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?
