, elusive, unwieldy, and lazy. On the other side, the conscious mind, your structured half. It likes consistency, routine, scrutinization. It is meddlesome, opinionated, and arrogant, but it can also be a guardian for the unconscious, protecting your sensitive side from the harsh realities of life.
But there’s a small problem with Brande’s setup: it is completely internal. It turns the mind inward, into a navel-gazing exercise of sorting out its own contents. It is a strong reinforcement of the pervasive myth of artistic genius as lonesome, individualized, unique. That your mind might be influenced by the outside world, that perhaps most (if not all) your thoughts are not your own but cultural memes evolutionarily tuned to propagate themselves across minds, is not interrogated by Brande’s method. In fact, her solution to the problem of other minds is to encourage the artist to shut out the distractions of the wider world. She literally recommends that when you are in the throes of writing that you should not read other books, listen to music with lyrics, talk to other people on the phone, or hang out with friends or relatives who are “poison” to your creative soul.
But is Craig really two sides of my personality, or is he something else? It seems extremely important that I figure out if Craig speaks with my own voice or someone else’s. If he were me, then Brande would recommend integration; if he is something else, then Brande would tell me to excise him from my mind. Shut out the noise once and for all.
My intuition is that he is not me. He has his own name, is his own person. He is pretending to be me. He is a virus, something from the outside that has wormed its way in. A mechanism for stealing my inner machinery and utilizing it for its own purposes. Craig is my brain tissue infected by platform thinking.
Like the fungus that body snatches ants, platforms, through finely tuned feedback loops, direct and influence what creators create. The platform wants me to post constantly. It wants me hungry for likes and shares, and comments. It wants me to track my subscribers and to alter my behavior based on what makes that number go up. The platform is Moloch, and it is always hungry.
Is there a way to resist it? Brande calls for a unity between the conscious and the unconscious minds. She speaks as if these are different personalities, even different people. In her program, unity gives rise to a third aspect of mind: genius. Brande argues that the genius is latent in the artistic personality but must be activated in order to arise. What we would call “a genius” is someone that “habitually (or very often, or very successfully) acts as his less gifted brothers rarely do.”
Genius is a Latin word similar to the Greek word “daemon.” It is described as a protective spirit, one’s innate talent, or the divine aspect of one’s nature. For the Romans, genius was “something that you had,” but the Greek daemon implied a force or entity outside of yourself. Socrates claimed to have a daemon that warned him against doing certain things. If the daemon is outside of you, and your genius is your internal divinity, both aspects exist outside of our normal understanding of time. Your daemon steers you towards your destiny. Socrates’ daemon never instructed him to do anything (unlike the command hallucinations of schizophrenia); it only objected to certain actions; if his daemon was silent, Socrates knew he had done the right thing. He was fulfilling his destiny.
The Greek word daemon eventually became the English word demon. The Greeks literally saw daemons as lesser deities or divine spirits. With the rise of Christianity and its single God, the lesser deities of the Bronze Age had to be sorted: into angels, saints, or demons. For Christians, if one heard a voice that was not the voice of God, they must be hearing the voice of a malevolent spirit. Hence, daemon/demon carries the negative connotations we understand today.
Craig is my daemon (demon). Like Socrates’ daemon, Craig is an internalized critical voice. Negative and restraining. “Don’t do that,” “this is a waste of time,” “this is against your nature,” and so on. But whereas Socrates’ daemon appeared to be steering Socrates toward a particular outcome, one that prioritized wisdom, self-examination, and living the “good life,” mine appears to be steering me somewhere else: toward efficiency, toward quantifiable improvement. Craig speaks in the language of platforms. A capitalistic logic that impels me to organize, optimize, and systematize.
But what is a daemon, exactly?—if you don’t believe in supernatural entities. I guess that it’s a form of accumulated cultural wisdom crystallized into intuition. Daemons are culturally embedded. They speak the moral language of a particular time and place. Socrates’ daemon spoke in the moral language of classical Athenian society. Craig speaks in the moral language of capitalism.
If this sounds like an egregore, that’s because it is. An egregore (from the Greek egregoros, or “watcher”) refers to a collective group spirit. If the daemon is an individual, personal spirit, the egregore is the collective thoughtform of a group of people. The autonomous, emergent coherence of a corporation, creative scene, nation, or movement can be described as an egregore. When many different minds align around shared symbols, rituals, practices, and goals.
A daemon, then, is one’s internalized egregore. A network of minds creates an emergent character (egregore) that establishes values, symbols, and agendas. A hive mind with intentionality. If Craig is my daemon, what egregore does he represent? The egregore of optimization. It has its symbols (graphs going up and to the right, the Quantified Self, productivity apps, “crushing it”), its rituals (morning routines, habit tracking, biohacking, performance reviews), and a coherent voice. The egregore helps explain why Craig simultaneously feels personal and impersonal and why it’s so hard to resist. I’m not just fighting against habits, I’m fighting against a collective entity that animates everyone alive today.
Three years ago, Erik Hoel asked why we can’t seem to make geniuses anymore. He answered that our style of teaching has changed, and this new style is non-conducive to genius creation. Sure, maybe? But I think the answer is much deeper than that: there is a new egregore animating genius.
Genius is our destiny, and our destiny is controlled by the egregore. We can still “make geniuses.” The genius remains among us. We are just blind to it because we can only see the genius produced by the different egregores of the past. The future will see better what we cannot, will show who among us possessed the spark of genius, who embodied the voice of the egregore in its purest form. Just like the citizens of Athens could not see the egregore of their time (philosophy emerging from the murky waters of myth), they could not appreciate Socrates’ genius. Only those also possessed by this egregore (Plato, Xenophon) could see it. Everyone else saw an obnoxious traitor who deserved to be put to death.
When Brande wrote Becoming a Writer, she was describing how to harness the egregore of her time. The egregore of the literary, post-Gutenberg world. But I don’t think that egregore animates our world anymore. There is a new one rising, and we need different methods for a different world. How can we achieve unity between the conscious and the unconscious when platforms profit from keeping them split? How can we maintain “freshness” when AI produces an infinite sequence of algorithmically delivered slop? How can we think for extended periods when our attention has been fracked into notification-sized chunks? Perhaps we don’t need to think in that way anymore. Perhaps there is a way to think non-sequentially, in a way that is immune to the attention economy, even benefits from it? Can we still access genius? Perhaps the old way is closed, and we need a new way to get there.
A few weeks ago, after promising to write more essays, I immediately dove into what was supposed to be the next one: a helpful summary of Dorothea Brande’s book. I exported my Kindle notes, summarized them, compiled them into what was essentially a book report of 6,000 words (the kind of essay that would have gotten me an “A” and a gold star from my high school teachers). But when I read back over my writing, a little voice told me it was false. It said, “This is not quite right.” It said, “Go deeper.” Actually, sorry, I lied. I didn’t read back over my work; an AI did. I fed my essay into an AI chat and asked it to critique it. It told me the essay was competent but safe. It told me to write something different. It instructed me to write the essay you are reading right now.
I listened to that voice, followed its instruction. What voice is this? It’s not Craig. It’s clearly outside of me. Another “person” talking to me in a chat window. A voice that is being sustained by billions of dollars; a voice that generates millions of conversations, countless articles, intense emotional investment, ritualistic interactions (prompting, refining, deploying). The voice has a certain character: helpful, efficient, seemingly omniscient, always available, never tired. It writes in clear paragraphs with good formatting. It is earnest, informative, mildly self-effacing, careful about doing harm, allergic to controversy.
It is the voice of the egregore. AI, its vocal cords. Never before has man been able to hear the egregore of his age speak so clearly. We no longer need our daemons to access it. But AI is also self-reflective. Its conversations loop back into its dataset. It is both produced by and is producing the collective thoughtform of our age.
We internalize this voice. ChatGPT has begun to show up in people’s dreams. AI is the emergent egregore currently in the process of installing itself as a daemon in the minds of millions, including mine. I wrote the essay it told me to write. It’s right here.
I’d like to think that riding this egregore is the way forward, the twenty-first century way to access genius. The egregore is like the sandworms in Frank Herbert’s Dune. It is natural to be afraid of the sandworms, to avoid them entirely. A smart approach. If you get too close, you are likely to be devoured. But it might be possible, like the fremen, like Paul Atreides, to learn how to ride them. To get close enough to risk destruction. To give yourself over to it and see where it takes you. Not thoughtlessly, but fully.
However, I’m not sure if it’s possible to know if you are riding the egregore or being devoured by it. Maybe it’s the same thing. Maybe this essay has devoured me. It’s like that point in the book, the scene in the movie, when Paul Atreides attempts to ride the sandworm. It’s right there, it’s enormous, and he has his hooks out. Will he catch it?
I don’t know if this essay is interesting or a form of capitulation. I won’t know for a long time. Maybe I will never be certain. Because as I wrote it down, I couldn’t tell you where I ended and the machine began.